When I was around eleven or twelve, I used some of my lawn mowing money to join the Science Fiction Book Club. I still have the bonus volume that came with my first order. I subscribed for years. There’s no telling what impact Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination had on my social imagination. When The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere were published as twin novelettes by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1965, I fell under the spell of J.G. Ballard and never escaped.
The most generous offer ever made (Wikipedia).
Captain Edward Ruppelt’s long-lived UFO classic was up front in 1956, bookended with Asimov’s 1955 The End of Eternity. (Wikipedia)
Sci Fi covers were terrific (photo Gary Mawyer)
Science fiction is a way of exploring the future without going there, but science fiction is not all about futuristic machinery; it is a genre of social writing and often takes the nature and future prospects of Civilization as its topic. A capitalized Civilization, because in Sci Fi, civilization is frequently the main subject. Building, maintaining, losing, and if necessary rebuilding civilization is the huge theme taken in hand by countless science fiction works, short and long. Another great theme is an outrageous protagonist surviving in a dysfunctional civilization.
Or not surviving… (Wikipedia)
It’s a daunting tradition and I never imagined I would trespass in the haunted grove myself. But about fifteen years ago my son Edward thrust into my hands an untitled manuscript 30 pages long, framing the mad adventures of Reese Macaque. More than a few people saw Ted’s work and thought it was either deadly funny or too disturbing to be funny. It was a manuscript ambitious past the dreams of English majors, told from inside a startlingly real world, a world disturbingly like ours, and yet backlit with unjustified flashes of hope and aspiration.
For a time Ted and I worked on a short story version of the original manuscript, and Ted produced several more short passages that would most naturally go to other stories. The main artistic question about Rhesus A. Macaque was not simple. How is it that Macaque is a human? Or is he a monkey? As you can see, the main artistic question promptly split in half on us, but both halves pointed in the same direction: is there just one Macaque or are they a kind of thing?
That was how I found myself writing a science fiction detective novel, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. Detective novels are generally novels of manners. A science fiction detective novel of manners is (I suppose) about social interactions in a future world—and an obvious way to dissect social behaviors in our world. In the case of this book, the society in question is ours, in the year 2296. In this world Yeats was obviously quite correct: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”
That being said, iit was years before I realized that Macaque was science fiction. For a good while I assumed it was a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy in the same genre as Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, first published in 1930 and still very much in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business.
For a time Ted and I worked on a short story version of the original manuscript, and Ted produced several more short passages that would most naturally go to other stories. The main artistic question about Rhesus A. Macaque was not simple. How is it that Macaque is a human? Or is he a monkey? As you can see, the main artistic question promptly split in half on us, but both halves pointed in the same direction: is there just one Macaque or are they a kind of thing?
That was how I found myself writing a science fiction detective novel, The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. Detective novels are generally novels of manners. A science fiction detective novel of manners is (I suppose) about social interactions in a future world—and an obvious way to dissect social behaviors in our world. In the case of this book, the society in question is ours, in the year 2296. In this world Yeats was obviously quite correct: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”
That being said, iit was years before I realized that Macaque was science fiction. For a good while I assumed it was a fantasy, specifically a nonsense fantasy in the same genre as Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World or John Collier’s His Monkey Wife, first published in 1930 and still very much in print. Of course nonsense is a very serious business.
Edward Lear’s The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World.
(Photo by Gary Mawyer)
(Photo by Gary Mawyer)
But over the last few years, I began to believe that the little tales of mystery and detection that Ted and I have laid out in The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. are set in a more-than-probable future world—a world we will in fact be hard pressed to avoid. Though the world of P.I. Macaque didn’t seem likely to be an accurate or literal description of the future at first, I have come to think the present social moment is already close to it. Macaque seems to be on the road to actuality after all. So thanks, Ted. In an act of imagination, or maybe prescience, you created the world of Reese Macaque. We’re its first citizens but I have a notion that in the years to come just about everybody is probably going to have to live in it, whether they read this book or not.
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