The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word: content. Take it away — it's out. Take another: hypnoprone. It's mine and you can have it.

The great Media audience has reason to worry about content. (You too can be hypnoprone. When you no longer 'hear' the commercials, and you start singing-along with any lyric provided the beat is right, you better start hoping there's no content.) The latest thing is the sing-along (with Marsh McLuhan) school of criticism, which has compounded the ready-made artist/artisan and consumer/creator confusions, with a message/sermon mixup. Add a dash of camp; up pops Susan Sontag, who — actually — worries that 'the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content' will 'violate art' or make it 'into an article of use'

This Pop Preachment on null-content (anti-matter?) is described in the Report from Iron Mountain (Dial, 1967):

... Art would be reassigned the role it once played in a few primitive peace-oriented social systems. This was the function of pure decoration, entertainment, or play, entirely free of the burden of expressing the sociomoral values and conflicts of a war-oriented society. It is interesting that the groundwork for such a value-free aesthetic is already being laid today, in growing experimentation in art without conflict. A cult has developed around a new kind of cultural determinism, which proposes that the technological form of a cultural expression determines its values rather than does its ostensibly meaningful content. Its clear implication is that there is no 'good' or 'bad' art, only that which is appropriate to its (technological) times and that which is not.

Waiting for the first guests, the iguanodon gazed along the path and beyond, toward the monotonous cycad forests and the low volcanic hills. The landscape was everywhere interpenetrated by the sea, a kind of metallic blue rottenness that daily breathed in and out. Behind him, his wife was assembling the hors d'oeuvres. As he watched her, something unintended, something grossly solemn, in his expression made her laugh, displaying the leaf-shaped teeth lining her cheeks. Like him, she was an ornithischian, but much smaller — a compsognathus. He wondered, watching her race bipedally back and forth among the scraps of food (dragonflies wrapped in ferns, cephalopods on toast), how he had ever found her beautiful. His eyes hungered for size: he experienced a rage for sheer blind size.

The stegosauri, of course, were the first to appear. Among their many stupid friends these were the most stupid, and the most punctual. Their front legs bent outward and their filmy-eyed faces almost grazed the ground: the upward sweep of their backs was gigantic, and the double rows of giant bone plates along the spine clicked together in the sway of their cumbersome gait. With hardly a greeting, they dragged their tails, quadruply spiked, across the threshold and manoeuvred themselves toward the bar, which was tended by a minute and shapeless mammal hired for the evening.

Next came the allosaurus, a carnivorous bachelor whose dangerous aura and needled grin excited the female herbivores; then Rhamphorhynchus, a pterosaur whose much admired 'flight' was in reality a clumsy brittle glide ending in an embarrassed bump and trot. The iguanodon despised these pterosaurs' pretensions, thought grotesque the precarious elongation of the single finger from which their levitating membranes were stretched, and privately believed that the eccentric archaeopteryx, though sneered at as unstable, had more of a future. The hypsilophoden, with her graceful hands and branch-gripping feet, arrived with the timeless crocodile — an incongruous pair, but both, were recently divorced. Still the iguanodon gazed down the path.

Behind him, the conversation gnashed on a thousand things — houses, mortgages, lawns, fertilisers, erosion, boats, winds, annuities, capital gains, recipes, education, the day's tennis, last night's party. Each party was consumed by discussion of the previous one. Their lives were subject to constant cross-check. When did you leave? When did you leave? We'd been out every night this week. We had an amphibious baby sitter who had to be back in the water by one. Gregor had to meet a client in town, and now they've reduced the Saturday schedule, it means the 7:43 or nothing. Trains? I thought they were totally extinct. Not at all. They're coming back, it's just a matter of time until the government ... In the long range of evolution, they are still the most efficient ... Taking into account the heat-loss/weight ratio and assuming there's no more glaciation ... Did you know — I think this is fascinating — did you know that in the financing of those great ornate stations of the eighties and nineties, those real monsters, there was no provision for amortisation? They weren't amortised at all, they were financed on the basis of eternity! The railroad was conceived of as the end of Progress! I think — though not an expert — that the pivot word in this overall industrio-socio-what-have-you-oh nexus or syndrome or whatever is overextended . Any competitorless object bloats . Personally I miss the trolley cars. Now don't tell me I'm the only creature in the room old enough to remember the trolley cars!

The iguanodon's high pulpy heart jerked and seemed to split; the brontosaurus was coming up the path.

Her husband, the diplodocus, was with her. They moved together, rhythmic twins, buoyed by the hollow assurance of the huge. She paused to tear with her lips a clump of leaf from an overhanging paleocycas. From her deliberate grace the iguanodon received the impression that she knew he was watching her. Indeed, she had long guessed his love, as had her husband. The two saurischians entered his party with the languid confidence of the specially cherished. In the teeth of the iguanodon's ironic stance, her bulk, her gorgeous size, enraptured him, swelled to fill the massive ache he carried when she was not there. She rolled outward across his senses — the dawn-pale underparts, the reticulate skin, the vast bluish muscles whose management required a second brain at the base of her spine.

Her husband, though even longer, was more slenderly built, and perhaps weighed less than twenty-five tons. His very manner was attenuated and tabescent. He had recently abandoned an orthodox business career to enter the Episcopalian seminary. This regression — as the iguanodon felt it — seemed to make his wife more prominent, less supported, more accessible.

How splendid she was! For all the lavish solidity of her hips and legs, the modelling of her little flat diapsid skull was delicate. Her facial essence seemed to narrow, along the diagrammatic points of her auricles and eyes and nostrils, toward a single point, located in the air, of impermutable refinement and calm. This irreducible point was, he realised, in some sense her mind: the focus of the minimal interest she brought to play upon the inchoate and edible green world flowing all about her, buoying her, bathing her. The iguanodon felt himself as an upright speckled stain in this world. He felt himself, under her distant dim smile, impossibly ugly: his mouth a sardonic chasm, his throat a pulsing curtain of scaly folds, his body a blotched bulb. His feet were heavy and horny and three-toed and his thumbs — strange adaptation! — were erect rigidities of pointed bone. Wounded by her presence, he savagely turned on her husband.