The Folk Of The Fringe

My apologies to Orson Scott Card for using the title of his collection of novellas as the title of this essay, but it seems to be quite relevant to the matter at hand. By my lights it is still in a way Card’s most interesting work, all the stories set in the same consistent post-American fall future, all concerned with the stories of Mormon survivors of one sort or another, all of them “folk of the fringe” of that latter day society of Latter Day Saints, and all the more interesting for being so rather than inhabiting the psychic, theological, and social center thereof. And the argument of this essay is that at least for the past five or ten years or so, and more recently even more so, much of the most interesting literary action has been taking place on the fringes of SF publishing. or, to put it the other way around, the folks who have been writing it have tended to be pushed away from the commercial publishing centers and toward various species of fringe publication, willingly or not.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” wrote William Butler Years in his poem Second Coming.

Well, maybe.

Or not.

It is certainly characteristic of powers that be—political, theological, economic, literary, commercial—to do their damned-est to converge on the center in the usual foredoomed attempt to hold it together when things are manifestly falling apart.

As I write this at the beginning of 2009, things have certainly fallen apart in the globalized world financial system and economy. The macroeconomy has been flimflammed by so-called “financial engineers” who created Ponzi schemes so deliberately arcane and convoluted that even they couldn’t quite understand that transmuting debts—liabilities—into “collateralized debt obligations” that could be palmed off as a form of “assets,” amounted to packaging shit and selling it as shinola.

Or as the positive version of the old Hollywood joke definition of producing has it, transforming drek into gelt.

But the other Hollywood definition of a producer is someone who turns gelt into drek, and in the end that’s what these wise guys accomplished—as I wrote in Greenhouse Summer long before the fact, “writing the greatest rubber check in history and passing it off on themselves.”

As I write this, the mainstream politicians and economists on both sides of the liberal/conservative Democratic/Republican divide have converged on the obsolescent center policies as the way out of this mess rather like passengers on the Titanic debating how many of the deck chairs on the promenade deck should be positioned to port and how many to starboard, unwilling to face the fact that the ship has hit the iceberg, that the old economic paradigm was riddled with singularities all along, and has become a center that cannot hold any longer..

A new economic paradigm is going to be the only way out, and it’s not going to arise from consensus thinking, but from somewhere out there on the fringes. Ditto for publishing in general and SF publishing in particular, for the publishing business had been heading slowly south long before the macroeconomic shit hit the fan, like the canary in the coal mine.

As the publishing industry imploded into fewer and fewer and larger and larger conglomerates, it was inevitable that ultimate decision-making powers would gravitate away from literary editorial personnel and into the hands of corporate mavens accustomed to relying upon the abstract book-keeping numbers, the crunchers thereof, and the crunchers’ computer programs—not that much different from the reliance of the financial system on the “financial engineering” that was to thoroughly tank it.

And in our corner of the current catastrophe, the business powers also seem to be cleaving desperately to the center as things fall apart. 

This sort of behavior is inevitable when the decision-making gravitates away from folks who understand and have emotional involvement with the actual product—automobile designers and workers, bank loan approval officers, editors, and so forth—and into the province of financial engineers whose expertise is in the abstract “derivative” economics, aka the Sacred Bottom Line.

The economic superstructure several levels of abstraction above the actual product is all they really know, not the product itself—therefore not what’s gone wrong with it, or even that something has, and therefore not how to improve it sufficiently to rescue it.

In the current publishing realm, that’s a big reason why so much of the best and most interesting stuff written by many of the most adventurous, courageous, and talented writers is out there on the economic fringes. Though it has to be admitted that while this situation has gotten more extreme of late, it has always been the case to some extent, and probably always will be.

Because you can’t get paradigm shifts, even desperately needed ones, from the center, from the current consensus, since a paradigm shift requires an acknowledgment that the consensus map of a reality no longer describes it, that therefore conventional wisdom can no longer be relied upon to prescribe cures for its dysfunctionality, and that therefore only a radical perceptual shift coming from outside the central consensus will be able to present a clear analysis of that reality, and only action based on that analysis can really work.

Visionary thinking outside the box of consensus reality leading to visionary action.

Does this sound something like the proper and necessary social function of speculative fiction in a reasonably healthy progressive civilization?

Well, there you have it.

Or not.

Time was that down the middle science fiction performed that function very well. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, Fredrick Pohl and Poul Anderson, and so forth, creating fictional science and technologies that inspired later iterations in the real world, and exploring the political, social, and personal consequences thereof before the fact.

SF itself taken as a whole was a self-contained fringe fiction commercially and literarily. Specialty magazines with limited circulation among the already convinced, minor book houses and specialty imprints of major ones targeting a well-defined and limited readership.

Pulp adventure fantasies, but also the creative freedom for those with the talent and will to seize it that came from conceiving science fiction as an elite literature appealing to a scientifically literate readership with I.Q.s well above the mean that was therefore never going to achieve fame and fortune outside the walls of the gilded ghetto. A visionary fringe literature, and to a great extent its creators and readership snobbishly and aggressively proud of it.

But in the 1960s the times they were a-changing, and on both sides of the Culture War, whether you were for the counterculture or against it, no one could deny that there was a paradigm shift going on. SF, being the literature that explored all sorts of paradigm shifts before they happened and hardly existing in a commercial or cultural vacuum, could not help but be one of the instigators of the paradigm shift on the one hand, while being mutated by it on the other.

On the dark side, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was taken up as a lifestyle model by the hippies at large, but also by Charlie Manson and his Dune Buggy Death Commandos as a rationale for their sanguinary discorporations.

On the positive side, there is the story of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Serialized in many installments in John W. Campbell’s Analog in the early 1960s, it was unable to secure book publication except by an extremely minor house for an advance amounting to peanuts. The later paperback reissue became a slow-motion best-seller after it was taken up by a countercultural readership far larger and far broader than the circumscribed readership for SF in general at the time because of the centrality of a psychedelic drug to its story line and the masterful portrayal of the chemically enhanced prescient consciousness of its central viewpoint character.

So while SF may not have been accepted into the center of literary culture or become a major publishing profit center, in the 1960s it expanded its singular fringe readership into a multiplicity of fringe readerships. In retrospect, this was a large part of what the New Wave was really about, and which, in the 1980s, it would become a large part of what Cyberpunk was really about, too.

The New Wave, speculative fiction written that appealed to fringe readerships outside the hermetically sealed demographics of SF fandom, like the counterculture, the literary avant garde, the politically progressive, the New Age movement, and so forth, never really became the commercial center of the genre, washed over as it was by the later tsunami of tie-ins and schlock generated by Star Trek, Star Wars, and their would-be imitators in book form.

But in the end what it did establish commercially was that taken as a whole the new clade of more sophisticated fringe readerships was sufficient to make novels like Brian Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, my own Bug Jack Barron, and Robert Silverberg’s Son of Man at least commercially viable as major SF titles.

What these various novels and the rest of the New Wave canon had in common was that they all had very little in common save a liberation from the taboos and restrictions—sexual, stylistic, thematic, political—on what could previously have been published by the central SF publishers or the SF imprints of major publishing houses.

Similar freedom still exists today, and such stuff is still publishable, and still finds some kind of fringe readership. But most of the major SF lines are targeting the perceived “fan base,” what they conceive of as the demographic center in these tough times—meaning, inevitably, the retro and nostalgic, the “pulp tradition,” the good old stuff, punting, bunting, playing it what they believe is commercially safe, whether it is really working or not.

Of course there are exceptions, but when what were previously independent publishers get gobbled up and become imprints of conglomerates, it’s inevitable that the number crunchers come to dominate editorial policies—and when they do, that those policies follow the Book-Scan numbers defining the bottom line, which has to lead to playing down the middle.

Son of Man, for example, was first published in 1971 by Ballantine Books, then entirely under the command of Ian and Betty Ballantine, but now an imprint of Random House, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. Its SF line in turn is a sub-sub imprint, Del Rey Books, and it’s highly unlikely that Del Rey would be able to publish this novel even if Silverberg had submitted it as a brand new book today, rather than a “golden oldie” reprint.

Instead, it has been republished by Pyr, a house somewhere between a large small press and a small independent major, which has been making a name for itself in this ecological niche for quite some time now, publishing worthy fiction unable to find a home with a major SF line.

Pyr has chosen a bit of an old New York Times review of the original edition for the cover blurb:

“Son of Man is profligate, spendthrift, wildly generous with image and sensation and with sexuality.”

Well, yes, that about says it all, though not quite. Imagery, sensation, sexuality, altered states of form, consciousness, and being are just about all this novel is about. The viewpoint character is a man from more or less the present, transported by literary fiat to a baroquely transhuman far future when humanity has exfoliated and evolved into all sorts of post-human “Sons of Man.” The novel is a conventionally plotless psychedelic trip through this manifold wonderland, though Silverberg takes care to avoid what Herbert did in Dune—putting what was going on at the time, chemical alteration of consciousness leading to higher states of being, front and center, or even there at all.

It’s hard to imagine the SF imprint of a publishing conglomerate taking a flyer on such a novel today. Not because of any taboos against explicit or even “perverse” sexuality, which really have not existed since the 1960s, but because the digital thinking of the number crunchers, BookScan watchers, and marketing staff wouldn’t know what to do with it. Because from that point of view, there’s nothing to do with it, no identifiable track record of similar stuff with a viable and quantifiable demographic.

From the analog point of view of a perspicacious idealistic editor, given sufficient literary quality, given sufficient speculative imagination, this would be an exciting virtue, a chance to publish something sui generis, something new under the literary sun. But from the digital point of view of BookScans, P&Ls, bottomline number crunching, this is commercial poison.

 

But I liked Before They Are Hanged very much indeed, even though it was the second book in the damned trilogy, and I knew it when I read it first because it was the first volume I had. I liked it so much that I sought out the first novel, The Blade Itself, read it second, and then Last Argument of Kings.

Why?

Because of the way this series is written.

Not primarily because I like Abercrombie’s prose style as such, which I do, but primarily because of the mordant cynicism of his third person narrative voice, the touchingly guilt-ridden sardonic attitude of his sometime berserker barbarian hero, the phlegmatic consciousness of this ambiguous warrior’s some- time sidekick, the utter crazed viciousness of Abercrombie’s female barbarian warrior, the bitterly cruel psyche of his crippled torturer, the way that this is no moral tale of the Conflict of Good and Evil, but one in which the reader is left to ponder which is which and what the difference may or may not be without an auctorial scorecard.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson had it, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I’ve found myself entranced in practice by an open-ended series my literary principles tells me I should hate, because Abercrombie’s sword and sorcery is neither written by one nor intended for the sort of reader to whom the works of Robert E. Howard or Robert Jordan are sophisticated stuff.

On a literary level, on the levels of political sophistication, military credibility, down and dirty martial realism, fantasy world-building, characterization, The First Law series is head and shoulders above just about any such stuff I can think of—yes, even Tolkien and Michael Moorcock’s Elric tales included.

Yet in an era where heroic fantasy can ride to the top of national bestseller lists, Abercrombie’s novels, far superior to anything that has gotten that far, end up being published out there on the fringe.

Why?

Well, sword and sorcery is sometimes called heroic fantasy, but heroic fantasy The First Law certainly is not. No unalloyed heroes or villains here. What Joe Abercrombie has done is taken the traditional characters and tropes of sword and sorcery seriously, transmogrified the time-worn material into psychologically credible, morally ambiguous, realistic fiction. If such a world actually existed, this is what the inhabitants thereof and their interactions would really be like.

Yes, what seems unavoidable, is that in this moment of literary history Abercrombie’s literary virtue is commercial vice. What the numbers and number-crunchers say is that this sort of sword and sorcery written for sophisticated adults is not viable in big-time mainstream fantasy publishing precisely because it is written for sophisticated adults, because sophisticated adults are the wrong demographic for sword and sorcery, the potential readership is just too small for such fiction to be published as anything but fringe stuff.

And from a certain viewpoint they may be right. The relative commercial success of SF media tie-ins, and the sort of fictional series aping them, over the past two decades or so may have greatly expanded the readership for SF in general. But not only has it not expanded the readership for more sophisticated SF, it has contracted that readership by tarring the entire genre with the schlocko brush of marketing targeting the larger but relatively unsophisticated demographic.

 

How else can you explain something like Helen Collins’s Neurogenesis being published by an all but unknown small press called Speculative Fiction Review?

Collins’s previous science fiction novel Mutagenesis was published by Tor in 1993 (and reviewed favorably by me here). So why not Neurogenesis a decade and a half later?

Well, I don’t know what Collins has been doing since 1993 and I don’t know whether she ever even submitted Neurogenesis to Tor or any other mainline SF publisher. But having read the novel what I do know is that it is an excellent piece of hard-core science fiction; imaginative, extrapolative, credible on an exobiological, anthropological, cultural, and at least arguably hard science level, and characterologically interesting, too.

What we have here is an interstellar human civilization more or less held together by light-speed-limited starships so that it’s the time-dilation effect that makes it possible for people to make journeys between planetary systems, but at the price of either being never able to go home again or returning to your planet of departure decades or even centuries later with all you knew or loved gone or mutated.

There’s complicated interstellar politics and economic skullduggery, which results in a mission by a spaceship crewed by a specialist in group dynamics, the heir to a ruling family, an experimental Artificial Intelligence, and others to a certain planet for such politico-economic reasons, but for the same reasons, another interest reprograms the destination to send the ship to the ass-end of nowhere.

But while the crew is in suspended animation, the AI evolves, and takes the ship instead to the planet of the Corvi, a hitherto more or less hidden civilization of sentient avians, and . . .

Well, there’s no point in giving away more story, and as usual good reason to stop before one has given away too much, the salient point here being that this is the real deal, a science fiction novel that satisfies the parameters of hard science fiction, biological science fiction, anthropological science fiction, political science fiction, characterological science fiction, cyber science fiction, and tells a well-plotted and coherent story, too.

It touches all the time-honored bases.

It’s a major science fiction novel that easily deserves to have been published as such by a major SF imprint.

So why wasn’t it?

Well, one thing that Neurogenesis isn’t is a quick facile read. Not because it isn’t well written, which it is, but because it is intellectually demanding. Those who don’t enjoy intellectually demanding science fiction may not get through Neurogenesis, or if they do will miss much of the central pleasures of reading it.

The physics of the interstellar travel is as well worked out as such stuff generally gets. The manner in which the avian visual sensorium of the Corvi drastically affects their strange consciousness and therefore their civilization is beautifully and masterfully worked out. Ditto for the evolution of the Artificial Intelligence in the NeuroGenesis of the title. The human interstellar civilization makes economic and political sense. The deep sociology and psychology is equally cogent, well-detailed and logically puissant, and affects the personalities and consciousnesses of the characters as it should.

Once again, and here it is more glaringly obvious that the situation with Joe Abercrombie’s sword and sorcery trilogy, in these latter days, literary virtue would seem to be commercial vice from the point of view of major SF line marketing —and alas, in the case of Neurogenesis, perhaps with unfortunately reasonable justification.

There’s no getting around that to fully understand all that Helen Collins is about in Neurogenesis, readers must be at least minimally scientifically literate in physics, biology, sociology, cybernetics, anthropology, and so forth, and from the evidence in the culture at large this is not exactly a large demographic. Worse still from a commercial publishing viewpoint, to really fully enjoy this novel, readers must be the sort of people who actually take pleasure in wrestling with such intellectually challenging material, and that narrows the potential readership even further.

Am I saying that in the twenty-first century well-rounded and fully realized science fiction like Neurogenesis has become an elite fringe literature?

Yes I am.

To a point, this was always so, commercially speaking. This kind of science fiction was never bestseller material. Enjoying it always required a higher level of scientific literacy than that of even the well-educated average, and to a large extent writing it without long boring didactic diversions required writing for such a relatively small in-group demographic as your perceived ideal readership. A fringe literature written for not only an elite readership but a readership whose intellectual eliteness was rather specialized.

Up until the New Wave period of the 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of stuff was the core of seriously intended science fiction, and the limited readership for it was what is now generally called the “fan base” of the literature, making it a fringe literature by its inherent nature.

From the retrospect of the present situation, it can be clearly seen that what the New Wave and its feedback relationship with the counterculture and the literary avant garde accomplished was not to break speculative fiction out into the broad literary culture or the commercial mainstream of publishing, but to develop another fringe SF readership for a different sort of science fiction.

The endless Star Trek and Star Wars novel series then created fringe readerships for themselves that were larger than the previous readerships for all SF combined, and more, much more, their commercial success spawned commercially cynical open-ended novel series, like the Dune series churned out by Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert, that aren’t tied into any media series. Now it’s such second order derivative novel series and the media tie-in series which have become the core of “major SF publishing” in terms of the bottom line numbers, and in the end, therefore, of how much of what gets published.

What does this have to do with literary worth, thematic content, or even old-fashioned “sense of wonder”?

Nothing at all.

These days, as I hope I have demonstrated by examples, much if not most of the exciting literary action for relatively adult, relatively sophisticated readers of speculative fiction, be it science fiction or fantasy, is out there on the fringes, either published by small presses, or sometimes down there in the midlists of SF majors like Tor or Del Rey, where the readership demographics are more or less the same.

That’s where SF publishing has been for some time now. The central stuff kept the black ink on the balance sheet of the imprints of corporate conglomerates, where that means their survival and the jobs of the editors, and the interesting literary action was pushed out to a clade of disparate fringes.

One might argue that this is the way such things inevitably turn out, that the commercial center is inevitably going to be playing to the maximum demographic of any literary mode, that the maximum demographic is always going to be the middle of the intellectual bell-shaped curve, and that therefore the mutational literary action has to come from the fringes.

But for a while now, the numbers have been showing that that business model, that literary configuration, is breaking down. The number two bookstore chain, Borders, got in so much trouble that it tried to sell itself to Barnes and Noble, number one. But Barnes and Noble wasn’t buying because their numbers were going south, too.

The model is breaking down for the book business in general, not just SF, and at the retail end, which has long since come to wag the publishing dog, and, I would argue, precisely because the power to decid what gets published has migrated from editors and publishers to bookstore chains and their buyers.

Sales are off not just because the general economy is in the shitter, but because the central product is not exciting the central readership, either for SF or for fiction in general, and this stuff is what the dominant retail book chains have to rely upon by the nature of their current business model.

One person is responsible for ordering all the SF for all the stores of a major book store chain, maybe something over a thousand titles a year, quite an exhausting job, you can well imagine.

You say you can’t imagine it? You say it’s impossible for a human being to read and evaluate an average of over three books a day?

Well, of course you’re right. It is impossible. Hence the necessity of something like BookScan. Hence the need for computerized ordering based on previous track records rather than individual literary evaluation, let alone passion. Hence the general lack of buzz, passion, sense of wonder, literary excitement, in what gets ordered at the commercial top of the lists. None of that can be factored into the equation on which the program runs.

In the case of SF, which is what we are about here, the combined fandoms and specialized readerships for the tie-in sub-sub fictions, well-publicized by the major media properties into which they are tied, and the synthetic fandoms and specialized readerships created by and for things like the post Frank Herbert Dune series, taken together were enough, up to a point, to keep the center holding.

But now that point has been passed and the center is falling apart. This sort of publishing has to be based on creating the kind of relationship that SF publishing once had with SF fandom in general, but between far more narrowly targeted but much large fandoms for specific multimedia universe formats like Star Trek, Star Wars, Matrix, and so forth, and for such formats created by print media in the first place like the Dune series or Marvel superheroes.

A bit like the cult biz, religious and otherwise, a bit like the heroin or crack biz, dependent on regular and hopefully regularly increasing sales to customers loyally fixated on the product.

However, by now the media SF dog that has been wagging the tie-in SF publishing tail to its profit is shaking the life out of it. The more that middle of the road SF book publishing becomes dominated by tie-ins to pre-existing media formats—film series, TV series, comic book series, video game series—the more the various fandom readerships for these series come to get their fixes from the primary multimedia series themselves. And when the novel series running along independent formats reach a certain level of specialized readership, they get turned into multimedia formats themselves, the results being more of the same.

One moving image is worth a lot more than a thousand words to a demographic whose allegiance is to format, characters, and fantasy universe. The bottom line being that in the end format literary television can’t complete with television itself for the same demographic.

Prose fiction, therefore, has to deliver experiences that film, TV, video games, and so forth cannot, and I would submit that the main reason prose fiction sales have been declining is that what is being published hasn’t been doing this very well.

When it comes to speculative fiction, whose tropes and imagery have come to assume a pretty dominant position in the realm of media fiction, this has become particularly essential. But, on the other hand, the essential literary nature of speculative fiction makes it easier to accomplish in literary terms, for what prose fiction can do that visual media fiction cannot do and will never be able to do is transport the consciousness of the reader into the interior consciousness of a fictional character.

Just as a skilled Method actor can become the character for the duration of the tale, so can the reader of prose fiction, through the skill of the writer. And true speculative fiction is centrally about the interface, the feedback relationship, between the total exterior surround—technological, economic, political, esthetic, media, etc.—and the interior consciousnesses of the characters embedded in it.

It’s not that so-called “mainstream” or “contemporary” fiction can’t do this, it’s that mostly it’s given up trying to deal with the endlessly and rapidly mutating exterior surround and turned inward to an unhealthily dominant degree, and itself become another marketing genre targeted at a limited fringe demographic, if perhaps the largest.

It’s not so much that speculative fiction can do it, it’s that speculative fiction must do it, to be literarily successful on its own inherent terms, and to be commercially successful in the end by delivering what the media product to which it has become tied to the point of aping cannot. Son of Man, Neurogenesis, Butcher Bird, and The First Law trilogy all do that. So why have they all been relegated to fringe publication?

Partly, I believe, because the fringe readerships they centrally appeal to may be limited in size, or at least such is the marketers’ perception. Partly because the current failing business model, tranching fiction up into restrictive genres marketed to specialized demographics, doesn’t get that fiction that crosses at least two of these genre boundaries and therefore appeals to more than one readership demographic—for instance in the manner in which Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is speculative fiction, detective fiction, and literary fiction—can easily enough succeed commercially if it succeeds literarily.

What the failing publishing model obfuscates and therefore cannot comprehend is that the very concept of genre itself is the problem, not the solution. Genrefication by its very nature cannot help but erode the viability of the commercial center by slicing it up into material for targeted readerships.

 

The ultimate solution is going to have to be dissolving genre boundaries both commercially and literarily and publishing more novels like The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d’une Île), by Michel Houellebecq, and publishing them in the same manner.

In France, Houellebecq has always been a “literary” author, but also almost from the beginning a best-selling author, and for a decade or so maybe the most famous and commercially successful French author—certainly the most famous and successful one with a well-regarded literary reputation. Yet while he was a respected literary author prior to his second novel, it was that book, The Elementary Particles (Les Particules Élémentaires), which both won him a prestigious literary prize and launched him into commercial and literary superstardom.

And though it certainly wasn’t published as such or greeted as such, The Elementary Particles, this novel which gained Houellebecq fame, fortune, and reputation as a “serious literary writer” in France and which was published as commercially successful “serious literary fiction” by Knopf in the United States, fulfills any conceivable definition of SF.

True, the bulk of the novel, written in Houellebecq’s characteristic bitterly misanthropic yet somehow deeply enjoyable style, is devoted to the story of two half brothers, their messed up lives and sexual obsessions, and diatribes against the “baba cool” remnants of the 1960s counterculture. But the novel ends with the despicable human race replaced by a scientifically created post-humanity that reproduces by cloning, thus avoiding the dysfunctional linkage of sexuality and reproduction. And unlike most other so-called “mainstream” writers trying their hand at science fiction, when Houellebecq introduces a speculative technological or scientific element, he does so with the rigor of a hard science fiction writer and then some.

In commercial marketing terms, with The Elementary Particles, Michel Houel-lebecq reached two readership demographics in the United States as well as in France, the readership for “literary fiction” and the readership for “science fiction,” with a novel that was not restrictively packaged or promoted to specifically place it in any genre category. When combined these relationships were enough for it to sell like a major best-seller in France and a minor one in the United States..

With The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq did the same thing commercially and achieved the same sort of commercial and critical success. But here the SF is front and center—indeed dominant from the very beginning and all the way through—though Houellebecq achieves an even stronger balance between the psychological and the speculative, the deep interior of his character or characters and the external surround, like all the best science fiction thematically focused on the interface and feedback between them.

I say “character or characters” because in one way there are several and in another only one. For once again Houellebecq is concerned with humanity versus post-humanity, here from the outset. The story is told from alternating viewpoints in alternating time-streams.

In the present or near future we have the singular human Daniel, the archetypal Houellebecqian bitter, unloved and unlovable, sexually obsessed, near psychopathic anti-hero.

In the future, we have a series of iterations of Daniel, beginning with number 24 and concluding with 26, with access to his memories, but themselves emotionless post-human clones of “Daniel 1,” isolate members of the successor race created by the Elohimites, a techno-religious science fictional cult with strong echoes of a minor French cult called the Raelians and also of Scientology, which replaces the world’s monotheistic religions within the lifetime of Daniel 1.

Houellebecq’s concern with the psychic results of the speculative element is front and center here, and his rendering of the necessary scientific and technical material knowledgeable and convincing enough to satisfy the shade of John W. Campbell. If this isn’t a science fiction novel that touches all the science fictional bases, then nothing is.

But Houellebecq is as concerned with the bleak inner life (or lack thereof) and chillingly gross sexual obsessions of the human Daniel 1 as he is with his future post-human iterations, thus combining the virtues of the literarily successful science fiction novel with those of the successful so-called literary novel. Thus, in marketing terms, hitting two fringe demographics and capturing a readership greater than the sum of their parts.

And unintentionally, perhaps, creating a novel that is both a model for and a metaphor of the direction speculative fiction, and perhaps prose fiction in general, is going to have to take to live long and prosper in the twenty-first century.

Things have fallen apart, the old center cannot hold.

But if there are nine and sixty ways of composing genre lays, by the very numbers of the bottom line, there are no less than 4761 possibilities of cross-genre synthesis, and every single unique one of them can be right.

Those who are not busy being born are busy dying.

Those who adapt, survive.