Posthuman Blues

Yesterday evening I read the beginning of "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" by Thomas M. Disch. Disch, a science fiction writer, is an articulate and capable critic. His thesis is that science fiction is responsible for shaping the 20th century in more ways than idle bystanders might expect.

The preface was excellent. But I was annoyed by the first chapter, which Disch devotes almost exclusively to lobbing cheap shots at author Whitley Strieber, whose 1987 book "Communion" became a bestseller and raked in a million dollar advance. Disch makes no secret of his distaste for Strieber; he thinks he's lying, and uses "Communion" as evidence of what he identifies as America's oddly tolerating attitude toward quackery and deceit (so long as they're delivered in a convincing package).

Disch has every right to disbelieve Strieber's alien abduction claims. But he tears into Strieber with a tenacity that I found disconcerting for a book on literature and its role in society. I didn't see any profound literary agenda at work behind Disch's spiteful Strieber-bashing; I saw an angry intellectual taking out his wrath behind a screen of well-worded condescension (and some demonstrable lies for good meaure). Could Disch's nastiness be due to "Communion's" financial and pop-cultural success? Disch would deny it in a heartbeat, and maybe even truthfully.

It goes almost without saying that Disch dimisses the entire UFO phenomenon based on Strieber's perceived lies. This smug disdain for ufology among writers of science fiction is far from uncommon. It parallels a telephone conversation I had yesterday with a well-known physicist who's embarking on a fiction career. His novel's premise is thoroughly science-fictional, but it also deals significantly with UFOs, so-called "New Age" matters and religion. I pointed out that the science fiction-reading community has a strange (and perhaps surprising) aversion to such stuff. (Isaac Asimov was an insufferable UFO "debunker" whose whining about the subject annoyed even fellow unbelievers, as related in Jerry Pournelle's introduction to Karl Pflock's "Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe.")

(Of course, there are exceptions: "Dune," "Childhood's End," "Contact," and Robert Sawyer's recent "Calculating God," to name a few theological SF novels. UFO-themed SF is much rarer; John Shirley's "Silicon Embrace" and Patricia Anthony's "Brother Termite" come to mind -- and these are postmodern satires that use the "Gray" alien as a clever plot device. I've corresponded with John Shirley, and my impression is that Gray aliens are the last thing he would expect to come out of a parked flying saucer.)