It is when we try to define that group that we run into trouble. SF is not fiction about science; some of the best SF writers – Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison – have no detectable interest in the subject. Nor is it necessarily about the future, or about space travel, or about robots. It may deal with any of those matters, but it also may not; it is the only genre literature that is not defined by its subject matter, since its subject may be anything.

Decades ago, the late John Phillifent, who produced some good SF of his own under the pen name of John Rackham, wrote to me in some excitement to say that he had finally figured out just what the diagnostic cut was between science fiction and all other forms of writing. SF, John announced, was unique in that it was invariably written by ‘the science-fiction method’ analogous to the ‘scientific method’ which, or so we would all like to believe, underpins all science.

Unfortunately, John died before he ever described just what this ‘science-fiction method’ was, but I think he was right all the same. There is such a method. SF is the literature of change, and writing it consists in looking at the world around us, dissecting it into its component parts, throwing some of those parts away and replacing them with invented new ones – and then reassembling that new world and describing what might happen in it. And I think that every SF writer who ever lived has used precisely that method.

Of course, most SF writers don’t know they’re following Rackham’s rule, or for that matter any rule at all. It just rubs off on them through observation and imitation. That doesn’t matter. Most three-year-olds don’t know they’re learning the rules of grammar, either. That does not prevent them from learning to obey the most fundamental of the grammatical rules all the same, long before Sir forces them to parse their first sentence.

The above notwithstanding, the world of SF and the world of ‘real’ science do overlap to a considerable degree – more than either of them do with any other human activity, I believe. We see an indication of that in that so many scientists have written SF on the side, some of their work even becoming such bestsellers as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Mathematician Eric Temple Bell was also the SF novelist ‘John Taine’; Fred Hoyle produced a number of novels like The Black Cloud; Robert Forward, Greg Benford and many another have combined careers in both fields. Sometimes what the scientists have written has been political satire, like Leo Szilard’s The Voice of the Dolphins or OR Frisch’s charming little thought experiment On the Feasibility of Coal-burning Power Stations, in which he applied to fossil-fuel power generation the strictures imposed on nuclear plants. And the list of young SF addicts who grew up to be imposingly seminal scientists – Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Marvin Minsky among them – suggests that to be a really good scientist, it does no harm to expose oneself to a lot of freewheeling SF before tackling the drudgery. Of the three teenagers who published the SF fanzine at the Bronx High School of Science, two wound up as Nobel laureates.

It is even possible to find an organic connection between notions derived from early SF reading and later scientific accomplishment. Minsky, who was heavily influenced by Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, and Isaac Asimov’s robot stories in his youth, tried to program Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into the primitive computers of the 1960s at MIT; he failed, but learned a lot about hierarchical programming in the process. And Leo Szilard credits H. G. Wells’s SF novel The World Set Free with at least a part of the inspiration that led to the atomic bomb. In 1933, in London’s Bloomsbury, while waiting for a traffic light to change on Southampton Row, Szilard had just read an account in The Times of Lord Rutherford’s ‘moonshine’ speech on the folly of ever trying to get energy out of the atom. Reminded by that of the Wells novel, Szilard imagined a neutron striking an atomic nucleus and thus knocking out two or more neutrons. Szilard thought this process might produce an energy-releasing chain reaction. As the residents of Hiroshima discovered a decade or so later, after a few billion dollars were spent on experiments, it did.

Still, SF is not meant to predict future science, or indeed to predict anything at all. It is even fair for SF writers to send spaceships zapping around the known galaxy in warp drive, in defiance of Albert Einstein’s universal speed limit, or to invent time machines. They are no more than literary devices, the sleight of hand the writer has to perform to make it possible to write about something that interests him. Wells wasn’t really writing about time travel in The Time Machine. What he was writing about was his semi-Marxist view of the darker side of the human future – how capitalists might turn into Eloi and the proletariat become Morlocks – and the only way available to him to make a story out of it was to pretend that time was a dimension as traversable as any other, and that therefore a machine to travel through it was possible. Similarly, if a science-fiction writer has something he wants to say about the interactions between some intelligent extraterrestrials and our present human race, he often finds it necessary to pretend that some means of faster-than-light travel can be found (tachyon transmissions, black-hole transit, ‘warp drive’, or whatever), and Einstein be hanged. If the writer happens to be more conventionally inclined – like myself, for instance – he may more frequently choose to rely instead on such prospects as cryonic suspension or time dilation at relativistic speeds to get his people across interstellar distances within the bounds of a mortal lifetime.

Of course, that sort of literary licence is not granted exclusively to writers of SF. Without some similar legerdemain, fiction writing of any kind would be drearier, if not impossible. All fiction writers lie to us. That is their profession, because that’s what fiction is. But it is through these lies that we may, perhaps, glimpse some interesting truths. James Joyce really did not have any practicable way of tapping into the inner processes of Molly Bloom’s mind, either, but by pretending he did he was able to enrich us all with the wonderful, though only simulated, stream of consciousness that ornaments the ending of Ulysses.

This is not to say that the SF writer is free to ignore what is known, only that when what is known is inconvenient he has the privilege of trying to find some scientifically possible way of dodging around it. In this connection some new particle is often useful. Asimov employed the newly discovered positron to make his robots capable of thought and many a writer has borrowed Gerald Feinberg’s postulated (but unfortunately never yet actually detected) tachyon to exceed the c speed limit. The situation is like that in the Chesterfieldian (or is it perhaps actually Chestertonian?) definition of a gentleman: ‘One who is never rude by accident.’ In just that way, a good science-fiction writer should never violate scientific laws through ignorance.

The operative word there is ‘good’. There are a number of SF writers who aren’t, particularly, but manage to get published anyway. But then the late Theodore Sturgeon – now unfortunately best known to current readers by the caricature Kurt Vonnegut made of him as ‘Kilgore Trout’ – explained all that for us long ago when he said, ‘Ninety per cent of science fiction is crud, but then 90 per cent of everything is crud.’ That’s Sturgeon’s Law, and from that law no dispensations have ever been granted.

Fred Pohl is a science-fiction writer based in Illinois.

Science-Fiction writers are a crotchety race. They are capable of imagining
wondrous technological marvels and Utopian societies, but once they have
constructed them and set them forth in print for the delight of their readers
they can’t help mulling over their creations to see what possibly could
go wrong – and almost always finding some little flaw, or perversity, or
accident that will destroy the whole wonderful fabric they have invented.

Thus the world-building team of Gribbin and Chown (both of whom write
for 91av). A couple of years ago they took on the task of converting
the dead old Moon to prime farmland and building lots. That was in their
science-fiction novel, Double Planet, and they did the job by dumping comets
onto its surface. The frozen comet gases melted and became an atmosphere,
rain fell, rivers flowed, genetically engineered trees were planted and
began breaking the sterile Moon rock up into soil, and the Moon’s far side
became a lunar paradise. (The side facing the Earth didn’t do as well, though,
being subject to serious bombardment from the continuing supply of comets
needed to keep topping up the Moon’s air.)

Now, in Reunion, Gribbin and Chown have come back to the Moon a thousand
years later to see how their work has prospered, and of course it hasn’t
prospered at all. Plague and natural disasters have wiped out high-tech
civilisation on the Moon. Contact with the Earth has been lost, and even
forgotten. The descendants of their brave lunar colonists continue to do
well enough for some centuries as they tend their farms and wage their small-scale
low-tech battles with each other (even gunpowder has been lost to them,
not to mention tanks and air power); they do not have any technology to
speak of, but they get along – as long as the supply of comets, which have
been brought to them by surviving automatic machines on an unmanned space
station, continues to arrive to replenish their atmosphere.

But then the supply stops . . . and the story of Reunion begins.

Gribbin and Chown begin by telling their story through the eyes of a
young Lunarian girl, Tugela, whose parents have just been abducted by the
armies of the priesthood which is all that is left of science on the Moon;
the priests know nothing, but pretend to know much and tyrannise over the
common people. Tugela is what literary theorists call the ‘unreliable narrator’;
she can be trusted in what she sees happening, but understands very little.
Among the things Tugela does not understand are the queer ‘Eyes’ (brightly
glowing metal spheres that fly overhead on mysterious errands and are thought
to be spying for the priesthood), the meaning of the Forbidden Zone (actually
only the hemisphere set aside for the comet strikes, but thought to be a
‘nightmare land’ of terrifying dangers) and, of course, the fact that the
priests, who pretend to have the disposition of the comets at their command,
really don’t have a clue. What she does understand is that the comets have
stopped, the air is growing thin, the rivers have ceased to flow and the
farms are dying. So she bravely seeks answers by entering the terrible Forbidden
Zone herself; and when she finds there a cluster of the Eyes nestled near
some ancient high-tech structures and enters one she (and we) discover that
the Eyes are actually automated spacecraft.

Switch point of view: now we are looking at things through the eyes
of a young boy, Ondray. He lives on the surviving South Sea islands on Earth,
and his world is in almost as much trouble as Tugela’s. The Earth humans
have not exactly forgotten technology. They simply do not need to bother
with it any more, because their ancestors have created a vast computer brain
(Ondray addresses it as ‘Link’) to deal with all their physical problems;
therefore they live the life of lotus-eaters. When Tugela and her spaceship
arrive on the shores of one of their islands Ondray tries to interview her
– not an easy task, because Tugela’s frail Lunarian body has been choked
by Earth’s thick air and crushed by Earth’s pulverising gravity and she
is unconscious. But with the help of the Link Ondray manages to get her
back into her spaceship, where she can heal, and the two of them are carried
to the Lagrange-point habitat where the other vast computer brain should
be continuing to drop comets on the Moon, but is not.

This is the point where the high-tech minds of Gribbin and Chown can
flaunt their stuff, and they do. Ondray is almost as unreliable a narrator
as Tugela, but he does know what a computer is and the two of them manage
to gain control of the errant Lagrange computer and establish connection
with the Link on Earth; the comets begin to come again and the world is
saved.

But will the boy get the girl? (And if he does, considering their serious
physiological disparity, how will they work it out?) Will the rejoined halves
of the human race go on to fulfil humanity’s manifest destiny to colonise
every astronomical body in sight? Stay tuned; for if ever any sequel showed
the diagnostic signs of being about to become a trilogy Reunion is it.

Frederik Pohl is a science fiction writer. His Homegoing (Gollancz)
appears in paperback next month.

THERE are few people as well qualified as Iurii Shcherbak to write a
book on the Chernobyl accident. Shcherbak is a noted Ukrainian author who
is also a medical doctor, and trained as a epidemiologist. A few days after
the explosion in Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in
April 1986, Shcherbak went to the vacated town of Pripyat, ‘because,’ as
he once told me, ‘one seldom gets an empty town to study, and it was a unique
subject for epidemiology’. But it was the writer, not the epidemiologist,
who found the most interesting material in that bedroom town for the power
plant, and so for many months after the explosion Shcherbak spent his time
interviewing the people who had been involved in or affected by it. Chernobyl
is the result.

Although Shcherbak’s book is subtitled ‘A Documentary Story’, it is
not deeply concerned with the accident itself. The author devotes only a
few pages to describe what went on inside the plant in those early-morning
hours of 26 April, when the experiment in using residual kinetic energy
to generate emergency power went so tragically, and stupidly, wrong. What
most of Shcherbak’s many interview subjects do for us is to tell us of the
ways in which they, and those around them, reacted to the accident after
it happened – with frequent panic, with almost universal incredulous shock,
with hasty and massive mobilisation of resources and improvised damage-control
measures and, very often, with great heroism.

One of Shcherbak’s most useful witnesses (as she was my own, in researching
my novel of the same title) was the young woman named Luba Kovalevska. Before
the accident, Kovalevska worked on the staff of the local newspaper Tribune
of Energy, though she was beginning to feel that her position was at risk.
Just a month earlier she had published, in Literaturna Ukraina, the periodical
of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, an article entitled ‘Not a Private Affair’.
In it, she documented some of the shortcomings at the proposed new fifth
reactor at Chernobyl – shoddy materials, inadequate supervision and poor
morale.

For a time after the article appeared, Kovalevska’s life became almost
a burden to her. ‘I was accused of everything under the sun,’ she told Shcherbak,
‘that I was incompetent, half-educated (the expressions they used were,
it’s true, milder, but that’s what they amounted to.’) She was summoned
before the local Party organisation for an interview. There was a good chance,
she felt, that her Party membership would have been revoked – if Reactor
No. 4 had not blown up first.

Kovalevska is scathing about managers who house themselves in hotels
and use their position for material advantages. They are responsible for
slack workers: ‘People wonder: ‘What’s the point of living the life of a
fool, when next door people are living well, just as they like. They exhort
us to honest work and enthusiasm, while all the while they themselves acquire
Czech lavatory pans from the hotels. They leave their own ones there and
take the Czech ones.’ ‘

On the night before the accident, Kovalevska had been working late,
finishing a long narrative poem on the Italian violinist, Paganini. She
took a sleeping pill. She heard nothing of the distant explosions, saw none
of the ‘shooting star’ flashes other witnesses described. When she woke,
her mother asked her if there had been a thunderstorm in the night, and
so, Kovalevska says, ‘I went out and looked – all the roads were flooded
with water and there was some white solution, everything was white, foaming,
all the roadsides. And I know how it is when there is an accident, some
accidental spill. I began somehow to feel uneasy. I walked on. I looked:
policemen here and there, never had I seen so many policemen in the town
before. They were not doing anything, just standing around near strategic
²ú³Ü¾±±ô»å¾±²Ô²µ²õ.’

But no one spoke of the accident; no authority acknowledged it had happened;
children went out to play, and there was no warning that it would be better
to keep them inside. The first definite information Kovalevska had that
an accident had truly occurred was when she went to look at the powerplant,
only a kilometre or two away, and then she saw the pillar of fire. But that
it contained deadly radionuclides no one said; it was more than 24 hours
before the town of Pripyat was evacuated.

The Pripyat doctor, V. P. Bilokin, was the first to arrive at the Chernobyl
plant after the explosion. The emergency message had said simply that there
had been a ‘fire’. As Bilokin came in he was challenged by a guard: ‘ ‘Where
are you going?’ ‘To the fire.’ ‘Why haven’t you any special clothing on?’
‘But how was I to know that special clothing was necessary?’ I had no information.
I was wearing my doctor’s smock, it was an April evening, a warm night,
I didn’t have a cap, nothing. We drove in.’

When casualties began to report feelings of weakness and nausea and
when, belatedly, a dosimeter crew arrived, Bilokin realised his own danger.
But there was little to do. He had no mask, nor were there any available.
He phoned for gauze to put over his face, but there was not even gauze to
be had. Bilokin himself wound up as a radiation casualty, though he recovered.

When the accident was finally acknowledged at the highest levels, the
Soviet state mobilised immense forces to control the fire and deal with
the casualties. But that did not happen at once. Glasnost had not arrived
in that part of the Soviet Ukraine; Kovalevska says flatly: ‘The newspapers
were writing lies.’ Even those who knew the truth refused to act on it.
Another witness, A. Perkovska, went to the Pripyat town authorities to demand
that the children, at least, be kept off the streets. She was refused: ‘This
is not your affair. The decision will be taken by Moscow.’

One of Shcherbak’s most interesting interviews is with the American
doctor, Robert Gale. Gale gets kinder treatment from Shcherbak than he did
in, say, the play Sarcophagus (where playwright V. S. Gubarev makes him
a publicity-seeking American millionaire). But when California comes to
Kiev, there must inevitably be a certain number of raised eyebrows on both
sides. Shcherbak’s description of Gale suggests some of the reasons: ‘He
is elegant, too. He invariably wears a dark-blue blazer with gold-like buttons,
a dark-red tie, and grey trousers. And his bare heels at first look somehow
very ridiculous and moving: he wears shoes without heel-pieces.’ (We would
call them ‘sandals’, of course. Gale did make it a point to wear sandals
in the Soviet Union.) Unfortunately, there are flaws in this book not of
the author’s making. There is no index. The translation is stilted and,
typographically, the book is curiously amateurish. It is hard to tell whether
it is the author or one of his subjects speaking. Shcherbak deserves to
have been better served in these respects. But this is only the first half
of the work he has planned on Chernobyl and its consequences; with any luck,
when the second part is ready the whole thing will become available in a
better format.

Frederik Pohl is an SF writer and is based in Palatine, Illnois.

THE CITY in question is New York; the phrase ‘that never was’ refers
to that immense number of urban-development projects – good, bad and sometimes
ludicrous – that were seriously contemplated over its four-odd centuries
of history, but for one reason or another never came to fruition (and, for
many of them, a damned good thing).

The City That Never Was isn’t an altogether satisfying book. If you
aren’t particularly interested in New York City in the first place, there’s
not much here for you. Even if you are (as I am: native born and fiercely
fond of the dirty, crime-ridden but intensely alive old thing), you may
feel the book doesn’t live up to its premise. The author, Rebecca Read Shanor,
has limited herself to the plans for which she had complete documentation,
and even contemporary drawings to show what they would have looked like
if carried to completion. One feels there must have been more exciting ones
among those excluded. Still, there are some gems in The City That Never
Was.

Manhattan being an island, many of the worst ideas had to do with getting
across the rivers and bays that surround it. It wasn’t hard to connect with
the mainland on the north (the Harlem River was bridged three times before
the American Revolution) but the big need was to cross the East River to
Long Island, or the Hudson to New Jersey on the west.

Even in the middle 19th century, the state of the art wasn’t up to the
task. Some people, such as Colonel John Stevens, proposed pontoon bridges
(but what was to be done when the winter ice came down the river, sweeping
everything away?). Others thought of vehicular tunnels (but the fact that
smoke from early locomotives would asphyxiate everyone on board was held
to be a drawback).

In 1811, an ‘architect and landscape gardener’ named Thomas Pope came
along with a ‘stupendous’ plan to bridge whichever river anyone chose. His
invention was a cantilever design which he called ‘the Flying Pendant River
Bridge’. The bridge was made of wood, the sections prefabricated on land
and fitted into place as the work progressed. As a true cantilever, there
were no mid-span supports at all; today’s engineers may wish to calculate
just how far the carpenters could extend the span over emptiness before
it fell into the river and floated away.

It was 72 years later that John Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge at last permitted
New Yorkers to walk dryshod across the East River. (And that heroic span
still stands as solid as ever, when later bridges are already rusting.)
Because New York was jealous of its role as cradle of the skyscraper (before
every skyline in the world came to look like every other), Shanor devotes
a long section of The City That Never Was to tall buildings. A little off
the stated theme of the book, but enjoyable all the same, is Shanor’s account
of the building of the Empire State Building. Its presiding genius was John
J. Raskob, determined to have the world’s tallest building; his arch competitor
was Walter Chrysler, equally determined to win the title with his own skyscraper,
a dozen blocks to the northeast. Each watched his rival’s progress, day
by day. When Chrysler hoisted his secret stainless-steel spire to the top
of the Chrysler Building, Raskob was ready with his ‘200-foot mooring mast
for dirigibles’ that still tops the Empire State.

As a mid-city airport, the Empire State Building was just less than
a total failure (one blimp did moor to it, on 15 September 1931 – for three
minutes). But its traces remain, and if you are ever in the 86th-floor observation
level of the Empire State Building, reflect that the original purpose of
the space was to hold ticket windows, customs agents and (no doubt) duty-free
shops for passengers of trans-Atlantic dirigibles.

Of course, no city is without its traffic problems, and Shanor tells
us about some interesting attempts to solve these. Manhattan’s checkerboard
street plan, which was imposed in 1811, certainly makes it easy for any
visitor to know how to get to any destination in the city (at least, north
of Houston Street, where the numbered streets begin), but it contributes
to the ‘gridlock’ which makes it so difficult actually to get there.

By the time of the American Civil War the traffic problem was already
acute; omnibuses and streetcars were not up to the job. The solution was
obviously to go under the streets or over them, and in fact both were tried.
In 1863, London inaugurated its first Underground; in 1864 New Yorkers began
planning for one of their own.

The proposal was held at first to be ridiculous, but in 1871 an epidemic
of equine distemper took most of New York’s horses off the street; commuters
found themselves having actually to walk to work, and the legislatures began
to get serious.

It seemed easier to go up than down, and one of the early schemes for
an elevated train line was Dr Rufus Gilbert’s pneumatic tubes, 20 feet above
the horse cars and hansoms on ornate Gothic arches. Because the cars would
be windowless capsules, not all prospective commuters looked forward to
the ride. But the factor that did the plan in was economic, rather than
technological or aesthetic: the financial crash of 1873.

Mass transit finally did go underground in 1904, and still operates
(though often with graffiti-covered cars). The only major technological
revolution was the abortive attempt to dispense with human crews in 1962.
The short stretch of track from Grand Central to Time Square was given a
fully automatic three-car train. The arrangement worked perfectly, apart
from infuriating the head of the Transport Workers Union, Michael Quill
(he called it ‘the Headless Horseman’). Quill insisted that a live motorman
ride along on every trip; and I remember seeing one of them in the act of
doing it, sitting and staring into space while the train made its three-minute
run, then getting up and walking to the other end of the train for the return
trip. A fire destroyed the automatic train after two years of operation,
and it was replaced with conventional equipment.

The City That Never Was also has interesting sections on parks (not
having a royal family, whose gardens and hunting preserves could be taken
over for urban parks, New York had to create them for itself); on public
buildings (look for the Beard design for the entrance to a proposed art
museum, to be entered through a rough-hewn tunnel that looks like a section
of intestine, flanked by heroic statues of cavemen with clubs); and on highways
(most of them, fortunately, never built).

All in all, this is a handsome, well made book, exceptionally free from
printers’ and other errors (the only conspicuous one I observed being a
rather endearing reference to that famous French musician, Eugene Normandy.)
But perhaps its interest is somewhat limited.

Frederik Pohl is a science-fiction writer based in Palatine, Illinois.
This week’s reviewers