Month: April 2009

The Links of Ages

Post-bank-holiday-catch-up-edition:

Hugo Nominee: “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders”

Time for this week’s discussion. The story is here, and for the opinion round-up we start with Rich Horton:

“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” is a thoughtful story about one of those mysterious shops, this on a magic supply store at which a couple of boys meet, leading to a lifelong partnership. And now they are aging, and try to find the store one last time. Inevitably, when they find it, they find that there is real magic on offer. But is such magic really worth the price? This is one of Resnick’s better stories, though still not really one to which I’d give a Hugo. In the end, for me, the final revelations weren’t intriguing or new enough to push the story from “decent” to “special”.

The Fix:

In “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick, Silver and Gold are two old men who met each other as kids in the titular shop, which purports to sell magic tricks. They are now ninety-year-olds in a retirement home, reminiscing on the past, but they decide to take one last look at the shop, to see whether it’s still there, and when they find out it is, Baffle makes them an offer hard to refuse…

Although this starts slowly, I loved the atmosphere that it drew, from Chicago in the thirties to the present day, and the Emporium of Wonders is truly a wonderful place. The interplay between the two main characters was spot-on and often hilarious as they nagged at each other. The ending was not altogether surprising, but it succeeded in presenting both answers to a dilemma in a clever fashion, while not passing judgments on either. Recommended.

Russ Allbery:

Like a lot of Resnick’s writing, this story is a bit sentimental, but it didn’t take the obvious and expected ending. It’s about two old men, lifetime friends and partners in all sorts of things, who first met in a mysterious magic store. As retirees living in a nursing home, they decide on a final adventure and try to find some trace of the store that meant so much to their childhood. As one might expect, they succeed in finding it, and from there the two men have different reactions nad follow different paths. I liked the ending; it avoids any obvious happy ending and tells a more complicated story about aging, belief, memories, and decisions. (7)

Jason Sanford:

The short story “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (in the January 2008 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine) deserves to be on every award and anthology short-list next year. Not only is the story amazingly well written, it’ll stab you through the heart while leaving you both sad and optimistic about humanity and our desires. This is Resnick at his very best.

John Berlyne:

Stalwart Mike Resnick’s story “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” is a haunting tale of two old men having one last roll of the dice. They venture out of their sheltered home in search of a magic shop they remembered from the youth and lo and behold, they find it, just exactly as it was seventy years ago. Weirdly, the proprietor is equally unchanged. It is a bittersweet story of ambitions unfulfilled, suffused with gentle humour and a generous pinch of pathos.

Best SF:

At the other end of the age range, is a very, very satisfying story from Resnick. Two old guys, sharing a flat in a retirement complex, are getting very near to the end of their lives and their almost life-long friendship. With creaking joints and failing organs, they reflect on their moment of first meeting, in the magic store which they visited as children. They reflect on that time, as young boys when all was possible, and indeed, Alastair Baffle seemed to suggest that even more was possible.

Maury Gold is determined to see if the shop is still there. Against all the odds, of course, as he is 92, so the shop must be long gone. Nate Silver reluctantly accompanies him, and they find that not only is the shop still there, but so is the owner, and Mr Baffle appears to be not a year older. It appears that Baffle has much more to offer than sleight of hand tricks, and Gold is quite willing to take what is on offer, whilst Silver less so.

It’s an extremely effective but gentle and subtle story.

A bit more positive than the initial reactions here, then. But what did you think?

Whither the super-reader?

I’m still slowly working my way through Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, and have reached postcolonial criticism. In true textbook fashion, each chapter includes a “STOP and THINK” section, and this one actually made me do both:

Postcolonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts and is one of several critical approaches we have considered which focus on specific issues, including issues of gender (feminist criticism), of class (Marxist criticism), and of sexual orientation (lesbian/gay criticism).

This raises the possibility of a kind of ‘super-reader’ able to respond equally and adequately to a text in all these ways. In practice, for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest.
[…]
Should we, in general, try to become super-readers, with multiple layers of sympathy and awareness, or will trying to do so merely produce blandness and superficiality?

Obviously, it is impossible for anybody to answer this question for anybody else. My own feeling is that while an even spread of awareness across all these issues is theoretically possible, in practice aiming for this, merely in the interests of political correctness, is almost bound to produce superficiality. A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstance. These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit — they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency. (198-9)

Now, Barry’s bias shows through before he declares it — the very term “super-reader” carries connotations of the unattainable, even childish. And when he does declare his bias, he still loads his dice, with that clause about “merely in the interests of political correctness”: yes, obviously aiming to do something merely in the interests of political correctness is doomed to failure.

But leaving that aside, I’m still struck by a number of things. To start with: “for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest”. I’m sceptical of that most (many, I could get behind; but I’m not sure about most), but more than that, this doesn’t seem to leave much room for the idea that a text might shape the way people who read it respond. Surely it is also the case that for most texts, one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest, in either a positive or a negative way. There is a threshold, I think, beyond which reading a text from any particular perspective becomes an act of creation in itself, rather than a useful response to the text; where any given person draws that threshold will vary, but it seems an inevitable limitation of single-perspective criticism.

So I think that limitation has to be put on the other side of the scales to a super-reader’s presumed blandness and superficiality — except, I’m not sure what Barry actually means by those terms, here. The most sensible reading I can come up with is that it comes from what he discusses in his personal opinion paragraph, namely motivation: it’s impossible for anyone to truly care about all these different perspectives at the same time, says Barry, so attempts to accomodate them will of necessity be artificial. There is an extent to which I agree with this (or at least am anxious about it; see below), but I think I disagree with it much more. If nothing else, it’s a position that presumes these different perspectives are indeed separable, and it seems to me that’s only possible in an — pardon me — academic sense. In the real world, and by extension in sufficiently complex texts, they’re going to be interlinked. Parsing them separately has value, but taking that so far as to declare them islands seems damaging.

And then we come down to the nub of it, which is to say Barry’s argument for his position. “A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstance.” What is genuine, here? This gets personal: for each of the four perspectives Barry lists in his first paragraph, I fall at the “privilege” end of the spectrum (as, indeed, I do for just about any axis of privilege you care to define). That establishes the terms of my engagement with any of them and, clearly, those terms are never going to be the same as they are for individuals at the other ends. In a real sense, that’s going to limit the depth of my understanding. By the same token, however, the implication is that whenever I do try to adopt one of these perspectives, I will, precisely, be putting it on like a suit; and that my interest can never be “genuine”. Which rather leads you to wonder, why bother?

And the inevitable answer to that is, because I like to think I care. That no one of these critical perspectives seems to declare itself to me with particular urgency — or, put another way, that it costs me nothing to see them as all urgent — is certainly a luxury. I’d like to think it’s a luxury I can take advantage of, though. “Multiple layers of sympathy and awareness” doesn’t seem like a bad thing for me to aspire to, nor does it seem inherently unattainable (though a perfectly even spread of concern surely is). I’d go so far as to say, acknowledging this is as biased a way of putting it as “super-reader”, that to me, right now, it seems the responsible thing to do.

Hugo Discussion Schedule: Best Novelette

Following on from Liz’s post, I’m not attending Eastercon this year. I’ll no doubt be tracking some of the online shennanigans over the weekend, including virtual panel discussions that should be happening at Maureen’s place, but I’m going to be spending most of my time (a) watching TV, (b) catching up on reading, (c) catching up on editing, and (d) catching up on my own review-writing. And as part of (b), I’ll be reading the first of the Hugo-nominated novelettes, with the intent of posting about it on Sunday. I’m going to be following the alphabetical-by-title order on the Anticipation website, which means first up is …

“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)

And for those who want to play along at home, the subsequent schedule — one discussion a week, on Sunday afternoon — should look like this:

19 April: “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
26 April: “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
3 May: “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
10 May: “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)

Eastercon LX

The full programme for Eastercon LX is now available, both as a PDF, and as a Google calendar for those living in the future (available as HTML, or use the XML to subscribe to it on your phone/RSS reader.)

For those of you who will be there, you can find me on the following panels:
Making the most of your Eastercon, Friday 15:30
New SF for Old, Saturday 20:00
BSFA Focus: Jo Walton, Saturday 21:00
Hugos for Fans, Monday 12:30

I’ll also be at the BSFA Awards (Saturday 18:00), and generally around all weekend in programming and in the bar. Come up and say hi.

For those of you who are not attending, there are a few ways to follow the con online. It looks like wireless at the hotel will be expensive, but inevitably there will be Twittering – try following the Eastercon twitter, or watching the #eastercon tag. (I will be twittering away as usual.) Look for photos on Flickr tagged with “eastercon” or “LX2009”, I’ll try and upload a few if I can find internet access. Following the success of the live streaming at Corflu, there are also plans afoot to stream some of the panels and events live from LX – check out the Virtual Tucker Hotel site for more details as they finalise the schedule.

BSFA Awards Voting — Final Reminder

Yes, for those not attending Eastercon, today is the day to get your votes in. Those who are attending Eastercon can vote now if you want, or can vote at the convention itself.

As a reminder:

And here’s what you do: send your votes (nominees ranked in order of preference) and your BSFA or Eastercon membership number to awards at bsfa.co.uk by the end of the day. Easy.

Oh, and a service announcement: something’s gone wrong with the BSFA website, such that it seems to be crashing peoples’ browsers when they visit. So you might want to avoid it for a couple of days. I’ll post another announcement when it’s fixed.

BSFA nominee: “Little Lost Robot”

And last but not least (yes, I know I got my order mixed up), we have Paul McAuley’s “Little Lost Robot”: read here [pdf] or listen here. The roundup:
Martin Lewis:

This is very much the winner by default. There is nothing massively interesting about it – a giant robot flies around the universe exterminating humanity before being confronted by its origins – but at least it isn’t completely bloodless. The stories by Chiang and Rickert are icily perfect and pointless, the story by Egan could have done with being a bit more abstract, out of all of them only McAuley is having fun and being serious at the same time.

David Hebblethwaite at The Fix:

In his notes on “Little Lost Robot,” Paul McAuley says he was aiming to subvert the usual template of the killer-robot story by telling the tale from the viewpoint of the machine. So, here we have a “superbad big space robot” dedicated to roaming the universe and destroying all life. It’s nigh-on invincible—so good at its job, in fact, that it’s running out of targets. The robot is keen, therefore, to chase after a new signal it picks up far away, even though it seems naggingly familiar for some reason. By the time the robot arrives, the signal is gone, but then the machine notices an apparent infiltration into its own programming, and then…

As may be anticipated, this story is rather dense with information; it’s a mark of McAuley’s skill that the tale drags so little. The beginning is especially striking, as the author weaves language evocative of space opera movies (”Sooner or later it’ll be coming to the star next door to you, and it will rock your world”) into prose of a more literary style, which has the effect of anchoring this impossible creation into the fictional reality—it’s an aid to suspending disbelief. As for the rest, good prose can only take “Little Lost Robot” so far; its ultimate success depends on its ideas. And, though the ideas were interesting enough whilst I was reading the story, sadly I didn’t find them striking enough to think about them much afterwards.

James Bloomer:

Paul McAuley has written novels and stories that I love, Fairyland and Gene Wars are both stories that I often think about. And I really enjoyed this story too. Little Lost Robot starts with fun big robot prose. Boy’s toys stuff perhaps. I loved it. A quick quote from the opening:

“Sooner or later it’ll be coming to the star next door to you, and it will rock your world.”

Nice. The story is fast, fun and entertaining and yet ends on a thoughtful note, suddenly casting the story in a different light. With a chunk of hard science thrown in too. Great stuff. My favourite of the nominees.

Karen Burnham:

Paul McAuley’s “Little Lost Robot” is just about the Exact Opposite of the Asimov story he references in the title. Asimov’s lost robot was simply a man-sized robot trying to get away with something, trying to escape. McAuley’s is a planet-sized solar-system-killing war machine… that finds itself with not much left to kill. It finds its way to a solar system and has a conversation with what may be a remnant of humanity. McAuley has done an interesting thing in giving the “robot” four distinct functional avatars: Librarian, Philosopher, Navigator and Tactician. However, the Philosopher got damaged somewhere along the way, and that lack gives and extra frisson of tension to the story.

Lois Tilton:

A superbad big space robot, bigger than an asteroid, smaller than a moon. A self-aware, heavily-armed killer machine on a mission of no return, seeking out the enemy wherever the enemy may be hiding and destroying every last trace of the motherfuckers. It’s a midnight rambler.

But after wiping out all traces of life in this side of the galactic disc, it has run out of targets. Driven by its prime directive, it sends out radio telescopes to search for any signs of life elsewhere. But it is not prepared for what it encounters.

McAuley is clearly re-imagining the sort of autonomous killer machines epitomized by Saberhagen’s Berserkers. But this encounter seems rather anticlimactic and lacking conflict, after all that has gone before.

And my original thoughts:

This is a fun story on several levels. For starters, it’s about an immense civilization-killing robot, travelling from solar system to solar system, carrying out a prime directive to wipe out The Enemy, which basically seems to be any organic life. It’s not hugely pyrotechnic, but there is a sense of intoxicating power hanging over the story. The style is rather droll; the robot is described simply as “the big space robot”, and the narrator says things like, “Sooner or later it’ll be coming to the star next door to you and it will rock your world”. And although the dilemma that ultimately faces the robot – it uncovers evidence that it may be about to destroy the civilization that birthed it; can said evidence be trusted? – is familiar, McAuley finds an angle on the dilemma, and a resolution, that feel fresh. It’s big, clever fun in five pages.

So perhaps the most varied reception of any of the nominees — to which, of course, you are invited to add your thoughts. And, since this is the last of the four nominees, feel free to give your opinion on the shortlist as a whole …

BSFA nominee: “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment”

Or to give it its full title, “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account”, also now nominated for a Stoker Award. You know the drill by now — read (or listen), survey the opinions collected below, then give your own. First up, Nader Elhefnawy in The Fix:

M. Rickert’s “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” is written from the point of view of a girl whose mother has “disappeared” in a theocratic future America reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It is, however, not a simple redo of that earlier story, and if anything, this piece struck me as being creepier than Atwood’s book, partly because of the use of the perspective of a child who has never known any other world; and partly because of Rickert’s subtler worldbuilding (though admittedly, it also has the advantage of being more recent, enabling it to exploit more immediate sources of anxiety). While there certainly are politics here, Rickert succeeds in crafting a very personal (and devastating) tale.

Lois Tilton:

A dystopian vision of how it would be to live in such a country, with Taliban-style public executions in football stadiums. The narrator is a young girl whose mother has fled to avoid execution for an earlier abortion, and she wrestles with her conflicted feelings, missing her mother and hating her for the stigma her actions have inflicted on her family.

With the example of the Taliban before us, no one can really say anymore: This couldn’t happen. Yet it is up to the author to convince us that it could have actually happened, or at least to willingly suspend disbelief and enter into the mutual pact between author and reader in which we accept the scenario for the sake of the message the story is meant to deliver. The problem with such fiction, however, is that the Message can outweigh the story, and I think that in this case it has done so, going too close to the line between chilling and absurd.

Abigail Nussbaum:

More disappointing is M. Rickert’s “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account,” but then I expect a great deal from Rickert, who has a knack for combining present day events with SFnal speculation and a possibly unhealthy dollop of cynicism about human nature. She does all that here, imagining a world in which abortion has been made retroactively punishable by death, and in which women are rounded up by the hundreds and thousands to pay for abortions performed years or even decades ago. As the title indicates, the story is narrated by the daughter of one of these condemned women, who has fled rather than face her punishment, to her family’s everlasting shame. It’s an effective piece, as, indeed, how could it help being? Mass executions! Gross miscarriages of justice! Institutionalized misogyny! Young women brainwashed into a Handmaid’s Tale-esque attitude of seeing themselves as nothing but walking wombs! It is also, however, shamelessly manipulative and unsubtle, a piece aimed only at people who agree with its politics, and one which encourages them to sneer rather than think.

James Bloomer:

This story is a harrowing extrapolation what might happen if fundamentalist anti-abortion laws are pursued. It reminded me of The Handmaiden’s Tale or The Carhullan Army. It’s undoubtedly designed as a warning to US citizens and the right wing religious tendencies. The extrapolation is taken to a horrible future conclusion. It’s emotional and well written, but it’s hard to love a story that makes me feel like that. You should read it, but it isn’t fun.

Michael J DeLuca:

Mary Rickert, as far as I’m aware, is incapable of writing a less than phenomenal story. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” freaked me the hell out. A totalitarian future USA in which abortion is not only illegal, but punishable by death. Profoundly unsettling. Somebody should give this lady a Tiptree.

Russ Allberry:

This is one of the creepiest stories that I’ve ever read. It’s set in a nasty 1984-style dystopia built by fundamentalists around the punishment of anyone who has gotten an abortion. Both the effectiveness and the terrifying creepiness are hightened by a thoroughly brainwashed first-person narrator who believes every word of it. Rickert pulls no punches in portraying the anti-abortion horror show, complete with execution of women as mass spectacle. Like all dystopias, it’s an extrapolation of a position to extremes that probably would never occur, but I found it chillingly effective. I’m not sure I really wanted to read it, though. (6)

Martin Lewis:

Like ‘Exhalation’ it is a well executed take on an extremely unlikely and not very interesting idea. The only thing that bumps it up over Chiang and Egan is that contains characters who are recognisably human. Niall Harrison has a typically lengthy, articulate and wrong review. God knows how he managed to write for so long about a story that, as others have pointed out, is like a modern version ‘The Lottery’ by Shelley Jackson. That isn’t a good thing, by the way.

As Martin points out, I actually already wrote about this one at some length. Can I possibly have anything left to say?

Heroes Revisited

I was pointed at this interview earlier this morning, in which Bryan Fuller explains what he wanted to achieve with his return to Heroes:

I just really wanted to get everything back to a character base. I think character was shoved aside for plot. The second year with the virus was interesting, but then it got complicated and techno-babbly. With “Villains,” it started out interesting and then became about formula. When they started talking about how we were injected with our powers and it became sci-fi ghetto storytelling, I became disconnected. Mohinder went from a noble scientist to being a mad scientist with Jeff Goldblum hair and wardrobe. Claire became so strident and unlikable because she was just whining, bitching and holding a gun. I was just concerned the wheel had been jerked so sharply in the wrong direction with what had worked about the first season, which was ordinary people with extraordinary powers. Everything ordinary about their lives went out the window, and everything was extraordinary. That was my frustration.

Funnily enough, much as I would usually object to generalizations about “sci-fi ghetto storytelling”, in this case, if I assume Fuller is using the term in the sense I would use it in — to denote lurid, sensationalist storytelling, which goes for cheap manipulation and spectacle over character consistency or logic — then I actually agree with him. “It got complicated and techno-babbly”; “Everything ordinary about their lives went out the window”; these things are true, are they not? Heroes‘ third volume, “Villains”, was bad, and those are some of the big reasons why. Not that complicated, extraordinary stories are bad in themselves, but that Heroes didn’t manage to tell those stories well, ending up with dumb and/or outright offensive stories. Now, if Fuller’s using “sci-fi ghetto” to denote all science fiction, it’s annoying, but at face value, I’m OK with it. (If he’s got previous, and has said something silly like, I don’t know, Pushing Daisies isn’t really a fantasy, it’s a human story, then don’t tell me.)

But then, I’m very nearly at the point of being won back over by Heroes, so I’m inclined to cut Fuller some slack. Yesterday evening I got myself caught up to the most recent episode, “Into Asylum”, which is the most interesting the show has been for some time; but even the early episodes of this volume, before Fuller’s re-involvement, were a step up from “Villains”. You have to accept that Heroes is not the sort of global story it once pretended to aspire to be, that it is now just about one well-off white extended family with superpowers … but at least the show is now not pretending it’s anything else, and on those terms, I’m enjoying it. More than at any time since the peak of the first season, “Fugitives” finds Heroes telling more focused, controlled stories. They’re not trying to do too much in an episode; they’re not afraid to rotate characters out for an episode; and they are, slowly, getting the characters back to comprehensible relationships.

They fixed Peter! Narratively, I mean, though I’m also finding him somewhat less annoying than he used to be. And it’s a really good fix, too, that keeps the core of the character and his ability without letting him dominate the proceedings. It’s a shame they didn’t come up with it immediately after the end of the first season; it would even have made some sense as a reaction to going all ‘splodey. Similarly, Sylar is largely enjoyable to watch again, particularly now that he’s — at last — got past his family issues. (I assume the Smallville crossover fic has already been written, yes?) I’d be concerned that the latest power they’ve had him acquire makes him too powerful, if (a) he weren’t vain enough that it’s entirely plausible he won’t use it that much, (b) it’s not actually an easy power to use, and (c) the power itself, and the mutant of the week he acquired it from, weren’t such a perfect metaphor for what I take to be the recurring arc in this volume, which is redefinition.

That is to say: they keep giving characters really quite good scenes, or at least scenes whose heart is in the right place, in which they are asked who they really are, or what they stand for, or are given an opportunity to choose. Claire in the comic book store in “Cold Snap” (though that is otherwise a very weird scene which seems out of place in the larger arc), Claire talking to Nathan in “Into Asylum”, Sylar and his dad in “Shades of Gray”, Peter and Angela in the church in “Into Asylum”, to an extent powerless Hiro. I think Claire’s arc has probably been the standout in this volume so far, in that she’s actually getting to move on in ways the other volumes promised and then reset. There could be another reset coming, of course, but it’s hard to see how, particularly when it comes to, say, her relationship with her mother as it was developed in “Exposed” (and, I have to say, Mrs Bennett really got to shine in that episode). The character conflicts also make more sense: I thought “Cold Wars” was a very solid piece of television largely because I actually believed the arguments between Peter, Matt and Mohinder.

And they’re back to having actually cool and satisfying plot twists and set-pieces, ones that feel like integrated, natural developments, rather than throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Tracy and the sprinklers was awesome. Rebel’s identity was double-awesome. Having the puppeteer turn up on Claire’s doorstep was a really good idea, and made me forgive the predictable nature of her plot in “Exposure”. Matt and Daphne’s final scenes, even, were pretty good. Hiro and Ando, sadly and frustratingly, remain the weak link. The introduction of baby touch-and-go had me rolling my eyes, because it was obvious where it was going, and yet another in a series of storylines that position Hiro and Ando as the comic relief, when all anybody wants to see is Hiro actually being a hero. But even within those scenes there were some good, solid character moments — Hiro telling Ando about his mother — and cute moments — Hiro talking to the baby won me over, particularly when he tried to teach it “Yatta!” — and I’m glad the baby’s power was only partially effective on Hiro. It’s also true that Ando’s development has been more successful than I feared; the India subplot in “Building 26” gave him some good material, and maybe eventually we’ll get something more like an equal partnership between the two of them.

There are, of course, still plenty of flaws; there’s inevitably something in each episode that I find unconvincing or poorly thought-through. It’s probably still more of a failure than a success, in fact, but at least now it’s an interesting failure again, and those fascinate me. It takes a lot to make me give up on a TV show — in recent times, only Lost has managed it that I can think of — but rarely do I feel that I’ve gained anything by sticking with a show that’s declined. Heroes may turn out to be one of the exceptions.