New Book: The Secret History of Science Fiction

The Secret History of Science Fiction includes an early story by DeLillo, and that’s just the beginning. Ed Park in the LA Times:

“Ratner’s Star” is mentioned by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel in the introduction to their new anthology, “The Secret History of Science Fiction” (Tachyon: 382 pp., $14.95). Engaging with Jonathan Lethem’s 1998 Village Voice article “Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction,” in which Lethem imagined a world in which Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” won SF’s Hugo Award in 1973, the editors contend that the distinction between science fiction and mainstream (or mainstream literary) fiction has grown fuzzier over the last decade and, indeed, has always been sort of fuzzy. (I think that’s what they’re saying.)

I’m mildly interested in this sort of debate, and I was going to talk about “The Secret History of Science Fiction,” which is brimming with aces — from Margaret Atwood’s strange “Homelanding” to George Saunders’ chilling lab report “93990″ to Carter Scholz’s antic, deeper-than-it-looks “The Nine Billion Names of God” — and maybe also to laud the altogether winning tone of Lethem’s “Chronic City” (stoner science-fiction-as-magical-realism?) as a new path in the genre battle. … But all I really want to do, at the moment, is embrace the unsuspecting editors in a massive, spine-crunching bear hug for including DeLillo’s story “Human Moments in World War III,” which first appeared in Esquire in 1983, and which I’d never read before. . . .

“Human Moments in World War III” is not just vintage DeLillo (appearing in between 1982′s “The Names” and 1985′s “White Noise,” by any sane estimate two of the great novels of the 1980s), but a potent encapsulation of his powers. The nameless narrator and his partner, Vollmer, are in orbit high above the Earth, where some large but ill-defined war rages. The astronauts are seated back to back when manning the firing panel, “to keep us from seeing each other’s face.”

Their mission is to inspect “unmanned and possibly hostile satellites.” The vantage understandably “puts men into a philosophical temper,” but Vollmer is starting to get on the narrator’s nerves. “Vollmer has never said a stupid thing in my presence,” he notes. “It is just his voice is stupid, a grave and naked bass, a voice without inflection or breath.” The spaceship rapidly becomes an echo chamber, a place of doubt where “the only danger is conversation.” The scenario is at once mundane and out of this world.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Eco on Science, Technology, and Fundamentalism Umberto Eco has a short piece on the difference between science and technology, and how these relate to fundamentalism. It is not science that is...
2. Newspaper Science Coverage in Decline Could someone remind me what it is that newspapers still cover these days? NYT blogger Andrew C. Revkin: Of course, the situation at CNN is...
3. On the Coming of Science Fiction’s Time via Atwood and Ballard Interesting synchronicity in the literary pages last week. First, from Jonathan Lethem’s review of JG Ballard’s complete short stories: Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist,...
4. Secret Workings of the NYTBR Revealed! Well, not quite that thrilling, but there is some useful info here. The part I find most interesting is that the Book Review "winnows down"...
5. On the Natural History of Destruction Well, I’ve just finished W.G. Sebald’s uneven collection of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, which caused quite a stir in America when it...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.