Category: criticism and reviews

Salon Fantastique: Femaville 29

If I tell you that on the second page of this story a tsunami is described as looking “like a liquid mountain mounted on a rocket sled”, it probably sounds like I’m saying “Femaville 29” is typical Paul di Filippo: slightly parodic, slightly manic, with some big boffo concept at its core. And to an extent that’s true, since it’s a story where plot is king, and characters hook up with an almost charming disregard for anything so prosaic as motivation, and the protagonist does have the rather daft name of Parrish Hedges. But, as it turns out, that tsunami is headed west across the Atlantic. It smashes into an unnamed city on the Eastern seaboard of the US, Parrish’s home, and the rest of the story takes place in the titular refugee camp (FEMA being the Federal Emergency Management Agency). The political sentiment is clear, if somewhat self-flagellating.

But that’s not the core of the story, either. Lip-service is paid to the sense of trauma such a catastrophe must cause, but if anything, for the survivors it turns out to have been a boon, by clearing away the detritus of their world. “The first week after the disaster”, we learn, felt like “an open-ended New Year’s Eve, the portal to some as-yet undefined millennium where all our good resolutions would come to pass.” When Parrish is interviewed by the FEMA reallocation officials, he rejects the placements they offer him, explicitly because he doesn’t want to leave the “interzone of infinite possibility” that the camp represents. And it’s not just him; nobody in the camp, it seems, wants to move on. Parrish’s explanation for why nobody wants to go somewhere secure and sensible is that everyone “wants to be reborn as phoenixes” because that’s what it would take to justify the loss they’ve suffered.

Written down so plainly, such a scenario looks crass and juvenile, because it is; yet in di Filippo’s hands, it somehow becomes breezy and infectious. It’s a gift that can sometimes make di Filippo seem an old-fashioned writer, and something of a big kid. You sense that, for him, sf is, genuinely and largely unironically, a toybox — that being an sf writer is, to borrow the phrase Bruce Sterling used in the introduction to his most recent collection, “a golden opportunity to get up to most any mischief imaginable”. And he’s good enough at it that we keep turning the pages, and while we do we don’t notice that the plot is running on convenience (Parrish hooks up with a woman called Nia, but said hooking is entirely irrelevant except that it brings him into the orbit of Nia’s daughter Izzy). Or if we notice we don’t care. In most Paul di Filippo stories, we’re on first-name terms with all the characters, and we like it that way.

If “Femaville 29” is a kind of wish-fulfillment, though, it’s not an entirely uncomplicated one. The members of the camp get restless; their enthusiasm for limitless possibility turns to dissatisfaction with their very limited present. Fights and arguments break out — at least, so we are told. We stay with Parrish, who by this time is too busy watching the children of the camp create a new city out of stones and twigs and leaves. Izzy is one of the “designers, engineers, imagineers” running the show, and it quickly becomes clear that the last of those categories is the most important. The children are filling the space left in the world with something better than the world (perhaps a polder). Inevitably, when FEMA loses patience, and decides to forcibly relocate the refugees, the city is ready and willing to take them instead — with the caveat that they have to let go of their past enough to cross the threshold. Parrish (I’m about to give the ending away) doesn’t make it (if he did, the story really would be too generous to like), but he accepts his lot without rancour. It’s enough for him to know that he might be able to get there someday. For a few moments, it’s enough for us, too.

Salon Fantastique: The Lepidopterist

When I think of Lucius Shepard’s writing, I think first of a voice. It’s a voice filled with experience and confidence, speaking in long, fluid sentences, knowing that it’s telling me a story I need to hear. It’s the voice of stories like “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” or “Jailwise“. Of course, Shepard modulates this voice according to the character using it (Senor Volto, for instance, uses almost as many long words as the narrator of either story above, but clearly to somewhat different effect), and on occasion he uses other, more colloquial voices as well. But it’s that rich, mellifluous tone I think of first when I think of Shepard, to the point where it comes as a bit of a shock to start reading “The Lepidopterist” and encounter (after a brief opening paragraph that frames the story as a transcript of a recording made thirty years ago, and the narrator we’re about to hear as “short, in his sixties, as wizened and brown as an apricot seed, and […] very drunk”) this:

I’m goin to tell you bout a storm, cause it please me to do so. You cotch me in the tellin mood, and when John Anderson McCrae get in the tellin mood, ain’t nobody on this little island better suited for the job. I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town, and this storm I goin to speak of, it ain’t the biggest, it don’t have the stiffest winds, but it bring a strange cargo to our shores.

It’s different, but well-executed. There’s still poetry here, albeit of a rougher kind than is usual for Shepard — “I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town” is a lovely, clever expression, and there are lines like it throughout the story. But while McCrae is clearly still a Shepardian storyteller, experienced and confident, to me at least he never rang as true as someone like Tommy Penhaligon or Billy Long Gone. That’s partly because I never quite got the hang of the dialect — as with any writing so stylised, you expect it to take a few pages to get acclimated, but I found myself re-reading passages even up to the end — but also, I think, a function of the relative brevity of the tale. Shepard always seems most comfortable to me with some elbow-room in his stories, but he doesn’t (arguably can’t allow himself to) have any here, and beyond being a storyteller, it’s never really clear who McCrae is. A voice is an indication of character, but also a vehicle; which is to say that what the voice says matters.

So my problem with McCrae is compounded by the fact that the plot is nothing to write home about. Indeed, if the voice is something of a departure for Shepard, the story it tells verges on being overly familiar. The trajectory is one we’ve followed before, a tale of an encounter with the fantastic: the protagonist is drawn by stages away from the consensus reality we know, is confronted by a hallucinatory vision, and dazedly withdraws into normality. This is the basic shape of Shepard stories such as “Eternity and Afterward”, “The Park Sweeper”, and “Crocodile Rock”, and even “Only Partly Here” (probably the best thing Shepard has written in the past five years, though “Over Yonder” runs it close). In “The Lepidopterist” McCrae tells how, as a youth, he worked with his father as a wrecker, drawing storm-lashed ships astray onto rocks; how on one such job they encountered Arthur Jessup, an American transporting some unusual butterflies (“Whether they the Devil’s work or one of God’s miracles, I cannot tell you,” McCrae says. “But it for certain they unusual butterflies”); how the butterflies wove silken cocoons large enough to hatch a person; and what happened next.

But at no point does “The Lepidopterist” have the astonishing intensity of a story like “Eternity and Afterward”, or, at the other end of the scale, the delicacy of a story like “Only Partly Here”. What’s left? There’s a nod to the politics of the situation in the fact that Jessup engineers McCrae’s encounter with one of the butterfly-creatures as a gift, saying that he wants to take away some of the boy’s courage for his own good. But McCrae’s subsequent assessment — “So if Mister Jessup make me a present, it were like most Yankee presents and take away more than it give” — feels oddly half-hearted. As allegory it doesn’t catch, and the sense that McCrae hasn’t lived the life he was meant for doesn’t sting as it should. So while my presumptuous guess would be that it’s the voice for which David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have picked the story up for their year’s best fantasy, I can also see why some reviews haven’t mentioned the story at all. It’s strange: McCrae’s voice is classic Shepard in a number of ways, but seems to be missing the one thing that can usually be taken for granted: a burning need to tell. I enjoyed “The Lepidopterist”, but I don’t know why it had to be told.

Salon Fantastique: The Night Whiskey

I got my hands on a copy of Salon Fantastique, the latest Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling anthology, a couple of days ago, and the probably-foolish idea of reading at least a story a day from the book, and writing short blog posts about them, has germinated in my head. “Short” being the operative word; if these start ballooning into 1500-word essays I’m going to start running out of time. I might write about every story in the book, I might just write about a handful, or just this one. We’ll see how it goes.

First up (but not the first story in the book) is Jeffrey Ford’s entry, “The Night Whiskey”, which Nic singled out as one of the best stories in the book in her review, and which Jonathan Strahan has picked up for his year’s best. It’s certainly a strong story, although for me I think not quite first-rank Ford — which should be taken as praising the story with a faint damn, since Ford is so reliably good. It’s also quite interesting as “a Jeffrey Ford story”. In a (slightly rushed) piece for the LBC when Ford’s novel The Girl in the Glass was under discussion earlier this year, I tried dividing Ford’s stories into two types, loud (exuberantly fantastic) and quiet (liminal). In those terms, “The Night Whiskey” is one of the stories that don’t really fit into either category; a quiet story about someone on the edge of a loud one.

The story is set in a small American town called Gatchfield, which would be like any other such town (“one of those places you pass but never stop in while on vacation to some National Park”) except for a unique local flora, the deathberry. Deathberry plants grow only out of dead bodies: once a year some of the townsfolk harvest them and distill the berries into the titular whiskey. There’s only enough in each harvest to produce eight shots of night whiskey, so a lottery is held to determine who gets to drink them. Winning tickets are prized, because in addition to being sufficiently intoxicating that just the one shot gets the person who consumes it blind drunk, the whiskey transports the drinker to a fugue state, or possibly an actual alternate dimension, in which they can talk with dead relatives. The protagonist, Ernest, doesn’t win the lottery, and isn’t involved in the production of the whiskey. Instead, he’s an apprentice for the drunk harvest, helping to round up the whiskey-drinkers the morning after the night before — not the easiest feat in the world, given that for some unknown reason drinkers always climb a tree before they pass out.

Tonally, the first part of the story is surreal, even lighthearted. But there is, inevitably, a shift: a darker side to the drink is revealed. To borrow a phrase that Graham used when reviewing 20th Century Ghosts, “The Night Whiskey” is a masterclass in the rhetoric of endings. (It may not be a coincidence that, like most of Joe Hill’s work, “The Night Whiskey” is ultimately a horrific story; endings are always important, but arguably they’re essential for horror stories to work.) Details from the first part of the story are picked up and paid off; the reader’s understanding of what’s happening is stage-managed so precisely that recognition arrives barely a sentence or two ahead of the explanation (at least, that was the effect for me); and the shift in the positioning of the fantastic, with Ernest never drawn all the way into the wildest happenings at the centre of the tale, but drawn in further than we think he will be, and dealt a sort of glancing blow that reorients his life, is beautifully handled.

My main reservation is the pacing of the opening pages, which seemed to take just a little too long to get to where they were going, without ever quite making Gatchfield either real enough or Twin Peaks enough to compensate. Thinking about it, I would also have liked, just this once, the articulation of the story’s theme to carry a bit more force. The idea — that Gatchfield is a town in unnatural stasis, and the deathberry and its consequences are a sort of re-assertion of a natural law of change — resonates strongly with me, and forms the basis of the ending. Ernest and his girlfriend escape to “the biggest brightest city” they can find, where “Every day there was change and progress and crazy news on the television”. That seems to me a neat inversion of a common fantasy arc, and it deserved to stand on slightly more solid ground, to have more to balance it than the theorising of an eccentric doctor.

The Color of Neanderthal Eyes

Everyone knows what they say about the work of James Tiptree, Jr: that the longer his stories, and the later written, the weaker. So that is what was in my mind when I started reading Tiptree’s penultimate story, “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” (written 1986, published in the May 1988 F&SF; page numbers here come from 2000’s this-and-that book Meet Me At Infinity). It was, they say, the revelation of his true identity that marked the change. After all, only a few stories written after made it into Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and though one of them (“Slow Music”) is a favourite of mine, another is perhaps the least satisfactory Tiptree I’ve read, being a story that does indeed seem to be weaker because it is longer. The pace of “With Delicate Mad Hands” is uneven, sagging in the middle, and the content seems stretched thin over the page count. They say that Tiptree’s stories are intense, but “With Delicate Mad Hands” is not.

And neither, by and large, is “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes”, although it is much more evenly constructed. It starts as, more or less, an idyll. A telepath by the name of Tom Jared, whose job is (for obvious reasons) alien contact missions, is enjoying (for obvious reasons) the solitude of shore leave on a nearly empty waterworld called Wet. He encounters one of Wet’s inhabitants, Kamir, who seems entirely too good to be true: a natural telepath, friendly, childlike in her innocence, and beautiful. As in “And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill’s Side”, Tiptree’s evocation of alien beauty is skillful; there is no doubt that Kamir, with her green skin and flat, non-mammalian body, is alien, but there is no doubt either that Tom is entranced by her. And so they end up on an island together, in a storm, and Tom breaks Rule One of alien contact: “There is a feeling of clasping. […] It isn’t Human, but exciting beyond words, and finally, somehow, fulfilling” (116).

But although the story is told with present-tense uncertainty, we know that something has gone wrong. A note at the start warns us that “It’s my fault, all of it and Kamir is dead. […] I am too torn up and tired to make a formal report. I am simply talking out what happened so you will see that something must be done” (112). And though Tom and Kamir spend some happy days together, travelling between various islands — indeed, Tom tells us they are the happiest days of his life — before too long Tiptree starts unweaving her paradise. The first shadow to fall over the map is Kamir’s prediction for the future: “When you love, you die,” she says. “The woman dies. The man lives, to feed the babies” (129). (Because this is a Tiptree story, we take her entirely literally.) The second shadow is Tom’s growing suspicion that Kamir has, in fact, miraculously, become pregnant: and that he has therefore caused her death. The third — after Kamir’s brother catches up with the couple, and leads them back to their peoples’ nearest camp — is the revelation that there is another people on Wet, golden-skinned, who have attacked others of Kamir’s kind. “A dreadful parallel” comes into Tom’s mind. Thanks to the story’s title, we already know what it is, and we watch as Tom resolves first to explain the situation to the Mnerrin (they are a people with no word for “peace”, because they do not know war), and then to help them.

“The point is this. You and your people are very different from the great majority of races. In my life of traveling and learning of travels, I have never encountered a race who so hated killing. You have not even the words for what is the daily occupation of many peoples — war, aggression, fighting, invasion, attack. Here, let me show you.” And I send out horrible images, to him and the other men who were leaning to hear. I saw their faces change. (143)

This is all, more or less, Tiptree stuff. But it’s true that there is something different about it, and I think it’s in the languid landscape of Wet. With the possible exception of “Slow Music”, I don’t think any of the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever take place in such a peaceful environment; Wet seems independent from the convulsions of the story taking place on its surface in a way that Earth (or what we see of it) is explicitly not in stories like “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” and “On The Last Afternoon”. Or to put it another way, Tiptree’s earlier stories feel more intense because either everything hangs in the balance, or the things that hang in the balance are made to feel as big as the world. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” steps back a little. It has, perhaps, more room for detail — and for tenderness. You suspect that the early Tiptree would have spent much less time establishing Tom and Kamir’s contentment. According to the endnotes in Meet Me At Infinity there is actually an earlier draft which is somewhat compressed along these lines.

Which is not to say that the story as it currently exists is bad. The ending, which makes the Neanderthal comparison explicit, is massively unnecessary (like the awkward final sentence of “The Screwfly Solution” to the nth degree), but the journey is memorable. Tom succeeds in arming and leading the Mnerrin; and if Tom never quite seems to feel the qualms about involving himself in the struggles of aliens that we are told (and feel) he ought to, the unease that comes from watching his deliberate removal of the Mnerrin’s innocence is some compensation. Most striking of all is the scene where Kamir gives birth, in which the full alienness of Mnerrin physiology is revealed:

Kamir puts her hands with mine up on her great belly. It is hot, hot. Then she pushes at it again.

Suddenly, with a dreadful caving-in feeling, her whole belly, containing the fetuses, starts to separate from the rest of her body! It tips forward, away from her, as the scarlike “lips” open. Agna is furiously working at this line, pushing his hands under her. She whimpers again. I see that the lips are actually a deep separation line, circling her whole belly, from ribs to pelvis. Oh gods, what is happening here?

[…]

But I have a horrifying look at the shell of her body left after the fetal mass tore loose. From diaphragm to hips it is empty, covered by a rapidly thickening gel membrane. Through it I can see, under her ribs, a dark mass pulsing: her heart. Below that, by her spine, I can see the great cords of nerve and blood vessel running along her backbone, inside her empty flanks, to her hips and pelvis. Nothing more. (166)

It is, to put it mildly, a contrast to the initial romanticised descriptions of Kamir. It’s not really surprising that the one mention of “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” in Julie Phillips’ biography highlights this scene, putting it in a context of Alice Sheldon’s ongoing engagement with the concept of motherhood: “In it a mother dies happily in childbirth, knowing that her children will go on. This time Alli seemed almost wiling to accept instinct as an explanation” (390). And perhaps the scene is, in fact, the scene my hypothetical early Tiptree would have structured the story around, because it seems to me the sort of unflinching image we associate with Tiptree. But in the story as written it’s part of a larger whole, a more general exploration of the limits of biology, the in-built frameworks of weakness and strength that shape a culture.

“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” isn’t unique in the way that early Tiptree is, there isn’t the sense that only Tiptree could have written it — but it is a good story, and makes me interested in seeking out that final collection, Crown of Stars. The value of the story, I think, is in that step back, in the way it portrays a broader situation. It ends with death, but not with the death of hope. One of the Mnerrin puts it best, as Tom is preparing to leave, to return to the Federation and petition for the people he has fallen in love with to be saved from their attackers. “It has been for you a happy time, out of your real life, which we cannot imagine,” he says. “But for us this is real life, with all its good and evil.”

A Billion Eves

There are three obvious things to say about Robert Reed, and they get said all the time. One: he is prolific. Two: he writes (mostly) traditional science fiction stories. Three: his work is highly competent. In isolation, none of these qualities is particularly remarkable, but the combination marks him out.

To take the question of productivity first, for instance, there are plenty of sf writers who produce a book a year, and more than a few who seem to manage a book every nine months or so; and of that cohort, there’s a depressing number I can’t help wishing would slow down a little. Not because it’s hard work trying to keep up, although it can be, but because there is often a sense that such productivity—whether driven by the market or by the writer’s own need to get their stories told—comes somewhat at the expense of the final product. There are a lot of sf books (to be fair, probably a lot of books in general) that feel as though they have escaped from their writers’ desk just a little too early, that seem to have needed just one more draft, just that extra bit of care. But that’s almost never the case with Reed’s work. He is, admittedly, most visible a writer of short stories. In twenty years or so of writing, he’s produced eleven novels, but more noticeable is the fact that it seems barely a month goes by without him cropping up in some magazine or other (“The Cure”, in the December 2005 F&SF, was his fiftieth story for that venue), not infrequently with substantial novellas. The stories I’ve encountered have been, almost without exception, smart, tidy, well-put-together—competent—work.

And to my mind, at least, the most interesting of them have been science fiction. I was recently involved in a discussion about what current sf it would be best to recommend to someone who used to read in the genre, drifted away a decade or two ago, and now wanted to try it again. One immediate problem with the question, of course, that a lot of the high-profile writers at the moment (China Mieville, Kelly Link) are best-known for recombinative, border-case work, which may not be the most effective starting point. Reed’s work was suggested as one way in, which makes sense to me: although the settings and themes of his stories vary widely, they tend to work like traditional sf, being usually either idea-driven, or on a grand scale, or both. In 2004, to pick a year more-or-less at random, Reed stories included “A Plague of Life” (Asimov’s, March), which is essentially a family saga, but set in a world where humans are vastly longer-lived than us; “Hexagons” (Asimov’s, June, later Hugo-nominated), which reveals an alternate history through its depiction of a strategy game and real political machinations; and several entries in his “Marrow” sequence (“River of the Queen”, F&SF, February; Mere; and The Well of Stars), which relates the story of a Great Ship, an environment so vast it contains a planet at its centre.

“A Billion Eves”, in the October/November issue of Asimov’s this year, is one of the aforementioned substantial novellas. It works in a similar way to “A Plague of Life”, which is to say that it opens on a recognisable, even familiar scene (a family preparing to go on holiday, their daughter sceptical, expecting things to go wrong) with a few odd details (character names like Kala, the daughter, and Sandor, her brother; place names like the Mother Ocean), and then pulls back by stages to reveal how drastically the story’s world differs from our own. In the foreground, though, sure enough trouble strikes the holiday: they leave on Friday, but the family car soon breaks down. Luckily, it’s not too far to the nearest garage.

Despite its being the Sabbath, the traffic was heavy—freight trucks and tiny cars and everything between. Traveling men and a few women bought fuel and sweet drinks. The women were always quick to pay and eager to leave; most were nearly as old as Mom, but where was the point in taking chances? The male customers lingered, and the fix-it man seemed to relish their company, discussing every possible subject with each of them. The weather was a vital topic, as were sports teams and the boring district news. A glum little truck driver argued that the world was already too crowded and cluttered for his tastes, and the old gentleman couldn’t agree more. Yet the next customer was a happy salesman, and, in front of him, the fix-it man couldn’t stop praising their wise government and the rapid expansion of the population.

As prose, this paragraph is not particularly special, but what’s nice about it is that it raises questions and provokes assumptions through its choice of details, without stepping outside the scene. Friday is widely accepted as the Sabbath; there is either a specific or general situation that’s putting women in danger; population growth is encouraged by the government; and sports and local news continue as usual. Before too long, a repurposed school bus pulls in for fuel. Sandor interrogates the driver about his intentions. It is a tense scene, but we don’t quite know why—in fact, it’s a tense scene because we don’t quite know what’s going on, and its resolution evokes a complex mix of relief that the family are ok, and horror as the implications of what’s just happened become clearer. The driver is a member of something called the Church of Eden, and planning to leave (where to, we don’t know). When Sandor asks him how he’s going to maintain his gene pool, the man replies, “You think I should take along another? Just to be safe?” Kala starts to wonder who else is on the man’s bus, and whether they’re there voluntarily. But though it’s clearly a fate to be avoided, it also appears to be business as usual. It may not be a practice officially endorsed by the government, but the abduction of women isn’t very actively policed against, either.

For a while after this, the story devotes itself to making such a situation plausible, and exploring how things got this way. We learn that, despite the apparently twentieth-century levels of technology, we’re a long way in the future: at least 20,000 years. We learn that we may not be on Old Earth, but we’re certainly on An Earth: humanity has been expanding sideways, into parallel Earths uninhabited by humans or other intelligent species, using machines known as “rippers”. We learn that the man from the Church of Eden was on his way to finding a new Earth of his own, using a stolen ripper only powerful enough to relocate the bus and a few surrounding metres; bigger rippers can move whole city blocks. And we learn how it started: a young man named Owen, from our Earth, stole one of the larger rippers, loaded up three trucks with essential supplies, and transported them, himself, and a local sorority house to another world. Kala and Sandor’s world is just one of hundreds of worlds downstream of that initial shift, and Owen’s story—the story of the First Father—has long since become myth, forming the basis of a whole spectrum of religions.

The most devoted wives left behind written accounts of their adventures on the new world—the seven essential books in the First Father’s Testament. Quite a few churches also included the two Sarah diaries, while the more progressive faiths, such as the one Kala’s family belonged to, made room for the Six Angry Wives. Adding to the confusion were the dozens if not hundreds of texts and fragmentary accounts let behind by lesser-known voices, as well as those infamous documents generally regarded to be fictions at best and, at worst, pure heresies.

The worst of those heresies is The First Mother’s Tale, which relates the story of Claire, the fifty-something widow who had overseen the sorority house. No major church recognises Claire’s existence, but we are given every indication that her testament is, in fact, the closest to the truth. In the aftermath of the shift from Old Earth, Claire confronts Owen. In every official testament, Owen unlocks the supplies in the trucks he’d brought through, and his new wives give themselves to him willingly; in The First Mother’s Tale, Claire rejects Owen’s demand of three women out of hand, offering only herself instead, and pointing out that “You don’t know us […] Everyone here is going to realize that you’re just a very ignorant creature. If they don’t know it already, that is. And if you think you’ve got power over us … well, let’s just say you have some very strange illusions that need to die.” But despite the fact that she gets her way—and in fact seems to be instrumental in the survival of the colony, and its establishment as a functioning society—history has swept her under the rug. Owen has a tomb; Claire does not.

Relating all of this takes time, during which Kala is growing up. But it’s the former rather than the latter that drives the story. We don’t turn the pages to find out what happens to Kala (which is just as well, because Reed’s characterisation of her is only serviceable); we turn them to find out what has already happened to her world, and how. The answer to that second question is that a sort of memetic Founder Effect holds sway: uprooting civilisation and starting from scratch every couple of thousand years doesn’t just restrict genetic diversity, in Reed’s model of history, it restricts the ideologies that people carry with them. This is clearly an arguable premise, at best, but much like the conservation of the path of progress in a book like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, it makes for an interesting story. There is progress, but of a limited kind, and heavily dependent on starting assumptions. So by Kala’s time, establishing new colonies is part of religious practice, and the founders are equal numbers men and women, who undergo formal group marriages the day before they depart; but it’s still accepted that some men will kidnap some women, because that’s the way things are. When Sandor saves his younger sister from just such an abduction, and castrates the would-be kidnapper to boot, the reaction of the family’s friends and colleagues is incomprehension: Kala’s friends can’t understand why she would stand by her brother, when he’s committed such a horrible act.

At about the half-way mark, then, the story seems to be headed for the neat ending, to wit that Kala and her brother will find a way to Do It Right. There would be nothing wrong with this, as such, but it wouldn’t be doing anything we haven’t seen before; and given Reed’s commitment elsewhere in the story to the logic of his premise, it would have the mark of contrivance. To have Kala go all the way, by herself, would seem (I think) too much. So Reed throws another idea into the mix, with the result that what we more-or-less expect is more-or-less what happens, but it doesn’t happen entirely for the reasons we think it’s going to happen. Kala is concerned about the oppression of women in her world, but she’s even more concerned about something else: the fact that her world is dying.

“Computer models point to the possibility,” she explained. “Low diversity means fragile ecosystems. And it’s more than just having too few species. It’s the nature of these species. Wherever we go, we bring weed species. Biological thugs, essentially.
[…]
Do you ever wonder why so many earths don’t have decent air for us? Do you?” Kala gave [Sandor] a rough pat on the shoulder, asking, “What if a lot of pioneers have been moving across the multiverse? Humans and things that aren’t human, too. And what if most of these intrepid pioneers eventually kick their worlds out of equlibrium, killing them as a consequence?”

It’s a theme that could easily become heavy-handed, but Reed balances it against the already-established conservative nature of the story’s setting. Both the social and the environmental elements of the story underscore Reed’s basic argument—that human nature really doesn’t change, even across thousands of years; that thinking outside your immediate world really is hard, even when you know for certain that your world is only one of an infinite number of possible worlds. The scale of the story exposes the bleakness of the sentiment.

Kala’s world, like all the other worlds descended from the First Father’s colony, is inherently out of balance. So, not unlike the early garage scene, the end of “A Billion Eves” plays two emotions—what we feel, and what we know the characters feel—against each other. The joyous release provided by the fact that Kala and her brother eventually do escape from history (perhaps) is tempered by the knowledge that they are not really doing it for (what to us are) the obvious reasons, even if they’re doing it for perfectly good reasons. “I don’t want virility and stupidity,” says Kala. “I want wisdom and youth.” There is something comfortable in this, too, because all the strategies Reed has used in getting to this point—the initial use of strangeness as a hook, the narrative emphasis on uncovering history, the clean but unadventurous prose, the viewpoint character who grows to understand the world at the same pace as the reader, the generation of story through the collision of two different speculations—are classic science fiction strategies. But in the end, they still work. Robert Reed knows how to make them work.

Brief Notes on a Double Life

  • When I sat down to read Julie Phillips’ biography of Alice Sheldon, I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to write a review of it. And I’m not: it’s surely been one of the most widely-reviewed (and often, though not always, well-reviewed) books of the year, from the front page of the New York Times Book Review to Excessive Candour. But having read it, I can’t say nothing. It’s that kind of book. Normally, when I’m asked what books I’d recommend to people, I say that you have to know the taste of the person you’re recommending to. I can’t think of a reader I know who wouldn’t get something out of James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, however. If you have any interest in one or more of science fiction, fandom, men, women, feminism, twentieth century America, colonialism, psychology, identity, writers’ lives, or half-a-dozen other topics, you should read this book.
  • Major Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon, PhD., had a truly extraordinary life. We knew that. We knew that she had lived before she started writing. There’s a telling comment from Charles Platt, late in the book: “After her death, some people said, ‘Oh, if only she’d gone to more conventions, she would have found the community was willing to provide her the emotional support she lacked, and then she might have found there was more to life.’ But the fact is—how can I put this?—her taste and breadth of experience and knowledge of the world was so far beyond the average science fiction convention-goer, it’s just laughable that she could have derived very much from these embarrassing events of people dressing up in costumes and firing ray guns at each other.” Reading through the events of Sheldon’s life, rather than knowing them as a list on the page, makes the truth of Platt’s comment blindingly obvious—although the list is pretty impressive in itself. Before Tiptree’s first story was published, in 1968, when Sheldon was 53, she had, roughly in order: been on several extensive trips to Africa; come of age into Chicago society; eloped with and married a man on five days’ acquaintance; become a painter of some talent, and an art critic; divorced; served with distinction in the WAAC during World War II; remarried; joined the CIA as an intelligence analyst; run a chicken hatchery in New Jersey; and studied for and achieved a PhD in psychology. And she kept a brilliant journal all the while.
  • Given such source material, you have to suspect that it would have been hard to write this biography badly, but extremely easy to write it averagely well. Sheldon’s life is busy, and complex, and portraying the ways in which the world constrained her, and the ways in which she reacted to those constraints, demands nuance. Just occasionally, there is a sense that Phillips is trying a little too hard to (to coin a phrase) story Sheldon’s life. For instance, Sheldon once characterises Ursula Le Guin as the Martin Luther King of feminist sf, and Joanna Russ as the Malcolm X; Phillips perhaps plays up to this characterisation a little too much, with Sheldon neatly in the middle, having struggled to invent feminism for herself, almost from first principles. But for the most part the balance is perfect. And despite the obvious extraordinariness of Sheldon’s life, or perhaps because of it, there is a sense that it signifies: everything Sheldon does seems resonant. The story of the book is the story of someone being brought up hard against the inflexibility of the world.
  • Understanding the roots of James Tiptree Jr’s fiction, part I:

    At Lake Tanganyika, too, [Alice’s mother] Mary thought of Lake Michigan before the pioneers came, and foresaw factories, movie theaters, a whole dirty Chicago springing up along its idyllic shores. The scene she saw “was beauty itself, the perfect loveliness of beauty undespoiled. But it was beauty with a doom on its bright head, for already the white man had come. […] In ten years, twenty or fifty, civilization and its gauds would be enthroned. The old Africa would go.” Their very arrival on the frontier was the beginning of its end. Alice grew up, she once wrote, in a world “suffused with sadness; everywhere it was said, or seen, that great change was coming fast and much would be forever gone.”

    Part II:

    “I realize that my definition of being OK or normal was being able to conceal the pain I felt so as not to radiate it at other people, so as not to lay it on them because I assumed they already had all the pain they could take and were doing the same thing. And that there was sort of an unwritten convention that you didn’t load onto somebody else or didn’t break down or allow the pain to get out of control. […] I really assumed this was general in life. Everybody was just like me and could just barely stand what they had inside, and it was just noblesse oblige not to load more on there.”

    Part III:

    Almost everything Alice saw in India [at the age of 10] went into the category of “horror-recitals”. In Calcutta, she said later, “As we went for some morning sweet cake, we’d step over dying people with dying babies in their arms.” She saw “starving dwarf-children roving around racks of bones that were mothers trying to nurse more babies, toothless mouths and unbearable eyes turning on me from rag heaps that were people.” Again she saw frightening scenes she was told were normal, such as “a man on the steps of the Ganges reverently—and quite inadequately—burning his mother’s body, and then leaping into the water to fish up the still recognisable skull and pry out the gold teeth.” She thought of her own grandmother, lying in a silk-lined casket in Chicago. She wondered if that was normal. She wondered if this was what it meant to be human.

    Part IV:

    Finally Alice got to be alone with Adele, on the couch in the ladies’ restroom at a party. They sat close together; Alice felt Adele’s hair brush her cheek and was “paralyzed with love.” But when Adele spoke, it was to ask her if she’d ever been with two men at once. Adele had, and it was wonderful. She would never make love to just one again. Alice had profoundly wanted to believe that the girl she admired was also a virgin, that within her beauty she, too, sheltered a shy, solitary intensity. Now Alice’s own crush felt tainted and perverse. Then, as Alice was still trying to take in her friend’s words, Adele became violently sick to her stomach. The vomiting went on and on, while Alice held her friend’s head, until “there were phone calls to people I didn’t know, and she went away, or was taken. a very short while later she was dead of septic abortion.”

  • The book, then, makes very clear the ways Sheldon’s experience informed her fiction. In fact, one satisfying thing about the book is the simple experience of seeing sf taken so seriously and represented so fairly (which does not always mean positively). Perhaps the coverage of the late stories is a little rushed, but that’s about all there is to complain about: Tiptree’s many correspondences are documented extensively, and many of his stories are discussed in some detail.
  • Of the cast of characters, I knew at least the outline of Sheldon’s life, and a reasonable amount about her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley (mostly as a result of the discussion surrounding Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See”—which I will have to reread in the near future). I knew next to nothing about Sheldon’s second husband, Huntington “Ting” Sheldon, except insofar as he figured in the background of the Tiptree story. I also didn’t know what Alice Sheldon looked like. This last is only remarkable because there is an unfortunate tendency for women artists to have their looks noted and catalogued, particularly if they’re beautiful, as if they meant something; and based on the photos in this book, Alice Sheldon was beautiful. I’m impressed that nobody’s mentioned it.
  • One way of looking at the story of Sheldon as a writer is that it tells us there is no such thing as a True Name. Phillips treats Tiptree (and Sheldon’s other pseudonym, Racoona) as, effectively, a character, who comes from Sheldon like any other literary creation (I’m following her convention of referring to Tiptree as “he”, for instance, though I can’t quite bring myself to be on first-name terms with Sheldon). But it’s clear that the relationship is more complex than that, and also that every relationship in Sheldon’s life was partial. We are always, to different people, slices of ourselves, personae; to live as a whole, single person is impossible, in many ways. And in Sheldon’s case, that’s more true than most. One reason she had such a varied life is that every so often, she would simply up and change things. Aside from Ting, she seems to have had few truly long-term friends.
  • Notwithstanding Platt’s comment above, it’s also clear that Sheldon’s epistolary relationships, as Tiptree, with so many and varied members of the sf community, meant an awful lot to her. At the same time, the gregarious inquisitiveness of the community took its toll, even through the filter of the pseudonym. If Phillips’ account of the near-hysteria at the Worldcon where “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” won a Hugo is anything like accurate, for instance, it is definitely a good thing that Sheldon wasn’t there. As it was, at one point, Phillips notes, writing letters almost took over from writing stories as Sheldon’s main occupation; and when, later on, friends would visit her in person, the amount of performance required drained her. When David Hartwell visited, Sheldon asked him if he’d like to stay for dinner. Ting took Hartwell for a walk in the garden, and asked him to decline, on the grounds that it would take Sheldon days to recover.
  • For all that the revelation of Tiptree’s identity left people with egg-on-face (famously Robert Silverberg, with his quote about Tiptree’s writing being “ineluctably masculine”, although it’s worth noting that Joanna Russ said equally absolutist things about Tiptree’s gender, despite also coming closest to seeing through the pseudonym), there is a sense that there are parts of this story that the sf community wants very strongly to be able to believe in. Namely, the almost-total acceptance on the revelation of Sheldon’s identity; but this story does seem to be true. Le Guin’s delight is palpable, Silverberg’s response is graceful (“you didn’t fool me; I fooled myself”), Gardner Dozois said more than once that he thought the best work was still to come, as Sheldon learned to write truly as herself. And so on.
  • So even as we can see the effect that the revelation of her identity was having on Tiptree—if it didn’t make Tiptree mute, it at least changed the fiction dramatically—we can also see the positive effects Sheldon and her work were having on other people, and on the community she had become a part of. Of course, the scales don’t balance, and eventually the story becomes fully tragic: in 1987, during a period of depression, Sheldon shot Ting, and then shot herself. What can you say to that? Not a lot. You can say she left behind a remarkable body of work, sure, but that doesn’t seem adequate. Having read Phillips’ book I think I’d say that what she left behind above all is a reminder of the importance of questions. Sheldon’s writing begs questions, about men’s writing, and women’s writing, and about sex and death and human nature; but Sheldon’s life as a writer begs more. It’s hardly adequate, either, but as a legacy, to keep us asking questions seems to me fitting, and meaningful.

Note: to anyone who got here following the link from Julie Phillips’ site, I did actually say what she says I said, but in a different post (down the bottom).

Pop Squad

At some point in the next few years, Paolo Bacigalupi is going to put together a very good collection of very grubby futures. It will not be a book for the faint-hearted. For starters, Bacigalupi’s stories, almost all of which are set in worlds coping with one or more varieties of ecological collapse, from the desertified midwest of “The Tamarisk Hunter” (2006) to the post-petroleum bioeconomy of “The Calorie Man” (2005), typically need unpacking. This is not to say they are linguistically complex—Bacigalupi’s prose can be striking, but it tends to be fluid rather than ornate—but more that they tend to be narrated by characters who have no reason to explain their assumptions to us. All science fiction stories offer that particular pleasure of unfamiliarity—the challenge of learning the ropes—but Bacigalupi’s stories are often more unfamiliar than most. At the start of “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004), for instance, the characters jump from a hovering airship and land in a pile of breaking bones with no suggestion that this is any more remarkable than the bleak weather. By the time they’re eating sand for dinner, if not before, we’ve worked out that we’re in a world where humans have been rendered virtually invincible through the judicious use of nanotech, but for a few paragraphs we’re in free-fall. Moreover, Bacigalupi can be stunningly unsentimental: where similar technology in a story by Cory Doctorow might lead to a post-scarcity utopia, in “The People of Sand and Slag,” with no need to preserve the land for their own benefit, humanity has allowed all to fall into ruin.

“Pop Squad,” from the October/November issue of F&SF, is in a similar vein. It reads like the work of a writer playing chicken with the abyss. I don’t usually have much time for spoiler warnings, on the grounds that if a piece of prose fiction can be truly spoiled by knowing what happens, then it’s probably not a very good example of the form. But there are a couple of first-rate jolts in “Pop Squad”; I’m going to have to talk about them, because they’re integral to the story’s success or failure, but it would be unfair to deny anyone the chance to experience them first-hand. So here’s the warning: to say what I want to say about the story I’m going to talk about all of it, up to and including the ending. If you were planning to read it, skip this post for now, and come back when you’re done.

For everyone who’s left, here’s the opening paragraph:

The familiar stench of unwashed bodies, cooked food, and shit washes over me as I come through the door. Cruiserlights flicker through the blinds, sparkling in rain and illuminating the crime scene with strobes of red and blue fire. A kitchen. A humid mess. A chunky woman huddles in the corner, clutching closed her nightgown. Fat thighs and swaying breasts under stained silk. Squad goons crowding her, pushing her around, making her sit, making her cower. Another woman, young-looking and pretty, pregnant and black-haired, is slumped against the opposite wall, her blouse spackled with spaghetti remains. Screams from the next room: kids.

My comments about unfamiliarity above notwithstanding, this scene, and the confident rhythm with which it’s sketched, are basically familiar. The narrator is a police officer, possibly slightly shady, and he’s visiting a slumland crime scene. We don’t know the nature of the crime, or why the kids are screaming, but that’s ok; these are things we expect to not know. We do know how this sort of procedural unfolds. And we could easily be in the here-and-now. The narrator’s judgement on the women (“It amazes me that women can end up like this, seduced so far down into gutter life that they arrive here, fugitives from everyone who would have kept them and held them and loved them and let them see the world outside”) has a depressing familiarity about it. The only indications that we’re in an elsewhen are a passing reference to wallscreens and, a few paragraphs later, a suggestion of high-tech uniformity in the flat’s design.

Needless to say, this opening is a trap. In retrospect the signs are there: in the way the narrator’s partner hustles the women, but not their children, out the door, for instance, and in the reference to a toy dinosaur as funny “because when you think about it, a dinosaur toy is really extinct twice.” But even on a second reading, we’re not ready for what happens next. The narrator stands in front of the children:

I pull out my Grange. Their heads kick back in successive jerks, bang bang bang down the line, holes appearing on their foreheads like paint and their brains spattering out the back. Their bodies flip and skid on the black mirror floor. They land in jumbled piles of misaligned limbs. For a second, gunpowder burn makes the stench bearable.

With the possible exception of some of Joe Hill’s work, I can’t recall having experienced such a spectacularly effective drop-kick of readerly sympathies for years. We can’t see it coming, because Bacigalupi plays the lead-in straight. But he gives us just enough hints to develop, in the aftermath, a suspicion—which is quickly confirmed—that this isn’t a depiction of a maniac, it is normal. This is his job. While we’re in free-fall, the narrator is going up in the world. Literally: in a vertiginous paragraph he rushes from the slum out of the urban sprawl, out of the jungle, up one hundred and eighty-eight stories of an immense spire, where his girlfriend Alice is playing lead viola in a classical concert. We follow in his wake, dazed. The music is beautiful; notes “spill like water and burst like ice flowers”. The contrast with the scene we have just left could not be more brutal. And it sinks in that the trap has sprung: we are caught in a world we don’t understand with a reliable narrator we absolutely cannot trust.

Inevitably, the story calms down a bit. We start to get more information. Details here and there allow us to build up a picture of how the world is and, maybe, how it got to be that way. It’s a darker, more damaged world than our own; it has warmed, and New York has flooded—hence the spires and the slums. And, via the revelation that Alice’s concert was much like a world-record challenge, an attempt to knock the acknowledged virtuoso from his pedestal, we learn that this is a world of immortals, which in turn suggests a reason for the kid-killing. The price of eternal life is voluntary sterility. But for the people at the concert, the narrator’s job is remote, its implications abstract:

Alice makes a face of distaste. “Can you imagine trying to perform Telogo without rejoo? We wouldn’t have had the time. Half of us would have been past our prime, and we’d have needed understudies, and then the understudies would have had to find understudies. Fifteen years. And these women throw it all away. How can they throw away something as beautiful as Telogo?”

I said that Bacigalupi was playing chicken with the abyss, and I think passages like the above make the point. The incomprehension demonstrated of the true choice being made is chilling, the more so because the authorial handling of the conversation is so deadpan: despite the yawning gap between the story’s world and ours, we are never nudged towards an opinion. The facts of the case speak for themselves. Combined with the memory of the narrator’s murderous actions, we are left thoroughly unsettled.

Unfortunately for the story, however, Bacigalupi ultimately blinks first. In the second half of “Pop Squad”, the narrator makes two more home visits. In the first, he kills a baby—but this time the kill is less because he believes in his job, and more because he can’t work out what else to do with the child. It’s more instinctive, an attempt to ignore the doubts growing inside him. He attempts to rationalise the actions of the women his squad tracks down, arguing to himself that “the whole breeding thing is an anachronism—twenty-first century ritual torture we don’t need anymore”, but we can see that it’s not working. (As an aside, we only ever see single mothers: the men, it is implied, are cowards who prefer to participate in the process from afar, by donation, rather than risk pop squad retribution themselves.) To quash the nag in the back of his mind, he sets out to track down the supplier of the toy dinosaur he saw at the start of the story. These days, it seems, they’re marketed as “collectibles,” at which point we understand why it was extinct twice: once as a dinosaur, once as a toy. The third home visit occurs when the narrator decides to track down a woman he bumps into in the collectible shop, and is the climactic scene of the story.

There are good things about this confrontation. It is tense. The inevitable cute child is not unrealistically or unbearably cute. The scene doesn’t break character, and indeed continues to reveal character: confronted with an obviously fertile woman, the narrator responds with involuntary sexual attraction that we can understand (and find somewhat disturbing, admittedly), but which he is only confused by. “She sags,” he observes, “she’s round, she’s breasty and hippy and sloppy, I can barely sit because my pants are so tight.” The mother doesn’t waste time asking the narrator why because she already knows, even if we don’t. The incomprehension is all on the narrator’s side. And the mother’s outrage is delivered with a conviction that frees it from cliche:

She looks at me, hard. Angry. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking we need something new. I’ve been alive for one hundred and eighteen years and I’m thinking that it’s not just about me. I’m thinking I want a baby and I want to see what she sees today when she wakes up and what she’ll find and see that I’ve never seen before because that’s new. Finally, something new. I love seeing things through her little eyes and not through dead eyes like yours.”

But at the end of the confrontation, the narrator walks away, leaving mother and child unharmed. “And for the first time in a long time,” he tells us, “the rain feels new.” We should be relieved: this sort of awakening is exactly the sort of ending we should want. It’s where the story has been obviously heading from around the half-way mark. The problem is that although seeing the dinosaur was clearly the trigger, it’s not clear why. Why does the narrator wake up now, why this case above all others?

In “The People of Sand and Slag,” the plot revolves around the discovery of a dog, an animal previously thought extinct. It has no place in the new world, and the characters don’t know what to do with it or how to care for it; in a beautifully alien sentiment, one of them describes it as being “as fragile as a rock.” So at the end of the story, they eat it. Bacigalupi allows his protagonists the hint of a realisation that something valuable might have been lost, but that’s all: they never wake up to the state of the world. The narrator of “Pop Squad” does, but he seems to do so only because to not do so would be unthinkable. He wakes because morality demands it, not because the story does. The result is that the obvious skill employed in the first half of the story in creating the world, the situation, and the character feels somewhat wasted. Bacigalupi has done such a good job of interrelating the three that to short-change one is to short-change them all, and what could have been truly haunting becomes a momentary discomfort, not so unfamiliar after all. “Pop Squad”, we realise, is just another story about the development of conscience in a fallen world. We don’t need to struggle out of the trap; we are let out and, despite the narrator’s claims, it feels quite the opposite of new.

Understanding Space and Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did that make him feel?

Cold. Alone. Fragile.

Curiously precious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The World and Alice

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

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

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

This is what Alice has thought all her life:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for Jake

When you first open this book, you quickly discover one thing. Something has happened: something not good. The narrator of the first story lost Jake about nine months ago, but doesn’t remember how. It happened after the city changed; after the urban monotony became “charged desolation” (p.7), after the shadows filled with horrors and the phone lines filled with static, after the coming of “the things that flap.” (p.9) But the details are lost. It seems only fitting. It has been, after all, “a very inexact apocalypse.” (p.11) By the time the narrator decides to end the story (he is writing it as a letter, and posts it before embarking on the journey he hopes will lead him to Jake) he has not been able to pin down for us exactly what has happened or why, but we have been put thoroughly ill at ease. This London is sick, and the sickness seems bleakly inevitable; seems to have been just waiting to happen. Or perhaps the city is transforming, into something “hungry like a newborn” (p.17), and its inhabitants are just having to ride out the pangs. Something has happened; something is happening, and the narrator’s lonely letter is all that exists to mark it.

All things considered, such a messily ambiguous thinning does not make a bad orientation package for what comes next. “Looking for Jake” was published in 1998, making it the oldest story in Looking for Jake (of the other thirteen, which I think represent the entirety of China Mieville’s short fiction output, only two were published before 2002), but it is the most typical story in a collection with a wider range than you might expect from Mieville’s reputation and novels. It is also one of the best. It starts things off well. After reading it, the most sensible thing to do is to continue on; Looking for Jake is a cannily-sequenced book, and most satisfying when read in order. To get at the bones of the book, however, the most useful thing to do is to skip to the story Mieville published next.

“Different Skies” (1999) is in some ways similar to “Looking for Jake.” In “Different Skies,” however, the weirdness is much more localized. It’s the story of a lonely old man who buys an antique stained-glass window, and finds that on the other side of it is another city. (And, yes, another sky. Mieville’s titles tend to be literal, although not always in the sense that you expect. It is one of the ways in which he disguises the truth of his stories.) But both tales use a structural device—a letter in the first story, a diary in the second—to present a first-person narrative in such a way as to maintain ambiguity about the fate of its narrator. Both question the nature of the story they are telling—the narrator of “Jake” wonders how to relate the incredible, while the narrator of “Different Skies” hopes his story is not a “banal morality tale” (p.162)—and both climax with their protagonists planning to cross a threshold into the unknown. Second time around the execution is perhaps a little less sure, but what’s most striking about the two stories is how they highlight an interest in alienation from contemporary landscapes. And this isn’t something that got shouldered aside once Bas-Lag came along: new story “Go Between,” for instance, is brilliantly unsettling in its depiction of a man who receives cryptic instructions from an unknown source at random intervals. The psychological unravelling of the narrator, as he oscillates between pride at being chosen and fear at what he might be a part of, is expertly handled; it could be called Kafkaesque if it was not so solidly tied to contemporary international politics. Even the (perhaps inevitable) Cthulhu-mythos tale “Details” (2002) is light on the squamous and rugose, focusing instead on the grimy reality of everyday life. The Lovecraftian sense of the truth of the world as debilitating is present and correct, but is somehow subsumed into the reality of an old woman in a run-down apartment building who appears to see a literal devil in the details of things.

The third and last of what might be called the early stories is “An End to Hunger” (2000). Like “Different Skies,” it has rough edges; the plot, which concerns a genius marxist/anarchist who seems to have hacked the protocols underlying the world wide web, is fairly cursory; Aykan’s vendetta against An End To Hunger (a transparent stand-in for the real-world click-to-donate outfit The Hunger Site), while entertaining, never really hits the right satiric register. It’s notable, though, as the first of the overtly political stories. “Tis the Season” (2004), which when the book is read sequentially is the next story, is clearly the work of a much more confident writer: here the satire is shamelessly exuberant, centering around a father’s attempts to give his daughter a genuine YuleCo. Christmas(tm), and not just a generic MidWinter Event. The climactic set-piece, in which the two are caught up in a Christmas Day riot in Central London, protesting against the privatization of the season, is a joy. How many other stories can you name, after all, in which the day is saved by the Gay Men’s Radical Singing Caucus? And it makes the shift into New Crobuzon for the next story, “Jack” (2005), that much more effective. New Crobuzon, of course, is custom-built to make place and politics inseparable, and “Jack”—which relates the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer, the nearest thing that city has had to a Robin Hood—is an unarguably political story. But as with many of Mieville’s later stories, the politics are the bones of the tale, not the flesh. The narrator admires Jack, or maybe what Jack stood for or what he achieved, but is unable to say so publicly; he has to maintain a separation between his personal life and his political life. Like and unlike the go-between, his sense of being connected allows him to value himself, but he knows where he stands, which side he’s on. I said that “Looking for Jake” emerged from the book as the most typical China Mieville story; “Jack” is what I expected a typical China Mieville story to be when I started. It is swaddled in rumour and hearsay, and couched in a rough, forcefully baroque argot.

A similar intensity marks two of the best stories, “Familiar” (2002) and “Foundation” (2004), although both take place in our world. The former, first published in the New Wave Fabulists issue of Conjunctions, seems almost to be an experiment in how descriptively dense a story can be without imploding. The plot is schematic in its simplicity—witch creates familiar from his own flesh; witch is creeped out by familiar but can’t kill it so dumps it in the river; familiar grows; familiar and witch have a showdown—and the strength of the story resides entirely in the presentation of the familiar. “Its power was change,” we are told, with “no way of knowing except to put to use.” (p.86) And it uses everything:

When the familiar emerged from the water with the dawn, it was poured into a milk-bottle carapace. Its clutch of eyes poked from the bottleneck. It nibbled with a nail clipper. With precise little bullets of stone it had punctured holes in its glass sides, from which legs of waterlogged twig-wood and broken pens emerged. To stop it sinking into wet earth its feet were coins and flat stones. (p.87)

It learns well; it learns London. It becomes, in fact (in a nice moment of dark humour) a Londoner—as much a native of its city as the narrators of “Looking for Jake” or “Jack” are natives of theirs. It’s impossible not to notice, in fact, that most of the stories that evoke a strong sense of place do so by associating an urban environment with life, or death. In “Foundation”, a modern city has been built on a mass grave, and the protagonist is vividly haunted by the dead. Mieville points out in the acknowledgements that in the past the US army has actually buried Iraqi soldiers alive, and that it is such an act that gives the story its bones and marrow. But although that truth can be excavated from the text with a little work, it too is buried; rightly, I think, both symbolically and because it allows the story to stand alone. “Foundation” works as a demonstration of the moral power horror can achieve: it is possible to read it as the delusional experience of a man complicit in a terrible crime, but it is more powerful to read it as truly fantastic. To do so gives the dead a voice. More literal still, however, in its conflation of city and life, is “Reports of Certain Events in London” (2004). Like “Foundation”, and “Familiar”, and a number of other stories in the book, there is in some senses relatively little substance to the tale; it is entirely about decryption, trying to work out from a succession of found documents exactly what has happened, or is happening. To say that it’s a story about feral streets, and a Brotherhood that tracks their appearance and disappearances across London, is to describe both its premise and almost all of its revelations. Mieville’s narrative sleight-of-hand, however, entraps the reader even on a second or third reading; carelessly bland phrases like “certain events took place” gain a thrillingly cold edge.

The last story in the book is the longest, and embodies the virtues of many of the others—it is, for example, an interesting counterpoint to “Looking for Jake.” “The Tain” (2002) is the story of another London apocalypse, but this time the monsters are fully on-screen. This time London is again diminished, emptied of people but filled with its feral conquerors. It is, even more than the rest of the collection, a strikingly visual story. Look, for instance, at the opening paragraph:

The light was hard. It seemed to flatten the walls of London, to push down onto the pavement with real weight. It was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth. (p.229)

To me, this and later descriptions, such as the Thames “matte as dried ink, overlaid on a cutout of London” (p.231), recall nothing so much as the grainy, washed-out style of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later (and of course both “The Tain” and that film echo John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), although Mieville’s story also references more gung-ho scenarios such as 1981’s Mad Max 2). The enemies here are not zombies, however, they are a kind of vampire: our reflections, having broken through from the realm beyond mirrors, furious from our millennial humiliation of them, shackling them into our “meat vulgarity.” (p.242) This is not the simple portal of “Different Skies,” but something more strange. These creatures are the fauna of mirrors—the debt to Borges is acknowledged—and they don’t just spill through as whole people: everything that has ever been reflected has been trapped.

Pouting lips fly like butterflies, eyes blink in and out of existence, and manicured hands crawl like rats. Where in “Looking for Jake” the unease came from what was unsaid, here, as in “Familiar,” it appears to be generated by what is on the page. And yet, it is not the narrative that cuts to the bone; it is its implications. The two characters—Sholl, one of those who survived the invasion, and a nameless vampire (or imago) who encounters him in a Tube station—do not follow the paths laid out for them by the story. Sholl’s shotgun-wielding search for the general of the imagos has a logical goal, not an unattainable one; and our imagos’s most profound wish is to escape. Wyndham is revealed as only a starting point (although a particularly apt one), and the vivid menagerie as a diversion, because as in “Foundation” our attention is ultimately drawn to our existence as a privileged enclave: to the peoples on which our civilization is built, and to what they might think of us, if they ever got the chance to break into our lives. It is a point made with superb grace, by a writer who understands how to wield the fantastic both for its own sake, and for ours. “The Tain” knits together Looking for Jake and ensures that at its end, the book leaves us with a thought worse but more important than the one it greeted us with: something has happened, and we haven’t even noticed.

This review first appeared in the Readercon 17 Souvenir Book.