Category: criticism and reviews

A Discussion about Matter, part two

As promised, here’s the second installment of that discussion about Iain M Banks’ new book, Matter. Part one is here, and part three will be over at the Velcro City Tourist Board tomorrow. Enjoy!

Niall: And so to question three, the big one: what did you think of Matter?

Jonathan: Matter put me in mind of that Helix column by John Barnes where he argued that all artistic movements and genres passing through three phases. You have the initial phase when ideas are laid down, then the second phase when you get the great masters of the genre and then the third phase when it’s all about being a virtuoso, about not challenging the limits of your genre but rather producing art that relentlessly pursues beauty as defined by the genre with no interest in innovation or change.

In those terms, Matter is not just a virtuoso work of SF, it’s also a virtuoso Culture book.

The previous three Culture books were more “difficult” because rather than following the formula laid down by the early Culture novels, Banks went out of his way to examine the Culture from new perspectives. Matter has no difficulty. In fact, it’s probably the most accessible Culture novel since The Player of Games. The concepts in it are all familiar and were developed in previous books, a lot of the characters are familiar and really there’s nothing new in it. It’s just a well constructed Culture novel. There are neat character arcs, big plot lines and quests for those readers who want escapism. Matter will probably be one of the most commercially successful Culture books ever written.

However, I couldn’t help but feel that Banks has just stopped trying to be clever and has settled down into a commercially successful franchise that will doubtless keep him in single malts and Porsche Boxters until the end of his days. His fans will adore the book, as will most SF fans looking for a bit of adventure with some witty remarks but personally, I thought Matter was disappointing in its complete lack of ambition.

James: I thought Matter was disappointing, and not just in lack of ambition, but more generally. Maybe it was my expectations? To me it read like an overlong fantasy epic, and when it finally got going it ended. I want to see more Culture, not the societies they’re messing with, or the aliens they’re sharing the galaxy with. I want Minds, Ships, SC. Culture stuff. Basically, I want Excession.

I also thought it was far too long. Banks was obviously having fun with his mega-BDO and pretending to be a fantasy writer, but I got bored. Compare that to something as huge as the Night’s Dawn Trilogy, where whatever else you want to say about it I can’t remember ever being bored. It crossed my mind that maybe Banks was suffering from the JK Rowling syndrome of being too succesful to be edited.

Niall: Overlong fantasy epic? No, no, that was The Algebraist!

More seriously, space opera and epic fantasy are one of the points on the literary spectrum where sf and fantasy come closest to each other (and then mingle, in Star Wars), so I can see where you’re coming from. But in Matter it didn’t bother me, largely because the characters on Sursamen know full well they’re not living in a fantasy world. They know they’re in a giant artificial world, they know there are vastly more advanced species above them, and they have to deal with that.

So I enjoyed it. I have to say I didn’t even find it overlong; big, yes, but not padded. I read it in a much shorter timeframe than most of you, which probably gives me a different perspective, but on the level of basic reading pleasure it kept me fully engaged – it was fun, often funny, sometimes dazzling, with a couple of proper emotional punches towards the end. What I think Matter adds to the Culture series as a whole is a much clearer sense than there has been before of (a) how the different species in the galaxy are trapped into a hierarchy and (b) what it’s like for them to try to live within that hierarchy. And many-levelled Sursamen is of course the perfect setting for literalising those ideas.

James: Yeah, I do agree with some of what you’re saying Niall. I’m pretty sure a lot of my disappointment was down to my expectations. I agree with your last point about what Matter adds, and there were definitely enjoyable parts – witty bits that made me laugh, cool mega-tech etc. But by the end I was left thinking “what was all that actually about?” There seemed lots of, not so much padding, but meandering away from the plot; quite literally in the case of some of the characters.

Paul: I enjoyed Matter very much, possibly because I came to it with no prior expectations beyond it being a Banks novel set in the Culture universe. Which may sound counter-intuitive, as that’s exactly what seems to have disappointed others, but it may clarify if I say I read Banks for the way he writes as much as the what he writes.

Granted, I’d have been pretty stoked if we’d had another Excession-scale Minds’n’conspiracies fest, or a Use of Weapons literary effort. But what we have instead is something that seemed pretty inevitable (and was clarified in the interview) – it’s the edges where things happen in a stable society like the Culture, and that’s where Banks’ thinking has shifted to.

If anything, as a function of the above, I think Matter‘s flaw is that it is unconsciously pitched to readers familiar with the franchise more than to the newcomer – though not in a cynical way, just in the same way that any franchise universe becomes self-contained and slightly exclusive over time, not least in part because its creator becomes so attached to (and familiar with) it.

I’d agree that Matter meandered – but that’s not a flaw for me, Banks meanders in a way I enjoy. And I’ll agree there were loose threads (a function of that stated deliberate effort to make it seem like the start of a trilogy even though it isn’t one?) – but again, that’s not an issue, as I think similar loose threads of plot are what has filled in much of the fine grain detail of the Culture universe over the years.

I think what we’re highlighting here is indeed how expectations and mind-sets make a book different to different readers. I’ve been accused of being a forgiving reviewer before (in music as well as books), and it’s a fair cop. I try to look for the best in things if I can, that’s just my way, though I try as best as possible to leave predisposition to the side. On the other end of the scale, we have Jonathan, who subscribes to the “test-to-destruction” method – setting the highest of standards for everything without favour or compromise, a position I often wish I could emulate (not least because it comes across as a lot less wishy-washy than my own).

I can see all the things that have been pointed out as flaws in Matter, and noticed them while reading it too (I have the post-its to prove it!). But the simple fact is I just enjoyed reading it. A metaphor for this phenomenon just occurred to me, but it’s a trifle earthy and colourful and deals with the fairer sex, so I’ll let your imaginations do the work …

Final point – Jonathan’s accusation of a lack of ambition is one that could be made to stick, I think, but only in one sense. Banks certainly had no ambition to further the field of space opera, or of sf in general. But I think there’s a case to be made that he has tried to do something different and ambitious within the field of Culture novels. Determining its success or failure on its own terms would take being privy to the man’s inner creative processes – which he either doesn’t examine (as he claims) or guards like a junk-yard dog. So, we have to let the reading public (and us critics, natch) decide its worth on whatever terms we bring to the table, I guess … and it appears mine are unfussy!

Niall: It’s interesting that you talk about Matter being pitched to readers familiar with the franchise because if anything, I got the opposite vibe – I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a Culture novel intended as an introduction to the Culture for those readers, primarily US readers, who may not have encountered it before. It’s quite true that this could be another result of expectation on my part. After all, I knew before I started reading it that (a) Banks hasn’t had huge success in the US, historically, and (b) Orbit are planning to make a fuss about the US launch of Matter – but it meant that I read some of the digressions as cluing-in-the-newbies rather than self-indulgent-wandering.

Jonathan: Yes, I’d agree with all of that.

I think that Matter is a work of little artistic ambition but some quite considerable commercial ambition. I know it’s generally considered a bit “off” to speculate about author’s mindsets but if this book wasn’t written with the explicit intension of “cracking” America then I’d be very much surprised.

This leads us to my first question: How did people feel about the plotting?

I thought that the individual plot threads worked on a tactical level but failed on a strategic level. What I mean by this is that the arcs associated with all of the characters worked well in and of themselves. You had the young Prince having to work out what politics was all about, you had the older prince realising that the world he inhabits really is incalculably larger than the courtly dances and bawdy houses he frequents, and you had the SC agent juggling the ethical and practical demands of the Culture (her adopted culture) and of her native culture. So you had Need For Vengeance vs. Career Management and Non-Intervention Vs. Using Your Culture Training To Go Home And Kick Arse.

I thought all of these threads were well written and nicely handled but they made little or no sense as parts of a larger story. The older Prince escaped from the Shellworld and went off to find an ally who delivered a speech and sent him home. The younger prince learned some politics but it didn’t make a difference in the end since he never got to rule, and the SC person was completely passive, just turning up and watching some other stuff going on.

Furthermore I felt that, even by the standards of the Culture novels, the plot with aliens wanting to kill some other alien was all a bit convoluted and silly.

I got the impression that Banks was mining the Big Book of fantasy plot lines – wrangling tropes effectively but with little real attention given to the wider political issues that tended to characterise the previous Culture novels, which would all have little threads going on but they’d all fit into a wider picture. Matter has no wider picture… just pleasing little stories that are nicely unchallenging and unadventurous.

Paul: Points taken, Niall – another perspective issue. I dunno, I just figured if he was going to do a “Culture 101”, there’s be a lot more close detail set within the core Culture, a la The Player of Games, Excession etc. But again, we’re assuming conscious agency where the man claims there was none, so we’ll never get a definite answer, I suspect.

Niall: I have to think he was being just a little disingenuous when he said that to Farah – I mean, I’m willing to believe he’s a pretty instinctive writer, but I do find it hard to imagine writing any novel, and certainly not one this big, without at least some idea of what I want to say and who I want to say it to. On the other hand, I’m of the school of thought that says that everything on the page is the result of a writerly choice, on the grounds that if we want to hold them responsible for some of it (either to praise or to criticise) we have to hold them responsible for all of it, even if the choice is not always an excruciatingly concious and thought-through one.

Back to the plots … as Paul alluded to, in his BSFA interview Banks also said he wrote the book to feel like part one of a trilogy, with no intention of ever writing parts two and three. I think he succeeded entirely in that goal, but if you’re not prepared to roll with that – the realisation, about 80% of the way through, that the book you’re reading is not the book you thought you were reading – it’s going to be unsatisfying, because of the way various plots either change direction suddenly or end up unfinished. On the other hand, if you do roll with it it’s a nice inversion.

In the case of Oramen, I disagree with Jonathan’s assessment; I thought the fact that, in the end, his journey didn’t go anywhere was tragic in the best sense. (It helps that I was starting to worry, at that point, that the whole book would be irredeemably cosy, and that none of the protagonists would get seriously hurt.) In the other two cases, I think Jonathan has a point, and in particular the length of Anaplian’s journey did feel contrived to make sure she was in the right place at just the right time.

More broadly, I think you could make a case that plot and character end up subservient to idea and theme. For me the book was so strongly about hierarchy and differing ideas of what power and freedom mean at different points in a hierarchy that I could certainly see someone making that case against the book. (Which means I’m not sure I can go along with your argument that the book has no wider picture.) But then, most of the time when I was reading Matter I was quite happy to be swept up in the development of the idea.

Jonathan: Fair enough Niall, in that case I think that we should address the “wider message” once we’ve all had a go with the plot.

James: Niall, I don’t agree with you about intent – I often think that critics over-analyse work, and found it quite amusing when Farah analysed Banks’ writing and he more or less said, I don’t know, that’s your job. (And at this point, if you haven’t already guessed, I should point out that I’m not a critic in any sense, as my reviews on BDO will reveal!) I’m not exactly in the same league as Banks (understatement) but I have definitely written stories that just come out, writing in the headlights as it were. Admittedly when writing a novel the length of time it takes often leads to deeper thought, but surely the writer can just aim for a “good story”?

On plots, I pretty much agree with Jonathan. Everything was setup in the first few chapters, and I was feeling optimistic, and then everything just bumbled along until the very end, when everyone died. Everyone went on a journey somewhere, during which nothing much happened of importance. And everything seemed subservient to the shellworld. It reminded me of Rendezvous With Rama, or Ringworld in this aspect, both of which I found dreadfully dull.

And then there’s the monster under the falls! What was that all about? It came from nowhere and just tried to kill everyone. Why? Because it was nasty and wanted to kill Shellworlds. I didn’t like it at all, and By the end I was left wondering what had really happened? Was the whole big picture just random? Did anyone really know what the monster under the falls was? Did the higher level Involveds really care? It all felt so unresolved. The plot for me was the worst aspect of the book.

Paul: Well, I think saying it (they) were bad would be a stretch too far, but they weren’t the stars of the show either. I agree with James that there are a lot of unresolved threads (though not as many as all that – I seem to remember some signposting about the critter beneath the falls earlier on, a remnant of one of the various factions of species that vie for control of the shellworlds, IIRC). But again, we’re back to the “false trilogy” issue – which means there was very possibly a deliberate attempt to make the situation seem wider and more complex than it would actually be shown to be.

I think the analogy here is that Matter, if it were a film, spent more production time on the CGI and eyeball kicks than it did on translating the story as conceived into the story displayed, if you see what I mean. It’s the ‘blockbuster’ phase of the Culture oeuvre, perhaps. But again, I think the unoriginality of plot threads is probably meant to be subservient to the wider theme. The theme is the engine, the plots are the roads the vehicle drives upon.

Note: Link to Part 1 redirected to Internet Archive in Feb 2021. Part III is also in the Archive.

The Surfer

If you want to write fiction with an agenda, this is how to do it. Kelly Link’s “The Surfer”, like all the stories in The Starry Rift, was written to meet Jonathan Strahan’s editorial challenge to write “stories that would offer today’s readers the same kind of thrill enjoyed by the pulp readers of over fifty years ago”; or, if you believe the version of the remit given on Wikipedia, which chimes with what I’ve actually read of the book, it was to write science fiction stories “aimed at young people, reminiscent of the type of 1950s science fiction stories that are considered to be classic SF juveniles, but that would resonate better with young people of today.” To avoid confusion, according to the book’s publicity information the target age range is that version of “young adult” that means “ages 12 and up” (or to judge by the introduction, it means anyone young enough to need a footnote explaining what the Cold War was). If you think about it for a minute, this is a mission that makes certain assumptions – notably, that not only will the science fiction of the fifties not grab contemporary young readers, but that much of the science fiction of today won’t grab them, either. (Or else why would the anthology be needed?) I have to admit I’m skeptical of this line of thinking, not least because I suspect that if you’d given me a copy of The Starry Rift when I was twelve, I’d have turned my nose up at it. I didn’t turn to science fiction because I wanted to read about “young adults” like me having extraordinary adventures; that was actually just about the last thing I was looking for. I turned to sf because I wanted to read about grown-ups having grown-up adventures, and about the world I could expect to grow up into. (In Strahan’s defence, his introduction does also say that he asked for “tales […] that ask serious questions about the world we are living in and the world we might face”. But the kid protagonists outnumber the adults.) Maybe I’m typical of sf readers and maybe I’m not, but the received wisdom, which I have no reason to doubt, is that “young adults” tend to be both sensitive and resistant to attempts to sell them something and, at least on the basis of the introduction and the four stories I’ve read so far, The Starry Rift does look an awful lot like an attempt to sell them science fiction.

But I don’t want to hold the book’s agenda against it, because it also has a pretty cover and a pretty stellar table of contents – in addition to stories by established YA authors, not all noted for their sf output, like Garth Nix and Margo Lanagan, you get offerings from established sf writers not noted for their YA output, such as Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, Tricia Sullivan, and Greg Egan (!). If anyone can sell a mission, these should be the writers to do it. And it has this Kelly Link science fiction story – which, despite what looks like a conventional Kelly Link first paragraph, if I can be permitted such an oxymoron (“In the dream I was being kidnapped by aliens. I was dreaming, and then I woke up”), is science fiction, by anyone’s definition. Not “can be read as sf” like “Most of my Friends are Two-Thirds Water”, not “sf trope treated as fantasy” like “Lull”, not “future fantasy” like “Light”; in fact, for most of its length “The Surfer” is mundane science fiction. Obviously it’s not a complete departure – Link has a good few YA stories under her belt by now, and in some ways “The Surfer” is of a piece with them. I don’t think it’s a secret that in general I’ve found most of these stories less satisfying than her earlier work; there does seem to be, at least for me as an adult reader, a difference between a Link story that can be published as YA, such as “The Specialist’s Hat”, and a Link story written for a YA context, such as “The Wizards of Perfil”. The latter seems to sacrifice some weirdness, some strangeness (what you could go so far as to call Link-ness), without a compensating change in other areas.

“The Surfer” suffers from this problem a bit, too, and as science fiction, with the stronger fidelity to realism that that usually implies, is perhaps even hit a bit harder by the loss of Link-ness. Certainly there are some distinctively Linkian sentences (“It was kind of like the bats. They were there, and after a while you noticed them. Only it wasn’t like the bats at all and I don’t mean to say that it was”), and there’s a charming riff about an empty bottle that is alleged to have a genie trapped in it (guessing an author’s mood from their prose is a mug’s game, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I felt Link was more comfortable writing this section than some of the rest of the story), but there isn’t the same sense of freedom or play that comes through in the stories in Stranger Things Happen or Magic for Beginners. Put another way, if you gave me a copy of the manuscript without a name attached, I think I would guess that “The Surfer” is a Kelly Link story, but Kelly Link probably wouldn’t be my first guess. But it would be churlish to suggest that being less Linkian — or rather, that Link trying new things — is a bad thing per se, and crucially “The Surfer” has more compensations than a story like “The Wizards of Perfil”, such that learning how to read it is worth the time.

One major compensation is getting to see how Link thinks about the future. Not too long from now (my guess would be 2020, plus or minus five years) the US is falling apart: various bits of it have seceded to form alliances with Mexico and Canada, and what’s left is in a mess, with a healthcare system that can’t cope with outbreaks of lethal flu variants and an economy that can’t offer much in the way of prospects for anyone. Yet when his father takes our 14 year-old narrator away from all this to more prosperous Costa Rica, it’s against Dorn (Adorno)’s wishes. What Dorn wants is to stay and practice his football (here actually meaning soccer) skills (about which he is more than a little arrogant), with the aim of one day being picked up by one of the major international leagues – Italy or Japan for preference; he’s learning Japanese as a second language. When they land in Costa Rica, reports of another flu outbreak lead to them being quarantined in a hangar (a state which persists for most of the story’s sixty-odd pages and allows Link to report on the world outside without needing to provide much direct description of it), where among other people Dorn meets Naomi, a (self-described) fat computer nerd who’s come down hoping to find a job in the booming Costa Rican software industry, and Lara, a native Costa Rican who’s studying hard so that she can grow up to be an astronaut in the equally booming Costa Rican space program.

What all this looks like is an argument that’s been popping up with increasing frequency over the past few years: the future, having been American for so long, now belongs to the rest of the world. But this isn’t what the story’s about; what it’s about is how a number of the travelers, including Dorn’s father and Lara’s mother, are traveling to join a commune run by one Hans Bliss, a hippyish German surfer who was abducted by aliens several years earlier, and claims to have guidance for humanity that will encourage the aliens to return. The twist is that Bliss isn’t just another nut: his abduction was verified, albeit during a hurricane, which means that people take his claims seriously, although not always in the way he might hope. He says the aliens want humanity to disarm; human governments find this mighty suspicious, and are now stockpiling weapons as fast as they can.

Here’s the bit that’s liable to make you groan: Dorn’s dad is a science fiction reader. Bearing in mind what I said about The Starry Rift’s goal of selling sf to a YA audience, at first it’s hard not to view this revelation as cynical. We learn that he’s traveling to Bliss’ commune not because he believes the peace and love rhetoric, but because he wants to see aliens. And to cap it all, he’s traveling with a bag stuffed with old sf paperbacks, which during the quarantine get passed around and read (and discussed) by everyone, including Naomi and Lara.

If Dorn’s dad had been the protagonist of “The Surfer”, I’d probably have been unable to stop rolling my eyes. In the last year I’ve read several novels featuring protagonists, invariably middle-aged or older men, who despite reasonable expectations to the contrary get to enjoy the sort of future that science fiction promised them – which from one point of view is exactly what happens at the end of “The Surfer”. At the story’s end, the aliens do come back, and the sort of future that science fiction long promised us does seem to be arriving. To be clear, I’ve no problem with stories that address the gap between what science fiction promised and what we have, which is on one level what “The Surfer” is doing; but it has to be said that the sentiment is now a ready commodity. You can buy it on a t-shirt from threadless (in fact, I have). And I do have a problem with stories that uncritically manipulate their futures to fulfill a wish – that gift their characters with experiences that the author and readers may want, by proxy, for themselves. If Dorn’s dad had been the protagonist, that’s more or less the sort of story “The Surfer” would be.

But Dorn’s dad isn’t the protagonist, and “The Surfer”, quite literally, isn’t his story, which means Link isn’t being uncritical of either him or his wish. More important still, while Dorn reads science fiction, sure he does – he knows enough to recommend Octavia Butler or Connie Willis – he’s not a fan of the stuff in the way that his Dad is. More importantly, he doesn’t believe in it. To Dorn, sf is good for escapism, but not really relevant to him or his world. His future is football. When Lara tells him of her dream of traveling to Mars, his reaction is more cutting than scorn; he’s simply baffled.

I shrugged. It wasn’t really anything I was interested in. “What’s the point,” I said. “I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they’ll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a space program is, I don’t know, it’s like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bilss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don’t see the point.”

“The point is to go to space,” Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. “To go to space. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back.”

He is, in other words, exactly the sort of reader that you have to suspect Strahan had in mind when he sent out the invitation to contribute to The Starry Rift, and Lara has exactly the sort of belief in the future that The Starry Rift seems to want to inspire. Link’s afterword to the story (all the stories, save Egan’s, have afterwords from their authors) very nearly makes this explicit, explaining how Dorn’s father’s love of books is her own, and how she’s jealous of her characters for having had the chance to read books she hasn’t heard of yet; and then she wonders whether some of them will be written by readers of The Starry Rift.

So ultimately, “The Surfer” is neither a story about how the future has left America and gone elsewhere, nor a story about how science fiction lied to its readers, though it raises both those issues. Ultimately, and in hindsight inevitably, “The Surfer” does come back to The Starry Rift’s mission, and becomes a story about Dorn – about an American Young Adult – learning that the future can after all be his, too. (Disguised as a story about Dorn starting to grow up, about Dorn learning a little humility and a little empathy.) The very end makes this explicit. Not long after the quarantine is lifted, as I mentioned, the aliens return, in numbers, all over the world. Everyone but Dorn goes outside to greet them; our hero, despite knowing that “outside the hangar were the aliens and the future”, initially can’t make himself leave. He wants to stay inside, to stay in goal, to make another save, to be doing something he can control, even if small, rather than face something big and uncontrollable. But go out, in the end, he does, and it’s really very hard to escape the conclusion that Link is trying to persuade her readers that they want to go out with him. “The Surfer” seems much more like a deliberate work of advocacy than anything else I’ve read by her; and as I implied, in another’s hands I think it could very easily have been nothing more than a cynical exercise. (I want to like The Starry Rift, but I fear that cynical is exactly what some of its stories will be.) But it is redeemed by wit and love – Link’s love, I think, for her characters, and not just her genre. The dialogue, as you would expect, sparkles; and there are moments of uncomfortable, for Dorn, insight that do him a world of good. He starts with the half-formed nature that seems to be so common in YA, and doesn’t quite have time to become a fully-defined adult, but when he goes out I do want to go out with him.

(Of course, I’m already a science fiction reader.)

Category Schmategory

I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a while. Paul Kincaid reviewed The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy:

Given the increasingly complex games with authorship that her most recent novels have played, and given how much non-fiction she has written for children, it was perhaps inevitable that Pat Murphy would write a young adult novel about writing. Which is precisely what The Wild Girls is, though if you expect anything of the subtlety or complexity of those novels you are going to be disappointed. This is writing reduced to a simple lesson in life, light, appealing and entertaining but very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects.

And literaticat responded:

* young adult novel about writing…: It isn’t a YA novel. It is very clearly a middle grade novel. And yes, there’s a difference. Consider how prickly many in the SF/F community get about people who are ignorant and dismissive about SF/F. Well, that’s how children’s book people feel when people are idiots about children’s books. GRR. I don’t understand why you would want to review a mainstream children’s book when that is so clearly NOT your forte, or why you would post it on an SF site… But moving on.

* …very definitely aimed at a younger audience by removing any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects: Imagine, a children’s book aimed at children? Bust my buttons. As for doubts, hesitations or darker aspects: The dissolution of two families. The children’s struggle to cope with the emotional fallout of their parent’s disastrous marriages. Their finding their own voices in challenging times. Not doubty and dark enough? You were expecting the apocolypse, maybe?

I have issues with both these comments. To take the second comment first, I think literaticat has simply misread Paul. I do not think Paul was expressing surprise or disappointment at the fact that The Wild Girls is aimed at children, because I don’t see how you can unyoke that statement from the rest of the sentence. Paul may or may not be right that the book removes “any doubts, hesitations or darker aspects” (I haven’t read it), but it seems clear to me that it’s the concept of doing that as an approach to writing for children that he’s commenting on. And in fact, that’s the thrust of his judgement on the book — that it is “clearly written and very readable”, but that it is limited by its need to provide a lesson.

Having got that off my chest, I’m going to briefly return to my opening comment: I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for a while. YA isn’t new, and YA sf isn’t new, but the visibility of and emphasis on YA as a category certainly seems to be greater now than it was only a few years ago; and hand in hand with a more clearly defined category come the readers with allegiance to that category, and comes a more clearly defined set of expectations for what is in that category. At the same time, over the last few years there have been a number of fairly high-profile examples of YA writers getting serious props from the main stream of genre criticism (Margo Lanagan, Ysabeau Wilce, Philip Reeve), and a number of well-regarded established sf writers turning their hand to YA (China Mieville, Stephen Baxter, Ellen Klages). All of which means that it’s not a surprise that a new YA novel by a writer who has previously committed sf picks up a review on a website devoted to sf (even though it is not, apparently, sf). At some point, given that despite what I said above most sf readers are not yet habitual YA readers, friction was probably inevitable.

But I’m not completely convinced that the situation is, as literaticat would have it, analagous to a non-sf writer reviewing an sf novel. In some ways, it is. If you’re reviewing something, you should try to be aware of that thing’s context — though I note that the definitions of YA in the US (where literaticat is) and UK (where Paul is and I am) seem to be somewhat different, to the point where I’m not even sure that “middle grade” exists as a separate shelf. (And I note that on her website, Pat Murphy merely describes the book as a children’s novel.) In a very interesting discussion at Gwenda’s place, Colleen Mondor says:

What I find sometimes reading so many MG and YA books is that there are those that seem to appeal regardless of the reader’s age (Cecil Castellucci’s work would fit in here or the KIki Strike book), some that seem to appeal more to adults that kids (I think “King Dork” is an example of this to a certain degree) and then those that adults might think are okay, but kids really go nuts over. But all of them are books for kids and for reviewers not used to wading around in these waters, it can get easy to mislabel or misread something.

This is surely true, and the inherent paradox of all reviews of children’s books, but I doubt Paul is unware of it, and I don’t think it makes sense of this specific case. Literaticat isn’t (or doesn’t seem to be) saying that The Wild Girls is good because it appeals to its target audience, she’s saying that The Wild Girls is good, full stop — that it is not the simplified, reductive story that Paul paints it as. The problem is this: how can advocates of YA (or, in this case, middle grade) fiction claim, as they frequently do and implicitly do here, that YA is an arbitrary label, that YA does everything non-YA does, and that the books that bear the label are as worthwhile on their own merits as books that do not (see, for example, the reactions to Octavian Nothing last year), and yet also object to Paul’s review on the grounds that he isn’t sufficiently familiar with “middle grade” fiction?

It looks like trying to have your cake and eat it, too. If a book isn’t making concessions to its audience, or operating in category-specific ways, then I can’t see why you’d need to be familiar with the market for books aimed at that audience to review it fairly. (There is, of course, also the argument that any reader reaction is a fair reader reaction.) And I’d argue that this is different to the equivalent sf neurosis because “sf” as a marketing category not an arbitrary label; it is a description of content. Sf novels don’t do everything that mimetic novels do, just as mimetic novels don’t do everything that sf novels do, so when a reviewer approaches an sf novel expecting it to reward her in the ways a mimetic novel will (or vice versa), a disjunction can, and often does, result.

UPDATE, 21/10: Paul Kincaid has provided his own response, in the comments below and on his journal.

Human Nature

Of necessity, this will be more of a compare-and-contrast than a review. Paul Cornell’s 1995 novel, Human Nature, is the first Doctor Who novel I’ve read, and almost cripplingly mired in continuity I have next-to-no knowledge of. So if I say that I didn’t like it as much as the recent TV adaptation (as “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood”), in part all that means is that I don’t know the context. The outline of the plot is the same for both versions – the Doctor, living as a human teacher in England, in the months immediately before World War I, watched over by his companion, falls in love, and (unrelatedly) is pursued by an alien family. But the details are different. In both, the companion is the viewpoint character; but I don’t know Bernice Summerfield like I know Martha, and nor do I know Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor.

Some of the changes are cosmetic. Benny is clearly cut from the same cloth as Martha (or rather, vice versa; both are smart, proactive, athletic, funny), and has an equally impressive resume, being a professor of archaeology, not to mention more overtly political in ways that would probably not sit comfortably with the current TV incarnation. In fact, in some ways it’s hard to imagine a more companion-ish companion, and at times Benny comes across as almost too good to be true, in the manner of the characters in The West Wing: you want very much to believe in her, but there’s always a nagging suspicion that people as intelligent, competent, and passionate about what they do as she is are too awesome to really exist. On the other hand the book’s family, never named as the family of blood, are more alien but less threatening than their TV counterparts. In the novel, the family are from a species of shapeshifters known as the Aubertides, who reproduce by budding. The catch is that (apart from their queen) they can only do so for a half-dozen generations, after which point they become (a) a complete family and (b) sterile. To get around this, the particular family in Human Nature want access to Time Lord “biodata” to enable every member of their family to reproduce 13 times — more than enough to form an army. We are told that this will lead them to scourge Gallifrey (among other places), mostly out of boredom (“Don’t knock it,” says one family member. “It’s something to do”). So they set a trap for the Doctor. As fuel for the action of the plot they work well enough, but none of the family members are as well-defined, as instantly sinister, as their TV counterparts.

Other changes between book and TV are more fundamental – surprisingly so, in some ways. The novel takes an impressive risk (if you don’t know what’s coming) by introducing us to John Smith as though he is just another character. It’s only when we see him through Benny’s eyes that we realize he’s the Doctor in human form. (The downside of this, of course, is that we’re not given a chance to get to know the Doctor before the story starts, so without context we don’t know how similar he is or isn’t to Smith; but the same could be said of the TV version, in isolation.) But to my mind, in the end the novel is a somewhat safer work than the TV episodes. For example, it seems that much more of the Doctor remains in Smith, who is never quite as nakedly human as his screen counterpart; when confronted with the truth of his nature, his reaction is not fearful but pragmatic. He attempts to do what the Doctor would do to save the day – albeit never with any intention of letting himself be turned back into a Time Lord. And what changes his mind is not the desire to do the right thing per se, but the appearance of a character who has been lurking in his memories throughout the novel, Verity. As in the TV episodes, the actual decision to change back takes place off-screen, to set up an encounter in which the Doctor bluffs the family. But, not knowing who Verity is, Smith’s choice in the novel feels more than a bit ex machina. In the context of the New Adventures it may all make perfect sense, but coming to it cold it looks clunky. Moreover, a plot contrivance allows Smith and the Doctor to talk to each other before the end, to reach some sort of accommodation; neat in theory, but unfortunately the scene comes across as nothing so much as an attempt to absolve the Doctor of his responsibility for creating a life he only ever intended to destroy, and that’s a shame.

At the same time, the other big difference of emphasis is that there’s much less of Smith in the novel’s Doctor. In “The Family of Blood”, the Doctor tells Joan (Smith’s love) that he’s capable of everything Smith was — including, implicitly, love. In the novel we get the opposite. Smith certainly still loves Joan, but after he has changed back, the Doctor tells Benny, “I can’t love her”; “whatever [love] is, I’m incapable of it” is how he puts it, bluntly, to Joan. On the flipside, this Doctor is more aware of the moral consequences of his actions – in the novel it is he, and not Joan, who raises the issue of how many lives he caused to be lost by choosing this time and place to become human, citing it as a reason he can’t risk changing back. This fits with the more selfish nature of the original choice to become human: as noted above, in the novel the Doctor walks into the family’s trap, choosing voluntarily to become home to take “a holiday from being himself”, rather than undergoing the transformation as a last resort to hide.

Of course, much of the power of Human Nature comes from the contrast of Smith’s love story with its setting – among schoolboys training to be soldiers, on the eve of a singular, terrible, global war. That aspect is the same, and similarly effective, in both novel and TV episodes — if anything, the argument for pacifism is stronger in the original. The epilogue – which, as in the TV version, plunges us fully into the midst of war – is probably the best piece of writing in the book, arguably the only place where the prose aspires to anything beyond the comfortable. But in the novel, Timothy, the boy who finds the Doctor’s essence (which in the novel is stored in a cricket-ball-like pod, rather than a watch) only goes into the conflict as a member of the Red Cross, a choice made as a direct result of his experiences with the pod. Both versions of the story shift focus as they develop, moving the rural idyll from foreground to background, but the extra room to breathe in the novel makes the contrast between quiet, pastoral life and the harsh intrusions of conflict that much more powerful. It’s a contrast that, in the end, perhaps gives us a taste of the Doctor’s perspective, his capacity for what in the novel is called loving “big-ly, not small-ly”; or is that already part of human nature?

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Ursula Le Guin is two for two. It was her review of Jan Morris’ Hav that first pointed me in the direction of that wonderful book; and likewise her review that persuaded me to add Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which turns out to be nearly as good, to my wish-list. It is, of course, a love story, between a young Chinese woman and an older English man. 23 year-old Zhaung Xiao Qiao arrives in the UK one February (2003, I think), nervous and alone, fearing the future, to learn English at a school in Holburn, hardly even understanding why her parents have sent her. A little over a month into her stay she meets a man at a cinema in South Kensington, falls easily and comprehensively in love, and as a result of a miscommunication ends up moving in with him. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is Z’s story over the following year, up to the point where her visa expires. It’s presented as a diary-stroke-language-notebook; Z carries with her a Chinese-English dictionary, and later, a Collins Concise English Dictionary, at all times, and often refers to them in her attempts to understand and describe the world around her. Chapter headings (e.g. “romance”) are taken from the latter, with accompanying definitions (“fantasy, fiction, legend, novel, story, tale; exaggeration, falsehood, lie; ballad, idyll, song”), and the whole thing is written in the second person, addressed to the never-named man.

Which inevitably means that the most immediate thing about the book is the language in which it’s written. Here, for example, is part of Z’s first encounter with a full English breakfast:

What is this ‘baked beans’? White colour beans, in orange sticky sweet sauce. I see some baked bean tins in shop when I arrive to London yesterday. Tin food is very expensive to China. Also we not knowing how to open it. So I never ever try tin food. Here, right in front of me, this baked beans must be very expensive. Delicacy is baked beans. Only problem is, tastes like somebody put beans into mouth but spit out and back into plate. (17)

I concede this is probably the prose equivalent of Marmite, but I love it: particularly the innocent directness, the seeing-for-the-first-time-ness of it. Leaving aside the question of taste for a moment, however, there might also seem to be a question of authenticity. On the one hand, the artifice of this sort of writing, bad in very specific ways, is obvious: for example, it’s hard to believe that Z’s grammar would be so bad while her spelling is impeccable (although a few artfully misheard nouns are dropped into the text every so often — “rocksack”, “peterfile”). On the other hand, the book apparently grew out of a diary Guo herself kept when she moved to London (Concise Dictionary is her first novel to be written in English, although her seventh in total), which raises various questions but does at least suggest that the portrayal of the learning process is likely to be accurate. And an aspect that may seem the most contrived — the present tense; bear in mind that these are not Z’s thoughts as she is having them, they are entries written later in her notebook — is a consequence of incompletely translating Chinese thought into English. “Chinese, we not having grammar,” Z explains. “We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language” (24). The fact that Guo conveys the difficulties of translation so lightly is one of the most impressive things about the book, for me, and I think you have to respect at least that, even if you find Z’s voice to be nails-down-chalkboard grating. She does, of course, learn over the course of the year, but her position as a naive teller of truths never changes. This, for instance, is another breakfast, in Berlin:

The early morning air feels cold, like autumn coming. Occasionally, one or two old mans in a long coats walk aimlessly in the street, with the cigarettes in their lips. Under the highway there is bridge. By the bridge there is a sausage shop, lots of large mans queue there to get hot sausages. Gosh, they eat purely sausage in the morning! Even worse than English Breakfast. The morning wind is washing my brain, and my small body. This is a city with something really heavy and serious in its soul. This is a city which had big wars in the history. And, I feel, this is a city made for mans, and politics, and disciplines. Like Beijing. (218)

Again, it’s characteristic of Z’s writing — the fresh phrases that seem careless (“The morning wind is washing my brain”), the odd but valid word choices (“Gosh”), the unabashedly obvious observations (“This is a city which had big wars in the history”). There is something memorable on nearly every page of the book. Walking home one night, Z observes that “Also, the robbers robbing the people even poorer than them. In China we believe ‘rob the rich to feed the poor’. But robbers here have no poetry” (42). They may not, but Z does – the poetry of an acute observer, plain in everything from her descriptions of a pub to her consternation on discovering that her man is a vegetarian, to her reaction to a David Lynch double bill. In a number of ways, Z is not an easy character to love — apart from anything else, she is stubborn, and rude – but she is always sharply aware and, at least from a reader’s remove, inescapably charming.

Which is not to imply that this is always a comfortable book, though it is one with an extremely generous view of human nature (certainly in contrast to, oh I don’t know, The Inheritance of Loss). By far the majority of the people Z encounters are good-hearted, even if they sometimes can’t resist teasing her; only twice, during a solo jaunt around Europe, does she encounter someone who tries to take advantage of her, and while the encounters are unpleasant, they are not irretrievably horrific. And if Z is frequently baffled by the world she finds around her, she is not intimidated by it. In fact, she is often indignant in the face of it. “English is a sexist language … always talking about mans, no womans” (26), she observes — although despite this awareness her view of what constitutes a relationship is extremely conservative (at least in our terms; more on this below). Moreover, she’s always conscious of the distance between herself and her man: “You a man of free world. I am not free, like you” (113); “In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner” (153); “You are boss of yourself, so you have dignity” (184). Strung together like that, such moments look obtrusive, but in fact they are more often grace notes to scenes about other things. Which is to say that they describe the reality of Z’s life — we’re put in her man’s shoes; we can’t ignore what she says — but not the extent of it. (Again, the contrast with Desai’s novel couldn’t be more striking.)

The fear at the heart of such worries, though, inevitably informs her relationship. Here we come back to love. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is built around a distinction expressed with particular elegance, to my mind, in KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, between love that exists “as a mutal sentiment or not at all” and implies “a voluntary blending of identities”, and love that denotes “two travellers meeting, enjoying each other’s company, then parting and moving on.” Z and her man do love, with joy and vigour, but — it becomes increasingly clear — in different ways, ways that have an awful lot to do with their differing backgrounds. To Z, love is a mutual act, a commitment that abolishes privacy and (for example) entitles her to read her man’s diaries, and enables her to blithely tell him that she’s done so. Love is about creating a home, a family, and a future: the three are inextricably related, aspects of an incompletely translated cultural inheritance, and lead to the conservatism I mentioned earlier. Love as security, as community. But the man Z has fallen in love with is more casual — as Z notes, he can afford to be. He is something of a bohemian, an artist who’s drifted through his life believing “the future only comes when it comes”, that nothing is forever; he values his independence. To him, love is about the preciousness of the present moment, not the promise of the future.

In other words, the lovers occupy positions opposite to those staked out by their native languages, an irony that defines their relationship. Z is so engaging that we badly want to see her grow into a more complete sense of self: but we fear that in doing so she will almost certainly doom her relationship, despite the fact that said relationship is the original catalyst for her growth. In fact it is specifically the physical relationship that is the catalyst. Z’s descriptions of sex, whether going right or going wrong, are as refreshingly matter-of-fact as her descriptions of everything else; and though her initial understanding, both of the act and the emotional paraphernalia it requires, is limited, she’s a quick study. She goes to a peep show, and has a lot of sex with her lover, and starts to explore her own body, and along the way she begins to believe in her own independence. More and more, this (as we feared it might) hems her into an absurd, uplifting, heartbreaking paradox: a catch-22 of love. Almost miraculously, Guo finds an honest resolution — one good enough that the other books shortlisted for the Orange Prize are going to have to go some if they want to replace A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers in my affections.

The World Has Gone Wrong: Specimen Days

Maybe we’ve been spoiled. The past few years have given us a series of novels that were published outside the genre, were commercial and critical successes, and that were — let’s not be ashamed to admit it — good sf as well. Margaret Atwood might call it the wrong thing, but she knows what it is. David Mitchell, as demonstrated in Cloud Atlas and his other novels, clearly knows the old stories intimately. Audrey Niffenegger has confessed to reading sf as a teenager; Kazuo Ishiguro probably hasn’t, but he’s obviously thought carefully and deeply about the implications of imagined worlds for the stories he wants to tell.

Now here comes Michael Cunningham, with a book that aspires to tell the myth of America. As in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (2002), a literary giant looms behind the story. There it was Virginia Woolf; here it is Walt Whitman, the man who wrote “the poem that was the United States.” (145) Also like The Hours, Specimen Days involves three stories linked across time. The differences are of focus and structure. Specimen Days does not stay in the 20th century, it ranges from 1850 to 2150, and its stories are not intermingled, they are arranged in chronological sequence.

Further comparisons are equally inevitable. Like Cloud Atlas (2004), for example, Specimen Days reeks of design; its stories echo and interact. Cunningham is not the master ventriloquist that Mitchell is — all three tales are told in variations of the same cool, clear voice — but he moves between genres with something of the same enthusiasm. The oldest story, set in the industrial revolution, is a ghost story; the contemporary tale is a thriller; and the final piece appears to be science fiction. There are similarities, too, with Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Specimen Days takes place within our history, not alongside it, but it employs the same trio of characters in each time period: Simon, a man; Catherine (or Cat, or Catareen), a woman; and Lucas (or Luke), a boy. Each character becomes the viewpoint for one of the stories. As in Robinson’s book, the world may be a variable, but souls are a constant.

Lucas’ story is first. “In The Machine” is set in a New York in the throes of industrialisation. Lucas’ older brother, Simon, has been killed in a factory accident, and Lucas is to inherit his job and support their parents. He has inherited also (or so he feels) his brother’s adoration for his bride-to-be, Catherine. Lucas is strange, earnest and innocent. He does not really understand people, or the world around him, and that’s not just because he’s a child. His parents — ill or idle — are little help, and Catherine looks at him with pity, not as an equal. Lucas’ only guide to life is an early edition of Whitman’s repeatedly-revised book, Leaves of Grass. In the book he finds understanding and support; indeed, in stressful moments the poetry will take him over, leading to involuntary, and sometimes inappropriate, recitations. Through the poetry, however, he gains an answer about where Simon has gone, an answer that can reconcile Catherine’s contradictory insistences that he is in heaven, yet with them still. Simon, per Whitman, has gone into everything: into the grass, and into the machine.

“In The Machine” is a claustrophobic story, and conveys well the sense of how dehumanising technological change can be. To Lucas, the factory seems to literally be another world. The men in it have “relinquished their citizenship […] their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works” (29). Moreover, Lucas becomes convinced that Simon is not just in the machine, but trapped in it. Unable to make Catherine understand, he resorts to drastic, tragic measures. The story is a lament for the loss of innocence: by a boy, and by the world.

Skip forward to today or tomorrow, and innocence is harder to find. In Cat’s New York, the hazy edge between sleeping and waking “was as close as it got to collective innocence” (114). Cat herself is doing ok, mostly: she’s a 38 year-old African American detective, living in a small but somewhat sought-after apartment on fifth avenue. She works in terrorism deterrence; she’s the person the crazy people call when they want to rant at someone. And in this time, she and Simon — working in finance, trading in futures — are together, but Lucas is absent.

But the rest of the world, the post-9/11 world, is ugly and dystopic. Cat asks a colleague, “It’s getting harder to see the patterns, don’t you think?” (155) and with that question the story becomes a bleak inversion of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003): all noise, no order. Like the world in Gibson’s novel, the world in “The Children’s Crusade” is not yet science fiction, but it does seem an exaggerated reality, in this case exaggeratedly negative, every pessimistic hypothetical made manifest. This is a time when children can walk up to adults, seemingly randomly chosen, hug them, and detonate the bombs strapped to their chest. And yet, there has been some progress. Cat is acutely aware of the sexism and racism that surround her at work, but in her personal life, in her relationship, the balance of power is ambiguous. She is wary of Simon’s white, middle-class nature, but she loves him, and believes he loves her; and when her work intrudes on their time together she reflects that he is “a spectator […] a wife if you will.” (139)

The intrusion is a lead in Cat’s investigation into the child terrorists, which itself leads to more ambiguities: these children seem to have taken Lucas’ obsession with the book to terrifying lengths, adopting Whitman’s words as a prescription for change. Here the effectiveness of the book’s structure is highlighted for the first time, for this story’s Lucas turns out, unsurprisingly, to be one of the bombers. If we had not spent the previous hundred pages inside his head — if we did not understand his desperate need to make the adults understand — then he would be an alien creature indeed. And yet, this sympathetic quality is also troubling. It comes close to endorsing a crusade which seems, at heart, to be sincerely anti-technological. The children were raised by a woman they call Walt Whitman, who may be the reincarnation of the poet. Cat tracks her down, and asks her why:

“Everybody wants a reason, don’t they? Let’s say this, then. Whitman was the last great man who really and truly loved the world. The machinery was just starting up when he lived. If we can return to a time like Whitman’s, maybe we can love the world again.” (188)

The slyly unsettling trick of characterisation-by-association is repeated in “Like Beauty”, the only story in which all three characters are alive and interacting simultaneously. This time it is Simon’s eyes through which we see; this time Simon is a simulo, a made man, working as a rent-a-thug in Old New York, hired to give tourists a thrilling fright (it is interesting that having been killed by the future in the first story, and paid to surf it in the second, now he ignores it entirely, and works in the past). This time Catareen is an alien, “a four-and-a-half-foot tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls.” (199) In Simon’s eyes she is exotic and terse and enigmatic — but we know what goes on in her mind. We know the restless, cynical intelligence that lies behind her orange eyes, and because of it we see Simon’s well-meaning but patronising affection for what it is. More troublingly, the two of them are closer in station — her a refugee, he stolen property — than in either of the other two stories, and yet they still do not fully interact as equals. If anything, they fix in traditional power structures more firmly than they did in our time.

The success of Catareen’s characterisation highlights one of Cunningham’s themes, that everything is connected, human or alien, self or other; but it is the first failure of Cunningham’s future as a literal world. As soon as we realise Catareen is comprehensible as a human, by definition she ceases to be an alien. She becomes a symbol — a metaphor, in the Star Trek tradition — but is no longer a believable nonhuman intelligence. It is difficult, therefore, to read the story as full science fiction.

Nor, after a while longer, do we want to do so. Cunningham’s future has, as Michel Faber noted in his review of the book for The Guardian, “the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction.” It is old and faded, and feels like unwitting reiteration rather than homage; it looks backward, recreation of Central Park and all. The backdrop is by-the-numbers political fragmentation and environmental meltdown. The details are either superficial (the drinks and the clothes are unusual colours) or embarrassing (children are named tomcruise and katemoss). Matters are clarified somewhat when Simon’s artificial nature becomes clear: he is no more than a tin man, and this is not truly science fiction, it is mythic fantasy. This future is Oz. “I want something. I feel a lack” (232), Simon tells Catareen, as they set out on their quest; but it is an unrevealing revelation that serves only to pave the way for a predictable narrative escape trajectory, first from the city and then, perhaps, from Earth itself.

Through it all, of course, there is Whitman. Like Lucas before him, this Simon involuntarily spouts Whitman in times of stress. The poetry, we are told, is part of his programming; it regulates his spirit, he is told, makes him “better able to appreciate the consequences of [his] actions” (281). Whitman binds these characters together, and infiltrates their thoughts. ‘In The Machine’ is the only story in which he appears directly — as a guide to Lucas, in a curiously soft-focus scene that sketches the poet as a sort of spiritual Santa — but he informs both “The Children’s Crusade” and “Like Beauty”. In each time Simon, Lucas and Catherine are characters bewildered in different ways by the failure of the world and Whitman, perhaps, offers an answer: a lullaby of a world-that-was. Specimen Days repeatedly demonstrates that it is a regressive book, one that looks back to a pre-industrial age of peace as mythical as the post-industrial landscape through which the last Simon wanders. The industrial revolution is bad because it disconnects people from the world; the present is dystopian because urbanisation and technological progress have poisoned the well; the only viable future is to look to the past.

Most egregious is the suggestion that all of this should be accepted on instinct, without discrimination, because “if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point.” (147) Whitman’s veneration of the everyday is used as a justification for simplistic reasoning, for an argument that values feeling about thinking, sentiment over intellect. And from such reasoning comes guilt: through our choices we have destroyed the innocence of the world. We should undo them, refill and close Pandora’s Box — or worse, abandon this project and start over. Reach back to the twentieth century, before the old world ended and the towers came tumbling down. If this is the myth of America it is empty, and it is a shame that Cunningham’s undoubted skill — the first two novellas, at least, are worthwhile — should be used in service of a message so obviously banal. It is also the novel’s ultimate undoing, because such clumsy logic does a disservice to Whitman as much as to the reader. By the end, a great poet is not so much a reference point as a crutch for a narrative that emphatically rejects complexity; and such a crutch can only leave splinters in the reader’s hand.

This review first appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction #210 (February 2006)

The Siege of Earth

Writing about favourites is always hard. Not — at least for me — because it’s hard to be critical, but because it’s too easy. Writing about something I really like, I often feel somewhat self-conscious, and try to compensate by pointing out all the flaws before anyone does. And when we’re talking about a writer like Stephen Baxter — who started publishing just as I reached the golden age of twelve, who I keep thinking I should try to write about in some vaguely substantive way, and who remains one of my favourite writers — it has to be admitted that there are flaws to be pointed out. Baxter stories are full of passages such as this, from “Last Contact” (in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, ed George Mann). Caitlin is visiting her mother, Maureen; at this point, on the second page of the story, all we know about the larger situation is that Caitlin is about to deliver news about something called the “Big Rip”:

It was just a scrap of lawn really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.”

“Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.” They walked around the lawn. “It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,” Maureen said.

“You mustn’t think like that.”

“Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.”

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

It’s that last phrase — “silent at the mention of the future” — that grates, a clumsy intrusion into Caitlin’s thoughts. And it seems both unnecessary — we don’t yet know for certain that we’re reading an end-of-the-world story, but we could have made an informed guess without that sort of nudge — and premature. Why not build up the atmosphere of unease just a bit longer?

Baxter’s writing is never going to be lauded as beautiful, exactly (although more often than not he has a good eye for description), and I think this sort of infelicity is part of the reason why — the sort of thing that, even if entirely intentional, looks like it would have been caught and removed if there’d been one more draft. Of course, there are compensations, most commonly the sort of cosmological vistas that almost nobody else is writing right now. Which is why I was so glad to read, and so dazzled by, “The Siege of Earth”. It’s been over year since I read a really mind-expanding Stephen Baxter story — Transcendent, the third of the three novels that make up what is probably Baxter’s most consistently impressive (if somewhat unfortunately named) sequence of novels to date, Destiny’s Children. “A Siege of Earth” is another pure hit of no-apologies, no-compromises science fiction.

It’s the closing story — and the only original story — in Resplendent, a (very) loosely linked collection of short stories which was published as “volume four” of Destiny’s Children. All four books are set in Baxter’s well-established Xeelee universe, a future history in which godlike and eternally-offscreen aliens deliver as thorough a kicking to the idea of a manifest destiny for humanity as you could wish for. Moreover, all four track the fate of humanity over evolutionary timescales, but in truth most of the stories in Resplendent add little to arguments already made in the novels. In particular, many of them read as pendants to the second Destiny’s Children novel, Exultant. Some of the stories explicate events referenced in the novel — as part of a Grand Tour of the solar system, for instance, Exultant’s protagonists visit the site of “Reality Dust”; you don’t need to know that, but if you do the scene in the novel acquires an additional resonance. Most of the stories are also set in roughly the same period as the novel — give or take ten thousand years, and on the scale Baxter’s working to you can give or take ten thousand years quite easily — and share a predominantly militaristic tone. “The Siege of Earth”, though, is a leap forward from the rest of the book, more elegiac in tone, and set almost four times further in the future than its nearest neighbour, “Between Worlds” (AD 27,152). Admittedly this may seem rather inadequate by the standards of something like “The Baryonic Lords”, which capped Baxter’s previous Xeelee collection, Vacuum Diagrams, and which takes place more than four times further into the future again; but it’s still deep enough into time for the solar system to be virtually unrecognisable, and well past the events of Transcendent, noted in Resplendent‘s timeline as “the high water-mark of human destiny”.

Most of Baxter’s Xeelee stories have a specific date attached to them, but the date of “The Siege of Earth” is tidier than most: 1,000,000 AD. Such an ostentatious declaration of futurity can’t be accidental, and nor, surely, are the associations raised by the oh-so-familiar image in the story’s opening line: “The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.” Not for the last time, the writing trades openly on a presumed familiarity with earlier sfnal visions to gain emotional power. (With a commendably broad scope of reference; one character even says, in so many words, that “Earth got used up”, albeit to an extent far beyond that implied in Firefly.) The three paragraphs immediately following that opening sentence establish the tone of the story more firmly:

Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose — in this case to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.

His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.

Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.

Plainspoken these may be, but they achieve an impressive amount nonetheless, taking us with satisfying economy through several different understandings of what the story is going to be about. Depending on the reader, the “Of course” in the first of the above paragraphs is either a slight jolt (how casually such grand work is mentioned!) or an expression of trust (yeah, you know what Mars is going to be like in 1,000,000 AD). The next paragraph swiftly punctures any hopes we might have been harbouring that this is a time of human prosperity: Mars is “growing silent”. But we’re not given time to fully absorb the implications of that, either, because the next paragraph focuses the story down onto Symat, the boy-engineer, and his much more mundane unhappiness. He has, in fact, run away from home.

The first part of the story continues Symat’s exploration of Mars, gradually unpacking some of the other implications of those opening paragraphs. Through his eyes, we start to see a solar system not just engineered (Mars no longer rotates) but prematurely aged (the sun has swollen into a red giant before its time, and has already swallowed Mercury and Venus). The towns and cities through which Symat passes are magnificent but empty. He encounters some other children, and befriends one in particular, a girl called Mela. But none of them are true humans; they’re Virtuals, holographic projections of Mars’s own artificial mind (which is in turn part of a galactic-scale assembly known as the Conclave), created as surrogates by a human race so broken it seems to have forsaken the future altogether. This turns out to be more of a literal truth than we might expect; in fact, it’s another iteration of evolutionary destiny, probably the grimmest anywhere in Destiny’s Children. The forces shaping human development in Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendent were (loosely) family, war, and religion: here it is ultimate defeat that provides a selection pressure. The humans of “The Siege of Earth” live between the might of the Xeelee on one hand, humanity having become enough of an annoyance that they merit being dealt with permanently, and the inevitability of the sun’s death on the other. “The trap of history”, we are told, “closing in Symat’s lifetime.”

“The Scourge has been continuing now for three hundred thousand years. To the Xeelee the Scourge is a conscious project. To humans it has become our environment.” Mela’s voice was neutral, her words not quite her own, Symat thought. “A steady force applied to a population for long enough becomes a selection pressure. In such an environment those able psychologically to accept the reality of inevitable defeat will prosper. And that is why you are prepared to walk trustingly into the booths, even without knowing what lies beyond. Your ancestors have learned to accept similar bolt-holes without question, far back into your history. You’ve been preadapted to accept the booths for ten thousand generations! Perhaps even that was part of the grand design of the Scourge.”

As evolutionary theory this may not be entirely convincing, even with godlike aliens to help the process along, but it’s a powerful starting point for a story. Of course the reason Symat is the protagonist of the story, it transpires, is that he’s different. He has, as his mother says, the instincts of an engineer, the engineer’s urge to investigate, find out, solve; which is a shorthand way of saying he has the instincts of someone from our own time, that he is someone we can safely identify with in this alien deep time. The very last thing Symat wants to do is walk into a “transfer booth” of uncertain origin, even if it does ostensibly lead to a pocket universe that might be a sanctuary for humanity. (And others: one of the story’s multiple grace notes establishes that booths have also been provided for the solar system’s other indigenous intelligences, such as those identified in Baxter’s 1993 story “The Sun-People”. Another sidebar notes that Saturn’s moon Titan, now warmed by the sun, is finally blooming into life, an idea Baxter spent more time on in his 1996 novel Titan.)

In pursuit of an alternative ending, Symat and Mela embark on their own Tour of the solar system. Revelations come thick and fast, producing repeated shocks of perspective in Symat, and the cumulative effect is powerful, even if some of the surprises are easily enough anticipated by readers familiar with the shape of the Xeelee timeline. There are still some immortals (described, perhaps too cutely, as “Ascendents”) trying to save humanity from the transfer booths. The plan involves saving the Earth, over the course of millennia — although given the state of it, you’d be forgiven for wondering why they’re bothering. The Earth Symat imagines, our Earth, is a “story-book vision”. In reality, “The mountains were worn down”, and “the air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.” The ecology is even more radically reconfigured than this suggests, imported alien species gone wild having developed a new balance with the native flora and fauna. Even the gravity has been reduced. It is through such dramatic aftereffects, rather than direct effects, that Baxter most effectively conveys the scope and power of the forces which have worked on the solar system over time.

There is an extent to which a good-sized chunk of Baxter’s recent sf, and certainly a story like “The Siege of Earth”, can be read as grappling with the challenge of personalising cosmic-scale events. Primo Levi’s recent story notwithstanding, a date like “1,000,000 AD” is not meaningless — quite the opposite. Such a great vista of time, so effortlessly stated, is invested with an almost overpowering amount of meaning. The challenge, for a writer, is to draw that meaning out, and shape it into something resembling a readable story. “The Siege of Earth” is arguably not entirely successful, if you object to being told things by fiction: it contains great gobs of backstory to explain the mighty ruins that Symat finds around him, such as the changed Earth noted above, either exposited by other characters, or by the omniscient narrator. What makes it work, I think, is the impersonal tone with which such information — and the story as a whole — is delivered, the casual mentions of immense projects, and the contrast between that tone and Symat’s emotional, excitable reactions.

Ultimately, as you may already suspect, the story’s resolution involves a choice made by Symat that only Symat can make (in flat contradiction of an earlier assertion by Mela that “every important choice was made long ago”). The setup is a black inversion of the robots-poison-Earth dilemma in Asimov’s Robots and Empire: here, the Ascendents know how to save Earth, but like the robots they need to have their solution authorised, and to do that they have to get around a restrictive definition of “human” that prevents them enacting their solution. So, R. Giskard invented the Zeroth Law; and Luru Parz, first Ascendent, spent several millennia selectively breeding herself a throwback human to fool an ancient machine. The whole situation is so extensively and coldly rigged — not to mention fail-safed, since if things don’t go the way Luru wants, she’ll just start again from scratch; she has time, after all — that the only response left to the reader is a kind of bleak awe.

I don’t know of any contemporary writers as skilled at evoking this sort of vertigo of perspective as Baxter, from the cold immensity of Ring to the dizzying well of futurity in Time to the epic sweep of Evolution. Like the vast emptiness that suffuses “The Siege of Earth”, it’s something that can’t be trivialised, can’t be reduced to something within normal human experience by refiguring it as a metaphor; it simply is. It’s the sort of choice that results, Baxter seems to be saying, when you look the universe as it really is in the eye and don’t blink. It’s also a choice that kills Symat. The story, however, lives on: in the last few pages, it becomes apparent that Luru Parz’s vision of an “Old Earth” is one that Baxter has already started exploring. A sequence of stories beginning with “PeriAndry’s Quest” (2004) has explored a world encased in a pit of spacetime that isolates it from the universe outside, where time runs faster the higher you climb — an extraordinarly resonant setting for all sorts of stories. Symat’s choice is where “The Siege of Earth” ends, where Resplendent ends, where Destiny’s Children ends; but not where the story ends. We’re only in 1,000,000 AD, after all. There’s plenty of time left on the clock yet.

Salon Fantastique: La Fee Verte

I’m pretty sure the fault is in me rather than in Delia Sherman’s story, but as I read the first few pages of “La Fee Verte” I kept thinking of the pilot episode of Angel. As Our Heroine, Victorine, is approached for no apparent reason by the title character (“exquisitely thin … dark eyes huge and bruised in her narrow face”; her name is never translated in the story, although the frequent references to (a) absinthe and (b) green silk should be enough to jog most peoples’ memory), and recoils in astonishment as the enigmatic woman relates events from her past, I kept thinking of the half-demon Doyle appearing out of nowhere and doing the same for Angel. So I was all ready for Victorine to turn around and say, “Okay, you’ve told me the story of my life which, since I was there, I already knew … why aren’t I kicking you out?” (Or, given the setting, some 19th-century Parisian equivalent). Instead:

When the tale was done, La Fee Verte allowed her tears to overflow and trickle, crystalline, down her narrow cheeks. Enchanted, Victorine wiped them away and licked their bitter salt from her fingers. She was inebriated, she was enchanted. She was in love.

I very nearly gave up on the story then and there, because the moment felt unjustified and overwritten, and because it seemed highly unlikely that a character who fell in love on such dubious grounds was someone I was going to enjoy spending the best part of fifty pages with. (“La Fee Verte” is, I think, the longest story in Salon Fantastique.) But I didn’t give up, because many other people have spoken highly of the story, and in the end I’m glad to have read it: I think it’s quite far from being one of the best stories in the book, but it’s enjoyable, with a few moments that raise it above the ordinary.

The first promising moment, in fact, occurs only a few paragraphs later, when it transpires that the stories La Fee Verte tells of Victorine’s past aren’t quite true. “Little by little,” we are told, “Victorine came to depend on [these revisions], as a drunkard depends on his spirits, to mediate between her and her life.” The explicit parallel with drunkenness is probably unnecessary, but the conceit of an addiction to a seer’s visions — not to mention a seer who enables such addiction — is an interesting one. Things between the two women quite quickly sour, though, as La Fee Verte becomes entangled with a (male) client, a writer “of novels in the vein of M. Jules Verne”, to whom she divulges clearly absurd visions of the future, such as a man on the moon who “plants a flag in the dust, scarlet and blue and white, marching in rows of stripes and little stars.” Since this was the US flag at the time the story is set, it’s perhaps a little surprising that La Fee Verte doesn’t recognise it, but the moment serves its purpose, such that when the seer tells Victorine that she is destined to be loved, we know that she is telling the truth.

Gradually Paris as a place asserts itself, and some of the best parts of the rest of the story contribute to a portrait of a city in flux. The story takes place between winter of 1868, when Victorine and La Fee Verte first meet, and autumn of 1870, when Paris is besieged by the Prussian army. Victorine has a succession of lovers, and through her eyes we see the effects that the change in government and fortune is having on the city and its people. At one point, during a relationship with a colonel, Victorine finds herself at an extravagant dinner that “belonged more properly to last month, last year, two years ago”, and feels herself “lost in one of La Fee Verte’s visions, where past, present, and future exist as one.” Such feelings of instability, brought about by the rigid class divisions in the city, are almost eerie, as is the lingering sense — reinforced by La Fee Verte’s periodic appearances — that though Paris too is destined to be loved, the course will not be a smooth one. Which (indulge me) I suppose you could say parallels how I feel about Salon Fantastique. I haven’t been writing about the stories in order; and this is my last post, although “La Fee Verte” is, in fact, the first story in the book. So I know that for anyone who reads the book through, there will be ups and downs, but I think it is probably destined to be loved. There are stories here worth loving.

Salon Fantastique: Down the Wall

In the season four West Wing presidential debate episode, “Game On”, there’s a rather nice running joke about a Republican, Albie Duncan, who Toby thinks they should use in the post-debate spin session, to counteract the fact that the Republican candidate has a Democrat “shilling for him on defense”. CJ and Toby have the following exchange:

TOBY: This is why I’m talking to you. You’re going to use Albie Duncan.
CJ: He’ll do it?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Duncan?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: He will?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Look at me. He’s not a little bit crazy?
TOBY: Albie Duncan?
CJ: Yes.
TOBY: No. No. No. [beat] A little bit.

Give or take Richard Schiff’s ever-marvellous delivery, that’s sort of how I feel about Greer Gilman’s story “Down the Wall”. It’s not because of Gilman’s much-discussed use of language, or not specifically. Here’s the opening of the story:

Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance. Old craneycrows, a skulk of powers. How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing. How they serpentine their necks. And stalking, how they flirt their tails, insouciant as Groucho. Fugue and counterfugue, the music jigs and sneaks. On tiptoe, solemnly, they hop and flap; they whirl and whet their long curved clever bills. A sly dance, a wry dance, miching mallecho. Pavane. They peacock, but their drab is eyeless, black as mourners, black as mutes. They are clownish, they are sinister, in their insatiable invention, their unending.

As I had been led to expect, this is certainly careful, formidable writing — the unfamiliar words (“miching”), the words verbed (“serpentine”) or nouned (“drab”), the striking phrases (“the music jigs and sneaks”), the oddly placed cultural reference (“insouciant as Groucho”), the rhythms — but it doesn’t require significantly more unpacking than the writing of, say, Margo Lanagan, or even Catherynne Valente or Hal Duncan in full flow. What impressed me was what happened next. When the long paragraph (at least double the amount I quoted) ends, we have an extremely vivid image of the bird gods’ dance in our minds, and we think we know what sort of fantasy story we’re reading. And then we’re confronted with one phrase — “the birds are phosphor in a box” — which forces us to reframe everything we thought we’d learnt. The second paragraph continues:

The birds are phosphor in a box. They sift and sift across the screen; they whisper. They are endless snow or soot, the ashes of the old world burning. Elsewhere fire. The hailbox whispers, whispers. There is no way to turn it off. No other channel but the gods. All day and night it snows grey phosphor, sifting in the corners of the air. The earth is grey with ash.

The birds are images seen in the static of a dead tv. And quite suddenly, it starts to become apparent that “Down the Wall” isn’t fantasy at all. There’s a tv the characters can’t, or don’t know how, to turn off; they think of the static as “the ashes of the old world burning”; it all sounds very much like post-apocalyptic science fiction.

I think I’m right in saying that nothing in the story later contradicts this interpretation. The bird gods, it transpires, have an existence beyond static, but it’s an existence in stories of this time. The world of “Down the Wall” struck me very much as world where the horizon has drawn closer, where the giants have been kicked out from under the characters. They describe lightning, for instance, as “godlight”; the bird gods themselves are described so lyrically it’s hard to be sure, but I think we are meant to understand that they are the projections of a people scared by a world they no longer comprehend, and not a literal reality. Which is to say that I think they are wind and sticks and storm, but I could be wrong.

What makes the story — which involves a brother and sister going out from their home, into the world — so decidedly odd, though, isn’t this shift, it’s the way in which the world is rendered. For one thing, the characters all have names — Spugget, Harpic, Fligger, Theek — straight out of Peake, which makes them sound grotesque, although there’s little indication that they actually are. For another, when they speak they say things like “Hush. Nobbut an awd busker. I’ll fend” and “Gerroff wi’ yer. Left, left, down close and top o’t stairs”, which frankly makes them sound like they came from the North of England and brought all their cliches with them. It was all I could do not to imagine the lot of them wearing flat caps — not exactly a common image in sf. But in the end, if the story’s construction feels a bit patchwork, and if its ending is somewhat arbitrary, there’s no denying its urgency or imagination — the descriptions of the gang of children running world are particularly impressive. Later in the West Wing episode I mentioned above, defending Albie Duncan further (the Democrats do eventually use him), Toby says, “Look, he’s Albie Duncan. […] If he’s crazy, then I don’t want to be sane.” Sanity sounds overrated when reading “Down the Wall”, too.

Salon Fantastique: Dust Devil on a Quiet Street

Per Rich’s request, this was meant to be a post about Jedidiah Berry’s story, “To Measure the Earth”. Unfortunately, I find myself with nothing of interest to say — it seemed to me far and away the weakest of the Salon Fantastique stories I’ve read, largely because of the extent to which it embraces obliqueness. At one point, one of the characters notes that “Questions distract”, and we’re apparently meant to take her seriously, despite the fact that insisting on answers is exactly what any half-way intelligent person would be doing. But “To Measure the Earth” isn’t about people, it’s about ciphers; they’re held at arm’s length, and the vagueness of the precise relations between some of them, or the meaning of some of their actions, is more frustrating than suggestive.

So, instead, this post is about Richard Bowes’ story, “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street”, and the difference is striking. The mystery at the centre of Bowes’ story is perhaps more obscure than that at the heart of Berry’s, but far more compellingly portrayed, with its effects rippling out through a multitude of characters. Like its namesake (an episode of The Naked City), “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street” is a New York Story, and drips with references to places and people. I suspect it has more named characters than any other story in the book, deftly orchestrated and all introduced with economy — “In high school, he had an obsessive compulsive disorder. She was bulimic. Now, and it almost seems to follow logically, he is a painter. She is an actress” — and almost all part of New York’s past or present alternative arts scene.

The next-but-one issue of Vector includes a transcript of a panel on Fantastic Cities from Interaction a year and a half ago, in which Jeffrey Ford makes the observation that “every city is really a palimpset of history”, with the new overlaid on the old; “Dust Devil” embodies that attitude. The narrator, an unnamed science fiction writer, is already experiencing a season of reminiscence (“That summer, the whole city, maybe the whole world seemed to be in a similar mood. Books were all memoirs, every concert was a reunion, every museum exhibition a retrospective, every Broadway opening a revival”) when he attends a memorial service for a critic of the local scene, Robin Saint Just. The circumstances of his death set off a chain of memory and investigation for the narrator that rambles across months and between incidents. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the story, to my mind, is that I didn’t feel excluded: I’ve been to New York exactly once, when I was much younger, and I really have no sense of the cultural milieu that Bowes is describing, yet it didn’t seem to matter. Many of the details are decodable from context, and those that aren’t merely add to the sense of the narrator’s New York as a place that is layered, cluttered but vibrant.

You may, quite legitimately, be wondering what the fantastic element is. As in most of the other stories by Bowes that I’ve read, it is notably low-key, probably having something to do with the soul of Callimachus, the first critic, trapped in a ring. (If I have a reservation about liking this story, it’s that in part it’s about the relationship between critics and the scene they comment on, something about which I am perhaps less than objective.) Alternatively, the fantastic resides in the dust devils of the title, which the narrator and a friend once decided, on a whim, “were actually the small gods, the spirits playful and malign, of Manhattan”. Or the magic is in the art itself. You decide.