Ancient Logic

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia  is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel  Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid? Picard: ...We work to better ourselves. Star Trek: First Contact (courtesy of IMDb) What kind of future interests me in my writing? I started writing science fiction because I read the Foundation series, Neuromancer added some complications and then Star Trek went back on air. Those are the three big touchstones of my early writing life. Each of these worlds offer significantly diverging views on how the future might play out. Neuromancer, Gibson's protestations aside, paints a fairly vivid dystopia. Corporations rule the world, vast inhuman forces use people as chess pieces in incomprehensibly baroque intrigues. With Star Trek, the future is a sand-box, a stage from which the great personal dramas of individuals are played out. The moral questions are weighty but the tone is ...

Horror infuses the familiar with dread. Read Peter Straub, Stephen King or Algernon Blackwood, and become alarmed by the commonplace. Cars become monsters, the family dog is a killing machine and an island filled with willow trees becomes an avatar of cosmic horror. Science Fiction, on the other hand, is about making the unfamiliar real. The best of the genre take concepts like first contact with aliens, the fusion of man and machine and time travel and make them plausible, inevitable even. Speculative fiction authors in general aspire, I would argue, to a mantle of pronogniticator, a seer of the possibilities. So, hopefully you can see that these genre are often in opposition. They haven't always been, of course. HP Lovecraft famously mined the intersections of horror and science fiction for his Mythos stories. Tales of astronauts fighting tentacled alien creatures became so stereotypical that by the Silver Era that entire class of story was known simply as BEM (Bug-Eyed M...