Author: Niall

The Point Of It All

Meme Therapy’s latest brain parade asks “What is the job of contemporary sf? Does it have a job?” To which most of the respondents so far say no, not really, or at most no but. Which of course is the correct and proper stance: we all know nowadays that the important part of science fiction is that it’s fiction, that it is an art form, that it has no responsibility, and indeed no ability, to be anything else. We know that whatever value inheres in science fiction is aesthetic value, and that it can and should be measured by the same yardsticks as other forms of fiction.

I’m not saying this is wrong, per se, but it’s interesting to compare that sort of stance to, of all things, the latest episode of Stargate SG-1. I don’t watch Stargate. Once upon a time I would have done—in my teens I was indiscriminate, happily gobbling up whatever BBC2 decided to show in their weekday 6.45 slot—but these days it seems like too much commitment for too little return. But It’s reached two hundred episodes, which is an absurdly high number, and the prepublicity photos suggested they were going to celebrate the fact in gloriously absurd style. And they do, for forty-two minutes and thirty-one seconds of the forty-two minute and fifty-five second episode.

The conceit, by the way, builds on the show’s hundredth episode, which I haven’t seen, in which it transpires that a studio is developing a thinly-veiled (to those in the know) version of the SG-1 team’s story for tv. It’s called Wormhole X-treme!, and in the latest episode we learn that it lasted for three episodes, but that it did well on DVD so now there’s interest in making a tv movie. Cue all the meta ever—not only is Stargate itself based on a film, of course, but two of the current actors, Ben Browder and Claudia Black, were the leads on Farscape, which died and was resurrected as a tv movie—plus various suggestions for how the movie could work, and so on. The movie falls through, but the tv series gets recomissioned, and the last segment is a flash-forward ten years to a behind-the-scenes documentary focusing on the Wormhole X-treme! cast and crew. Cue even more gentle parody, as the actors’ doubles talk about the challenges they faced in such a long-running show, and the producer says that he thinks one of the secrets of their success is how they don’t take themselves too seriously; and then, in the last twenty-four seconds, we cut to an interview with the actor playing the Teal’c equivalent, who says:

“Science fiction is an existential metaphor. It allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, ‘individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today. But the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.'”

End of episode. Fade to black. It’s shameless, it’s manipulative, it’s arrogant … and yet I found myself moved by it, by the simple, whole-hearted belief that it demonstrates in the project of science fiction.

I’ve been reading Mark Budz’s latest novel, Idolon, for review for Strange Horizons. It’s set in a near future on the edge of the sort of shared sensory environment that’s cropped up in recent work by Vernor Vinge and Chris Beckett, among others. People and buildings are habitually coated with electronic skin, programmable matter that allows them to imitate the style of people and places from times past. I don’t want to gazump my own review, but one of the things that’s struck me about it, particularly having just watched that Stargate episode, is the presence of passages like this:

He felt the pressure, too. It got to him after a while. It got to everyone. Each day, reality became a little less familiar … a little more uncertain. Maybe that was why so many people cast themselves in the past. It wasn’t real, but it had been real. Which was more than anyone could say for the future.

Which surely chimes with the prevalent sentiment in that brain parade (not to mention echoing Pattern Recognition). I think it’s Graham Sleight’s review of Rainbows End that suggests the futures of science fiction can be thought of as arguments, works of advocacy. Reading the above passage, I suddenly realised that one of the reasons I was still turning the pages, probably a reason at least as strong as my interest in the characters and plot, was that I wanted to know how Idolon‘s argument resolved. More than wanting to see the bad guys beaten, I wanted to know whether the world Mark Budz was creating would rediscover its belief in the future.

Which I guess means that, on some level, I’m a believer too.

(All of which has nothing to do with international sf, for which I apologise. As recompense, I propose to write about one of the following later this week: “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” by Geoff Ryman (Oct/Nov F&SF); “R&R” by Lucius Shepard; or the special Finncon edition of Usva. Which would you prefer, o readers?)

Out of the Silent Blog …

… come links. Apologies for the complete lack of other content, but this week is keeping me busy. With any luck I’ll get something more substantial posted at the weekend. In the meantime:

In the best tradition of contentless posts, I now expect to receive at least 39 comments.

Another Word for Link is Whuffie

(Why yes, the August F&SF did arrive here yesterday.)

1. I went to see Superman Returns earlier this week. On IMAX. Bits of it (the flashback, the plane crash, the rescue from the boat, and the ending) were in 3D. I enjoyed the spectacle of it, and it’s hard not to have at least some admiration for how transparently mechanical it is, how diligently it ticks the boxes associated with Superman. As summer movies go, it didn’t seem bad.

Lou Anders didn’t care for it much; on the other hand, one of the things he picks up on, the lack of nuance, is actually something I think Singer made a virtue out of. It is strange to see a hero so straightforwardly and comprehensively moral, and as Abigail Nussbaum notes it’s equally strange to see a modern screen version of this story that so thoroughly foregrounds Superman, as opposed to Clark Kent.

What I think both this choices have going for them is that they emphasise the alien-ness of Superman. To the point, in fact, where having seen Smallville, whatever the merits or the flaws of that show, it’s hard to imagine how the Superman of Superman Returns avoided being similarly humanised by his upbringing. It also puts an interesting spin on the Lois/Clark dynamic; personally, I’ve never quite been able to decide if I don’t understand what Clark sees in Lois, or whether I understand all too well, but it’s never been a relationship that quite sits comfortably with me, and this film, I think, plays up that ambivalence. Clark seems more of a disguise, more of an act than ever. At heart, Superman Returns could almost be seen as asking a question in response to Lois’ Pulitzer-winning article; not “Does The World Need Superman?” but “Does Superman Need The World?”

2. Jose of the extraordinarily energetic Meme Therapy asked me if I had anything to say about this question:

Science Fiction often presents a coded commentary on the present. What current work of science fiction do you think delivers the most relevant/poignant message with respect to our present geopolitical situation?

So a couple of thoughts.

One, define “our”. A book like Geoff Ryman’s Air, for instance, examines the consequences of the increasing connectedness of the world. It’s a brilliant and important novel, and certainly relevant, but it’s not about the “us” that are most likely to be reading this post in the sense that a series like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitol is about us. (I’m trying to think of a recent and particularly British future here, and drawing a blank. How embarrassing.) It’s not just that the answer to the question depends on where you’re standing, but that I think mainstream sf is (finally) becoming aware of that fact.

Two, I’m interested in the time-sensitivity implied in the question. Accept as a given that all fiction is a response to the times in which it’s written, and that looking back at now from ten years in the future it is likely to be more obvious which books were prescient. The question is then really about what seems most relevant now, which implies fiction with a certain consciousness in its approach. This seems to me to take us either in the direction of deliberate allegory, or more interestingly towards something like Sterling-definition slipstream (works that make you feel very strange, the way living in the early twenty-first century makes you feel).

Here’s my suggestion: Hav by Jan Morris. It’s possibly the slowest fixup in history, being comprised of a short novel, “Last Letters From Hav”, published in 1985, and a long novella, “Hav of the Myrmidons”, published this year, plus an introduction to bind the two together. It’s fiction in the style of travel writing, and an exploration of a city that doesn’t exist, and how it changes over time. In its 1985 incarnation, Hav seems bowed down by the weight of history, of multiple colliding traditions; in its 2006 incarnation, it seems both febrile and somehow diminished. Ursula le Guin, reviewing it for The Guardian, argued that it’s science fiction, and concluded:

Morris says in the epilogue that if Hav is an allegory, she’s not sure what it is about. I don’t take it as an allegory at all. I read it as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the west and east in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us. Its enigmas are part of its accuracy. It is a very good guidebook, I think, to the early 21st century.

3. Strange Horizons reviews is having a Doctor Who week. Specifically, Iain Clark reviews “School Reunion“, Tim Phipps reviews Love and Monsters“, Abigail Nussbaum reviews the season two finale, and Graham Sleight provides an overview of the whole season. Speaking as someone who didn’t really watch Who growing up (or at least not sufficiently for it to have been a formative experience), it’s been interesting to see how differently seasons one and two of the new version have been received.

One World, Many Stories

I have it on good authority that Vector 247 has been sighted in the wild. Or at least in peoples’ letterboxes. The theme this time around is “international sf”. Here’s the damn fine lineup:

Torque Control — editorial
Che Guevara on a Greyhound Bus — translator and editor Marcial Souto interviewed by Ian Watson
The Future That Never Began — Michael Froggatt on Soviet SF
Colourful Stories — Nisi Shawl on African-descended SF
The Search for South African SF — Nick Wood
Bears, Bombs and Popcorn — Judith Berman on cultural source-mining
Archipelago — Dan Hartland on the stories of Zoran Zivkovic
First Impressions — book reviews edited by Paul N. Billinger
The New X: The Walls Are Down, Unfortunately — a column by Graham Sleight

As usual, we’ll be putting some of the articles and reviews up on the website over the next week or two. Of course, to get the whole thing (and Matrix, and Focus), those of you who aren’t already members could just join the BSFA.

Understanding Space and Time

To judge by some of the most visible metrics of quality, Alastair Reynolds had a good 2005. His novel Pushing Ice was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and three of his short stories were picked up for various year’s best volumes: “Beyond the Aquila Rift” by Dozois and Hartwell/Cramer; “Zima Blue” by Dozois again; and a novella, “Understanding Space and Time” by both the Strahan and Horton volumes. As this perhaps indicates, although Reynolds is best-known for his novels—and in particular the four-volume Inhibitors sequence—he has been amassing a significant body of short fiction, culminating in not one but two short fiction collections due later this year: Galactic North, from Gollancz, collecting the existing Inhibitors stories (except for “Diamond Dogs” and “Turquoise Days”, which are available as a separate double-feature) and adding a few new ones, and Zima Blue and Other Stories, from Night Shade, collecting everything else.

Because I haven’t read any of the Inhibitors books, I can’t help feeling relatively under-read in Reynolds; this can in fact be attributed to being thoroughly dissuaded from reading his work by a story published in Interzone sometime in the late nineties, which I suspect was “Galactic North” itself. Since then I’ve gradually read more of his output, although I think he remains a problematic writer. The two novels I’ve read both had fairly serious flaws (Century Rain primarily of pacing, Pushing Ice primarily of characterisation), and while I’ve been impressed by much of his work at shorter lengths, the three stories I mentioned above run the gamut from forgettable to surprisingly moving. “Beyond the Aquila Rift” falls into the first camp, “Zima Blue”, with its build to a striking abdication of humanity, into the second; and Understanding Space and Time (published as a standalone book for last year’s Novacon) seems to me to equally illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of Reynolds’ writing.

In many ways, it’s a prototypical cosmological hard sf story. A catastrophic plague on Earth wipes out humanity; the story’s protagonist, the last man, John Renfrew, escapes by virtue of the fact that he’s in a base on Mars; he decides to spend his remaining years studying the mysteries of the universe; and he is contacted by aliens who help him with his quest. So much is familiar. The ultimate revelation is, for obvious reasons, withheld from the reader, but even that is hinted to be somewhat hoary. But in most such stories, that doesn’t really matter: we read them for the experience, to feel the thrill of approaching transcendence.

There’s an intriguing subgenre of sf stories that take music as a metaphor for their subject. Reynolds doesn’t take it as far as, say, James Alan Gardner’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Organism” (1992), or John G. McDaid’s “Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord and Two Manuals” (2005). His story, although it has the graceful swell and fade of music, is not literally structurally dependent on it. But it sings the music of the universe. It is threaded through with musical analogies: the life-support machines surrounding Renfrew’s last colleague begin to seem to him like music; the aliens, when they turn up, communicate in musical tones; Renfrew’s imaginative exploration of the universe leads to fever dreams which recapitulate “the entire history of the universe, from its first moment of existence to the grand and symphonic flourishing of intelligence”. (There’s also, as Peter Hollo points out, an egregious misuse of the word ‘crescendo’, but you can’t have everything.)

The most obvious representation of music in Reynolds’ story, though, is the delusion that Renfrew indulges in to cope with his isolation: he strikes up a dialogue with a hologram of Elton John (named throughout only as ‘Piano Man’, and who also contributes the story’s epigraph). At first, the appearance of the hologram, and his white Bosendorfer grand piano, seems like a sign of hope—the station isn’t broken beyond repair, Renfrew has more options than he thought he did. It’s not true, but even so “when the piano man was playing,” we are told, “he did not feel truly alone.” Gradually, their interaction deepens, their conversations becoming more involved. Narratively, this is useful for Reynolds—along with the dreams mentioned above, it allows him to make the physics lectures slightly more digestible—but what’s most interesting about the piano man is how he becomes a hook for characterisation.

John Renfrew appears, at first glance, to be a standard hard sf protagonist. Andrew Wheeler neatly nailed the type recently, with reference to Spin: “everyone in it is just a bit more like an engineer than real people actually are: they all explain things just a bit more clearly, and they all do what they say they will do, and they’re nearly always rational.” And sure enough, when the time comes to sit down with the Mars station’s supply of books, Renfrew discards the fiction—”too depressing, reading about other people going about their lives before the accident”—and the philosophy—not a total waste of time, but “detached from anything that Renfrew considered mundane reality”—which leaves (ta-da!) the physics textbooks. When it comes to the day to day stuff, Renfrew acts like an engineer. But Reynolds’ trick is in how Renfrew reacts to his larger situation:

And what if there was in fact no one else out there at all: just empty light years, empty parsecs, empty megaparsecs, all the way out to the furthest, faintest galaxies, teetering on the very edge of the visible universe?

How did that make him feel?

Cold. Alone. Fragile.

Curiously precious.

It’s that trace of ego that’s the key, because it only grows. Confronted with the immensity of the universe, Renfrew strengthens his belief in himself. It is strongly implied that, like the creation of Piano Man, it’s a survival tactic, a mild insanity to prevent a much more total one. As Maureen Kincaid Speller notes, this sort of thinking-through of the psychological consequences of hard-sf scenarios is characteristic of Reynolds’ work. In Understanding Space and Time the sense of pressure builds steadily, although Renfrew’s situation is not visibly changing; it’s his conversations with Piano Man that spur him on.

Piano Man was right. It was a question of how deep he wanted to go.

But surely there was more to it than that. Something else was spurring him on. It felt like a weird sense of obligation, an onus that weighed upon him with pressing, judicial force. He was certain now that he was the last man alive, having long since abandoned hope that anyone was left on Earth. Was it not therefore almost required of him to come to some final understanding of what it meant to be human, achieving some final synthesis of all the disparate threads in the books before him?

On one level, this is simply a description of the force of the story, a recognition that this is how the last man is meant to live his life. Later on, as Renfrew’s quest nears its end, he senses the proximity of an answer as an approaching ending. But more immediately, when the (refreshingly unenigmatic) aliens arrive, bearing the bad news that the virus that wiped out humanity subsequently mutated and wiped out every other biological organism on Earth as well, a stereotypical hard-sf dismissal—”Renfrew dealt with that”—looks somewhat more pathological than usual. Even more tellingly, when the Kind offer to create new humans from Renfrew’s genetic material, he refuses, because “When I was alone, I spent a lot of time thinking things through. I got set on that course, and I’m not sure I’m done yet. There’s still some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Maybe when I’m finished …” It’s not exactly a profound examination of the human condition, but it’s something for us to hold on to.

And so Renfrew upgrades. And so the story almost grounds itself. Reynolds is committed to hard sf—even the Kind are explicitly limited in their capabilities—with the advantage that his work engenders trust that it means what it says: that Renfrew’s characterisation is grounded in a fairly close approximation of what his situation would really be like. But despite this, his portrayal of deep time is curiously flat. It is a portrayal rooted in casual dissonance, the sudden passing of great gobs of time, or the creation of great structures. As his intellectual exploration becomes more demanding, Renfrew leaves behind his human body, becoming first a kilometre-high crystalline mound on the summit of Pavonis Mons, and then growing until eventually he has to detach himself from the planet (for the wonderfully practical reason that the heat dissipation from his thinking is starting to disrupt the planetary climate). But throughout, Reynolds’ description is matter-of-fact:

In space he grew prolifically for fifteen million years. Hot blue stars formed, lived and died while he gnawed away at the edges of certain intractables. Human civilisations buzzed around him like flies. Among them, he knew, were individuals who were engaged in something like the same quest for understanding. He wished them well, but he had a head start none of them had a hope of ever overtaking. Over the years his density had increased, until he was now composed mostly of solid nuclear matter. Then he had evolved to substrates of pure quark matter. By then, his own gravity had become immense, and the Kind reinfoced him with the mighty spars of exotic matter, pilfered from the disused wormhole transit system of some long-vanished culture. A binary pulsar was harnessed to power him; titanic clockwork enslaved for the purposes of pure mentation.

It’s the sort of thing that put me off “Galactic North” way back when. There’s nothing in this that captures how Renfrew’s pursuit of knowledge feels; compared to similar passages in most Stephen Baxter novels (or any of the vastly more personal stories of intelligence amplification that sf is fond of), this is cold, flat stuff. That the story doesn’t collapse entirely is a tribute to the groundwork Reynolds has laid earlier on. We’re content to wait for wave to break, because we suspect it’s fundamentally unstable.

As it turns out, it is and it isn’t. As noted above, the answer Renfrew seeks is both old-fashioned and eventually sidestepped, left to implication. In fact, Renfrew splits his identity: one part of him goes on to the answer, and possible oblivion, while the other waits, receives confirmation that an answer is reached (without being told what the answer is) and chooses to diminish, to return to humanity. As is common in such cosmological stories, a certain amount of this is cast in religious terms, and for the second time Reynolds’ touch almost fails him (there is little excuse for dialogue such as “But that would mean I’m—” “Don’t say it”). But this time, it is not just the glimpses of selfish humanity that keep us reading. The echoes, in Renfrew’s return, of a similar, much more famous story, are distorted, muffled: but in the distance there is the music of the universe, cold and clear.

The Wheel Turns

So we’re losing Emerald City (and, sadly, the blog), but we have gained a new ‘zine this week: Heliotrope, from the people behind Fantasy Book Spot. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, you can download a pdf of the whole first issue, or smaller pdfs of each individual article and story, but there’s no easy way to actually view the content online (i.e., no HTML version).

As you might expect for a first issue, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Heidi Kneale’s essay “Where’s the Sci-Fi: the relationship between trends in science fiction and modern history,” for instance, seems perfunctory, to put it kindly; Edward Morris’s story “On The Air” is an intermittently entertaining but clunky alternate history, largely cast in the form of an radio broadcast by Hugo Gernsback. (Others may like it more. It’s in a similar vein to “Imagine“, from Interzone last year, which I also wasn’t bowled over by, but which made the most recent BSFA Short Fiction Award shortlist.) But there are some good reviews by Victoria Hoyle, and an interesting poem by Catherynne M. Valente. (Which may sound like faint praise, but I’m a tough sell when it comes to poetry.)

There’s also “The Skeptical Fantasist: in defense of an oxymoron,” an essay by R. Scott Bakker which, from the title, I was hoping was going to be an antidote to Charles Stross’ odd assertion that “fantasy is, almost by definition, consolatory and escapist literature. Pure fantasy doesn’t really tell us anything about the world we live in”. (Further discussion, although mostly of the other bits of Stross’ post. And while we’re in the neighbourhood of the subject, see this discussion of what’s ‘cutting edge’ in sf.) And it is, in a way, once you get past the equally odd assertion that “Where science fiction, one might say, constructs pseudo-knowledge of the future, fantasy fiction reconstructs the pseudo-knowledge of the past” by realising that Bakker is talking almost exclusively about genre fantasy.

His argument, I think, is that (1) to go along with the general fall in scientific literacy, there has been an equally damaging but less recognised fall in “interpretive literacy”, the ability to recognise the fluidity of texts; and that (2) genre fantasies, typically based on anthropomorphic (“familial”) worldviews, look familiar and comforting to those who lack facility of interpretation, but can be used to “speak out, to use the frequency of shared interests to communicate different values, different perspectives, to people engaged in their own ingrown conversation.” Fair enough. But along the way, this argument almost gets lost in the noise of an entirely separate argument about the stagnation of the literary establishment. I’m also not entirely convinced that he understands molecular genetics enough to be drawing on it for similes:

Within the literary establishment itself, the consensus seems to be that the culture industry is largely to blame, that in the interests of reaping the efficiencies that follow from standardization, the media corporations have literally trained the capacity for critical interpretation out of consumers. […] No one, they might say, laments interpretive illiteracy more than they do, but so long as the system continues unchecked, there is precious little they can do.

Of course this story is an oversimplification. Nor is it the case that all the literati buy into even its most sophisticated versions. But nonetheless reproductions of this tale float around university literature departments like bits of messenger RNA, ready to undo any damage to the master code that not only determines the form and content of all things literary, but also secures the authority of those with the proper institutional credentials.

A shame. But the ‘zine is worth a look anyway, and it pays good rates, so long may it survive.

On an entirely different note: John Clute’s new website has a page of notes and things, including a collection of “aphorisms and thoughts, mostly swollen, out of which is it sometimes possible to say something”, of which my favourite is probably this:

Genres: Stud farms for McGuffins that lasted the course.

Reading is sexy (again)

Or so reports the Guardian blog. Don’t they do this survey about once every eighteen months? Surprisingly, this time sf doesn’t seem to feature in the list of turn-off genres (and not only that, the picture in the post is of someone reading a fantasy novel. A Booker-longlisted fantasy novel, admittedly, but even so). There is this rather good story about a third of the way down the comment thread, though:

My worst ever literary experience came from re-reading Asimov’s I, Robot. The film had just come out; I hadn’t read any sci-fi since I was 14 and I wanted to go back and see if there was anything to it.

Obviously I took great care on my morning commute to shield the book from the view of the several attractive women sitting near me. However this was a Routemaster (no. 12), and when the conductor came to check my ticket he spotted the cover and launched into a 20 minute conversation/monologue about the merits of various sci-fi authors and novels, in the course of which I was compelled by politeness to admit familiarity with several of those authors, in full view of girls.

Astonishingly, the exact same thing happened the next day with a different conductor. I did not mourn the advent of the bendy bus.

Maybe they have a reading group.

All About Books

Since I’ve been tagged:

1. One book that changed your life?

I always use the same answer for this question, but it’s kinda true, so: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. When I went to university and joined OUSFG, one of the perks was being able to choose a book for the society to buy for its library. The Sparrow had won the Clarke Award that year, and seemed like an obvious choice. It handily blew me away, and I started to pay a lot more attention to what I was reading, rather than (as had been previous practice) omnivorously consuming whatever I could get.

2. One book you have read more than once?

I don’t tend to do much re-reading these days, but Kim Stanley Robinson seems to be an author I revisit with some frequency. I’ve read Red Mars several times, and I keep meaning to find time to go back to Pacific Edge.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

I have utterly no idea. Maybe on a desert island I’d finally have time for the Baroque Cycle …

4. One book that made you laugh?

At the moment, I’m working my way through the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts. Sometimes, when I tell people I find Peanuts funny, they look at me as though I’m a little bit crazy. But I’m a Peanuts kid; my Dad has several shelfloads of the small paperbacks from the 50s and 60s and 70s (the ones with titles like Good Grief, Charlie Brown and You’ve Come A Long Way, Charlie Brown) and for the majority of my childhood they were all not-so-neatly packed into a bookcase that sat just outside the bathroom, making them perfect loo break reading. There’s something in the sensibility of the strip, the mix of resignation and optimism, that gets to me; makes me laugh, makes me smile, makes me ache with the truth of it, sometimes. (I’m not so good with humour in prose fiction; I don’t find Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin or Jasper Fforde funny, for instance, or at least not enough to make me laugh.)

5. One book that made you cry?

The closest I’ve come in recent years is at one scene about half-way through Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I tend to be quite internal in my responses to books.

6. One book you wish had been written?

Foundation and Zombies.

7. One book you wish had never had been written?

I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question. Books are axiomatically good, aren’t they?

8. One book you are currently reading?
9. One book you have been meaning to read?

I’m going to double up on this, because I’m going through a phase of dipping into a lot of things. And I have been trying not to acquire book this year, honestly I have. I’ve been very good about not wandering into bookshops and impulse-buying, and almost as good about not going to Amazon. Despite this, my to-be-read pile seems to exist in a state of punctuated equilibrium. Most of the time books are added at about the rate they are removed; every so often, though, the pile suddenly has a growth spurt. This is one of those times. (It never shrinks, of course.)

There are the books that are totally not my fault. Warren Ellis’ Ocean was a present, for instance, as was Oxford by Jan Morris (although that just makes me feel guilty for not having finished A Writer’s World yet). And Daughters of Earth (some of which, including the introduction, is online here) was an offer that was just too tempting to refuse.

Then there are the books that I obviously had to buy, such as Theodora Goss’s collection In the Forest of Forgetting and Michel Faber’s The Fahrenheit Twins. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow fits here as well, as recommended to me by Abigail; and since she’s got around to writing about what I recommended to her, I should probably get around to reciprocating. Though Twenty Epics keeps sneaking up on me at the moment, since it is shinier and has a better index.

And of course there are books for review: I’ve just finished Sonya Taaffe’s collection, Singing Innocence and Experience, for NYRSF, after which I have Mark Budz’s new novel, Idolon, to review for Strange Horizons. And I’m sure something else will be along in a moment. Not to mention the fact that Clarke Award books are starting to trickle in …

In conclusion: at this point, I’m almost more worried about my flat bursting at the seams than about my ability to ever read everything. I’m not going to tag anyone else and insist they do this meme, but if anyone wants to confess their own recent book-acquisition guilt and help me to feel less like a hopeless case, that would be more than welcome.

The World and Alice

Traditionally, science fiction believes in its worlds. It likes to talk about them, and in particular about the ones that take off from our world, and to treat them as though they are things we can hold in our minds; as though they have a shape we can comprehend. The way we talk about sf reflects this shared assumption, from the communal fascination with world-building to the persistency of tropes such as one world governments, or the Clutean description of sf novels as being about “the case of the world.”

All of which plays to one of sf’s great strengths—its ability to give us a sense of perspective—but all of which is, of course, in many ways a pretense. The world has far too many degrees of freedom to be captured in a story; even the most detailed futures are, in the end, pale shadows on a cave wall. And somewhat paradoxically, living at the start of a century in which the world is smaller than it has ever been makes it easier to be aware of this fact, without needing to be prompted by fiction. It may sometimes feel that the interconnection of things is approaching saturation point, but while we wait for that to happen it’s hard not to be humblingly aware of how many individual lives there are out there, and how meaningless it can be to sum across them. It gets easier to notice the people who are left out; to face up to the fact that someone is always going to be left out.

Because the key question, the one that it’s getting harder and harder to justify not answering, is: who is left out? Whose world is it anyway? In this, feminist science fiction, by which I mean a self-aware tradition within a self-aware tradition, has clearly been ahead of the curve. The story of feminist sf is the story of breaking into the clubhouse and claiming a voice. It is an energetic, passionate story. So any new fiction—such as L. Timmel Duchamp’s “The World and Alice” (Asimov’s, July)—which is shaped around a female character and her exclusion from the world is bringing two live wires together. Or in this case, not quite together: just close enough to feel the charge between them buzzing in the air.

This is what Alice has thought all her life:

She belonged somewhere else. Or perhaps nowhere, nowhere at all. And so she thought of herself as the world’s mistake. A century earlier, she believed, the mistake could not have been made.

The problem is one of heft. Alice feels too light for the world, and growing up she thinks (as any child could think, but in her case with more justification than most) that everyone else can see that she’s out of place. So she blames the technology that saved her, the incubator that nurtured her in the weeks after her premature birth. In a sense, she’s right: hers is a specifically contemporary alienation. A century earlier, she wouldn’t have lived.

As she grows up, Alice discovers that ties of love and blood—first to her grandmother, and later to her husband, Daniel—can tether her to the world. The heft of other people exerts a special gravity, to the point where, when Alice’s mother has terminal cancer, she becomes the equivalent of a neutron star: Alice’s life becomes furiously focused on caring for her, with the rest of the world relegated to peripheral vision, and receding to a dangerous extent.

But in the end, such ties are only partial, temporary solutions, and they don’t stop Alice sometimes coming adrift from the world. When she sits mourning at her grandmother’s grave, she meets her older self; or you could equally say, since the perspective of the story neatly flips at that point, that Alice the Older is reminded of a long-ago meeting. It is not time travel in the usual sense, from now to then or then to now. It is more chaotic, more unpredictable, more slippery. Alice’s life in time is a piece of string, scrunched into a ball. Where it crosses itself, the two Alices involved are drawn out of time, into their own moment outside the world. Here they are on a beach:

The ocean held constant, and the rocks on which they stood, and both Alices. But the sky fractured into disjointed shards, zigging and zagging down into the earth and below the surface of the water, every misshapen fragment glittering with sinister, nauseating beauty. Alice and Alice knew she was nowhere, nowhere at all, her being as evanescent as the shifting shards of the world around her, constantly moving, appearing and disappearing, growing and shrinking, in an unceasing parade of change. Alice the Younger held out her hands to Alice the Older. “Touch me, please touch me. I’m so afraid, so afraid I’m not real. That nothing is real. Is this where we really belong? Not in the world, but here?”

It is an arresting image. The contrast between the broken world and Alice the lost individual is stark. She wonders what causes it, beyond the simple fact of the world having made a mistake, but it’s a tricky puzzle. It could be the effect of Alice on the world; it could be the effect of the world on Alice; it could be mutual. What seems clear is that the Alices cannot stay in such a no-place, and so they go back to the world, to live their lives a little more, waiting for the next meeting and for an answer.

This could all get arbitrary and confusing, but Duchamp’s structuring of her story is careful and clever. Most of the time, we follow Alice through her life, through the world, growing older. We share her feeling of acute dislocation, her sense that there should be a reason for it all. But no reason arrives, so every time she meets herself (and by this point we are seeing the encounters from the point of view of the older Alice) she reiterates what she remembers being told: go back to the world.

It is not until Alice’s twilight that things start to come clear. She discovers boxes and albums of old photos, and starts to sort through them with her friend, Marion. They seem alien, as meaningful as images from another world, because they come with no context, no names or descriptions attached to give them relevance. She cannot connect to them any more than she connects to her everyday life. Except:

She looked down at the picture in her hand, a yellowed color photo of her father holding herself at about eighteen months. What she saw in it, she realized, amounted to two individuals in close relation, not figures in relation to a world. Everything else looked like backdrop.

At which point we know what the story is trying to say. It’s telling us what happens when we talk about the world: we reduce it to a backdrop, in front of which there are only individuals, “perhaps embedded in but essentially distinct from the world”, instead of being an integral, vital part of its processes. So when Alice starts to wonder whether she was wrong, after all, about the need to go back to the world, we can feel the stirring of a deep sadness. Pulling herself out of space and time permanently, locking all of herself into a no-place, isn’t a solution: it’s a retreat.

Her final encounter is with her three year-old self. She never remembers being as happy as little Alice seems, playing in her sandbox, full of life and imagination and capable of constructing bold worlds and endless stories. Alice takes Alice outside the world for the first time, and it’s not a surprise to us that she steals something from herself. When they get back, Alice the Younger seems thinner, lighter than she was, and we know that her fate has been sealed. Back in her own time, Alice the Older is suddenly heavier, bowed down by the full weight of the world, and we know that her fate has been sealed as well. The story is a time loop, and it has closed.

And it lingers in the mind until we realise why Alice’s isolation hits so hard: because what she did, focusing on individuals rather than the world, is what we all do too often—what we think we have to do—to get through the day. Too much is reduced to backdrop. If there is such a thing as “the world”, then it’s true that we cannot help but be all too aware of our size in relation to it, to see the limits of our own life and our own times. But if that’s all we see—individuals on the one hand, the world on the other—then we are crippling ourselves. If we don’t see the history, the continuity, the community of the world, we might as well not be looking at all. In the end, “The World and Alice” is a lament for the political consciousness (or lack thereof) of our times: graceful, bleak, familiar.

London Meeting, Tonight

Tonight’s BSFA meeting features Peter F Hamilton, interviewed by BSFA co-chair Pat McMurray. BSFA members and non-members alike are welcome, and there’s no entry charge (but there is a book raffle).

The meeting takes place in the upstairs room of the Star Tavern in Belgravia; there’s a map here.

As usual, the interview kicks off at 7pm, although there will be people around from about 5.30pm onwards. In addition, at 6.45pm there will be a presentation of the SFRA‘s Clareson Award to Paul Kincaid, so this month would be a good month to turn up early.