The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

Now Butler's papers will join those of Jack London, Charles Bukowski and Christopher Isherwood in the library, which just received 39 cartons and eight file-cabinet drawers full of Butler's manuscripts, correspondence, school papers and photographs. It's a gold mine, including typed drafts of Kindred, and note cards with Butler's thoughts on the writing process.

Hodson heard Butler speak at a women's history seminar at the library years ago, and was immediately stunned by her ideas. So she ran up to Butler and "put my business card under her nose," she tells the Pasadena Star News. She kept pursuing Butler, until one visit, when Hodson was driving Butler around, and Butler told her, "the Huntington is in my will."

As Hodson says, it's terrible that Butler's papers are being delivered to the Huntington so soon — Hodson had expected someone else to be unpacking those boxes, years from now — but it's great that scholars will have access to so much insight into the inner workings of Butler's mind. [Pasadena Star-News]

In Kindred, a present-day African American woman in California, Dana, keeps getting drawn back in time to the antebellum South. She saves the white plantation owner, Rufus, from drowning, but every time Dana travels back in time her stays grow longer and more arduous.

Beacon, which has been publishing editions of Kindred since 2004, is seeking an artist to put images to Butler's ideas: contact Alison Trzop by March 16. [Tor.com, Racialicious and SF Scope]

Writing for NPR about the UN Conference on Racism, Butler talks about her own thought experiments in creating a world where people tolerate each other instead of trying to impose hierarchy from above. She tried to create a fictional civilization where everyone could actually feel each other's pain telepathically, but decided that it would make people less compassionate, not more:

The point was to create, in fiction at least, a tolerant, peaceful civilization — a world in which people were inclined either to accept one another's differences or at least to behave as though they accepted them since any act of resentment they commit would be punished immediately, personally, inevitably. Eventually, though, I chose not to write about such an empathic society. I wrote instead about a single empathic woman who suffered from the delusion that she shared other people's pleasure and pain. She was not a particularly peaceful woman, but she did have to consider the consequences of her behavior more than other undeluded people had to. After all, delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

In my novel, unavoidable empathy worked fine as an affliction, but popular, painful sports like boxing and football convinced me that the threat of shared pain wouldn't necessarily make people behave better toward one another. And it might cause trouble. For instance, it might stop people from entering the health care professions. Nursing would become very unpopular. And who would want to be a dentist in such a society.

So much for fiction.

I love the fact that Butler did the thought experiment, and then rejected it, because the initial utopian impulse resulted in an even worse dystopia. Few writers are that honest and fearless with their thought experiments, I think.

The whole essay is worth reading, and so is the other stuff ZeroAtTheBone linked to. Jo Walton also wrote a great overview of Butler's Pattern series at Tor.com a while back, which I meant to link to at the time.

And, of course, if you haven't read Butler's work, especially the Pattern and Xenogenesis series, you should run out and get them right now.

Both Surrogates and Avatar feature posthuman heroes, in very different ways. And television's Lost is starting to look as though its protagonists are going to wind up evolving past their standard-issue humanity. But Hollywood has tried to explore posthuman ideas in the past, but has either fallen flat or lapsed into standard "fear the other" tropes. But this time around, things may be different, because books have shown the way forward, and we need a new dose of optimism and escapism. Will posthumans finally conquer our screens? Maybe.

For the purposes of this post, I'm thinking of posthumans as "vanilla" humans who get upgraded somehow, either by becoming cyborgs, or connecting their minds to cyberspace, or becoming part-alien, or enhancing their bodies with nanotech, biotech or some other improvements. I know that's not the only definition, but it's one that's easy to talk about in the context of SF.

Posthuman stories are a long-standing staple of science fiction books. Finishing the addictive Eclipse Two anthology the other day, I couldn't help but notice how many of those stories were about posthumans. (You have humans whose consciousnesses have migrated to virtual worlds, and an immortal emperor whose brain has gotten so large and wired, he now looks like a finless whale more than a human.) We almost don't remark on the occurrence of posthuman themes in novels like Charles Stross' Glasshouse and Accelerando any more - they're just part of the backdrop of the story. (SFSite called 2005 the "Year of the Post-Human Novel," with a rich harvest of posthuman tales.) Literary authors Kazuo Ishiguro and Michel Houellebecq tackled post-human themes in their 2006 novels, Never Let Me Go and The Possibility Of An Island respectively. Cyberpunk is a venerable literary movement at this point. And it's hard to believe it's been 15 years since Octavia Butler's classic Xenogenesis novels, in which aliens and post-apocalyptic humans merge to form a new species.

But posthuman characters in TV and movies? Much fewer and farther between, I think.

Reading about Disney's Surrogates trailer, right after reading Eclipse Two, was an interesting contrast for me. Surrogates is very consciously about people augmenting and transcending their bodies: in the movie's cyber-ish future, nobody leaves his/her home any more - instead you send your beautiful robot "surrogate" out to interact with other people and do errands. (Unless you're Bruce Willis' kick-ass lawman, who ditches his cyber wig and gets his hands dirty in the real world investigating a murder.) Of course, the movie is bound to critique this idea, but it may also show why it's cool, or the ways in which it enhances your life.)

The other big movie coming up which seems to have posthuman themes is James Cameron's long, long-awaited Avatar, where Terminator Salvation's Sam Worthington goes to a planet where humans can only interact with the natives by taking on quasi-alien surrogate bodies, or "Avatars." Worthington's character, a disabled ex-marine, is the perfect choice to inhabit one of these hybrid human-alien bodies. (This could be one of the first movies ever where a human becoming part alien, or having a part-alien body, is presented as a good thing rather than a monstrous bodily invasion, as in Cameron's own Aliens.)

I'm also starting to wonder if TV's Lost could turn into a posthuman narrative. Do we know exactly what the island is doing to the castaways? They seem to have some kind of connection with the place, which seems to confer rapid healing and immortality on its inhabitants, and they're being engineered to withstand time-hopping. Could we eventually discover, maybe in season six, that Locke and some of the others are no longer exactly human? (And commenter im.thatoneguy points out that Heroes is a strongly posthuman show as well, featuring characters who have evolved to have special abilities, plus superpowered people who are the results of scientific experiments. And the protagonists of Heroes often are involved in hacking the future, and are starting to customize themselves as well. This makes me think of a related point: superhero narratives are often inherently posthuman, especially something like Iron Man, where the hero is a cyborg with his own built-in power supply that keeps him alive.)

There was a boomlet of posthuman TV and movies in the 1990s. Star Trek: Voyager gave us Seven Of Nine, a member of the Borg collective who explored her humanity even as she proved that she was superior to any human, in almost every episode. There was 1999's cyberpunk trifecta of The Matrix, Existenz and The 13th Floor. The Matrix, in particular, spends a lot of time showing how the virtual world is a trap made out of lies - and then revels, for the rest of its length, in how much cool shit Neo is able to do with his in-born ability to hack the virtual environment. The Matrix probably wouldn't have captured people's imaginations nearly as much if it hadn't made uploading your consciousness to a VEarth look cool as well as oppressive.

The Matrix tried, and failed, to turn a cyber-rebellion story into a franchise and add more complexity and layers to the original's fairly simple concept. And the past decade hasn't featured much in the way of successful posthuman storylines in movies and TV, that I can think of anyway. (Maybe Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, or The Man From Earth, starring John Billingsley.) As books have continued to obsess about what we'll become after we finally transcend our design specs, movies and TV have stuck to unreconstructed humans, who may encounter "the other" in the form of aliens, cyborgs, robots and monsters, all without changing their configuration.

It's easy to see why posthuman tales might be easier to tell in books than in movies or television: it's a lot easier to depict a divided consciousness - one which is part-machine, or part-alien - in prose. Even with modern CG effects, it's hard to depict an upgraded human on screen without a certain amount of cheesiness creeping in. Also, many of the coolest posthuman stories span thousands, or even millions, of years, as quasi-immortal protagonists travel across the stars. Many of the coolest things in posthuman lit are among the hardest things to depict on screen.

As much as futurists and transhuman pundits would like to insist that the Singularity is coming in our lifetimes, and that the Singularity will turn us posthuman, most posthuman narratives don't really function as predictions about the future at all. Instead, they have two super-important functions:

First, they're metaphors for our current super-rapid progress. We haven't transcended our humanity at all, but we have made huge advances in medicine and improved our life-expectancy massively. Our 90-year lifespans make us seem like 1,000-year-old mega-brains compared to our short-lived ancestors. We have, in a sense, outsourced part of our brains to the internet - I no longer remember a lot of facts or details, because I rely on Google to remember them for me. We're increasingly socializing in virtual realms, where we get to customize our identities and live through "avatars." As Joss Whedon pointed out the other day, we can customize our states of mind with amazingly personalized medicines. None of this, in itself, makes us posthuman. But it's a jarring transition from even a decade ago, and one that people need metaphors to help make sense of.

Second, posthuman stories are pure escapism. It's pretty awesome to imagine futures where we can be instantly beautiful, transform our bodies based on our whims, live to be a zillion years old, and vastly expand our mental faculties, etc. In some ways, it's the purest distillation of science fiction's promise: even more than visiting the stars and meeting aliens, getting past our crappy human weaknesses and becoming fully awesome, thanks to science.

That's what makes me wonder whether the time for posthuman pop has come at last: on the one hand, a degrading environment and deteriorating economy may make us feel less excited about fancy tech gadgets, and life-enhancing medical technologies may be out of reach for more people. But on the other hand, everybody says we're primed for some escapism about now. And pretty much the only easy answer to our myriad problems is some kind of huge leap forward in human evolution, making us smarter and vastly enhancing our brainpower.

People are crying out for a dose of optimism as everything teeters on the edge of disaster. We need a bright, shinier vision of the future, as much as posthumanly possible. Has the posthuman movie star's time come at last?

"Cyberpunk literature toyed with this - but, I feel, never very successfully. It's like in Gibson's work. In some sort of grand theoretical sense the protagonists were "from the street", but their interaction with the system was essential one of equals. That is, I believe, an attitude that is quite natural for white men to take - that the system, even if stupid and corrupt, nevertheless recognizes them as human and acknowledges their ability to challenge or destroy that system. It is my experience, so far, that in afro-futurist works that assumption is not there. The system often does not recognize the legitimacy of the humanity of the protagonists. I feel that even in science fiction where humans are regarded as backwards, and I am reminded of David Brin's Uplift novels, the author tries very hard to assure the readers of the inherent specialness of humans (generally, we are either stronger of will or more adaptable than the aliens - it's pretty predictable), and afro-futurism doesn't seem to deal much with aliens, but the evils that people do to each other. There is no confidence that the specialness of the protagonists will win out (and, indeed, in several of the stories that is not the case)." [Christopher Bradley]

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In 1959, Philip Shockey wrote an essay called "The Ultimate Necessity of Space Travel," which was about how humans would never survive unless they left the planet. Shockey's daughter has posted the article in its entirety (which we found thanks to Paleo-Future), and it's fascinating to see early Space Age writing on a topic that has become almost a cliche in science fiction — and a nonstarter as a political platform.

Shockey points out that the sun is going to go red giant and destroy the Earth in the next 50 million years, and therefore we must start prepping now to get all our valuable Earth culture off the planet where it will be safe. What's interesting is that his ideas take a decidedly political turn once he's made this point:

The project is so huge in scope that no single country will be able to carry it through; the physical and mental resources of all the world will be required. This unified effort should produce nonviolent political and religious revolutions terminating in world harmony . . . It is difficult to see how any of the existing formal religions or political plans, except democracy, will survive scrutiny by a world population applying the scientific method to all phases of life.

If you want to hear a more contemporary plea for offworld planning, check out Carl Sagan's Cosmos miniseries, which is airing again on the Discovery Channel starting Jan. 8.

"The Ultimate Necessity of Space Travel" [Space Journal]

5. Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder. Rebel, former pirate, and kickass airbike rider Hayden lives in Virga, a giant bag of air floating in space, built by a post-human society. The air is heated by high-tech suns dragged around by city-states that create their own gravity by building on the inside of vast, spinning tubes. Virga is a kind of eighteenth-century world of kings, despots and pirates, and many of the city-states horde sun power — they'll attack out any nation that tries to assert independence by building its own sun. Most people remain dependent on a few big sun-owning nations for their warmth; those who refuse to toe the line live in the cloud-draped sunless reaches of "winter." Hayden, whose mother was killed after she built a pirate sun, is out to change all that, even if it means killing the leader of Slipstream, one of Virga's most powerful nations. The characters may be a little two-dimensional, but you'll keep reading just to visit the vast, globular floating oceans, the strange cities, and bizarre barren outposts in Virga. Plus, pirate battles in zero gee! Sun of Suns is the first in a trilogy, and the second novel just came out in hardback.

4. Ringworld, by Larry Niven. A classic 1960s world-building epic about aliens on a quest to find out more about a vast artificial Dyson ring built around a dying sun. This is the novel that inspired the people who created the game Halo, which also takes place on a ring world. Expect strange weather, bizarre vistas from on and below the massive structure, and alien encounters that feel very Star Trek (but at a time when Star Trek was still the shit).

3. Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler. This trilogy of novels by MacArthur winner Octavia Butler is about what happens to humanity after earth is destroyed in some kind of nuclear apocalypse, and all the human survivors are rescued by powerful, mysterious aliens called the Oankali. Three-sexed, the Oankali reproduce via a third sex called the TK, which mixes genetic material inside its own body and creates offspring. All their technology is biological too. Lilith, one of the human survivors that the Oankali enlist to help them deal with the other human survivors, discovers that the Oankali recreate their species every few hundred years by merging their genetic material with other species. And the humans are next on their list of species to merge with. Set aboard vast biological ship-words and a newly geo-engineered Earth, Lilith's Brood traces three generations of humans and Oankali as they have children together — children who grow more alien to both species with each generation. Yes, it's a very complicated and subtle allegory about colonialism. And yes, it's an amazing tale of the unknown. Enjoy it for either, or for both.

2. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. It's a world where bureaucrats raise demons with steam-driven machines, and "thaumaturgists" remold human bodies with their hands. A strange kind of species-transforming weather called The Torque occasionally rips through, converting humans into half-insects, half-birds, half-seamonsters. It's been years since a Torque came through, and all the different post-Torque human groups live separated into nineteenth-century style ghettos in a city whose polyglot heart is in a train station called Perdido Street. Everything is steaming along normally in the city — anarchists print subversive pamphlets, artists date across species lines, and scientists study winged creatures from around the globe. But trouble comes to town in the form of dream-eating moths who suck people's minds out, and the only creatures who can stop them are a mad scientist, his half-insect lover, a sentient garbage dump, and a trans-dimensional spider.

5. The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. A classic novel by one of the supreme world-builders in SF, The Dispossessed is a tale of two planets: one is a lush, economic powerhouse ruled by greed, consumerism, and a rich elite; the other a desert planet full of the descendants of rebels who fled the first planet two centuries before. It has scant resources but is governed by a feminist-anarchist belief system that preaches collective ownership, gender equality, and sexual liberation. Shavek, a physicist from the anarchist planet, is one of the first to visit the home planet in many generations, and his experiences traveling between worlds reveal chinks in the Utopia he's left behind — and unexpected benefits on the corrupt home world, where scientific innovation flourishes in an atmosphere of capitalist competition. What's stunning about this novel is that LeGuin avoids simplistic judgments, and shows in honest detail how even the most progressive culture can be corrupt. And even the most corrupt culture can foster creative brilliance.