Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They’ve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.
This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn’t about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Deborah, was a graduate student in linguistics who taught E.S.L. He listened to her young Japanese students talk about Vancouver as though it were a backwater; Tokyo must really be something, he thought. He remembered a weeping ambulance driver in a bar, saying, “She flatlined.” On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out “infospace” and “dataspace” before coming up with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person might explore even though it was dangerous.
But perhaps the most devastating scene in the book involves Brian, who has AIDS, diving into a public swimming pool and, in Meg’s words, “everyone losing their minds.” Meg had picked it out in the brief, but was understandably worried that images of swimming pools were becoming too commonplace on book covers. The scene had such an effect on me, though, that I really wanted to try and work it into a visual of some sort, and that’s where I ended up starting the process.
Compared to the unsolved mysteries of the universe, far less gets said about one of the most profound facts to have crystallized in physics over the past half-century: To an astonishing degree, nature is the way it is because it couldn’t be any different. “There’s just no freedom in the laws of physics that we have,” said Daniel Baumann, a theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam.
Since the 1960s, and increasingly in the past decade, physicists like Baumann have used a technique known as the “bootstrap” to infer what the laws of nature must be. This approach assumes that the laws essentially dictate one another through their mutual consistency — that nature “pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.” The idea turns out to explain a huge amount about the universe.
For years there was darkness. No comet raged in the sky. No further fire swallowed up Europe. As many as could be hoped, which is not many at all, read Copernicus’s On the Revolutions. Copies bled across the continent and into England. Non-astronomers heard about it. They laughed. They disagreed. They quit thinking about it and went to bed. And then there was light.
In November 1572, stargazers all the world over looked up and saw something new. A supernova. To them it looked a star, a new star, a day star, a space dragon, blazing in the heavens alone with the Sun, brighter than Venus in the night, usurping the throne of the princess, constellation Cassiopeia. Four hundred years later, it had changed everything. None understood what this new star meant, especially once it began to fade.
In the very first scene of Johanne Bille’s brief but incisive novel, Elastic, we find a woman in the shower. She’s probing her own vagina, these “pink curtains of flesh” that she hates, considering it an alien entity. “Today, I think cunts are ugly,” she concludes, and this is where Bille’s book begins: an exploration of gender identity and body discomfort from the inside out, often in an excruciatingly literal sense.
This woman in the shower is Alice, our narrator, and the locus of an extreme interiority of perspective. We only experience the narrative through her eyes and her mind. It is the core strength of the novel that Alice’s mind, as expressed through Bille’s elegant control of narrative voice, is acutely attuned to the sensual, physical world. Nearly every page is awash in sensuous, erotic similes. A half-erect penis is described as “caught between two poles, like a ripple moving across the surface of the ocean.” A door with a faulty latch keeps “creeping open like a stab in the back.” Mathilde, the centre of Alice’s attentions, her lusts and desires, and, increasingly, sense of self, is described as “enthroned like a kingfisher in a nest of cotton.”
What follows is a series of essays — sometimes more like memories or musings — that don’t subscribe to a particular classification. They share the theme of travel, since they’re often associated with, but not anchored to, a visited or inhabited locale. Food (although rarely given as much attention as the lives and work of the people Condé meets, her irreconcilable sense of alienation or her thoughts on her writing) is the connector from one place or time to the next.
Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal. “Most objects, like all people, disappear in the end,” she writes at the start of The Pulse Glass, an excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance. And yet not everything crumbles to dust; some bits and pieces defy the odds by surviving, and it is Tindall’s delight – albeit of a measured and low-key sort – to describe their escape from “the quiet darkness of forgetting”.