
Forty-five years ago, when I was young and in love with science fiction, and Gregory Mellor was a toddler, the great sf fantasist Theodore Sturgeon faced a tough task, introducing the first collected stories of a then-new writer. Here’s how he began:
There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—
Thus began the first draft of this introduction and there it stayed for about forty-eight hours while I maundered and chuntered for ways to finish that sentence with justice and precision. . . . Suffice it for now to say that you’ll be hard put to it to find a writer like Zelazny anywhere.
Suffice it as well to declare that there has indeed been nothing like the meteoric arrival of Mellor in the Australian science fiction field since—since who? Terry Dowling? Stephen Dedman? Lucy Sussex? Sean Williams? Yes, there are resemblances to all of these in different ways—the professional competence pretty much right from the start with a rapidly developed accomplishment, high-energy attack, a poetry blending reflectiveness and kinesis, closely observed detail of surfaces and scrutiny of what lies below the surface.
So I’m not making preposterous claims here. Greg Mellor is a new and remarkable writer of enormous promise. Enjoy these early premonitions of considerable achievement. Mellor pulls you right into realities as vivid as any I’ve inhabited lately, replete with the fabled sense of wonder. A mother searches for her absconded, angry son, pursuing hints to the far extremes of the outer solar system, and finds him transformed:
Silhouettes glided languidly across the star field until I could see the sheer, terrifying wonder of him. He was there—at the centre—but the rest of him was strung out in many disconnected parts. What looked like advanced relay panels were stretched over delicate bio-ceramic bones, unfolding over kilometers. Titanium pivots and joints secured critical junctions of the larger pieces. The entire array ebbed and flowed, resonating to Matt’s remote commands, a thousand separate parts miraculously working in synch—a dark cybernetic angel gliding down to meet me.
I extended my arms as he approached, the sheer scale of his structure more daunting as he got closer, until I was at his centre, his human body encased in a sleek black bio-alloy skin. His eyes were still the same, that dark brown with green flecks, glazed with a protective covering that blended into his skin.
At its core, Mellor tells us, this is a book about being a man, yearning for completion, buggering things up, trying again, moving into realms we dimly imagine but cannot quite perceive. Some of his men are genuinely monstrous and abetted in their monstrousness by technology out of control. Other stories share a universe blighted by relict weapon systems able to overwhelm and parasitize men and women alike in ways that make the horrifying scenes in Alien seem cozy:
The air crackled around her as the entity tunneled into the nexus. It thrashed over her head and latched onto her collar bone. She screamed as it ripped open her chest.
Blood sprayed across my face and I staggered back. I heard grunting in the distance and realized it was coming from me. . . . I stepped out into vacuum. The entity was inside Chenzira now, zipping her up from crotch to shoulder. Her skin blackened as the spacesuit activated, its amber lenses glowing.
A Scourge cloud sprayed out from the suit, boiling space in a confusion of black on black. It spread in all directions, penetrating my field, cutting through me.
Aliens can be frightful but there’s also a clear-eyed recognition in these stories of how flawed our own species is, even in its most utopian ambitions. This recognition is not cynicism, just brutal and uncompromising honesty, and we need to face such truths if we hope to go beyond them, especially into uploading of minds into machine substrates or along the screaming upward curve of a technological singularity:
The Enlightened Age lasted a decade, a short-lived, contained tech singularity. For the first time in history, life-changing, global-spanning technology was in the hands of scientists and philanthropists with no agenda other than to provide a lasting vision for humanity. But Old Earth choked on its own vomit before the new memes could get a foothold, and the survivors came clutching at Mars like ghouls.
An alien visiting a slightly future world appraises us sorrowingly:
>Working hypothesis: the dominant meme has hampered global self-awareness and intellectual capacity.
She placed her wine glass down, propped her elbows on the table, slipped her shaking hands under her chin, and held me with her gaze.
I’d stared down politicians and dictators alike, brought corporate executives and rogue activists into line, and convened peace talks around the world . . . but this . . . damn it, I just wasn’t prepared. No one was prepared.
“I have not seen anything like it,” she said. “And trust me when I say I’ve seen a lot in my time. You’ve created a slaughterhouse in your own backyard. The environmental degradation and bio-depletion is staggering, but still you carry on with your consumption.”
It’s not all gloom and despair, though; that would smack of adolescent posturing. Indeed, of one story, Greg Mellor notes in an illuminating afterword:
I really did just want to write a feel-good story set against the backdrop of the solar system. I wasn’t trying to break new ground or develop new takes on future science or provide fresh insights into the genre.
It was interesting how the feedback from the reviewers varied from the readers. I think the reviewers see such a volume of material that they are always looking for that needle in the haystack that takes the genre another step forward—“something new.” But I think there’s a place for heartfelt, traditional themes that don’t constantly stretch (and shred) the limits of science (and plausibility), so long as they are entertaining and make readers feel something. Judging by the readers’ comments on “Signals in the Deep,” I think they felt something.
Mellor has two advantages not all sf writers bring to bear on our play with words: he holds an honors degree in astrophysics (which admits him into the privileged company of such scientifically trained sf experts as Alastair Reynolds, Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Vonda McIntyre, Greg Egan, Joan Slonczewski, Paul McAuley, Charles Stross, not to mention Asimov and Anderson and others of the old guard), and he has worked in industry (“professional service firms”) for a decade and a half, so he also knows a thing or two about the non-academic world. He has a wife and son, and aside from a decade-long residency in Britain, he’s lived in the Australian political and bureaucratic capital, Canberra, all his life. That provides grounding in reality and a distinctive vantage point such that most readers in the rest of the planet will find his everyday world sufficiently alien to give it a running start into the imaginary.
You’ll feel astonishment in most of these pieces, and sometimes your pulse will race; always, there’s that very Australian way of looking at, let’s say, the end of the world or a son’s relationship with his father. When I opened the submission file of “Defense of the Realm” at Cosmos science magazine where I was fiction editor for its first five years, I had that immediate clutch of delight that grabs you when you find new talent. When I passed over the editorial keyboard to Cat Sparks, the current editor at Cosmos I bequeathed her a truly extraordinary story by Mellor, “Day Break.” She added her own touches, honing the piece to a hard gloss. Here is the funny but heartbreaking opening of that terrific story:
It rained cows on Christmas Eve.
When the world broke, the atmosphere tore in raging cyclones, tornadoes, oceans of air sucked up and flung down, and those poor animals were caught in the turbulence, hurled into the sky. Until they fell back to Earth, crying in terror.
They were Jerseys, all deep tan with white patches. The sight of them rupturing like swollen bladders was terrifying. I had known each of them by name, with their soft brown eyes and flickering ears. Only Jessica had survived, tethered to a fence. I sobbed my heart out in the three days of cold snow that followed, and then again when the snow melted and I found Jessica in a pile of muddy slush with her legs sticking up stupidly.
How many professional writers with years under their belt would have the chutzpah to start with “It rained cows on Christmas Eve”? It sounds like a shaggy dog story. And yes, the black humor, the gallows comedy, is intended. But the global catastrophe that murdered the terrified animals is of larger than Biblical proportion and is told with exactness and poignancy from the viewpoint of one man moving toward the end of the earth—literally, in several senses. This is a tour de force, and by itself is proof that Gregory Mellor is a writer to watch in the way we kept an eye on Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian W. Aldiss and Roger Zelazny when they were setting out, learning to pilot their burning imaginations into the realm of words shaped to ignite the dreams of their readers.
Damien Broderick lives in San Antonio, Texas. This essay appeared in Gregory Mellor’s collection Wild Chrome (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2012; $13.99 tpb; 308 pages).
A PDF or ePub copy of the NYRSF issue in which this article first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.
A print edition of Issues 293 and 294 is available from Lulu.com.
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