Author: Niall

Short Story Club: “Trembling Blue Stars”

… which can be found here. On with the comment. James over at Big Dumb Object says:

It’s probably a story which is divides readers depending on their taste for the style, but it was my kind of thing. Stylish, cool and with a surprising upward lurch of emotion at the end.

Cory Doctorow also liked it, as did someone at the Asimov’s forum, and it gets a positive mention from Thomas Eaves here. Lois Tilton described it as “a sad story“. Martin is less keen:

There is an overpowering whiff of girl cooties to the story. Arkadi has fled his relationship for space and it turns out space is no place for girls. “You can’t blame me for that. There are basic biological incompatibilities between female neurochemistry and the guests.” This, as Valentina points out, is very convenient. She does get her shots in but she on the whole she is portrayed as desperate, pathetic and unable to define herself except against Arkadi. The final section of story is a race to see just how much she will debase herself to try and win him back: “Take me with you. I don’t need much. I’ll be your rabbit. Give me lettuce and water and rub my ears every now and then.” Arkadi, augmented by the emotional detachment of his guest (a “meat puppet run by a space monster”), spurns her again and considers this an act of kindness.

And Maureen is ambivalent:

Is it a good story? I’m not sure. If it were a typeface, it would be sensible, solid, readable Helvetica, as set against last week’s story, which would be some half-illegible, fancy display font. The prose seems clean and spare by comparison, but the story seems empty, devoid, but not performatively devoid, as if reflecting Arkadi’s emptiness. Lack, then, rather than emptiness. It feels at times as though it’s reaching for effect, and for a nostalgic effect at that. Aviator sunglasses, Gauloises, espresso, delivering supplies in the Oort Cloud; the whole thing reeks of the past, in terms of sf and film imagery. All very noirish. And indeed the story itself seems to belong to a past era of short stories. I read a lot of material like this in the late 1980s but now it seems anachronistic. Beyond that, Kadrey seems to be setting up the discussion points, but the story ends before anything happens, and one isn’t left in a position to imagine what might happen. I don’t dislike it, but I don’t love it either, and this week I am extremely keen to see what others make of it.

So: what did you make of it?

Tonight, on Newsnight Review …

… Kevin Smith vs Jeanette Winterson! Or put another way, a “cult fiction special“, asking (the site says), “Is cult now mainstream?”, “Have the geeks inherited the earth?”, and “Is science fiction writing still in the ghetto?” Hmmm.

UPDATE: Well, you can watch it (if you’re in the UK), here. Unlike some I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as it could have been; or rather, if you’re going to choose And Another Thing… and a Mark Millar comic as your starting points for discussion, you deserve what you get. I do agree that it would have been nice if they could bring themselves to mention the author of Yellow Blue Tibia, rather than just the title…

Buffer Overflow

Apologies for the near-total silence around these parts; work on the survey is eating up most of the brainpower not allocated to the day job, and I don’t really have anything left for the blog posts I know I want to write (such as the one about Gullstruck Island by Frances Hardinge). I keep meaning to at least pull together a links post, but (a) I don’t really have the time to do that, either, and (b) my personal fatigue seems to be translating into a more general exhaustion with the sf blogosphere, where so many discussions seem to just be re-runs.

What does still pique my interest, as ever, is discussion of specific work, so don’t fear that the short story club will fall by the wayside. (Even if, er, I failed to post my own thoughts on last week’s story. Must get round to that.) And io9 has started a book club, for which the first subject is The Quiet War. I’ve never actually tried to read a comment thread on io9 before, and hadn’t realised how ludicrous the comment-ordering system there is, but it’s interesting to see how much antipathy there is for the novel, more than you might expect from the general critical response when the book was published last year. There are many sentiments along these lines:

i agree with what so many others have said – this book was a challenge. when i saw the author’s former career listed on the inside back jacket (of course when i was finished) it all made sense – the book really reads like it was written by a research biologist.

Which is similar to the problem some had with that passage about Europa I posted the other day; though I would tend to give McAuley rather more credit for deliberateness than io9’s commenters do, I think.

Bonus fact: one of my friends recently read The Quiet War and strongly disliked it in part because she is a research biologist, and felt that McAuley’s science wasn’t up to scratch; that is, she objected to detail of lab techniques that she wouldn’t use now because cheaper and better options are available, without any explanation as to why those options might not be available in the future.

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.)