Does sci-fi writer, Jack Chalker, even like science and technology? Maybe, maybe not.

I think that it is super funny that for someone who is essentially a science fiction writer, Jack L. Chalker doesn’t seem to really think much of advanced science or technology. He sort of hints at this inescapable fact in the preface to Wonderland Gambit 1: The Cybernetic Walrus.

the simple life is the thing for me: a red-picket fence and blue skies

I’ve come across discussions on such diverse platforms as conventions, fanzines, and the Internet where people argue whether I write fantasy novels or science-fiction novels. Most people think I write predominantly fantasy, and in this they are wrong. What I do not write are engineering stories—hey, gang, let’s build a space station! Hey, let’s terraform Mars! Those are all well and good, and some folks do them well, but they are very much in the tradition of Astounding in the Campbell era, a magazine I am not going to ever denigrate but which, I think, told as many variations of engineering stories as I ever want to read…

…Me, I look in different places. I look in books and articles on the “new physics,” in arcane studies in biology, chemistry, and other subjects, and I keep bumping up against visions of the future that are often not terribly nice but hard to ignore.

Well, I believe him. Do you? But he’s not actually saying that he doesn’t like science and engineering here, is he? Let’s look at some of the evidence, shall we?

Most of the series deal with advanced forms of science and technology in one way or another. We’ve all seen the marvelous Well of Souls Computer create and destroy the entire Universe one too many times to think that, a., Chalker is primarily a fantasy writer, and b., that he thinks that advanced technology equates with individual or societal advancement. Let’s face it, the Markovians failed as a species. And these guys were the best and the brightest of the engineering set.

In the Soul Rider series, World is colonized by Earth humans possessing a vastly advanced kind of science and computer know-how, yet fairly soon after mankind arrives, the culture degenerates into a primitive medievalism. Of course, you’ll object, the great computers had a hand in the whole mess. Granted. Though doesn’t that simply illustrate my initial point? In a Chalkerian universe, technology is more of a curse than a benefit.

In other series, advanced computers malfunction horribly, which sets the stage for the drama. Look at Wonderland Gambit where fifty-two people are trapped living endless lives in one insane world after the next, all in computer simulations with no apparent way to stop playing the game. That idea depressed me so that I finally, viscerally got it about Buddhism as a response to Hinduism.

Even more strange is Master System in the Rings of the Master series. The super computer brutally murders its own creators, returns humanity to primitive (i.e. pre-technological) ways of living on Earth and forcibly alters our physical shapes and hurls us out into the Galaxy to “protect” us. We’re led to believe somehow that Master System itself develops a kind of split personality, which eventually allows Hawks, China Nightingale and company to capture the elusive five rings and regain control of the schizophrenic machine. The stand-alone novel, The Messiah Choice, is similar in that it, too, is about a very powerful computer that goes completely nuts. Neither of these are hopeful visions of a bright future.

What do we see in the Four Lords of the Diamond series? There, we’re initially led to believe that the Warden Diamond System is some kind of super prison camp for horrible criminals of the advanced and egalitarian Confederacy. By the end, it turns out that the Confederacy itself is more of a stagnant and corrupt mess than most of the citizens and institutions of the Warden worlds. Interestingly, the technology on the Diamond is behind the rest of humanity elsewhere. What a surprise.

The Quintara Marathon has to be one of the most technologically advanced and most depressing of Chalker’s series. Set in the far distant future, humanity has been absorbed into three competing interstellar empires where our lot is at the bottom. Turns out that we’re playthings for everyone: the Quintara, the Exchange, the Mychol and the Mizlaplan. Technology is so advanced that nobody even understands it any longer. Three of the four competing super-races have to put aside their differences to combine their vast resources of knowledge to defeat the fourth, and even then it’s a touchy situation. It makes me wonder if nobody’ed ever learned all that stuff if things wouldn’t, in fact, be better. I think that’s exactly what Chalker tries to demonstrate in all these stories.

So often, it’s at those temporary yet timeless periods when Chalkerian heroes and heroines get stranded on deserted tropical islands that everything seems right with the world. Nathan Brazil recalls such a stay on the Well World as one of the best times of his millennia-long life. We see it in the Changewind series when Charlie gets stuck with Dorion on another fabulous desert isle littered with huge gemstones. Right now I’m reading G.O.D. Inc. and it’s there too. Sam and Brandy Horowitz get re-routed through the Labyrinth to a paradisiacal vision of tropical Oregon. Oregon isn’t an island in this alternate Earth. However, the invisible barrier around the area in which they find themselves more-or-less makes it seem like one. I’m sure that I’m forgetting other examples.

I don’t have the sense that Chalker really believes in these Edenic paradises as permanent homes for anyone. They’re more “vacation destinations,” if you will. I think that, like the duplicitous Jamie in The Labyrinth of Dreams, Chalker longs for an earlier age of technology, perhaps analogous to Europe at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. You know, a “quieter” time where life went a bit slower, people were polite and religion wasn’t just about shopping and power, but you could still have your morning coffee, ride a locomotive occasionally, and even enjoy a good cigar from time to time. We all know that there are endless problems with this idyllic fantasy. Even Jamie got that. That kind of lifestyle wouldn’t suit me one bit (how could I do my blogging?) But I keep coming back to Dillia, the semi-tech centaur hex on the Well World, when I survey Jack Chalker’s oeuvre. It wasn’t perfect, that’s true, but it really did seem like a rather nice place, indeed.