The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word. Take lots. Call them words. Call them a medium.

Everybody uses them. In our culture, almost everybody reads and writes them. All rational thought, almost all consciousness (of even 'purely sensory' experience), is locked firmly into a linguistic framework. Only the mathematicians and the widely multilingual have even comparative freedom from the limitations on logic inherent in the cultural happenstance of native language. In music and mystical/religious experience, sometimes in dance or athletic or sexual activity, occasionally through the graphic arts, we have brief moments of truly nonverbal perception. It is possible that as little as one more decade of electronic-media 'participation involvement' and 'psychedelic' (with or without drugs) transcendentalism and biochemical advance in molecular learning theory, may produce the first generation of a truly revolutionary civilisation, a sophistication not chained to verbal symbols. Today we are all, still, far more enslaved by synaptic/semantic matrices of language than we are influenced — for good or ill — by any other medium of communication.

The word-craftsman, the writer, is both the sorcerer and spellbound victim of word enchantment. Every serious writer I have ever known is a word-gamer/tamer. It may not be visible in the published work: some of the best prose is apparently artless. But its author is probably a secret crossword-puzzler or cryptographer — or it might be Scrabble or Anagrams, formal verse (if only for the desk drawer), foreign languages, Finnegan's Wake explications, or simple refreshing plunges into atlas or dictionary reading.

Or dictionary writing.

Science-fiction writers carry this farther than most: there are very few who have not at least once constructed an extensive glossary of an 'alien' language, (If a story contains five words of Arcturan, you may be assured that a lexicography of 50 or 500 more was on a wall chart or in a notebook at the author's left hand as he worked. I myself have a cardfile indexing a complete genealogy of more than a hundred names cross-bred on board a star-ship originally crewed by twenty women and four men — the residue of two short stories totalling less than 10,000 words.) Few of these ventures remain parenthetical in nature although they are sometimes more inventive and engaging than the formal stories. One reason I embrace the word fabulation so eagerly is that it provides an extension of critical vocabulary for the discussion of the increasingly acceptable and necessary body of work which is neither 'fiction' by traditional standards, nor 'essay' nor 'exposition' nor 'reportage': something that might have been called fiction-science. (The classic example would be Asimov's famous 'Thiotimoline' article; the best-known recent one, The Report from Iron Mountain.) 'Confluence' is one of the rare pieces of this sort to see prints although its publication in Punch was in a slightly altered version.