he tale of interstellar travel, like the boomerang, comes back down to the hand that tossed it. No matter how far it seems to roam, it never leaves home. Though it looks like Robert Silverberg has suggested a few ground rules for the six writers whose six novellas make up Between Worlds—no generation starship stories seem to have been allowed to apply to join; faster-than-light travel (by various means) is assumed; the Core of the galaxy is inhabited by a Massive Black Hole whose Mysteries have not yet been Plumbed; the protagonists are human; the stigmata or vestiges or continued health into extreme old age of some sort of galactic empire is assumed; and the phrase "between worlds" is encouraged to mean not only travel but rite of passage—it is also clear that the space-opera arena remains enormously responsive to each creator's touch. Space operas are prestiges (as Christopher Priest might put it) of the soul at play. This is, of course, a mixed blessing.
We should be clear. There are no stories in Between Worlds that are exactly bad, though a couple have love handles, and a few may have hung too long in the barn to cure. But there is no contempt here for the form, or for the ongoing potential of space opera as a genre, either. To the contrary, of the authors included—in order of appearance, Stephen Baxter; James Patrick Kelly; Nancy Kress; Silverberg himself; Mike Resnick; Walter Jon Williams—none can be accused of slumming, and most still find the form highly ductile to the touch of the dreamworking mind.
What does also get exposed, though, sometimes a little embarrassingly, is the antiquity of the futures that some of the contributors seem to have found themselves most at home imagining. Imaginative comfort does not necessarily, of course, imply cognitive incompetence. I have no doubt (for instance) that Robert Silverberg knows as much about physics and the information revolution as anyone else in the book—but the comfort level of the galaxy in which he places "The Colonel Returns to the Stars" is really very intense, and we find ourselves reading a story that (except for the dynaflow control of mood and pace) he could have written half a century ago, when the future worked. The tale is set in a galactic Imperium that the eponymous Colonel has spent his long life attempting to defend from Chaos. Everything is as simple as ago: no computers steal our scenes, no aliens occupy stage front, the teleportation devices are demurely unhaunted by doubles or shadows or partials or ghoolies, the villas and cities and towns and hotels where the action concentrates are about as alien as Ohio. Nothing, in other words, has been allowed to change, except for the retrospective tone, as the Colonel has been brought back from retirement to save one more planet at the Core of the galaxy. "The Colonel Returns" is, in other words, a pastoral, the kind of story that is written in the city about Arcadia. It is a tale about the Golden Age of science fiction. It comprises the still contemplative heart of Between Worlds. On either side, we find noise and maybe a touch of bemusement.
So 20th-century
Mike Resnick's "Keepsakes," which follows Silverberg immediately, also takes its cues from ago: the mysterious aliens out of Clifford Simak who do not (but mysteriously do exactly) understand what makes human folk tick in their farms and suburbs across the galaxy, and who demand as a keepsake, in return for hi-tech cheap labor, the One Thing that makes life meaningful for each human so helped. The presumption that there is indeed One Thing and that affect-deficient aliens know how to find it; the seat-of-his-pants government official who tries to trace these Star Gypsies down: this is all ago stuff. If it feels thinnish here, the lack of any embedded awareness of how belated it all is may explain why.
The tale that closes the book, Walter Jon Williams's very long "Investments," gives us a complexer interstellar venue populated by an entrepreneurial culture, echoic (this might be less evident to readers familiar with Williams' Dread Empires Fall series, to which this is an appendage) of both Jack Vance and Jerry Pournelle. The quite astonishing slowness of the first half of the novella may be an homage to Vance, but it fails to supply much backstory of any use to new readers. The second half of the tale, on the other hand, takes off into a highly competent crescendo ending in a very large, extremely enjoyable, hard-SF bang; the insider traders are resoundingly defeated, and the story stops with a hint that the protagonist (having saved a planet and his boss's bacon) may get his rocks off again. It was worth sticking the course.
But all these three tales are fatally, or blessedly, 20th-century—fatally because they describe futures we can no longer imagine, except with nostalgia, through a tunnel into the past; blessedly because each of these returns to Arcadia is a gift, a recouping for us of futurama worlds, seemly souls, clean-tramline physics and no biology. Each of the authors concerned knows better (knows worse) about the real world, of course. The 20th-century futures they so knowingly depict are homages to our origins; they evoke that part of the last century where science fiction was (and for some of us remains) most comfortable. Pragmatically, after all, an increasingly important function of the genre nowadays lies in its capacity to return us from the real futures we now inhabit, to remind us who we were when we were unbeknownst to history. SF has become a conservator form.
As a consequence, what's most missing from these three tales about prior worlds is what one might call information incest. The world we are now beginning to inhabit is a world whose information nodes or clusters—Microsoft doing jane faces from the coigns of every computer screen; spaceships that will talk to themself tomorrow; the voodoo incantations of cyberspace; the Net exfoliating argosies of spider-spin daily—possess greater ontological density than we do. Human beings might once have been conceived of as autonomous beings, monads that no story could do more than tell (as it were) stories about. No more. In the world itself, and in the stories that approach the world, we have become less real than our instructions. Most younger writers—whether or not they contribute consciously to the literature of the fantastic, though in fact most of them now do so, willy-nilly—tend to write stories whose human actants are programmed into tales they cannot ever fully grasp and that are not ultimately about them, figures who come to life only when they are spoken to by some embodied or godlike voice of Information out of the depths. Most especially in modern space opera (which is why it has truly become a literature of the future), the role of humans has become performative: they (we) act out truths about the galaxies to come that they (that we) cannot understand, like bees dancing routes to honey they must not attempt to drink. The deep honeys of the future are really none of our business.
Worlds we'll never see
The consolation, one must suppose, is that we are never alone. As contemporary SF writers propheticallly depose, we now live in a bath of the voices of information, of the AIs or partials or cell phones or fetches or bubbles or mimes in the breath of mirrors who talk to us, who prepare us for the tales we are prodded to enact. In Stephen Baxter's "Between Worlds," what seems to be an inordinately complicated interstellar craft plumbing the fractal arrases of interstellar space under the governance of the laws of physics and the dictats of its human Captain, turns out to be mostly composed of plumage designed to signal to others of its kind that the invisible true owners within the walls have come on heat and are ready to breed. The role of the human Captain is to act out the role of Captain, and to supplicate. And the role of the young human protagonist of the tale is basically to molt: to transubstantiate out of human seeming into something rich and strange in the Core of Things. To be human, in "Between Worlds," is to be a spear carrier. The story is all inconceivably dirty—like biology in 2004, like the viral pixilations of code that guy our drab meat in 2005 as we dress-rehearse the Singularity play—and the main joy in the tale, over and above its expert climb to climax, lies perhaps in a suspicion that Baxter himself quite looks forward to the world he limns here.
It is much the same with the two remaining tales in the book, "The Wreck of the Godspeed" by James Patrick Kelly and "Shiva in Shadow" by Nancy Kress, both of them (like Baxter's) about performing humans. In Kelly's complexly rendered tale, a young human's implants, which present as vaudeville aspects of his conflicted consciousness, help him understand his role within a vast sentient ship in trouble, which also presents—like a skunk in heat. (Sex is everywhere in any space-opera world where humans mate with owners.) In the end, like Baxter's human protagonist, the young human transubstantiates into something like information, something like light, something like a true protagonist. In Kress' remarkable story, a dysfunctional cast of humans in a ship at the edge of the black hole at the core of the universe sends a probe, containing computer renderings of each of them, over the edge, where they may find (and send back) information about the true nature of the universe. The full meat-puppet humans come to grief, savaged by sex and superba and ambition, and the survivor begins her return to the heavy gravity of meat existence. But the renderings—whose flesh is programs confected by their computers as aides-memoires to keep them on course—discover the truth about the universe, which they join.
Between Worlds starts with Baxter and Kelly and Kress, then turns back home. This was perhaps wise of Silverberg. The hands that toss our stories out into Neverland, the eyes that read these iterations of worlds we'll not get to drink, do still need to have something return to us, where we continue to reside. One of the joys of being human is to guess the truth, however daunting. But there is another joy as well (I am writing on Christmas Eve), which is the joy of celebrating all the honey we had, back when we were the honey.
