Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 for Free Online Page A

writer he was, all of this hopelessness is screamingly funny.
    In a typographical stunt that blends foreboding with a cheeky grin, all those fated to die before next sunset are given an asterisk before their name. *Andrew MacIntosh is a sociopath billionaire with a blind daughter, Selena, who survives. Her seeing-eye bitch is Kazakh, who, “thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality”—like the posthumans of the far future, who manage it by natural selection. (Curiously, Kazak without an h is the alert canine companion to Winston Niles Rumfoord in Sirens of Titan, whose fate is to become detached in time and space. This probably signifies the sort of meaningless coincidence that for Vonnegut comprises most of the events of life and indeed the universe.) *Zenji Hiroguchi is the inventor of the Mandarax, and his death strands his pregnant wife Hisako, skilled in ikebana or flower arrangement, in a hellish landscape devoid of flowers.
    Adolf von Kleist avoids Huntington’s (unlike his brother *Siegfried). He is captain of the Bahía de Darwin, out of Ecuador, deserted by its crew. This vessel is chosen for “the Nature Cruise of the Century,” a strenuously promoted event that attracts celebrities such as Jacky Onassis and Rudolph Nureyev, although both are spared the rigors of Santa Rosalia as the human world goes bankrupt and sterile. This ship of fools comprises rogues, victims and other hapless souls: fiftyish Mary Hepburn in surplus combat fatigues, widowed school teacher; *James Wait, a younger swindler who makes Mary his eighteenth wife; JesúsOrtiz, an Inca waiter who idolizes the wealthy and hopes to join their number until a brutal encounter with financier *MacIntosh sets him straight; others. Leon Trout, political refugee to Sweden from the Vietnam War after partaking in a My Lai-type massacre, is not aboard, being dead, but we learn his tale as well, and that of six little Kanka-bono cannibal girls.
    The whole shambling novel, typically for Vonnegut, is a jumble of flash stories and blackouts, salted with sardonic jokes and agony, yet somehow manages to achieve what Martin Amis claimed for it, that “it makes the reader sweat with pleasure, but also with suspense.” This is so even though we know that “Thanks to certain modifications in the design of human beings, I see no reason why the earthling part of the clockwork can’t go on ticking for ever the way it is ticking now.” Brainless, that is, with no Beethoven, no Shakespeare, no high school movie showing annually the erotic mating dance of the Galápagos’ blue-footed boobies, copulation deleted.

7
    Pat Murphy

The Falling Woman (1986)

     
    ARE COMMUNICATIVE , rational ghosts still a fantastical, supernatural conceit, rather than some as-yet unplumbed facet of the quantum-strange universe, if they convey accurate information about their pre-posthumous lives; undertake no actions that violate natural laws; and appear at times and places that bear a logical relationship to their old identities, visiting us, perhaps, out of physicist David Bohm’s implicate order?
    Such is the categorical conundrum posed to the literary taxonomist by Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman , a novel full of ghosts. We think such a story can be parsed as sf. Murphy’s second novel is undeniably science fiction, due not only to the general reasonable affect of the ghosts therein, but also to the science-heavy apparatus and storyline that contain them, like Prospero’s warding spells
    Science fiction has made many accommodations with spirits in the past. Timeslip tales such as Jack Finney’s Time and Again are really all about a live human easing back into the realm of the departed, achieving time travel (an essential motif of sf) without the machinery. Sometimes, alien cultures have ready access to their dead, as in Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy. And finally, the whole iffy area of paranormal powers has long been accorded a central place in science