Novums Foreign and Domestic

Anyone who reads more than the bare minimum of contemporary criticism of sf, particularly academic criticism, will have come across the concept of the novum, as advanced by Darko Suvin, meaning “the central imaginative novelty in an sf text, the source of the most important distinctions between the world of the tale and the world of the reader.” That’s Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr’s gloss on the term, at any rate, in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (page 47, if you’re interested), at the start of what is the most useful discussion of the term’s origins and evolution that I’ve yet encountered. To summarize: in strict Suvinian terms, in a work of “optimal sf” novums are “validated by cognitive logic” and create a “multipoint metaphor” which “dominates” the text; the degree to which an sf text excavates the novum’s potential for this domination to create “rich and varied aesthetic effects” becomes a marker of its success or failure.

Of course, as Csicsery-Ronay Jr rightly notes, in most contemporary sf things are a bit more complicated than that. There’s plenty of sf which contains scientifically nonsensical novums validated by the merest pretense of cognitive logic and, particularly when it comes to populist science fiction, there are large audiences which do not care one jot about this, and derive science-fictional pleasures anyway. Equally, while the idea of a single shaping novum works well for a lot of sf written before, ooh, about 1960, since then the trend, and arguably the expectation, has been towards the presence of multiple interacting novums. What Csicsery-Ronay Jr calls “carnivalesque” sf – such as Fairyland (1995) or River of Gods (2004) — is often valorised as the most appropriate response to the modern world. Clearly this doesn’t mean single-novum works as envisaged by Suvin have gone extinct, nor that they can’t find their own successes — Csicsery-Ronay Jr lists the attractions of single-novum works as “intellectual intensity, elegance, and a sense of dynamic rigor that may be treated as fatality or comedy” (66). This seems fair to me, particularly when you think that the classic single-novum form is the sf short story, but the more immediate reason I like this list, and the rest of Csicsery-Ronay Jr’s discussion, is that it’s helped me to articulate my reservations and admirations for two books I’ve read recently. Both are, or can be discussed as, single-novum books, and both are – in different ways – driven by a sense of playfulness about those novums, even while being shaped by them.

That said, to deploy sf terminology in the vicinity of the first, Bernadine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots, may appear to be self-defeating, and even to risk doing violence to the text. I can use that terminology to tell you, for instance, that it’s an alternate history in which the polarity of the slave trade is inverted, and “blak” enslaves “whyte”; but as Gwyneth Jones notes in her review, Blonde Roots is very far from being a conventional alternate history. (Or, if you prefer, the nature of the reversal cannot be expressed in terms of a plausible train of cognitive logic.) The first thing you see when you open the book is a map: it depicts an Earth that could not exist, a place of transposed geography which places “Aphrika”, with the familiar outline of Africa, where our Europe is, and similarly “Europa” where our Africa is – and yet leaves a Britain-shaped island off the coast of Aphrika, known as the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa. If more confirmation that this is not alternate history in any straightforward or rigorous sense, even relative to such recent fantasies of history as Naomi Novik’s Temeraire and its sequels, is needed, it quickly becomes apparent that the climates have been swapped along with the geography — the UK of GA is on the equator, and therefore tropical, while Europa’s weather is so dour it’s known as “the grey continent”.

This, then, is the initial playfulness of Blonde Roots: it is a comedy, and it invites us to be in on its joke. It’s a good joke, and Evaristo certainly gets her money’s worth from it, often with a sting; and novum-like, the joke shapes the book’s entire reality. Underlining the above point about climate, for instance, one chapter is called “Heart of Greyness”, and features a trader visiting a contact gone native. In the great town of Londolo, in the UK of GA, we find Mayfah, “the most expensive piece of real estate in the known world”; Paddinto Station; and a literal, functional Underground Railroad. There are suburbs. CVs. Baringso Bank. “Barbae” dolls. Coasta Coffee. A Minstrel Show. On Voodoomass, it’s “business as usual” for slaves.

Within this clamour of parody, there is a familiar rock to cling to: the plot. Blonde Roots hews to what can be thought of as a template slavery story – abduction from home, years of service, attempted escape, recapture, exile to plantation, formation of community – with deliberate precision, such that the only unfamiliar element of it is the central reversal. (Gwyneth Jones’ review also points out parallels with Alex Haley’s book Roots; I haven’t read Roots, but from what I’ve gleaned it makes sense as a template.) So in Londolo we meet Doris Scagglethorpe, engaged in an escape attempt. Back home in Europa, Doris’ life was a generic Western European medieval/feudal life, freshened because explained to us, with its customs and habits, as though exotic: “Pa’s hair was the dark ginger of the folk from the Border Lands. It fell to his shoulders in spirals beneath the wide-brimmed farmer’s hat he always wore when outdoors” (10) – the sting here is that later there is a deal of stuff about the hairdressing of Europane “flyaway fine hair” (30) to achieve the twists and braids of Ambossan women, in response to which Doris notes that, “As it was their world I was living in, I had image issues, of course” (31).

Initially, Doris’ present and past are juxtaposed, with flashbacks describing her abduction and forcible bringing-to-awareness about race, and how she came to be owned by Kaga Konata Katamba I — note the initials; Doris gets branded with them. KKK is a rich slaver, working class made good, and a firm anti-abolitionist. In the middle of the Blonde Roots there are some extracts from “The Flame”, a self-regarding periodical written by Katamba arguing for the necessity and rightness of the slave trade, using all the arguments familiar from our own history (“Craniofecia Anthropetry” proves that the negroid race has a superior intellect …); and there is then a period in which Doris works on a plantation, her fall from (relative) privilege to the lowest of the low (a “field wiggar”) complete. This last is certainly the most science-fictionally interesting section of the book, because it’s where the shackles of satire start to be cast off, and Doris starts to participate in the development of a new, hybrid, slave culture. “Happy Birthday” and similar tunes are refigured as songs of Doris’ homeland; Doris starts thinking that, “Now that it was gone, I realised how much I was embedded in the past. I had to let it go because there was no future in it” (246), which is surely in part a jab at victim mentality, but also acts as confirmation of the book’s general trajectory, which makes clear that the first two sections of the book were as much about laying foundations as telling jokes. It all culminates in what looks like a happy-ish ending, swiftly undercut by a where-are-they-now, anti-consolatory postscript.

The point of it all, of course, is to demonstrate the contingency of power. The book’s epigraph, from Neitzsche, makes this point directly — “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is function of power and not truth” — and the frequent force of the following story, which sets out to disabuse everyone, black or white, of any notion of moral or practical superiority, is not to be denied. The punishments inflicted on Doris go to the bone: the abduction is on-screen, and harrowing, as are the various abuses inflicted on Doris during her captivity: the callous dumping of the dead by slavers; the naked, squalid, vicious, hungry, maggoty life in slave ships. A whipping is particularly visceral (172). Evaristo is good at finding the language for this — there are moments of emotional punchiness: “A cluster of moths crashed into each other in a tiny, heart-shaped space” (157) – and at giving Doris and Katanga a necessary awareness of language, which turns jokes to ashes. Here’s the boss on the language of the Europanes: “A language without the clicks, clucks, clacks and !tsks of normal speech sounded dreary beyond belief, more akin to the low monotonous moan of cattle than the exuberant sounds of human communication” (124).

It’s impossible to read Blonde Roots, I think, and not be uneasily aware of the cultural as well as physical costs of mass slavery: how thoroughly native culture is quashed, and how tragic, even if beautiful, its necessary mutations to survive can be. [Additional thought, March 2009: It’s the telescoping of references to the past and present into one moment, and the articulation of that telescoping through a voice that combines modern and archaic language, that really drives this message home.] And this awareness is, at least for me, enhanced by reading Blonde Roots in the context of the sf megatext. Straightforwardly, by making the inversion of slavery obviously ridiculous (as opposed to, say, the more cognitively logical reversal seen in Ian R MacLeod’s novella “The Hob Carpet” earlier this year), Evaristo makes our reality ridiculous, too; but I think there is an extent to which the impact of the novel is increased by an awareness that not only do we usually perceive our history as non-ridiculous, but we expect alternate Earths — for no particularly good reason — to be non-ridiculous as well. Why is alternate, we might ask, so rarely radical? And yet for all that, some part of me holds back from fully embracing Blonde Roots. It’s not that the novel ever feels dutiful, as books tackling such “worthy” subjects sometimes get accused of; nor does it feel as though it is aimed at a narrow audience (quite the opposite, in fact). Nor is there a lack of wordsmithing-craft. It’s true that it is not as transgressive as it styles itself; the observation that our reality is ridiculously unfair is not, perhaps, a new one, though that doesn’t mean it’s not an observation worth making. But more than that, I think, my hesitance comes down to that concept of “aesthetic richness”: however inventive Evaristo’s variations, they all say, at heart, the same thing, and that engenders a weariness that all the vim in the world cannot fully dispel.

The playfulness of M. M. Buckner’s fourth novel is more buried, and simultaneously more familiar (in a megatextual sense), having to do with the basically absurd conception of the swamp-born, Blob-like artificially intelligent trash colloid that gives Watermind its title. The prologue describes how a collection of “mote computers”, washed away from a weather experiment in Canada, eventually fetch up in Devil’s Swamp, Louisiana, a pollution dump where six-legged frogs are not out of place and where, ominously, “the water stirred with signals and ring tones. And the motes formed new bonds” (12). You just have to roll with it, because the story that follows takes this moment of pulp implausibility and puts on its serious face. The story’s principal, CJ Reilly, dropped out of MIT after her driven, genius-chemist father blew his brains out, and has been wandering (and guy-hopping) her way around present-day America for the past year. When we catch up with her, in the opening chapter of Watermind, it’s just another day in what now passes for CJ’s life: blundering around a swamp in Baton Rouge on a warm day in March, ostensibly working as part of a chemical company’s clean-up crew, actually more interested in getting stoned with her current beau, Max Pottevents, a mixed-race local who doesn’t always talk like a cut-price Gambit. Together, the pair stumble across an impossibility: a frozen pond. (Max: “Put your gloves on, lamie. It don’ sound like ice.” [17]) It’s still understandably a bit of a surprise, at least for the characters, when the ice suddenly melts, envelops and fondles CJ, before equally suddenly letting her go. Her curiosity (not to say dignity) is pricked: the game is afoot.

As in Blonde Roots, the game follows a familiar arc: this time, a close-focus account of the action delivered in scene-shaped gobbets with handy timestamps (the novel takes place over a grand total of eleven days), tracing a trajectory of gusty escalation. CJ’s personal investigation — after her discovery that the Watermind is somehow converting toxic sludge to pure water — is co-opted by the chemical company that owns the swampland, and gradually comes to the attention of the media. Oddly (you might think), there is little sense of threat. CJ projects the worst-case scenario at one point — “Think how fast he might grow […] there’s plenty of pollution to keep him growing […] he’ll infiltrate the clouds and rain in the rivers. And we’ll drink him. Then we’ll be part of him, too” (135) — but Buckner never spends much time trying to convince you this sort of apocalyptic outcome is a real possibility. The CJ-vs-the-corporation intrigue mostly seems like a kind of bluster, an excuse for CJ’s urgent need to figure out how the Watermind does what it does. Because figuring-out is what Buckner does spend time on: not many life-and-death confrontations here, but plenty of hefty chunks of experiment and/or theorising about how the Watermind might work. Meanwhile, the Watermind spends most of its time just bimbling down the Mississippi, wishing (so far as anyone can tell what it’s wishing) to be left to its own devices but defending itself, in increasingly creative ways, when necessary. It’s all a little odd.

Perhaps the key to what’s going on is in paragraphs like this one:

CJ steered her rented Viper up the Mississippi. A bright dry wind blew in from Colorado, bringing positive ions to mate with dopamine receptors in her brain so that, in the languid depths of Louisiana, she felt a clear Rocky Mountain high. (166)

Moments like this, when the camera pulls back and Buckner gives us a glimpse of the messy molecular soup of the world (it could be seen as a kind of Gaia) working on and through her characters, are their own kind of cold-water shock. The wide-angle lens is readied in the novel’s first sentence, which borrows from Wells (“As the twenty-first century dawned over western Canada …”) before descending to the seemingly proasic (“…three grad students saw their weather experiment ruined”, 11). It’s used to, among other things, give the currents of sexual tension wandering through the book possibly the least erotic gloss imaginable: “Their molecules of sexual scent wafted on air currents too fine for conscious awareness, but in the shadowy subliminal undersides of their brains, both of them recognized the chemical code” (53). Such dispassion is undeniably striking, but at first glance an odd choice for what is in most other respects a kind of technothriller: the result is a story that sometimes feels like a gale trying to blow through a vacuum.

But on reflection it’s not such a complete mismatch after all: at the end of both War of the Worlds (the scientific romance on which Watermind leans most explicitly, per that first sentence) and your average technothriller, after all, the threatening novum goes away. (Is scientific romance particularly amenable to single novums? There’s something in the characteristic juxtaposition of the familiar and the radically different that leads me to suspect so.) It is also, as rapidly becomes inescapably apparent, part of Buckner’s aesthetic elaboration of her novum, or at least of the “awesome multiplicity” (207) that is said novum’s key characteristic.

Hybridity, in Watermind, is endemic. It is the condition of the world – and us, as CJ’s recurrent anxiety about what she may have inherited from her parents tells us. Louisiana is of course a melting pot — for race, religion, music — on the verge of boiling over. “Every year,” CJ is told, “the Mississippi runs higher, and the hurricanes blow harder, and the local citizens are trapped between” (48); and we are later assured that the Mississippi itself is “not a single entity but a transient, multiplicitous spill” (177). When Roman Sacony, the CEO of that chemical company, wonders, “why now, when so many critical issues were converging? (105), we get the point; when Max speculates of CJ that “maybe she had mixed motives” and wonders, indeed, “[are] anyone’s reasons ever pure?” (158) we get the blunt end. Hurricane Novum rampages through the book, never showing any signs of blowing itself out. If Blonde Roots’ problem is that it says everything about one thing, Watermind’s is that it wants to say one thing about everything.

And at times such over-zealousness to elaborate results in the book becoming, if not incoherent, certainly inelegant, which is a real shame because in general Buckner integrates technical detail into her prose less obtrusively than the average technically-interested writer. But CJ’s first sample of the Watermind is described as “pearly” four times in the space of ten pages (and more intermittently thereafter); Max’s voice is never allowed to stand unadorned, being variously a “resonant baritone”, a “rich baritone”, a “gentle baritone”, and a “sonorous baritone”; another character”s “ample breasts” (136) are mentioned every time they come on-screen, while yet a third character can’t seem to stop sneering. It’s not that Buckner can’t turn a phrase: one of the colloid’s more memorable special effects is to spark with electricity, which is noted as “light drizzled upwards”; except it’s also then explained as being “like brilliant inverted rain” (281). “Drizzled” already did the heavy lifting in that image; the clarification just leadens the whole thing. Most damaging of all, for a book so clearly aiming to rehabilitate its pulpy premise with a veneer of scientific plausibility, are the occasional gear-grinding errors of this sort: “On the laptop, he enlarged one particular bacterium and clicked through a fast-forward sequence of images […] it was the lumpy swollen nucleus that drew their attention”, as well it might; bacterial cells not normally having a nucleus, and all.

It all makes for a weird creole shambles of a novel. Norman Spinrad’s hailing of it as “a post-genre novel, a novel that works the interfaces between any number of genres” makes very little sense to me, unless his conception of what “science fiction” can naturally encompass is rather more limited than it otherwise seems (and than mine is); Watermind strikes me most obviously now as a single-novum novel more rigorous than dynamic, and mercilessly elaborated to the point of collapse. Or near-collapse: because somehow it almost always comes into focus whenever it comes back to CJ Reilly. After memories of the foghorn mentions of her “slender hips” (15), allusions to her nymph-like sexiness (66), and reassurances about her “astonishing IQ” (49) have faded slightly, there is a character left behind who stubbornly demands to be remembered, a deeply Imperfect Girlfriend. There are moments in Watermind, most particularly in CJ’s cutting negotiations with Roman Sacony’s professional chemists, who perceive CJ as a pixie-girl parachuted into their midst with no real justification, and whose claws never quite retract, that reminded me of Gwyneth Jones’s Life (2004) as a novel about the practice of science by a woman, which I consider high praise. But whichever of the many twists in Watermind‘s braid is uppermost, CJ feels fully engaged with it. This is where Buckner’s commitment to the multifarious pays off: CJ gets to show off all sides of a human personality. Inconstant in her aspect, she provokes and fascinates more than anything in the somewhat tattered story that surrounds her.

Story Notes 3

“The Region of Unlikeness” by Rivka Galchen (The New Yorker, March)
“Surely,” the nameless narrator says near the end of this tale, “our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations”. She’s ostensibly talking about the possibility of time travel, though the larger point “The Region of Unlikeness” is structured to make is that she may as well be talking about the impulses of the human heart. From the start, the story emphasizes what is unknown or uncertain: describing how she fell into an intellectual pose of friendship with two ostentatiously erudite older men, the first thing the narrator admits is that she doesn’t actually know whether one of them is a philosopher or a physicist; nor does she understand the relationship between them, although now she suspects it may hide “a scientific secret, that rare kind of secret that, in our current age, still manages to bend our knee”. If that sounds like the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this; the story is brim-full with carefully observed quotidian (New York) detail, the contours of the relationships between the three characters are finely delineated, and the tension between the story’s science fictional and mundane explanations well balanced. I do like this sort of thing, and I did like this, particularly the last, caught as it is between an evoked longing for the conspiratorial explanation to be true – for there to be rules still alien to our imaginations – and a recognition that its truth is potentially horrifying. It’s made me bump Atmospheric Disturbances a few notches back up the reading stack, anyway. It also reminded me of Justina Robson’s “Legolas Does the Dishes“ at some points, though Galchen’s tale is more conspicuous about guiding its readers; but then, the narrator is the sort of person who thinks playing a video game is de facto evidence of childishness, so it makes sense that she’d be proud of her learning.

“The Kindness of Strangers” by Nancy Kress (Fast Forward 2)
Kress also sets up a balance between the human and the science-fictional, but of a more traditional kind, telling a story about an implacable but literally incomprehensible alien visitation contrasted with an implacable but all too comprehensible human story. For it to work the aliens must be impressive, and they are – they start removing Earth’s cities, in decreasing size order, made retrospectively even more impressive when their appearance afterward in human form has the feel of a more simple magic – and the personal crisis be affecting, and it is. Jenny is the other woman in an affair that she knows can’t go anywhere – or couldn’t, before Eric’s family were apparently obliterated by the aliens and they were trapped, with a small group of others, between invisible barriers. Several stylistic and structural choices on Kress’ part maximise the story’s effectiveness; it’s told in the present tense, and notably Eric is kept almost entirely off-screen, placing the emphasis on Jenny being drawn into interacting with one of the other families. The answer for the aliens’ actions obtained in the inevitable final confrontation isn’t new – none could be – but it reaffirms the chill contrast in perspectives that’s at the heart of the story. Likewise, the story as a whole isn’t new, but it’s done with satisfying skill.

“The Sun Also Explodes” by Chris Nakashima-Brown (Fast Forward 2)
A story which is clearly trying to be new, and depending on your reading is either caught between its utopian and satiric impulses, or productively exploits the tension between those impulses; being charitable, I lean towards the latter. The tension is there in the setting, a desert micro-state advertised as a haven for artistic, cultural, political, sexual and interpersonal experimentation – where topics of conversation range freely from new planets to comics – if you can afford the entry fee. You suspect a wink when Nakashima-Brown describes his characters as a “posturban hipster crowd”, and the relationship/collaboration that develops between the narrator, a kind of literal landscape artist, and Elkin, a bio-artist, has the kind of casualness (at least on the surface) which that characterisation suggests. But it’s also a bond informed and altered by the new biological and cybernetic technologies that infuse their work and bodies. The terms of success the story sets up for itself are ambitious, and more met than not; the major disappointment is that there is not, in fact, an exploding sun.

“Little Lost Robot” by Paul McAuley (IZ217)
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.

“Divining Light” by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s, August)
A perhaps slightly overlong, but very proficient, sf story about quantum mechanics in the classic mode, which is to say idea-driven and didactic. As with Kress’s story, it’s a piece that does what it needs to do to work – three things, in this case. First, it makes its chosen idea – the famous, although apparently not as famous as I thought, given that the story includes a diagram, two-slit experiment demonstrating the wav/particle nature of electrons – parsable, both in terms of a literal clear explanation of the experiment and in rendering the experiments and their implications human-scaled and easy to grasp. Second, it gives its new idea (an implementation of Wheeler’s Delayed Choice thought experiment) human weight: this in part flows from the voice of the narrator, Eric Argus, a researcher driven to bitter existential despair by his work on quantum computers, who faces down drink and the solace of a gun every day at his “new start” job in Boston, and is prone to saying noir-ish things like, “I learned this: there is no bottom to see” of his experience with Scanning Electron Microscope scans, or “the more research I did, the less I believed in the world”. (Just as well, since he’s the only half-way real character in the piece.) And third, “Divining Light” brings the idea and the human story together with appropriate elegance. The story’s last ten pages spin off implications of Eric’s work rapidly in several directions (animal welfare, the nature of faith, human evolution), such that the world begins to be changed; but ultimately the story comes down to one devastating moment, rendered comprehensible by the explanations that have gone before. A very nice performance, and one that handles the slide between the real and the speculative expertly.

The Best Novels of 2008

According to SFX readers:

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Flood by Stephen Baxter

Matter by Iain M. Banks

The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl

Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert VS Redick

Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

I’m not quite sure how the eligibility for this works, given that Making Money, The Empire of Ivory and The Name of the Wind were first published in 2007; but that aside, I will be interested to see what, if any, correspondence there turns out to be with the BSFA Award shortlist, when that’s announced in January. (Get your nominations in now, folks!)

Now That’s What I Call A Book Log

Here is what Joe Bernstein read, or at least skimmed, this year:

Via. It adds up to more than 100,000 words, if you’re wondering. I am boggled, approaching staggered.

For reference, here’s last year; a measly 70k.

Empire in Links and Gold

The new issue of Fruitless Recursion includes Karen Burnham on A Companion to Science Fiction, Duncan Lawie on The Issue at Hand, Jonathan McCalmont interviewing ST Joshi and more.
Over at The Internet Review of SF, meanwhile, you can read Nader Elhefnaway on the Starship Troopers films, Robert Bee on Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross, and Greg Beatty on David D. Levine’s Space Magic, among other things.
At Bookslut, meanwhile, Paul Kincaid considers Steven Millhauser and Geoffrey H Goodwin interviews Christopher Barzak
Reviews online at the Science Fiction Studies website: Graham Sleight on Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, John Langan on Clute’s Darkening Garden, and Joe Sanders on The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, among others
Abigail Nussbaum on Nation by Terry Pratchett
Kim Newman on The Last Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
David Hines on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen tackles another poor review.
Jason Stoddard on The Burden of the Modern Science Fiction Writer; Jeremiah Tolbert’s response
Richard Larson on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Jonathan McCalmont on Waltz with Bashir
Margaret Drabble on the short fiction of Doris Lessing
Electric Velocipede is partnering with Night Shade Books, which sounds like a good thing, although boo to the subscription bonus only being available in the US; in other Night Shade News, Eclipse 2 will appear before the end of 2008, honest.
Rich Horton will also be editing Unplugged: the best of online fiction
Thoughts on the David Gemmell Legend Award
Lisa Tuttle’s Christmas sf picks, in The Times; various other people offer their picks at SF Signal and the Aqueduct blog. More to follow, no doubt.

Another Reading List

Following on from Jonathan Strahan’s year’s best, here’s Rich Horton’s:

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2009

Elizabeth Bear, “Shoggoths in Bloom” (Asimov’s, March)
Daryl Gregory, “Glass” (MIT Technology Review, November/December)
Ted Kosmatka, “The Art of Alchemy” (F&SF, June)
Margo Lanagan, “The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross” (Dreaming Again)
Robert Reed, “Character Flu” (F&SF, June)
Rivka Galchen, “The Region of Unlikeness” (The New Yorker, March 17)
James Alan Gardner, “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” (Asimov’s, February)
Will McIntosh, “The Fantasy Jumper” (Black Static, February)
James L. Cambias, “Balancing Accounts” (F&SF, February)
Charlie Anders, “Suicide Drive” (Helix #7, January)
Peter Watts, “The Eyes of God” (The Solaris Book of New SF, Volume 2)
Beth Bernobich, “The Golden Octopus” (Postscripts, Summer)
Jeff VanderMeer, “Fixing Hanover” (Extraordinary Engines)
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, “Boojum” (Fast Ships, Black Sails)
Paul Cornell, “Catherine Drewe” (Fast Forward 2)
Mary Robinette Kowal, “Evil Robot Monkey” (The Solaris Book of New SF, Volume 2)
Garth Nix, “Infestation” (The Starry Rift)
Ian McDonald, “The Tear” (Galactic Empires)

Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2009

Kij Johnson, “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” (Asimov’s, July)
Naomi Novik, “Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake” (Fast Ships, Black Sails)
Eugene Mirabelli, “Falling Angel” (F&SF, December)
Meghan McCarron, “The Magician’s House” (Strange Horizons, July 14-21)
Karen Heuler, “The Difficulties of Evolution” (Weird Tales, July/August)
Jay Lake, “A Water Matter” (Tor.com)
Liz Williams, “Spiderhorse” (Realms of Fantasy, August)
Alex Jeffers, “Firooz and His Brother” (F&SF, May)
Ann Leckie, “The God of Au” (Helix #8, Spring)
James Maxey, “Silent as Dust” (Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January)
Erik Amundsen, “Blue Vervain Murder Ballad #2: Jack of Diamonds” (Not One of Us, October)
Delia Sherman, “Gift from a Spring” (Realms of Fantasy, April)
Christopher Golden, “The Hiss of Escaping Air” (PS Publishing)
Peter S. Beagle, “King Pelles the Sure” (Strange Roads)
Alice Sola Kim, “We Love Deena” (Strange Horizons, February 11)
Jeffrey Ford, “Daltharee” (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy)
Patrick Rothfuss, “The Road to Levinshir” (Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy)
Holly Phillips, “The Small Door” (Fantasy, May)
Richard Bowes, “If Angels Fight” (F&SF, February

Let’s see if I can get my sums right this time: 18 stories in the sf book, 44% of which come from genre magazines; 61% of contributors are male, and there are three overlaps with Strahan (Bear, Kosmatka, VanderMeer). 19 stories in the fantasy book, 74% of which come from genre magazines; 53% of contributors are male, and there are four overlaps with Strahan (Bowes, Johnson, McCarron, Phillips). In terms of first publication sources, F&SF currently leads the pack, accounting for 10 different stories across the three books; Asimov’s is the next nearest with 4, while Realms of Fantasy and Fast Ships, Black Sails account for three each. I have to say that, “The Tear” and Rivka Galchen’s story notwithstanding, of these two books on balance the Fantasy volume looks more interesting to me.

A Discussion About The Ant King and Other Stories

The Ant King cover Time for another round-table discussion. On the table this time: Benjamin Rosenbaum‘s debut collection The Ant King and Other Stories, which you can purchase in dead-tree form or download for free here. Around the table: Abigail Nussbaum, Martin Lewis, me, and Dan Hartland. You can read Dan’s review of the collection today at Strange Horizons; other reviews can be found in the Washington Post by Ed Champion and in the Boston Phoenix by Nina MacLaughlin. I kicked things off …

Niall: I picked out “Sense and Sensibility” as a starting point for this discussion because it seems to me the closest Benjamin Rosenbaum comes to having a signature story, in terms of the number of boxes (favourite themes, subjects, techniques) that it ticks. This perhaps means it contains much more than any single story should ever try to contain – or alternatively, is pure ADHD fiction; whatever it is you’re not enjoying about the story will probably stop in a paragraph – and is always threatening to fly apart at the seams. It’s also referential (to Austen, Barth, and whoever it was wrote the original sf story about living on the flanks of an enormously larger creature – I want to say Damon Knight); metafictional; extrapolative of its implications; witty; and silly.

I think silliness is what holds this particular story together, actually. Rosenbaum can get away with a lot through sheer cleverness and technique – for example, his ability to control, and therefore anticipate, his reader’s response is what carries off a lot of the metafictional asides. And he orchestrates the various elements of his story to create thematic parallels and resonances almost too precisely (or at least almost too explicitly). And he seems to have access to an almost inexhaustible well of inventiveness. But the silliness prevents the story from feeling self-indulgent, or coldly controlled – even when it’s silliness that’s reinforcing one of the story’s core themes. I’m sure, for instance, that in a story about the interaction between the “sense” (meaning) of a story and the “sensibility” (reading protocols) of its readers, and given what happens a sentence later, “Miss Dashwood collapsed upon an Ottoman, sobbing” is meant to recall “he turned on his left side” as an example of a sentence whose sense depends on the reader’s sensibility; and that could be horribly po-faced, but is in fact done as a horrible, groan-inducing pun.

There’s so much going on in “Sense and Sensibility” that I can’t help but find the process of reading it exhilarating, and on more than just a purely intellectual level. And that goes for the best of the rest of Rosenbaum’s fiction, too. I think The Ant King is a flawed collection, but the flaws are almost all on the level of the collection, and very rarely on the level of the individual story.

Abigail: It’s precisely Rosenbaum’s expansiveness that has me uncertain about whether I like the story. On the one hand, you can’t help but admire an author who tries to do so much and with such insouciance. On the other hand, the pieces get somewhat lost in the whole. Unsurprisingly, I read this story concentrating on the Austen parody, and there’s a lot of meat there — Regency characters, with period-appropriate attitudes towards sexuality and proper relations between the sexes, whose lives are thrown into disarray precisely because the creature they live on has modern attitudes, of which they are aware. That’s not even to mention the interaction between the Dashwoods’ cool Austen-ish attitude (even Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood) and the more gothic sensibility they encounter once they reach the mouth (which reminded me, perhaps inevitably, of Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus”), and the fact that the story compares the insular world of Austen’s novels with the perhaps similar insularity of fantastic worlds. But in concentrating on that aspect of the story, I can’t help but feel that I’ve ignored others, and perhaps missed out on the whole. It’s not necessarily a flaw — I agree with Niall that the story is exhilarating — but it does make the story hard to discuss.

I was a little meh about the metafictional asides. Though it’s clear that Rosenbaum doesn’t truly expect us to forgive “Sense and Sensibility”’s metafictionality just because he’s hung a lantern on it, I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t trying reverse-reverse psychology — if a writer pointing out his own story’s metafictionality is tired and pretentious, then doing it egregiously cancels out that pretentiousness, and achieves the effect of getting us to swallow the metafictional asides without feeling that we’ve been pressured into it. If that makes even a little bit of sense.

As for your definitions of “sense” and “sensibility” — Hmm. Hmmmmmmm. I mean, it’s probably not significant that this not how Austen uses sense and sensibility, and it’s not that this approach doesn’t make sense. I’m just not sure I see that the story encourages it.

Lastly, I’m not sure what you mean by flawed on the level of the collection. How does that work? I’d call The Ant King uneven — half stories I really liked and half I didn’t have much time for — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t flaws in individual stories.

Niall: I just happen to have spotted Ed Champion’s review, which seems an interesting thing to throw into the mix, and in particular:

But the startling “Red Leather Tassels” atones for the collection’s filler material. The story begins with a captain of industry losing his shoes, continues with the businessman being lifted into the air by a flock of pigeons, and concludes with an adulterous affair between the robber baron’s wife and a woodpecker. It’s a testament to Rosenbaum’s talent that such an unusual premise offers an unexpectedly touching conclusion.

Now, “Red Leather Tassels” wouldn’t be in my top ten from the stories in the collection. Is it just the sort of collection where everyone’s going to have a different favourite? I’m imagining some kind of online test … WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE ROSENBAUM STORY SAYS ABOUT YOU!

Martin: I started re-reading “Sense And Sensibility” in order to comment on this and I was suprised at how quickly I ran out of steam (even given that I wasn’t very keen on it the first time.) When I got to the third paragraph I wished it was all over:

Though gifted with an insightfulness and candor suitable to a matron of advancing years and declining income, Mrs. Dashwood was generous, sympathetic, impatient, irregular, bashful, imaginative, dramatic, modest, fanciful, clandestine, opportunistic, prudent, celebratory, prurient, madcap, ostentatious, retiring, whimsical, and toothsome, qualities that her marriage and its subsequent devolvement into tragic farce (joined to the propriety and calmness of her instincts) had rendered sadly irrelevant.

This is just waffle — replace half the adjectives with entirely different ones and the sentence remains the same. The only thing that gives it the illusion of meaning is the fact that the prose style parodies Austen, so because Austen’s convoluted sentences made sense you are tricked into thinking Rosenbaum’s do. And you only need to read this paragraph once, not have it seemingly endlessly repeated. If the silliness is meant to be a refuge for the reader then it is too uniform to actually be leavening and ends being extremely tiresome.

Then another three paragraphs later we get the first straight-to-reader bit and I completely hit a brick wall. I like Abigail’s description of this as being reverse-reverse-psychology.

I didn’t finish my re-reading of the story. I did skip to the final page, was reminded of the further meta-fictional “look at me”s and the arch closing sentence and felt glad I hadn’t. Most of the time Rosenbaum could have probably programmed a computer to write it for him, in a similar manner to that automatic cultural theory generator. (Although admittedly he would have to have gone back over it to insert the diabolical puns.)

Dan: Martin is exactly right. Niall argues that Rosenbaum’s flightiness is his great strength, that because you know the next page will have something entirely new for you, it doesn’t matter if the current page is rubbish. This is such nonsense that it barely requires noting: I do not enjoy my half hour of The World’s Worst Doctors because I hope the next half hour of Eastenders will be better. Rosenbaum’s key weakness is his absolute inability to find a theme or story and stick to it. Again, the paragraph from “Sense and Sensibility” which Martin quotes is an obvious example of a total insistence on form over content, on tricking the reader into thinking what they’re reading is clever when in fact it is simply marking time until the next sleight of hand. Abigail’s point that Rosenbaum’s ubermetafictionality is a ploy to short-circuit his pretentiousness gets to the heart of his hollow trickery: he isn’t clever, merely big.

In this way, Ed Champion’s appreciation for “Red Leather Tassels” is actually understandable. It does manage simultaneously to pop with ideas but also hang together as a story. Its turns are at right angles, for sure, but they are not, I think entirely unconnected. Likewise, though “The Ant King” is hardly Saki, it does succeed in allying Rosenbaum’s love of the vignette with a theme strong enough to carry the required weight.

One of the strongest stories in the collection, for my money, is “Start The Clock“. Like the others, it doesn’t rewrite its chosen mode, but its profusion of images is carried along by a happily disjointed narrative and a point or two which manage to hit home. On the other hand, a story like “Biographical Notes” teems with concepts and episodes, but grows quickly tiresome in its failure to cohere. What it thinks is Boy’s Own lurching from incident to incident is in fact merely the sign of an author having more fun than his reader. And, again, Rosenbaum relies on the pastiche style to wink his way out of things. Surely this isn’t enough?

Niall: Given my lack of appreciation of Austen, I didn’t pick up on half of what Abigail did about the referentiality of “Sense and Sensibility” in that direction (though I assumed it was there). But I’m pretty confident that the story does indeed encourage other interpretations of its title, and specifically the one about genre protocols that I suggested. I’d say it’s one of the big things the metafictional asides are doing, actually. The very first time the narrator addresses us directly, it (he?) talks about whether the story is doing what we expect of it, speculating on our readerly sensibility: “Perhaps the quasiplastic penumbrarium has piqued your interest”, and so forth (which, of course, in my case, it had). And there’s a lot about people saying what they mean, or not, which brings out the “sense” of the story – the puns, of course, but also the conversation which is “conducted entirely in impenetrable euphemism”, for which the subtext is transcribed, or when Miss Dashwood speaks a ridiculously convoluted sentence and Mrs Dashwood takes “a necessary pause to reflect upon her daughter’s syntax”. If you like, the story marries Austen’s fascination with social protocols with a fascination with reading protocols.

I’m confused by Martin’s criticism of that list as waffle. Of course it’s waffle: that’s the punchline of the paragraph, that this extravagant list of qualities is “sadly irrelevant”. Similarly, Dan’s comparison to TV is misleading; on the one hand because a lot of people regularly invest time in series television on the understanding that the quality of individual episodes will vary, and on the other because spending half a minute reading a page of prose is hardly a comparable investment to spending half an hour watching World’s Worst Doctors. I don’t feel “tricked” by the paragraph Martin quoted; I feel amused to a level not disproportionate with the time it takes me to read it. Similarly with my disappointment when it’s a paragraph I think doesn’t work.

Looking at Dan’s other criticisms, it strikes me that we are looking for entirely different rewards from Rosenbaum’s stories. “Red Leather Tassels” does indeed hang together as a story, but for me that is all it does; it did not particularly inspire or amuse or impress. “The Ant King” feels somewhat second-hand — I’ve said before that I find the combination of pop culture and deadpan tone feels too in thrall to Kelly Link – whereas I can’t see anything tiresome about “Biographical Notes”. I’ve read it four times now, and each time it has seemed both coherent and fun; or rather, I think it’s clear that any “failure to cohere” is entirely deliberate, since the story is an extended argument with the way we construct narratives around events. I fail to see what is hollow about that.

The furthest I can go towards agreeing with Dan is to say that it is almost impossible to make general statements about Rosenbaum-the-writer on the basis of this collection, except to say that he likes to play. But so what? The fact that we can’t agree on which experiments work and which don’t hardly seems an adequate criticism of his drive to experiment. And there are plenty of other writers who demonstrate a similar fickleness – David Mitchell comes to mind.

I do think there’s an argument to be made that the way the stories in The Ant King are sequenced doesn’t prepare you adequately for what follows, which is what I meant by the book having collection-level flaws; “The Ant King” strikes me as too tame to make a good opener, and liable to cause disappointment if it becomes the standard against which the rest of the collection is compared (I, at least, have a tendency to take opening stories as in some way being statements of intent). Were I introducing someone to Rosenbaum, I would probably tell them to read “Biographical Notes” first, and “Other Cities” last, since they seem to me a much better pair of bookends for the range of what his stories attempt.

Martin: Niall, If that is your idea of a punchline it is no wonder we have different opinions of the story. Rosenbaum is doodling here — there is clearly no coherent Mrs Dashwood in his mind that he is trying to accurately describe — which is “Sense & Sensibility” in microcosm. It seems we are all agreed on this. You will only put up with this sort of thing if the pay off is worth it and from where I’m sitting “Sense and Sensibility” has no punchline. There is a reason most jokes don’t start “Did you hear the one about the reading protocols?”

I think you are too harsh on “The Ant King” because I don’t think it has a overpoweringly specific debt to Link. It is more of collision between the new wave fabulist school in general and gonzo-tech Doctorow/Stross axis. Obviously this is a terrible idea, but the story doesn’t fail because it is a poor imitation of Link, it is much more individual than that. Besides, you say the mix of pop culture and deadpan prose is inherently Linkian but she dials the pop culture stuff way down low and Rosenbaum’s prose here is not what I would call deadpan, it is too glib, you can see his mouth turning up at the corners. There is a connection between the two but it isn’t as strong as you make out (and it doesn’t overdetermine how I view the rest of the book).

I like “Red Leather Tassels” because its silliness is not inordinately overextended like “Sense and Sensibilty”, nor is it too pleased with itself like “The Ant King”. Like Champion I think it makes a welcome contrast to the aimlessness on display elsewhere in the collection.

Finally:

One of the strongest stories in the collection, for my money, is “Start The Clock”.

Dan Hartland in preference for conventional SF shock!

Abigail: It seems to me that, when it comes to “Sense and Sensibility,” Martin and Dan are assuming that the story’s ADD-esque flitting from subject to subject, style to style, and excessive game-playing, are all that it amounts to, whereas Niall and I are trying to find some unifying theme or point. I’m not saying that we’re right and you guys are wrong — it’s probably telling that we’ve each come up with a different interpretation which is rooted in topics we found interesting before reading the story — but I do think the story achieves the effect of suggesting that such a unifying element exists, which I find compelling in itself even if this suggestion is false (Donnie Darko and Magnolia both get a lot mileage out of this suggestion of a greater meaning). Not to drag us back into the question of whether Rosenbaum’s writing is Link-ian, but I kept thinking of “Magic for Beginners” when I read “Sense and Sensibility.” On the one hand, this is an unfortunate comparison, because Link’s story is a great deal better than Rosenbaum’s, but I do think that “Sense and Sensibility” comes close to doing what “Magic for Beginners” does, which is to create, from disparate, ill-matching, and nonsensical pieces, a whole that is, though not coherent, at least cohesive.

Dan, on waffling, said:

Again, the paragraph from Sense and Sensibility which Martin quotes is an obvious example of the writer’s total insistence on form over content, on tricking the reader into thinking what they’re reading is clever when in fact it is simply marking time until the next sleight of hand. Abigail’s point that Rosenbaum’s ubermetafictionality is a ploy to short-circuit his pretentiousness gets to the heart of his hollow trickery: he isn’t clever, merely big.

And now to contradict myself: though the ubermetafictionality (love this word) left me cold, in general I don’t think that “not clever, just big” is necessarily an indictment of a writer. A brazen author can sometimes get away with far greater flaws than a more competent but also more timid author might, simply by virtue of having the balls to go completely off the deep end. “Sense and Sensibility” does this. So does “Biographical Notes,” which holds on to the courage of its convictions all the way to its end. Stories like “Red Leather Tassels” or “The Ant King,” meanwhile, are perhaps more technically accomplished and coherent, but in terms of theme I didn’t find them any more resonant than it was, and so the relative modesty of their surrealism becomes their undoing.

Or, to put it another way: why I liked The Book of All Hours and you didn’t.

Since Dan’s mentioned “Start the Clock,” shall we talk about the SF/F divide in the book? It seems to me that the SFnal stories in The Ant King are a great deal more conventional (for a certain value of the word) than the fantastic, surrealistic, or parodic stuff (with the possible exception of “A Siege of Cranes” which was written for a traditionally-oriented anthology). “Start the Clock” is at the far end of the scale from “Sense and Sensibility,” but “Embracing-the-New,” “The House Beyond Your Sky” and even “Biographical Notes” are a hell of lot more grounded than stories like “The Ant King” and “Other Cities.”

Dan: When Martin says that “Red Leather Tassels” is coherent enough and short enough not to tire, he is not I think getting at what Abigail suggests is his (and my own) position: it’s not so much that Rosenbaum is only about the metafictional gameplaying; it is that the ends to which he uses that technique are not sufficiently weighty. I’m surprised, too, that Abigail thinks the “Sense and Sensibility” convinces that there may be a unifying theme beneath its surface, since I agree with Martin that it is patently obvious that Rosenbaum has no coherent purpose in the story beyond the metafictional. And from my perspective, if the only unifier exists above the level of the text, then no amount of cleverness can pull a story together. (Indeed, if Donnie Darko is a touchstone on this matter, I rest my case.)

This is what I think makes Rosenbaum’s flightier stories ultimately hollow. Niall suggests that the failure to cohere is deliberate, and that therefore there is no hollowness. But, again as Martin points out, if the pay-off isn’t enough then the reader will still find that deliberateness tiresome. A deliberately incoherent story is still incoherent, regardless of the meta piled on top of it, as if to apply downward pressure on the text itself. The illusion that the vignettes stick together is thus artfully created, but it remains a trick rather than the real thing. In this sense, Niall is right about one thing: that Rosenbaum is indeed merely all about the playfulness. There’s nothing else of any weight to him.

Abigail boils all this down: if the reader is willing to prise ambition over craft then they will like Rosenbaum; if they are not, they won’t. I don’t see the different between an incoherent story and a coherent story with similar thematic resonance, except that one is coherent and the other isn’t. If you’re interested, as Niall is, in generic reading protocols, then perhaps there is something in incoherent metatextuality to get your juices flowing. But otherwise you have a choice between two stories with not half as much thematic insight as they’d like to have, but one that has a plot where the other doesn’t.

The only line I’m willing to throw Rosenbaum is one labeled “dissolution”. Time and again in his stories, the old encounters something different, destroys itself to assimilate it, and creates the new. The flux and confusion in his stories mirror that of his worlds. Rosenbaum is perhaps interested less in the coherency of his stories than he is in the incoherency of existence. Whether or not this excuses his failings is obviously down to individual taste!

Niall: There are a whole pile of things in Dan’s last email that I’d be inclined to press a bit further on. Rosenbaum’s use of metafiction is “not sufficiently weighty”? I disagree with that on general principle; if we start down the road of only assigning worth to those fictions which deal in Serious Topics, we’re going to exclude a lot of very good and enjoyable and admirable fiction from the ranks of the worthy. And to suggest that certain techniques are only allowed if they are counterbalanced by a seriousness of topic is patently ridiculous. “The House Beyond Your Sky” is not a good story with metafictional elements because it portrays abuse, it’s a good story because the metafictional elements and the elements of abuse are handled well. Similarly, Dan talks of Rosenbaum’s stories being “tricks” rather than the “real thing”: what, exactly, is the “real thing” when we’re talking about a short story? A deliberately incoherent story may encourage us to find enjoyment in incoherence.

I second Abigail’s discussion that we shift the topic somewhat, to consider the more traditionally science fiction and fantasy stories; I think perhaps another way of parsing her descriptions of them as “conventional” and “grounded” is to say that they do not trade in the same incoherence that “Sense and Sensibility” does. To continue talking about “The House Beyond Your Sky”, which I think is one of the best stories in the collection, one of the things that sets it apart for me is that I find it very hard to reduce, to summarize in any way that doesn’t do damage. It strikes me as the epitome of coherence, in fact, every element reinforcing every other; the shifts in this one between abstraction and personal detail feel seamless, as do the juxtaposition of radically different kinds of detail (“sodium and potassium” vs. “button nose”, for instance.) It’s a textbook example of finding a sense of wonder in the small.

Of the others Abigail mentioned, I find “A Siege of Cranes” relatively unsatisfying precisely because, as she hints, it retains elements of unconventionality. Something I didn’t realise the first time I read it is how well it sits in a tradition of Moorcockian epic fantasy, with the compression of events into a short story frame … except that the humour Rosenbaum uses continually breaks the immersive aspects of the story, in a way that for once doesn’t feel intentional. “Embracing-the-New” seems to me interesting as a story that can be read either as sf or as immersive fantasy (it reminds me somewhat of Tiptree’s “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” mashed up with Stross’s “Tourist“), and because I think it generates quite a substantial emotional weight in relatively few pages. And I’m intrigued that Dan listed “Start the Clock” as one of the strongest stories, and would like to know why; not that I don’t think it’s good, but it struck me as more of an outline for a story than a full story – in contrast to, say, “Falling”, which packs an incredible amount into its two pages.

I’ll end with a question: do Martin and Dan think it is even possible to reconcile the breadth of references that Rosenbaum attempts to reconcile throughout this collection? Do your objections boil down to thinking he should just pick a style and work in it?

Dan: I think Niall’s banging the wrong drum here. It’s not that Rosenbaum’s use of metafiction isn’t weighty, it’s that the stories onto which he bolts his meta simply aren’t strong enough in the first place. My argument simply is that, however well executed this particular technique is, its explicit status above the story renders it particularly susceptible to being left high and dry by a weak story. In this way, it’s not that metafiction is “non-serious”; it’s not even that the stories are non-serious, though in trying to add substance to themselves through metafictional trickery they certainly hold themselves open to accusations of bald pastiche; it’s that, even as non-serious stories, they don’t quite work. And no amount of oh-so-arch metafiction can rescue them from that.

Niall’s right in saying that a great story can very easily be a light and fun story. Rosebaum’s are neither, regardless of his cleverness. I’m only interested in the meta if I’m interested in the fiction. It’s been suggested that the fictions in this collection are deliberately incoherent; so it may be. But deliberate inocherence is a coherence of a stripe. In don’t detect much in terms of even that in Rosenbaum — his is a scattergun approach to the short story, and inevitably each of his attempts at the art miss as much as they hit.

Abigail: OK, but this seems to be starting from the assumption that metafiction is solely a technique, a means to an end rather than an end in its own right. I don’t disagree when you say that some of the stories in The Ant King are weak and substanceless — though I’d count “Red Leather Tassels” in that group — but in the case of a story like “Sense and Sensibility,” and despite the fact that I found the metafictional asides manipulative, I thought the less obvious metafictional aspects of the story actually added substance to it and helped knit together a fractured plot.

Dan: In one sense, Niall and I do agree: “The House Beyond Your Sky” is one of the very strongest stories in the collection, not because it is Serious or Grounded, but because it is a finished, rounded artifact, very much its own thing and irreducible. Sadly, elsewhere Rosenbaum too often falls back on distractions, sleights of hand and tipped winks. I’m not sure this means SF is Rosenbaum’s strength — merely that it may impose upon him an external discipline. He’d be a fine writer if he could find his own internal discipline to match: not so much pick a style to stick with, as draw in his many influences more tightly.

Martin: I’m confused by Niall’s use of the word “reconcile”. I’m not sure Rosenbaum attempts to reconcile his grab bag of stories in way I am familiar with, and the fact that he doesn’t makes no difference to me. I don’t dislike the collection because it isn’t cohesive — I admire it for this. I just happen to dislike one particular recurring part of it, his laboured postmodern schtick.

Moving on to the “straight” stories. They don’t put me off but they don’t particularly entice me either. “Start The Clock” is the Stross/Doctorow half of “The Ant King” that I refered to before. Heartland stuff. I liked “Embracing-the-New” without ever getting excited about it but I’m not sure what is interesting about the fact that it can be read as either SF or fantasy. This is true of a large class of stories, what we might call the indistinguishable from magic set, and it makes no difference. Multiple valid readings are only interesting when they allow you to read the same story in different ways whereas whether it is SF or fantasy you still read the story in the same way.

I recently read “Bright Morning” by Jeffrey Ford which I thought made an interesting contrast with “Biographical Notes”. (Even the comparison between the two titles is slightly illustrative.) Ford’s story also features a character with his own name as well as a narrator who is also (to some extent) him, but it is carried off with a grace that makes Rosenbaum’s story seem crude. When Dan talked about prising ambition over craft, here is a story that shows you can have both.

I don’t especially prize ambition on its own. I don’t want to have to read The Book Of All Hours again. It is true that control isn’t everything — there is more than one way to skin a cat and sometimes it nice to read something completely off the wall — but I do think The Ant King is a collection that is often lacking restraint in the worst possible way. The exception is the one story we seem to be agreed on, “The House Beyond Your Sky”, which I liked a great deal for the same reasons that Niall outlines. Along with “Red Leather Tassels” it is one of the few times Rosenbaum strikes the right balance and shows what a good writer he is.

Niall: I’m taking Dan’s answer as a “yes”. I think.

Martin, I think the argument I’d put forward for “Biographical Notes” being of equal worth to “Bright Morning” (which I do like) is that they’re trying to do different things. Ford’s story is primarily about that confusion of narrative identity – that’s the main interest. In Rosenbaum’s story the confusion of identity is worth a few gags, but it’s mainly a starting point for an attempt to explore (and re-invigorate) a classic genre story form, the pulp adventure.

And with that … I think we’re done. It’s nice to end by agreeing about one story, at least!

Chinese Futures

The Del Rey Book of SF and Fantasy cover Given how astonishing China’s story over the past twenty-five years has been, and the implications that story would seem to have for both China and the rest of the world, it’s perhaps slightly surprising that there is relatively little sf that deals with that country’s future in any depth. On of the best-known examples, of course, is Maureen F. McHugh’s generous China Mountain Zhang (1992), set in a twenty-second century in which Communist China is the dominant superpower. But the future looks different now than it did then, so I had a certain amount of expectation for McHugh’s “Special Economics”, published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy earlier this year. Also set in China, but rather closer to now, the story’s major speculative conceit is that a quarter of a billion people have been killed by a bird flu plague. Against that background, it tells the story of 19-year-old Jieling, who has moved from her home in Northern China to Shenzen in the South in search of a job. My expectations were more or less met: it’s a good story, perhaps a little undercut by the ease with which Jieling manages to do the sf-protagonist thing of pulling the levers of the world, but good nonetheless. One of the things that’s good about it, I think, is the deftness of its construction, which allows Jieling’s life to quietly illuminate her country.

In that sense, plague notwithstanding, Jieling could almost have walked out of the country drawn in James Kynge’s 2006 book, China Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation. Kynge, who spent over two decades as a journalist in Asia for Reuters and the Financial Times, is interested in the past two or three decades, the forces that during that time have driven China’s economic and political rise, how China relates to the rest of the world, and how that may change in the near-ish future. In China Shakes the World, a broad range of facts and figures — as you’d expect, staggering comparisons are commonplace, such as the fact that between 1998 and 2004 Chongqing grew by more than the size of two Birminghams, eight times faster than Chicago’s nineteenth-century peak of growth — are orchestrated into a series of narratives, case studies that illustrate particular aspects of his argument. Some are set in China — the story of Liu Chuanzhu, founder of Legend computers and recent purchaser of IBM, is one compelling example. Jieling could be one of these: another one of China’s millions of poorly-treated, economically essential internal migrants. Some of the case studies, meanwhile, range as widely as a UK private school, a small town in Ohio, or a textile town in Italy (the sort of migrant factory seen in the recent, and superlative, film Gomorrah); perhaps most striking is the book’s opening chapter, which describes the infamous wholesale relocation of a steel plant from the Ruhr to China. But it’s the movement between the specific and the general that gives the book its distinctive and welcome fluidity.

Broadly speaking, the first half of China Shakes the World is concerned with establishing the narrative of the past; the second, with speculating about the narrative of the future. Kynge argues that China’s recent development is actually something historically new. This he puts down not just to the sheer speed of the transformation, what he describes as “the compression of developmental time” that puts skyscrapers next to huts, though that is of course daunting. It’s China’s most obvious characteristic — its size — which is, for Kynge, ultimately telling. Crucially, it enables China to simultaneously possess the characteristics of multiple countries: it has a vast workforce prepared to work for preindustrial wages and yet it also has a highly educated workforce skilled with modern technology; the result is immense productivity, but also, per the book’s subtitle, powerful hunger. Kynge’s argument that “Chinese history is very much less the story of multiplication than of long division” (48) rings true, with a tension between the number of mouths and the amount of food available to feed them having been replaced by a related-but-different tension between the number of people, and the number of jobs available to occupy them. One of the reasons Kynge’s choice of case studies ranges so wide is to demonstrate how that hunger can reach out around the world.

Kynge also describes the shape of China’s economy, and its inherently unstable aspects. Although it’s no longer accurate to describe the economy as “communist”, government policies have the effect of ensuring that almost all manufactured products are in chronic oversupply, with the result that where other nations’ companies export to expand their success, China’s companies export simply to stay afloat. One of Kynge’s contacts in China explains that the central principle of the Chinese economy is that, “when reform is too fast there is chaos. When reform is too slow there is stagnation” (178) – i.e. that although the power and legitimacy of the Communist Party springs from continued growth and total control, maintaining both is nigh-impossible; one must be sacrificed to achieve the other. The extent to which China’s internal development has been unplanned was also new to me: in Kynge’s analysis, Deng Xiaoping is notable as much for being disobeyed as for being an architect of economic reform; he gave local governments and businesses an inch, and they took a mile, which has ultimately led to the promise we’re now confronted with nearly every week, of China’s economic dominance in the century to come.

But it may not happen. Kynge gives four reasons why. The first is the environment. Kynge describes conservation as a “blind spot” for Chinese authorities, pointing to systemic failures of policy which cause immense damage, and suggests that if China’s “Green GDP” – the cost of dealing with the damage that has been done – is factored into estimates then growth has actually been more or less flat over the period of China’s miracle, rather than at 10% or more. Second, there is endemic corruption throughout the Chinese state; Kynge argues that most analyses of China’s economic potential do not take account of its underground economy, not just in its direct monetary value — which may be up to a third of the value of the mainstream economy — but in the effect it has on the value of China’s brand. He cites numerous examples of Chinese companies increasing their value by acquiring Western brands (such as Liu Chuanzhu’s takeover of IBM), rather than by exporting their own brands. Third, Kynge suggests that the “overriding contradiction” of China is simply that a communist state cannot manage a capitalist economy appropriately, leading to accumulating hidden costs, primarily in the form of bad debts and deferred insolvencies. And finally, he points to the consequences of the rest of the world’s attitude to China in recent years, speculating that Western hunger for access to Chinese markets may not, in fact, be limitless, and that Western societies could descend into resentful protectionism (because the benefits that trade with China brings are less visible than the job losses it causes). We may, in other words, yet prevent China from rising. There is, of course, the obligatory suggestion that now, when this book is being written and published, is the crucial moment (Kynge actually pinpoints the Rubicon-crossing in 2004), about which I am sceptical; but in general this is an engaging, thoughtful analysis.

As I said earlier, Jieling’s narrative has the sort of solidity found in Kynge’s case studies, and many of the factors shaping her life are factors he describes; the plague has perhaps intensified some, but it has not been transformative. In the intervention of a somewhat hapless government agent towards the end of the story, for example, “Special Economics” gestures towards the idea that Beijing’s power is ebbing, that a communist government inevitably cannot fully control a capitalist state. Moreover, although Jieling finds a job with relative ease, despite her migrant status – she is hired by a biotech company to do basic work that is “pleasantly scientific without being very difficult” (150), and serves as both macguffin and metaphor — there is a nasty catch, which is that employees at New Life (the ironically-named company) sign away their basic rights and become slaves. Among other things, living expenses, food, and uniforms are all deducted from their wages – and there are further performance-related deductions. One of the driving forces behind this is a desperate need for New Life to remain competitive in foreign markets; but the human result is that Jieling is heavily in debt by the time she receives her first pay cheque. Faced with near-impossible odds of ever paying off their rapidly accruing debt, some of Jieling’s colleagues have surrendered themselves to the company – after all, they reason, it’s not such a bad life – but Jieling, with Heinleinian resourcefulness, of course Finds A Way to pay off her debt, by dancing in the “plague-trash markets” where the possessions of bird flu victims are sold on. None of this is to disown the story’s more straightforward humanity; just to say it is not the only thing that drives it.

I could provide a similar analysis of UFO in Her Eyes, despite its garish-seeming title. The starting point for Xiaolu Guo’s fourth novel to be published in English is an event that took place in Silver Hill village on the twentieth day of the seventh moon of 2012 (as the local calendar has it). Standing in a rice field, a friendless, unmarried peasant woman named Kwok Yun saw a big silver plate in the sky, heard a strange noise, and felt a force from above tugging at her. When the moment passed, she found a foreigner – a Westerner – lying nearby, sunburned and with a wound in his leg. For fear of damaging relations between China and other nations if she does nothing, with the help of some children she takes him to her home and dresses the wound, then goes to collect some healing herbs. When she returns, however, he has vanished. After some thought, Yun realises she needs to report the incident to Chang Lee, the village chief (unfazed by, and in all honesty not entirely understanding of, the potential for first contact; she is more concerned with where dinner is coming from). Chang passes the news on up the chain; and in September, two government agents arrive in Silver Hill to investigate.

UFO in Her Eyes is the story of that investigation and what follows. It is presented, as were A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, as a series of documents: in this case, primarily transcripts of interviews conducted by the two agents, but also emails they send to and receive from their superiors, maps drawn by Chief Chang, lists of local vendors, minutes of village meetings, and other odds and ends. This makes for an appealingly magpie-ish book, as interested in assembling a collage portrait of Silver Hill from individual stories and details – the first time, I think, that Guo has used multiple first-person narrators, and she handles them pretty well – as it is concerned with establishing any one character, or the facts of the incident described above. Although UFO in Her Eyes has its own epigraphs (from Ban Gu and Milan Kundera), to return to McHugh for a moment, it strikes me as a novel that could have been written around the epigraph which China Mountain Zhang takes from Camus: “A simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.”

And Silver Hill is an emblematic place indeed. It is located, as several villagers proudly note, less than fifteen kilometres from the birthplace of Chairman Mao; as a result it was gifted with generous amounts of farm equipment — eight tractors and ten manure spreaders. But that was fifty years ago, and since Mao’s death the village seems to have dropped off the government radar. “Once we were revolutionary and progressive,” Chief Chang notes, in a careless moment of honesty, “now we are slow and backward” (7). Every trend seems to be moving against the villagers. The young think that “any big city is better than Silver Hill” (17) and leave; the youngest person interviewed by the government agents is Yun, aged 37. (Jieling, we can imagine, came from a village like Silver Hill. For her, country is axiomatically bad and city is axiomatically good; her friend’s plans to go home and get married when she pays off her debt “seemed very country”) And each year, creeping desertification makes it harder for those who remain to draw a living from the land. No wonder the villagers constantly refer to their past; no wonder many of them cite an old proverb to the effect that people must be prepared to “eat bitterness”.

In his report into the UFO incident, the lead agent – BJ1919; in one of the novel’s faintly absurd touches he, like his counterpart, HN1989, is never given a full name, although you can translate the two as “bad cop” and “good cop”, respectively, with the clichés those labels imply – provides a cautiously paranoid assessment. In the absence of a clear explanation, all nearby aerial activity should be monitored; Kwok Yun should be visited regularly; Chief Chang’s leadership should be more closely scrutinised; and, if possible, the identity of the foreigner should be determined. The last of these proves surprisingly easy – early the following year, the village receives a letter from Michael Carter, claiming to be the rescued man, thanking Yun for her kindness (he remembers her for her sloganed t-shirt: “Is This The Future?”), and offering a check for $2000 “in the hope that it will help fund your village school and any children in need” (82). Inspired, Chief Chang awards Yun a “model peasant” medal, and declares that

“For the last thirty years,” Chief Chang said, raising her hand to show everyone she was going to make an important speech, “the people of Silver Hill have eaten enough bitterness to last us to eternity! And because we are poor and uneducated, we have been unaware of what has been going on in the rest of our country, let alone in the world! Well, I can tell you that, recently, China has changed beyond recognition. Silver Hill is running far behind. It is time for us to do something!” (88)

I would be surprised if, on reading passages like this, I’m the only person reminded of Geoff Ryman’s Air (2004). That novel is not set in China, but Silver Hill and Kizuldah are the same kind of place, and Chief Chang seems cut from the same cloth as Ryman’s Chung Mae – a middle-aged woman determined to pull her village up by its bootstraps. Subsequent to the speech above, we find that as a result of Chang’s lobbying the government has awarded two million yuan to Silver Hill to make it “one of China’s ‘up to speed’ villages”, to which end a Five Year Plan has been prepared which entails investment in such things as infrastructure, a “future technology hub”, service industries, entertainment provision, and housing – and developing tourism as the village’s major growth industry, based on Yun’s “significant contribution to science” (108). The next batch of reports are transcripts of interviews carried out by Hunan Finance Officer 8 (again, no name) to document the villagers’ reactions to this incipient economic miracle, which are about as mixed as you might expect.

If Guo’s novel also has a certain amount of stylistic similarity to Ryman’s – in prose that aspires to a sort of unjudgemental innocence about its characters, in its portrayal of a living small community, in its themes of the impact of globalisation and development – it is, ultimately, rather different in temperament. Air is not uncritically optimistic, but it is, at heart, optimistic – luminously so; it is one of the book’s virtues – and, particularly in its later stages, evinces a fable-like conviction in the story being told. UFO In Her Eyes, by contrast, is a far more sceptical work. The urbanisation of Silver Hill (the characters describe it as modernisation) becomes a goal unto itself, a pursuit of something they should be whether or not it’s something they want to be, and irrespective of its worth to the village’s inhabitants. In many cases, that worth is “not much” – there are interviews with the fisherman whose pond will be destroyed, the rice farmer whose field will be replaced with a UFO memorial and restaurant, the noodle seller whose stall will be forced out of business. These are men who know no other life, who in some cases are unable to live any other life – who struggle with the transition from their “proper peasant calendar” to an “impossible city people’s Western thing” (35), who may be scarred by previous Chinese attempts at modernisation. Even when they can adapt, they may be prevented from doing so by bureaucracy or circumstance. Much is lost in the rush to progress.

Of course, Silver Hill is not a unique creation. The speed and ferocity of China’s urban boom is well documented, as are the development policies which drive it, not least by books like Kynge’s. And in sfnal terms, UFO in Her Eyes is lower-key than any of the other works I’ve mentioned here, even “Special Economics”; even in the background of Guo’s story there are no grand events, and there’s certainly no innovation as transformative as Air. Yun’s sighting remains enigmatic to the end – the UFO is never seen again – and, at least at first glance, appears to be important more for its catalytic effect on the local economy than anything else. So there is an extent to which UFO in Her Eyes could be characterised as sf in trappings only. Seeking to portray the normal life of the future is one thing – an admirable thing – and understatement is appealing, but merely placing an existing normal life in the future could be said to lack a certain vigour.

I think Guo is cannier than that, though. I don’t think it’s a stretch, in fact, to suggest that Yun’s t-shirt hangs a lantern on this very issue. To say that the book demands to be read as an exploration of that question – Is this the future? – might be taking it too far, and would in any case sound awfully ponderous for a book with as light a touch as Guo’s usually has, but the resonances that the book’s sfnal trappings raise are significant. There may or may not be any actual aliens in the story (I think there may in fact be one, hidden in the interstices of other people’s stories), but there is no shortage of alienation, from the nameless government officials, and Yun’s initial position as an outsider, to the connotations of foreigner-as-alien and how they reflect on Chang’s desire to get Silver Hill to engage with the outside world, and the silent but increasing number of deprived migrants who arrive in Silver Hill seeking the new jobs that development creates.

There are moments of bureaucratic absurdity, and moments when the remote fumbles of government have all too real consequences. The society presented is one in which “peasant” is a political designation, where by habit much is censored, or simply not reported. (“Disaster belongs to the West” [154], Chang cynically notes, in another unguarded moment.) If this sounds like a lot of ground to cover in a slim book (it is only a shade over 200 pages) then, well, it is. Guo is not a writer who paints her panoramas with detail; rather, she suggests much with a few strokes of the pen, and provokes much in the reader. The bulk of UFO in Her Eyes has a documentary coolness and sweep, which is occasionally counterpointed by vivid close-ups. Much that is troubling hides behind the carefully correct official answers, through reference to the past or gesture to the future; along with just enough sweetness to make eating the bitterness bearable, even as the first smog clouds the sky above Silver Hill.

Speaking To The Mysterious Fears Of Our Nature

Earlier in the autumn, the Bodleian Library hosted a one day event to mark the publication of The Original Frankenstein:

… a ground-breaking new edition of the first and most popular work of science fiction, allowing Mary Shelley’s pure authorial voice to be heard for the first time since 1817, when the book was initially written. The Bodleian publication uses the unique handwritten draft of 1816-17, held at the Library, to distinguish Mary’s own words from the additions written in by her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I didn’t manage to make it to the event, but thanks to Vulpes Libris I (and you) can now read Brian Aldiss’ closing speech:

A teenager! She was a teenager, you know?! Not the sort of female teenager today’s newspapers would have us believe in. Mary came from a civilized — a crowded but civilized — home. Literature, science and politics were regularly discussed there; Coleridge read his poetry there. (To see and to hear Samuel Taylor belting out ‘The Ancient Mariner’ might not have been to everyone’s taste — a bit like early Dr Who — but it is something to have a living poet rampant in the parlour, even if aided and abetted, I might say, by ‘a substance’ …) Anyway, Mary would have been aware that new things had developed and that the world was opening up, in the same way that we’re aware now that we’re closing down the shop — victims of our own cult of greed.

(There’s more substantive stuff about Shelley’s writing and significance, too.)

Lessing and Reviews

The new issue of Vector should be dropping through letterboxes right about now. It looks like this:

And contains the following:

Torque Control — editorial
Letters — from Nic Clarke, Lindsay Jackson and James Bacon
The BSFA Awards — call for nominations by Donna Scott
Doris Lessing and SF — by Adam Roberts
… And The Law Won — by Jonathan McCalmont
On the ‘Art’ of Reviewing — by Frank Ludlow
First Impressions — reviews, edited by Kari Sperring
Particles — books received, compiled by Kari Sperring
Transmission Interrupted: Midnight at the Lost and Found — a TV column by Saxon Bullock
Foundation’s Favourites: Vector 1 — by Andy Sawyer
Resonances — by Stephen Baxter
The New X: Photocopying the Navel of Augustus Caesar — by Graham Sleight

There’s already been a bit of discussion about the issue on the BSFA forum; as ever, all feedback is welcome. I’d particularly like to be able to continue running a print letters column, so send your comments to the usual address.

Although this issue was a bit (cough) delayed, V258 is following close behind, and with any luck should go to the printers next week. And if you’re really lucky, I’ll get around to putting some articles up on the website this weekend.