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Introduction, by Damien Broderick

Seven years before I was born, far away and long ago, a British technology whiz who called himself “Professor” A.M. Low published a truly terrible novel for young readers titled Adrift in the Stratosphere. That was a couple of years before the fabled Golden Age of science fiction was kick-started by editor John W. Campbell, Jr., in the pages of a US magazine with the even pulpier title Astounding Science Fiction. Crude as that magazine’s title was—and Campbell tried for years to change it to a simple Science Fiction, which would have helped a lot, and finally managed to shift it to Analog, still its name—a fresh spirit moved over what were already the rather stagnant waters of early sf.

Archibald Low missed out on these developments, alas, so his young Stratospheric adventurers followed the same ridiculous path to glory in space that had been hacked from the pulp jungle for many years. To quote the wry and entertaining summary by British wit David Langford,

[Three young men] accidentally launch a “rocket-balloon” spacecraft left unattended by the professor who built it. Soon they’re “passing through a belt of X-rays,” causing the ship and their own bodies to become transparent. Next they dodge a living, mile-long air monster that flies at 800 mph.... Our heroes are tormented by yellow radium beams from Mars. Will they discover the ship’s anti-radium ray? [At length] they plunge to an emergency landing on a Fortean skyborne island.1

Surprisingly, in the year I was born, Low became, Langford reports, “the first-ever author named as a British sf convention’s official guest.” Surely it wasn’t for Adrift in the Stratosphere.

I mention this grisly history because a couple of decades after its publication, I had contracted the sf infection, and haunted the closest library, several miles away by bike. I swiftly devoured all the regular science fiction in the place, and finally fetched up at “Professor” Low’s weird emanation. I forced it down, gagging gently. A rocket-powered balloon! War with Martians via radio! (In a way, perhaps this had been a perceptive glimpse, in the mid-1930s, into Hitler’s dreadfully effective use of the new mass media.) It was very silly, and yet, strangely, the title has stuck in my mind through all the decades since.

This was science fiction, but not as we know it, Jim.

§

And what of the Noösphere? Why, that was a notion I encountered at the start of the 1960s, long before people started wearing strange clothes and flowers in their hair. It was first proposed, though not named, by the Russian Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), a founder of the discipline of geochemistry, whose book The Biosphere (1926) argued that our world has been shaped by the life swarming its surface, waters and air for billions of years. It was a forerunner of James Lovelock’s idea of Gaia, but Vernadsky pushed it further: the planet’s history had seen three mighty epochs, with the new realm of mind following those of inanimate and then living matter. This mental world, the Noösphere, is today given literal expression in the global skein of billions of messages flung through space, wires, and cables, tying humankind into a kind of emerging hive mind.

The term was the coinage of a French Jesuit, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955). Teilhard was a paleontologist and early supporter of evolutionary explanations for the shape of species and the biosphere—a somewhat risky proposition for a Catholic priest to maintain in the 1920s, when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species remained on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Curiously enough, Teilhard’s approach to the topic rejected Darwin’s idea of gradual change via natural selection of random inherited characteristics. He was convinced that life’s evolution is goal-directed, presumably following a path prescribed in advance by a divine Creator. The Noösphere, then, was the gradual fulfillment of this project at its highest levels, with the minds of humankind being drawn together into a gestalt unity that would become, at its highest or Omega Point, the veritable consciousness of Christ on Earth.

For a while, I thought this was a pretty cool idea. It resonated with a lot of feel-good tropes in science fiction, which tends to be godless yet mystical, non- or even anti-religious yet spiritual, anchored in scientific empiricism as an ideal method yet profoundly touched by a yearning for transcendence. The celebrated “sense of wonder” is its ensign. Eventually I learned enough about evolutionary biology and philosophy to realize that Teilhard de Chardin was, in effect, barking mad; his theories (or “theories”) of radial and tangential energies were pure moonshine. It made as much sense as a rocket-propelled balloon into space. But wait—

As metaphor the Noösphere promised to be fertile!

Especially as a science fiction metaphor—one that applied to the stories themselves, as they clawed their way into existence in the heads of their authors and flourished into fresh life every time they entered the hungry consciousness of readers and viewers.

Humans are creatures of self-aware purpose (some of the time, anyway), utterly unlike the evolutionary process that cobbled us together. But we achieve our purposes as much by dreaming and playing games with ideas and imagined feelings as we do through deliberation and planning, or by following a path already set for us.

If sf is about anything, it’s that endless, ever-changing dream, that set of imaginary games we play, using the endlessly renewed toolbox of the genre.

We’re adrift, like voyagers on a raft, carried into strange seas by currents we can barely identify—adrift, indeed, in the Noösphere!

§

Some of my own voyages in the Noösphere, brief or extended, are gathered in this collection. Here’s how they came into existence, and the wanderings that led me toward them.

“Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order,” to my delighted astonishment, was purchased the very afternoon I submitted it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, at Tor.com, in 2011. It was my second sale to that website, and the story was elegantly illustrated by Victo Ngai. I hope it’s funny, in a grim sort of way. One of these days I should get back to this time-traveling couple; I like them.

I’ve read a lot of robot stories in the last half century, most memorably Isaac Asimov’s tales of his “positronic” humanoids, and John Sladek’s sarcastic rejoinders snapping at their heels. But in all this trove of mechanical men, Terminators, robots stunned and led astray by paradox, there aren’t many stories where robots...just wanna have fun in the sun. “All Summer Long “ was commissioned by Australian editors Paul Collins and Meredith Costain, and telling it from the point of view of a kid seemed just perfect.

Some years ago, I produced a burst of stories one after the other without pause, a return to the short form after years of writing mostly novels and other books—although for five years I was sf editor of the Aussie popular science magazine Cosmos, which meant I was reading a lot of short fiction. Let me assure you, this is an experience guaranteed to engender sympathy with the lot of the editor. I was going great guns until I got to the opening stanzas of “The Beancounter’s Cat,” which I carelessly showed to a senior and very astute editor. He told me just what was wrong with it, and that killed me stone dead in mid-stream. I immediately lost the capacity to write short fiction. Trust me, this happens to more writers than you’d suppose (it hamstrung the great Theodore Sturgeon repeatedly). Some years later, the brilliant Australian editor Jonathan Strahan asked me if I could urgently send him something for his non-themed anthology Eclipse Four. Why yes, of course, I said, and pulled out my false start. I saw quickly where I’d been going wrong, and had a very pleasant time reinventing the direction of the story, no longer adrift. It appeared from Nightshade Books in 2011, and I was charmed when Gardner Dozois took it for his 2012 Year’s Best SF volume.

Gardner had already bought reprint rights to “Under the Moons of Venus” for the 2011 Year’s Best SF anthology—and so too had the editors of four other Year’s Bests (David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Rich Horton, Allan Kaster, and Jonathan Strahan). I was startled to find how few other sf stories have been snapped up by so many different anthologies in a single year, and heartened by the success of this ambiguous tale. Is the protagonist psychotic and delusional, or has the solar system been rewritten by Singularity-grade entities? You must be the judge, but I think it all really happened just the way it seems. This was another story bought by Jonathan Strahan, and appeared in Subterranean, in 2010. It was a finalist for the 2011 Sturgeon Award.

As I write this, I’m in the process of proofreading a book I wrote with Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. That’s an ambitious guide to the finest long fiction sf in the years after those surveyed in David Pringle’s remarkable Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984. Paul and I have never met, but we’re frequent contributors to the internet chat group Fictionmags. Our first story together was “Cockroach Love,” in 2008. (It’s in my 2010 book Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer.) Our follow-up, “Luminous Fish,” is a tribute to the confrontational Jerry Cornelius stories devised by Michael Moorcock and others, and appears here (with Mike’s permission) for the first time.

Reading “Coming Back,” from F&SF in 1982, is a bit like watching the 1993 Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day a number of times in a row. Sometimes people adrift in the Noösphere find themselves caught in a whirlpool, sucked into the same Sargasso of idea. I don’t know who originated the notion in this story, but it wasn’t Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis (although they came up with an excellent and very funny script). It wasn’t sf veteran Richard Luphoff, whose 1973 story (in F&SF nine years before mine, although I’ve never read it) was also filmed for TV in 1993. Maybe it was me in 1971, when I published the original version of “Coming Back,” as “All the Time in the World,” under the jesting by-line Alan Harlison, in the Aussie men’s magazine Man. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the notion goes back to the Greeks, or further.

“Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” is another story commissioned by the indefatigable Jonathan Strahan, for his 2010 anthology Engineering Infinity. It is one of several collaborations by me and my wife Barbara Lamar. Our longest is a 400 page sf/thriller, Post Mortal Syndrome, which was the first novel serialized on-line in Australia (by Cosmos, the beautiful popular science magazine) in 2005, and released by Borgo Press in trade paperback in 2011. Barbara and I met through mutual interest in advanced technology, especially the kinds associated with the prospect of extended healthy longevity; at the time, she lived on her permaculture farm in Texas, and I in suburban Melbourne, Australia, and we were quite literally brought together by a confluence in the Noösphere. Nowadays we live near downtown San Antonio in a heritage-listed dwelling, formerly the family seat of the Texan painters Robert Onderdonk and his impressionist son Julian. We don’t, though, own an early Rauschenberg.

Just for the form of the thing, and for auld lang syne, let’s dip back to the dawn of time for my 1964 story “All My Yesterdays,” which I revised slightly for Van Ikin’s anthology Glass Reptile Breakout, in 1990. Frankly, it’s more a fantasy than sf, unless an interventionist deity (rather more annoying than Teilhard’s) is regarded as an sf idea.

Finally, “The Womb” was one of the longest pieces in the landmark 1998 original anthology Dreaming Down Under, winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1999, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb. Jack is my doppelgänger; he moved from the US to Australia after falling in love with writer, editor, and literary scholar Dr. Webb, and they spend most of their time there now, while I rusticate in the States. Meanwhile, the very much longer, closely detailed saga of Daimon Keith and his daughter Flake is told in the collaborative novel Dark Gray, by Rory Barnes and me, released in the US in 2010 by Fantastic Books.

§

All of these stories—all sf stories in general, perhaps all fiction—drift in the Noösphere, drawn and shoved by the currents of strange attractors we rarely identify. Perhaps science fiction is the story-telling medium best suited for this understanding. At its best, it is not programmatic, not goal-driven by ideology or compulsion (yet not, of course, plotless)—a kind of zestful or mournful or hilarious or yearning contemplation impelled by wonderment. These stories are my attempts upon that ambition.

It’s appropriate, perhaps, to close with a few of the thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught that “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.” But he wasn’t always so high-toned. Sometimes the world bit him on the ass, as it does with us: “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” But finally he and we know this much: “It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.” And who knows—maybe those abilities, enhanced by deepening knowledge, will burgeon and continue to enrich and enliven us, as our favorite fiction promises. Meanwhile, here are the stories.

1. http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2008/cur0808.htm