RECURSIVE SF

   Recycling material from the vast and growing storehouse of the already-written has long been a practice of sf writers. Plots and characters constantly reappear throughout sf, usually but not always in the form of sequels written by the author of the original work; venues (like Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's MARS) become universal props; and termsdescriptive of devices or circumstances unique to sf (from BEMS to CORPSICLES to partials - Greg BEAR's coinage for autonomouscomputer-generated partial copies of human personalities) tend, once introduced, to become common parlance. When Robert A. HEINLEIN made reference in "The Number of the Beast" (1980 UK) to characters and situations which appeared in earlier novels by him and other sf writers, he was operating in this traditional manner. But when he introduced into the same book people - writers, editors, fans - who had been involved in sf itself, he did something very different, something which marked his career, and the sf genre within which the book was written, as approaching a late and self-referential phase. Wilson TUCKER so frequently introduced real figures into his stories that such insertions became known for a while as Tuckerisms; but a Tuckerism is a private allusion or joke among friends, and should not be seen as making a binding argument about the relationship between fiction and the world. Heinlein, on the other hand, was writing full-blown recursive sf, a term narrowly defined in Anthony R. LEWIS's An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (1990 chap)as "science fiction stories that refer to science fiction . . . to authors, fans, collectors, conventions, etc.". More broadly, recursive sf may be defined as stories which treat real people, and the fictional worlds which occupy their dreams, as sharing equivalent degrees of reality. It is, in other words, a technique which may be used to create ALTERNATE WORLDS, usually backward-looking in time, and frequentlyexpressing a powerful nostalgia for pasts in which the visions of early GENRE SF do, in fact, come true.Novels with recursive elements includeBrian W. ALDISS's Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and Dracula Unbound (1991), Manly BANISTER's early spoof on sf fandom, Egoboo: A Fantasy Satire (1950 chap), Michael BISHOP's The Secret Ascension (1987), Anthony BOUCHER's detective novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942), Fredric BROWN's Martians, Go Home (1955), Gene DEWEESE's and Robert COULSON's Now You See It/Him/Them(1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977), Philip K. DICK's The Man in the High Castle (1962), David DVORKIN's Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Philip Jose FARMER's To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and its sequels, Charles L. HARNESS's Lurid Dreams (1990), Sharyn MCCRUMB's farce-mysteries Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) and Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992), Barry N. MALZBERG's Dwellers of the Deep (1970 dos), Gatherin the Hall of the Planets (1971 dos, both as by K.M. O'Donnell, a pseudonym which itself homages C.L. MOORE and Henry KUTTNER), and Herovit's World (1973), Larry NIVEN's and Jerry POURNELLE's Footfall(1985), Tim POWERS's The Stress of Her Regard (1989), Christopher PRIEST's The Space Machine (1976), Mack REYNOLDS's mystery The Case of the Little Green Men (1951), Rudy RUCKER's The Hollow Earth (1990), Fred SABERHAGEN's and Roger ZELAZNY's The Black Throne (1990) and Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965). Inside the Funhouse (anth 1992) ed MichaelRESNICK assembles examples of the form, with an introductory essay.

   JC