OTHER WORLDS

Science-fiction fans have so often seen their genre derided for its “lack of realism” that they understandably have grown defensive toward literary critics. Henceforth I’ll be careful to use the term SF for example, instead of the more common abbreviation sci-fi , which aficionados have come to find condescending.

And well they should, San Diego State University professor Larry McCaffery suggests in a new book, for sci-fi recalls the giant bugs and dastardly aliens of dime-store novels and space operas, images that bear little resemblance to the genre’s new frontier.

In Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press: $49.95, cloth; $17.95, paper; 404 pp.), McCaffery has assembled an anthology of fiction, poetry and nonfiction to show how SF writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Lucius Shepard are updating the genre’s staples--space travel, robots, ideas about evolution--by attention to new developments in artificial intelligence, information theory and biotechnology.

“Freed from the requirements of ‘realism’ ” McCaffery writes, “and sensitive to the ways in which the ‘real’ and the ‘true’ are being systematically replaced (even excluded) by the ‘hyperreal’ of images, statistics, and other abstractions . . . postmodern SF has recently produced the only art systematically exploring this ‘desert of the real(s).’ ”

Early SF writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. (Doc) Smith (“The Vortex Blaster”) lived a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away from ideas like this, of course. Indeed, McCaffery’s anthology includes work not only from science-fiction writers but from heavyweight literary theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson.

This is an interesting and valid way to look at contemporary SF. My one quibble is McCaffery’s conflation of “cyberpunk” with “postmodernism.” The cyberpunk movement, centered on William Gibson’s groundbreaking novel “Neuromancer,” which crossed a vision of streetwise computer hackers with the edgy sensibility of William Burroughs, was a self-conscious effort by a small group of writers to define themselves as different from, and in opposition to, their contemporaries. Postmodern SF is a more sweeping category, going well beyond cyberpunk. Because McCaffery draws no clear distinction between them, he is forced either to slight work that doesn’t fit his definition or shoehorn it into the cyberpunk mold.

Four recent books by writers who emerged in the 1980s offer an interesting commentary on this approach:

Tom Maddox, an academic who has an essay on Bruce Sterling in “Storming the Reality Studio,” is one of the writers most closely identified with the cyberpunks. Halo (Tor: $18.95; 288 pp.), his first novel, features artificial intelligences, virtual realities, multinational corporations and space colonies, powered by a mystery/thriller plot and garnished with quotes from Baudrillard and Jorge Luis Borges.

Mikhail Gonzales, a trouble-shooter for SenTrax, a multinational information conglomerate, is sent by company executive Frederick Traynor to Halo, a space colony on which an experiment linking a dying man with the artificial intelligence that runs the colony goes awry.

From “Neuromancer” on, cyberpunk has focused on such relationships between humans and artificial intelligences. In “Halo,” most of the significant action takes place within “virtual realities,” environments created and managed by an artificial intelligence named Aleph. Can this dying man be preserved as information in Aleph’s memory after his physical body dies? Maddox asks. Raising important philosophical questions of reality and simulation, “Halo” boldly suggests that the prospect of turning humans into information, and computers into people, might be liberating rather than dehumanizing.

As an examination of how the “real” is being replaced by the “hyperreal,” “Halo” is fascinating. But while its characters are drawn intelligently and subtly, they do not have much depth. As a result, they are often overshadowed by Maddox’s beautiful evocation of the planet Halo. In cyberpunk, as in postmodern fiction and traditional SF, characterization may become beside the point.

In contrast, in A Bridge of Years (A Foundation Book/Doubleday: $12, paper; 333 pp.) Robert Charles Wilson tries to fuse mainstream realism with SF. Tom Winter, recently divorced, has been yanked out of a six-month binge by his brother and given a job as a car salesman in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. He is a man on the brink of despair. Tom buys a deserted house in which he discovers a portal to the past--a tunnel with one end in his basement and the other in an apartment building in Greenwich Village in 1963. He escapes 1991, falls in love in 1963 and begins a new life. But unknown to him, a paranoid cyborg soldier who established the time portal is determined to kill Tom to preserve his own refuge.

Like older SF writers such as Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn, Wilson is interested in character, and Tom is particularly well drawn. Wilson’s prose is lovingly crafted. His technological background, however, is purely a means to other ends. Wilson clearly intends his thriller to support a meditation on the difference between that more optimistic summer of 1963--before the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and the decline of the American economy--and our current state of disillusionment. But in the end, plot begins to overshadow both character and theme, and the conclusion, though it wraps up every loose end, does it perhaps a little too neatly.

Kim Stanley Robinson, though not numbered among McCaffery’s postmodernists, in his second story collection, Remaking History (Tor: $18.95; 256 pp.), demonstrates that he is hip to postmodern literary techniques. In several of the stories here, Robinson violates narrative conventions to incorporate direct discussion of ideas. “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions,” for instance, is more an essay on chaos theory, history and Robinson’s earlier story, “The Lucky Strike,” than it is a conventional story. “Vinland the Dream,” about the discovery that evidence of Norse settlement of America was an elaborate hoax, in its own quiet way addresses the metaphysical questions of simulation versus reality.

“Remaking History” also shows Robinson’s considerable range with more conventional SF, from comedy (“The Translator”) to political fantasy (“A Transect”) to allegorical fantasy (“Zurich”) and SF (“The Lunatics”).

“Down and Out in the Year 2000” presents a gritty few days in the struggle of Leroy Robinson to survive in a Washington, D.C., of the near future. First published in 1986, it is chillingly prescient about our current economic slide. It also contains a delightful backhand swipe at the absurdities of the cyberpunk hacker elite.

One of my favorites here is “A History of the 20th Century, With Illustrations,” about a historian commissioned to write the text for a coffee-table book of that title. In the process of his research at the British Museum, counting up the losses from the 20th Century’s wars, he spirals deep into depression. He flees to Scotland and eventually the Orkney Islands, there to visit ruins that date to before recorded history, and to face the uncertain future.

Here Robinson’s discursive urges--mini-essays on world history and anthropology--are integrated with a well-realized character and a simple but effective story line. What emerges is a study of our lives at the brink of the new millennium. Like the best SF, going back to Wells, Robinson puts the present in the context of the large sweep of history, integrates the personal with the political, the cultural and the evolutionary. The result is powerfully moving.

Michael Swanwick has occupied an ambiguous position with regard to the cyberpunks. His novel, “Vacuum Flowers,” cyberpunk by virtue of its content and milieu, was accused by some of jumping on the bandwagon. Gravity’s Angels (Arkham House Publishers: $20.95; 302 pp., illustrated) collects the best of Swanwick’s short fiction from the ‘80s and demonstrates just how beside the point pigeonholing writers can be.

Like Robinson’s, Swanwick’s work covers a considerable range. “The Transmigration of Philip K” is a clever and affectionate pastiche of the work of Philip K. Dick. “A Midwinter’s Tale,” a nested not-Christmas tale within a tale within a tale, set on a distant world in the far future, attains a kind of magic through its complication, fusing tragedy with poetry. “Mummer Kiss” presents a gritty picture of an alternative future Philadelphia where the Three Mile Island mishap resulted in a Chernobyl-scale disaster that has poisoned the environment and fostered a suicidal political cover-up.

Like the work of Gene Wolfe, Swanwick’s stories are both precise and mysterious. Reading them in this collection reveals Swanwick as a games player, a Symbolist with a capital S , interested in altering our state of consciousness, performing a dance of veils for our edification and delight. His stories owe as much to Vladimir Nabokov as to Robert Heinlein. Like Nabokov, the games may at times become a bit obscure, but they’re fascinating.

If you want to call Swanwick postmodern, then he’s postmodern as all get-out, but he’s not going to give you a lot of help on information theory. He’s pursuing his own lights, and yet his teen-agers in the Borgesian landscape of “The Edge of the World” say some things about alienation that you will not encounter in the high-tech musings of the cyberpunks.

If these five books show anything, it is that there are a lot of ways to write good SF, and a lot of good SF being written, including, but not confined to, what we might call postmodern.