My Spaceship Knows Which Way to Go Wednesday, August 13, 2008

This post is about one of the greatest first lines I've ever read. But first I'm going to bore you with some thoughts about Seventies sci-fi.

Our friends at Outside the Dome have an ongoing series about bargain-bin genre novels from the Me Decade. They've covered lots of the high points, but I want to suggest one stylistic tic that I think defines the genre: the hipster voice.

I haven't read enough of these novels to speak definitively, because frankly a lot of them really suck. But most of the ones I've picked up--both highly regarded ones and obscure trash--have a nasty, nihilistic tone that sounds something like Lenny Bruce doing a Mystery Science Theater act over an Asimov story. In other words, you've got many of the standard sci-fi tropes--Earth recovering from disaster; space crews exploring the unknown--except the narrator is sneering at them. The characters are inevitably nasty to each other, especially when it comes to race (every black guy is a Panther, every white is Archie Bunker). There are lots of offhand references to terrible things happening, with no weight given to them in the story or in the narrator's head. ("We lost Switzerland to the Garcia Plague last year.") Sex is pervasive and embarrassingly dated (TOPLESS STEWARDESSES!!!!!!). Even better is the language itself, full of radical slang that was out of fashion as soon as it hit the page.

At any rate, that's exactly what I got when I picked up a copy of Ron Goulart's A Talent for the Invisible at the book-exchange rack at my train station. Every single trope, down to the teleporter-hostess who asks our hero if he wants to have sex before he blips off to Portugal. So why am I determined to read this one to the end? Because of the very first line, one of the truly great specimens of the genre*:

Robots were chasing him.

For that, I'll put up with 144 pages of horseshit.

* The best ever, of course, leads off A Scanner Darkly. Look it up!

@ 11:26:00 AM,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home