Two hundred million sperm in one ejaculation; and we are standing firm and spouting with elation, though but a single germ survives to incarnation.
And much in nature throws vast clouds into the ocean, where myriad embryos become a magic potion consumed by all that goes with food its only notion;
yet one or two survive to adulthood and, later, will make the species thrive and serve up like a waiter new young crowds that arrive like cargo crammed on freighter.
This is how nature lives; we should not think it foolish eight billion of us gives but forty fierce and mulish posthuman narratives, godlike as much as ghoulish,
in retrospect appearing nature’s plan for how we cross to Nietzsche’s Superman.
*****
This poem was originally published in the Amsterdam Quarterly, although without the final couplet. I usually allow editors to make changes if they suggest them, and often the changes are an improvement that I retain. But in this case I’m afraid the science fiction speculation may be lost without those last lines: the idea that the present billions of us are on the point of being superseded by the first handful among us who achieve a godlike state of posthumanity… and that this ratio of 200,000,000 seeds being sacrificed to achieve one mature adult in the next generation is not unusual in nature.
This very short (poem?) was just published in The Asses of Parnassus – thanks, Brooke Clark! I chose this post’s accompanying photo for its enigmatic mixture of futuristic construction and threatening natural conditions – the building is the Globe, or Avicii Arena, in Sweden but that is irrelevant.
An alternative photo I considered had a doomsday prophet holding a sign saying “The beginning is nigh”, which would be equally true: the end of homo sapiens being the beginning of some unguessable post-humanity. I read Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari, and ponder. And then I look back at (others’) 2015 predictions of what the next ten years would bring, and, well, not so fast…
Illegals, both of us; married last year, now she cleans houses, I cut grass, sweep decks, for superrich who see us as mere specks while their big spaceship exit they prepare. Earth will be fishless, treeless, plastic, bare. They’ve offered us both jobs as restaveks, but I said No, they just want us for sex. She said Then suck them off, why should you care? I said, We’ll stay. She said, I said I’d go. I said, You’d leave me? She said, Stay, be dead. I said, That makes you nothing but a whore. She said, I fucked him for your job, you know; I go to space, I’ll live, have food, have bed, and, if I’m good, oh maybe so much more…
*****
“Restavek” is normally a term for a child of an impoverished Haitian family, sent to live as a domestic servant for a wealthier (or less poor) family. There are an estimated 300,000 in Haiti, mostly girls; and an unknown number in the Haitian communities in the US.
This sonnet (Petrarchan, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) was recently published in the frequently NSFW Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates!
Once we were all one tribe, our branch that broke from those who now are bonobos and chimps; but wandered off when restlessness awoke, went poking into any land we’d glimpse, new seas, new clime. Now: family reunion time!
We’ve found each other, these last centuries, gone to each other’s homes for ill or good, marrying cousins from across those seas in worlds of travel, music, football, food: sing! ring! chant! chime! It’s family reunion time!
Aggressive individuals still fight, still work to drag their group into a brawl, but no one any longer has the might to be successful when confronting all. War’s now a crime. It’s family reunion time!
We merge by TV, plane and internet, we dye and body-mod against the flow of currents mixing us to one fixed set, and build a culture of both yes and no, crass and sublime. It’s family reunion time!
Once more we’re all a family; once more some will roam out across the galaxy, and we will grow apart, till on some shore of spiral arms we’ll meet, first disagree… shift paradigm… then… family reunion time!
*****
Ancient history and far-future science fiction are all part of the same story, the same continuum, of equal interest to me. This poem was published in Snakeskin 303, i.e. February 2023 – thanks, George Simmers! (And the good news is that the Snakeskin Archive – decades of good poetry – is now functioning again!)
If you’ve the aptitude and love the role, the Army’s always been the place to be. Rise in the ranks, absorbing strategy: coordinate, consolidate, control. And what a blessing when those new implants gave mind-to-mind awareness… and command. Like the unthinking fingers on your hand you can maneuver thousands with a glance. The battle then’s to see what you can wrest from other leaders, fighting mind-to-mind; you have to grow, or you get left behind: can you control ten million, like the best? Of would-be kings there’s never been a dearth… will it be only one who rules all Earth?
*****
This sonnet has just been published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal’s 3rd issue (thanks, David Stephenson!) It is one of a series written in response to a comment from Maryann Corbett (a brilliant formalist poet) about the bleakness of my vision of the future. Well, she’s a Christian, so she has a totally different take on humanity’s future from my irreligious SF-infused speculations. Another sonnet in the series, ‘Exiled Leader‘, was published by Star*Line.
I don’t find it bleak to think that there will be unprecedented individual and planetary disruptions. I’m not distressed at the thought of humans being supplanted some posthuman higher intelligence. Should the earliest rat-like mammals of 145 million years ago be upset to learn that their human descendants build cities and kill any rats they find in them? Should they identify only with the familiar rats and wish that evolution had stopped there, or instead be proud that they have also developed into humans (and dogs, and whales, etc)?
For myself, life is a wild ride, and I long to see where it will take humans in a hundred or in a thousand years. Because of the current revolutions in genomics, robotics, AI and nanotechnology, I doubt we can reasonably forecast even a hundred years into the future. We can speculate all we like but once we merge a human with AI, create a cyborg, all bets are off.
And when we leave this planet, even leave corporeal necessity behind, launch in new realms of space, new states of matter, encapsuled and encoded, searching blind, who will we find, as we have always found, those others there before us, unconfined? How will we meet them, how will we relate, them settled formlessly, we coming late?
*****
Perhaps I owe an explanation to non-readers of science fiction. The premise of the poem is that we humans will continue to tinker with not just our bodies but our DNA, as we have always experimented with everything. We will produce ever more bizarre manifestations as posthumans, especially useful in off-planet environments (I recommend the short stories of John Varley), ultimately finding ways to exist with intelligence and control without being tied to physical bodies. (Try Vernor Vinge.) But as always, wherever and however we voyage in exploration, we will always find someone (some thing) is there before us. And then there will be all the usual situations that occur with first contact… confusion, lack of communication, miscommunication, trust and distrust, treachery, violence, accommodation, mutual benefit, all the things that social species engage in.
Appropriately this short poem was first published in Bewildering Stories (thanks, Don Webb!), an excellent weekly magazine of speculative stories both short and serialized, and speculative poetry and art. This eight-line poem is structurally pretty basic: it’s in iambic pentameter with the second, fourth and sixth lines rhyming and with a final couplet.
We had no destination ever, from birth, save into the ultimate ocean, or ultimate fire, or ultimate earth. Now we have not quite so ultimate ice. For now, it will have to suffice.
The chance of reanimation from cryonic suspension may be small, but still greater than the chance of reanimation after cremation or burial in land or at sea. And I guess we now have a fifth option – ending up off-planet, adrift in space. But in effect that will be a variant on “not-quite-so-ultimate ice”. In space you’d end up near Absolute Zero, as with cryonics – but whereas with cryonics there is the miniscule hope of eventual reanimation, in space your ultimate fate would be that of all space debris: drifting for millions of years until burning up into a star or planet, or getting sucked into a black hole.
Life, death, quite fascinating. Not many options for changing the outcome, though various billionaires are throwing some of their money at the search for immortality, as people have done since at least the time of the pharaohs and early Chinese emperors. And why not? think it’s “just science fiction”? For thousands of years we used to dream we could fly to the moon, and that happened eventually…
This poem was originally published in Snakeskin #274, July 2020. Thanks, George Simmers!
If angels ate apples, potatoes and pears they’d soon be chubby and cheerful as bears nibbling knishes and other such things, tickling your face with the tips of their wings.
If seraphim shouted and whistled at girls, drank drafts from thimbles, all friends with the world drained the best ale and chased it with rye, then fluttered in circles while trying to fly.
Angels on tables! (Watch out for your glass!) Slipping on puddles, right plop on their ass! Laughing at music that only they hear, then tweaking the barmaids a pinch on the rear.
Fuzzy fat angels, that’s something to see, as they dance to the jukebox at quarter to three, and ace out the pinball, a marvelous feat, the lights and bells flashing (though sometimes they cheat).
If angels made merry, would that be so odd? Must they always be solemn, to stay friends with God? It’s a pity that Heaven is so far away angels hardly ever come down and just play.
Geoffrey A. Landis writes: “It’s impossible to chose just one poem as a favorite, of course, and even if I could, which poem I’d pick would change from day to day, maybe even from minute to minute. Still, I’ve alway been fond about ‘If Angels Ate Apples’; it’s one that reads well out loud, and I had fun writing it. Mostly I was playing with meter and alliteration. I was happy that Gardner Dozois picked it up for Asimov’s Science Fiction, and since then it’s seen a couple of reprints.”
Geoffrey A. Landis is a rocket scientist who sometimes plays at being a science-fiction writer, and a science-fiction writer who sometimes plays at being a poet. In the process he’s picked up a handful of awards, ranging from science fiction’s Hugo and Nebula awards to the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling award, and had his stories and poems appear in twenty languages. He lives in Berea, Ohio, with his wife (who is also a science fiction writer and a poet) and four cats.
The hyperspace viewer shows a flowing plane of treebark, roots; a distorted approximation of what we aren’t permitted to see. Clearing again with each rugose transformation, limited by the speed of post-quantum rendering, the map of our passage grows: an icebound dimensional lake thaws, remembering the hot pulse of its creation, shows palpable vestiges of times, energies and matters through which our wake will trace. The reflection of our ship shimmers, spatters light back to streaming stars. We race onward, out to where no atmospheres and skies of planets can frustrate our vision; the provocation of empty black where no suns rise unbearable without acquisition. Particular silence surrounds us like a felt of absence, itself the sinuous, tentacular touch of a void-god whose cult is abstinence, who meditates on dark too much— those distances between the stars and galaxies— and has a singular affection for black holes and cosmic fallacies.… Sometimes we overreach. Each direction (up? down? sideways?) seems different now; our ship’s brain’s blocked—no ability to calculate location. We tell it to go back: how— why these results? We’ve lost mobility, it says; the only options are charm and strange. We clear its cache, then re-install the route. On the viewscreen, no known space in range; nothing but the false stars of snow. About fifty-six hours in, the background gigahertz hiss of relic radiation is finally broken: our A.I. transmits a mad-dog growl. Something’s amiss. What does it mean? Unspoken fears flicker on our faces like shadows cast by entities we feel but cannot see, leaving invisible tracks across the vast cosmic chasm, preceding one more tangibly manifesting. A small silver embryo afloat in amnion of atrament, our ship is dwarfed by tentacles of terror. We’re but a mote in the eye of a demonic god, a blip cascading down through superimposed dimensions to our doom, where something pines beyond a threshold, longs to enter our attention— and hungers for the taste of human minds. Our Earth’s a pale blue memory, a ripe prize to harvest; our civilization will revert to a predawn whence no human can ever rise. The God Void sits in judgment—but won’t convert one soul. Its vastness grows, membranous and bloody, slithers back into the open portal of a queer dwelling where it withdraws to sleep and let the muddy waters of vacuum clear.
F. J. Bergmann writes: ” ‘Further’ first appeared in the Lovecraft eZine. I selected ‘Further’ because I’m fond of cosmic horror, and I was pleased with being able to maintain the form and narrative at this length. The process I used for this poem is what I call ‘transmogrification’: starting with a text source, which can be anything, from another poem to spam, I write a different poem or story using most or all of the words from the source, generally in reverse order. The source for this poem was ‘Let Muddy Water Sit and It Grows Clear,’ a considerably shorter nature poem by Ted Mathys, whose title is reflected in the last two lines of my poem.”
F. J. Bergmann is the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), past editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com), managing editor of MadHat Press (madhat-press.com), poetry editor for Weird House Press (weirdhousepress.com), and freelances as a copy editor and book designer. She lives in Wisconsin with a husband, intermittent daughters and a horse or two, and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Her writing awards include SFPA Rhysling Awards for both long and short poems and SFPA Elgin Awards for two recent chapbooks: Out of the Black Forest (Centennial Press, 2012), a collection of conflated fairy tales, and A Catalogue of the Further Suns, first-contact reports from interstellar expeditions, winner of the 2017 Gold Line Press manuscript competition. She was a 2019 quarter-winner for Writers of the Future. Venues where her poems have appeared include Asimov’s SF, Missouri Review, Polu Texni, Spectral Realms and Vastarien; her speculative fiction has been published in Abyss & Apex, Little Blue Marble (CA), Pulp Literature (CA), Soft Cartel, WriteAhead/The Future Looms (UK), and elsewhere. She has competed at National Poetry Slam with the Madison Urban Spoken Word slam team. While she has no academic literary qualifications,. she is kind to those so encumbered. In a past life, she worked with horses. She thinks imagination can compensate for anything.
The “Potcake Chapbook” series is named for the dogs of the Bahamas and the Caribbean – strays that live off the burnt scrapings of cooking pots. The poems in the series are a mixed bunch – but the potcake of our logo wears a bow tie to show that he and all the poems are formal. These poems are memorable in part because they rhyme and scan, as all truly memorable (i.e. easily memorisable) poetry does. We subscribe to the use of form, no matter how formless the times in which we live.
Potcakes hunt around the back streets and beaches, looking for something unguarded to eat. Like a potcake, I’m always looking to see if there is some good poem to carry off. The plans for the chapbooks are a bit sketchy, always changing–everything depends on what I run across and what Alban Low would like to illustrate. Perhaps half the poems we have published have come from my poking around back issues of online poetry magazines; and the other half have come from material that has been sent for me to look at.
When there is enough good material on a single theme to fill 13 pages of a chapbook (still leaving room for Alban’s work, of course), then it may become the next project. But until a chapbook actually goes to print everything is subject to change. An even better poem may show up and displace one tentatively placed. A slew (or slough) of poems on a new theme may cause a reprioritisation of planned chapbooks.
This is one of the reasons that I prefer to consider only poems that have already been published–so that I don’t feel guilty about having a bunch of poems that will sit with me for months, years, and may or may not be included in the Potcake series. I have flagged a thousand poems that interest me; but I can only publish a dozen in a chapbook, and only a few chapbooks will get produced in a year.
However I am always keen to read and consider rhymed and metered verse that has already been published. There are several chapbooks that are jostling in the queue for completion and publication:
Travels and Travails (travel) City! O city! (urban life) Just a Little Naughty Portraits Unpleasant Various Heresies (religion) Lost Loves The Horror of Spring! (seasons)
and there are more; but the next one in the series, to come out early in 2021, will be one of science fiction, tentatively ‘Rockets and Robots’. Like all the chapbooks listed above, it is nearly full already. As with all of them, if I run across another poem I really like, I’ll include it.
Poems in the chapbooks run from two or three lines to some 40 lines in length–obviously, with space at a premium, poems over 20 lines and running over one page are less likely to be included… but it does happen. Other criteria: I’m looking forwit, elegance, a variety of traditional and nonce forms, a variety of voices and moods: happy, sad, angry, sardonic, meditative… anything interesting I can scrounge. If you have something you think I might like, on any topic, please send it along to robinhelweglarsen@gmail.com
I can’t promise to use it, but I will read it and reply!
Form in Formless Times 