This week’s Strange Horizons has my second “Depth of Field” column, this time taking a meander through several deep-time and far-future books. Inevitably, there is some faffing about definitions:
What counts as deep time? When does the far future start?
Stapledon uses the latter term, and, perhaps following him, so does The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, whose entry focuses on stories set in what might be paraphrased as evening times, either of the Earth or the universe. Perhaps if you can pin a date more precise than the nearest million years on it, it’s not the far future. Meanwhile, “deep time”, as Noah Heringman discusses in Deep Time: A Literary History (2023), may have been popularised in the 1980s by writers such as John McPhee in narrative overviews of geology such as Basin and Range (1981), but the concept is obviously older. Heringman dates it back, via novels such as Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), not only to early geology (although the contemporary phrase used about Hutton’s work was “abyss of time”), but to Hindu, and other, cosmologies that situate recorded history within a vaster frame. His interest in “the qualitative dimensions of deep time as an imaginative experience” (p. 3) feels relevant to my exploration here, albeit in the opposite temporal direction. Perhaps any duration that makes a human life feel infinitesimally small is deep time.
I knew from the start I wanted Stapledon to be the keystone of this one, but when I was deciding what other books to look at, I found myself sometimes thinking there were too many to choose from (because just going by timelines, there are a lot of stories set a long way into the future), and sometimes thinking there were hardly any (because almost nobody, even Clarke and Baxter, has really done what Stapledon set out to do). So the above paragraph, plus borrowing the concept of “timefulness” from the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, represents an attempt to build me some sort of framework through which to read the books I did pick — by Annalee Newitz, Paul McAuley, CJ Cherryh, Ryu Mitsuse, and CM Kosemen. Hopefully leading into a few interesting observations along the way.
This is also a good time for me to mention that this year’s fund drive for Strange Horizons has (at the time of writing) twelve days left to run — I encourage you to head over to the Kickstarter page and take a look. Stretch goals include a special issues on Japanese SF and on SF and neurodiversity, and also raising the pay rate for reviewers. The special fund drive issue is, I think, already all unlocked, and includes a fascinating piece by Kai Ashante Wilson, “Whither Queer?: The Genre At Midlife And A Rec-list“, fiction by Aimee Ogden and Christi Nogle, reviews and poetry, and a round-table discussion of Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath that I’m saving up because I haven’t read the novel yet. If any of that, or indeed my column, appeals, and if you’re in a position to do so, then do consider chipping in.
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