The Best of Science Fiction 12

Both Sonya Dorman and Tom Disch, as it happens, started out with an interest in the dance, then turned to poetry, and then to s-f. Mrs. Dorman is still better known for her poetry than for her rare (and I use the word with care) fiction. Disch's poetry has just begun to be noticed by his first novel, The Genocides (1965), stirred up a storm of controversy, and his next (Camp Concentration, serialised in New Worlds and forthcoming from Doubleday) is likely to renew it, violently, (Doubleday is also publishing a 'black humour' novel by Disch and Sladek: Black Alice.)

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.

The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably, perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.

As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, has been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Oeldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.

Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words that follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanised phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr. Rohan Prendernath, one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been complied.

AB WE TEL MIN- The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker

ARN TUTKHAN- Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine

BAGI RACK- Apologising as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun

BAG RACK- Needless and offensive apologies

BAMAN- The span of a man's consciousness

BI- The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years

BI SAN- A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature

BIT SAN- A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a blasphemous nature

BI TOSI- A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes

BI TVAS- A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes

BIUI TOSI- A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair

BIUT TASH- A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Ka- themes

CANO LEE MIN- Things sensed out-of-sight that will return

CA PATA VATUZ- The taste of a maternal grandfather

CHAM ON TH ZAM- Being witty when nobody else appreciates it

DAR AYRHOH- The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place