Intermission: Science-Fiction Postcards?
"There are Jaunt-ships on their way to four different star systems with solar systems of their own...but it'll be a long, long time before they get there."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“They die if you put them through all the way, and they die if you put them through halfway headfirst. Put them through halfway butt-first, they stay frisky.”
When I was younger, I read science-fiction stories. Most of them I cannot remember, because they were jumbled into collections or not exciting enough for the brain to register into a symbol, like a parable or myth, except for a few which have remained in my life like strange and parallel dreams.
My favourite ones were those by Ray Bradbury and Loren Eiseley—I can still remember the gunshot which killed the dinosaurs, the virtual tigers which preyed on blood-and-flesh parents, the sight of the gold-eyed amnesiacs of Mars as well as the despair I felt with one starfish. But I remember Stephen King’s The Jaunt (1981) the best; this is to say, that I remember the ending of that short story the best, because it was sheer and mischievous horror—the boy went in and came out a gremlin.
Most children live in their heads; and their thoughts swirl like magic pinball machines, shooting back-and-forth and everywhere they can reach, and they reach at everything they can—knocking for all bumpers—and forget their lights as soon as they reach them, like an endless Easter morning of chocolate and plastic eggs.
Reading science fiction stories was similar to such mornings; or rather, there is a similar romance between the finding of a small egg in the morning grass, the forgetfulness of a thousand whacked-out pinballs, and the reading of a hundred short stories set on Mars, Venus, Earth and elsewhere, and the doomed and grateful people who somehow inhabit them.
Science fiction is a glorious playground for poetry, and for the longest time, I held in my mind these stories—the ones I can remember—in the same way that I cherish poems by Wallace Stevens or Philip Larkin or Edwin Markham, because the robust stories of Bradbury and Eiseley have pips of poetry in them, especially in their endings, and in poetry, the ending is everything like a graceful decrescendo.
So, when I visited a vast bookstore, I purchased a single thing: a collection of science-fiction postcards as the greatest value I could have for money—each postcard took the cover of a book, in their bold letters and massive colours, like a promising and wild surface of a dream.
I have read enough science-fiction stories—or enough stories in general—to know that the first impressions of covers and titles are vastly different from the ones of our minds. In this way, we never read the masterpieces of our imaginations, but only the real works of others, which on occasion are good enough to compensate for the distance between our disappointments and the real thing.
Likewise, we enter theatres because of the imagined film in our minds; we never pay for a ticket for a film we have seen and even if we do, it is because we are convinced of the other film and not the one we are about to see again. We envision an entire film before we see it—dripped from its name or its poster or the secondhand waves of our friends or reviews and synopses—and this fake film of ours is what motivates us to watch the real film of others and sometimes we are not disappointed because it turned out better than our dreams.
But sometimes, we wake up from sleep in the dredges of half-finished dreams, and we stir to keep them as long as we can and to finish their pictures. We hold them trapped within shut eyes, percolating them in the tongues of the mind, and savour their taste as if we would lose them upon sight, and we do lose them, most of the time, in the moment that takes place between opening our eyes and forgetting our dreams; this is to say, the moment the film begins, the dream is lost, and so is the first story when we turn the page to the real one—so, I wrote out the bare impressions of my dreams.
I parsed through the postcards, which fell out like an oversized tarot deck. They crawled across the bed like a million portals of capability, and each one promised a dream—if you closed your eyes to the real thing and dreamt in your own dream. The best dreams I remembered and kept close and wrote them down, and so these dreams are the small shards of me, with which I will make you dream, like the footsteps I was made to dream in my dreams of Mars, the Sun and the orbit of Kulath.
The Reefs Of Space (1964) by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson
This universe is an ocean; its dark void is a vast habitat. In its furthest reaches, the reefs of space grow out in spirals, each one extending forwards with million of stars and fingers with the glows of galaxies, eventually forming into gigantic arms which plunge outwards into darkness like a massive hypocrisy of light against empty space.
Like an ocean, this universe is teeming with life: in the dark of every matter, there is a cause which should not exist, a rebellion which prolongs itself against longing annihilation, and a life which denies itself to entropy and to the immanence of energetic critique. It cascades onwards, as far as it may travel, and hungrily for sheer existence; the reef is alive with the intention to exist, to remain extant, and to throw back to oblivion like a wave baffled by a shore the energy of ancient libido—the mother of the land hurls back the mother of the sea.
As with any living being, the universe ignores its own contradiction: like a Sisyphean movement, it strives against the essentialism of its own death, and desires to propagate itself against a singular odd of desolation, and refuses to quicken to the end, which is only promises that which exists. The universe is not suicidal; it expands out like a silent reef, and if its rocky plateau would dissolve underneath it, it would still produce in a spiral—like time—a baby-like flotsam, or its little lights, which it pushes out from darkness.
And I too live in this contradiction, because I too am a little light, and like a smaller reef, I push forth my own little lights into the dark—they too afraid of extinction—and yet I light them anyway, keeping within the natural instinct I share with the rest of the universe, and like any other form of matter, which I long for the sake of existing; and if I must exist, I must likewise push back against the void by the token of my existence, like a muted banshee, and a reef of light in space—I am not void yet and neither are you, my little light.
The Pollinators Of Eden (1969) by John Boyd
How could anything procreate in the Garden Of Eden? In its perfect stillness, how could sex become a necessary idea, if it were less pleasurable and beautiful than stillness? If adults could grow and yet remain innocent, what need would there be for children and for the messiness of love? And if history does not matter in the earthly paradise, what need is there for a life beyond life—is there not enough life in the Garden of Eden or was there not enough death on Earth? And if there are no pollinators in Eden, is it because there is no reason to pollinate them with names? And if there are pollinators in Eden, then was Eden itself an imperfect place?
The Seeds Of Time (1956) by John Wyndham
Every moment of time is like a seed: the universe is born on time. Each seed is planted in a row parallel to the next, and like grand clockwork, the universe keeps to a consistent interval of time, such that you could create a watch made of universal matter—you may own one—and observe how each seed of time grows, and how time never skips unduly. There are no irregular movements, because each seed grows and dies within the interval of a second, and each seed is different from the last—it is new—and only their species remains, progenating strains of time that flawlessly descend from ancestor to successor in a wink. But if every moment is like a seed, where is its fruit? And from which plant carries this fruit to fruition? Or rather, which question arrives first: the seed or the fruit—or time or time?
The Book Of Imaginary Beings (1969) by Jorge Luis Borges
There is a book which catalogues every possible and imaginary being; there is a bestiary for every possible dream we can conceive of, and especially those we cannot; there is a list of every crime ever committed; there is a cookbook for every infinite and possible recipe—the food is both terrible and delicious.
There is a cave which houses all paintings in history; there is an ocean which blankets every statue which could be built; there is a woman and a man for every possible woman and a man; and there is a love which contains in of itself every possible love—an aleph-love—where lies the infinite in you and none whatsoever.
There is an infinite which possesses in you the infinite; there is a one which encompasses in you the one; and so there is a life which must encompasses your life, and every other life, but this one—you must live your life.
The Invisible Man (1897) by H. G. Wells
Every man is invisible but tries his entire life to be seen by his desire. From the moment he is born, he cries out this desire; and from each moment afterwards, he seeks this desire to be met, until the very moment of his death, when he cries out this desire once more: I wish I was desired by death.
Pattern Recognition (2003) by William Gibson
I cannot recognise any patterns; I can only recognise exceptions. There is nothing inherent to the sun which says it shall rise tomorrow, except when it does; there is nothing inherent to the moon which says it shall rise tonight, except that it did. Every minute is an exception that follows; every day is a number which does not exist until it follows.
There are no rules which can be followed and no laws which can exist until they do; and what lies on the border of perception is incomprehensible, and nothing conceivable is real and remains impossible until the moment it is not—water the garden.
The Wind From Nowhere (1961) by J. G. Ballard
A wind blew from nowhere; it shook everything up. The nights were quiet before this; or perhaps, there were celebrations every night. No one can remember anymore, except the wind, which swept through everything and still sweeps through.
Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut
Point at the culprit of the nuclear bomb and no finger will point to every human on earth.
Apeman, Spaceman (1968) by Harry Harrison and Leon E. Stover
What did they see in space—what did our simian eyes see in those big windows? Did they recognise Earth when it was far away? Did they recognise the black sky, as if it were night, and yet bright as day?
What did Albert think in his last moments? As his oxygen fell low, I wonder if he cried. What about his namesake, who succeeded him, and who crashed and died on his reunion with Earth? And the other Alberts too?
What did monkeys see in space?
Men Like Gods (1923) by H. G. Wells
How many times in history have men felt like Gods? I imagine the millions who have stood like locums for Olympus; they gazed over the earth, like deathless gods, and so do I, who sits on their stories, thinking of the implausible frescoes of their lives, and the immortal poems they still slept with, and I can hear the final purrs of the Gods.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
love the invisible man blurb. i see u bro. in fact im reading the time machine by hg wells right now. i loved the movie as a kid. the monsters in the well freaked the hell out of me. light horror is just my cup of tea.