The path to becoming a lifelong reader of science fiction that wends through youth and adolescence is a well-charted one. Fans of my generation, after devouring all the Dr. Seuss books they could glom onto, often moved on to franchise fiction like Tom Swift or the justly forgotten Rick Brant adventures. Then they might discover quirky beginner series like the Mushroom Planet books of Eleanor Cameron, or A Wrinkle in Time, before segueing into the hardcore yet invitingly transparent genre works by Andre Norton, or the Scribner juveniles of Heinlein. The gateway to reading mature works of science fiction was then thrown wide open, and we were hooked for life and seldom abandoned science fiction as we entered our adult years. Today, the incredible wealth of young adult fantastika has broadened this introductory avenue even more, luring curious teens into the habit of reading SF by any of a hundred franchises or solo works — if they have not already been hooked by the cinema of the fantastic.
But what about adults who never developed a taste for science fiction when they were young? Sometimes the marketplace itself produces a book that, for whatever obvious or enigmatic reason, seems to leap out and snare novice readers. Perhaps the most recent such title is Andy Weir’s The Martian. If we look at its success, we can identify several factors that attract the newbie. A heroic yet Everyman character with whom it is easy to empathize. A clear-cut quest or problem to be solved. A story that doesn’t require familiarity with other SF stories or tropes. A small degree of pleasant estrangement from the mundane, an exoticism that is not utterly weird or off-putting. An ultimate hard-won victory, instead of a tragic ending. A depiction of science that renders it essential to human progress and survival, a force for good rather than evil. Familiar interpersonal relations, involving primal emotions such as love and fear.
If we cast about for classics that meet these parameters at least in part — books that could entice the non-reader of SF — we find that the list is short. I would first point to such perennials as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. H. G. Wells‘s The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land might still allure. Certainly the success of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline paralleled that of The Martian, both coincidentally released in the same year. Humor is perhaps the one vital ingredient lacking in The Martian (a deficit that Matt Damon’s droll line readings helped redress in the film version) and the popularity of Douglas Adams’s books among all kinds of readers attests to that powerful factor.
An SF novel does not necessarily have to be “upbeat” to win over a general audience, as testified to by the canonical role of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Jack Finney’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. A book such as Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, with its meticulous mimetic depiction of a telepath losing his powers in a contemporary milieu, could easily hook the typical New Yorker subscriber.
Sometimes authors deliberately try to create an accessible novel that mimics the “gateway drugs” of their own youth. John Varley’s Thunder and Lightning series, which began with Red Thunder, is perhaps the most successful recent example. Steven Gould’s Jumper series is another, and so is the Everness series by Ian MacDonald, launched with Planesrunner. Less well known are a couple of books by William Barton: The Transmigration of Souls and When We Were Real. Richard Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon, took the sometimes arcane tropes of cyberpunk and blended them with enough noir to facilitate engagement by newcomers. Kim Stanley Robinson‘s trilogy about the colonization of Mars lured many new fans by its meticulous realism.
Perhaps the newest outstanding success in this vein is the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, which has spun off a well-regarded television show. If we were in this essay considering High Fantasy, then George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones would be an obvious analogue to Expanse: an undiluted genre property that nonetheless reaches beyond the fanboys.
And then of course, there are sui generis brand-name writers such as Stephen King, who seems magically able to make vast crowds of civilians accept far-out tales of time-travel and apocalypse without flinching.
Although successes like The Martian come infrequently and cannot be programmed or predicted, we might be seeing a similar case with the debut novel from Jaroslav Kalfař, Spaceman of Bohemia. But whereas The Martian was all engaging “competency porn” and featured easily apprehended surfaces, Kalfař’s novel is resoundingly about failure and the interior life. In fact, it is a pedigreed descendant of the landmark novels of Barry Malzberg, who at the height of his career represented the deliberate, postmodern dismantling of the Golden Age verities about space travel. In books such as Galaxies, Beyond Apollo, and The Falling Astronauts (all of which have been recently reissued by Anti-Oedipus Press in handsome new editions), Malzberg portrayed astronauts as neurotic basket cases, subject to existential doubts, sexual tensions, bureaucratic headaches, and bouts of hallucinatory mysticism, with space travel itself being seen as an unnatural violation of cosmic and ethical proprieties. Kalfař is fully onboard with this assessment.
The book opens in 2018, with the launch of the Czech space shuttle JanHus1. Instantly, given the absolute historical insignificance of any actual Czech space program, we feel we are in the slightly absurdist territory of Leonard Wibberley‘s books about the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, notably The Mouse on the Moon. This mismatch between overweening ambition and humbling reality will continue to flavor the tale.
Onboard the craft is a single astronaut, Jakub Procházka, an expert in cosmic space debris. His mission, funded by several corporate sponsors, is to investigate a mysterious and perhaps threatening cometary dust cloud, newly materialized out around Venus. (The cloud, discovered by India, was named Chopra — a dig perhaps at a certain popular New Age icon?) No other nation has volunteered, and so it’s up to the Czechs. Four months outward bound, four months back. Surely, with the support of his loyal ground crew and daily audiovisual chats with his wife, Lenka, as well as some delicious comestibles such as Nutella and Tatranky candy bars, Jakub can perform his task satisfactorily. And he might well have succeeded, despite some minor emotional storms, had not an alien materialized inexplicably inside his ship.
The smell was distinct — a combination of stale bread, old newspapers in a basement, a hint of sulfur. The eight hairy legs shot out of the thick barrel of its body like tent poles. Each had three joints the size of a medicine ball, at which the legs bent to the lack of gravity. Thin gray for covered its torso and legs, sprouting chaotically, like alfalfa. It had many eyes, too many to count, red-veined, with irises as black as Space itself. Beneath the eyes rested a set of thick human lips, startlingly red, lipstick red, and as the lips parted, the creature revealed a set of yellowing teeth which resembled those of an average human smoker. As it fixed its eyes on me, I tried to count them.
This creature, which will eventually allow Jakub to call it “Hanuš,” wishes to interrogate Jakub and learn all about “humanry,” without offering much in return. It consumes all of the larder’s Nutella, too. At first believing himself to be hallucinating, Jakub eventually accepts the creature. With his Earth-resident wife having ditched him, he needs the company. And then, as the craft impacts the dust cloud: transcendence, extinction, rebirth, in a most unexpected manner. The latter half of the novel finds Jakub trying to reassemble his life and dreams, post-Chopra, under the most unexpected conditions.
Kalfař wisely and deftly provides a second track to Jakub’s narrative: his poignant familial back-story. Jakub’s father was a state-sponsored torturer under the Communist regime. Upon the death of Jakub’s parents, the young boy goes to live with his grandparents. One day, a stranger arrives, a victim of the interrogations conducted by Jakub’s father, and now, rich and free in the new Czech Republic, seeks revenge. And so, interspersed with Jakub’s spaceflight, in long episodes richly evocative of a vanished past, we see Jakub’s sociopolitical path in his changing nation, as well as his early romance with Lenka. All this history will eventually blend with the outer space experiences to produce deep insights about Jakub’s destiny and that of his country
Kalfař’s prose, Jakub’s first-person voice, is equal to the task of explicating such weighty fates. Alternately droll, sardonic, weary, gravitas-laden, melancholic, tender, and outraged, Jakub conveys the full dynamic range of the emotional tempests he must survive on this odyssey of self-discovery.
My chest felt hollow. It was a strange sensation, the opposite of anxiety or fear, which to me was always heavy, like chugging asphalt. Now I was a cadaver in waiting. With death so near, the body looks forward to its eternal rest without the pesky soul. So simple, this body. Pulsing and secreting and creaking along, one beat, two beats, filling up one hour after another. The body is the worker and the soul the oppressor. Free the proles, I could hear my father saying. I almost cackled.
Spaceman of Bohemia is not your standard Anglo-American science fiction: In its allegories about geopolitical power trips, it hews more closely to the work of the Strugatsky brothers. In its cognitive derangements and depictions of ontological levels of reality, it stands as a cousin to the work of Stanislaw Lem. The work of Gary Shteyngart — like Kalfař, a writer with a foot in both is his native country and his adopted one — might also come to mind.
Jakub and Hanuš approach the interface of Chopra with the strains of the opera Rusalka playing over the ship’s speakers, evoking similar classical-music-tinged interplanetary trajectories in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then they experience its majesty much as 2001‘s Bowman does the Monolith’s:
I passed through the knot of time like sand slipping away inside an hourglass, grain by grain, atom by atom.
Time was not a line, but an awareness. I was no longer a body, but a series of pieces whistling as they bonded. I felt every cell within me. I could count them, name them, kill them, and resurrect them. Within the core, I was a tower made of fossil fragments. I could be disassembled and reassembled. If only someone knew the correct pressure point, I would turn into a pile of elements running off to find another bond, like seasonal farmhands journeying from East to West.
This is what elements do. They leap into darkness until some-thing else catches hold of them. Energy has no consciousness. Force plots no schemes. Things crash into one another, form alliances until physics rips them apart and sends them in opposite directions.
Such bravura metaphysical insights, matched with Realpolitik drama, might very well propel Spaceman of Bohemia into the realm traversed by The Martian and other tales for novice travelers and seasoned astronauts alike.
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Sig Nordal 