Science Fiction Haiku
Before there was scifaiku on the Internet, there was science fiction haiku. Probably the earliest publication of science fiction haiku was Karen Anderson's "Six Haiku" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1962). Below is number four of her six SF haiku.
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- Those crisp cucumbers
- Not yet planted in Syrtis --
- How I desire one!
Terry Pratchett included the following SF haiku as a chapter epigram in his early non-Discworld novel, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976).
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- Hark to the crash of
- the leaves in the autumn, the smash
- of the crystal leaves.
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- Charles Sub-Lunar, 'Planetary Haiku'
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It wasn't until 1979 that science fiction haiku were regularly published, with Robert Frazier's "Haiku for the L5" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1979) and "Haiku for the Space Shuttle" (IASFM, 1980) starting the trend. In 1994, Michael Bishop's story "Cri di Coeur" (IASFM 1994) featured a haiku contest held on an interstellar ship, with the topic of haiku about astrophysics, subject to the constraint that (as in Japanese haiku) the poems must each feature a season. (The ten haiku featured in the story were written by Bishop and Geoffrey A. Landis).
The most extensive use of haiku in science fiction is in David Brin's Uplift Universe (especially in the novel Startide Rising), where the uplifted dolphins speak a haiku-like language called Trinary. He has characters quoting haiku by Kobayashi Issa and Yosa Buson, and has them spontaneously writing their own haiku. Outside of his Uplift Universe, Brin has haiku as chapter epigrams in his novel The Postman.
One of the main characters in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Bobby Shaftoe, is a haiku-writing U.S. Marine Raider during World War II. The book's prologue starts with one of his very rough haiku :
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- Two tires fly. Two wail.
- A bamboo grove, all chopped down
- From it, warring songs
Zoe's boyfriend, in John Scalzi's 2008 novel Zoe's Tale, sends a haiku to her PDA.
Two of the more famous science fiction authors who have also written science fiction haiku are Joe Haldeman and Thomas M. Disch. The author Paul O. Williams, who has written a series of science fiction books as well as books of regular haiku and senryū, has combined both interests with some published science fiction haiku.
Read more about this topic: Scifaiku
Famous quotes containing the words science, fiction and/or haiku:
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—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“The haiku lets meaning float; the aphorism pins it down.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)