Notes on a Shortlist

It has not been hard for me to decide which novel I think should win this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award. There are, for starters, two nominees I neither particularly admire nor particularly like, one that I like more than I admire, and one that I admire more than I like. But differentiating the two nominees that I both like and admire isn’t hard, either: for there is one that lives more vividly in my mind, that I am more eager to reread, and more evangelical about pressing into others’ hands. So my preference is clear. But here, for the record, in advance of the announcement of the winner this evening, is a summary of my opinions of the whole shortlist.

I don’t think it’s a bad shortlist, per se; there are several books that spring to mind when I think about books I would rather have seen listed, but on the whole Adam Roberts’ judgement that “Solid is one word for it, which is another way of saying safe” is right, I think. It is a shortlist whose values are predominantly the core values of genre sf. There are a lot of spaceships; for all the talk about New Space Opera, only one other Clarke Award shortlist this decade has had as many.

There are also a number of recurring themes. Sherri S. Tepper’s The Margarets, which would be at the bottom of my list if I got a vote, incorporates a number of them. Like four of the remaining five shortlisted books (which is surely more than the average among the submissions), it is written in the first person, which immediately puts questions of identity front and centre. Like Reynolds’ House of Suns, it explores these questions through multiple narrators who are in a sense the same person (and physical cloning features in The Quiet War, while mental cloning is an important element of Song of Time). It is concerned with ecological questions (like The Quiet War, and to a lesser extent Song of Time); and in that Margaret’s multiple identities spring from her childhood imaginings, it invokes questions of youth and maturity that, I would say, resonate in every nominee other than The Quiet War.

Adam Roberts’ review, I think, gets to the heart of the problems with this book, although for a more sympathetic take see Nic Clarke and Sherryl Vint at Strange Horizons. The Margarets is a book in which the value of life resides in its fecund diversity, but this leads to a number of problems. There is a moral problem: as Adam puts it, it leads to Tepper prioritising forest over humans. There is a structural problem: the diversity, and the divergence, of Margaret’s lives is never conveyed as well as it should be; it’s all too abbreviated, or too clumsy. There is a a stylistic problem, in that Tepper has an absolute tin ear for names. Sentences such as, “We were shortly disabused of this idea when several humans in transit to Chottem from bondslave planets farther into Mercan space were also slain by the ghrym” are, to my mind, at least as wearying as anything Stephenson comes up with in Anathem; there is an absolute profusion of proper nouns, none of which seem to follow particularly well thought-out linguistic schema. (I think Tepper is winking at the reader at least some of the time — more, in fact, than many discussions of this book have given her credit for — but that does not excuse, for example, cat-people called Prrr Prrrpm and Mrrrw Lrrrpa.) And finally, there is the problem that Tepper’s stance seems to me a lie. Were she writing of just Earth — or a fantastical analogue of Earth, which is what she seems to want to be writing for most of the second half of the book, at least — her argument would be sound; but in the vastness of space, life’s value seems to me to inhere in its scarcity, in how fragile it is. The Margarets never conveys that sense; indeed, life in its galaxy is so commonplace that it is hard to care whether humans learn the error of their ways. The book has plenty of other problems — a distressingly Campbellian attitude to alien life, for example, as Edward James points out; and I can’t help thinking that a critique of humanity’s willingness to lean on comforting stories of magic instead of facing up to reality would carry more force if it didn’t co-exist with telepathy as a crucial plot element — and the result is a near-incoherent muddle.

Mark Wernham’s Martin Martin’s on the Other Side spends a good portion of its time being incoherent, but at least it does so deliberately; this, and the fact that it is just over half the length of Tepper’s novel, are the only things raising it above The Margarets in my estimation. It was over sooner. Jonathan McCalmont has noted that the book grew on him since he first read it, but I find it hard to imagine that happening to me; though there is an extent to which I admire, as Adam puts it, “the inadvertent eloquence of Jensen’s ‘fucking fucker’ laddishly limited register”, there is a much greater extent to which I simply found it tedious. I diverge from Jonathan, too, in that I don’t think it’s a novel about idiocy; it’s a novel, as Nic has it, about infantilisation, which is somewhat different. It means, for a start, that there were a few moments where I felt sympathy for Jensen Interceptor, trapped within the role his society has forced him into: the eternal puerile child There is also something inspired about the melding of PKD-style undermining of consensus reality with a cultural drive towards getting totally fucking hammered; but it is never elaborated coherently enough to sustain an entire novel.

The rest of the nominees I have already written about. Reynolds’ House of Suns is the book I like more than I admire, and a book that articulates the idea that we, the members of the human race, are all children, much more effectively than does The Margarets. I liked the expansiveness of the novel, and I found it rather more visual and well-paced than did, for example, Edward. I also think the flashback sequences are more effective, and better-integrated into the novel, than many other reviewers. But there’s no denying that it does have limitations: “Narrative, tick. Widescreen visuals, tick. Other stuff, hmm.”

Unlike the judges, I don’t have the benefit of a second read of the shortlist to give depth to my opinions; however, for the remaining three novels on the list — the three I could live with winning — I do have the benefit of time, in that it’s some months since I read any of them, and my opinions have accordingly had more time to settle. The Quiet War is the novel on the list I feel most out of step with the consensus on; Edward picked it as his favourite, as did Adam, and the Not the Clarke Award panel at Eastercon. But in Liz’s poll, at least at the time of writing, far more people think it will win than think it really should win; so maybe I’m not as out of step as all that.

Still, reading my review of The Quiet War now, I can’t shake the feeling that I didn’t get to the core of the novel, either in terms of its virtues or its flaws. I think Nic does that rather better in her post about the book, although Edward also inadvertently put his finger on it when he compared the book to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy: “a cast of well-imagined characters, a mixture of political and scientific speculation, and a complete ease with the occasional infodump”. That is exactly right, and exactly my problem at the same time: I simply never felt the spark of life, in either The Quiet War‘s characters or its landscapes, that so distinguishes Robinson’s work. It is a book with few major flaws — its greatest virtue is its coherence of thought, although as the first volume in a duology, it is not quite self-contained — but almost by the same token, it is a book that never truly excited, challenged, or inspired me.

That leaves the two novels I both like and admire. Stephenson’s Anathem is an extraordinary book, there is no doubt of that; as Martin Lewis put it, “one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness.” As a vehicle designed to explicate and demonstrate a set of mind-expanding ideas, I have difficulty thinking of a recent, or even not-so-recent, work to match it. When I wrote my original review, however, I think I was perhaps too impressed by the overall architecture of the novel, that Stephenson had written something that worked as a novel, rather than (as I see The Baroque Cycle, or at least as much of it as I’ve read) an epic mess. It has not worn well in my mind; it’s still a book I will have no hesitation in recommending to (some) people, but I feel absolutely no need to revisit it. I am also, now, rather more sympathetic than I was initially to Abigail Nussbaum’s criticism of the novel for installing an intellectual homogeneity in its invented world. Or rather, it’s not the intellectual homogeneity per se that troubles me — I don’t want there to be a range of theories about how gravity works, or time works, or consciousness works; I want there to be single theories, that work — but that, as Nic explores, in setting up that intellectual homogeneity, Stephenson does away with cultural diversity. Perhaps the most telling indicator of this flaw is that while there are nods to equality of gender and sexuality — even if they are absolutely tokenistic — there is no equivalent nod to cultural diversity.

Which leaves Song of Time — or rather, doesn’t leave, since it is emphatically not the case that MacLeod is my preferred winner by default. Once again, and gratifyingly, I find that on the evidence of Liz’s poll, more people feel the way I do about the book than I expected. I think I came rather closer to getting to the bones of it in my review than I did with either The Quiet War or Anathem; although I have to say, although Nic’s review and Tanya Brown’s review are both very good, I don’t think anyone has yet fully captured what makes Song of Time so compelling. Adam Roberts’ criticisms of the book are largely reasonable, but don’t seem that significant to me when weighed against its virtues. On a shortlist which emphasizes the value of personal, subjective, human experience (as opposed to the kind of distanced perspective found in, most obviously of the novels not shortlisted, Flood), Song of Time offers unambiguously the best realised, most fascinating character; and for all the detail of McAuley’s colonies, for my money MacLeod offers the most vivid settings of any of the nominated authors. (Particularly, as Nic notes, cities; not because they are particularly “authentic”, but because the versions of their subjects that they construct feel so convincing.) It is the book that most productively challenged my sympathies; it is a novel saturated with science-fictional speculation, grounded in the emotions those speculations generate; and it is the only novel on the list, I would suggest, that engages with what it means to write science fiction in the early twenty-first century, both on a literal level, through the reflections of its characters, and stylistically, in how its voice refracts our understanding of some of contemporary sf’s common images and ideas. There is an irony, I’m aware, in asserting this in a week when YA novels have been awarded Nebula and Tiptree awards; Song of Time is about as far from the concerns of most YA fiction (and certainly as far from the narrative propulsivity of most YA fiction) as it is possible to get. But it is, I think, the best book on the list, and one of the best novels published in 2008. I hope it wins. Whatever does, I will post here as soon as I can, with a full update tomorrow. Let’s see, eh?

House of Suns

The Quiet War cover On the one hand, coming to a novel this late, when numerous people have pretty much reviewed the heck out of it, makes life easier, in that I can point at what they’ve said; on the other hand, in the case of House of Suns, there isn’t much left that hasn’t been said, which you can take as an indication of the kind of genial, transparent book it is. (This may seem ironic, given the evident length this post has grown to, but really, it’s all just my variations on themes already identified.) In particular, Adam Roberts’ review says almost everything I would, give or take some differences in emphasis, and his summary judgment gets to the heart of the matter for me:

if it is your contention that the face of SF 2009 is Asimov’s mutton-chops and meaty NHS-style-but-presumably-not-actually-NHS-what-with-him-being-American glasses, and if you’re not bothered by bourgeois heteronormativity, then this is most definitely the book for you.

On the Asimov thing: Jonathan Wright also notes an Asimovian flavour to the proceedings and, though it doesn’t seem to have been deliberate, it was there for me, too. And I don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing; specifically, there were times when I felt that House of Suns was doing salvage work on some of the more satisfactory aspects of Asimov’s late novels — even more specifically, Foundation and Earth (1986). The future history in House of Suns features a galaxy in which the only forms of intelligence are human or human-derived; the central characters are members of an organization that sets itself above or beyond the immediate, squabbling concerns of planetary and interplanetary civilizations; and there are some radically divergent posthumans wandering around, but the story’s ultimate focus is the relationship between humanity and robots, known here as Machine People. One of the main characters, Hesperus, is a Machine Person with some similarities of attitude to some incarnations of R. Daneel Olivaw (updated for the noughties, of course). If you squint a little, I think you can even see a deformed magus-figure shadow of Hari Seldon behind Abigail Gentian, the woman who establishes the primary clone Line with which House of Suns concerns itself, in the way she establishes rules, a preservational Plan that her “shatterlings” follow down the deep well of centuries.

Incongruously enough, my other touchstone while reading this book was Russell T. Davies’ Doctor Who. Dan Hartland mentions Star Wars as a reference point, which captures the curious innocence of House of Suns; there is less New in this Space Opera than in the others that I have read by Reynolds. (Also, one of the Machine People looks like a slightly more sculpted C-3PO.) But Who has some of that innocence to it as well, and for all its inanities, I think it’s a better match, and not just because one of Reynolds’ posthuman races are called the Sycorax. First, what Reynolds brings to Asimov’s framework is colour, gleeful splashes of the stuff. In a science fiction novel like this, which essentially takes an infinite empty void as its backdrop, there is particular skill needed in choosing which bits to sketch in; Reynolds makes good choices, and goes about his sketchings with gusto. So although a fair portion of the book takes place in deep space, depicting voyages or chases (Reynolds does like his chase sequences, particularly interstellar ones that go on for tens of pages; fortunately the one that closes this book is rather better paced than the one that closed Century Rain [2004]), there are marvels at every waystation, from giants with faces to dwarf even the Face of Bo, to sleeping beauty awaking in a techno-forest of gold and silver cables. Sometimes these settings are handled off-handedly:

Ashtega’s world — shown beneath the map of the galaxy — was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons. We were crossing the ecliptic, so the rings were slowly tilting to a steeper angle, revealing more of their loveliness. There was no doubt that it was one of the most glorious worlds I had ever seen, and I had seen quite a few.

But we had not come here to gawp at a picturesque planet, even if it was a spectacular exemplar of the form. (21)

Sometimes more attention is lavished on them:

Four stiff black fingers reached from the dunes, each an obelisk of the Benevolence, each tilted halfway to the horizontal. The shortest of the fingers must have been four or five kilometres from end to end, while the longest — one of the two middle digits — was at least eight. From a distance, caught in the sparkling light of the lowering sun, it was as if the fingers were encrusted with jewellery of blue stones and precious metal. But the jewellery was Ymir: the Witnesses had constructed their city on the surface of the fingers, with the thickest concentrations of structures around the middle portions of the fingers. A dense mass of azure towers thrust from the sloped foundations of the Benevolence relics, fluted and spiralled like the shells of fabulous sea creatures, agleam with gold and silver gilding. A haze of delicate latticed walkways and bridges wrapped itself around the twoers of Ymir, with the longer spans reaching from finger to finger. The air spangled with the bright moving motes of vehicles and airborne people, buzzing from tower to tower. (161)

This is not elegant writing; it is even a bit laboured (“… on the surface of the fingers … around the middle portions of the fingers”). But it’s trying to get us excited about something extraordinary. So my second comparison point is that, as in Doctor Who, the characters are not immune to wonder; dialogue like this, for example, would I think be entirely at home in that show:

“Sand grains start sliding downhill, just beneath the outer membrane of the dunes […] The membrane vibrates even more strongly and sets up excitations in the surrounding airmass. You get something like music.” After a pause, he said, “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Wonderful and a little spooky.”

“Like all the best things in the universe.” (172-3)

Comparisons with Who can only go so far, though. There is, for example, that whitebread heteronormativity that Adam mentions — not something Who can be accused of too strongly these days — which is for most of the novel a nagging annoyance, and a couple of times something more than that. [EDIT: Although there are also the orgies during the thousand nights, which suggest a certain degree of flexibility …] The projection of particular standards of beauty got me, too: the descriptions of how beautiful the Machine People were, in particular, felt very culturally specific, and while I’m fine with the shatterlings having retained the standards of beauty they started with (see below), I’m a little disappointed that the standards of beauty in Abigail’s time, which is already some way in the future from us, apparently hadn’t changed at all. What most irritated me, however, was the abuse of bioscience. Reynolds is scrupulous about stressing the physical constraints of the universe — say, the speed of light — yet is, bizarrely, happy to construct a scenario in which a female progenitor gives rise to a clone line containing both male and female individuals. If there’s a reason for this beyond Reynolds wanting to include more male characters, I missed it. If there’s an explanation given for how this miracle is achieved, I missed that, too; [EDIT: It could be, for example, that Abigail has a rare variant of Klinefelter’s syndrome, though I don’t recall such an explanation being offered in the text (though see discussion later regarding the flashbacks) and so] I’m left imagining that they imported a Y chromosome from somewhere else, which makes any male shatterlings less than an exact clone. (Indeed, I found myself defaulting to imagining the shatterlings as female until otherwise specified for just this reason, which led to a couple of interestingly disconcerting moments.)

A more global difference to Who (but a similarity with Asimov) is that Reynolds is in earnest. House of Suns never indulges in the sort of ironic nudging that Who — or a writer like, say, Ken MacLeod, in a novel like Newton’s Wake; or Banks in any Culture novel– so often enjoys. Dan Hartland put it this way: “Reynolds manages space opera that does not read like farce.” I will go a little further: one of the novel’s strengths is that Reynolds manages to keep a straight face almost all of the time. There are no knowing winks. There is some — not that much — snappy dialogue, but when Reynolds has one of his characters report that “The next three minutes passed like an age as I watched Hesperus streak forward and then slam past Mezereon’s position, missing her by barely half a million kilometres” (123), the deadpan delivery is essential, because on the face of it that “barely” looks absurd.

It’s this earnestness, also, that makes it possible to believe in characters driven by the search for wonder: a perhaps childish impulse (see Who, again; and Charlie Anders touches on this in a piece at io9 about childhood and sense of wonder that I’ve only just seen; and also see below) but one that, as the ending makes clear, is a function of civilizational youth as much as individual organism youth. The shatterlings are flung outwards by her at the close of humanity’s dawn age, explicitly in search of knowledge and experience. In each Line, each of a thousand clones is given a ship; each is then set on a different course, with instructions to rendezvous after completing a “circuit”, a trip around the galaxy. At the rendezvous they share experiences; then they do it all again. For the Gentian Line, these circuits now take two hundred thousand years each (the shatterlings spend much of their time in suspended animation, “tunnelling through history” as one character puts it), during which time they may interact with civilizations caught in “the endless, grinding procession of empires” (15) that the shatterlings call “turnover”. It is, at any rate, no surprise that Abigail’s rules have, by the time of the novel, some thirty-odd circuits down the line, hardened into commandments; no real surprise that maintenance of continuity is one of the book’s main themes.

Here is where I diverge slightly from most other reviewers of this book. House of Suns is narrated by two Shatterlings of Abigail’s line, Campion and Purslane, in alternating chapters. (At the start of each of the book’s eight sections, there is also a flashback chapter to Abigail’s youth; but all the Shatterlings share these memories — both Campion and Purslane refer to events that take place in the flashbacks as theirs, as happening to “me” — so there is no way of knowing which is narrating them.) And they do sound frightfully similar. As Adam puts it:

all the characters are pretty much the same character. Of course most of the characters in this novel are the same character, or clones thereof, but I don’t think this excuses it; they’re supposed to have been living separate lives, and developing separate personalities, for millions of years after all. They haven’t done so, though, on the evidence of this text. I was perhaps a quarter of the way into the book before I twigged that the narrative p.o.v. was alternating between the two twin-like deuteragonists (Purslane and Campion), and that’s not a good thing.

Or Paul Kincaid:

House of Suns is a novel with three narrative voices: Campion and Purslane narrate alternative chapters, while each section of the novel is introduced with a passage narrated by Abigail Gentian, the founder of the line (I will come back to her shortly). This is a technique that has a number of problems. For a start, Campion and Purslane spend most of the novel together, so that until the climax the alternating chapters don’t actually show us anything different. More seriously, the voices of male Campion and female Purslane are indistinguishable, and both are indistinguishable from Abigail Gentian. Is Reynolds making the subtle point that, as clones, these are all the same person anyway? If so, he actually does nothing with the idea, and the point could have been made as well without the exchange of narrative duties. I suspect, rather, that Reynolds has got hooked on multiple narrative strands, a technique he has used repeatedly before, and has followed it regardless of the fact that in some instances, as here, it can be more harmful than helpful to the novel.

I actually think the technical issue Paul identifies, that for most of the novel Campion and Purslane are sharing the same experiences (and thus that it’s sometimes only possible to tell which is narrating a chapter when they refer to the other), does the more harm. On the other hand, I can make an argument that the similarity of identity is deliberate; or at least, I feel I can construct a satisfactory rationale for embracing the confusion it causes based on what’s in the text, which is actually the more important thing. I’ve already mentioned that both Campion and Purslane claim Abigail’s memories as their own, but it’s also the case that they share their own memories with each other, and share memories with other shatterlings; indeed, at one point Purslane misremembers something that happened to Campion as having happened to her. So I don’t think they have been developing separate personalities for millions of years — I think, in fact, that they have been developing parallel personalities for millions of years. The point is repeatedly made that the differences between members of the Line are much less significant than the similarities, and I don’t think that is just clan loyalty.

At the time we meet them, just before a reunion, after hundreds of thousands of years apart, the shatterlings are as divergent as they will ever be; the point of the thousand-nights reunion is to celebrate sharing that experience. Before it can take place, the assembled Gentian Line is ambushed, and most of them are killed, so; yet they are still remarkably similar individuals. (One shatterling’s taste for torture, for instance, is merely out at the end of the bell curve compared to the rest of them; even those who object to the torture most are prepared to embrace its use in other circumstances, later in the book.) The differences between Line members — in particular, between Campion and Purslane, the former pruning regularly, the latter sentimentally hoarding — seem to arise in large part from differing choices about which memories to delete than they do from differing individual experiences. It is the presumed similarity between the shatterlings that makes Campion and Purslane’s romantic liaison anathema to the rest of their Line — it is rather worse than incest — and it is the need to maintain continuity that makes Campion’s decision to delete his “strand” (the archive of his memories) a transgression beyond the pale. Both actions threaten the stability of the Line.

This obsession with continuity has, I think you can argue, resulted in a kind of arrested development on the part of the shatterlings; it is emphasized more than once that near-baseline humans such as they are not perceptually suited to experiencing long stretches of “raw time”, and that their pride in their longevity is, in important ways, a delusion. But it’s interesting to think of them specifically as children, of a kind, who have not yet become full individuals; as Purslane says, shortly after the ambush, “now we are growing up” (99). You can even gloss the overall shape of the novel as being about humans learning exactly how young they really are in comparison to the depth and breadth of the universe. Coming to terms with being, in a sense, spoiled children. The Gentian Line is incredibly conscious of its fragility; for some of them, the worst consequence of the ambush is not that eight-hundred-odd unique individuals have been killed, but that as a consequence the Line may cease to exist. They take pride in their status as one of humanity’s strategies to maintain continuity over deep time, one way to rise above the churn of turnover (they would probably say, the most human such strategy). As Ludmilla Marcellin, creator of the first line, puts it:

“If [Faster-than-light travel] is developed, it will clearly be of significance to us. We’ll embrace it wholeheartedly, have no fear. But it won’t change the nature of what we are, or the reason for our existence. The galaxy will still be too big, too complex, for any one person to apprehend. Shattering, turning yourself into multiple points of view, will still be the only way to eat that cake.” (225)

If Ludmilla Marcellin’s shatterlings cease to be her, the whole point of the endeavour is lost; and as with Ludmilla, so with Abigail.

This doesn’t do away with the problems Paul and others have noted; but I think it suggests a way to reframe them as part of a more satisfactory reading of the novel. (I actually think more points of view — probably other shatterlings, though someone outside the Line would also work — would make the point more clearly.) Similarly, I think the flashbacks work better than many have given them credit for. They are there, in part, to emphasize the shared lineage of the line, but their real trick is that they turn out to be false memories, indicators of both a cargo of damage that must be common to all Gentian shatterlings, and of displacement of a specific, repressed act that stains the history of the Line. And perhaps more than that. Note that in the memories Abigail’s development is arrested in childhood for thirty years; this could perhaps represent a displaced consciousness of the thirty circuits the Gentian Line undergo before the ambush, before they start growing up; or perhaps is just a parallel to note as something that shapes the Line. [Equally, is the fact that Abigail’s guardian is “Madam Klinefelter” significant, a nod to Abigail’s genetic heritage? It’s rather a coincidence if it’s not.]

Certainly, though, my qualms didn’t bother me much during the actual reading. Back to Adam:

Reynolds is rather disgustingly skilled, actually, when it comes to plotting—not only structuring his story so that its build-ups and pay-offs are all in the right places, but pacing the whole, drawing the reader along, with only the occasional longeur. The first 200 pages hurtle by; the next hundred tread narrative water a little, but things pick up again around 300 and the reader is propelled nicely down the flume to the end-pool.

This is, clearly, not enough to make a truly good novel; but it’s not nothing, either. House of Suns is by some way the most satisfying of Reynolds’ novels that I’ve read (i.e. of those since Century Rain). I did sometimes feel that it became a touch genteel, a touch domesticating; although again, a concern with rules, the value of them as well as their limitations, whether set by Abigail or the universe, is a concern of the novel, and to manifest this as a kind of formality makes a certain amount of sense. Reynolds also falls foul of a personal bugbear, in that he fails to explain how or why his first-person narrators are relating their story. But as I was reading, only rarely were the problems severe enough to pull me up short; for the most part I barely paused for breath. I blasted through House of Suns in a little over a day and, while I wouldn’t give it this year’s Clarke Award, and am not even really sure it belongs on the shortlist, I don’t begrudge the time I spent with it one jot. A guilty pleasure is still a pleasure.

Whither the super-reader?

I’m still slowly working my way through Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, and have reached postcolonial criticism. In true textbook fashion, each chapter includes a “STOP and THINK” section, and this one actually made me do both:

Postcolonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts and is one of several critical approaches we have considered which focus on specific issues, including issues of gender (feminist criticism), of class (Marxist criticism), and of sexual orientation (lesbian/gay criticism).

This raises the possibility of a kind of ‘super-reader’ able to respond equally and adequately to a text in all these ways. In practice, for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest.
[…]
Should we, in general, try to become super-readers, with multiple layers of sympathy and awareness, or will trying to do so merely produce blandness and superficiality?

Obviously, it is impossible for anybody to answer this question for anybody else. My own feeling is that while an even spread of awareness across all these issues is theoretically possible, in practice aiming for this, merely in the interests of political correctness, is almost bound to produce superficiality. A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstance. These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit — they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency. (198-9)

Now, Barry’s bias shows through before he declares it — the very term “super-reader” carries connotations of the unattainable, even childish. And when he does declare his bias, he still loads his dice, with that clause about “merely in the interests of political correctness”: yes, obviously aiming to do something merely in the interests of political correctness is doomed to failure.

But leaving that aside, I’m still struck by a number of things. To start with: “for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest”. I’m sceptical of that most (many, I could get behind; but I’m not sure about most), but more than that, this doesn’t seem to leave much room for the idea that a text might shape the way people who read it respond. Surely it is also the case that for most texts, one of these issues tends to eclipse all the rest, in either a positive or a negative way. There is a threshold, I think, beyond which reading a text from any particular perspective becomes an act of creation in itself, rather than a useful response to the text; where any given person draws that threshold will vary, but it seems an inevitable limitation of single-perspective criticism.

So I think that limitation has to be put on the other side of the scales to a super-reader’s presumed blandness and superficiality — except, I’m not sure what Barry actually means by those terms, here. The most sensible reading I can come up with is that it comes from what he discusses in his personal opinion paragraph, namely motivation: it’s impossible for anyone to truly care about all these different perspectives at the same time, says Barry, so attempts to accomodate them will of necessity be artificial. There is an extent to which I agree with this (or at least am anxious about it; see below), but I think I disagree with it much more. If nothing else, it’s a position that presumes these different perspectives are indeed separable, and it seems to me that’s only possible in an — pardon me — academic sense. In the real world, and by extension in sufficiently complex texts, they’re going to be interlinked. Parsing them separately has value, but taking that so far as to declare them islands seems damaging.

And then we come down to the nub of it, which is to say Barry’s argument for his position. “A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstance.” What is genuine, here? This gets personal: for each of the four perspectives Barry lists in his first paragraph, I fall at the “privilege” end of the spectrum (as, indeed, I do for just about any axis of privilege you care to define). That establishes the terms of my engagement with any of them and, clearly, those terms are never going to be the same as they are for individuals at the other ends. In a real sense, that’s going to limit the depth of my understanding. By the same token, however, the implication is that whenever I do try to adopt one of these perspectives, I will, precisely, be putting it on like a suit; and that my interest can never be “genuine”. Which rather leads you to wonder, why bother?

And the inevitable answer to that is, because I like to think I care. That no one of these critical perspectives seems to declare itself to me with particular urgency — or, put another way, that it costs me nothing to see them as all urgent — is certainly a luxury. I’d like to think it’s a luxury I can take advantage of, though. “Multiple layers of sympathy and awareness” doesn’t seem like a bad thing for me to aspire to, nor does it seem inherently unattainable (though a perfectly even spread of concern surely is). I’d go so far as to say, acknowledging this is as biased a way of putting it as “super-reader”, that to me, right now, it seems the responsible thing to do.

Cat Country

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before, but for the last however long I’ve been slowly (very slowly) working my way through Jonathan Fenby’s hefty Penguin History of Modern China, picked as a starting point for increasing my historical knowledge largely because my knowledge of its subject was so sketchy. A little while ago, this passage caught my eye, for reasons that will become obvious:

Between 1929 and 1935, 458 literary works were banned for slandering the authorities, encouraging the class struggle or constituting “proletarian literature”. A draconian press law was introduced in 1930. Film directors were told that their work should be 30 per cent entertaining and 70 per cent educational, to promote “good morals and demonstrate the spirit of fortitude, endurance, peace and the uprightness of the people.”

Though the regime was not strong enough or sufficiently centralized to exert repression on the scale of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR, progressive writes and intellectuals were marginalized, harassed and, at worst, arrested and killed. […]

A cutting allegory of China, Cat Country by the Beijing writer Lao She, carried the sense of despair to a pitch of high irony, telling of a Chinese who landed on Mars, where he found a population of cat people who were lazy, dirty, cruel, undisciplined, disorganized, and addicted to drugs. The cat emperor had been overthrown, and replaced by the Ruler of Ten Thousand Brawls. Then the ‘small people’ had invaded and slaughtered all the cat people except for ten who escaped to a mountain. There, they went on fighting among themselves until only two were left. Caught by the invaders, they were put in a wooden cage where they bit one another to death.* (211-12)

The asterisk indicates a footnote, which with delightful casualness relates that “The narrator gets back to China on a passing French spacecraft”. Anyway, on reading this my first reaction was ooh; and when I googled and discovered that Cat Country is “sometimes seen as the first important Chinese science fiction novel”, I thought ah-ha. Great was my woe when I discovered that it is well and truly out of print; and great my joy when Nic borrowed the Oxford Chinese Studies library’s copy on my behalf. (The benefits of an academic other half!)

Cat Country cover It’s an Ohio State University Press edition, translated by William A. Lyell, Jr and published in 1970, and comes complete with an Introduction by Lyell that provides a bit more background about the life and work of Lao She — a pseudonym for one Shu Qingchun, b. 1898, d. 1966. The reason for his pseudonymity is not specified: given the situation in China at the time he started writing, I wouldn’t be surprised if a desire to speak freely had something to do with it; on the other hand, Lao She was living in Britain at the time he became a writer, and only returned to China in 1931, so maybe he just fancied (as, of course, is his right) having a pen-name.

Lyell provides a (slightly stilted) sketch of the political situation in China at the time Lao She started writing. His first novels were published in the heart of the warlord era, just before the worst of the Nanjing decade as it is described in the above extract: a time of national unification that was nominal at best, and a time when China faced continual aggression from Japan, and interference from other nations. In fact, the manuscript of one of Lao She’s novels was destroyed in one China-Japan incident, which led to Cat Country being written, in 1932, as a deliberate airing of his “disappointment in national affairs and indignation over China’s military failures” (xxxvii). However Lao She himself considered the book a failure; Lyell quotes him:

What I thought [about the situation in China at the time I wrote Cat Country] was what most ordinary people were thinking and there was really no need to say it since everybody knew it anyway … I simply gave a straight-forward presentation of what was common knowledge at the time and then dignified the whole thing by calling it “satire”. I guess I must have gotten carried away. In my hands “satire” became “preaching”, and the more I preached the more sickening it became. A man who takes it upon himself to preach to people is either exceedingly intelligent or an utter numbskull. Now I know that I’m not the brightest man in the world, but I’m not willing to admit that I’m an utter ass either. And yet, since in fact I did write Cat Country, what can I say? (xxxix-xl)

Lyell suggests that Cat Country is nevertheless worth reading because it “… is better than Lao She would have us believe. There is some spritely as well as tedious writing in it. Like most of Lao She’s novels, it is uneven in quality. In addition to literary value, however, it possess a great deal of worth as social documentation on China in the early thirties” (xli).

Do I agree? Broadly speaking, yes. Here is the narrator’s first description of Mars, shortly after he has crash-landed:

I saw a grey sky. It was not a cloudy sky, but rather a grey-coloured atmosphere. One couldn’t say that the light of the sun was weak, because I felt very hot; however, its light was not in direct proportion to its thermal power. It was simply hot, but not at all bright. The grey atmosphere that surrounded me was so heavy, hot, dense, and stifling that I could almost reach out and grab it. […] It wasn’t at all like it is back in Peking when we have dust storms of wind-blown sand. It was rather that the light of the sun was diminished upon first entering this grey world; what was left of it was then evenly distributed so that every place received some for the light, thus creating a silver-grey world. It was a bit like the summer drought in North China when a layer of useless grey clouds floats in the sky, shading the light of the sun without at all reducing the extremely high temperature; however, the grey atmosphere here was much darker and heavier so that the weighty ashen clouds seemed glued to one’s face […] In sum the atmosphere made me feel very ill at ease. (6-7)

Even allowing for translation deficiencies (for I am not convinced, on the evidence of his introduction, that Lyell has the world’s most sensitive ear for style; the inclusion of phrases like “got into her pants” [140] and “go blow it out your ass!” [191] later in the book also feel like clangers), and even allowing for the fact that it’s probably intended to be humorously over-the-top (the narrator goes on to tell us how the land is “flat … boringly flat” in every direction), surely it’s over-egging the pudding a bit. If it’s deliberately tedious, it does its job a bit too well for my taste.

But thereafter events develop fairly briskly, if very episodically. Cat people appear from the grey, and immediately take the narrator prisoner. In his cell, he frees his hands and legs using his gun (which the cat people did not confiscate because, the narrator deduces, they are scared of metal — the narrator deduces many things about the cat people, and is always correct; but I guess that goes with the territory of this sort of novel), and is then freed from his cell by one of the cat people, with whom he runs off into the night. There’s enough time, in all this, for the narrator to explicitly compare his plight to the situations in which Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver found themselves; this certainly makes clear what sort of novel Lao She is aiming to write, but the overtness of the references surprised me slightly, even having read in Lyell’s introduction that Lao She was much-influenced by Western writers as a result of his time abroad. As expected, however, for most of the rest of the novel, the narrator is a tourist, escorted around (quite consentingly; he is generally unfazed by his surroundings) by a series of cat people who lecture him on various aspects of Cat Country’s history and society.

His liberator, Scorpion, turns out to be an opportunistic and self-centred local lord – a stand-in for the Chinese warlords of the time — whose major motive in freeing the narrator is to gain the kudos and, more importantly, the security of having a pet foreigner. Scorpion is a landlord, and a farmer of reverie leaves, which are all at once a staple food crop, the underpinning of the economy of Cat Country, and the drugs mentioned in Fenby’s summary of the book. On eating one, the narrator feels “benumbed and excited at the same time — the kind of feeling that one gets when slightly high.” As the effect becomes more intense: “every last pore in my body felt relaxed and happy enough to laugh, if pores could laugh. I no longer felt the least bit hungry or thirsty, nor did I any longer mind the dirt on my body. The mud, blood, and sweat that clung to my flesh all gave me a delicious feeling, and I felt that I should be perfectly happy if I never took another bath as long as I lived” (36). As Lyell points out in a footnote, this is an obvious analog for opium, which in the nineteenth century was imported into China by foreigners in massive quantities, despite Chinese prohibitions against it.

In Cat Country, reverie leaves were not just imported, but actually first introduced by a foreigner. This happened several hundred years ago. In short order, everybody was addicted to them, with the result that everyone become addled and idle. In response, the emperor banned the leaves; but everyone went into withdrawal, so he rescinded that order and made them the national dish, instead. Then — three centuries or so before the novel is set — there’s a chronic shortage of leaves after a terrible flood, at which point all the cat people, desperate for their fix, start stealing leaves from each other, with the full approval of the government, “for stealing is an act that most fully expresses a man’s freedom; and ‘freedom’ had, throughout their entire history, always been the highest ideal of the cat-people” (freedom meaning, naturally, “taking advantage of others; non-cooperation; creating disturbances” [43]). Eventually we discover that the whole economy is even more of a house of cards than this makes it sound, being built entirely on the ruling class’s plunder of Cat Country treasures and land: these things are sold to foreigners, and the proceeds are distributed among officials, who use the money to buy leaves. Licensing this behaviour is the anarchic political system; in place of political parties, there are political brawls (d’you see what he did there?), one of which in particular has ruined the country in ways that seem not just reflective of Lao She’s present, but grimly predictive: “the members of our Everybody Shareskyism Brawl didn’t understand economics to begin with […] when all the killing was over, everybody just stood around and stared blankly at each other. They had hoped to build the new society on a base of peasants and workers, but they didn’t have the foggiest notion of what agriculture was or what work was” (222).

Another consequence of the situation is that foreigners are both the bane and the life support of Cat Country society. They are entirely outside the law — hence the narrator’s ability to wander around pretty much as he pleases – and they know they’ve got a good thing going. When the narrator encounters other foreigners (who are, of course, also cat people; or at least, as they condescendingly explain, their ancestors were also cats), they automatically treat with him rather than with the Cat Country natives, knowing that it would be against their self-interest to fight among themselves. After the harvest, the narrator travels with Scorpion to the capital of Cat Country – called, naturally, Cat City (the total lack of imagination displayed in the naming throughout the book is, you have to assume, deliberate; the cat language is called “felinese”). Once there, he is sought out by foreigners who prove themselves to be more civil, reliable, and generally with-it than anyone else the narrator has so far met. They warn him not to let the cat people take advantage of him. “We foreigners have to look out for each other”, they explain. “To tell the truth, it’s a disgrace to Mars that a country like this should still exist. We’re so ashamed of it that we don’t even bother to treat cat-men as men at all” (111) — ashamed, but without sympathy; they feel that “the filthy habits of the natives here are past all rectification” (112), a position the narrator gradually moves towards as the novel develops and which, crucially, seems to be justified.

Cat City itself is certainly a pretty dismal place. Cat Country houses are made of mud and consist of “four walls surrounding a foul smell” (33), and Cat City embodies the same aesthetic. “As soon as I set eyes on Cat City,” the narrator relates, “a sentence took form in my mind: This civilization will soon perish!” (96). Yet in describing the place — or more accurately, in describing the behaviour of cat people en masse — Lao She produces some of the most memorable images in the book, such as this:

The arrangement of the city itself was the simplest that I had ever encountered in all my experience. There was nothing that you could really call “a street,” for other than an apparently endless line of dwellings, there was nothing but a kind of highway, or perhaps one ought to say “empty square”. If one kept in mind what the layout of a Cat Country army camp was like, one could well imagine the layout of the city: an immense open square with a row of houses down the middle, totally devoid of color and utterly drowned in cat-people. That’s all there was; this was what they called Cat City”. There were crowds of people, but one couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. None of them walked in a straight line, and all of them got in each other’s way. Fortunately the streets were wide, and when it was no longer possible to go forward, they could switch to walking sideways as they crowded past one another. (97-8)

And this, describing how Scorpion, who at this point is carried aloft by a number of other cat people, negotiates the crowd:

With seven of them bearing Scorpion on their heads, they plunged headlong into the cat-surf! Then music was struck up. At first I thought it was a signal for the pedestrians to clear a right of way. But as soon as they heard the music, rather than shrinking back, the people all began crowding over in the direction of the reverie leaf formation until they were packed as tight as sardines in a can. I thought that it would be a miracle if Scorpion’s men ever made it through.

But Scorpion was much more capable than I had imagined. Bump-ba dump-dump-dump, bump-ba dump-dump-dump — lively as a roll of drums in a Chinese military opera, the clubs of the soldiers came down on the heads of the cat-people and a crack began to appear in the human tide. Thus the miracle of the Red Sea had been of Scorpion’s own making. Strange to say, the people’s eagerness to see what was going on was not abated one whit by the clubs, although they did fall back out of the way to open up a path. They kept on smiling at the formation. The clubs, however, didn’t stop merely because of this friendly reception, but continued with a bump-ba dump-dump-dump. By dint of careful observation, I was able to make out a difference between the city cats and the country cats: the city cats had a bald spot where a part of the skull had been replaced by a steel plate that was placed at the center of the head and also doubled as a drum — clear evidence that they had had long experience with having their heads drummed by soldiers while watching exciting public spectacles, for experience is never the product of a single, fortuitous occurrence. (101-2)

It’s still terribly long-winded (it’s very hard to quote from this novel other than in whole paragraphs), but: they have drums for heads! Is that not beautifully absurd?

Once in the city, the narrator ditches Scorpion for his rather more interesting relatives, notably Young Scorpion (see above re: naming) who explains that while his grandfather eats reverie leaves because he thinks it disgraces the foreigners who brought them, and his father eats the leaves to maintain his social status, he has to eat them because if he didn’t, he simply wouldn’t be able to deal with the mess that is Cat Country. (Ah, youth.) Young Scorpion introduces the narrator to, among other things, some Cat Country feminists (or “new women”), and the workings of the Cat Country educational system. The latter is evidently something of a hobby horse for Lao She, because he spends several chapters explaining and demonstrating how it is broken. There is a hint of the situation early in the novel, when Scorpion quotes Cat Country classics at the narrator in bizarre and non-sequiteur-ish attempts to justify his actions (a practice that was, at the time, not uncommon in China, as a footnote by Lyell reminds us), indicating a certain debasement of the value of knowledge. But in Cat City it’s taken to extremes. There are vacuous “graduation ceremonies” that take place on the first day of school, because the only reason to go to school is to gain status; pupils who literally dissect their teachers; and squabbling “young scholars”, who pose and talk in foreign languages “so that nobody understands them. They don’t understand what they’re saying themselves, but they enjoy the lively atmosphere that all those foreign sounds create” (197). And much more in that vein. It’s no surprise that, after rescuing two teachers destined for death, only to have them flee because they are unable to conceive of someone rescuing them for a reason other than wanting to kill them himself, the narrator despairs:

I wasn’t laughing at them alone, I was laughing at their whole society. Everywhere one looked in it, one found suspicion, pettiness, selfishness, and neglect. You couldn’t find an ounce of honesty, magnanimity, integrity or generosity in the entire society. In a society where principals are dissection material for their students, how could you expect a man to claim the honor of being principal? — darkness, darkness, total darkness. Was it possible that they were unaware that I had saved their lives? Very possibly, for in such a dark society, the very concept of saving another man’s life was probably unknown. I thought of Madam Ambassador and the eight little sexpots. They were probably still rotting away back there. The principal, the teacher, the professor, the ambassador’s wife, the eight little vixen — did any of them have anything worth of being called “life”? (166)

It’s passages like this, and more generally the development of the narrator, that give weight to Cat Country, and make it more than the preachy tome Lao She would have us believe that it is. Of course, it is preachy, the parallels with the China of its time transparent — at least to someone reading it now, with a knowledge of its context. Indeed, “70% education, 30% entertainment” isn’t a bad description of its content, though it’s almost certainly not the education the Chinese authorities had in mind when they established that specification. And its interest as science fiction is also largely historical, I think, though certainly echoes of its attitude towards authority can be detected in a book like Xiaolu Guo’s UFO in Her Eyes.

But ultimately, if there’s a single reason to read Cat Country, beyond that historical interest, it’s the narrator. From speculating, at first, on the possibility of driving Scorpion away and becoming a good leader for the cat people — forbidding them to eat the reverie leaves, and saving them from themselves — he becomes inexorably more cynical, not just about the possibility of improving the cat peoples’ situation, but, like the other foreigners, about whether they even deserve such improvement. Even before he arrives in Cat City, he has begun to lose respect for Scorpion and his ilk for seemingly inviting the abusive treatment of the foreigners; after a short stay there he, too, is regularly eating the leaves, and musing that “Cat Country was like an undertow in the ocean: get too close to it, and you’d be sucked in” (149). In its final third, the novel grows increasingly dark, and acquires more force than I would have anticipated either from Fenby’s summary or from its early chapters; and that’s because the narrator’s despair has the feel of something real, something to latch on to. Revolution and invasion bring the final doom of Cat Country; it is the end of both place and people, complete with mass graves that, like the descriptions of Everybody Shareskyism, seem chillingly familiar. Every scrap of hope, of light, is done away with by the end of Cat Country; and the narrator’s return to a China he insists is peaceful and happy — not at all like the place in which he finds himself! — turns out not to be in the least delightful, or casual. Rather it is a last, deliberate, bitter pill for the reader to swallow. It is, after all, a French spacecraft that rescues the narrator; the work of foreigners, taking him home.

Machine

Machine cover A curious little book, this, ostensibly the story of a speck of matter from its “highest degree of concentration” to its “most unstructured state”. The former is in the heart of a dawn horse, Eohippus, fifty-five million years before the present; the latter is as the products of the combustion of a drop of petrol in a Ford Pinto, produced at 7.59pm on the 23rd of June 1975 on 1st South Street in Austin, Texas. The moments of overspecification of place and time are not intended (as they are in, say, the narratorial voice-overs in Pushing Daisies) to indicate the comforting embrace of Story; rather they are intended to emphasize the chill inhumanity of the shaping of the world by cause and effect and time. Although there is a human tale within Machine, it is usually crufted with technical, scientific and historical detail, in passages such as this:

It happened as they turned right into the car park at Timber Creek Apartments: the fibres in the calf muscle of Jimmy’s right leg had reacted to the electrochemical signals from his nervous system with a contraction that rearranged the internal positioning of the ankle bones, thus creating a downward pressure which transmitted through his sock and shoe to the rubber-covered surface of the accelerator pedal. From the pedal the command was transmitted to the throttle valve, which opened up and activated the fuel injections system, thus sucking the drop from the tank and transporting it via the pump to the filter and from there into the carburettor that mixed the fuel with air from the open throttle valve. The mixture was carried through the suction manifold to the injection nozzle of the third cylinder, where the suction valve opened as the piston moved downwards from its uppermost dead centre and created a subpressure which sucked the aerated petrol into the cylinder. At the lowest dead centre of the piston, the valve closed so the piston, returning to the upper dead centre, compressed the gas mixture, and just before its arrival the spark plug gave off a tiny spark and ignited the petrol whose combustion occurred at a temperature of just below 2000^o Celcius and a pressure of 40 bar.

‘BANG!’ it went. (75-76)

It’s not all like this, of course — some of it is perfectly traditional narrative, with dialogue and everything — and it’s not done without a sense of humour, from the central “horse power” pun to that BANG! But there is quite a lot of what is essentially non-fiction writing about everything from engineering to chemistry to geology to philosophy. Perhaps the story it reminded me of most strongly is Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in its counterpointing of the mundane (a meeting between two young people) and the vastness of existence, although Peter Adolphsen’s tale doesn’t seek the emotional intensity of Zoline’s: rather, as I said, it is chill, interested in life precisely as a remorseless, endless mechanism. There is little room for desire, of any kind — even that Eohippus is not killed by a hungry predator, but drowns after being startled by a flash of lightning.

Similarly, the encounter between Machine‘s two principle human characters would in another work probably be the start of a love story, but here is purely a mechanism of plot, which is not even consumated, let alone fully resolved. Its significance lies in the parallels it allows to be drawn between various kinds and levels of order, human systems related to broader scientific ones rather than contrasted. Jimmy Nash is Djamolidine Hasanov, an immigrant who escaped from the former USSR in 1970, who found work on an oil pipeline in Utah, but who lost an arm in an accident. His story is the negotiation of organization in the form of power structures, with the formal hierarchy of the USSR (which of course is on an anti-entropic historical trajectory towards perfection) contrasted with the informal conformity of the USA. There is a tension between who he is in each country — he trains a a cyclist, and we are told he is a perfect cycling machine; but like the speck of matter, he must change from one form to another when he leaves, metamorphose from a Soviet to an American. As a hitch-hiker, he’s picked up by Clarissa Sanders, who we are told is average in all ways except her fascination with biology (at one point we are told that she distrusts the hippy vision of humanity at one with nature, and believes that human behaviour could only be fully understood through controlled experiments). When she imagines a future in which molecular genetics is becoming the most important system affecting individuals’ daily lives, we know she is right; but she sees only the potential benefits. When she tries to explain her vision to Jimmy, he sees Gattaca. He gives her some LSD (the discovery and pharmacology of which is of course described by Adolphsen’s narrator), and during the trip that follows rather than perceiving the one-ness of everything she perceives that everything is “too complicated” (70), which feels like a kind of truth.

Of course, it’s a fiction, and there’s a constant awareness in Machine of the tension that telling this story creates between fiction and fact – between the notion that these events are made up, yet something like them has almost certainly happened. Early in the story, a census official, waxing philosophical about the problems with censuses to Djamolidine and his family, notes that “selection and interpretation are activities which presume an acting subject” (19), i.e. that even the census, which involves selection and interpretation, is not pure fact; and by extension, no such narrative of pure fact is possible, no matter how likely it may be. Djamolidine subsequently attempts to improve on the census company’s survey design, but is thwarted by, e.g. intermarriage and other such unavoidable hybridisation problems, reinforcing the point.

The end of Machine takes this concern to a logical conclusion: the narration resolves into the first person, with the narrator revealing themselves to be the neighbour of one of the other characters, and explaining that they’ve been writing the preceding story (1) as a result of a spiritual vision and (2) as a means of escaping from depression. More, the narrator explicitly refuses the idea that they have the omniscience required to know the story they’ve just told, undermining the sense of certainty that Machine has spent the rest of its length establishing, and restoring a view of the universe in which human imagination is central. Clearly Adolphsen felt it would be something like dishonest to pretend to any other view, but on first reading, I found the shift unwelcome – the last twenty pages or so, which have the feel of a reassurance that endings are real and meaningful, and even imbue the speck with something like a sense of destiny, seemed to sit uneasily with earlier insistences that “Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense” (10), and that stuff is never created or destroyed, merely transformed from one state to another. On reflection, I think if anything it reinforces the distance between the human scale and the broader story the book tells: because for humans, of course, endings are not just real and meaningful, but inevitable.

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.