"The Spirit of Science Fiction" by Roberto Bolaño

Good writing is fine, but great writing takes you to more great writing. Alice Sheldon caught me after Roberto Bolaño knelt at her feet in a poem, one in a series called “A Stroll Through Literature” (see “BOMB Magazine” or The Unknown University). Bolaño was never one to hold back with his high or low opinions of anyone, or anything really, so there’s nothing small to be found in the reverence he offers Sheldon in a dream, which finds the narrator traversing the planet, mortal risk directing his every move, since it seems there’s nothing else to do if giving his heart to Sheldon will not be returned in kind. 

Time passes. 

Youth leaves Bolaño behind. 

Then, in short order, the queen affirms his life, all with a unique and graceful brevity I won’t spoil here.

So, being the committed Bolaño devotee that I am, it wasn’t up to me. I had to read Sheldon, and still do.

In her life story I find a 20th century legend that actually happened: from world explorer to CIA-cohort to a turn at story-telling that arrives later than most, which proceeds to don a mastery of the craft very, very few have worn. She taught everyone, even the greats, about what the mask of a pseudonym can say and create, Mr. James Tiptree Jr. being the best known. In doing so, Sheldon slew assumptions around gender and then blew through the limits of what a genre can do.

Her stories turn in some of the most unhinged springboards and excavations of the imagination one can hope to find, each an immersive dimension all its own. In Sheldon, entirely new worlds bloom and bleed, revel in joy and devastation, and churn up and examine every gradient in between. I cannot overstate her need to be read, now or at any time.

All that to say I share Bolaño’s unmitigated love for who Sheldon is, as well as a passion for science fiction that abstains from rules as a rule and charges us to go and do likewise.

My fandom for Bolaño himself is similarly thorough, though even with Sheldon’s service in the OSS, there is not a little haze around the particulars of his life. He still owns a personal arc that entrances and inspires me to no end, along with a literary journey that starts with more poetry, and ended with a novel/series of novels as monumental as it/they is/are bewildering: 2666.

Or as much as we can believe it ended, since the stories kept, and keep, arriving in our hands. 

In January 2020 I read two poems for Dead Rabbits LA at Sideshow Books in Los Angeles, California. People liked them, which is always nice, and it doubly nice to see one of my more science fiction-y poems connect well with the crowd. 

During the intermission I, of course, took to the winding line to the back of the shop where the owner, bless him, was serving refreshments. I started talking shop with another writer in line, and together we found an entire wall of science fiction gems standing behind us. We scoured the titles and moved into naming favorites when he mentioned Bolaño, which will never fail to light me up.

We talked some more, I pulled Dangerous Visions atop Borges’ Labyrinths, which had found me at the front table. My friend Will got on the mic to let everyone know we were starting again, and I found a place to stand towards the back. 

I looked around to see what was on the racks around me, waiting for the next poet, and there, at first glance, at eye-level, was Roberto Bolaño’s The Spirit of Science Fiction. 

I had heard nothing about the book before that moment, and the effect seeded a rare meeting of the very tangible and very surreal. Me, standing in a dark room with a poet about to start reading, staring at a new book by a dead man who wrote poetry, and novels, short stories, and essays, all of which I love and cannot get enough. 

I took the book in my arms with the other two books. The poet was great and I had a wonderful night, truly a gift for what I was able to share and receive from new voices and friends. I got into Spirit soon after. Opening the book played well with more good things happening in my life at the time, and kept me in good company when the opposite was true as well. 

The novel itself is as fun as any foray that lets us peak in on a favorite artist in their early years. Bolaño’s voice would find sturdier octaves and volume later on, but the same soul is at work in Spirit: youth biting the edges of illusions, both interior and exterior, undercurrents of dread answered by the most reckless of means and/or art, all relayed with a level-eyed blend of honesty, hope, and humor that is all Bolaño’s own.

Though some have called Spirit incomplete or too early in a career that would see better works later on, I found nothing to complain about in getting to ride along yet again with a true rockstar of the medium. 

I started Spirit on a morning of work at a trail running event on one of the chillier sides of Santa Clarita, California. Everything went well and I stopped to eat on the way home, took what I didn’t eat in a box to give to someone who’s hungry, and outside the restaurant a man without his shirt on paced and wrung out his shirt in his hands. 

I asked him if he wanted food, and he politely declined, but asked if I had a cigarette, which I didn’t. I wished him well and went to my car and took a second to check a few things on my phone, like we all do, when the man walked up to my car, shirt still in hand. I opened the door and he shook my hand and asked for a cigarette, very nicely again, and I said I didn’t have one. 

The man asked if I remembered that dog, the dog, and I told him I didn’t, and he spoke quietly about something that sounded faraway but had been within reach at one point, long ago. I listened and he said, “God, I’m loaded,” and I asked if he wanted some food, and we had both repeated our questions and declined them politely, twice. 

We shook hands again and I came home, and page seven of Spirit had to start with a letter to Sheldon, and there’s more than enough love and food and water and mystery to go around, it’s just very, very easy to forget it, no matter who or where you are.

Later in the book we’re treated to a shout-out to Gene Wolfe that made my heart sing again, thinking as I have, many times, that Bolaño swam in the same oceans that have summarily tossed me about, too. And, of course, we get more deference by way of a letter to Tiptree Jr., the stand-in Sheldon created and that Spirit’s Jan confesses she might prefer to be known by at the time of his letter-writing. Or might not. In any case, he kneels, again, and this has me up to my eyes.

I keep reading, and someone close to me is attacked on her way to work.

Physically she comes away fine, they pushed her down in the snow, a man and a woman, took her things, and left, and this world, the real one, has people who find a viable option in assaulting librarians, why not, what there is there in literature and archival work and the preservation of the records and dreams that make any of this all of this? I’m furious and despair sharpens me in ways I don’t like but will not deny.

I write and run and read more than I usually do, which makes me feel good about being angry, and makes my anger do things that feel good.

I finish the book soon after, on a night I spend wasting myself on the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo track. I lean into the straightaway that takes you northwest, but was full of a cold wind I fought on my own or with one or two other runners at times, three at most, other restless or regimented strangers who wander in out of the dark to whirl through this loop, all of us pushing ourselves out of our selves, passing each other, wordless, then gone. 

I find the short story “Mexican Manifesto” at the end of Spirit. I’d it read before, a story about students of the bath-house scene in Mexico City, more wanderers coming together in places mixed with pleasure and anonymity, losing themselves as they seek what they want or need.

A better-fitting coda is hard to imagine, as unnerving and courageous as anything else Bolaño would produce into an end that came far too soon.

But his is an end that, fittingly, is unlike any other. It keeps speaking.

The essence of science fiction is to speak to fears and hopes in new ways, both by way of metaphor as well as the horrendous or liberating aspects that keep finding us as a species. Especially so in the 21st century. It is a living genre with no end to its powers of adaptation, spanning the poignant to pulp, parables and prophecies.

All are invited, from well-trodden tropes to new goal posts for those who dream in technology. And it won’t end, or will end with whatever limit we put on the imagination. 

When I turn the last page on “Manifesto,” it’s an end I can now believe is the end, since how much more can be found in these glorious archives Bolaño’s executors are holding so close?

But, again, how many times will I keep saying that? 

When this much still glows from what has every appearance of a vacuum, what remains above challenge? And what excuse do we have to not attempt the same? How much of our resilience and generosity and visions can we leave behind us, we, who are lucky enough to still be here, for a little while at least? 

“…I had blind faith in my luck, and in the signs I thought I had glimpsed.” 

• Roberto Bolaño, The Spirit of Science Fiction