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en stories spanning nearly Zebrowski's entire career—from his debut in 1970 when he was just 25 to a recent 1996 appearance—along with a nostalgic introduction comprise this collection, the second to appear from Zebrowski this year.
The initial trio of stories are among his earliest, and focus on a character named Christian Praeger. In "The Water Sculptor," Praeger runs a satellite devoted to restoring Earth's biosphere. His friendship with a neighboring orbital artist forms the core of the tale. Moving backward in Praeger's biography, "Parks of Rest and Culture" finds our protagonist employed on Earth, tending to the same damaged ecosphere. Finally, Praeger's earliest days as a youthful minor criminal tinged with motivating regrets are recapitulated in "Assassins of Air."
A most uncommon form of murder and subsequent identity theft are detailed in "The Soft Terrible Music," wherein Wolfgang Silverstone, master of an immense mansion of many miraculous doors, is tracked down by the woman he has wronged. The cyber-entity known as the Sponge is about to transcend its programming to attain real consciousness. What this entails for the whole human race is revealed in "The Sea of Evening." What would you ask God if you came face to face with him—and he proved to be a shriveled alien gnome? This is the quandary that confronts Father Louis Chavez in "Heathen God."
Zebrowski's first major novel, Macrolife (1979), detailed a future in which gigantic spacegoing habitats marked the next stage in mankind's evolution. Several stories here are tangential to that future. "Wayside World," part of a shared-universe project generated by Poul Anderson, is set on a lost colony world visited by one of the "mobiles," whose advanced citizens wreak vast changes among the degenerate groundlings. The title story looks at the same scenario, except that this time the people visited by the mobile world exist on a more equal level, thus making their choices more complex and intellectually challenging. The final two stories, "Transfigured Night" and "Between the Winds," deal with far-future outcomes attendant on the discovery of virtual reality, as humanity slides into a kind of mass solipsism.
Thoughtful SF excursions
Although not quite as excellent as Zebrowski's earlier collection from this year, Swift Thoughts, the current volume still offers a good snapshot of this author's oeuvre, as well as some intriguing tales. Also, by the chronological array of stories presented, it provides a chart of his development as well.
It's highly interesting to me to see from the Praeger trio that Zebrowski was a true child of the New Wave, a fact that had escaped me till now. His first story was originally entitled "The Water Sculptor of Station 233," and the resonance with Ballard's "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D" is surely intentional. Entropy and a general malaise suffuse these early tales. Surely the inclusion in "Parks ..." of a drained swimming pool, part of Ballard's quintessential iconography, is not coincidental. And the revelation that Zebrowski's fourth sale, "Heathen God," sprang from a Barry Malzberg idea cements into place another early influence. Zebrowski as a New Worlds author? It's not where he ended up, but his ongoing concern with entropy and the limits of human achievement, as exhibited in later stories, now seems to have its roots in familiar, albeit unsuspected soil.
But Zebrowski's main thrust and set of tactics soon developed away from this school. Long an admirer of Clarke and Wells and Stapledon, Zebrowski quickly fashioned a kind of fiction incorporating "design, language and the thoughts and emotions expressed by people," as he tells us in his introduction. In other words, a kind of SF that always sought to incorporate humanist and artistic elements with the more rational and discursive ones. Treading this kind of tightrope is a tricky job, and Zebrowski sometimes wobbles to either side of the divide. In "Wayside World," for instance, the psychosexual, societal problems faced by Ishbok, one of the few truly intelligent and sensitive souls on a world of brutes, are much more dramatic and affecting than the rather tacked-on job he's given at the end by the voyagers from the stars. And in a story like "The Sea of Evening," the utterly rational, philosophical dialogue between the two researchers tends to render pale the revelation of the story's end.
But when Zebrowski has both his horses pulling in tandem, he can achieve some fine effects. The final story, "Between the Winds," which flips back and forth between the tortured inhabitants of a virtual reality and the dispassionate real-world observers, is a perfect blend of mind and heart. And of course he's good in simple thriller modes as well, as illustrated by "The Soft Terrible Music," which functions as a straight-ahead SF murder mystery while also working in questions of identity in the Greg Egan manner.
Zebrowski also proves he can be something of a surrealist along with his other identities. The "biological fluidity" exemplified in "Transfigured Night" recalls David Lindsay's trippy A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), and that's just one more arrow in his quiver. — Paul
Also in this issue: Thieves' World: Turning Points, by Lynn Abbey
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