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.

Sparkle Motion

When I mentioned I was planning to read Stephenie Meyer’s young adult vampire blockbuster Twilight, many people reacted with puzzlement. Why was a reading a book with so many negative reviews, so many articles about the disturbing gender roles and creepy romance? Partly it was curiosity, to see if there’s anything to explain why these books hit such a chord with female readers, much like I read (and enjoyed) Harry Potter to see what all the fuss was about, but mostly it was because I don’t like writing off books without actually reading them just because everyone else says they are rubbish.

Twilight is the story of Bella Swan, who selflessly moves from California to live with her dad, the sheriff of the small, exceptionally damp town of Forks, Washington. There she meets the mysterious and pale Edward Cullen, falls in love, meets his family of equally pale and attractive vampires, and has a run-in with a nasty vampire before the Cullen family rescue her and Edward takes her to the prom. While I was prepared for how much of the book is devoted to the love story, I didn’t realise how lacking in plot it actually is. For 300 pages we follow Bella around as she goes to school, is terrible at gym, makes dinner and does the laundry, and has lots of teenage angst, before she and Edward actually go skipping through the meadows and meet the proper villain. Surely there are better ways of portraying the mundanity of Bella’s life pre-Edward than to tell me every detail.

Bella is clearly an attempt at a character the female readers with empathise with – she worries about fitting in at her new school, she’s bad at gym and worries about her clumsiness. Other than that, her personality is a blank slate, which is why it’s so unbelievable that all the boys she meets are attracted to her, and the clumsiness is so exaggerated that she can barely walk a mile without falling over. It becomes an even bigger problem since the whole plot hinges on Bella being Edward’s one true love, and the only evidence we have for that is Edward’s continual declarations that she smells nice and how intriguing she is, mostly because she’s the one woman whose mind he can’t read.

When James the bad vampire turns up, things get more interesting and more disturbing, at least from a gender angle. The vampires are playing baseball, in an unintentionally hilarious scene as they reveal that they can only play baseball during thunderstorms as they hit the ball so hard it sounds like thunder. (And yet the bats and balls can stand up to this treatment.) The vampires in Meyer’s world draw lightly on traditional vampire mythology, as they do drink blood, and get “turned” by another vampire, but other than that they have superpowers – immortal, exceptionally fast and strong, and a variety of powers which allow them to foresee the future, read minds, control emotions, track humans, and also compose heart-rending piano pieces. In a fight between two groups of superpowered individuals, Bella gets literally picked up and carried about, ordered around, and when she decides to confront the villain herself, it all goes wrong and she has to be rescued, and being a first-person narrative we don’t even get to see the fight as Bella is out cold.

While the relationship between Bella and Edward is undoubtedly creepy and disturbing, with Bella lacking in agency and awareness about how weird it is, I was never sure quite how much was deliberate and how much is Meyer unintentionally robbing Bella of her agency because that’s the only way she can think of to make the plot work. There are occasional nods to Bella having thoughts of her own, as she comes up with a plan, or protests a little at Edward ordering her around, but it is unconvincing against such events as how romantic it is that Edward spends his nights sneaking into her bedroom and watching her sleep. The writing might be an attempt to write like a seventeen-year-old girl in love might write, but it is drowning in adverbs; everything is ‘utterly absurd’ or ‘gloriously intense’, Edward has a ‘sculpted, incandescent chest’ and ‘scintillating arms’, and he even has an alabaster brow, which I hope is a nod to Anne of Green Gables but I’m worried it’s meant to be sincere.

I can see why Twilight does appeal to teenagers, because Edward is the perfect, older boyfriend, one of the cool kids from high school, who takes her out to dinner and wants to know all about her, always the one restraining himself from taking the relationship further while Bella is eager to progress. I don’t worry about teenagers reading it, because I read piles of books with much worse role models and gender issues than this as a teenager. It’s just disappointing that of all the good books out there, so many people are obsessing over it, but if I could predict what book would sell a million copies I’d have a lot more money.

Your Twilight linkapalooza:
Helen-keeble is more forgiving than I am, and has interesting theories on why Bella appeals to teenagers.
The first of Cleolinda’s many Livejournal posts.
Ide Cyan at the Feminist SF blog talks about the cultural positioning of Twilight.
A feminist takes on Twilight’s abstinence message.
Liz Henry is enjoying it so far (it’s true that Bella does think about how she might think about hurting her attempted muggers, but then Edward comes along and rescues her and tells her how she needs a healthy does of fear).
A set of Livejournal posts on Twilight and mormonism.
And just for the funny, Growing Up Cullen, which fills in what Edward was doing for years and years waiting for his true love to turn up.

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.

The Knife of Never Letting Go

The Knife of Never Letting Go cover Everyone has a good word for this book: Liz liked it, Rachel thinks it’s probably the most gripping book she’s read this year, Martin thinks it’s the best effing science fiction novel he’s read all year, Frank Cottrell Boyce thinks it is fantastic, and it’s already won this year’s Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and Booktrust Teenage Prize. So at this point it’s probably very nearly redundant for me to say I like it too; but here goes. I like it.

From the start, two things make The Knife of Never Letting Go one of the most admirably readable books I’ve encountered for ages: pace and voice. Regarding the first, Patrick Ness simply has that gift of being able to structure a narrative so that you want to read just one more page, just one more chapter. The bones of his story are familiar – it’s a pursuit story-stroke-bildungsroman – but what could be a haphazard ricochet from incident to incident is held together by a process of continuous revelation, in which just about everything young Todd Hewitt initially believes to be true about life on the frontier-style colony world he calls home —

There ain’t nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you, ever since the Spacks released the Noise germ during the war, the germ that killed half the men and every single woman, my ma not excepted, the germ that drove the rest of the men mad, the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men’s madness picked up a gun. (13)

— is revealed to be a lie. As just about every one of the commentaries I linked to above notes, Ness’ control over his dripfeed of information is so good that it’s a bit unfair to tell a naïve reader much about the story. In nearly every encounter you learn something new about Todd’s world, and almost all of the revelations are interesting enough to distract you from the fact that they’re usually not what you went into the scene wanting to learn. (The success of this tactic is perhaps lessened a bit if you read it in one sitting.) And then the next scene starts. As Todd puts it at one point, “the world keeps getting bigger” (100); his story is driven by expansion.

But if it’s pace that made me want to read The Knife of Never Letting Go, it’s voice – and the consequent emotional weight that accretes behind the runaway train of narrative – that makes me want to re-read it. This is where the Noise comes in, which is just what Todd says it is in that quote above: the thoughts of men shoved out into the world. Before too long, it becomes apparent that one way of describing what we’re reading in this book is to say that it’s Todd Hewitt’s Noise. He is stripped naked before us — and before anyone else who happens to be listening. This is a book which feels immediate and unfiltered, rough-edged; Todd’s joy and pain, however fleeting, are our agony. At times, under intense pressure, Todd’s narration becomes fragmentary, or entirely lost in the babel that surrounds it. This allows Ness to get away with some narrative cheats — there are several key pieces of information which Todd glimpses in the Noise of others early on, but refuses to accept, which means they’re withheld from the reader until he’s ready to face them, at nearly the end of the book — but it also means the manner in which he’s telling his story (i.e. prose) becomes inextricable from that story, which seems a fair trade.

That what is being unfolded in the course of the story happens to be science-fictionally interesting is a happy bonus. Noise, for example, can’t be ignored, but also can’t be trusted. “Noise ain’t the truth”, Todd reminds himself at one point, it’s “what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out” (23). In Prentisstown, which Todd believes to be the last town on the planet, Noise is peer pressure, monsters from the id, information overload: all of this and more. The implications and possible variations of Noise continue to be developed throughout the novel — dogs and sheep are sort of eagerly dumb, for instance, while some of the native fauna make more creative use of Noise — but the first and most elaborated variation flows from the first truth that Todd uncovers, that there are still women in the world.

One of the few things Todd is right about, in his initial understanding, is that women don’t have noise. Ness treads a fine line with this, repeatedly leaning towards literalising a hoary cliché, only to upset things later in the novel. Shortly after fleeing his all-male home — for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture; save to say that the enemy chasing him is appropriately chilling — Todd encounters a girl called Viola. When he first perceives her, from a distance, as a silence, he finds her cooling and soothing; and he (sort of) rescues her from one of the nastier townfolk. However, although Viola is (initially) strangely silent, she is impressively self-possessed; she fairly quickly decides that Todd is a bit useless, hits him with a big stick, and starts walking back to where she came from.

Of course, things between them do improve from there, and in fact one of the joys of the book is watching the relationship between the two of them develop, not least because it doesn’t become romantic — although in the promised sequels I imagine that’s unavoidable — but it’s apparent that Viola is rather more with-it than Todd. (During the reading week, a number of people read this book; and one of them explained that he liked it a lot more once he realised Todd was a bit of a twit, and switched his mental identification to Viola.) Other cliches played with: initially, Todd is frustrated because he (literally) can never tell what Viola is thinking (so the connection between the two of them is ultimately all the more powerful for existing independently of Noise); and the emotional incontinence Noise causes in men is used to good effect.

All of which, perhaps, is merely to say that for all that The Knife of Never Letting Go looks straightforward, it is not. Hidden within its Allen-Steele-style-colonization exterior beats a darker, Tiptree-ish heart and, an odd timidity about swearing aside, The Knife of Never Letting Go rarely disappoints. Rather, it develops its premise with consistent wit (“he hears me looking”, Todd thinks at one point), not a little charm, and absorbing thoroughness. It is fast to read, and intense; channelled Noise. As everyone else has said: roll on The Ask and the Answer.

The Gambler

Here’s a good story to read. It almost (almost) makes me sorry that Ted Chiang has a story in Eclipse 2 that is easily up to his usual standards, because I think Paolo Bacigalupi deserves a Hugo, and “The Gambler” could otherwise have won him one. It is a very fine piece of work, which manages to find a new angle on — and, not insignificantly when considering award chances, a new tone with which to explore — Bacigalupi’s trademark environmental and globalisation concerns.

In the very near future (itself not actually a venue Bacigalupi has really used; his best stories have tended to be set after some ecological deadline has passed), Ong is a refugee from Laos who has found a new home and a job in Los Angeles. A couple of flashbacks involving Ong’s father flesh out this backstory, but most of the tale revolves around Ong’s work as an online journalist for a large media conglomerate. The depiction of a data-dense newsphere — referred to as “the malestrom” — is good, vivid and chilling; stories “bloom” into existence, as explosions might over a battlefield, and reporters are spoken of as raising and caring for and sustaining their biggest stories as they might a child.

Unfortunately, the stories Ong writes — exposes about the loss of the genetic archive of an extinct butterfly, or mismanagement of water recycling — don’t bring in the clicks, certainly not compared to his colleague’s latest celebrity paedophilia scoop. Ong is threatened with redundancy unless the hit-rate on his stories improves, and out of generosity a colleague sets up an interview with a pop princess called Kulaap, another Laos exile; she ends up trying to save Ong from himself, when his instincts tell him to try to use the interview as a platform for calling attention to the plight of his home country.

There’s an unavoidable element of meta about “The Gambler”, never more prominent than when Kulaap tells Ong, with a sigh, that “No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once”, and Ong responds by insisting (quite rightly) that his stories are real news. Thus (the suspicion is unavoidable) does Bacigalupi deal with his reputation for miserablism. But the reader is never nudged into noticing this parallel — you need information external to the story to see it — and the story instead wisely spends its time deepening Ong’s quiet but firm sincerity. The end of the “The Gambler” is probably the most touching thing Bacigalupi has yet written: what Ong gambles on is human nature, and Bacigalupi makes us want him to win.

In other news: not dead yet, just busy. I’ll be at the BSFA 50th party tomorrow evening, though. And one issue of Vector went to the printers last week (meaning it could start hitting doormats as early as the end of next week), with another hot on its heels.

Story Notes 2

Apologies for the quietude around these parts at the moment; I’m going through another busy period at work. I actually have a fair few posts in the half-written or draft-that-needs-polishing stage, though, and hopefully I’ll get some of them up next week. In the meantime, have some more brief short fiction reviews.

“Greenland” by Chris Beckett (IZ 218)
A bleak story, and one which both revisits a familiar Beckett theme (identity) as well as extending into new territory, in that (as he notes in the story’s introduction) it’s one of his few tales to feature climate change as a significant background element. A solidly rendered sub-tropical Oxford is the primary location, with a dystopic background in which “Old Brits” defend the borders of their country with machine guns on the beaches. The narrator, Juan, is a refugee from a fractured Spain, and early in the story he loses his menial job at Magdalen college due to competition from newer — for which read “cheaper” — immigrants. In order to make ends meet, Juan takes up an ostensibly friendly professor’s offer of participation in an experiment for cash. But the bleakest aspect of the story is the depiction of Juan’s dysfunctional relationship with another immigrant, a French graduate called Suzanne; both have been damaged and deformed by the un-person treatment they receive from the population around them, despite the fact that immigrants now represent the majority of the population. When Juan tells Suzanne that he has a way to perhaps make enough money to get them to Greenland (a fabled refuge), her thought is not of the potential risk to him, her eyes just light up. “Here,” Juan thinks, “was the evidence of how much poverty and fear and hopelessness had coarsened and corrupted her. But I was coarsened and corrupted too.” The experiment itself turns out to be a less mundane kind of science fiction, although in Beckett’s hands it doesn’t feel incongruous, and it provides Beckett the opportunity to make some strong points about the moral value of any kind of sentence. In that, the story of Beckett’s which it most closely echoes is “Karel’s Prayer”, though it is to my mind the more effective of the two pieces; worth reading for its detail, and for the cumulative power of its voice.

“Crystal Nights” by Greg Egan (IZ 215)
Charles Stross with the lobsters filed off. This is a story about evolving AI by darwinian selection — crab-shaped AI with control of their own physiology, in fact — and the ethical pitfalls thereof. As with Beckett’s story, in fact, the deeply felt and convincingly articulated ethical concern for other forms of sentience is one of the most satisfying aspects of the story. It comes in this story from the author, not the protagonist; Daniel Cliff thinks himself not an unkind god, just one who is prepared to make some sacrifices, cause some suffering, to promote the development of the kind of intelligence he wants. The story accelerates nicely, in a “Sandkings” direction, with some welcome flashes of wit (how Daniel made his money, for instance, or what the crabs find when they reach their simulated moon), and an ending that is apt, if not completely satisfying.

“Traitor” by M. Rickert (F&SF, May)
I don’t know, you wait years for an M. Rickert science fiction story, and then … this is another near-future piece and, as with “Bread and Bombs” and “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment” (a) it derives quite a lot of its power from revealing exactly how the world in which it is set has changed from our own time, (b) the change is dystopic in nature, and (c) the viewpoint of a child is central. Where “Traitor” goes further than either of the others is the elliptical manner in which the world is described; a scene in which a mother and daughter visit an ice-cream parlour verges on true surrealism, and a several-page digression into another story (another familiar Rickert trick, admittedly) successfully obscures precisely how the relationship between that mother and daughter is developing until the final page of the story. I have to admit that I found “Traitor” a bit less organic than the best of Rickert’s stories, but it still achieves a commendable intensity.

“Shad’s Mess” by Alex Irvine (Postscripts 15)
Irvine strikes me above all as a competent writer; everything in his stories always fits together with a pleasing clockwork deftness. This one is about a blue-collar teleport repairman who, after a somewhat grisly transporter malfunction, gets sued by some Christian missionaries and starts seeing something he refers to as the Entropy Gremlin. You might think that the satiric/fantastic elements wouldn’t mesh with the down-to-Earth grubby space life aspects, yet they do. What it lacks, perhaps, is the ability to inspire a particularly strong emotional or intellectual connection in the reader; I’m left with a sense that as well-executed as it is, it’s a story that doesn’t add up to much more than the description I’ve just given it.

“Africa” by Karen Fishler (IZ 217)
I’ve enjoyed Fishler’s previous Interzone stories, and I enjoyed “Africa”; like the majority of modern Interzone‘s stories, it seems to me, it aspires to craft rather than innovation, but like Irvine’s story it is a good, solid piece, even if that means I’m damning it with faint praise. The set-up is this: at some point in the future, humanity is expelled from Earth by an alien race, probably (though I don’t think it is explicitly specified) for incompetent planetary stewardship, bound never to return or indeed to land on any other planet. A barrier was constructed around the Earth, with a station that travels on its surface to meet and interrogate any intruders; it is manned by long-lived Guardians, although their numbers have dwindled such that there are now only two of them, Tomeer and his clone-father. A ship approaches, which also appears to be carrying only two people, this time a daughter and her natural father, who is dying. The daughter, Ainkia, tells Tomeer that they are all that is left of Expelled humanity, the rest having died of age and sadness. Youthful, innocent Tomeer is touched by her request to bury her father in the Earth’s soil, but his father is less than impressed by the idea. What’s most satisfying about “Africa” is that, though hardly action-packed, it never feels as though it is treading water – indeed, as usual with Fishler the character relationships are well defined, such that when the inevitable hard choices come (and this is where it scores slightly over “Shad’s Mess”) they mean something. It is not an extraordinary story; but it is an admirable one.

Story Notes 1

I’ve not been reading that much short fiction this year but, with an eye to being a half-way informed voted by the time Hugo nominations roll around, I’ve started to play catch-up. I’m going to try to post brief notes on what I’ve been reading every other week or so; and I’m going to dot around as the mood takes me, so don’t expect reviews of complete issues or anthologies.

“Fellow Traveller” by Hari Kunzru
“Collecting” by Zhu Wen
“A Matter of Timing” by Bernadine Evaristo
(The Guardian, August-October)

The three entries so far in the Guardian’s “China Reflected” relay of stories, which alternates contributions by Western and Chinese writers, riffing off each others’ ideas and themes. Kunzru’s “Fellow Traveller”, probably the best of the three, is a gently comic piece in which a Western traveller finds himself a guest at a hotel on the summit of “Queer Stone Mountain” without quite remembering how or why he got there. By day he goes for aimless walks along misty paths, takes photographs of what he sees, and finds himself harassed by talking pandas who object to his choice of subjects:

“Many things to take pictures in China. Bridge over Yellow River. New Beijing Stadium. Development in autonomous regions. Three Gorges Damn.”

“It’s just a house.”

“House never just house, when photo taken by imperialist lackey.”

The hotel bartender is contemptuous: they’re throwbacks, she says, wishing it was the Cultural Revolution all over again. Gradually the narrator acclimates to his situation, without ever full understanding it. Zhu Wen’s short essay picks up on the idea of pandas as a Chinese national treasure (“Serve Chinese people by harness power of childlike feature, soft two-colour fur and pretending we about to have sex,” they say in Kunzru’s story. “We play major role in cold war”), and describes differing attitudes to collecting and cultural preservation in Britain and China, among other things reframing the tale of the communist party’s use of last emperor of China, Aisin Gioro Puyi, as a form of collecting.

Bernadine Evaristo’s story in turn picks up on the idea of individuals as cultural treasures, and satirically imagines a museum in a near-ish future China which presents, among other things, an “Exhibition of Britain”. Features include his former Royal Highness, King Charles III (“forced to wear, at all times, a heavy ermine cape and a rather tacky papier-mache-crown”), an ex-Beefeater held up as a “typical, everyday Englishman”, as well as more traditional treasures such as the Domesday Book, the statue of Eros from Piccadilly Circus, and a reconstructed Stonehenge. So the targets never really move beyond the obvious, but the story doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the pointed final image offers a welcome counterbalancing seriousness.

“[a ghost samba]” by Ian McDonald (Postscripts 15).
Not, so far as I noticed, directly connected to Brasyl, but set in the same country and making use of the same basic sfnal concept, this is as story narrated by a 40-something music obsessive who tracks down the only copy of a young prodigy’s second album (said prodigy having died in a fire) and then obsesses about completing it. At times it reminded me of both Stephen Baxter’s “The Twelfth Album” and Alastair Reynolds’ “Everlasting”. It’s probably a better story than either of them; arguably less sfnally ambitious, but as you’d expect, McDonald writes extremely well about the sound and sensation of music, and that’s what gives this tale its force.

“Glass” by Daryl Gregory (Technology Review, November/December)
The problem with “Glass” is that it’s too short – not that much longer than one of Nature’s Futures – although whether that problem originates with constraints of the venue or with Gregory I couldn’t tell you. The story is constructed as another neurobiological thought experiment, a la “Second Person, Present Tense” or “Dead Horse Point”, except that this time there’s a literal experiment involved: a trial of a new drug that stimulates mirror neruons. Dr Alycia Liddell is administering the drug to a small group of convicted criminals — sociopaths — with the hypothesis that it will provoke empathy. That she finds herself having to talk one patient out of a violent confrontation turns out to be evidence of a not entirely anticipated kind of success; and although that confrontation is tense and focused, and the story has a vicious final turn, there’s an an inescapable sense that it ends just when it should be getting started.

“An Honest Day’s Work” by Margo Lanagan (The Starry Rift)
I enjoyed this a lot; although there’s a serious story at its heart, I think this is one of Lanagan’s more playful stories (at least compared to the likes of “The Goosle”). It also happens to be the third story I’ve read this year – after Adam Roberts’ Swiftly and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility” – that riffs on the idea of humaniform life on a different scale. The narrator, a disabled boy, lives in a coastal village whose economy is built around capturing and carving up giant human-like creatures. The story deals with one such event and, even without the obvious resonance of the central image, provides plenty of opportunity for Lanagan to showcase her imaginative reach with characteristic vividness.

“Arkfall” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF, September)
This is a story with a very interesting background – indeed, the story seems to exist in large part to allow the ecology and culture of the setting, a waterworld with the rather unconvincing name of Ben, which in the process of being terraformed, to be described. But the story itself is flat and predictable. After an accident, three characters – Okaji, one of the waterworld’s inhabitants, her mother, and an uber-obnocious Heinleinian go-getter with the unironic and stunningly hackneyed nickname of “Scrappin’ Jack” – are trapped together in one of the living vessels that contribute to the terraforming process. Okaji, and the culture from which she comes, are everything that Jack is not – in his terms, passive and introverted; though they seem actually to function perfectly well on their own terms, even if their habit of referring to each other in the third person grates after a while – and so, unsurprisingly, the two come into conflict. The simplistic nature of their interactions is intensely frustrating, as is the fact that one of the key events in their journey – they discover an undersea alien city, which admittedly is quite spectacular – apparently requires us to believe that the terraforming project was initiated before a thorough survey of the planet was carried out; and the conclusion is, as I said, is predictable. To nobody’s surprise, Okaji and Jack gradually iron out their differences and bond, their plight being resolved when Jack has a “Bennish” idea and Okaji admits her urge to explore for exploration’s sake. I’ve rather enjoyed other stories by Gilman, particularly her earlier novella “Candle in a Bottle”, so this was a real disappointment.

The Steel Remains

The Steel Remains cover Here I am back at the start, in a sense: it was Morgan’s acknowledgement of Elric and The Broken Sword as influences on The Steel Remains that made me seek them out. So the review that follows has a slightly tortured history, having been first composed back in June (or thereabouts), then revised both in light of having read the other books I’ve discussed this week, and having read Graham Sleight’s review, my reaction to which helped me to pin down how I wanted to say some of the things I wanted to say. And then, earlier this week, an interview with Richard Morgan was posted at io9, in which (among much, much else) apropos of some of the reactions to The Steel Remains he says:

In genre — and this seems to be the case more in science fiction — we cursed with a template-based form of appreciation. They always read in the context of what they’re already read. A book will be assessed on how much it seems to be like something else in the same … which seems to be a really old way to read to me. I don’t think it happens in mainstream fiction. […] an awful lot of reviews of The Steel Remains were measuring it against a fantasy novel by George R.R. Martin, a fantasy novel by Steven Erickson. I find that really strange. I am not George R.R. Martin and I am not Steven Erickson, and who’s to say that the book I’ve written is anything like those? There’s a constant blind impulse to find similarity and contrast.

I can understand his frustration; the tendency of some sf fans to dismiss new book X because author Y did the same thing in his book Z, twenty years ago drives me up the wall. (For a recent example, substitute “Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels” for X, “Michael Kube-McDowell” for Y and “Alternities” for Z.) It’s irritating because it’s usually a way of shutting down discussion – and even if it’s true, the fact that it’s true is not interesting, how and why it might be true is what’s interesting – and because it’s often a form of avoidance, a route to cheap, deceptive understanding. That said, I think Morgan is also being more than a little disingenuous. No two books are identical, but no book exists in a vacuum, either. How X is like (and unlike, of course) Z might well be useful information for someone reading a review: and done well, such comparison is another tool with which a reviewer can illuminate the specifics of X.

So I don’t feel any guilt about saying that, now that I’ve read some Anderson and Moorcock, their influence on The Steel Remains seems obvious. (There’s no danger of me making a similar claim for either George RR Martin or Steven Erickson, largely because I haven’t read the relevant books by either of them, but also because – from what I know about their work – such comparisons do seem to fall more towards the deceptive than the illuminating end of the spectrum.) From Anderson, I see a deliberate and forthright refusal of anything resembling a rose-tinted view of pre-industrial life; from Moorcock, a healthy dose of emo. The combination manifests as a worldview steeped in weary frustration: there are three main characters, all of them heroes who have outlived their war, and one of the strongest emotions afflicting each of them is a sense of waste, a sense that it could have been different. It’s not surprising that when the time finally comes to draw a line in the sand, one character does so because “I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilisation we’d saved […] And I will not watch it happen again” (370).

When the Scaled Folk invaded, Egar (called Dragonbane for a reason, now a clanmaster on the Northern plains), Archeth (dark-skinned half-breed, engineer, now advisor to the Yhelteth emperor), and Ringil (scion of a well-to-do family, leader of a last stand, now living in largely self-imposed exile) were in the front lines, but afterwards either they lost their way, or the world did. They all chafe at the situations they now find themselves in. Either there is no place for them (Archeth’s people have left the world; Ringil’s sexuality is illegal), or the place they’ve found is not enough (Ringil gets by as a hero-mascot for a tavern in small settlement, but resents it; Egar finds nomadic, tribal life unfulfilling after the intensity of urban civilization). All of them want to get back, into the world and what they do best, and on one level The Steel Remains is, straightforwardly, the story of them doing just that. Each of them needs a different shove to get going — Archeth is given a chance to put her expertise to use when she’s sent to examine the aftermath an attack on a Yhelteth port; Egar becomes a pawn in a godgame; Ringil is recruited by his (formidable) mother to track down his cousin, who has been (legally) sold into slavery by her husband — but thereafter their momentum carries them through their various investigations.

That plot structure is one important difference to the other books I’ve been discussing — Our Heroes don’t form a Quest Party, although of course eventually the threads do collide, and events reach a climax – but there are others. Apart from anything else, The Steel Remains is a modern novel, constructed as a novel from the ground up; there is none of the compression that marks out the Elric stories, for example. Other differences are obvious because I know some of Morgan’s previous work, in a way that’s not true with most of the other writers I’ve been talking about; for instance, where The Broken Sword is fairly relentless in its intensity, like Morgan’s other books The Steel Remains adopts what Adam Roberts aptly described as a sort of post-rock aesthetic, interspersing moments of quiet with moments of thundering loud.

The most familiar loudness in Morgan’s work is, of course, anger, which sometimes leads to the argument that there is a contradiction at the heart of his novels between style and subject that undermines their coherence. But it strikes me that such an argument is based on a slight misreading. There’s no doubt that Morgan’s books frame their physical, verbal, and moral engagements in high-stakes, high-contrast terms, but they shout with a purpose. Violence, for example, is as costly and terrible as it can be useful, or even necessary; above all, it is (rightly) seen as part of being human, or at the very least part of being human for the people Morgan is interested in writing about. Ultimately Morgan’s characters, for all their individual vigour, tend to be victims of a system. Black Man was venemously explicit about this towards its end – as one character sardonically put it, “Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen” – and while there’s no single comparable crystallizing moment in The Steel Remains, the anger at misplaced prejudice, the architects of injustice, and the mechanisms that encourage both frequently rings through.

The angriest character in The Steel Remains, and the axis around which the rest of the book is organised, is Ringil. (With three protagonists, and three books planned in the series, it will be interesting to see whether Egar and Archeth get their turn in the spotlight.) In a number of ways, Ringil resembles Black Man‘s Carl Marsalis: both are soldiers who appear to have lived longer than they were needed; both have an ironic sense of humour; both have a high sex drive; and of course, both attract hate and fear simply by being who they are. In other ways, they’re different. For all that Ringil is a veteran, he is younger than Marsalis, with less sense of himself, and all the hot-headedness and arrogance that condition brings; he thrills in battle in a way that would probably cause Marsalis to snort and shake his head. (It has that effect on the reader a couple of times, at least.) But ultimately the two of them complement each other as points on a spectrum of what men are allowed to be. Marsalis, allegedly a genetic throwback to the sort of Real Men who existed before wussy stuff like agriculture came along, was seen as too much man; Ringil, whose homosexuality marks him as a deviant, is seen as not manly enough. Which of course is nonsense; he’s in a Richard Morgan novel, so even while straining (and shouting) against the boxes his cultures put him in, Ringil is possessed of the sort of earth-shattering maleness that usually indicates a Lucius Shepard protagonist (although I can’t, offhand, recall any gay Shepard protagonists, or indeed any who are quite as nifty with edged weapons).

Because of his sexuality, from a distance Ringil looks like the same sort of intervention into the expectations of heroic fantasy as Alyx. In fact Morgan accepts more of the terms of engagement than Russ, in that Ringil’s personality is closer to that of Scafloc and Elric; but certainly Morgan is no less frank about Ringil’s fucking than he is about Ringil’s fighting (or indeed than he is about his straight characters fucking, both here and in earlier novels). Put another way, passion is another source of loudness in the book; and when it gets mixed up with anger, as it often does because of the way Ringil’s society treats his sexuality, you get passages like this:

[H]e couldn’t cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven [a lover] had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. Pleasure into loss, lust into regret and there, suddenly, the same sick spiral of fucked up guilt they sold down at the temples and all through the po-faced schooling and lineage values and Gingren’s lectures and the new-recruit rituals of bullying and sterile manhood at the academy and every fucking thing ever lied and pontificated about by men in robes or uniform and– (59)

It’s the sort of anger that would in other hands be mere bluster: the sort rooted in frustration, that grabs you and becomes all-eclipsing while it lasts; the sort that often leads to violence, in this world and in Morgan’s, and then ebbs as quickly as it rose. (Or doesn’t: the rage at the execution of one particular gay youth remains undimmed throughout the book.) There’s a lot for Ringil to be angry at; his world is medieval in all the worst ways, thinned with no sign of recognition or recovery. In addition to the condemnation of homosexuality (it is punishable by execution), the post-war economy is in the toilet, and as a part-consequence slavery has been legalized; and religious fundamentalism is on the rise. In fact, about the only thing Ringil has going for him is that he’s not a woman. Reviewing Scott Lynch’s most recent novel — a writer whose mix of formal and informal language bears some comparison to Morgan — for Strange Horizons, Martin Lewis objected to the way in which (as he saw it) gender and other inequalities had been largely airbrushed away. Lewis was subsequently taken to task by some commenters for a lack of imagination, but if such it is then a similar lack attends The Steel Remains, in which prejudice and discrimination are endemic; Ringil’s only advantage is that he can hide his assumed inferiority (and in some cases, his fighting prowess might persuade people to look the other way). I’d say it’s something that elevates Morgan’s book above Lynch’s: better, to my mind, to engage with something than to sidestep it.

Part of that engagement is that, as much as any of the Elric stories, The Steel Remains is about the difficulty of claiming a new identity when the old one is taken from you by force or time. With a sense of waste, inevitably comes a sense of what was lost, and how loss leaves you adrift. It’s probably Archeth – for all that she gets relatively little action until late in the book, and spends relatively more time infodumping or being infodumped at for our benefit – who anchors this theme. She has the advantage of being close to the seat of power; she can see all too clearly how badly the empire she serves matches up to her dreams for society after the war. She has lost her heritage, and we eventually learn that her dark-skinned people left because they felt diminished by contact with human society. And, as an engineer with some access to technologies far beyond those of the people she lives among, she is the only one of the three protagonists equipped to argue with the world by any means other than force (though she is no slouch with her knives): to most people, science and sorcery are one and the same. But Ringil, too, is troubled by loss, or not so much troubled by it as assaulted by his memories — they sneak up on him, and once even literally stop him in his tracks. Nor is memory the only way the past breaks loudly into the present; there’s unfinished business of various kinds, returning enemies, several corpses that appear to have risen from the dead and one that actually does.

Such eruptions of the creepy and wonderful and strange are handled as confidently as good fantasy requires. They’re a different kind of loud for Morgan (as Graham noted in his review) but one that seems to me to sit comfortably, perhaps surprisingly so, with the more familiar elements of his aesthetic. Indeed, the final third of The Steel Remains is exhilaratingly full of discovery, without ever sacrificing either emotional intensity or the plot’s forward motion, and highlight another interesting link to Moorcock, Anderson and Russ, if not Leiber: there are several heavy hints dropped that Ringil’s world is in some way connected to our own. (Which brings me back to a question I raised in the comments earlier this week and didn’t get an answer to: when did full, separate secondary worlds become de rigeur in genre fantasy? I’ve heard it attributed to Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy (1976-9), but I really have no idea.) There are characters in The Steel Remains – Archeth is one – who know, for instance, that their world is part of a solar system that’s part of a galaxy; that the “band” that illuminates the night sky was probably once a moon; that their world has probably been visited by more than one near-human species. And Morgan’s fairies are to all intents and purposes worldwalkers, beings who can see and navigate through “a malestrom of alternatives” (and thus see the possibilities that are not; more loss, more weariness).

As in The Broken Sword and Stormbringer, in The Steel Remains, there is no guarantee in any of this that Ringil’s world can be saved, or that its future will be better than its past. But there is perhaps a little more optimism. If, you think, if Morgan’s heroes could see through their loss, if they could use their anger — if they could shout loud enough — then maybe they’d actually have a shot at healing some wounds. But it seems a pretty slim if. More likely they’ll keep fighting, because that’s what they do, because that’s what there is, because the system can’t be beat; and when they cry out, it will be with Egar’s battle-cry, in an “awful, no-way-back call for death, and company in the dying” (22). There are two more books to come, and I reckon that’s the way it will go; but if so, it’ll be a story worth telling, anyway. And reading.

The Adventures of Alyx

Adventures of Alyx cover If, like me before I read it, the only things you know about The Adventures of Alyx are that it’s Joanna Russ’s response to heroic fantasy, and one of the canonical examples (along with CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry) of introducing a female character into a role perceived (or at least assumed to be perceived) as basically male, what do you expect? I think I expected Xena, or Kitiara; what I found is conspicuously different, and rather elegantly set up. Although the world in which Alyx operates is still, in many ways, hostile to women, the world’s creation myth, in which women were created before men, and men were created from an extraneous body part, creates a space for a hero like Alyx to exist. But more than that, it seems to me that thinking about Alyx as a woman is a red herring. What really differentiates Alyx from the other protagonists I’ve been talking about — at least when reading these stories in 2008 — is not her sex, but her character. Unlike Fafhrd, Alyx is not callow; unlike Elric, there is no doubt Alyx is a hero: tough, smart, practical, competent, brave. (And, notably, explicitly not conventionally beautiful, unlike most contemporary tough, smart, etc, female leads.) And unlike Scafloc, her heroism is not doomed; she wins, convincingly, every time. Nor does she suffer much internal anguish in these tales. In short, unlike her male counterparts, Alyx is not only someone you can root for, but someone you might actually be able to stand being.

The Adventures of Alyx collects four short stories and one short novel, all but one of which revolve around Alyx in the way that the Elric stories revolve around Elric — though it’s worth noting that they are tidily-structured short stories, rather than the overstuffed mini-epics of the thin white duke – and none of which are as memorable as the character they showcase. The first tale (published in 1967; originally “The Adventuress”, and here “Bluestocking”), establishes Alyx as a “pick-lock” and general adventurer-for-hire, although — again, a difference to the men — not an heir to a kingdom, or a noble line. The descriptions of her are in many ways simply descriptions of an average 30-year-old working woman. She is short, with gray eyes, black hair, and freckles. She has an intellectual bent, but has found that her chosen profession “gratified her sense of subtlety” (9). Not that she’s unambitious; she has visions of becoming a Destiny, although what that means is never completely clear. The plot that Russ constructs for her seems inadequate. Ostensibly, it involves Alyx recruited to escort a young lady (never referred to as a girl, though she is only 17 and acts, at least to start with, like a spoiled brat) who wishes to run away from an arranged marriage to a rich boor whose previous wives, the narrator heavily insinuates, died in dubious circumstances; in practice, it’s a story that exists primarily to provide a series of trials which Alyx can overcome, demonstrating her toughness, smarts, practicality, competence and bravery in the process. It is not, in other words, a particularly high-stakes story — a distinguishing factor that persists throughout the book; the fate of the world is never in the balance — and nor is it particularly spectacular. An encounter with a sea-monster is typical:

Then she saw the sea monster.

Opinion concerning sea monsters varies in Ourdh and the surrounding hills, the citizens holding monsters to be the souls of the wicked dead forever ranging the pastureless waves of the ocean to waylay the living and force them into watery graves, and the hill people scouting this blasphemous view and maintaining that sea monsters are legitimate creations of the great god Yp, sent to murder travelers as an illustration of the majesty, the might, and the unpredictability of that most inexplicable of deities. But the end result is the same. Alyx had seen the bulbous face and coarse whiskers of the creature in a drawing hanging in the Silver Eel on the waterfront of Ourdh (the original — stuffed — had been stolen in some prehistoric time, according to the proprietor), and she had shuddered. She had thought, Perhaps it is just an animal, but even so it was not pleasant. Now in the moonlight that turned the ocean to a ball of silver waters in the midst of which bobbed the tiny ship, very very far from anyone or anything, she saw the surface part in a rain of sparkling drops and the huge, wicked, twisted face of the creature, so like and unlike a man’s, rise like a shadowy demon from the dark, bright water. It held its baby to its breast, a nauseating parody of human-kind. (16-7)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is bad, even if some of the tricks used (an extremely long sentence followed directly by a short, abrupt one, for instance) crop up a bit too frequently throughout the book. But it’s not exciting. First, the forward action of the scene is paused to tell us some stuff about what is believed about sea monsters; and most of the description is vague generalities — “huge, wicked, twisted”. Although we’re told that final image, of a distorted tableau of motherhood, is “nauseating”, the emotion isn’t evoked in us, particularly, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the image is more important for its symbolic qualities, particularly when Alyx goes on to kill it in short order.

This is not to say that Anderson and Moorcock’s stories were lacking in symbolism — hardly — but that I think Russ’s goals are somewhat different than theirs. What The Adventures of Alyx has going for it, largely, is voice. I’ve already mentioned the alternate mythology, and the narrator of “Bluestocking” clearly takes some fun in poking at conventional roles, such as the (I presume) heavily ironic comments that Alyx is “among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise”, and that women’s “natural weapons” are “deceit, surprise and speed” (19). But there is also a laconic, even mocking element to the voice — and the story construction; although lip service is paid to the idea of Alyx’s charge, Edarra, growing up during their journey together, in fact what happens is that the major part of the journey is elided, and Edarra is suddenly and magically grown up, almost between paragraphs — and a sense that the tone has been chosen not to create a world out of whole cloth, but to subvert one (ours). It’s at odds with the innocent expectation of belief that marks The Broken Sword and the Elric stories, and makes for businesslike, even brusque storytelling.

Russ is also far more impatient even than Moorcock with the boundaries of the type of story she is telling. “Bluestocking”, with its nod to Fritz Leiber and all, is actually the only story in the book that could be called straightforward heroic fantasy. Tale two, “I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard” (also 1967, original title “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry”), is an origin story for Alyx that doesn’t mention her by name until the final page — or looked at another way, until Alyx chooses to claim her name. Before then, she is an oppressed wife who escapes from (and, not incidentally, kills) her abusive husband before going out to make her way in the world and train as a fighter. Although she travels for a while with a captain called Blackbeard, and learns some things from him, the narrative is careful to insist that at no time does she need him. “The Barbarian” (1968) looks at first like a return to the format of “Bluestocking”. Alyx is approached by a fat man who patronisingly claims to know a lot about her — “‘And now,’ (he pronounced the ‘now’ with peculiar relish) ‘you are getting old […] You’re thinking of settling down'” (50) — and who wishes to recruit her to assist him with a series of break-ins. We can tell he’s a bad guy because he’s stupid (the defects of those Russ wishes us to dislike are usually framed as a kind of stupidity, and in this case we are explicitly told his stupidity offends Alyx) and sure enough, on one break-in he tells Alyx to kill a baby, on the grounds that he claims to know she will grow up to be a cruel queen. Alyx refuses — although as much on the grounds that the man should do his own dirty work as anything else; her first reaction is not “no!” but “What on earth for?” — and subsequently tracks the man to his lair, where it is revealed, for anyone who doubted it, that he is a time-traveller, given to tinkering with history. “My hobby is world-making” (63), he says to Alyx, who kills him, and then smashes his machines.

And Picnic on Paradise, originally published in 1968 as Russ’s first novel, appears to be even more straightforwardly science-fictional. It picks up on the time-travel theme, revealing that Alyx has been brought forward 4,000 years in a sort of temporal archaeology accident, and recruited as an Agent. As the novel opens she’s been dispatched to the planet Paradise, a popular tourist destination caught in a “commercial war”. In an echo of the plot of “Bluestocking”, she’s recruited to escort a group of civilians, of varying degrees of uselessness, from A to B — quite literally, from station A to station B, in an example of Russ’s dry humour. Of course, B turns out to have been destroyed when they get there, necessitating a longer and increasingly dangerous journey through cold, mountainous, treacherous terrain to the next-nearest station, at the planet’s pole. In other words, it’s the sort of story that could comfortably be told in a fantasy setting (indeed, the level of sfnal invention on display, with humans having interbred sufficiently so that everyone is a pleasing shade of light brown, and treatments such as “Re-Juve” on offer, is in all honesty not far above what you’ll get in a middling episode of Doctor Who), which perhaps is intended as a comment on the separability (or not) of the two genres. You could even argue that the imposition of the mission on Alyx from higher up the chain of command is The Adventure of Alyx‘s equivalent of the sort of godgames that make Scafloc and Elric’s lives so miserable.

In some ways, Picnic on Paradise is not actually very good. For an adventure story it’s baggy, featuring a crowded party of sketchily-differentiated characters, and perhaps a little too much commitment to conveying the mind-numbing tedium that polar expeditions probably come with in real life. Predictably, members of Alyx’s group start falling by the wayside one by one, and equally predictably Alyx grows from being more than a little frustrated with her charges, thinking of herself as a teacher saddled with a class of small children, to considering them to be “her people”. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the most interesting element of the novel to be the relationship that develops between Alyx and one of the male civilians, known as “Machine” and initially introduced as “an idiotic adolescent rebel” (74) – and not just for the contrast it presents to the relationships in the other books. “Bluestocking” (very weirdly) ends with Alyx and Edarra finding some men, and the one that Alyx pairs off with may be the new husband we get a glimpse of at the end of “The Barbarian”; but of the nuts and bolts of Alyx in a relationship, this is our only sight. Like Scafloc and Elric, she is older than her partner; unlike them, thankfully, there is no suggestion that her attraction to Machine stems from his youth per se, although they do start calling each other “dear” and “darling” with alarming speed, and it’s not actually entirely clear what the attraction does stem from, other than, perhaps, the fact that he’s the only not-entirely-obnoxious, vaguely competent man within several hundred miles. But the scenes of them together are largely thorny and convincing. This is particularly true when Russ is dealing with the collision between Machine’s serious attitude to sex — who has what can only be described as a mechanical dedication to making sure his partner enjoys herself — and Alyx’s rather more passion-led approach. Interestingly, in this Russ positions Alyx as the child: “When you do something, you do it right, don’t you?” asks Machine, trying to explain his approach, to which Alyx promptly says “No,” before explaining that the only reason to do it is “because you want to”, as “any five-year-old child” should know. It’s an interesting exchange, because Alyx’s temper frequently gets the best of her elsewhere in these stories — not always, in fact rarely, for the worst, but not entirely admirably, either.

The collection’s final story, “The Second Inquisition” (1970) changes setting, tone and style yet again — in the process making clear exactly how much control Russ has over those elements of her writing — relocating to 1925, and the narrative of a young woman still living with her parents. She describes an unusually confident visitor who is staying with them, who seems fairly clearly to be one of the tall, indefinably mixed-race people of Picnic on Paradise‘s time, and who sure enough turns out to be a time traveller, one of a number of agents trained by Alyx and engaged in a temporal conflict. It’s a story that picks up on one of the most moving exchanges in Picnic in Paradise, when Alyx is trying to convey to one of the civilians what the world she comes from is like, and what time travel feels like to her:

“Think of that, you thirty-three-year-old adolescent! Twenty-six and dead at fifty. Dead! There’s a whole world of people who live like that. We don’t eat the way you do, we don’t have whatever it is the doctors give you, we work like hell, we get sick, we lose arms or legs or eyes and nobody gives us new ones, we die in the plague, one-third of our babies die before they’re a year old and one time out of five the mother dies, too, in giving them birth.”

“But it’s so long ago!” wailed little Iris.

“Oh not it’s not,” said Alyx. “It’s right now. It’s going on right now. I lived in it and I came here. It’s in the next room. I was in that room and now I’m in this one. There are people still in that other room. They are living now. They are suffering now. And they always live and always suffer because everything keeps on happening. (127-8)

This works on several levels: it conveys the shock of transition which Alyx experienced, moving between times; it is metafictionally true, in that just before and just after this exchange we are indeed reading about the people in those other rooms; and of course it’s a reminder that geographical inequality in the real world, today, is as significant as the temporal inequality Alyx is describing. This last is, I think, reinforced by the collection’s overall trajectory from stories about a world that is remote and separate from ours, to stories about a world that is directly and intimately linked to us.

The first four Alyx stories all end with the same line, or a variation on it: “But that’s another story.” “The Second Inquisition” ends with the narrator isolated, having witnessed extraordinary events and a glimpse of a world from which she is excluded, in favour of having to live in reality. “No more stories,” she says, echoing the finality of Stormbringer rather than the ongoing tapestry of The Broken Sword. The sadness of it contrasts with the upbeat expansiveness of all the other endings, but it works better. And there is a sense, too, that the stories say all that Russ wanted them to say. Others — Mary Gentle, Samuel Delany – may have found other routes into the same seams of ore, but I think Russ got the gold she wanted from this mine, and was ready to move on to others.