Year: 2009

Short Story Club: “Oh He Is”

We start the discussion of this week’s story with Lois Tilton’s comments:

Strangely unsettling tale of enchantment and jealousy. The tone is sufficiently surreal that it doesn’t seem too strange to see the enchanted children kept in storefronts, that they seem to have no parents, that there seem to be no other adults in the town but Walter, Fleur and Nina. But it’s not quite enough to keep me from wondering why the piper abandoned the children in the first place, which leads to a whole lot of wondering about other matters. Are there other flocks of children on the hilltops outside other towns?

Commenters on the story liked it:

R.J. Isle Burroughs said: Brilliant. Haunting. Beautifully told.

Liz Catalano said: Mesmerizing. I was impressed with how the tone of the story mimicked the theme… drawing you on and in (although not, I have to say, against my will!!). Well done, Karen.

Martin didn’t care for it:

When, at the conclusion of the story, the piper is strangled, “his face flew from scorn to pity to lust.” Even in a fable I find this an unlikely series of facial emotions for someone being murdered. His murderer then “built a cottage next to him and planted herbs and spices at the head and foot of his coffin, starting with lavender, thyme, anise, lemon and rue.” Leaving aside the fact lemon is not a herb (lemon balm is), Heuler is again relying not on the precision of her prose but on an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.

‘Oh He Is’ is one of those stories which requires its world to be unpopulated. The three characters who live in the town appear to be the only residents and they are allowed to play out their little drama in isolation. This betrays a lack of interest in the world Heuler has created; how it fits together, how it came to be, how it might really smell. Into this void she simply throws anything she thinks might stick.

Neither did Maureen:

The ending, with Piers’ body incarcerated in a glass-lidded coffin, reminds one of Snow White, and the cottage built next to the coffin, heads off into fairytale realms, but to what purpose? And that is the problem I have with this story. What is its purpose? I don’t want to be grimly utilitarian about the uses of fiction, but I see no developing argument in this story at all. There are nice images, images that don’t work, there are fragments of story that sometimes vaguely link up, but I do not believe this is a postmodern fairytale so much as someone striving for effect, it not being entirely clear what that effect is. Of all of the stories so far, this is, I think, the one I like least, because it tries so hard and delivers so comparatively little.

And green_knight in the comments there:

This is a writer who fails at the very basic level of _writing coherent sentences_. And she’s overfond of ‘there was.’ Considering how often we writers are told that there’s a fierce competition for very few publishing slots out there, I’m kind of completely baffled at the thought that this made anyone want to acquire it. Reading her biography, I see that she’s doing reasonably well, which puzzles me, because for me there are fundamental things missing from this story; it fails in ways that I cannot get past.

See also Heuler’s own comments on her story in this interview.

Two Quotes About Criticism

L. Timmel Duchamp posts extracts from Brian Attebery’s Pilgrim Award acceptance speech:

My third discovery about writing is that it only works when I force myself to ask the hard questions. That’s especially true when writing about something I care deeply about– passion has to be tempered and tested by critical thought. Otherwise it does become a mere exercise in political or aesthetic orthodoxy (and I think aesthetic correctness is more harmful than the political variety). When I look back at my early papers…the problem is not that they’re badly written or that they misread the material. It is that they don’t probe deeply enough into their own–which is to say, my own–assumptions and reading practices. I didn’t ask hard enough questions.

But what exactly is a hard question?

Well, that one is.

I believe that when we study literature, we are never studying just the literary work itself. Instead, we’re examining our own interaction with the text. That is difficult because it means bringing to consciousness the very structure of consciousness, which is the business of theory. Psychological theory, political theory, feminist theory, semiotic theory: these all have to do with making the invisible patterns of thought and culture more visible, so that they can be challenged.

And (unrelatedly) Andrew Wheeler quotes WH Auden:

“One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”

Writing About Europa

Paul McAuley, The Quiet War (2008):

It took Sri and Alder more than a day to reach him, travelling in stages down a series of elevator shafts, a vertical journey that on Earth would have taken them to the edge of the discontinuity where the continental plates rafted on molten lava. On Europa, it delivered them to a canyon cut into the underside of the ice and filled with air. Huge biome chambers had been excavated on either side of the canyon, and its walls were hung with tiers of platforms gardened with alpine meadows and dwarf pines and furs, jutting out above a silverly halflife membrane that flexed and undulated with the heavy wash of currents beneath. Despite the elaborate seals along the edges of the membrane, a faint curdled-egg odour of hydrogen sulphide leaked in from the anoxic ocean, and although chains of sunlamps brightened the air and panels of ice were tinted with bright, cheerful colours, it was very cold. The older citizens wore long fake-fur coats and tall fake-fur hats, and many of the younger citizens had been cut to give them thick, lustrous coats of fine hair and insulating layers of fat — seal-people with human faces and human hands and feet, clad only in shorts and many-pocketed vests. (125)

Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream (2009):

To one side of the white towers, an arc of pale aquamarine appeared across the whiteness. The stranger led him to this arc, which proved to be a broad rampway cut into the ice, dropping at a very slight angle, down to where it cut under an arch or doorway into a long wide chamber.

They descended; the chamber under the ice roof had broad white doors, like white gates. At the bottom of the ramp they waited before these. Then the gates went transparent, and a group of people dressed in blouses and pantaloons of Jovian hues stood before them, in what seemed a kind of vestibule. The stranger touched Galileo lightly on the back of the arm, led him into this antechamber. They passed under another arch. The group fell in behind them without a word. Their faces appeared to be old but young. The space of the room made a gentle curve to the left, and beyond that they came to a kind of overlook, with broad steps descending before them. From here they could see an entire cavern city stretching to the near horizon, all of it tinted a greenish blue, under a high ceiling of opaque ice of the same colour. The light was subdued, but more than enough to see by; it was quite a bit brighter than the light of the full moon on Earth. A hum or distant roar filled his ears. (51-2)

I’m working on a review of Galileo’s Dream at the moment, and posting these here because I probably can’t justify including two quotes this long, certainly not when one of them isn’t even from the book at hand. But I’m fascinated by them, and how differently they describe what is essentially the same thing — a traveller arriving in an under-ice city on Europa; how they get down, the quality of the space they find themselves in, the nature of the people there. The difference, of course, is the viewpoint character. Both are scientists, but Sri is native to the time, and knows what she’s looking at, whereas Galileo has been whisked forward hundreds of years, and doesn’t. I can’t help feeling you shouldn’t be able to get away with the second one in a work of twenty-first century sf — it’s a tour of utopia (except it’s not utopia); how quaint! — and yet in a sense it works because it’s a work of twenty-first century sf, because we can sense (or impose, if you don’t believe Robinson did the research) the detail beneath the surface that Galileo sees.

Out of interest, which do you prefer?

Short Story Club: “The Slows”

Unfortunately, I have run out of time today — I’m rushing out the door to catch a train to catch a flight — so you don’t get a round-up of quotes this week. Just another link to the story, “The Slows” by Gail Hareven, and instructions to have at it! I’ll check in again this evening, hopefully.

UPDATE: OK, here we go.

Maureen:

This is a very dense story. There’s a lot going on in it anyway, and a lot more if one chooses to read it against Brave New World. It’s not a story to love, not because it’s a badly constructed story but because it is difficult and complex and unpleasant. It’s a rich story which can be read in a number of different ways, and that is something I do like.

Chance:

The story fails as a science fictional one – the worldbuilding is paper thin and the story never engages with the consequences of accelerated growth and the ensuing population explosion and cultural shifts except in a most cursory manner. Nor does it lead the reader to engage with the question about how minority populations are treated because the narrator’s perspective is so obnoxious and closed-minded that it’s easy to dismiss him without thought.

Instead, it works best as a horror story in the vein of Lovecraft where the narrator has been confronted with something unknowable and viscerally repulsive to him and as a result he cracks and commits a horrific act that he can’t reconcile with his supposedly superior nature.

Big Dumb Object (with bonus comment on the previous two stories):

The revulsion of the post-humans to small children is a good idea and shown nicely to begin with, tediously by the end. There’s some emotion in there, but it stays on one note – don’t take my child away – and never moves beyond that, consequently leaving me feeling a bit flat by the end, rather than moved.

Overall The Slows felt like a great SF idea needing a story, instead of just a conversation investigating that idea.

Perpetual Folly:

A bit of allegory is it? The problem with allegory often is that you can make it mean whatever you want it to. So, I pick a political interpretation. Obviously, the Slows are the Conservatives/Republicans. They think they are preserving the old ways, but they are really just standing in the way of progress. And the Accelerateds are Progressives/Democrats, who are on the verge of eliminating the last of the Slows. Total domination. (There is that nagging bit bout an outbreak of Slow behavior in the colonies, but maybe that’s just the suggestion that backwardness, like polio, cannot truly be eradicated.) Or something. (Of course the author isn’t American, she’s Israeli, and so I’m almost certainly wrong. So then, what’s it about?)

Slouching Towards Bushwick:

He ends the story with an explicit lie, the final denial. After she “spat out” “Don’t touch me!” he says, “No one’s touching you” in a deluded and defensive tone, emphasizing the levels of denial that his society foists on him: denial of physical experiences and truth-telling. Not only has he just touched her but the guards are on their way. But her vision of him as a sexual creature immediately eradicates his sympathy for her. If his superior sense of self as a person without needs, emotionality, and desires is threatened, he shuts down, loses composure, and hastens the immolation of something he values.

Hareven characterizes a person in power with wavering, not depraved, morality. The quality of his disdain, empathy, and repulsion is fleshed out, explicitly contradictory, hard to pin. “Why do you hate us so?” she asks. He gives a brief explanation to the reader, a “key to understanding the Slows’ culture” that does not consider the culture on its own terms but, of course, compares it to the dominant culture. Although her physical territory is threatened at the level of her body and geography, the researcher is isolated. He replies to her, “Hate? Hate is a strong word.”

Lois Tilton at IROSF:

This is the sort of thing that typically happens when a mainstream author gets hold of a SFnal idea. The idea absorbs the narrative at the expense of the story. [Admittedly, this sad result is hardly uncommon in the case of genre authors, as well.] The premise is not without interest, though unoriginal, but it is not well thought through in this case. It seems that the acceleration process does more than speed up growth, it eliminates certain obsolete physical features such as mammary glands. Yet this process is apparently only initiated after birth, which, as far as the text suggests, is accomplished in the same primitive fashion it is now. This is hardly reasonable—who would continue a grotesque and cumbersome nine-month pregnancy when you could instead begin acceleration at conception? The author also suggests that their primitive biology is causing the Slows to die out because they rarely produce more than four offspring. The historical rate of human population growth suggests that this notion is mistaken. But if the accelerated population is still stuck with a 9-month pregnancy, they’re not going to be accelerating all that much, even if women are stuck in a continual lifelong process of gestation. I don’t call this progress, even if we are rid of diapers.

As for the story, such as it is, we have an unsubtle moral message: readers are meant to be revolted by the narrator’s revulsion at the normal state of childhood, at the bonds of love between mother and dependent child. I would not quite call it a political screed advocating breast-feeding, but it serves the purpose.

Some discussion on LJ here; the story scores null points in this New Yorker fiction scoring system; and two members of NESFA commend it to your consideration for Hugo nominations.

Also, wow:

In my book, to the extent that a story is “thought-provoking” — and “The Slows” is certainly that — it cannot be good adult fiction. Only last week, The New Yorker published a story, “Vast Hell,” of incomparably deeper political significance, but the significance is rich because it cannot be reduced to a political decision. In “Vast Hell,” townsmen discover some graves of “the disappeared,” victims of a very bad spell in Argentinian history. The story is about the townsmen, however, and not about the desaparecidos. Guillermo Martínez’s fiction does not teach the reader anything; rather, it kindles a host of synesthetic responses in the mind that recreate, to the extent that the reader is attentive and imaginative, the complexity of making a ghastly discovery that one had been dead set on not making.

“The Slows” is an excellent story for younger readers who are beginning to learn not to read literally: it will kindle outrage. I mean that in earnest and without snark of any kind. There is nothing concealed in my conviction that science fiction has no place in The New Yorker — or in any magazine that I read regularly.

(“Vast Hell”, if you’re interested, can be found here.)

London Meeting: Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer

The guests at tonight’s BSFA London meeting are Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer, editors of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Banana Wings. They will be interviewed by Tony Keen.

The venue is the upstairs room of The Antelope, 22 Eaton Terrace, London, SW1W 8EZ. The closest tube station is Sloane Square, and a map is here.

As usual, there will be people in the bar from 6-ish, with the interview starting at 7. (I’m going, this month! Though I probably will not arrive until just before 7.) The meeting is free, and open to any and all, though there will be a raffle with a selection of sf books as prizes.

Short Story Club: “The Puma”

Theodora Goss’s story is here. We start our round-up of comment with Kimberley Lundstrom for The Fix:

“The Puma” by Theodora Goss is an interesting take on H.G. Wells’ classic The Island of Dr. Moreau. In Goss’ version, Edward Prendick’s post-island seclusion in the English countryside is interrupted by Catherine, a distinctly feline woman who calls herself Mrs. Prendick. Edward is struck by her beauty, the scars now erased from the face of the Puma Woman who killed Moraeu. Her presence releases a flood of memories for him: of the island, of Moreau, Montgomery, the Beast Men, of the fire and of subsequent actions of his own he would like to forget. But Catherine has come not only to reminisce — she has a favor she would ask, a favor she knows he cannot refuse.

This story is fascinating and well-wrought, flowing smoothly from a conversation between a civilized lady and gentleman in an English garden to the savagery of men and beasts on the island, and back again. Alive with sensory detail, gripping tension, and social commentary, “The Puma” is an engrossing story in its own right as well as a fitting homage to Wells’ novel.

Lois Tilton at IROSF:

A derivative work tends to assume that readers are familiar with the original. Given this, I find that the Puma repeats rather too much of the events on the island, even if they are not quite the same events as in the book. This is otherwise a rather unsettling evocation of the original tale, suggesting that the consequences of evil continue to propagate long before the original evildoer is gone.

Jasminembla:

Read ‘The Puma‘ today at Apex Magazine and really liked the delicate diction, very controlled plotting and neatly researched background. Almost like a fable, with lovely touches of inventive horror and mysterious revenge. So Chabon, ‘influence is bliss.’

Michele Lee:

“The Puma” is a continuation of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, in which Catherine, the puma-woman, tracks down Edward Prendick with a request. One might even say a demand. Goss’ prose is seamless, capturing a deeper meaning of the original story that hints at our own future.

Maureen’s thoughts:

My feelings towards this story are ambivalent. It’s an interesting story, a thought-provoking story, and I think it does interrogate the original novel in useful ways. Certainly, it’s a rich story in terms of topics for discussion, and that can’t be bad. On that level, I’m glad to have read it, to have been prompted to read The Island of Doctor Moreau, and to start thinking more deeply about it. But my ‘entertainment’ … I suppose one should call it that … has come as much from the greater project as from the story on its own. However one addresses a story there surely needs to be, at some point, an umami moment, a moment of just knowing that it’s right, without having to analyse it, and I’m just not getting that from this story. (Of the five I’ve now read for this exercise, the Chris Adrian comes closest, but I’m having a similar struggle with the contents of the latest Dozois Best of Year.) Is it me as a reader that is at fault, jaded as my palate appears to be, or are writers just not pushing far enough? I don’t know, but it’s frustrating.

Rich Horton listed it as a recommended story in the May Locus, but didn’t offer any analysis. A few supplementary links that may or may not be of interest: Goss on the circumstances of the writing of the story; Mark at Dinosaur Blues suggests that it make’s an interesting counterpoint to Jeffrey Ford’s “After Moreau“, and by way of an editorial for the relevant issue of Apex, Sarah Brandel has an essay on “Beast Men and the Human Animal“, discussing both Goss’s story and Ekaterina Sedia’s “The Mind of a Pig“. So a few hooks for discussion there, perhaps. The floor is open.

Where’s the sf?

Well, this is fun. Kim Stanley Robinson sayeth of sf:

The result is the best British literature of our time. Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I’ve heard of it even in California – supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year – but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels.

Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn’t read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

I note (a) that Life could not have won, alas, since it has not yet been published in the UK; and (b) that I really should get around to reading Yellow Blue Tibia. More usefully and proactively, the Guardian has put the issue to this year’s Booker judges. Quoth the chair of judges:

James Naughtie admitted that Robinson “may well have a point”, but suggested that “perhaps his arrows could be directed even more towards publishers than to judges”.

“There has always been a debate about whether the prize is sufficiently sensitive to all the forms of contemporary writing. He may well have a point,” he said. “We judge books that are submitted. The fact is that the science fiction component this year was very, very thin. If it is the best contemporary fiction in this country then most publishers haven’t yet tumbled to the fact.”

He said that judges had, collectively, been “disappointed at the way ‘the new’ was represented” in this year’s submissions, but said that “the idea that historical fiction is fusty is absurd”. “Our shortlist speaks to us about things around us, from whenever and wherever the books are set,” he said.

And John Mullan:

According to Mullan there was “essentially no” science fiction submitted for this year’s Booker prize, apart from Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, set in a dystopian future, which failed to make the longlist. “We as judges depend a great deal on what publishers submit,” he said. “There are certain kinds of genre fiction which get submitted – thrillers and detective books – which publishers think have literary quality, but this year I find it hard to think of any science fiction which was submitted.”

Around 40 years ago, it was historical fiction which was overlooked, he said. “Thirty to 40 years ago there was Georgette Heyer and it was generally speaking a fairly derided genre, whose standing was rather lower than science fiction where you had John Wyndham. Yet historical fiction has escaped the bodice ripper, so everyone does it,” he said, rejecting Robinson’s claim that historical novels “tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways” and “are not about now”.

“That’s absolute bullshit,” he said. “Of course historical novels can be like that, but really it is not to do with being a historical novel.”

To be pedantic, Robinson didn’t say historical novels aren’t about now, he said they aren’t about now in the way science fiction is. Though of course whether you apply a value judgement to that difference, and if so what judgement you apply, will differ from person to person.

But I have wondered, before, whether sf writers get submitted for the Booker. If I understand the rules correctly, publishers get two titles per imprint, so it doesn’t seem like (in most cases) they’d be using up slots by submitting sf; just getting extra slots, in effect. Of course, I may not understand the rules correctly. Ultimately, this is just one more reason why it would be nice to see a list of what’s submitted for the Booker prize in any given year.