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  Lewis Thomas points out that it’s this way in medicine. Low-tech medicine is cheap—people get polio (say) or Salmonella, and die. Medium tech is nasty and expensive—iron lungs and keeping people alive when there is no good treatment for a disease is costly. Really high-tech medicine, vaccine and antibiotics, is relatively cheap again, and everyone lives. The same thing happens with technology in developing countries—it has to be all or nothing. In between is the killer.

  This suggests that techno-savvy development should probably be concentrated massively on small areas, to get them to a “post-industrial” level. This will avoid spreading investment thinly and falling short of the critical point. Such small, intensive cases will be experiments, yielding different schemes, seeing what works. If even the Earth Firsters can come to see that development need not mean deforestation and the Glen Canyon Dam, a new direction in resolute ecovirtue could open.

  For the moment they are mere cranks, oddities, wild-eyed nobodies on their rickety soapboxes. But their numbers rise. Their actions gather allies. Their anger soars. We must defuse that anger with actions of our own.

  The zealot who could design a SuperFlu might well come from citadels of high moral purpose.

  The advent of Islamic zealots worsens this problem far more.

  Finally, global climate change is accelerating. Some writers like Stan Robinson think this arises from evil ’ol capitalism, by which he means free markets. Nobody has advanced a better economic model that works, so replacement is very unlikely—but the whole idea is misplaced anyway.

  Energy use rises because free markets better supply human wants—period. The whole planet wants to live like Americans; and who can blame them?

  So any democratically determined economy will hit the climate problem. More humans will worsen it more.

  That’s why I consider geo-engineering inevitable. It will begin in the 2030s with aerosols at high altitude to cool by reflecting sunlight. Sucking some carbon from the air will occur too. But it’s going to be a long haul to a future that looks as good environmentally as the world I grew up in.

  Copyright © 1994 by Abbenford Associates

  Robert J. Sawyer is the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Heinlein, Hal Clement, Skylark, Aurora, and Seiun Award—winning author of twenty-three bestselling science-fiction novels, including the trilogy of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, which just won Canada’s Aurora Award for the Best Work of the Decade. Rob holds two honorary doctorates and is a Member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Canadian government. Find him online at sfwriter.com.

  DECOHERENCE

  by Robert J. Sawyer

  1968

  This year, 2018, is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what many critics call the two best science fiction films ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Planet of the Apes.

  Both are adaptations of literary works, the former of a prize-winning Arthur C. Clarke short story called “The Sentinel,” and the latter of the 1963 novel La Planète des singes (The Planet of Apes, not the ridiculous and inaccurate Monkey Planet moniker that Penguin slapped on the first English edition) by Pierre Boulle, who had already gained fame with his 1952 novel Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (The Bridge Over the River Kwai).

  Both movies deal with spaceship crews in suspended animation, both are unreasonably optimistic in their view of how fast the space program would progress (Apes insanely has humanity’s first interstellar voyage being launched in 1972; 2001, showing restraint only in comparison, posits manned interplanetary travel by the first year of this century), both have spectacular makeup for humans playing hirsute primates, and both have surprise endings.

  But in most ways they are very different. Except for one brief shot (the famed femur toss), 2001 was filmed entirely on soundstages, Stanley Kubrick liking to control every aspect of each scene. Apes, on the other hand, was largely filmed outdoors against gorgeously stark Arizona, Utah, and California landscapes, with spectacular cinematography by Leon Shamroy.

  2001 has very little dialog (the first line isn’t spoken until twenty-five minutes into the film and the last line comes twenty-three minutes before the end), whereas Apes, ironically for a film about humanity having lost its ability to articulate, is filled with speeches, starting with a fabulous soliloquy by Charlton Heston that includes a rhetorical question that’s as relevant today as it was a half-century ago: “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?”

  Of course, science fiction is never really about the future; rather, it’s about the year in which it was written. The mid-1960s were the dawn of feminism, and Apes acknowledges this by including a woman astronaut in its space mission. That period was also the thick of the civil-rights movement in the United States, and Apes included an African-American astronaut. Contemporary reviewers tried to be blasé about that (Renata Adler, sounding painfully racist today, in the New York Times: “a relatively new movie type, a Negro based on some recent, good Sidney Poitier roles—intelligent, scholarly, no good at sports at all”), but in fact this was a breakthrough part.

  2001, on the other hand, was completely oblivious to women’s lib (the only female in a non-subservient role is a Russian, played by The Forsyte Saga’s formidable Margaret Tyzack), and there’s not a person of color anywhere. Kubrick, working in the UK, may have been blissfully unaware of then-current American events, but he had to have known about Star Trek, which had given us a female African astronaut as a regular character starting two years before, in 1966.

  Still, 2001 is every bit as much of its time as is Apes. It’s steeped in Cold War paranoia: the Americans have discovered an alien artifact on the moon, and the single most important thing is keeping the news from the Soviets. And although many misremember the bone the australopithecine throws into the air turning—in a four-million-year jump cut—into a Pan Am space plane, that’s not what happens: rather, it turns into an orbiting nuclear weapons platform, one of many we seen waltzing about.

  Indeed, both Apes and 2001 acknowledge the 1960’s fear of nuclear holocaust. In Apes, humanity “finally, really did it,” as Heston’s character observes: “You blew it up! You maniacs!”

  And although the orbiting nuclear weapons don’t reappear at the end of 2001—Kubrick got cold feet about coming anywhere near to repeating the ending of his immediately preceding film, the anti-nuclear satire Dr. Strangelove—Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of the screenplay makes clear the intent: the godlike Star Child, who comes to Earth at the end, wipes out the orbiting nukes, safely detonating them. Apes forlornly says that humanity is doomed to eventually use its nuclear weapons against itself; 2001 says nothing but divine intervention can save us from the same fate.

  Fifty years on, which film holds up better? Well, of course, no one makes movies with complex latex-appliance makeups anymore; the recent rebooted Planet of the Apes films all use computer-generated imagery instead (which, I confess, leaves me cold; give me Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter any day). Nor does anyone do the sort of intricate modelwork and trick photography that was the hallmark of 2001; again, CGI has replaced that sort of craftsmanship.

  In the end, though, Apes, for all its flights of fancy, stands the test of time better than 2001 does. Why? Because it’s about something. In fact, it’s about a lot of things including racism and class (the first ape to speak at any length in the film is Dr. Galen, a chimpanzee decrying that he’s been kept down by the racial quota system) and religious fundamentalism versus scientific truth (a literal Scopes Monkey Trial, if you will, as orangutan Dr. Zaius serves the dual roles of minister of science and chief defender of the faith).

  2001, on the other hand, is a paean to nationalist space exploration that seemed passé even before its titular year actually arrived, and its ending is infused with mysticism and religious symbol
ism that I find much less tolerable than the sometimes broad satire of Apes.

  Kubrick wanted to make a film that was open to interpretation, but, after five decades of analysis coming up with little more than it’s yet another retelling of the Christ story, we can say much the same thing of 2001 as the film’s character Heywood Floyd says, in the film’s final line of dialog, of the alien monolith found on the moon: “Its origin and purpose still a total mystery.” But the team making Planet of the Apes (the script for which was written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and the great Michael Wilson, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy communist witch hunt) crafted a film that was designed to provocatively engender debate about major issues.

  In the end, the Kubrick of 2001—like Jules Verne before him, who also loved to showcase technology at the expense of real meaning—had very little to say that was relevant or human. Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, by doing what science fiction does best—social commentary presented with masks and metaphors—makes us continue to think and feel...and probably will do so for many more decades to come.

  Copyright © 2018 by Robert J. Sawyer

  Lois McMaster Bujold has won Hugos, Nebulas, Locus awards and the John Campbell Award. In short, this leading light of science fiction and fantasy has won more awards for taking us to her worlds than almost any other writer in the genres.

  Joy Ward is the author of one novel. She has several stories in print, in magazines and in anthologies, and has also conducted interviews, both written and video, for other publications.

  THE GALAXY’S EDGE INTERVIEW

  Joy Ward Interviews Lois McMaster Bujold

  Joy Ward: Tell me about your first sale.

  Lois McMaster Bujold: I wrote Shards in 1983, Warrior’s Apprentice in 1984, and Ethan of Athos in 1985. Then they all sold at the end of 1985 to Baen Books, and that was actually my second sale. The first one had been a short story to Twilight Zone Magazine the prior year.

  I’d started on The Warrior’s Apprentice, and I hit a kind of a snag. Get something on your resume by selling short stories, and then maybe they’ll pay attention to your novel. There’s all kinds of writerly cargo-cult beliefs about how to sell your first novel or any novel. Some of which are true, most of which are not. But the idea was that you would learn how to write by writing short stories, and then write a novel. Which is wrong because they’re two different modes, and you can be good at one and bad at the other. I’ve known many people where their first sale was the novel. Pat Wrede was one of them. But it was the little short story called “Barter.” It was this little thing about a housewife. Housewife meets an alien, triumphs. Popped that off. I’d done three or four short stories at that time, all of which are currently in reprint as a little e-collection called Protozoa at the moment. You can still see these antique little things. I was sending them off and getting rejections. I finally got a hit after like five tries. That story. It came as a little teeny postcard in the mail, and down, had to fish it out of the bottom of my mailbox. It was like, “What? They bought it!” I was very excited.

  So that was validation. It said, “Okay, you’re, you’re on the right track. You can do this.” This was a little bit of a reward. On that kind of energy I went and wrote the third novel. We’d been going three years without a paycheck. It was pretty discouraging. So that was the thing that I needed and it gave me something to say in the cover letters, you know, besides, “Here is my story. I’ve never sold anything.” Or, “Here’s my story. I’ve sold to this editor over here.” You know. Editors have the herd instinct. They stay together and not be caught out from other editors.

  Whatever I wrote had to be something I had internalized. It had to be something I really liked. Which was science fiction, mystery, and remember I was a latecomer to romance so romance wasn’t really on my radar. Might’ve been mystery. I might’ve gone toward mystery. But I had been reading science fiction since I was nine. It was something that I felt like I knew. Kind of what the markets were.

  I was so blown away. I was a little cautious because I didn’t know Baen Books from anything. They were brand-new at that point. I wasn’t sure whether I should try to get an agent. There was some confusion about that for a while. I didn’t know that I could negotiate contracts. I didn’t know how. I did not have an agent. So I was very much at sea. Do it now, fix it later. But I sat on the news for a while, because I kept waiting for it to evaporate. It’s like something was going to happen and it wasn’t going to be broken off.

  It says I can write another book. Yes! I can do this. Which turned out to be Falling Free. It was interesting. It was the first time I had an editor on the line that I could talk to about, “What do you want to buy? And, I’ve got this idea and I’ve got that idea.” So Falling Free actually came out of a conversation with Jim Baen as I was looking at the material I had and I said, “Maybe I could do something with Arty Mayhew,” and it kind of fell flat. I had come up with the idea for the quaddies, this race of free-fall dwellers that Arty would go visit and were on his quest for a headset, or for a ship to go with his neurological headset. But we got to talking about the free-fall dwellers, and that led me back to thinking about the quaddies, and then thinking about them more, developing their backstory, and then going back. I said, okay, where does this story start? You know, and that brought me back to Falling Free, to the start of Falling Free, which was the beginning of this bio-engineered race in this future history that I was setting up to be, not aliens but in process of bio-engineering humanity such that humanity would speciate from about this period going forward, so that ten thousand years down the timeline, all the aliens would be us. From us. There’d be all kinds of races all over the place that were purposely or accidentally consequential to this, to this period where it was just getting started. So the quaddies are kind of like the first entry in that idea of human speciation. It’s a very biologically-centered future history.

  I was thinking mostly of Cordwainer Smith’s Tales of the Instrumentality. He was this great writer from the ’50s, ’60s, and, I’m not sure he quite made it to the ’70s. But he wrote these amazing stories that never explained anything. But you gradually picked up that, that it was this kind of a world where all these people eventually went back to earth in their family tree and had all kinds of races.

  JW: What have you learned as a writer?

  LB: Arguing with reviewers. You can’t argue with someone’s reading experience. It was what it was. You can’t reach in there and fine-tune and change it to have been a better reading experience by arguing with them. So that’s pointless.

  There’s a lot of talk that circles around every human subject, writing included, that is basically jockeying for social status. Fear of losing social status. That’s a big driver. Every flame war has got that underneath it. Somebody is convinced that they’re having this status emergency and they must defend themselves. It isn’t actually an emergency, just something on your mind. Falling into that trap of taking it too personally. Taking it as a personal attack is one to avoid. So that “I must be professional,” is a very good bulwark against that temptation. Even back in the old days, the first rule of writing, and the old pros would tell you is, “Don’t respond to critical reviews.” You can say thank you if somebody said something nice. Otherwise, let it go. That is still absolutely true.

  The being an author stuff, and then there’s the actual writing and people reading it. So those are two different compartments of things that can happen. I divide them by calling author and writer.

  The author stuff is everything that people see you do that make you think, “I’m gonna be an author.” And the writing is the actual writing and the reading and the genuine reader feedback. On the author side, the travel has been amazing. I don’t want to do it anymore because I’m getting older and my back doesn’t take it. But certainly the convention travel, the international travel getting to go, eventually, all over the world, taught me an enorm
ous amount of things. So that was, that was a high point. Trips to England. Trips to Europe. I’ve been to Croatia. I’ve been to Australia. New Zealand. Not sure if Canada counts. A lot of places I would never have thought to go on my own.

  To a great extent, certainly Americans and other Westerners, their identity is based on their work. You can have identity based on your family and relationships. You can have identity based on your possessions. You know, I have all this stuff, I must be okay. There’s identity based on your interests. Fans, for example. Identity out of that. Hobbies. So identity comes from all kinds of sources. The writing kind of rolls along all those sources together. It’s something that people are impressed by.

  You get that external validation. “She’s the writer. Is she all right?” It makes you interesting. So that’s a psychological boost. If you’re lucky it gives you an income. And income is another thing that identity is judged by and created by. Gives you the empowerment to do things. Like eat. Survive. Travel. Whatever. Send your kids to college. All those items. So that’s kind of on the input side.

  Then on the writer’s side, when people read the stuff and feed back to you their experience. A writer is kind of like a deaf composer. You never get to actually find out what art you’ve made because it’s taking place inside somebody else’s head. But make a comment. A review. Fan-fiction is a kind of response. And you get to kind of see, “What is it that I did?” Every once in a while someone will write you and say a book “has helped in his struggle with leukemia. He so enjoyed your books.” “Thank you, I was in the ICU for three months with my premature baby and I re-read Barrayar and it helped me process this.” Thank you for this or that experience that people use books to get through.

  It always makes me think about the books that helped me do this. So it becomes a paying forward. I’ve received this from books, now I’m paying it back with books. There’s that sense of balance. It’s balancing, so to speak. It makes it worth having done. It’s, it’s a side effect. It’s not something I control. Books go out and beyond that I have no notion of where they’ll land.