reviews by Simon Sellars
Originally published in Orb Speculative Fiction #0, Spring-Summer 1999.
Robotomy by Andrés Vaccari. Saturn Press, $12.95. ISBN 0 646 32003 3
Abaddon #2 edited by Andrés Vaccari. Saturn Press, $6.95. ISSN 1441-046X.
Robotomy
In the 1960s, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine ushered in the “New Wave” of science fiction. The stories Moorcock published – including JG Ballard’s remarkable series of “condensed novels” – often embodied a multi-disciplinary approach, eschewing linear narrative in favour of Burroughsian cut-ups. Collages and found texts were incorporated into actual layouts and Pop Art visuals became as important to the conveyance of meaning as the written word. Concomitantly, “Inner Space” became the favoured destination of New Worlds protagonists, rather than the Outer Space of traditional “hard SF”.
Moorcock and Ballard sought to map the terrain of the nascent media landscape, using science fiction’s tropes of estrangement and displacement to appropriate and critique the manipulative, “mass-cult” techniques of film, television and emergent communications technologies. It was an invigorating period; in many ways, New Worlds formulated a prototypical, hypertextual – utterly contemporary – art form, shot through with the disembodied strata of late consumer culture.
Of course, a freefall in Inner Space is not to everyone’s taste. But is there any valid reason why most commercial science fiction magazines today insist on publishing the cheesiest of graphics, often with no aesthetic relevance to the stories they illustrate? I’ll never forget the respected British mag, Interzone’s special Ballard edition from a couple of years ago. Its cover-art depicted JGB sitting wistfully on a moss-covered rock, uncannily resembling a taller Yoda, while a frankly bizarre Zeppelin-type contraption floated “enigmatically” above him. That’s not the Ballard I remember reading!
Sadly, our increasingly visual, iconic culture – a world barely imagined by the SF of yesteryear – has become utterly divorced from its contemporary mythos. This is an unforgivable crime in the age of Photoshop and accessible desktop publishing options, and plays a large part in perpetuating the myth that SF is purely a juvenile literature. Of course, it’s easier to market the genre in this fashion…
Andrés Vaccari is an exciting new author who seeks to update the New Worlds project. His novella, Robotomy, is a smart cyberpunk fable, married to gritty computer graphics and variant typographies. Although Robotomy was first published in 1997, it has been re-released to coincide with the second issue of Abaddon, the Sydney-based magazine which Vaccari edits. Robotomy is worth reviewing in 1999: it is a self-published, self-financed effort and will no doubt have been missed by the majority of Orb readers. It is too good to be allowed to sink without trace.
Robotomy tells the story of Drake Ullmann, a “deck cowboy” who cheats his employers, rips off their technology and downloads his consciousness into the corporation’s super-computer. The corporation sends a team of assassins to destroy Drake, who is also pursued by his real-time lover, Fabiana. Sound familiar? Certainly, Robotomy explores the stock cyberpunk fantasy of escaping the flesh, of projecting one’s soul into the non-space of virtual reality and subsequent immortality.
Yet Vaccari jettisons the self-conscious “hip” of generic stereotypes. While his prose is fluorescent and sharp, it also contains a beautifully judged poetic sense – the author is simply not interested in draping his characters with the dated cool favoured by scores of William Gibson imitators. Instead, the fusion of man with machine takes priority – the process is everything. Robotomy dwells on psychotic states, hallucinations, implanted emotions; as was the New Wave, Vaccari is obsessed with entropy, with the decaying of flesh and the body, and the impermanence of existence. The indeterminacy of our memories is the leitmotif, recalling the grand design of cinematic masterpieces such as La Jeteé and Blade Runner.
Robotomy is driven by its artwork, snapshots from Inner Space. Downloaded into a new reality, Drake’s disintegration (and eventual rebirth) is realised by harsh, low-res computer graphics, punctuating the lyrical writing and bleeding into the paragraphs themselves. According to Vaccari, he “wanted to exploit the aesthetics of the computer, and produced most of the graphics by deliberately causing errors and collecting the printer’s ‘garbage’”. Sometimes, from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, this aspect jars, giving the impression of visual “clunkiness”. But when it is fully integrated with the text, this “garbage” effectively complements Robotomy’s essence.
For instance, as Vaccari describes various scenes from differing perspectives – Drake’s, his pursuers’ – the visuals track the action, similarly. In one sequence, Vaccari skirts the physical boundaries of the text with a series of eye-montages, photographs of pupils distended and distorted into pixellation. In other sections, the text breaks off to be replaced by optical illusions, jumbles of computer code, slabs of solid black, previous paragraphs cut-up and rearranged – fonts and typography melding, displacing, estranging.
Vaccari works hard to mould SF into a relevant form, responsive to these often bewildering times; he largely succeeds. Robotomy is a stimulating, intelligent and entertaining read, its method providing a neat commentary on the late twentieth century – where technology sticks to the skin, framing and filtering our thoughts and deeds. But I can’t escape the feeling that its potential might be more fully realised as a CD ROM, or a piece of hyper-fiction…
This is an author to watch.
Abaddon #2
Andrés Vaccari is also the editor and co-publisher of Abaddon magazine, now two issues old. Abaddon is a difficult publication to categorise and the editorial in Number Two doesn’t clarify matters. Here, Vaccari writes of the horrors of Kosovo and the “deadening distance” provided by television coverage of the conflict. The writing in Abaddon is presented as an antidote to such a mediated environment: “If the world seems unreal then it is in art, in fiction, that we may hold to something real and true, that we may feel alive”. So, is Abaddon “science fiction”? Probably not. Does anybody really care anymore? Probably only the traditionalists, petrified that the multiplicitous, voracious world outside might erode their carefully constructed generic walls…
Much of the work in Abaddon #2 incorporates elements of the “fantastic”. Lyn McConchie’s “A Length of Scarlet Silk” tells the story of a “worthless” woman who tends a factory of mighty machines-with-artificial-intelligence; the product of this communion is a humble silk, sought after throughout the galaxy. And George Alexander’s suite of poems, “Voices”, meditates on the “otherness” of the writing process, accompanied by illustrations of the Horsehead Nebula and graphs and grids.
Plainly, this is not “high tech” SF. It is speculative fiction, subtle and contemplative, blurring genres, categories, styles – and sensations. The writers in Abaddon concentrate on the mapping and retooling of psychological states, as if their characters do not trust the reliability of their sensory inputs. In Geoffrey Maloney’s “The Parallax Garden”, codes and symbols are plucked from the outside world – from credit cards, from television screens – and re-ordered and recontextualised: “Over the last few months she had collected close to two dozens words and managed to form them into sentences that were meaningful to her”.
Again, a palpable influence from the New Wave is apparent, with this issue of Abaddon perhaps summed up best by its subtitle: “Earth is the Alien Planet”. It’s a paraphrase from a guest editorial JG Ballard wrote for New Worlds, and should tell the reader everything there is to know about Abaddon’s respect for SF’s traditional infatuations. Mention must also be made of Nick Howlett’s tasteful art direction and design, framing a collection of elegiac line drawing, Photoshopped collages and Brandon Cavallari’s striking cover painting. These illustrations invariably impart a surreal, “retro-futurist” ambience to Abaddon, wholly suited to the writing. And for Jack Dann fans, Vaccari conducts an exhaustive interview with the man himself, analysing the themes and obsessions embedded within Dann’s oeuvre. There’s also a thoughtful essay on “event films”, by Hamish Ford, and an amusing reappraisal of John Carpenter’s schlock classic, They Live.
In terms of Australian SF, Abaddon is – to my mind – in a league of its own. Robotomy and Abaddon are available from independent bookstores in Sydney and Melbourne, or by mail order from Saturn Press, PO Box 2258, Carlingford Court, NSW 2118. Email: saturn_press@hotmail.com.