Mmmm, Science Fiction!

The Top Ten M's of Science Fiction

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Mindfuck / Monofilament / Melange / Methuselah / Mass Destruction

  1. Monsters.

    2. One of the mainstays of SF, science fiction as horror with the bad guys and good guys clearly defined. Also dealing with alien creatures, not like us.

  2. Mars.

    3. Other planets, other places. An unfamiliar environment. Possibly also including other times and alternate, 'what-if' worlds.

  3. Misogyny.

    4. Science-fiction's readership has always been predominantly adolescent boys, either mentally or in reality. Classic examples include 'A Hole in Space', a short story by Larry Niven, where half the human race are excluded from space travel because the plumbing arrangements in space suits are too difficult to cope with. Also, when Stephen Donaldson submitted his first novel, to Del Rey publishing, it was rejected on the grounds that the protagonist would be too difficult for the book's potential readership to sympathise with. His second submitted novel, 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant', was accepted without a problem. The lead character of his first novel was a woman whereas the hero of 'Chronicles' is, of course, a leper.
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    Mindfuck / Monofilament / Melange / Methuselah / Mass Destruction

  4. Manifest Destiny.

    5. Empire-building, colonialism , spreading humanity's seed across the widest possible area. See 3. Why do you think rockets are shaped the way they are

  5. My God, that's big!

    6. Ringworlds, Dyson spheres and other Big, Dumb Objects in Space. Loops, hoops and super-structures of all kinds. From Rama to Trantor this is a sub- but significant genre.

  6. Mindfuck.

    7. The journey to inner space, the ultimate horizon , the mind. Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, Phillip K. Dick, Greg Egan. Bizarreness and subjective experience a-go-go.

  7. Monofilament.

    8. A hard, techy one this. Science fiction about materials and the potential of technology. Arthur C. Clarke was always a good bet for this kind of stuff.
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  8. Melange.

    9. Yahoo, drugs! Okay, here we go with Rik's List of the top ten S.F. drugs of all time:
    Super-Condamine
    .
    A drug so good that in Cordwainer Smith's 'Hell-Planet of Shayol' when the prisoners are given a choice between remaining on said hell-planet for an eternity and continuing on the super condamine or being released to a pleasure planet and receiving direct stimulation of the pleasure centres of the brain, the convicts are like 'Hmmm, that's a toughie'.
    Can-D and Chew-Z.
    Essentially the same drug, the latter being a more powerful version of the former. They are used in Phillip K. Dick's 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' for 'Minning', a sort of psychedelic look ahead to virtual reality without computers. Basically it's a complicated role-playing game, for extremely bored Mars miners, involving dolls and props to simulate life on earth with the drugs to make it all seem real. Of course, the corporation back on earth don't mind a few fatalities and odd events with Can-D so long as production stays high (sic). It's when Chew-Z is introduced and the nature of reality starts to become a bit ill-defined, not just for the Mars colonists but for everyone else as well, that the problems start. And then, of course, Palmer Eldritch arrives...
    Syncophine.
    This drug is the main motivation for the protagonist's actions in 'Involution Ocean', by Bruce Sterling, which was described by a friend of mine, Justin B. Rye, as 'a cross betweeen "Dune",' (q.v.), '"The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" and something extremely weird'. The Dune-like elements of the book are that there is a drug, Syncophine, which is refined from the oil produced by a whale-like creature which lives under seas of dust. The drug gives you visions, which are not likely to be of the future or indeed anything to do with reality at all and it eventually kills you but in the meantime it feels great so who cares!
    Coffee.
    A drug (containing substance) far more ubiquitous in science fiction than Ubik itself! (q.v.) From the 'Lensman' series by E. E. 'Donut' Smith (his doctarate was in food sciences and his day job involved figuring out more effective ways of making sugar stick to donuts) where it was quaffed by the litre and half litre (one litre=1.8 pints approx.!) through 'Dune' where spice coffee was one of the more popular methods of ingesting melange, to 'Lucifer's Hammer', co-authored by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where practically the only area on earth to survive a nuclear war, unscathed, was Blue Mountains, Jamaica, basically so that the main characters could feel good and peppy first thing in the morning! Uncounted other science fiction related books, films, comics etc. have felt it necessary to postulate 'synthi-caff', a substitute for coffee usually necessitated by the extinction of natural coffe beans due to environmental collapse. To my knowledge, however, only 'Judge Dredd' in the comic '2000 AD' has come up with 'synthi-synthi-caff' which was created when the caffeine substitute in 'synthi-caff', which was introduced when coffee was outlawed due to caffeine, along with sugar, being classified as a dangerous and addictive drug, was itself decided to be unacceptably habit-forming!
    Curious Yellow.
    Also Vas. I'm not sure if this should actually be classified as a drug but, in 'Vurt' by Jeff Noon, it definitely fucks with your head, and probably everything else as well.
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    Melange.
    An honourable mention is definitely needed for this one. Frank Herbert's 'Dune' is possibly one of the finest novels ever written and is certainly the core novel of one of the most popular series in science fiction or fantasy to have been published. It's treatment of currently unknown drugs in a far future society is impressive, not to say visionary. There are are a variety of drugs all which have a range of effects, both positive and negative. Their use and abuse is imaginatively and sensitively handled whilst maintaining a strong mythic feel. Dominating the lesser drugs is, of course, the spice, melange; 'the spice gives wisdom, the spice extends life'. 'Melange' means 'mixture' and, indeed, the spice has a range of effects. It can extend life 'by decades for some' and give prescient visions, 'Fremen are notoriously fey' and is necessary for the safe traversal of interstellar space; 'He who controls Arrakis controls the spice and he who controls the spice controls the Universe'. However, it is an addictive poison and, ultimately, it is 'just another way to die'.
    Monocaine.
    This was the drug used in Herbert George Wells' 'The Invisible Man' to 'lower (the hero's) refractive index to zero' and thus give him those unseeable qualities. A refreshingly unlikely effect for a drug to have but it did have the realistically unpleasant quality of driving the user psychotic. In the novel the hero becomes increasingly obsessed with the power invisibility gives him over other people and becomes less and less willing to allow himself to become visible again until eventually he reaches the point of total megalomania. In the mid 40's sequel to the (in)visually stunning film of the 'Invisible Man', starring Claude Rains, 'The Invisible Agent' the drug is notably free of this side effect, perhaps because it is a slightly new and improved, second drug, sequentially called 'Duocaine'!
    Umpty Candy.
    Again from 2000AD's Judge Dredd strip, Umpty Candy was a sweet that was physiologically totally non-addictive by all possible tests but tasted so good that people, once having tasted it, had to continue eating at regular intervals for the rest of their lives. Symptoms of Umpty Candy withdrawal included depression, catatonia and psychotic behaviour! ("Give us our Umpty Candy!"). The inventor, Uncle Ump was deemed an unwitting perpetrator of this suffering but was nevertheless sentenced to permanent solitary exile in a lifepod style spacecraft so that no-one would ever find out the the secret of its manufacture. This solution proved ineffective as his pod was intercepted by drug manufacturers who forced the secret from him and murdered him. Illicit Umpty manufacture continues in Mega-City one to this day (which is incidentally, as it is a continuuing comic saga, always exactly 122 years in the future).
    Thionite.
    Whilst E. E. 'Doc' Smith was an exponent of a very conservative and right wing 40's morality in all of his works he was nevertheless something of a realist in that he recognised that not everyone espoused the same values as himself. In his 'Lensman' series the Galactic Police not only fight against the big, overall bad guys, the Boskonians, but also on a small scale against muggers, con-men, protection rackets and, of course, drug-runners. These are always portrayed as amoral monsters and usually stupid and incompetent except for the evil genius boss who is usually just doing a little narcotics trading to finance their schemes for galactic domination. However, there is often genuine sympathy for the victims of the drug trade, the drug users, even if they are usually seen to eventually become either slavering monsters or pathetic wrecks and always come to a bad end. The drugs that are dealt in are genuine drugs with no mincing of words and with the addition of realistically postulated future drugs made from alien materials, thionite being a hideously addictive substance made from an alien plant, fortunately extremely difficult to cultivate off its native planet. 'Doc' Smith was unusual in 40's s.f. to realise that in the future not everything would be perfect because we had won the war and there would still be people willing to exploit new resources and their fellow human beings to make a buck.
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    Mindfuck / Monofilament / Melange / Methuselah / Mass Destruction

  9. Methuselah.

    10. Stories about the technology and implications of immortality and life-extension. Also lots of conspiracy type stuff; 'The Immortals walk among us!'

  10. Mass destruction.

    11. Kinda speaks for itself don't it? No? Oh OK then.
    These stories can be loosely divided into three types:
    Stories where the world is destroyed. OK, actually not but the population of the world is. The human population anyway. Alright, actually we're only threatening to destroy the whole human population but it could happen, right?
    Stories where the the world is actually destroyed. These are less common but they do happen. There are usually some survivors or the plot gets kinda thin.
    Stories where the portion of the destroyed human population is limited to foreigners, unattractive women and people who didn't support the invasion of Vietnam. Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein excel at these types.

Bubbling under:
Multi-Culturalism, Microscopic, Multiple Universe, Millieu, Medicine, Military, Millenia, Mimetics (shape shifters), Mega-Scale, Metaphysics, Monolith (My God, Its Full of Stars), Materials, Mutants, Moon

Return to the home page. Top of page. Monsters / Mars / Mysogyny / Manifest Destiny / My God, Thats Big /
Mindfuck / Monofilament / Melange / Methuselah / Mass Destruction

Science Fiction Links

The SF Site
A very good general science fiction site. Reviews, book and film releases etc. Hosts Analog and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
Greg Egan's Home Page
A great author, programmer and mathematician. A man after my own personality encoding or, more accurately I'm after his. And he's Australian, too! (West coast, mind you.). Check out the incomprehensible applets.
Known Space
A bit fannish, this one and not very much original material. Still, this shall change when they bow down before me...
Edinburgh University Science Fiction and Fantasy Society
Some nice links and pretty graphics for people both known and unknown to me. Soon to be the location of another insane, doomed and ludicrous attempt to sate my lust for power.