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  Zoran Živković

  First Contact

  and Time Travel

  Selected Essays

  and Short Stories

  Science and Fiction

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  Zoran Živkovic

  First Contact and Time

  Travel

  Selected Essays and Short Stories

  Zoran Živkovic

  Belgrade, Serbia

  ISSN 2197-1188

  ISSN 2197-1196

  (electronic)

  Science and Fiction

  ISBN 978-3-319-90550-1

  ISBN 978-3-319-90551-8

  (eBook)

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943298

  © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

  This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

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  To Dragoljub Kojčic, my dear friend

  Preface

  The two main parts of this book—essays and fiction—originated during two

  rather distant periods of my life. With one exception, all the nonfiction pieces

  were written in the second half of the 1970s, nearly twenty years before I

  embarked on fiction. At that time, in my late twenties and early thirties, I was a

  young scholar working on my MA and PhD theses. I hadn’t even remotely

  considered the possibility of becoming an author myself.

  Strange as it might seem today, my area of academic interest was then

  revolutionary: science fiction. Although by that time the SF genre had already

  abandoned its origins in pulp literature and started to produce works of

  indisputable artistic value, it was still far from being a favorite subject in

  proverbially conservative academic circles.

  I was very fortunate indeed to have an exceptional mentor, professor Nikola

  Miloševic, who, although by no means an expert in science fiction himself,

  realized that it possessed the potential to offer new insights into some of the

  fundamental dilemmas, not only of the art of prose, but also, more generally,

  in his principal area of interest—the history of ideas.

  In my PhD thesis (“The Origin of Science Fiction as a Genre of Artistic

  Prose,” 1982) I tried to explain a unique phenomenon—how of all genres of

  pulp literature only science fiction had succeeded in becoming art. In the long

  run, however, my MA thesis had the quality of a genuinely pioneering study:

  “Anthropomorphism and the First Contact Theme in the SF Works of Arthur

  C. Clarke,” 1979. Sir Arthur told me in one of his letters that, to the best of his

  knowledge, this was also the first academic paper ever written on his SF works.

  (Although flattered, I never cared to check because I don’t feel that precedence

  is really very important in these matters.)

  vii

  viii

  Preface

  Apart from first contact, I was also interested in a second theme unique to

  science fiction—time travel
(or, to use Lem’s beautiful neologism, chronomotion).

  In my last, brief essay on science fiction (1995) I recapitulated all the subaspects of this very challenging theme in order to identify those that might have greater

  literary potential.

  For a decade and a half (1975–1990) I tried my hand at every aspect of

  science fiction—but one. I wrote several books on it including a two-volume

  set: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I translated more than 40 SF books, I

  was a critic, a reviewer, and a commentator on the SF genre, I hosted a TV

  series on the history of SF cinema and attended numerous conventions,

  conferences, festivals, and so on.

  But I was never a science fiction writer.

  A somewhat simplified answer to the inevitable question as to how I could

  possibly not become an SF writer with such a background is that by the time I

  began to write my first piece of fiction in 1993, science fiction had already

  gone into decline. This is not the place to elaborate on this, but it is my view

  that science fiction no longer exists. It belongs to the history of literature as one of the two great movements of the art of “fantastika” in the twentieth century.

  (The other is, of course, magical realism.) In the twenty-first century, we don’t

  write science fiction because we don’t need it. We live it. It is all around us. For better or worse.

  In any case, what I write is not science fiction. (Curiously enough, no matter

  how often I repeat this simple fact, for the great majority of my compatriots

  who care to have an opinion I will forever remain a science fiction writer.

  Particularly for those who, for one reason or another, have had neither the

  opportunity nor the interest to read any of my 22 works of fiction.) I consider

  myself a writer without prefixes. Simply a writer.

  On the other hand, not being an SF writer doesn’t mean that I avoid themes

  introduced by science fiction. On the contrary, it is precisely through its new

  approaches to old SF themes that the new “fantastika” of the twenty-first century,

  which still doesn’t even have a name, is slowly but surely taking its final shape.

  If I had been an SF writer, I would never have been able to write Time Gifts

  or “The Puzzle”—my variations on the two pivotal science fiction themes:

  time travel and first contact. It took a long time to complete what I started

  back in the 1970s as an essayist. But completion would never have been

  possible without my being a writer.

  Novi Beograd, Serbia

  Zoran Živkovic

  March 2018

  Contents

  Part I Essays

  1

  The Theme of First Contact in the SF Works

  of Arthur C. Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  3

  1.1

  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  3

  1.2

  Three Short Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  5

  1.2.1

  “Report on Planet Three” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  5

  1.2.2

  “Crusade” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  7

  1.2.3

  “History Lesson” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

  1.3

  “A Meeting with Medusa” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

  1.3.1

  “There Is Life on Jupiter: And It’s Big...” . . . . . . . . 14

  1.3.2

  Medusae and Mantas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  18

  1.3.3

  Prime Directive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  25

  1.3.4

  Noumen and Phenoumen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  28

  1.4

  Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  34

  2

  Utopia in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

  3

  Chronomotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

  4

  The Labyrinth Theme in Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

  5

  Annotations 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

  ix

  x

  Contents

  Part II Fiction

  6

  The Bookshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

  7

  The Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

  8

  Time Gifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

  The Astronomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  83

  The Paleolinguist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  97

  The Watchmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

  The Artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

  9

  The Cone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

  10 Annotations 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

  Part I

  Essays

  First Contact

  Let us therefore tell the truth to ourselves: we are not searching for “all possible civilizations,” but above all those which are anthropomorphic. We introduce the

  law and order of experiment into Nature and after phenomena of this kind we

  want to meet beings similar to ourselves. Nevertheless, we do not succeed in

  perceiving them. Do they in fact exist at all? There is indeed something deeply

  saddening in the silence of the stars as an answer to that question, a silence which is so complete as to be eternal.

  —Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae

  Sometimes, in the dark of the night, I lie awake and wonder if different intelli-

  gences can communicate at all; or, if I’ve had a particularly bad day, whether the

  phrase ‘different intelligences’ has meaning at all.

  —Isaac Asimov, Gods Themselves

  1

  The Theme of First Contact in the SF Works

  of Arthur C. Clarke

  Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.

  Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

  1.1

  Introduction

  The “first contact” theme in science fiction is characterized by its two gener-

  ically different kinds of protagonist: the human and the alien. The notion of

  alien characters in fiction introduces a fundamental confusion, the resolution

  of which depends on what we would term the “artistic coherence” of the “first

  contact” theme: namely, is it at all possible to imagine and conjure up from a

  human perspective something essentially alien? The degree of difference

  between the human and alien protagonists in the “first contact” does not

  have to be absolute, of course, but the problem then changes in the quanti-

  tative and not the qualitative sense.

  The human/nonhuman confusion appears on two levels, that is, in the

  contex
t of the two different viewpoints attributing human characteristics to

  the alien which can exist in a work of sf. One is the perspective of the human

  characters in the work, and the other is of the author himself, as present in the

  narrative voice. From each of these perspectives, aliens can be ascribed human

  “The Theme of First Contact in the SF Works of Arthur C. Clarke.” Written in 1978–79. Originally published in Serbian in 1985 in Prvi kontakt/First Contact, Književne novine, Belgrade, Serbia. First published in English in “The New York Review of Science Fiction”, New York, USA, in two parts: February 2001, 8–13, and March 2001, 10–17.

  © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

  3

  Z. Živković, First Contact and Time Travel, Science and Fiction,

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90551-8_1

  4

  Z. Živkovic

  characteristics, but these two anthropomorphizations will not have an identical

  effect on the coherence of the first contact theme.

  The whole skill of writing sf works with a “first contact” theme is in fact

  embodied in avoiding the anthropomorphic pitfalls which appear during the

  process of imagining and conjuring up alien characters with independent

  status. Furthermore, of course, the question arises as to uttermost limits, and

  whether it is at all possible to portray a truly alien entity by literary means.

  When the human characters anthropomorphize the alien characters, the

  “first contact” theme serves as a means of artistic expression, in the sense that

  this factor is used as the best possible motivation for certain human charac-

  teristics and states. If, however, the anthropomorphization is from the per-

  spective of the narrative voice, the coherence of the first contact theme is often

  disturbed, inasmuch as it rests on the fundamental assumption of alienness of

  the nonhuman protagonists.

  There does exist, however, a kind of anthropomorphization of an alien

  entity from the perspective of the narrative voice that does not imperil the

  coherence of a work. This appears in those works in which the author uses the

  alien as a mirror, and in which the nonhuman character does not have an

  independent status but exists only because, through its mediation, one can

  make a statement about people. When, in contrast, the alien does have

  independent status, or when its role does not consist of the mere illustration