Torque Control

Legolas Does The Dishes

Postscripts 15 coverAlthough “Legolas Does The Dishes” (in Postscripts 15) is the least sfnal thing I’ve read by Justina Robson, it’s not a radical departure from the themes she’s been working with at novel length – identity, consciousness, relationships. In fact, it’s arguably her most careful expression of those themes to date, drawing out the inherent science-fictionality of the first two, and laying bare the tensions they inflict on the third. According to the header notes, the story was written between the completion of Living Next-Door to the God of Love (a book I admire greatly) and the start of Quantum Gravity (a series I wish I could admire more), and it does function as a kind of pivot between them. Both of the longer works have at their core relationships between (more or less) human women and otherworldly men, and what you get in “Legolas Does The Dishes” is a similar relationship, but reframed in terms of uncertainty.

Elizabeth is a patient in an unnamed North American asylum. She claims to have a curse of sight, to be able to see “other planes”, and to be uniquely aware that “the world is the product of the mind”. As the story begins, she describes her introduction to a new member of staff – a dishwasher – whom she becomes increasingly certain is, in fact, Legolas. She knows full well that The Lord of the Rings is fiction, but —

… the meme of Legolasness and all it implies must have been spreading around the general population like a plague and so, even though I cannot really be looking at an Elf of Middle Earth, but surely am only looking at someone through a voluntary delusion I am prepared to entertain as True, nonetheless, here he is. Legolas is washing our dishes. Because reality is of the mind. And my mind says this is the real thing. And so he is. Unless he thinks he isn’t. And then of course, he won’t be.

Elizabeth is like this: open, a little breathless — you always feel she could stand to take a deep breath — and well aware that we might consider her crazy. (And aware of the ways in which popular culture can be used to help us understand her craziness. When introduced to Legolas, she describes herself as moved towards him by an “unstoppable force”, until the “immovable object” of a kitchen counter stops her.) She was committed for poisoning her mother for “poisoning me with ideas” or, more specifically, with a story: “She brought me up believing that I was living in a fairytale.” For Elizabeth, ideative poisoning is no less severe a crime than the more traditional kind, and her actions were a kind of self-defence, but we’re left wondering. The intensity of her fascination with Legolas (he never acquires another name), and the strength of her confidence that he really is the reincarnation of a fictional character, are a disconcerting couple of degrees beyond normal. And when he doesn’t deny her initial questions (“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Valinor?” … He muttered hesitantly, “I forgot about that, I guess”) we may see it as a man humouring a woman he thinks is less than entirely sane, but she takes it as a license to believe the story in her head: as license, if her understanding of the nature of reality is accurate, to make the story true.

The pair are introduced by one Nurse Driver, who is aware of Elizabeth’s claims about what she can perceive, and seems to take a perverse pleasure from placing her with unsuspecting folks and seeing what happens. Nurse and patient are locked in an odd duel of wills and wits, in which neither party is ever quite sure of the other’s position. Elizabeth notes that, “[Driver] and I always had this thing going on where I could never tell if she were serious or simply playing me for the sake of being entertained”. Driver’s introduction of Elizabeth to Legolas certainly seems frivolous, until Elizabeth starts taking it seriously, at which point Driver gets more restrictive (possibly jealous) and Elizabeth is forced to employ both bribes and blackmail in order to achieve her self-imposed goal of waking Legolas up to his true heritage. (She notes that at first he is distinguished by “farm-animal calm”, perhaps in contrast to her awareness of her own supposed position as Nurse Driver’s “domesticated animal”. By the end of the story, both are certainly more alive.) Yet for all that Driver seems a less than honourable employee, we can never be completely sure that Elizabeth should get her way, because we are constantly reminded of her instability. Although Elizabeth’s first conversation with Legolas ends when Driver inaccurately blames her for breaking one of the dishes being washed, Elizabeth is alarmingly fascinated by the shiny shards that result, and apparently has a history of stabbing people.

Legolas’ motivations remain as tantalisingly vague as Driver’s, and the question of whether or not Elizabeth is correct about him is never fully resolved. For every bit of seeming corroboration — watching his eye movements for tell-tale signs when she’s quizzing him, for instance: “He glanced up and left. I knew it. People look that way for Visual Recall” – there is an excuse. The evidence available is either on the edge of extraordinariness, not clearly over the line — throwing something into a bin, “a throw of about eight metres and he did it with a gesture no more studied or powerful than simple pointing” — or its flaws are recognised by Elizabeth herself, such as her observation of pointed ears, usually covered by hair, in a very grainy photograph. Over the course of the story, during which Elizabeth sets in motion various legal moves that will end with her release, and aims to persuade Legolas to travel with her to her family home when that happens, Legolas either decides to use Elizabeth to his own advantage (she gives him access to her money), or is dumb enough that he starts to believe what she’s telling him about a past life (Driver characterizes him as a “born idiot”), or is genuinely changed by her mind, and awoken to some awareness of his true nature. Like Driver, Legolas’ actions – or what Elizabeth tells us of his actions – somehow don’t add up to a complete whole.

We do gradually get a better picture of what Elizabeth means when she says that reality is of the mind, and a sense that she might be on to something – even if she isn’t quite sane. It’s equipoised science fiction: Elizabeth has a complete, coherent, explanatory view of the world, but it differs from the consensus. When she says that the existence of Middle Earth can be defined by “a place in spacetime and a position in someone’s mind”, we have no way of judging whether she’s perceived the nature of reality or just making up things to fit the pattern her broken mind observes. We can at least be confident, probably, that Elizabeth isn’t consciously lying. At one point, she notes that “One could never trust to theories of mind alone to bring plans as important as these into fruition”: it could be simple pragmatism, or it could be a subconscious acknowledgement that she’s delusional, but it’s unlikely to be the sort of thing that a deliberate fantasist would say. She also tells us that her therapist, Dr Lucy, has confirmed that the fact Elizabeth’s scrupulous honesty, to the point of not understanding why one would lie, is part of her pathology; although Elizabeth thinks she’s spotted holes in Dr Lucy’s theories, and in a way that chimes with the portraits of Driver and Legolas that she offers:

Most of Dr Lucy’s beliefs about minds relies on a heavy emphasis to their regularity, stability and cohesion – the entire theory under which she’s trying to make a name for herself is in fact called Cohesive Behaviourism: the Integrity Glue That Holds Us Together. Because of this she missed the significance of my self-determination (excusing herself by saying that abstract elements of mathematics were unsuitable tools for dealing with psychological analysis) so I never got to the part where I could whisk the cloth off my big revelation and tell her that some probability distributions have no mean, or average value. And neither do objects, or atoms, or people.

Whether or not Dr Lucy’s theory is accurate in this story’s world, it certainly seems to be the case that the Quantum Gravity series, in particular, is intended to test something very like Cohesive Behaviourism to destruction. The premise of those books is that a “quantum bomb” has fractured reality into a number of different realms; one corresponds to the popular conception of fairyland, one to hell, and so on. Like “Legolas Does The Dishes”, it never fully commits to one genre, although Quantum Gravity is at least unambiguously fantastic; a collision of fantasy and sf, which to date has been pacy but uneven. (Depending on your perspective, the level of inventiveness on display is either exhilarating or suffocating; I tend towards the latter view.) At the tale’s centre is a cyborg heroine, Lila Black, who ends up with several personalities cohabiting in her head, challenging her sense of self; in another story, she’d be as crazy as Elizabeth. Lila also finds herself in a relationship with an actual elf – a rock star elf, in fact – in which the intensity of sudden attraction is in part explained by an interaction of energy fields. Similar fields apparently surround humans in “Legolas Does The Dishes”, although a closer match for Elizabeth and Legolas’ relationship can be found in Living Next-Door to the God of Love. In that novel, teenage runaway Francine winds up in a “high-interaction sidebar universe” in which something very like Elizabeth’s theories about the nature of reality is provably true, and meets a man who turns out to be literally defined by, among other things, her love.

What “Legolas Does The Dishes” adds to this stew of ideas, though, is an answer to the implicit question: if mind shapes reality, what shapes mind? The answer, almost inevitably, is recursive, and goes back to why Elizabeth killed her mother:

In retrospect I think the mathematics could all go in my sessions with Dr Lucy and I should stick to aphorisms and cilches, affirmations and the like, with their dripfeed of empty hope into the consciousness.

This is also how poisons and drugs work, but they are for the body. The mind requires stories. Dosage is very important. The right measure at the right moment.

Another way of phrasing the story’s central question is to say that it’s not clear whether the arrival of Legolas represents the right dose of story for Elizabeth, or the wrong dose. Certainly it seems that it was a wrong dose of story — her mother lying to her — that provoked Elizabeth into committing murder. And Legolas provokes Elizabeth into getting out of the asylum, after twenty years of incarceration, through a combination of legal and more practical scheming. (Elizabeth also wonders whether confronting Driver with incriminating evidence of an inappropriate liaison will be too much story for the nurse.) But it could simply be that Legolas drives Elizabeth deeper into her delusion, since another way of describing Elizabeth is to say that she believes in a different story to us.

“Legolas Does The Dishes” feels, to me at least, more controlled than Robson’s recent novels. There is the electric sense that Elizabeth, even if she is right, is a fundamentally unstable individual; the casualness with which she hides a shard of Pyrex under her nail (because glass is much less dangerous than steel to a body’s energy field) is squirm-inducing. But there’s an equally powerful sense of what a wonder it might be if Elizabeth is right, such as her description of spray from Niagra falls as “world’s tears” that give sight like no other. There’s a good amount of humour undercutting the seriousness of Elizabeth’s pronouncements; having asserted that story is medicine for the mind, she reveals that her preferred tonic is Oprah Winfrey. There are deft inverting observations, such as Elizabeth’s reaction to a Porsche in terms that we would more commonly associate with, well, encountering an elf — its “ineffable strangeness”. And holding it all together is an expertly managed tension between reality and delusion. The care with which each element of the story is shaped and positioned with relation to the whole, in fact, reminds me of the last story of Robson’s that I read — “Little Bear”, in Pete Crowther’s anthology Constellations a couple of years ago. That was good enough that I’ve been keeping my eye out for more; and “Legolas Does The Dishes” fulfils its promise.

Linkathem

Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment

Fantasy and Science Fiction Oct-Nov 08 cover

The problem is under control now. No one would think of getting an abortion. There’s already talk about cutting back the program in a few years and I feel kind of sentimental about it. I’ve grown up with executions and can’t imagine what kids will watch instead. Not that I would wish this on anyone. It’s a miserable thing to be in my situation.

So speaks Lisle, the young narrator of M. Rickert’s most recent story, “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account“, published in this year’s October/November double issue of F&SF. The sentences above are fairly typical of Lisle’s style and tone; what’s significant about them, I think, is where they place their emotional weight, and which emotions they invoke. By this point in the story, for example, we know that “the program” is the systematic capture and public execution of any American woman who has ever had an abortion, but it’s still a shock to realise that Lisle is so used to it as a background fact of her life that she would miss it if it were gone, and still hard to imagine anything so brutal as entertainment for children. We also know that, as the daughter of a “disappeared” mother, Lisle is something of a social pariah. Having an executed mother is “not necessarily that bad”, purely because it’s so common; “a lot of women of my mother’s generation,” Lisle explains, “were swayed by the evil propaganda of their youth, had abortions and careers even, before coming back to the light of righteous behaviour.” A missing mother, on the other hand, is cause for suspicion: where has she gone, and what is she doing? So Lisle resents her mother’s perceived selfishness in leaving, which explains the miserableness, even if it’s difficult for us to accept.

I start with Lisle because, although her worldview is not the first indication we get that the world has gone wrong, it’s the most enduring testament the story offers to the way in which it has gone wrong. Lois Tilton, at the Internet Review of SF, argued that for her, Rickert doesn’t do enough to make the setting plausible:

With the example of the Taliban before us, no one can really say anymore: This couldn’t happen. Yet it is up to the author to convince us that it could have actually happened, or at least to willingly suspend disbelief and enter into the mutual pact between author and reader in which we accept the scenario for the sake of the message the story is meant to deliver. The problem with such fiction, however, is that the Message can outweigh the story, and I think that in this case it has done so, going too close to the line between chilling and absurd.

While I can take issue with various bits of this assessment, I do think the question of plausibility is hard to avoid when talking about “Evidence of Love”. The idea of an authoritarian, theocratic government presiding over the continental United States is, at this point, something close to a cliché, but even so – and despite the fact that the magazine blurb introduces Rickert’s story as “a chilling glimpse of how the near future might be” – this version of this future is not one I can believe in, Taliban or no. It goes too far, too fast. I can believe (with depressing ease, in fact) in the advent of an American government that criminalizes abortion, even to the point of enforcing the ban with the death penalty. And I recognise that there are people who would like to go as far as the story does, and kill everyone who’s ever had an abortion; one of them provides the story’s epigraph, taken from a 1995 speech: “When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you.” You don’t need to know who Randall Terry is (I’d never heard of him) to understand that “Evidence of Love” is a story where he, or someone like him, has made good on his promise. My difficulty is in believing that a regime capable of enforcing a retrospective ban could arise in the United States within (as “Evidence of Love” must be) a generation. The distance between Randall Terry’s current residence and the White House seems too great to cover in that time, never mind that – so far as I’m aware – there has never been a retrospective act of criminalization on such a scale, and with such severe consequences for those convicted. So I can’t see “Evidence of Love” as a story about “how the near future might be” in anything more than a technical sense and – to return to Tilton’s criticism – I don’t think any writer could have rendered the story’s world convincingly enough to withstand post-reading reflection.

I wouldn’t normally spend this much time discussing whether or not I found a story’s premises plausible, because for an awful lot of science fiction the question is something of a blind alley: execution is all. (And in twenty-five years, when “Evidence of Love” is just one more of yesterday’s tomorrows, the question will be all but irrelevant.) I’ve spent some time on the issue here because, as I indicated, I think you can’t not. “Evidence of Love” gives every impression of being an Awful Warning, which is probably one of the exception categories where plausibility is concerned. If it’s not likely, after all, how urgently can we need to be warned against it? But in both “Evidence of Love” and Rickert’s only other straight sf story (so far as I’m aware), “Bread and Bombs“, the future is presented to us as a fait accompli. Both stories, in fact, draw their power from a gradual accretion of detail, not about the world, but about its inhabitants.

Which leaves us back where I started, with Lisle. Rickert, it seems to me, is intensely interested in subjective experience; a story like last year’s “Holiday” succeeds because it makes its narrator’s worldview both convincing and absorbing, and I think “Evidence of Love” pursues the same goal. (This view of the story means that, for example, I find Chris Barzak’s comparison of the story to “The Lottery” somewhat odd; Shirley Jackson’s story is third-person, and much more interested in a group dynamic than in an individual.) Here too the story has been criticized. Abigail Nussbaum wrote that “Evidence of Love” is “shamelessly manipulative and unsubtle, a piece aimed only at people who agree with its politics, and one which encourages them to sneer rather than think”, and attributed this in part to the setting, but in part to Lisle:

there’s also the fact that the narrator is so clearly brainwashed. She’s someone we can pity, but not sympathize with, because her reactions are so obviously wrong and twisted. Rather than putting us in her head and inviting us to feel her pain (and there is real pain there – this is a child who has lost her mother and been raised to believe that that mother is a horrible person), the narrative stands apart from her and regards her – or rather, what’s been done to her – with disgust.

I read the story differently. I don’t think, for example, that it’s accurate to describe Lisle as brainwashed, since she had no original convictions to destroy and replace. Rather, her personality and beliefs are the result of simply growing up in this future. As indicated in the quotes above, Lisle’s worldview has been shaped by the regime under which she has been raised: she talks of “righteous behaviour” entirely without irony, and resentfully assumes, as the title suggests, that she has been abandoned — the possibility that her mother has been taken never seriously crosses her mind.

What we pity her for is not the pain in her life, but the absence of pain. Here’s what she recalls of a time when her mother caught her with a list of boys’ names, and asked if they were boys Lisle had crushes on:

I don’t know what she was thinking to say such a thing because there were seven names on that list and I am not a slut, but anyhow, I explained that they were baby names I was considering for when my time came and she got this look on her face like maybe she’d been a hologram all along and was just going to fade away and then she said, “When I was your age, I planned on being an astronaut.”

My cheeks turned bright red, of course. I was embarrassed for her to talk like that. She tried to make light of it by looking over the list, letting me know which names she liked (Liam and Jack) and which she didn’t (Paul and Luke). If the time ever comes (and I am beginning to have my doubts that it will) I’m going to choose one of the names she hated. It’s not much, but it’s all I have. There’s only so much you can do to a mother who is missing.

This, to me, is heartbreaking. Nothing in the passage stretches beyond what it is conceivable for Lisle to have noticed or for her to be describing, yet it evokes so much in subtle ways: the long run-on sentence indicating how much the memory troubles her, the mother’s simple statement indicating how bad things have got, the choice of names extremely suggestive of the type of people who are responsible. There is, I think, just a hint in her final sentence that her feelings about her mother’s absence may come from more than one source; a suggestion that, however much she professes to be angry, knows she should be angry, Lisle misses her mother. But that’s powerful precisely because Lisle herself is unaware of it, and for Rickert to make more of it would be to betray her character’s integrity.

So I don’t know that I can agree with the idea that we should be able to sympathize with Lisle. It seems to me that the distance we are kept from Lisle is the major source of the story’s strength, since it enables the emotional misplacement I talked about at the start of this post, and the feeling of hopeless dislocation it engenders in the reader (or, at least, me). When it is strongly implied that, as the daughter of a disappeared mother, the best Lisle can expect later in life is to be a “breeder”, we should indeed pity her; but we should also notice that the problem with being a breeder (for Lisle) is not the idea of being forced to have children per se (since what could be more natural?) but the idea of having to give those children up to other people, every time; the idea of never being allowed to be a mother.

Perhaps most striking are Lisle’s reactions to the public execution she attends with her father. Her depiction of the event itself is unsentimental. It is implied that Lisle’s father takes her in an attempt to show her how horrific it really is — since her mother’s disappearance, Lisle has been obsessed with watching executions on television — but all the trip does is reveal that her desensitization is complete. “It’s way more powerful,” Lisle tells us, “than how it seems on screen”; but her descriptions of the fear and nervousness of the convicts are for the most part those of a person enamoured of a spectacle, detached and dispassionate. “No one wants to be away from his seat when the criminal gets close to the red circle at the center of the field”, she says. And if one of the criminals looks like not breaking down, and not giving Lisle (and presumably the rest of the audience) the emotional catharsis they crave, this is her reaction:

Occasionally there is a stoic one, but there aren’t many of these, and when there is, it’s easy enough to look away from the screen and focus on the big picture. What had she been thinking? How could she murder someone so tiny, so innocent, and not know she’d have to pay? When I think of what the time from before was like I shudder and thank God for being born in the Holy Times. In spite of my mother, I am blessed. I know this, even though I sometimes forget. Right there, in the football field bleachers, I fold my hands and bow my head. When I am finished my father is giving me a strange look. “If this is too upsetting we can leave,” he says. He constantly makes mistakes like this. Sometimes I just ignore him, but this time I try to explain. “I just realized how lucky I am.” I can’t think of what else to say, how to make him understand, so I simply smile.

We stand with her father here: we expect Lisle to be upset by what she’s watching, but of course, believing as she does in the rightness of what is occurring, she finds it reassuring, draws strength from the ways in which (she thinks) it keeps her safe. It’s all the more disturbing because her thoughts are clearly those of youth, and unconsidered. After the shot, this is her reaction: “I see the gaping maw that was her head, right where that evil thought was first conceived to destroy the innocent life that grew inside her. Now she is neither stoic nor alive. She lies in a heap, twitching for a while, but those are just nerves.” It is, to Lisle, justice.

To me, what ultimately makes “Evidence of Love” a success is that we never doubt Lisle. She makes the world real, which is to say that the tale gains what power it has not from the abhorrence of the society in which it is set, but from the shock of what that society has done to Lisle; and the trick at the tale’s heart is that if the society in which it is set were more plausible, Lisle would be less shocking. Put another way, if “Evidence of Love” were merely an Awful Warning against the rhetoric of anti-choice positions, if it were merely a Message story, it would be somewhat facile. The awfulness is fairly obvious. We would indeed, as Abigail puts it, be being invited to sneer. But I don’t think the same follows from the fact that we’re held apart from Lisle. We may not be able to fully sympathise with her, but I think we can certainly understand her, and most particularly we can understand that she doesn’t understand herself. After all, the only certain evidence of love that Lisle displays comes in the very last line of the story, and is its final sting: it reframes everything that came before as a denial.

Evidence of Links in a Case of Abandonment

(There will be content soon, honest. Probably starting with something about the M. Rickert story whose title I have corrupted for the title of this post.)

London Meeting: Gwyneth Jones

The guest at tonight’s BSFA London Meeting is Gwyneth Jones, author of Bold as Love and many other books, and winner of the 2008 Pilgrim Award for SF Criticism. She’ll be interviewed by Tanya Brown.

As usual, the venue is the upstairs room of The Antelope, 22 Eaton Terrace, London, SW1W 8EZ. The closest tube station is Sloane Square, and a map is here.

The meeting is free (although there will be a raffle), and any and all are welcome. The interview will start at 7pm, although there’ll be people in the bar from 6 onwards. (Annoyingly, those people won’t include me.)

Fan Funds Are Go

Two of the fan funds have recently announced the opening of races for 2009:

Damien Warman announces the opening of the Get-Up-and-over Fan Fund, for Australian fans wanting to visit the UK for Eastercon LX:

The next Get-Up-and-over Fan Fund is now open for nominations. If you know what this means, are an Australasian fan, and have a desire to attend the sixtieth British Eastercon, LX, then you need to contact me. You’ll need to find three nominators in Australasia, two nominators in Europe, and send me a 100 word platform and an AUD25 bond.

Nominations will close on or around 8 September, and ballots will be immediately distributed. Voting will run until shortly after Novacon.

And Bridget Bradshaw announces the westbound TAFF race for 2009:

Nominations are now open for the 2009 Europe-to-North America TAFF race. The winner will attend Anticipation, the Worldcon, being held on August 6-10, 2009, in Montréal, Canada.

If you don’t know what the fan funds are, try TAFF in Thirteen Paragraphs. Some of my favourite convention memories are meeting the fan fund winners and watching them put koalas in their beards – I look forward to meeting the Australian fan who wins GUFF, and voting for the fan we send over to Canada in 2009.

n Things Make a Post

Mike Glyer tagged me for a meme a little while ago. It’s the “which sf novels that have been made into films have you read?” list. Bold if I’ve read it, italicized if I started but didn’t finish.

  • Jurassic Park
  • War of the Worlds
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park
  • I, Robot
  • Contact
  • Congo
  • Cocoon
  • The Stepford Wives
  • The Time Machine
  • Starship Troopers
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • K-PAX
  • 2010
  • The Running Man
  • Sphere
  • The Mothman Prophecies
  • Dreamcatcher
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Dune
  • The Island of Dr. Moreau
  • The Body Snatchers
  • The Iron Giant/The Iron Man
  • Battlefield Earth
  • The Incredible Shrinking Woman
  • Fire in the Sky
  • Altered States
  • Timeline
  • The Postman
  • Freejack/Immortality, Inc.
  • Solaris
  • Memoirs of an Invisible Man
  • The Thing/Who Goes There?
  • The Thirteenth Floor
  • Lifeforce/Space Vampires
  • Deadly Friend
  • The Puppet Masters
  • 1984
  • A Scanner Darkly
  • Creator
  • Monkey Shines
  • Solo/Weapon
  • The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Communion
  • Carnosaur
  • From Beyond
  • Nightflyers
  • Watchers

(I’ve assumed that “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Body Snatchers” both refer to The Body Snatchers, and combined accordingly.)

Just for once, I’m not too bothered about doing badly on one of these lists, since there’s not many books on it I actually want to read and haven’t. (Although, yes, I probably have read more Michael Crichton novels than strictly necessary.) Some of the entries, as noted at SF Signal, look a bit dodgy; the one that jumped out at me was The Thirteenth Floor, although it looks like that may have been based on a comic. I assume films like The Prestige and Children of Men don’t make the grade because they didn’t take enough money. Of course, the adaptation I’m looking forward to most at the moment is Blindness.

F&SF are doing another one of their blogger giveaways, this time of the October/November double issue. Since I don’t have a subscription at the moment (yeah, yeah, I know), I put my name in the hat, and was lucky enough to receive a copy. So far I’ve only read M. Rickert’s story, “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” and, while I’m not as completely bowled over as Chris Barzak, it’s definitely a powerful story.

Other recent reading, and future plans: I’ve finished Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories, and am working on a review, although depending on how it turns out I’m toying with submitting it to the Virginia Quarterly Review Young Reviewers Contest rather than posting it here. Like Liz, I’ve read Anathem and enjoyed it; I’ve submitted my review to IROSF. I’m currently reading, on the one hand, Kairos by Gwyneth Jones (in advance of her BSFA interview on Wednesday) and, on the other hand, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, with the aim of writing a series of posts about various heroric fantasy stories for early next month. It’s the Gollancz Ultimate Fantasy edition, the best thing about which — as with the SF4U titles — is not the pretty cover (although that’s nice) but the fact that the text has been re-set so as to be legible. After that lot’s out of the way, I’ve got a number of review commitments for various places: Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi, Going Under by Justina Robson, Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon, Dogs and Nano Comes to Clifford Falls by Nancy Kress, The Quiet War by Paul McAuley and (if I’m honest, the one I’m most impatient to get to) Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod.

And now, some links:

The Host

The Host coverThe most depressing thing about Stephenie Meyer’s first science fiction novel, set in a future in which billions of humans have had parasitical aliens who call themselves “souls” implanted into their brains, is how throughly an interesting premise has had its body stolen by the mind of an emotionally stunted fairytale. Two choices on Meyer’s part prop up the story. The first is to begin after humanity has well and truly lost. Doing that skips over most of the familiar antecedents and suggests a story that will be as much about accomodation — about coming to terms — as it will be about resistance. The second choice sets up exactly that: the narrator is one of the souls, Wanderer, who discovers that the consciousness of her host, Melanie, is lurking in the back corridors of their shared mind. Although Mel begins to assert herself fairly quickly, the initial stages of the novel are successfully alienating, and some aspects of Wanderer’s coming to terms with her new humanity (such as her initial assessment of human language as “choppy, boxy, blind and linear”, compared to what she had access to in her previous life as an underwater sentient tree) are vividly done. So much of the book is good medicine: sadly, it comes with much more than a spoonful of sugar.

The Host, you see, is a novel in which everything is special. It is not enough, for example, that humans be sufficiently willful that they are hard to subdue, and sufficiently emotionally intense that occupation be disorientating for the souls; they must be the most willful species the souls have ever encountered, and their emotional reactions must be the most emotionally intense the souls have ever encountered, such that Wanderer (the narrator) is driven to wonder how any soul could survive in a human host. (And this is not to mention humanity’s “physical drives”, the like of which the souls have never seen, although in fact Meyer does a very good job of not mentioning them for most of her book’s six hundred-plus pages.) Nor can the narrative simply be the story of a soul and a host wrestling for control of a body: it must be the story of an extraordinary soul, who has lived many lives on many worlds, and an equally extraordinary host, so secure in her identity that, one soul asserts, she would have “crushed” any soul other than Wanderer in days.

To an extent, the snowflake-ness of all this can be justified. Melanie is only 17, and has just experienced her first love, while for Wanderer’s species altruistic urges are as powerful as the base physical ones that afflict humans. A better recipe for rose-tintedly seeing the best in everything is hard to imagine, and in fact the novel’s very last move could be read as an acknowledgement that nothing about the book’s story is as special as Wanderer tells us it is. But long before you reach that point, the sheer density of exceptionality becomes suffocating, and leaves you with the feeling that some of the most interesting implications of the novel’s premise are never being drilled to any great depth. The division between Melanie and Wanderer eschews anything resembling a reflection of the real complexity of memory, for instance; Melanie’s remembrances are simply a collection of home movies.

The true target of the novel is revealed in a conversation between Wanderer and her therapist who, in a nice touch, turns out to have been a front-line soldier during the initial colonization period. Describing why she kept a human name, and how she ended up bonding strongly enough with her assigned partner to maintain the relationship after the war, she says:

“At first, of course, it was random chance, and assignment. We bonded, naturally, from spending so much time together, sharing the danger of our mission. […] We lived every day with the knowledge that we could meet a final end at any moment. There was constant excitement and frequent fear.

“All very good reasons why Curt and I might have formed an attachment and decided to stay together when secrecy was no longer necessary. And I could lie to you, assuage your fears, by telling you that these were the reasons. But …” She shook her head and then seemed to settle deeper into her chair, her eyes boring into me. “In so many millennia, the humans never did figure love out. How much is physical, how much in the mind? How much accident and how much fate? Why did perfect matches crumble and impossible couples thrive? I don’t know the answers any better than they did. Love simply is where it is. My host loved Curt’s host, and that love did not die when the ownership of the minds changed.” (41-2)

As noted above, we already know by this point that Melanie was travelling with a man she truly loved, name of Jared. Actually, that’s being too kind: we have been bludgeoned over the head with the fact. The first time Wanderer gets caught up in Melanie’s memories of Jared, she says that despite the intimidating similarity of human faces (only “tiny variations in color and shape” to tell them apart by), “This face I would have known among millions” (10). Another memory recalls Melanie’s first meeting with Jared, after months of trying to survive with her younger brother, Jamie, during which, despite thinking he’s soul-possessed and out to get her, she has time to note his iron-hard abs and prominent cheekbones. Nor does Melanie object too strenuously when Jared’s his first action on realising she is also a free human is to kiss her, with only “I’ve just been alone so long!” (33) as an excuse. She focuses rather on his gentle voice, and how “He seems to realize how brittle I am, how close to breaking” (34). And this is only the beginning: originality of phrasing is not Meyer’s strong point, and once the relationship gets going, there’s really a lot of talk about how Jared’s touch sets Melanie aflame, and similar cliches of burning passion. Again, some of this — and some of the (for Wanderer) terrifying intensity of Melanie’s memories in general — can be attributed to the excitement of youth. But a lot of it seems to just be trying too hard. Jared says things like, “Neither heaven nor hell can keep me apart from you, Melanie” (84), after only a month of acquaintance, and without any detectable irony; never is the necessity of the relationship seriously questioned.

The questions the novel is interested in, clearly, are those identified by Wanderer’s therapist: whether Melanie’s love will transfer to Wanderer as completely as Wanderer’s therapist’s host’s love transferred and what such a transfer might mean. So it’s no surprise at all that Melanie’s yearning persuades Wanderer to go AWOL in an attempt to find Jared and Jamie (“I could not separate myself from this body’s wants”, 88), nor a surprise that she succeeds (thanks to directions to a secret hide-out in the Arizona desert memorized by Melanie); nor is it even a surprise that Jared, Jamie, and the plucky band they’ve hooked up with in Melanie’s absence are not best pleased to see Wanderer.

Nevertheless, what follows — when Meyer has moved all her pieces into place, and can just let them bounce off one another for a few hundred pages, with Wanderer’s struggles to fit in among a small community of survivors and deal with human emotions as the notional centre of gravity — is when the novel is at its most successful. The relationships that Wanderer (with Melanie as the devil on her shoulder, a dynamic that becomes increasingly appealing) builds up with various members of the community are largely well-handled, from the surrogate-mother role she adopts with Jamie to a genuine, if tentative, friendship that develops with the group’s pragmatic-yet-secretly-kind leader, Jeb. (Sometimes it seems as though Meyer is being cheerfully blatant about her use of central casting extras: the community’s Doc is exactly as crotchety yet honourable as you’d expect a character called Doc to be.) Wanderer’s relationship with Jared is, as you’d expect, fraught, recalling the reactions of human crew on Battlestar Galactica on learning that a close friend is a cylon (or, perhaps more aptly, recalling the reaction of Buffyverse humans to vamped friends). Wanderer is gradually accepted as a sort of teacher, giving the community (and, of course, us) the chance to learn things about her people that were heretofore unknown. We get more detail on the evolution and biology of souls, explaining why it is they were so horrified by the brutal violence of normal human affairs (indeed, it was a dramatic decrease in crime and unpleasantness that led to humans noticing the arrival of the souls in the first place). We get glimpses of a possible future in which humans and souls co-exist, such as an apparently loving family in which two souled parents are raising an unensouled child. There’s a lovely conversation about television at one point, in which it is revealed that all human shows up to and including The Brady Bunch have been censored due to their sexual and violent content. The new ones all have happy endings: “you have to consider the intended audience” (477).

That the novel stays readable right up to the end is something of an accomplishment, because the further into her story she gets, the more Meyer seems determined to undermine its integrity. (Maybe she thinks she’s considering her audience.) There is an odd inconsistency, for example, between the emphasis on Melanie-as-Melanie’s athleticism, on Wanderer-in-previous-life’s adventuresome feats, and the way in which Wanderer-in-Melanie’s-body turns into a weakling girl whenever the plot requires it: she is rendered helpless by the sight of a gun, and finds digging a hole in the ground an impossibly intimidating physical feat. Such a retreat to traditional gender roles — because of course Jared is a powerful leader of men — can’t be entirely unselfconscious on Meyer’s part, given the discussions elsewhere in the novel about alien societies with different constructions of gender; but it does seem odd. Similarly, there are moments in which the sf elements of the story are betrayed to lend a frisson of sensationalism to the relationship between Wanderer and Jared: at one point, Wanderer is forced — forced! — to kiss Jared, hoping the intensity of the contact will re-awake Melanie’s personality within her; at another point, Jared is forced — forced! — to scar Wanderer’s face, to provide her with a convincing alibi. Of course, the souls’ medicine can heal said scar right up.

But these are passing moments, and to be kind, you could argue that one way of parsing the novel’s trajectory is that it’s about Wanderer learning to escape from the neutered narratives of her kind. Sadly, she never quite does, and even with a six-hundred-page run-up the novel’s closing stages, which lean heavily on Wanderer’s propensity for selflessness, become tedious, not least because Wanderer’s final choice is rigged so as to make everyone else believe in it, too. In the last fifteen pages, Wanderer is put on a pedestal that threatens to burst out of the stratosphere; as I mentioned earlier, the book’s final move undercuts this somewhat, but it’s too little, too late. If Melanie is the devil on Wanderer’s shoulder, then Wanderer is an angel; and angels are even harder to believe in than souls.

Speculative Japan

Speculative Japan coverI’ve got a new review up at Strange Horizons: Speculative Japan, edited by Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis. It’s a somewhat belated review, in that the anthology was actually published this time last year to mark the first Worldcon held in Japan, but it’s an interesting book, worth reading and (hopefully) talking about. Not that it’s been entirely ignored until now — I was pleased to see the Hugo nomination statistics, for instance, which revealed that what is probably my favourite story (“Where do the Birds Fly Now?”) got ten nominations for Best Novelette, while another story (“Hikari”) got the same number of nominations in Best Short Story.

Anathem

The problem with trying to review Anathem is that to give the details of exactly why it is so great would give away half the fun of reading it. I’ve never read a Neal Stephenson book I didn’t like, but there are definitely areas where he is weak – endings, for example, also resisting the urge to cram all of his copious research into a book wherever he can, and while I like the parts where he spends four pages describing, eg, the removal of Randy Waterhouse’s wisdom teeth, I can see it’s not going to work for everyone. The good news is that Anathem is a distinct improvement over his past works in that it has a plot, an ending, and tells a self-contained story in only 900 pages, which compared to the Baroque Cycle seems positively restrained.

The first three hundred pages or so are an intense piece of world-building and scene-setting. This is not Earth, but it’s something like it, and Stephenson dumps you straight into this world a few steps removed from our own, with just enough resemblance to our language for you to almost understand. I spent the first fifty pages flicking back and forth to the extensive glossary, but when it starts to fall into place it’s worth the effort.

The “religious” communities of this world are not based on belief in a higher power, but belief in logic, and the mathematical laws of the universe. (Holding what we would term religious belief is optional, and as much a matter for debate as any other part of the world.) The monks and nuns (“fraas” and “suurs”, as they are named in this world) live in their monasteries and convents (or “maths” and “concents”), discussing and debating for years, and stepping out into the secular world once every decade, hundred years, or thousand years to mingle with the people outside. It’s a very convincing, detailed world, all told in the first person, and when the outside world starts to encroach upon the sheltered, unchanging world of the concents you feel for the bewildered monks having to deal with the changes it brings. The middle part of the book is a little slower, although it does introduce Fraa Jad, probably my favourite character because of his habit of dropping bombshells into the conversation as though nothing has happened, while being completely aware that’s what he’s doing.

The dialogues between the monks take up large parts of the book, and here’s where the brilliance lies – they allow Stephenson to digress, tell stories, explore physics and the universe and philosophy, but rather than being interesting sections which don’t advance the plot, they are an absolutely integral part of it, and every time I felt my interesting in the abstract nature of the dialogues flagging they tied them right back into the plot.

If there was an area that disappointed, it was that in a book filled with many good characters, the main love interest is underdeveloped compared to almost everyone else, and the romance comes right out of nowhere and never really convinces. It’s a necessary part of the development of our protagonist from innocent, cloistered youth to the more worldly-wise figure he is at the end, and with the first person perspective it’s probably intentional that he doesn’t spot her attraction to him until it’s right in front of him, but even afterwards she doesn’t get developed as much as many of the other characters. While I appreciate the proper ending to the book, it’s almost too sudden a finish, and after nine hundred pages of buildup I could have stood to have a few more pages of epilogue.

Anathem is probably not going to win over anyone who didn’t like Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon, but it is a return to proper SF, and a return to form after the slight disappointment that was the Baroque Cycle. It’s funny, filled with characters you feel for and root for, and a hymn to the wonders of a world where logic is the key belief, without being blind to the problems and failures that would ensue. There’s no doubt that Stephenson thinks it would be a better world than ours.