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Ryman, Geoff

Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1951-    ) Canadian-born author who moved to the USA at age eleven, in the UK since 1973. He began publishing sf with "The Diary of the Translator" forNew Worlds in 1976, but began to generate significant work only with the magazine version ofThe Unconquered Country: A Life History (Spring 1984Interzone; rev1986), which won theBSFA Award and theWorld Fantasy Award. It is the story of a young woman forced by poverty and the terrible conditions afflicting her native land (clearly a transfigured Cambodia) to rent out her womb for industrial purposes (it is used to grow machinery). In the book Ryman demonstrated – as have BruceMcAllister, Ursula KLe Guin and LucisShepard in various tales – that sf is capable of a mature response to the ordeal of Southeast Asia. That this response was a decade or more years belated confirms the depth of the trauma, as does the anguished saliency of Ryman's short text. It is included inUnconquered Countries: Four Novellas (coll1994), which assembles most of his longer tales of interest;Paradise Tales and Other Stories (coll2011) assembles shorter work, though it appeared too soon to include "What We Found" (September 2011F&SF), which won aNebula award.

Ryman's first full-length novel,The Warrior Who Carried Life (1985), is a questFantasy which, though pacifist, is less visibly subversive; butThe Child Garden; or A Low Comedy (Summer-Autumn 1987Interzone as "Love Sickness"; much exp1989), which won theArthur C Clarke Award and theJohn W Campbell Memorial Award, complexly massages an array of themes –Drugs,Dystopia,Ecology,Feminism,Gender,Hive Minds,Medicine andMusic – into a long rich novel about identity and the making of great art. Set in a transfigured UK – in effect aParallel World – the book stands as one of the sturdiest monuments of "Humanist" sf – which, as in this novel, and like genuine liberal cognition in general, is in truth far harder-headed about the reality of the world than most muscle-flexing contrarianism – despite some moments of clogged selfconsciousness. A non-sf novel, ostensibly about the life of the Kansas girl whose tragedy sparks L FrankBaum into creating theOz books,"Was ..." (1992; vtWas1992), focuses on the twentieth century, and the knot of memory and desire generated in the mind of an actor dying of AIDS, by both the books and the 1939 film. The simplified vt – evoking both the past tense andOz – points to some of the complex resonances of the tale.

Two Five Three: A Novel for the Internet in Seven Cars and a Crash (1996 Internet; rev vt for print253: The Print Remix1998), which won thePhilip K Dick Award for the print version, is necessarily a different experience (ie a different narrative enterprise) in its electronic and print forms (seeEquipoise). In either form, the artefact is structured according toOulipo rules: 252 passengers (plus driver) on the Bakerloo Line of theLondon Underground are each described in a 253-word chapter; everyone is killed instantaneously before the train reaches the Elephant and Castle station, in a clearly deliberate echo ofThe Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). In the electronic version,Hypertext links join together passengers with elements in common, which, according to Ryman, creates a net of similitude; in the book form, the text is read linearly, ending in a concatenation of dissimilarities. The tale, which is not ostensibly sf, cogentlyrecognizes the kind of world that contemporary sf must arguably deal with: a world experienced simultaneously as cloud and solitude.

Lust: Or No Harm Done (2001) is a fantasy whose gay protagonist examines the nature of his life, both as a failed human being and as one who has succeeded, through his capacity to dream into reality simulacra of figures for whom he feels lust; of those who appear in this encyclopedia,Tarzan is perhaps the most noticeable.Air (Or, Have Not Have) (2004), which won theArthur C Clarke Award, theBSFA Award and theJames Tiptree Jr Award, is sf. The title refers to what Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) might have continued to call the noosphere, if that term could be used to describe both the cloud-content and the media-intense distribution of information (seeCommunications;Cyberspace;Information Theory;Media Landscape;Virtual Reality) that, in theNear Future world ofAir, has been focused, for test purposes, on a small mountain village in the imaginary country of Karzistan (seeImperialism). "Air" is aTechnology whose powers amalgamate everything from the Internet to barcode-ordinated commerce, from pop music to Skype; through an accident the protagonist is embedded with (or in a sense becomes) Air, and must help guide her traditional culture, warily, into the inevitable world to come.

In its treatment of theNear Future as an extrapolated concretizing of the known,Air does something to justify Ryman's argument – as furthered by the stories assembled inWhen It Changed: Science into Fiction: An Anthology (anth2009; vtWhen It Changed: "Real Science" Science Fiction2010) – that sf writers should abandon their crutches, abandon the fantasticated devices that have motored sf until now – and focus on "mundane" matters: those elements of the world of science, and of the world as experienced, that are anchored in reality. The proposal has rhetorical force, but if taken literally would have a crippling effect not only on theThought Experiments and evolvedFantastic Voyages central to sf, but also on the nature of Story itself, whose moves have always been inherently nonmimetic (so far as reality can in fact be distinguished from the narrative strategies used by humans to tell their stories).The King's Last Song; Or, Kraing Meas (2006) is an historical novel. Ryman has also written some sf plays, none published but most performed, including an adaptation of Philip KDick'sThe Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).Him (2023), which marks a return to publishing sf, inserts a female Jesus into one of a cascade ofMultiverses created by God, where what seem to be iron dictates of typology enforce a repetition of the original narrative. The proceeds from the book publication ofThe Many Different Kinds of Love (November/December 2023F&SF;2024 chap) with David Jeffrey were earmarked as a donation to the magazine; the tale, set on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (seeOuter Planets), is narrated by anAI.

Though his work is irradiated by a substantially left-wingPolitics that places him outside the triumphalist orientation of much earlier sf, Ryman is a central figure in the long and painful transformation of sf into a form of literature that acutely addresses the twenty-first century world. [JC]

see also:Genetic Engineering;Gothic SF;Intelligence.

Geoffrey Charles Ryman

born Canada: 9 May 1951

works

collections and stories

nonfiction

works as editor

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