Torque Control

Wanted

James MacAvoy is Wesley Gibson, total loser, whose life is changed when he meets Angelina Jolie (Fox) in a drugstore. She tells him that a) his dad was a famous assassin b) his dad is dead and c) the man who killed him is standing over there in the cereal aisle with a gun. Then there is a big shootout with guns and explosions, and a car chase where Angelina drives a fast and sexy car with her feet while shooting out of the sunroof.

That’s pretty much the tone of the film. Director Timur Bekmambetov’s previous films were the Russian blockbusters Night Watch and Day Watch, and now Hollywood has let him loose with a larger budget and an R-rating to see what he can do. The result is a film which, while I am dubious about some of the morality and misogynistic overtones, can’t help but sweep me along with overblown stunts and serious violence.

Wesley’s life is changed by his meeting with the Fraternity of Assassins, where he discovers his panic attacks, which he takes as yet another sign of his loserdom, are actually an indication of his incredible reflexes and shooting ability. Guns as martial arts is not a new idea, but here it’s taken to extremes, with the assassins able to bend bullets, shoot other bullets out of the air, and generally ignore the laws of physics.

Once he’s over the initial shock of meeting a society of trained killers, Wesley tells his boss to fuck off, smacks his friend in the face with a keyboard, and takes this opportunity to become a man and learn how to kill people. This undercurrent of machismo runs through the whole film. Wesley isn’t just taking control of his life, he’s becoming a man, a lone wolf, fulfilling his destiny. To become an assassin first involves getting punched in the face a lot by Marc Warren until he admits he doesn’t know who he really is, then realising that what he wants is to follow in his father’s footsteps. (Not that this method of training is portrayed as a universal good, as it’s implied that it sent at least one of the Fraternity insane.)

Now we need a rationale so that we can have the main character go around shooting people in the head and not think he’s an amoral murderous dick, and it comes in the form of the Loom of Fate, which spits out the names of people who need to die. Yes, they may murder people in cold blood, but they do it because the loom tells them we’ll be better off for it. It’s taking one life to save one thousand, a message hammered home by the story Fox tells of a child who watched her father die when the Fraternity failed to kill the murderer in time, and in case you weren’t paying attention they spell it out to you that she’s talking about herself. All the targets of assassination are businessmen in suits and limos, often smoking cigars, and it’s a surprise when they don’t start cackling and stroking their cats.

Criticising Wanted for lacking in subtlety is probably missing the point. Shortly after that scene, we have a stunt where Wesley performs an assassination by getting his car to fly through the air and shooting his target through the sunroof, and there’s a certain joy in watching them stage preposterous stunts with the only possible reasoning being “because it will look cool”. Bekmambetov has a familiar style from his earlier work, filled with slow-motion and quick cutting, and there are some really spectacular scenes in Wanted – a train derailment, Wesley on a roaring rampage of revenge, the car chase early on. On the level of brainless gosh-wow action, it’s a good film.

And yet I can’t help but poke at the problems with it. There are parallels between the character of Anton from Night Watch and Wesley Gibson – both are nerdy loser-types and not your typical action leading man despite MacAvoy’s newfound six-pack, who discover they have supernatural skills and get involved with a mysterious organisation with shadowy leadership. But while Anton is sympathetic when caught up in the plans of others, it’s hard to feel any real sympathy for Wesley and what little there is comes from James MacAvoy’s convincing fear as he gets brought into the Fraternity. It’s all so very masculine, and out of the three female characters, one is Wesley’s fat tyrant of a boss, and one is his cheating harridan of a girlfriend, with Jolie’s Fox as the only female assassin we ever seen, sharing a curiously sexless kiss with Wesley only to piss off his ex.

The other problem is that the plot twists are not so much twists as gentle turns you can see coming from quite a long way off, and that includes the ending. Again, though, you don’t go and see Wanted for the plot, and you don’t watch it for the characterization or the acting. You watch this film if you want to see exploding rats, cars driven into trains, and a man shooting people while his gun is embedded in someone else’s brains, and it turns out that sometimes that is what I want to watch even if it leaves a faintly nasty taste in the mouth.

The Goosle

One of the reasons I wanted to get my hands on the Ellen Datlow-edited Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy was Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle” — not just because I usually admire Lanagan’s stories, but because the reactions to this story, as tracked on Lanagan’s blog, have been interesting. They have been generally enthusiastic (or enthusiastic but nervous about how Lanagan might react), and occasionally bizarre, but a number have had an undercurrent of uneasiness: Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, for instance, says that though he “appreciated the creativity and inventiveness on display,” he’s “not sure the viciousness created a disturbing experience rather than an off-putting one”; and in general the descriptions emphasize how dark the tale is.

And now Dave Truesdale has reviewed the anthology, as one of his “Off on a Tangent” columns, and attacked “The Goosle”. (It’s interesting that this column appears under the SF Site banner, rather than as an online column for F&SF, although it’s not the first of the columns to do so.) Before I go any further, in case you haven’t followed any of the links above, a brief review of the premise: the story is a sequel to a version of “Hansel and Gretel” in which Gretel (here Kirtle) didn’t escape, and Hansel was found wandering by a man called Grinnan. The two now travel together, with Grinnan regularly and sexually abusing Hansel (“goosle” is one of his names for the boy; in the original “silly goose” is what the witch says as she demonstrates her oven to Gretel), and as “The Goosle” opens they pay a return visit to the witch, here called the “mudwife” (one of Lanagan’s common linguistic tricks is to corrupt existing word; here we’re obviously meant to think “midwife”, and there is a suggestion that the mudwife may act in that capacity for some locals). Here’s a sample of Truesdale’s judgement:

Del Rey ought to get a long, loud, wakeup call… and quick. If the author, editor, and publisher can nuance this story, massage it, spin it to where the objectionable inclusion of child rape for shock value alone is acceptable, then there are absolutely no boundaries, for any reason, anywhere — and we can expect more of the same. This sets a precedent, if not challenged. And again, what audience were the editor and publisher expecting to hit here? Several stories seem written just for a younger crowd, so then what can be the reasoning behind also presenting a fairy tale retelling with repeated instances of child rape for shock value?

To sum up, his charges are: that the story is inappropriate given what he judges to be the likely audience for the anthology; that the abuse is included for “shock value” and crosses the bounds of decency, specifically in a scene where “young Hansel thinks he might even like what is being done to him”; and that it adds nothing to the story specifically or to “the canon of Hansel and Gretel”.

To take these points in order: Truesdale’s perception of the anthology as being marketed, at least in part, at young adult readers seems to rest entirely on the fact that several protagonists, including that of Lanagan’s story, are young adults. This strikes me as almost so daft as to not be worth engaging with: you’d think that the presence of a story as confrontational as Lanagan’s would be a fairly clear marker that young adults aren’t the target audience. But apparently not. There is the grain of a sensible point here, in that if the anthology can be mistaken for a young adult anthology then a reader might be confronted with material they’re not fully equipped to handle; but having read several of the other stories in the book, and looking at the way the book is presented, I think it’s unlikely anyone would actually make that mistake.

On “shock value”: here’s the scene that (I presume) Truesdale was thinking of with reference to Hansel enjoying being abused. As context, it occurs after arriving at the mudwife’s house; Grinnan and the mudwife have in fact kicked Hansel outdoors so that they can get busy.

I try dozing, but it’s not comfortable among the roots there, and there is still noise from the cottage — now it is Grinnan working himself up, calling her all the things he calls me, all the insults. You love it, he says, with such deep disgust. You filth, you filthy cunt. And she oh‘s below, not at all like me, but as if she really does love it. I lie quiet, thinking: Is it true, that she loves it? That I do? And if it’s true, how is it that Grinnan knows, but I don’t?

Earlier this week, Victoria Hoyle was debating where she draws the line in the sand with regard to the content of fiction. It’s a valid question, and it’s not unreasonable for Truesdale to note that this story crosses his line. The problem with his critique is that he never goes any deeper than assertion – his discussion of “The Goosle” is six paragraphs long and uses the phrase “shock value” six times, which leaves the residual impression that it is the simple fact of the subject matter, rather than how it is handled, that is giving Truesdale trouble.

But this sort of thing really happens, which makes it a valid subject for fiction, and for me the handling is good enough that the story does not cross my line. In the context of the rest of the story the depiction of abuse does not strike me as exploitative, or sensationalist, or cheap. To be honest, given the hollow pain evident in that last sentence — “how is it that Grinnan knows, but I don’t?” — even in that single paragraph I think there’s enough evidence to conclude that Lanagan is approaching her topic with some care, which is to say that it strikes me — as Jeffrey Ford puts it in the comments to a post by Datlow linking to the review — as part of a portrait of how damaging, confusing, and frightening abuse can be for a child. The entire story is filled with unsettling images and situations, from the very first glimpse of the mudwife’s house — it’s clear that it’s the house of bread and cake from the fairytale, but what Hansel sees is “the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud … you are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating” – and it’s the accumulative weight of disorder that gives the story its power. Because of its subject matter, the story reminded me somewhat of M. Rickert’s “Holiday“; with reference to that story Jonathan Strahan says, in his year’s best, that “the best fiction challenges us in some way. The frankly disturbing dark tale that follows … was one of the most challenging published this year”, and in a year’s time it’s not hard to imagine someone saying the same of “The Goosle”. Both stories are asking us to try to understand psychologically damaged individuals. It’s true that Lanagan is (often, though not always) more direct than Rickert: where Rickert is suggestive, Lanagan tells us how Grinnan gets Hansel drunk to make him an easier mark, how Hansel was cut and bleeding after the first time Grinnan raped him, how “The price of the journey … is being spiked in the arse”. Of course it is unsettling to read, we might say. It’s meant to be. But this economically confrontational style suits Lanagan’s purpose: it makes it impossible to ignore what has been done to Hansel, and impossible to ignore the issues it raises.

Which leaves the question of what the story adds to our understanding of the Hansel and Gretel ur-story. In some ways, I think this is the wrong question to ask. As Abigail Nussbaum said elsewhere earlier this week, a reasonable way to evaluate a piece of fiction is to ask whether it does something new, or does something well; and if there have been dark extrapolations of Hansel and Gretel before (though I, at least, have not read so many as to be bored by them) then Lanagan’s is done seriously and well, and that is enough to justify its existence. For example: in the original, the background calamity is famine, which resonates in obvious ways with the gingerbread house and the witch’s proclivities; in Lanagan’s story, the land is ravaged by plague, which resonates equally obviously with the moral depravity of the adult characters. In the original, there is a neat, happy ending; in “The Goosle”, although Hansel does eventually find his way home, to do so he has to witness the most “obvious and ongoing” act of evil he has ever encountered, and when he gets home, his family has been killed by the plague. The moral order that structures the most commonly-read version of “Hansel and Gretel” is entirely absent in “The Goosle” — as Truesdale notes, it is ultimately the mudwife, not Hansel, who kills Grinnan — but that absence is surely part of the story’s point, and that it may have been done before does not diminish its impact here. Indeed, Hansel ultimately avenges Grinnan: an act which is both just (for what has been done to Grinnan is in itself horrific) and disturbing (for we can’t be completely sure that Hansel is not to some tiny degree saddened by his abuser’s death). Hansel is alternately at the mercy of the world, and ignored by it, and “The Goosle” is a tragedy.

There is also one significant way in which the story doesn’t differ from the original, which is that in both cases the witch is basically evil. In the flashbacks we get to Hansel’s original captivity, it becomes apparent that her interest in the boy, like Grinnan’s, is in part sexual — she is still hungry to eat him, but instead of feeling his finger to determine whether he is ripe, she feels his penis. And in the moments before Hansel ultimately kills her, she is described in ugly terms: “She has her back to me, her bare dirty white back, her baggy arse and thighs. If she weren’t doing what she’s doing, that would be horror enough, how everything is wet and withered and hung with hair, how everything shakes”. It’s also something that makes “The Goosle” interesting as a Margo Lanagan story, a way of evaluating the work that Truesdale doesn’t even consider. (There is nothing in his review about Lanagan’s skill with description or imagery, which is as evident here as in most of her other work.) The depiction of the mudwife put me strongly in mind of the last Lanagan story I read, “She-Creatures”, which appeared in Eclipse One. If that story has a folk antecedent I didn’t recognise it — the story is of three night-workmen being attacked by the titular creatures. But as in “The Goosle”, women are figured as terrifying and horrible — although in ways that have to do with their appearance as sexual beings than with their age – and as in “The Goosle”, sex and hunger are inextricably linked.

I originally read “She-Creatures” as an exercise in the blackest of black humour: for the narrator and his macho companions, the most terrible monsters imaginable are women who want to have sex with them. In “The Goosle”, there is no doubt that the mudwife really is both terrible and monstrous; but considering the two stories in conjunction, it’s a little scary to see how easily caricatures of women can be figured as, well, scary. I don’t think it’s an accident that in both stories, our perceptions of the women are entirely filtered through male characters who clearly do not see the targets of their gaze as full human beings, either through prejudice or inexperience. And in the case of “The Goosle” — given the familiarly misogynist positioning of women in many of Grimm’s fairytales – it adds another layer to what is already a fearsomely memorable tale.

UPDATE: See also these.

Baroque Cycle: Odalisque

Previously, on the Baroque Cycle Reading Group:

And now:

Odalisque coverLike King of the Vagabonds, Odalisque opens with a step backwards. It’s Daniel Waterhouse’s turn in the spotlight again, specifically attending the death of Charles II in February 1685. As in Quicksilver, this strand delves into the scientific happenings of the day – notably the eventual publication of Principia Mathematica, complete with a review from Leibniz that basically predicts special relativity – but the primary focus, I felt, was the politics leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It’s the same in the book’s second strand, which picks up Eliza’s story in Versailles, where she appears to be working as a governess but is fairly quickly really working as a sort of financial manager to half the resident nobles, and all the time really really working as a spy, sending letters encrypted in a cypher she knows is broken to William of Orange (and, for reasons that I missed, letters encrypted in a much stronger cypher to Leibniz). Two very different courts, then, and although there are some similarities in how the two strands unfold — such as the complete uselessness of royal physicians — of course there are two different outcomes, for in France the story is of a rebellion quashed. The title at first suggests we’re going to be primarily reading Eliza’s story, and certainly her continuing progression from slave to noble takes up more pages than Daniel’s antics; but I think the title also has a more ironic sense, which ties in with the exploration of freedom in King of the Vagabonds, in which both Daniel and Eliza are slaves to the increasing complexity of the world.

On finishing Odalisque, which is the last part of the volume Quicksilver, I am struck by two main thoughts. First, I feel entirely vindicated in, and indeed grateful for, my decision to consider the volume as three novels: it simply makes no sense as one. It may be that The Baroque Cycle as a whole should be considered as a single, three-thousand-page novel, but it certainly isn’t three thousand-page novels. There’s no sense in which the volume as a whole achieves closure – but the individual books that make up the volume do, at least as much as, say, Snow Crash does. It will be interesting to see whether the decision to interleave Bonanza and Juncto — the two novels that make up The Confusion — gives that volume more of a unifying shape. If by this you infer that I’ve been won over enough to complete the Cycle, you’d be correct, although I still have the feeling I’ll enjoy having read it more than I’m enjoying reading it.

Because the most common emotion Odalisque evoked, like the two novels before it, is frustration. There is the question, for example, of what exactly Odalisque adds to the Cycle. Why do these 300-pages exist? The basic ingredients, after all, haven’t changed. The style is the same, pages and pages of talk relating events that happened elsewhere to other people; the overwhelming dumping of information is the same; and the sense that Stephenson’s main argument is that this period encapsulates the birth-pangs of the modern world is present and correct. The strongest justification I can come up with for Odalisque’s existence is that it’s a bit less annoying than Quicksilver and a bit more coherent than King of the Vagabonds. At times, it even seems like the book is in danger of developing a plot, although it always turns out to be just the natural momentum of historical events keeping the characters on the hop.

So you can look at the basic issues raised in the earlier books, and find that if Odalisque doesn’t have anything new to say, it at least says the same things more eloquently. For instance: all three books so far have, to one extent or another, foregrounded the question of historical accuracy, and of how history can (perhaps should) be represented in fiction; but Odalisque lays out the terms of the debate most clearly. Right at the start, the issue is cued up by a conversation between Daniel and Roger Comstock. Daniel describes Leibniz’s thoughts about the perception of reality, starting with the trivial observation that London “is perceived in different ways by each person in it, depending on their unique situation” (621), going on to argue that there is a sense in which the only meaningful description of London would be the sum of the descriptions of all of its inhabitants, and concluding by suggesting that some individuals’ descriptions will be more meaningful than others:

“Normally when we say [someone is distinguished or unique], we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity.” (621)

On one level, this is a way of explaining of why we read any writer: because their particular vision of the world reveals aspects of it that we did not see, or did not see as clearly, or because their vision chimes with ours. (We read Neal Stephenson because we like his geekiness.) But it’s also implicitly both an argument for Stephenson’s focus on the Great and the Good of seventeenth-century Europe in his narrative — being the people who, via Stephenson’s protagonists, can express the nature of the times most clearly – and, perhaps unconsciously, a way of highlighting the arrogance of that argument.

With this in mind, it’s notable that most of Eliza’s narrative in the book is couched in epistolary form. Initially this is satisfying because it gives us direct access to her way of seeing the world, but the ultimate point is that this form — a single viewpoint — never tells the whole story. In her last letter to Leibniz, Eliza meditates on the limitations of historical knowledge, with reference to the birth, or not, of James II’s heir. Was there really a birth, she wonders? If their was, was James II really the father? If he was, did the child really survive? And so on. “In a sense,” Eliza writes, “it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much…” (895). Truth exists, and truth can be sought, and in certain ways — such as Principia Mathematica — it can be found. But in other ways it cannot, and both kinds of truth (revealed and hidden) shape our world. Put another way — and Stephenson loves nothing more than to put something another way — all history is a form of cryptography. “In the plaintext story,” Eleanor writes, putting the unencrypted description of the burden she felt after the birth of her child into context for Leibniz, “it is a burden of grief over the death of my child. But in the real story — which is always more complicated — it is a burden of uncertainty” (906).

That in a thousand details the Baroque Cycle is repeatedly and visibly not “what really happened”, then, is irrelevant. (If, to me, annoying.) The standard by which the story is asking to be judged (I think) is not a standard of detail, it’s a standard of the big picture: whether or not it fairly represents how the system of the world changed during the time in question. Again, this was clear from the start of Quicksilver, but Odalisque is more convincing as an argument for this particular slant on this particular period of history, largely because the Glorious Revolution feels like more of a meaningful change than (for example) the Declaration of Indulgence. It feels like an event that can function as a synthesizing narrative without having to be forced into an unnatural shape; and the pursuit of synthesis in politics mirrors the pursuit of synthesis going on elsewhere in science. In Daniel, in fact, the two come to be inextricably intertwined. The first mentions of Newton in Odalisque point out how irreconcilable his divergent interests seem. As Daniel puts it, observers are “trying to figure out whether there might be some Reference Frame within which all of Isaac’s moves make some kind of damned sense … You want to know whether his recent work … is a change of subject, or merely a new point of view” (665). Of course, in this instance we can see the Reference Frame before the characters, because we know how gravity links tides to comets and to the movements of Jupiter and Saturn. But Daniel, in particular, becomes obsessed with how the new scientific understanding of the world might link to a new political understanding of the world; as Eliza notes, he stakes everything on the Glorious Revolution, “not in the sense of living or dying, but in the sense of making something of his life, or not” (746).

I said in my first post that I wanted to leave the question of whether or not the Cycle is science fiction for later. This seems to be a good time to visit that question, at least to reach an interim conclusion, and not just because Quicksilver was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the best science fiction novel published in the UK in 2003. The Cycle as a whole was later awarded the Locus Award for best sf novel, so clearly it’s not just an isolated group of judges who’re prepared to consider it as sf. There are several ways of responding to the question, I think. One is to say that it just doesn’t matter, to which all I can say is that I think it does: if we can read the novel as sf, it says something about the way sf is working in the early 21st century, and that to me is an interesting subject. Another response is to say that it’s trivially obvious that it’s sf: there’s Enoch Root’s longevity, for starters, not to mention the alternate-historical flavour of the whole project. But the most interesting response, I think, is the one that argues that Quicksilver is sf because it appropriates the tools of sf, because it forces us to ask what those tools are. One, perhaps, is the portrait of the world that suggests it is best described in terms of interconnection and the flow of information; that’s a familiar approach in sf, from Stand on Zanzibar through cyberpunk to a work like River of Gods; and it’s not only sf that does this, but it tends to only be sf that has the characters recognise their position in such a world and comment on it. (In fact, it’s possible to read Stephenson’s extreme enthusiasm for trivia as an argument that a way of looking at the world that emphasizes information to this degree will inevitably become overwhelming.) The build-up to the Glorious Revolution as portrayed in Odalisque struck me as sfnal for two more specific reasons, as well. First is the way that Stephenson clearly teases us with the alternate-history possibility of assassinating William of Orange: “If they happened to light on the particular stretch of beach where William goes sand-sailing, at the right time of the morning, why, they could redraw the map, and rewrite the future history, of Europe in a few minutes’ work”, says one character, to which another responds that “It is a clever conceit, like a chapter from a picaroon-romance” (652-3). And second, there seemed to be something sfnal in the way that Daniel perceives the coming revolution: as a gateway to a new world.

It is characteristic (although not universally true) of sf revolutions that they elide the pragmatic details of their construction, and focus on the world to come. There is something almost religious about this view of historical progress, and it’s a tendency Stephenson neatly draws out of Daniel, who initially argues that the Puritans who believed the Apocalypse was due in 1666 were on to something, and that they “merely got the particulars wrong … If idolatry is to mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized, then that is what they did with the symbols that are set down on the Book of Revelation … I would say that we might bring about the Apocalypse now with a little effort … not precisely the one they phant’sied, but the same, or better, in its effects” (743). Later he glorifies the process still further: “rebellion is … a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it” (810). Since we know that there are still two thousand pages to go, we can assume that Daniel’s idealism is going to be sorely tested, but it falls, significantly, to Enoch to sound the cautionary note, when Daniel reiterates his grand desires:

“In a few years Mr Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid — what we call a Cartesian grid, though ’twas not his idea — and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters — and that will be the end of Alchemy.”

“‘Tis a noble pursuit, and I wish you Godspeed,” Root said, “but remember the poles.”

“The poles?”

“The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together — no longer parallel and separate, but converging and all one.”

“That is nothing but a figment of geometry.”

“But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr Waterhouse, figments become real.” (881)

It’s not just that who is looking matters; it’s how they’re looking. How very — dare I say it? — postmodern. The system of the world defines the world: it’s immediately after the Glorious Revolution, with its promise of a truer participatory democracy, that Stephenson tells us the word “shopping” has appeared in the English language. Welcome to consumerism. Equally, reality will always fall short of the idea, and it’s not a surprise that Daniel finds the Revolution, when it comes, somewhat anticlimactic, and makes plans to leave for another New World: he’s a utopian. He can’t stop chasing the future.

All of which probably makes it sound as though I really liked Odalisque, when in fact I thought it merely not bad. Certainly the problems with the book are less pronounced than in the earlier installments – as all of the above hopefully demonstrates, I think this time you can actually draw a coherent argument out of it – but there is fundamentally too much stuff. Individual threads may be beautiful, but the tapestry as a whole is no better than workmanlike. To be clear, I don’t think this is a case of bloat: I think everything that is in the book is meant to be in the book, because I still think Stephenson wants us to see the hints of a System of the World that makes the relations between all the disparate elements of the narrative as clear as the relations between the disparate items of Newton’s research. That, I think, is meant to be the key, which like the key to Eliza’s letters would explain why there have to be five words every time one would do, which would unlock the encryption of this history, which would reveal the plaintext. It just seems like meagre reward.

London Meeting: Terrance Dicks

A day early on this one: the guest at tomorrow’s London Meeting is author and Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks. He’ll be interviewed by Tim Phipps.

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

The meeting is free and open to anyone who’s interested, and the interview will start at 7pm, although there’ll be people around in the bar from 6; in fact, I may even aim to get there earlier, since I suspect this one will be busy.

SFF Masterclass, Summary

Image006

The short version: I’m still processing.

The longer version: That was a lot of fun. The aim of the masterclass, says the original blurb on the Foundation website, is “to provide those who have a serious interest in sf criticism with the opportunity to exchange ideas with leading figures in the field, and also to use the SFF Collection”. Well, the latter was out of the frame this year — the Liverpool University library is being refurbished, so the class was held in London — but I’m not sure I or anyone else missed it terribly, and I’d say the first objective was resoundingly met. (From the sound of Jonathan’s summary, the post-masterclass Monday brunch at the Clutes’ place was also something to behold in this regard, but alas I couldn’t make that.) Since I don’t think I’ve explained the format of the masterclass before now, here’s the schedule:

Friday 20 June
10.00–13.00: Geoff Ryman
13.00–14.00 Lunch
14.00–17.00 Wendy Pearson

Saturday 21 June
10.00–13.00: Gary K. Wolfe
13.00–14.00 Lunch
14.00–17.00 Geoff Ryman

Sunday 22 June
10.00–13.00: Wendy Pearson
13.00–14.00 Lunch
14.00–17.00 Gary K. Wolfe

I don’t want to go into too much detail at this point about what each tutor covered, since I have ambitions of breaking that out into separate posts. But, briefly, I do want to say that I thought the three went together very well. Geoff Ryman’s sessions were about reading as a writer, first with a detailed look at Stand on Zanzibar, and then with sentence-by-sentence readings of the first chapter of Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Maker and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed”. Wendy Pearson talked about postmodernism and queer theory, and then encouraged us to apply it to such stories as “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” by Raphael Carter and The Child Garden. (Hopeful Monsters would have come in here, but we never made it to that one.) And Gary Wolfe set out to persuade us that, one, trying to defend sf against attacks like this is basically futile, and may make things worse (defend the work, not the genre); and two, that most of sf’s subgenres are useless as labels, or at least should be handled with extreme caution. He also talked a bit about the practice of reviewing. And enabled some bad puns. I’d be hard-pressed to say which of these three I found the most interesting or useful; I was certainly most resistant to Pearson’s sessions, for reasons I probably need to think about a bit more, but all three contained nuggets of practical information that I can actually use.

It’s worth mentioning the venue: Kitap Evi on Tottenham High Road. As I mentioned, the Liverpool library is being refurbished, so the masterclass wouldn’t have been there whatever happened; but the original plan was for it to be held in conjunction with the SFRA conference in Dublin. Unfortunately, the Dublin meeting had to be cancelled, and a new venue was found pretty much at the last minute. Kitap Evi is a cafe downstairs and a Turkish bookshop/internet cafe upstairs, and it worked brilliantly; it was just the right size, and gave the whole meeting a nice, intimate feel. (It could perhaps have done with better ventilation upstairs in the afternoon, but that’s a minor cavil.) And the other thing to do, of course, is to thank the other masterclass attendees, all the people I mentioned in my earlier post and the rest — everyone participated in the discussions at some point, which as Jonathan said really brought home the usefulness of an extended critical community.

Other photos can be found here.

Locus Award Winners

See here; finalists here.

SF Novel
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

I think this puts paid to the repeated suggestions that Chabon doesn’t have enough popular support to be a viable candidate for the Hugo. I think he’s going to win.

Fantasy novel
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)

Young adults book
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

First novel
Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)

Novella
“After the Siege”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)

Novelette
“The Witch’s Headstone”, Neil Gaiman (Wizards)

I admit to a feeling of relief that this one didn’t go to “Trunk and Disorderly”. That’s a bad story. But to be honest, “The Witch’s Headstone” felt too much like the novel-excerpt it is to really deserve this.

Short story
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007)

Collection
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)

I’m a little surprised Doctorow didn’t win this category as well; I think I also would have preferred it to go to a new collection, rather than a retrospective. Still, Connie Willis Always Wins, I guess.

Anthology
The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)

Non-fiction
Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)

I’d have gone with (and indeed voted for) the collection of Russ’s reviews; but this is good too.

Art book
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)

Editor
Ellen Datlow

Magazine
F&SF

Publisher
Tor

Artist
Charles Vess

Overall: for me a solid list of winners, but — particularly in the short fiction categories — not a particularly exciting one.

SFF Masterclass, Day One

So, today was the first day of the long-anticipated Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in SF Criticism, 2008 edition, at which several denizens of these parts were present. (And a bunch of other people too.) The format was straightforward: a morning session led by Geoff Ryman, structured as a writer’s close reading of Stand on Zanzibar, and an afternoon session led by Wendy Pearson, in which we discussed postmodernism, queer theory, and “The Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”. It would be fair to say I’m still digesting many of the issues the day raised, but it was all thoroughly stimulating. As a teaser, here are Geoff Ryman’s four tests for judging whether formal innovation in fiction is successful:

  1. It should not be confusing. The purpose of formal innovation is to provide greater insight into or access to either emotion or information; it should work without needing an instruction manual (or critics) to explain it.
  2. It should be fun. To take form seriously is to overvalue it; formal innovation is (or should be) driven by wit, freedom, and playfulness.
  3. It should be useful for something that couldn’t be achieved another way.
  4. It should do more than one thing at a time (as should most elements of prose fiction)

The Link Garden

Stand on Zanzibar

Superpowers UK coverThe plot: probably the least interesting aspect of the whole book, but here you go. There are two main threads, developing from the lives of two room-mates in 2010 New York, both of which involves first-world intervention in third-world nations. Norman House, VP at General Technics, ends up managing a huge investment in the (fictional) ex-colonial African nation of Beninia, at the behest of the ailing president; meanwhile, Donald Hogan, who works as an information synthesizer for the government, is “activated”, brainwashed with super-action-spy-skills, and sent to the (equally fictional) South-East Asian island nation Yatakang, where the government has announced they have the capability to create genetically enhanced supermen. Surrounding this narrative is a penumbra of vignettes, extracts from books, song lyrics, transcripts of videos, and much else, often but not always related to the main action in some way, which serve to flesh out the world.

What they thought then, part one: M. John Harrison, New Worlds 186 (January 1969):

… an application of the Dos Passos technique to the speculative field, a massive collage of a book that offers a broad fictional extrapolation from current events. Brunner presents as his protagonist an unbalanced society, consumer oriented and consuming itself to death. Violence and the special poverties of utopia set the tone; race riots; genetic control, and an East-West confrontation are balanced by ephemeral close-ups of personal frustration. Admass manipulators attempting to peg the status quo demolish human dignity from above while guerilla-action and anarchy attack it from below. This is a well-conceived book — a satisfyingly complete vision — marred by a lack of metaphor. Brunner is an inventive writer; his ability to theorise and document a feasible future is undeniable. But his success in evoking that future through images is limited. And his solution of the violence problem, though clever, is superfluous — it might have been more effective simply to state the problem.

What they thought then, part two: It won the Hugo in 1969, beating Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, Nova by Samuel R Delany, Past Master by RA Lafferty, and The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak.

Commentary, part one: Harrison is surely right about the completeness of Stand on Zanzibar‘s future being its most satisfying aspect; as is the way in any multi-threaded novel, not every thread is equally interesting all of them time, but every thread in is interesting at some point. The sheer number of trends extrapolated is staggering, and not just because some of the predictions seem spookily accurate, but because they’re integrated in a way that makes them seem part of the same society, and because Brunner is quite bold in connecting his present to his future — there’s even a complete history of fashion, at one point. I’m not sure, though, that the balance is completely satisfactory — I would have liked to believe that the world was the true character, say, but Hogan and House kept getting in the way — and I’m not sure that I buy Harrison’s take on the ending, which is surely powerful precisely because the solution it identifies is beyond the reach of the characters to grasp.

I haven’t read any of the other novels on that year’s Hugo shortlist, but it strikes me as a worthy winner.

The structure: There are four types of chapter, which largely do what they say, although there is some fluidity of material and style between different types. “Context” provides, typically, an extract from a book, or some other document, or a transcript of something or other, which explains the background of this 2010. “This Happening World” is about tracking the real-time of the world, and mixes thing up: a couple of lines of dialogue, an advertising slogan, a couple of lines from an article of some kind. “Tracking with Closeups” are the character vignette chapters, minor characters who may appear later in the main Hogan/House plot, or who may just be glancingly affected by some aspect of it. And “Continuity” is the meat of the story. As many will tell you (the detractors, cheerfully so), the style is more or less lifted from John Dos Passos’ USA; but for obvious infodump-related reasons, it’s a style extraordinarily well-suited to science fiction (and to this type of science fiction), and Brunner makes good use of it. It’s a steal for honorable purpose.

Vocabulary, a selection: Zecks (executives); Codders (men); Bleeding (swearword); Sheeting (ditto); Mucker (someone run amok); Block (never quite worked this one out); Shiggy (sort of a professionally single woman); Afram (African American); Hole (swearword, replaces “hell”); prowlie (police car); orbiting (getting high). Some of this works, some of it doesn’t. While the thought behind, say, “bleeding” is good — it’s replaced words like “bastard” and “bugger”, which are now considered purely descriptive without stigma attached to them, while hemophilia, as a heritable disease, is something to be ashamed of — I could never quite hear anyone saying it with the necessary force. In general I admired Brunner’s attempts at stylistic diversity, without thinking all of them equally successful.

What they thought a bit later: Brian Aldiss, p 367 of Trillion Year Spree (1986):

This sort of unlikely and unpleasant melodrama militates against the lively intellectual dance going on elsewhere, and eventually overwhelms it. Before that, Brunner conducts a teach-in on modern moralities, aided by Chad Mulligan, a sort of hippie philosopher. As with all Propter-figures, as with Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw, Mulligan wearies, being an author mouthpiece. He puts us all to rights and even out-talks Shalmaneser. The book becomes too long. … But it is an interesting experiment, because it marks a stage along the road, midway between pulp and social commentary.

Commentary, part two: I don’t disagree with Aldiss’ assessment of the way House/Hogan’s story gradually becomes overpowering (see above), but I thought Chad Mulligan livened up the book considerably, something I emphatically cannot say about the Heinleinian equivalents. Perhaps it’s because I never did feel he was an author mouthpiece, at least not in the sense that I believed Brunner believed everything he had Mulligan say, or that I was expected to believe it; in the sense that Mulligan was a way of spinning out notions in front of an audience, maybe. Perhaps, also, it’s because I feel that Mulligan gets to put his finger on the heart of the book when he asks Shalmaneser what it would take for the computer to believe in Beninia. Suspension of disbelief is a key question for any book that positions itself anywhere along the utopia/dystopia line: what would it take for us to believe in the possibility of a better world, or better people?

Predictions, part one: accurate. Implanted contraceptives. Hyperactive media. Gay marriage. TiVo. Genetic modification (and industrial pharma, to an extent). Privacy, or lack thereof, as a key social issue. Puffa jackets. Globalisation.

Genre descendents: Big chunks of cyberpunk; maybe The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson; Counting Heads by David Marusek; River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

Predictions, part two: inaccurate. The reliance on big central computers. The absence of peak oil and climate change. Continuing cold war-esque paranoia. The introduction of eugenics laws to control population growth. Sexual mores.

On shiggies: I have to say, I didn’t find the gender roles nearly as outdated or troubling as I’d been led to expect, which is not to say the book is unproblematic in this area. On the plus side, the shiggies — essentially the free love movement extrapolated into a whole social class — were depicted, so far as I noticed, without a trace of disapproval, and there were numerous female characters in prominent and powerful roles (not least the head of General Technics). What was missing, though, was a sense of balance, which in a way is a microcosm of my reservations about the novel’s overall structure, which is to say that although lots of female characters are mentioned, and have speaking parts, none of them are central in the way that Hogan, House and Mulligan are. Similarly, I’d have expected there to be male shiggies as well as female shiggies, and I didn’t notice any.

What they think now, part one: Adam Roberts, p.248 of his Palgrave History of Science Fiction (2006):

Other titles from the decade now seem less significant, despite being praised extravagantly in their own day. The British author John Brunner’s (1934-1995) Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is a lengthy disquisition layered over a sort of spy plot, set in a monstrously overpopulated world. But its choppy, “experimental” style, lifted directly from the work of the American Modernist John Dos Passos (1896-1970) seems second-hand and over-boiled, and the premise of the novel has a phlogistonic lack of contemporary bite (overpopulation had not brought the world to a standstill by the start of the twenty-first century, and will not do so by the start of the twenty-second either). Of course, Brunner was not alone in thinking his premise sharply relevant: many writers in the 1960s and 1970s adopted positions of Malthusian gloominess on the subject of overpopulation; a better treatment of the theme than Brunner’s (better because rooted in a Pulp terseness rather than a High Modernist prolixity) is Harry Harrison’s (b.1925) Make Room! Make Room! (1966).

What they think now, part two: Geoff Ryman, in SFX 168 (April 2008) [pdf]:

Every page has both a great SF idea and an emotional twist to the story. Its technique is kaleidoscopic … This wouldn’t work if Brunner wasn’t so good at different voices. This age’s hip commentator, Chad Mulligan, is quoted from at length. To an extent he’s Brunner’s mouthpiece (and a great way to info-dump) but he also convinces as a radical and original thinker … The world feels pretty much like now — which is when it’s set, not in 1968, the year it was first published … there is no other British SF novel I can think of with this breadth of invention, character and setting. There is something of Dickens in the vast panorama, the mix of wit, terror, sentiment, and satirical characters.

Commentary, part three: I find myself somewhere between messrs Roberts and Ryman. I don’t think the kaleidoscopic view is entirely successful; but nor do I think it by any means stale, particularly early on, when the disorienting effect of immersion is at its most powerful. Roberts is right to point out that the concerns about overpopulation don’t feel as pressing as they apparently did when Brunner was writing the book, but the way in which it asks what it is about humans that limits our ability to live together, that seems to make terrorism or solipsism such common responses to living in Brunner’s future, chimed with me. It also seemed to me a novel provocative on the subject of racial issues and interactions (much more so, actually, than on gendered ones; take that as you will), asking valid questions about postcolonial global relations. What it takes for countries to live together, if you like, and whether benevolent intervention is even possible (whether or not desirable). Which is to say that in many ways it did still feel like now; an alternate version of now, admittedly, but a tomorrow I could recognise.

See also: Wikipedia page here; Karen Burnham’s take here.

The Happening

If I see one more review that lambasts an M. Night Shyamalan film for not having a twist, I’m going to scream. It happens every time they’re released: a certain proportion of reviewers are apparently so unable to evaluate a film on its own that they reinterpret Shyamalan’s effort through a filter of expectation that, inevitably, does it no favours. This is by no means to say that Shyamalan is some maligned genius: Lady in the Water, for instance, was a mess. But while The Happening is by no means perfect, it is an idiosyncratic, interesting experiment that succeeds more than it fails. It’s unsettling at points, and scary twice; expect a twist, though, and you’ll be disappointed.

What you get, as many reviews have noted, is a B-movie disaster by way of Alfred Hitchcock. The film lives up to both halves of that comparison in multiple ways. For the first half, there’s the basic premise behind the happening itself — which, if you haven’t seen a trailer, is that people suddenly start committing mass suicide for no apparent reason. Given that the first tentative explanations are proposed just as the characters are approaching a small town called Hokum, I think it’s fairly clear that we’re not meant to take it entirely seriously (if I did, I would have to conclude that it’s based on an understanding of plant biology that is either much deeper than my own or much, much worse; but this is a film in which all science is Science, with a capital S). Moreover, both the acting and the dialogue are heavily stylised — but in a broad monster movie way, rather than the low-key, heavily naturalistic way of Shyamalan’s earlier films, with lots of heavily telegraphed reaction shots, and clunky observations. And the couple at the heart of the film (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) are almost unnaturally wholesome, in a way that recalls caricatures of ’50s America. Wahlberg’s character seems lost and bewildered, while Deschanel’s secret shame, endearingly, is that she went out for dessert with another man. Both frequently make big eyes at the screen, and each other.

But Shyamalan must know he’s set himself a near-impossible task in his choice of story, because at first glance it requires him to make inanimate objects scary. (It actually requires him to make an invisible force scary, a much easier sell because it can be made visible through its effect on people, but there’s still an initial hurdle to jump.) Which is where the second half of my earlier comparison comes in, because to a large extent he gets away with it. The Happening has a lot more laughs than you’d expect, almost all of which come from character interaction, or from moments when characters acknowledge that what’s happening is simply bizarre; and then something horrible will happen. Which is to say that although the film acknowledges, in various ways, its hokeyness, Shyamalan follows its implications through with conviction, often playing on the tension between terror and laughter. It helps that he’s admirably callous about killing off supporting characters (a lot of whom are very deftly drawn; I particularly liked the jittery private who’s seen most of his base kill themselves), and it helps that he excels at set-pieces and disturbing images. People walking off a building, as seen from the street; or a shot of a gun being successively picked up and then dropped by people shooting themselves in the head; or a car that starts accelerating towards something off-screen, such that you only get a second to realise that the driver’s lost it and is heading for a tree; or a mass hanging. Sometimes he shows you something traditionally gruesome, but more often he manages to make you think he’s going to show you something gruesome, and then pulls away at the last second.

Moreover, there’s much less of a sense of hubris about this film than there was about Shyamalan’s recent efforts. There’s no architect-figure cameo, for instance — indeed, unless I blinked and missed it, no cameo at all. There’s an ecological message, but it’s not thumped home, largely because the most portentious dialogue is placed in the mouths of characters whose grasp on reality may be a bit more fragile than the average; the film is pacy, and over quicker than you expect, if sometimes shamelessly contrived in its plotting; and in general, it feels like a film that sets out to please its audience, rather than its director. It may or may not succeed in that — reviews suggest that I’m in a minority, although the audience I saw it with seemed to get into the spirit of things — but for its distinctively personal approach, I’m bound to admire it. Perhaps I can pay The Happening no higher compliment than this: I can’t wait to see what Nick Lowe makes of it.