This is a slightly revised version of a review which first appeared in BSFA Review 15 (Autumn 2021).
Big Echo Anthology edited by Robert G. Penner (bigecho.org, 2021)
Reviewed byNick Hubble
‘The Death of Science Fiction had remained a perennial, if tiresome, subject for reviewers of SF novels for decades’, proclaims the first line of Gord Sellar’s ‘The Incursus, by Asimov-NN#77’. This is a mock book review of a 931-page doorstop written by ‘an emulator’, combining genetic material supplemented with ‘a horrifyingly complex reverse engineered schematic of the author’s cognitive patterns and dispositions, literary tics, and writerly style’. Aside from, according to the reviewer, producing more readable texts than the original, the other advantage of the emulator – as it writes on its own website – is that it excludes ‘those troublesome aspects of the man’s behaviour that, acceptable perhaps in his own time, have grown notorious in the decades since his death’. Indeed, as we know, all those old classics are much easier to update and repackage once the ties to their creators have been irrevocably severed. Perhaps that is exactly where the secret of the success of the old genre that is SF lies: what is dead cannot die.
Robert Penner, the editor of this anthology, started the e-zine Big Echo: Critical SF with Paul Klassen in 2016. The initial idea, as Penner explains in a brief introduction to the anthology, was to publish sf ‘which was more or less “hard,” and that was also, at least to some degree, a self-conscious engagement with the historical conditions that made possible the production of science fiction as both idea and commodity’. This almost sounds like a valedictory project; a sense that is reinforced by the fact that ‘The Final Issue’ of Big Echo appeared last year and, according to twitter, the aim of this anthology is to raise funds to keep what is already there online. As it happens, though, the works Big Echo ended up publishing, while often anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, ‘grew increasingly avant garde and experimental in style’ so that they linger, open-ended, continuing to pose their questions to a civilisation that hasn’t yet quite realised, even amidst a global pandemic, that it has stalled.
These stories take many forms, ranging from Tim Maughan’s realist depiction of a near-future California in ‘Don’t Be Evil’ and Vajra Chandrasekera’s time-travel yarn ‘Ruin’s Cure’ to Clifton Gachagua’s exquisite sonnet ‘Landing in Ganymede’. However, they mostly all concern the boundaries between life and death, and self and other. The point is that such boundaries are not intractable, as is made clear in the first story in the anthology (which is organised chronologically), Peter Milne Greiner’s ‘Plexaure’ from issue 1 of August 2016. Here, more happens in seven pages than in most of the planetary romances and generation starship novels ever written, and the allure of theology is laid bare. Wm Henry Morris’s ‘It is a Rare Thing the Emperor Requireth’ also involves aliens and God, while performing an almost anthropological analysis in the manner of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘The Structural Study of Myth’.
Some of the stories are even more explicitly philosophical. Natalia Theodoridou’s ‘Postscript to Mauser’ riffs off a line from Deleuze, although I’m not sure he ever speculated on whether ‘our clavicles are little keys to the secret of the universe’. An interesting interpretation of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment informs Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s ‘Parable of the Cocoon’. Jo Lindsay Walton’s ‘Cat, I Must Work!’, the longest story in the anthology, is a teasing, riddling story in which it is not clear whether a game designer and a philosopher are indirectly competing or engaging in a Socratic dialogue. Is Nia telling the truth when she claims to be able to ‘overcome the distinction between “individual quality of life” and “agitating for systemic change”’? Or is that just a lie we all tell ourselves?
Other fine stories by Elae Moss, Wongoon Cha, Stephen Langlois, Ahimaz Rajeesh, and Rudy Rucker add to the richness and variety of this collection. Carlos Norcia’s ‘We were The Workshop for (a torturer’s) Utopia’ expresses a particular nightmare of mine: the idea of the authorities infiltrating speculative fiction groups. The title of Brendan C. Byrne’s ‘The Three Stigmata of Peter Thiel’ has the immediate uncanny effect of reminding us that we now live in a world of Philip K. Dick novels made real. The abrupt but entirely logical shift from Thiel’s desire to become everybody in the world to an intense meditation on the assassination of Donald Trump reads like one of the condensed novels in J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
Similarly to Ballard’s work, I don’t think these stories are a manifestation of the death drive but an attempt to find a way beyond that, which can only come at a price. It is interesting that one of the earliest submissions published by Big Echo, Mileva Anastasiadou’s ‘The War of People’ – the third story in this collection – is described by Penner as helping him to find a way out of the initial, constrictive hard-sf conceptualisation of the e-zine. The story can be read quite simplistically as showing the reality of neoliberalism as war but it also includes the fatalistic philosophy of what the German critic Walter Benjamin once called ‘the tradition of the oppressed’: ‘What does not kill you does not make you stronger. It deprives you of hope. You cease to care about life. Not even your own.’ The point being that there are some things, such as a misplaced belief in the inviolability of the universal liberal subject, that it is better to let go of before they are stripped away from you.
Therefore, I can think of no better way of recommending this volume than with some of the concluding remarks from Sellar’s review of The Incursus: ‘But for those of you with courage, and especially for those of us who find science fiction no longer so mind-blowing as it once was, this text goes a long way to providing a substitute. So long as you are not too attached to the idea of one’s own ultimate existence in any recognizable form, that is.’
Prospective Cultures 