Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (149 page)

But the Holocaust is always somewhere around in Sebald’s writing. Describing the intricate business of the silk industry in East Anglia, he notes, for example, that
every year the luckless worms, having woven their cocoons, are exterminated ‘to pre-empt racial degeneration’ (the phrase ‘racial degeneration,’ rather than ‘species deterioration’ is loaded with historical reference). Had he not swerved into the path of an oncoming truck on that Norfolk road on 14 December 2001, what would Sebald have gone on to write? He would not, one may be sure, have maintained a Germanic silence.

Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th [1997].
The character John Connor in the 1991 film,
Terminator 2: Judgment Day

As the date of
Terminator 2
suggests, fiction – even science fiction – has a poor track record in scientific prophecy. Its long suit has always been paranoia. Recently, paranoia has switched from the traditionally big-brained master criminal – Professor Moriarty, Ernst Blofeld or Dr Evil – to the all-powerful computer. If you canvas student scientists in the US (as my teaching commitments have allowed me to do) as to who their favourite SF writers are, two names come up, time and again: one is the graphic novelist, Neil Gaiman; the other, more cerebral and textual, is Vernor Vinge (pronounced ‘Vin-jay’, a shibboleth for the knowing, like ‘Anthony Powell’, pronounced ‘Pole’). Vinge is the young scientists’ SF writer of choice, the caviar of the genre. He’s both techno-savvy and technophobic, especially where powerful computers are concerned.

Vinge is not himself young – a retired San Diego maths professor, he began writing SF with his left hand, in his late twenties. He was born in the Midwest, took a doctorate at Michigan, landed a job at the San Diego campus of the University of California in La Jolla (Raymond Chandler’s ‘Poodle Springs’) in 1972 and stayed there after his retirement from nearby San Diego State University in 2000. Little is publicly known of Vinge’s personal life and what little is known is very SF. On arrival at SDSU, he married Joan Carol Dennison, a student recently graduated, ‘with highest honors’, from the anthropology department. The marriage broke up seven years later. She promptly married one of Vinge’s friends, and his editor, James
Frenkel. SF people tend to hang out with each other. By the time of her divorce, in 1979, as ‘Joan D. Vinge’, she had already established herself as a ‘salvage archaeologist’ and one of the few women writers in the SF genre. Her
Eyes of Amber
won the 1977 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novella and
The Snow Queen
(a variation on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy story) won the 1981 Hugo Award for Best SF Novel of the year. In recent years, until a crippling car accident in 2002, Joan D. Vinge cultivated a lucrative line in ‘novelisations’ of big box-office SF and fantasy films, such as
Star Wars, Willow
and
Lost in Space
.

Mathematicians have a small, but distinguished corpus of fiction (e.g. Edward Abbott’s
Flatland
, J. B. S. Haldane’s
Daedalus
, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books), none more so, or more substantial, than Vernor Vinge’s. He wrote his first published short story in 1966 for the ‘hard SF’ magazine,
Analog
. ‘Bookworm, Run!’ has a plot similar to that of Daniel Keyes’s better known
Flowers for Algernon
(1959). But whereas in Keyes’s short story it is surgery which enhances the mouse Algernon’s mental powers to super-rodent levels, in Vinge’s story it is computer-database linkage which makes the chimp Norman a super-simian, or ‘simborg’. Like everything Vinge writes, the theme of the story is both witty and scientifically timely. Chimps were, in the late 1960s, being shot into space in rockets – going boldly where no chimp had gone before. Vinge’s subsequent work coincided with such communication-science developments (which he was lecturing on) as the formation of ARPANET (the military precursor of the internet), the World Wide Web and, in the 1990s, its universal domestic connectivity.

His SF revolves around two major paradoxes. One is that as the machines become smarter, the human beings that operate them necessarily become dumber. A broadly educated person could, for example, change a typewriter ribbon, but might well be at a loss as how to replace a motherboard in their desktop – which they were using for the same purposes as their old manual typewriter. The second paradox is that cyber-connection is both a weapon of liberation and equally a tool of state oppression. Does the rapidly evolving computer portend the end of tyranny, or its future perfection? Will it create McLuhan’s harmonious ‘global village’ or Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ (the basis of the nineteenth-century British jail system, in which the prisoner is under constant, all-seeing, surveillance). Who knows? We are, in Vinge’s pungent metaphor, speeding far ahead of our headlights. All we have as a map is SF – speculative fiction.

Vinge established himself as a genre leader with his novella,
True Names
(1981). It was, he recalls, ‘the first story I ever wrote with a word processor – a Heathkit LSI 11/03’. The story is set in 2014 and takes as its premise Arthur C. Clarke’s paradox that, at its most extreme development, technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It opens:

In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for – the stories go – once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again.

As the narrative continues, a ‘coven’ of ‘warlocks’ – effectively anarchist hackers – are at war with the ‘Great Adversary’, the American government. Their protection (their magic cloak, in Hogwartian terms) is their pseudonymity. The state cannot find out who they are. Enter a third player in the cybergame, ‘the Mailman’. He, it emerges, is an AI construct. Once he has, vampire-like, sucked in every computer avatar on the web, he – the machine – will rule. Exit humanity.

Vinge achieved fame, outside the SF village, with his Hugo-winning 1992 novel,
A Fire Upon the Deep
. (If you don’t know who the ‘Hugo’ is named after, incidentally, SF is not for you). He won the award again for
A Deepness in the Sky
(1999), for the novella
Fast Times at Fairmont High
(2001), and for
Rainbows End
(2007).

His later work is more cosmic in its scenarios. He creates a new cyber-universe, defined by the architectures of information.
A Fire Upon the Deep
is, for example, set in the frictional areas between the ‘Zones of Thought’ and chronicles a battle over a data archive. The tenor of Vinge’s vision, as it has been expressed over the decades, is pessimistic. He foresees thought-capable technologies which are no more comprehensible to the human (or SF-writing) mind than Jehovah – they move in mysterious ways. Human consciousness, whose offspring they are, can react to them, but will never understand them any more than a Pekinese can understand quantum mechanics.

This future catastrophe (for us, not for the thoughtful machines) Vinge terms the ‘Singularity’. He outlined it in detail in a much-cited article in 1993. ‘Within thirty years,’ Vinge predicted, ‘we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions must be investigated.’ They are investigated in his dozen or so novels. His vision of digito-apocalypse was popularised in
The Terminator
’s ‘Skynet’. What happens when machines ‘wake up’? Very bad things for their inventors – and no Arnie to help us.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone?

It’s easier to know a dead novelist than a living novelist. Fences fall on death – the libel lawyer’s sabre turns to putty, trespassers will no longer be prosecuted. But with all this access there is a loss of living contact. One’s in communication with a naked corpse. Of all the living novelists of his generation, Julian Barnes has privileged his readers with the kind of insight that usually only the Jamesian post-mortem exploiter can turn up. It is to be found in his book-length meditation on death,
Nothing to be Frightened of
(2008). The tone is Schopenhauerian. Why live, asked that philosopher – answering himself with the observation that the will would not concur with what the mind rationally resolved on the matter. Schopenhauer, however, is the wrong reference here. Since his university years Barnes has been a disciple of the French sceptic Montaigne. He could take as his motto the title of the Frenchman’s essay, ‘That to philosophize is to learn to die’, with the slight change: ‘to write novels is to learn how to die’. Let us get used to it, says Montaigne. Or, as the other Frenchman Gustave Flaubert puts it, ‘People like us should have the religion of despair … gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.’

The outline of Barnes’s life (but very little of his private life) is on record. He was born the son, and grandson, of school teachers – which meant, as he drily puts it, books, chalk and bourgeois decencies in the house. That his father taught French was manifestly influential. He was born in Leicester – lifelong support of whose football team is the only legacy (it is, he likes to point out, a very middling Midland club – no metropolitan flash). Until his father’s retirement, Barnes’s upbringing was London inner suburban: thereafter London outer suburban. He grew up under the shadow of an elder brother, Jonathan, justly regarded as brilliant, whereas he, Julian, was credited with being a good all-rounder. His sense of fraternal inferiority is a main element in
Nothing to be Frightened of
, and is given wry expression in the book’s opening sentences:

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: ‘Soppy.’

Some philosophers, one recalls, say the same thing about novels. Are his dozen volumes of fiction merely a ‘trivial response to mortality’? Barnes asks himself.

At school he was not outstanding in the classroom, but stood out on the sports field. His lifelong love of sport keeps him, he says, in touch with his inner athlete, his ‘macho’ self. The word is ironically inflected. He confesses to having masturbated heroically in adolescence. The absence of any divine mark of disapproval pushed him towards his lifelong agnosticism. He offers a snapshot of his early literary leanings at the same time of life:

When I was fourteen or fifteen I was just beginning to read in French, but the first time I read
Madame Bovary
it was certainly in English … At the time we were obliged once a week to put on army uniform and play at soldiers in something called the Combined Cadet Force. I have a vivid memory of pulling out
Crime and Punishment
along with my sandwiches on a field day; it felt properly subversive.

The City of London School does well by even its less than highest flying pupils and Barnes was accepted to read modern languages at Oxford. Modern French, he found, was taught there as a ‘dead language’: unmodern French. He changed course, briefly, in his second year to philosophy but discovered all those genes had gone to his brother, Jonathan. If he wanted answers, he would have to find them in literature. He ruefully recalls Oxford’s judgement on him:

When I had a viva for my finals one of the examiners … said to me – looking at my papers – What do you want to do after you’ve got your degree? and I said, Well, I thought I might become one of you. I said that partly because my brother had got a first and had gone on to become a philosophy don … [The examiner] toyed with my papers again and said, Have you thought about journalism?

Oxford was the loser and English fiction (not to mention higher journalism) the gainer. Eventually, one must add, he did not fly from the starting blocks. On graduating, Barnes worked as a lexicographer on the
Oxford English Dictionary
, researching etymologies in the C–G letter range. ‘I doubt it shows through in my fiction,’ he says, but his Flaubertian addiction to lists and categories suggests otherwise. He left OUP to read for the bar, which brought him to London where he began, as the dons had advised, to drift into journalism. His TV reviews were particularly brilliant.