An end to history

A meta-posting today: a post about and that leads you to another post, in this case the Public Domain Review's essays, and specifically Thomas Patteson and Deirdre Loughridge's Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments.

Not just because it deals with fantastika, and therefore falls under the very wide, though not always watertight, umbrella of this blog.  And not simply because the Public Domain Review's essays are consistently engaging and thought-provoking and deserving of your attention.  But because it throws up an odd parallel with the world of science fiction.

You see, there was a time when there were sounds we had never heard, sounds that could not conceivably have been heard then.  Every time a new instrument was invented, it created a new, never-before-heard, sound.  Hell, if you want to be impossibly fine-grained about it, every time a new instrument was made, it created new sounds.

Even in my lifetime - and I think RA Moog Inc must have been hard at work on the Mini Moog Model B prototype when I took my first breath - each new wheezy analogue or early digital device like the Fairlight had a specific recognisable sound quality, a warmth or a iciness or a razor-sharpness, that gave bands distinct identities.  But now, digital synthesizers (are they even synthesizers given that suggests processing pre-existing elements?) can create any sound imaginable, starting as they do from abstract parameters.  All of Patteson and Loughridge's instruments - we can hear them now, and without having to stick needles into felines to boot.

And what does this have to do with science fiction, other than I'm very fond of a bit of kosmische musik burbling away as I write?  Well, we live on a planet with pretty much every square metre of dry land now explored.  Maybe there is a lost city or two under jungle vines, but no undiscovered continents or even islands. We know what's over every horizon.  In space, too, we know the Moon and Mars are just rocks and dust, and the ones too far to ever reach are balls of frozen methane and ammonia.  There's nothing out there.  We are alone.  We have been everywhere we can ever go, just as we've heard every sound we can ever hear.  My lifetime has been one of closing down possibilities, an end to history if not the end to history.

Which is, I continue to tell myself, why I write speculative fiction because that's the only place left for adventure and am not, say, training to be an astronaut.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.