Eve's Alexandria

Runaway First Person

He taps in extreme well-being. And right away, he's swamped. In a world of free information, the journey of a single step begins in a thousand microcommunities. Inconceivable hours of global manpower have already trampled all over every thought he might have and run it to earth with boundless ingenuity. Even that thought, a digitally proliferating cliche...

I think it's fair to say that Generosity (2010), by Richard Powers, was the outlier on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. There's one every year - the leftfield pick, published outside the genre - and while I don't wish to suggest that I approached Powers' novel with a prejudging wariness, it's true that, over the years that I've been blogging the award, these lit-fic entries on the shortlist have rarely been to my taste. (With the exception of the marvellous Far North, which, if there was any justice, would have taken the prize last year.) It's not that I will only read sf, or am opposed to literary fiction (far from it); it's that the novels concerned don't seem to perform either of their modes particularly convincingly. It's as if the two genres somehow cancel each other out, leaving behind little but a bunch of ideas that genre-sf did to death decades ago, which are also couched in the overwrought sentences of a writer who thinks terribly, terribly hard about language, but still hasn't really worked out what to do with it.

Enter Generosity, and I think you can probably guess where I'm going with this. Alas, no, it's not another Far North. In Powers' favour, the treatment of his sfnal Macguffin (genetics), while hardly cutting edge for the genre, is both more or less topical and much less hackneyed than, say, Margaret Atwood's foray into the same field with Oryx and Crake. (As a rule, I adore Atwood's work, but Oryx and Crake is a not a very good novel.) Unfortunately, and for reasons that are at least thematically understandable, he chooses to pair genetics with postmodernism. Yay, it's another fictional story about how fictional fiction is! Largely narrated by a writer teaching creative writing! How astonishing and revolutionary! I never heard of such a thing before! As my esteemed co-blogger here at Alexandria is fond of saying, shoot me with a spoon. (Dreams of Speaking has nothing much to do with the point I'm making here, but any excuse to link to it again...)

Again, to be clear: it's not that I hate postmodernism, or am uninterested in interrogating the assumptions of narrativity, etc. etc. (Actually, the latter is kind of my day job.) It's that I'm bored with postmodernism for its own sake - when it's presented as if drawing attention to narrativity remains something revelatory in itself, as opposed to a technique that's at least as old as Don Quixote. Especially when it's this solipsistic and tedious:

This place is some other Second City. This Chicago is Chicago's in vitro daughter, genetically modified for more flexibility. And these words are not journalism. Only journey.

This appears to be turning into a rather grumpy post, so I think I'll call it a night and resume on the morrow.

--

Let those two little dashes stand in for the two and a half months in which I failed to resume this post. Ahem.

So. An early middle-aged man with stalled writing career, named Russell, takes a job teaching evening classes in creative writing at his local community college; he narrates the results to us, with excruciating self-consciousness, via a persona self-described as "hapless" and "flavorless", as if hanging a lampshade over some of his faults in advance might encourage us to indulgently overlook them, or to ignore the problems that go deeper than his self-deprecation. (It doesn't work.) Among his otherwise interchangeable students is a young woman named Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian who has fled the horrors of civil war for a new life in Chicago, and whose primary quality is that despire all she has suffered - "misery that would have broken saints", Russell opines - she is happier than anyone else around her. She "radiates awe at ever having survived adolescence", we're told, and soon the others in the class are "addicted to the woman's elation".

Thassa's uncanny joy comes to attract attention from both science and the media, and at length she is being tested for the presence of a 'happiness gene', while Russell is, of course, worrying about what all this means for the future of writing fiction. There is some interesting stuff in here about how people might react to such investigations, and in particular the role that popular media plays in mediating public understanding of science, both responsibly and otherwise; we're shown snippets of sensationalist documentaries, online discussions, and even a televised debate as news of the discoveries begins to filter into public awareness. Russell, with predictable melodrama, reimagines Thassadit as a trafficked child sold into eeevil scientific slavery, reflecting gloomily that research into how genetics affect behaviour "would never have passed my ethics board", because he finds the idea of free will rather poetic, even if the reality is a bit more complex and even if understanding that reality might actually improve some people's lives.

For a while it seems like the intermittent postmodernism of the narrative might be a jumping-off point rather than a punch-line. The televised debate - between a novelist and a scientist - raises some interesting issues. The novelist becomes the harbinger of doom, declaring that

genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature. Take control of fate, and you destroy everything that joins us to one another and dignifies life. A story with no end or impediment is no story at all.

The scientist, by contrast, suggests that knowing more about human nature is unlikely to change it in any fundamental way. Even if it might be possible in the future to introduce the so-called happiness gene into a wider section of society, it will never stop us imagining other possibilities. Through him, Powers posits the emergence of a revolutionary new type of fiction:

We'll never feel enhanced. We'll always be banned from some further Eden. When fiction goes real, reality will need a more resistant strain of fiction.

And it's true that I wanted to cheer at a well-deserved put-down - with reference to Brave New World - of the novelist's idea that pain is somehow ennobling, and that we are lesser without it:

That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanism, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering all this time?

A shame, then, that so much of the book revolves around Russell's paean to human suffering, in the form of his essentially self-centred worship of Thassadit, and the novel's failure to problematise this in any compelling way. Thassadit, you see, is idealised and exoticised relentlessly; she is the Noble Savage transplanted to the 21st century, continually referred to as "the Algerian" or "the Berber" and extravagantly admired much more than she is treated like a human being:

"May I go next?"

Before Stone can wonder how she learned her modal verbs better than the native speakers, she starts her entry. Her voice is one of those mountain flutes, somehow able to weave a second melody around the one it plays. Russell misses the gist of the words, he's so wrapped up in the cadence of the sentences. It's something out of the dawn of myth, set in a Chicago all but animist.

I might have taken passages like this - in which Russell is so caught up in his imagining of Thassadit that he doesn't listen to, or report on, a damn word she says - as a commentary on how idealisation of the Other is no better than kneejerk denigration. The image of womanhood on a pedestal, the noble savage, the magical negro: this is just objectification with a smile, which essentialises and depersonalises its target even as it claims to Really, Really Admire it. (You know the school of thought: No, really, I'm not sexist, I'm just in awe of how women manage to find things in supermarkets while their menfolk wander around in passive aggressive, not-at-all-learned helplessness! And isn't it amazing how women are just naturally so much better at housework than men; it couldn't possibly be because I never lift a finger to help - or, gods forbid, to do something on my own initiative - because I'm too busy thinking big, manly thoughts. Etc.) The object is worshipped, but only if it continues to conform to the ideal form created for it; it certainly doesn't get to have thoughts or feelings of its own outside that mould.

Alas, my confidence in this as a reading drained away as chapter after chapter went by with neither voice nor much in the way of agency for Thassadit. (Well, there is one tiny point-of-view scene, on pp. 253-4 of the copy I read.) Then there's an exceptionally tone-deaf episode in which one of the guys from the class, overcome by Thassadit's inner glow, tries to rape her, only to be fought off by the sheer strength of her saintly forgiveness. (Russell, predictably, blames himself: "You know this story. Everyone knows this story but her. The Berber wouldn't know how to read this story for the life of her." Another character tries to jolt him out of this solipsism, but the way she does it is really not an improvement: the attack failed, so clearly Thassa can take care of herself, so clearly everything is all right!) Reader, I felt ill.

As the story wears on, Thassa becomes not more but less real. When she - guess! - starts to suffer the effects of unlooked-for world-wide fame (she has no antibodies against unhappiness, we're told), Russell's attachment to her grows to fetishistic proportions. This might be interesting - Thassa is increasingly subsumed into the role Russell once imagined for her, someone "who might have walked out of a story he once dreamed of writing" - except that there is nothing to challenge Russell's storyfication of her. The more the idea of new ways of writing are floated ("post-genomic fiction, one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause's effect"), the more this feels like an age-old story in which the lines of power are wearyingly familiar: the privileged write the world after their own, limited imaginations, and everyone else can either sit on their pedestals and beam, or be crushed in such a way to give the narrator something to angst over. Ennoblingly.

~~Nic

"They're fighting a war over who can be most peaceful."

We ride after the army thru the west end of town, down the main road, past what can only be the wreckage of the original jails the Answer burnt down in their biggest attack before today. I only ever been down here once, when I ran thru it the other way with Viola in my arms, carrying her down the zigzag road when she was dying, carrying her into what I thought was safety, but all I found was the man riding by my side, the man who killed a thousand Spackle to start this war, the man who tortured Viola for informayshun he already knew, the man who murdered his own son--

"And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?" he says, reading my Noise. "What other kind of man is suitable for war?"

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.

"Wrong," says the Mayor. "It's war that makes us men in the first place. Until there's war, we are only children."

For various reasons, despite my good intentions - and a two-book head start on the shortlist - I singularly failed to get my Arthur C Clarke Award reading and posting finished in time this year. The always enjoyable Award reception was just two weeks ago, now; the prize went to Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, a result that pleased me, even if I was rooting for Ian McDonald's completely fabulous The Dervish House.

The fact that it's all over for this year doesn't mean I'm not going to write about the rest of the shortlist, mind. Next up is Monsters of Men, the characteristically intense concluding volume of Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy (books one and two of which I discussed here). More or less as I'd learned to expect by this stage, the final instalment proved to be another unabashed emotional rollercoaster, brimming with yelling, cliffhangers, explosions, yelling over the sound of explosions, and plain old Noise. It was, in short, good to be back with Todd and Viola, Ness' brave, determined, and fiercely loyal pair of narrators. If book one was a road movie, and book two a dystopia, book three plunges us into war, on at least three different fronts.

[Spoilers follow for the first two books, along with minor spoilers for this one. But frankly, if you intend to read the trilogy, it'd be better all round if you shut the computer down now, and come back to this review when you're done.]

The Chaos Walking trilogy is set on a distant planet that human beings begun colonising some decades ago - hospitable, but for one environmental quirk that has caused serious social rupture among the first wave of settlers: every living thing on the planet, whether it evolved there or travelled across space to reach the place and only arrived yesterday, thinks out loud. Constantly, and inescapably - with one or two very strong-minded exceptions - everyone broadcasts their thoughts to everyone else, in a buzz of words and emotions known as Noise. Everyone, that is, except human women. Some men learned, grudgingly, to accept this; some isolated themselves from human contact; a few, however, reacted badly to the abrupt appearance of such an unignorable new power differential at the heart of human society (and one that, moreover, favoured women). Widescale gendered violence was the dark secret of the settlers' past that Todd discovered during the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go; in book two, The Ask and the Answer, tensions over this issue - and more generally over who would shape the future of the planet's human community - boiled over into fresh violence and some deeply disturbing repressive governance.

The story resumes in Monsters of Men with things getting even worse - it seems impossible, but it's true - for the inhabitants of Haven/New Prentisstown. Just as the city's leading figures - the Mayor, a brutal dictator with the power of mind control, and his implacable rival Mistress Coyle, a death-obsessed terrorist - have succeeded in bringing the population to open civil war, two groups of newcomers appear. The first is an army of Spackle, the planet's indigenous inhabitants, who fought a war with the human settlers some decades back, and were subsequently enslaved by them in large numbers; they are Not Happy. The second set of arrivals are the two-person crew of a scout ship, sent ahead of the main body of fresh human settlers - the same sort of ship that crash-landed in The Knife of Never Letting Go, killing all of its passengers except Viola. The scout ship is tiny, but significantly better armed than anything on the face of the planet.

...What could possibly go wrong(er)?

And the Spackle keep coming, climbing over the bodies of soldiers, and their Noises are wide open and so are the Noises of every soldier and it's like a thousand wars at once, not just the one I'm seeing but ones happening over and over again in the Noise of the men and the Spackle round me till the air and the sky and my brain and my soul are filled with war and I'm bleeding it outta my ears and spitting it outta my mouth and it's like it's the only thing I ever knew, the only thing I can ever remember, the only thing that's ever gonna happen to me--

Oh, yes; that.

In my previous post on the trilogy, I discussed Ness' style at some length: fast-paced, confrontational first-person narration, peppered with incident and with bursts of staccato sentences and single-line paragraphs that drag the reader along to heart-in-mouth cliffhangers - and then inexorably over the page to the next chapter, to find out what happens next. Here, therefore, I'm going to concentrate largely on the final book's themes: violence, forgiveness, identity, and the sadly rather fudged conclusion to the arc about gender begun in The Knife of Never Letting Go.

To the primary narrators, Todd and Viola, Ness adds a very welcome third voice this time round: the Return, a deeply angry individual within the enormous Spackle army. In The Ask and the Answer, the enslaved Spackle of New Prentisstown were slaughtered in cold blood by the Mayor's men. The Return was the sole survivor of this massacre, an experience that has left him emotionally shattered, and bent on revenge; he comes back having raised an army of free Spackle. Through him we see how the Spackle - or rather, as they call themselves, the Land - have developed a society in which the involuntary sharing of one's thoughts and feelings through Noise is embraced as a source of harmony and a way of communicating without barriers, rather than feared and resented as a loss of privacy.

But the Return's time among the humans - the Clearing, in the Land's resonant terminology - has changed him in ways that make it hard for him to find a home with the Land. When he explains to the Land who he is, they react with "great shock, an astonished recoil" to the modified slave language that he speaks: "something so alien, so individual". He hears in their Noise the guilt and disgust his arrival provokes in them; even though they come to him, telling him,

that I was one of them, that I had returned to them now, that I was safe.

That I was not alone.

But before they did all of that, there was shock, there was distaste, there was dread, there was shame.

Here at last was the Land. And it was afraid to touch me.

He, in turn, is led to shut parts of himself off from them:

For I have lived my life among the Clearing and I have learned much from them.

Including how to hide my thoughts, how to conceal what I feel and think. How to layer my voice so it is harder to read.

Alone among the Land, I am not fully joined to the Land's single voice.

Not yet.

The Return is an extremely effective addition to Monsters of Men, deepening the trilogy's exploration of identity and belonging, and of agency and leadership. In the isolation of the Return's individuality lies both his destructiveness and his strength of character; cut off from the comfort of the collective, he can find no solace nor safe outlet for his rage, and - in common with all the major characters - carries out a series of reckless, selfish acts, repeatedly derailing attempts to resolve the situation with anything other than violence. But his singular experiences mean that he can also make complex, difficult choices (both good and bad) in a way that it is not obvious the rest of the Land can, and he is capable of - although intensely resistant to - compassion and regret. He has (very affecting) memories of the love he shared with his "one in particular", who was killed by the Mayor's men, and it is these memories that allow him to understand the feelings that drive Todd, even though they are enemies. It is for these qualities - the combination of individuality and fellow-feeling - that he is singled out as a potential future leader of the Land.

The Return is a much-needed expression of the other, non-human side of the story just as the two forces close in brutal battle; his viewpoint layers ambiguity over every episode in which the humans debate exactly how much violence they need to commit to protect themselves. And debate they do, although Bradley from the scout ship is in a minority with voice-of-reason retorts like this:

"They attacked us."

"After we attacked them," Bradley says. "After they attacked us, after we attacked them, and so on and so on until we're all dead."

Bradley is also the voice of unattainably impersonal objectivity; Todd and Viola, trying their best to resist the violence but getting drawn into it over and over again anyway, led by heart and gut against wisdom and reason, are closer to the difficult majority experience. The plot contrives to put each of them in peril at least once every hundred pages, forcing the other into a fraught, emotional cliffhanger and - at times - a panicked burst of protective violence, sense and broader consequences be damned. After one such act averted (by the fact that someone else took action before she did), Viola looks back with dread on what her feelings for Todd have made her capable of:

Simone and Mistress Coyle are arguing but I'm really not hearing them--

Because I also know this.

When Simone asked me what to do--

I was going to say fire the missile.

I was.

I was going to cause this damage myself. I was going to say, yes, do it, fire it--

Kill all these Spackle, these Spackle with their real reason to attack someone who deserves it more than anyone on this planet--

If it would have saved Todd, it wouldn't have mattered, I was going to do it--

Mistress Coyle rebukes Viola for "making it personal at the expense of the entire world", and Viola herself later wonders,

If this is what Todd and I would do for each other, does that make us right?

Or does it make us dangerous?

As the Return repeatedly demonstrates, letting emotion cloud judgement can have devastating effects for many more people than just yourself. At the same time - here, as on several occasions, the book will not allow an easy answer - it is the emotional tie between Todd and Viola that enables them to overcome the corrosive mood of war, to think past themselves and continue to view others with compassion. "It's because nothing and no-one matters to you that you're willing to blow the world to pieces!" says Viola in response to Mistress Coyle's rebuke, and while she is not entirely correct; Mistress Coyle's problem is that the thing that matters to her is an abstract ideal, and she cares about it so much that she is willing, time and again, to put it above any individual person, or group of people. Where Viola is a better person than Mistress Coyle is not in having someone who matters to her, but in recognising (most of the time) that others also have people who matter to them.

In keeping with one of the trilogy's stated themes, some of these perilous situations are not real, but the products of faulty, limited, or misinterpreted information. Ness has a great time with the possibilities offered by the scout ship's communications technology, chiefly a clutch of flying probes that can transmit images back to video screens within the ship. As might be expected, having an eye on events only adds complications. We duly get scenes where the view is blocked at a key moment; scenes where a probe is not close enough to pick up sound; and, of course, scenes where the thing cuts out just when it is most needed. It's not subtle in its manipulation of narrative tension, but it's compelling nonetheless, and helps drive home Ness' interest in the way blunders and pigheadedness often drive such conflict, even among well-meaning people.

Todd, too, is sucked into fighting by the side of the Mayor, the man he reviles, out of the faint hope that in doing so he will make Viola safe; in the process, he finds both horror - unsurprisingly, it turns out that war is even worse when you can hear the fear and pain of everyone around you, on both sides, in their Noise - and a grubby sort of exultation that brings him uncomfortably closer to the Mayor:

That's the nasty, nasty secret of war--

When yer winning

When yer winning, it's ruddy thrilling--

For their parts, the Mayor and Mistress Coyle find - for a time - some common ground in the common goal of leading people into violence ("'You can't just stop fighting and call it peace, my girl,' Mistress Coyle says. 'The war goes on even as you're negotiating with the enemy.' 'Quite so,' says the Mayor.") Mostly, though, they can't resist their old one-upmanship; neither one of them can bear to let their rival have an inch, refusing to see the situation as anything other than a zero-sum game even as their power struggle repeatedly jeopardises the survival of the settlers. This all starts to get repetitive, frankly, but Ness uses Todd and Viola's younger, more straightforward view of the world to mine some darkly funny satire as the Mayor and Coyle start "fighting a war over who can be most peaceful", with Viola explaining:

Mistress Coyle, meanwhile, looks happier than I've ever seen her. She's even started talking about how to make the truce. Apparently, this involves a lot of blowing things up. Mistress Braithwaite, who did my soldiering training what seems like a lifetime ago, plants bombs in trees, hoping to show the Spackle we can outwit them and also hoping to capture one who isn't killed in the blast. Then we'll send it back saying we'll keep blowing things up if they don't talk to us about peace.

Mistress Coyle swears this is how it worked last time.

Or, as Todd puts it, more succinctly:

You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them.

The fact that Todd is being succinct is a new development in Monsters of Men, the combined effect of his increasing control over his and others' Noise - as taught by the Mayor (never a good sign) - and his desire to hide from the traumas of the war. Cleverly, this is expressed both directly, as he reflects on how he has achieved this control, and in a more general withdrawal of Todd's narrative voice, a paring down of the giddy information overload of the younger Todd in the first two books. When Todd is hiding something from his Noise, he also hides it from the reader. This can be seen in the following extract, when the Mayor reveals - having, as ever, waited for the moment when sharing the information would give him the most power - that his subordinates have developed a cure for the blood poisoning he inflicted on New Prentisstown's women in book two:

"Why didn't you tell me, tho?" I say. "That you were close to a cure?"

"Because I didn't want to risk your disappointment if I failed."

He looks at me for a long time, trying to read me, but I'm so good at it now I don't think even he can hear me.

The Todd of Knife or Ask would have reacted to the Mayor's reply, at least in his narration; but in Monsters we are not always privy to his feelings. And if we are left out, so is Viola; her irritation at this demonstrates very neatly the imbalance that Noise creates between those who have it (and must reveal themselves) and those who don't (and thus can remain private), and I was delighted to see Todd calling her on her unthinking privilege, and the power it gives her over him:

"Viola, you know me. Out of everyone left alive on this planet, yer the one who does."

But I'm shaking my head. "Maybe not any more. Since I stopped being able to hear your--"

He really frowns at this. "So that's what you want, is it? I'm fine as long as you can hear everything I think but not the other way round? We're friends as long as you've got the power?"

"It's not about power, Todd. It's about trust--"

"And I ain't done enough for you to trust me?"

It's a shame, in light of this exchange, that Monsters of Men shies away from the central conflict and mystery of the trilogy: the fact that men have Noise, and women - alone of living things on the planet - do not. I share Abigail's frustration that the book fails to explore the issue - still less explain or resolve it - during what is, after all, a fairly hefty page count, and that the final statement on the matter is such a shallow one. A human character who has lived among the Land for some time - to say who it is would be a substantial spoiler - describes to Todd the wonderful future in which everyone, human and Land alike, will share in the joy of unfettered understanding through Noise, such that there "won't be any division twixt humans". When Todd not unreasonably points out that women don't have Noise - and surely, this reader editorialises with venomous sweetness, you couldn't possibly have forgotten that women are, y'know, humans too? - the other character brushes aside the objection as if it barely matters:

He stops. I'd forgotten, he says. It's been so long since I've really been around them. He brightens again. Spackle women have noise. And if there's a way for men to stop having Noise--he looks at me--There must be a way for women to start.

It's a cop-out, for which there is not a shred of in-story evidence beyond this ridiculous voice-of-God authorial intrusion; a head-patting there, there dear reassurance to shut down such killjoy objections. For a woman reader of what is otherwise a marvellously complex series of books, it's a deeply disappointing and alienating stumble at the final hurdle. In the heat of the reading moment, buoyed up by the heady action, it's easy to skim past it. But the further I get from the breakneck reading pace, the more bitter a taste this moment leaves behind.

~~Nic

Mutually Assured Desperation

The problem with my particular gift, curse, call it what you like, is that everybody's lost something. Stepping out in public is like walking into a tangle of cat's cradles, like someone dished out balls of string at the lunatic asylum and instructed the inmates to tie everything to everything else. On some people, the lost strings are cobwebs, inconsequential wisps that might blow away at any moment. On others, it's like they're dragging steel cables. Finding something is all about figuring out which string to tug on.

It's April, and that means tis the season to be blogging the Clarke Award. (Scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to read about the shortlists from the previous four years.) Anyway: two of the 2011 shortlistees I've already reviewed elsewhere; and so onto the third contender, the whip-smart fantastical noir Zoo City, Lauren Beukes' second novel.

Zoo City takes place in an alternate world, one distinguishable from our own largely by the exciting new way it has of marginalising people. Here, society's undesirables - the ones respectable folks won't live next door to, the ones passed over with a sneer for every legitimate job going, the ones hounded by the police for breathing and walking at the same time (but roundly ignored when they themselves are the victims of a crime) - are 'zoos', people whose guilt follows them around in the all-too-literal shape of an animal familiar. Acquired Asymbiotic Familiarism, as it is known officially, first appeared in the mid-1980s, and has been the subject of theorising and hysteria ever since; the afflicted - the 'animalled' - range from hardened criminals to those who, like the narrator, made some really bad choices. There is no indication in the book that an animal, once acquired, fades away with either repentance or time served; this is a stigma that lasts for life, reflecting actions that cannot be undone.

While zoos are demonised by the disapproving, and fetishised by the young and/or stupid - animals are on course to become essential fashion accessories for the edgier pop star, and there's even a Grand Theft Auto: Zootopia - the experience of having a familiar varies enormously. The book's first-person narrated chapters are interspersed with found footage-style extracts from scholarly articles, documentary film transcripts, and coffee table books about the phenomenon. The most interesting of these is Caged: Animalled Behind Bars, which reproduces interviews with people in prisons around the world. American and Australian interviewees explain how familiars operate as status symbols, the ferocity of your animal determining your place in the pecking order; in the Pakistan account, they're being used to torture inmates for information (hurting a familiar also hurts the one it's attached to). For others, they offer companionship. All come with compensatory fantastical abilities:

I oughta be pissed off, man. You can guess what it's like being in here with a Butterfly. Except for the stuff it lets me do.

See, when I go to sleep at night, I wake up as someone else. For the time I'm asleep, I live the day of someone else on the other side of the world. Man, I've been kids in Africa and India, I was once this old Chinese woman. Mostly I'm poor, but sometimes I get lucky and I'm rich.

What I'm saying is, I can't hate the Butterfly. Butterfly breaks me out of here every night.

Zinzi December, a former high-flying journalist who destroyed her career and her family with "a nasty drug habit", now scrapes a living by finding lost things; as described in the passage quoted at the head of this post, her Sloth familiar lends her the ability to 'see' connections between people and the things they have lost: "lost keys, love letters, beloved toys, misplaced photographs and missing wills. I even found a lost room once."

She lives in the Johannesburg slum of Zoo City. Her home is a crumbling, half burned-out tenement called - with savage irony - Elysium Heights, a place where, in the evenings, "[t]he smell of cooking - mostly food, but also meth - temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells". On the morning we meet her, the stairway down from her apartment - or, as she puts it, "this dank room with its precariously canted floor and intermittent plumbing" - is "mummified in yellow police tape" from a murder investigation that no-one bothered to pursue, so she has to drop through a hole in next door's floor, crunching across broken glass past an insensible junkie to find a route to the outside world.

Despite - or perhaps in reaction to - her environment, Zinzi is a chatty, jaunty narrator. Beukes gives her some wonderful, simile-rich turns of phrase, both at her own expense ("I've left distinctive tracks across three holes [of the golf course]: the common kitten-heeled hustler") and at others':

Emmanuel's grin drops from his face like a kicked puppy, bounces on the pavement and tumbles into the gutter with a little pitiful yelp.

Not all of these pithy one-liners are quite so pithy, or successful; "since Sloth I've been so monogamous I make the demonstration banana that Aids educators use to show how to put on a condom, look slutty" is a good idea, but in practice it just stumbles breathlessly over its subclauses. Still, mostly the technique makes for a punchy, page-turning read. It also lets details of the world - and of Zinzi's character - seep into the narrative naturally through the way she responds to what she sees, and the comparisons she reaches for, rather than requiring pauses for infodump.

Zinzi's self-presentation, too, is compelling: an infectious mixture of self-directed snark and prickly pride. She's up-front about her pratfalls and ebullient about the casual prejudice she is subject to, but at times her insistence on how she's so over the superficiality of her old life, and so down with her new one, rings hollow:

I reach past him to pull out a vintage navy dress with a white collar, match it up with jeans and slops, and finish off with a lime green scarf over the little dreadlock twists that conveniently hide the mangled wreckage of my left ear – let's call it Grace Kelly does Sailor Moon. This is not so much a comment on my style as a comment on my budget. I was always more of an outrageously expensive indie boutique kinda girl. But that was FL. Former Life.

Zinzi repeatedly juxtaposes these different aspects of herself to raise a smirk. On one occasion, she describes a bank of recording equipment at a client's house as "at least semi-pro, if I'm any judge of expensive. And I am"; then, further down the same page, she follows up with: "There's a bankie of dope inside. And it's quality, if I'm any judge of substances. And I am." She uses irony to keep herself at arm's length from the world she's dropped into, but there are signs that this - coping mechanism though it is - can be corrosive in its own way. In particular, she can be glib to an almost aggressive degree when discussing both how far she has fallen, and the reasons why. She describes her familiar, Sloth, as "my own personal scarlet letter"; meeting her ex for the first time since she did a swan dive into junkiehood and he dodged the worst of the consequences to keep his job and his old life, she provides a snarky running commentary on his discomfort:

"Sorry, yeah, guys, this is my friend I told you about?" Gio's tone is loaded with things left unsaid. "Zinzi December. We used to work together." Sleep together. Take drugs together. Sleep together while taking drugs together at work together. It was a simple relationship, really.

She is even willing - with some regret, albeit mostly for her own pride - to milk the harm she did to her family, if she thinks it will help her on a case:

"What point do you wish you could go back to?"

"You first."

"The moment before I got my brother killed."

"Heavy," says S'bu, but I can tell he's impressed. And this is what I've come to, breaking out my worst personal tragedy to pry open a teenager. If I hadn't already hit my ultimate low, this would be a close contender.

Looked at one way, it is this willingness to exploit anything that got her into this situation in the first place; looked at another way, Zinzi no longer has the luxury of scruples. The comparative calm and safety of Zoo City for its inhabitants, she says, is one of "mutually assured desperation". To pay off her drug debts, Zinzi is locked into a sideline in 419 scams run by the people she owes, and there is a blithe callousness in the way she reels off her resume:

People want to believe: you just have to feed them plausible constructs. [...] I brush the dusting of Mongoose fur and flea eggs off my laptop, and flick open the screen to see if the phish have been biting.

I've become a master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam. A broken levee and an old lady with a flooded mansion, desperate to sell her priceless antiques cheap-cheap. A Chechnyan refugee fleeing the latest Russian pogroms with her family's diamonds in tow. A Somali pirate who has found Jesus and wants to trade in his rocket launcher and ransom millions for absolution.

It's all topical. All rooted in the hard realities of the world. Ironic that Former Life I never watched the news. But then, lifestyle journalists don't have to.

She is not without feeling; a scene where she meets two of her marks to seal the deal, posing as a traumatised refugee from some horrific internecine conflict, is excruciating for her as well as for the reader. But most of the time she manages to avoid thinking about the consequences of her actions for other people, or the fact that her lover, Benoit, really is a refugee, one haunted by the fear that he left his wife behind to die in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The central thread of the story sees Zinzi pressganged, through a combination of veiled threats and flat-out financial necessity, into taking on the sort of case - a missing person, the most difficult and painful of lost things to seek - she'd sworn never to attempt again. Like any good noir, the plot thickens swiftly, the complications and betrayals pile on, and our heroine spirals down into ever seedier and more dangerous circles, taking more than a few punches to the gut (literal and figurative) along the way. I have some reservations about the ending - although, unlike Niall, not for any excess of neatness, but rather for the utterly bonkers grand Guignol of it all, which seems to belong in a different register than the rest of the book.

This is an assured, gripping novel held together by a strong, appealing narrative voice and the courage of its convictions; I'm very pleased to see it getting the attention of the Clarke Award jury - even if it's more fantasy than sf, to my mind! I can't wait to see what Beukes does next.

~~Nic

The Sum of All Possible Galileos

The four stars were moving around Jupiter, orbiting it in the same way the moon orbited the Earth. He was seeing circular orbits edge-on; they lay nearly in a single plane, which was also very close to the plane of the ecliptic, in which the planets themselves moved.

He felt the ringing in him. He straightened up, blinking away the tears in his eyes that always came from looking too long, and that this time came also from the sudden surge of an emotion he couldn't give a name to, a kind of joy that was also shot with fear. "Ah," he said. A touch of the sacred, right on the back of his neck. God had tapped him. He was ringing.

No one had ever seen this before.

I've been meaning to write this post for some time. Since April, in fact. It's not unusual for a book to wait longer than that for a review here, these days; I'm a chronic procrastinator. But I'm also OCD enough that I find it nearly impossible to let books go without writing about them, even if it's a year since I read them.*

Particularly such interesting ones as the last of my Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist reading, Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream (2009) - a big, rich, thoughtful, deeply enthusiastic book, overflowing with a love of humanity and of our spirit of enquiry. It's a science fictional biography of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) that dances back and forth between past and future to explore the different ways that we perceive, understand and represent the world: through personal experience and memory, positivist historical narrative, individual biography, imagination of the future and, centrally, the experimental observation and theorising of science. As I noted in my Clarke round-up in April, it's infuriating at times - I don't think I've ever spent so much time arguing with a book I really admired and liked - but it's certainly a work-out, and it does all add up to a novel that I felt I'd lived through.

The bulk of the story centres on Galileo's astronomical observations in support of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the universe, and his subsequent clashes with the Catholic Church over his findings. This strand opens in 1609, with Galileo and his faithful assistant Mazzoleni - whose "weathered face [is] an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta" - building a modified telescope (the device had been invented only the previous year, in the Netherlands). Galileo's priorities are signalled early: in his excitement, he "tousle[s Mazzoleni's] hair as he would a child's", reflecting that the two of them share a bond unlike any other relationship Galileo has known, because "they made new things together, they learned new things". The empirical urge - the desire to formulate theories, test, and observe - is evoked wonderfully; for all the drama of Galileo's life, on one level this is quite simply a book about the joys of learning and thinking.

The rest of Galileo's life is in a semi-permanent state of "pandemonium", by comparison. Learning the world is his consuming passion, and - being a man of a certain social standing and wealth - he has been able to pursue it at the expense of everything else, and furthermore can spend much of his time cushioned from the consequences. His household, a continually rotating and perpetually neglected collection of students, children, servants and other dependants, is "crazy as a convent and running at a loss". In one of a number of self- and historically-reflexive moments in the opening section of the novel, the omniscient first-person-plural narration (on which more below) notes that this has much to do with the fact that "La Piera had not yet entered his life, and no one before her could ever keep order". Biography, for all its pretence of linear storytelling, can rarely resist the allure of foreshadowing.

The historical sections are interspersed - rather disorientatingly, for both reader and protagonist - with episodes set in the far future, on the very moons that Galileo is watching through his telescope. Waking up there for the first time, Galileo believes himself to be in his own Dante-esque afterlife, and addresses the first person he encounters as "My Virgil"; he understands little of what he sees, and believes even less, but he is fascinated by it all and characteristically eager to learn:

"Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain."

"Teach me," Galileo said. "Teach me how you breathe here, and what these tides of colour are, and - teach me everything. I want to know everything! Teach me everything you have learned since my time."

He is told that his 'Virgil' (whom we later learn is called Ganymede) is part of a group of people who wish to consult with Galileo - as humankind's "first scientist" - on certain issues regarding exploration of the moons and contact with possible lifeform(s) on them; coming from the distant past with no awareness of the intervening years of human history, they believe he will be a suitably unbiased subject.

In general, I found these passages much less compelling than those set in the past. The setting feels rather insubstantial beside lively, noisy, untidy Italian city-states like Venice ("its usual grubby midday self. Magnificence at low tide"), and there is a tension between the limits of Galileo's viewpoint - he recognises next to nothing of what he sees, of course - and the omniscience of the narration; the mixture of the two is uneasy, and sometimes ineffective. The thematic and plot implications of these sections, though, are fascinating, opening up the historical story in a number of different ways. We gradually learn that several members of the group have another agenda: some wish to interfere with the events of Galileo's life, in the belief that by doing so they will change their present; others are equally convinced that Galileo must remain 'on course'. But even the act of observing, of course, creates changes in the object observed - and, in any case, it is nearly impossible for any of the observers to resist the urge to meddle.

A contemporary portrait of Galileo, by Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630); taken from here.

No-one - whether time-travelling scientist, church official, family member, or Galileo himself - can resist imposing a narrative on Galileo's life: the birth of modern science; the great clash of reason and religion; the further revelation of the marvels of Creation; a beleaguered Pope fighting for his authority and the Church's independence from powerful neighbours; a terrible father treating his offspring terribly. Robinson is not only aware that this is what he, too, is doing, he makes thematic hay with it. He is interested in Galileo, of course. But more broadly, he is interested in why certain people and events are remembered, while others are allowed to fade from the picture: why some things are considered historically and culturally important, and how those things are affected by the act of remembering them. We bring our own significance, he concludes, to the things we observe, creating them anew in our memories and histories. ("Paying attention", Galileo notes - our rather, our narrator guesses at his thoughts and notes for him - "was itself a kind of magnification.") At best we can only approximate the reality of the thing, because we - unavoidably - seek meaning.

Put another way, what happens when people start trying to write your story when you're still in the middle of it? On this evidence, they spend a lot of time telling you that you're doing it wrong. Robinson gives us a Galileo who is blithely - or arrogantly - ignorant about how his work might be construed. He is utterly convinced that no-one could be anything other than as intrigued and gleeful as he is; presented (or brow-beaten) with the facts, people will see the world as he does. Thus he proceeds to, um, tell the Pope how he should see the theological implications:

Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

"Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries," Galileo said calmly, "but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God's world and God's word are necessarily the same, both being God's."

Yeah, that'll work. Can't think of any reason why the Catholic Church, rarely keen on sharing religious authority, might have become a bit more twitchy about people running around interpreting doctrine for themselves in the last hundred years. Again, we run into issues of narrative, and hindsight; the reader knows how this will end, and so the reader finds herself wanting to give Galileo a swift elbow to the ribs before he can dig himself in any deeper. Events gain significance by their placement in the narrative: we know that this will prove to be a contribuing factor to Galileo's persecution, because it has been selected for inclusion in the story.

Galileo is naive, but he is hardly unusual in not recognising the full extent of the danger he is in, or expecting that the entire force of the Church is poised to fall on his head. He sincerely believes that he is doing no wrong - that he is, in fact, helping to demonstrate the glory of his God ("'God makes the world using mathematics, and he has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws that He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand! It's prayer. It's more than a prayer, it's a sacrament'"). He forgets that human institutions are subject to human whims, and the vagaries of circumstance, and all manner of pressures.

Hera, another of the time travellers, does her best to get him to understand. She lets slip that there may be trouble ahead ("'No one has ever forgotten the price you paid for insisting on the reality of the world'"); in response to his fearful questioning, she gives him, in a striking, disturbing passage, a glimpse of his future:

The pain was such that he would have screamed immediately, but an iron muzzle clamped an iron gag into his mouth. His tongue was nailed into his palate by a spike set in the gag. He worked desperately to swallow the blood pouring into his mouth fast enough not to choke on it. His heart was racing, and when he saw and comprehended where he was, it beat even faster. Surely it would burst with the strain.

It continues, in the same vein, for a couple of pages. This is not the fate of our Galileo, of course; but it is the fate of this Galileo, as seen from the future he visits. Among Hera's colleagues, as I have already noted, there are those who wish to alter this fate, and those who are determined to keep things the way they are/were. Hello, many worlds theory: there are many possibilities branching out from Galileo's lifetime, and as many different ideas of which one would offer the best outcome for humanity. In short, Galileo has become a pawn in a struggle to control the narrative not just of his own life, but of all human history after the early seventeenth century.

Hera is of the change-the-past persuasion, and she expends quite a bit of energy on trying to nudge Galileo in her desired direction. Unlike Ganymede, Hera opts for education over sleight-of-hand (and, since this is a Kim Stanley Robinson novel, the reader might thus develop a hunch that she's the good guy), giving Galileo a crash-course in scientific, political and social developments during the centuries between her time and his. At length, however, she gets more personal; with the true biographer's conviction that the key to her subject's intellectual life lies in his home life, she sets about dissecting his relationship with his mother, partner, and children. Unlike contemporary biographers, who must just imagine their subjects' thoughts, the people of Jupiter can simply invade Galileo's head:

Well, these people could voyage among the planets, and back and forth in time; of course they would also have tried to dive into themselves, penetrating the vast ocean that lay under every skull. So they had developed the power to dive into consciousness itself. [...]

It was a power that made Galileo more frightened of the Jovians than ever. Which didn't really make sense, he knew: remembering something vividly should not be more alarming than being transported across centuries. But one's mind was a private place.

This pushes some of my buttons, and taps into a discussion Vicky and I have had before, both here and elsewhere. I have reservations about the use of real people in historical fiction - and, for that matter, with some of the excesses of biographical writing - because I am uncomfortable with the appropriation of people as public property, as well as with the claim to authoritative knowledge of an individual beyond their actions or their own self-expression. (This is not to say that such works can't be creatively interesting!) I find it interesting, therefore, to see Robinson engage with this, letting his protagonist protest the intrusiveness of those who feel entitled to know everything about him so that they can better construct their narrative - and, in turn, questioning our own motives for reading biographical-fiction of this nature. He is explicitly not the real Galileo, or even an attempt to recreate him - the whole point is that he comes from an alternative world - but he nonetheless baulks at efforts to construct a reading of his life from the inside out, without his consent.

That said, I'm going to talk about his home life anyway. ;-) It's another important facet of the central theme: what and who gets remembered, and who and what is forgotten. Women - with the exception of the hot young love interest model - are so often left out of this sort of story, both in fiction and in history. Hera aims to put them back in, although I found myself frustrated and puzzled by her methods of trying to convince Galileo that he treats his family like crap in his self-centred pursuit of knowledge. Take the glance back to Galileo's youth, via the Jovians' mind-reading device, and the difficult relationship between his "gorgon" mother (Galileo's word) and his under-achieving musician father:

[Y]et in his own kitchen the nightly debates revealed him mostly cruelly to be only the second smartest person in the house - and really, after Galileo reached the age of five, the third. It must have been disheartening. And so he had died. Without your heart you died.

Now, I could snark at this sob story all day: Remember, ladies - hide your intelligence, lest you dishearten your poor husband to death; that's what masculinity is all about, after all, making sure your womenfolk wrap your poor ego up in cotton wool so you don't have to learn difficult truths, like maybe you aren't the most important and wonderful person in the world. But Hera chooses to psychoanalyse the situation. In a patriarchy, she explains, seeing one's mother be so much stronger than one's father is a source of ridicule and shame, as a result of which Galileo grew up to hate women.

As a theoretical explanation for someone familiar with the theory - for example, what patriarchy is - this is fine, but I fail to see how it helps Galileo in his own daily life, as it is supposed to. Would it not be better to put this is terms he will understand? If he is to survive at all, let alone become less of an entitled idiot, he needs to learn how to function in his own society. Because even by the terms of  patriarchal early-modern Italy, Galileo is a failure. Hera is entirely correct - and her cluestick starts to find its mark - when she points out,

"You ate yourself sick, you drank yourself into a stupor. And it wasn't the first time, or even the hundredth. While your women drudged and starved. Had the babies and raised the children and did all the real work, the work that's work. The woman you had children with, she didn't even know how to read, isn't that what you said? Didn't know how to add or subtract? What kind of a life is that?"

But perhaps a better place to start might be: call yourself the head of the household? You don't even provide properly for your children. Galileo's two daughters are illegitimate, and thus unable to make any sort of marriage - particularly since his salary is too poor to provide an incentive in the form of a reasonably dowry. Italian life being what it was in this period, and Galileo's finances being what they are, the pair are consigned to a convent; convents being what they were in this period, their life there - without financial backing from a family - is appalling. (Individual nuns were largely left to their own or their family's devices when it came to their food, clothing, and other comforts; most convents were desperately poor as institutions.)

Suor Maria Celeste - aka Virginia, Galileo's saintly eldest daughter (from here).

Galileo recognises this - some of the time - but is quick to declaim any blame for their situation. He hopes instead to pass the responsibility for their living conditions onto influential friends within the church; as he tells Hera:

"Well - my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I'm hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it's bad for my daughters."

"You are the one who put them in their situation, right?"

"Yes yes."

(He then swiftly tries to distract her from that line of questioning.) The fact that he has made stunningly little effort to maintain his relationships with these influential friends - and, indeed, has gone out of his way to antagonise them with his experiments - does not impinge on his imaginings at all. Indeed, his treatment of his family is only a symptom of Galileo's wider problem: he cannot, or will not, play the game. In a society almost entirely organised around the cultivation of personal relationships - a world of patronage and favours, of gratitude measured in money and opened doors - Galileo burns all his bridges on a semi-regular basis. In a fit of pique and wounded ego, he is ready to abandon his dependants - family, employees, and most significantly clients - at the drop of a hat to move to a city where his research will get more respect, trashing the social nexus of his status and protection without a second thought. It is a broken, deeply unfair system, but it is the one in operation, and there is an irony - of course - in the fact that Galileo can plot the paths of the planets but miss the workings of the environment he lives in.

Increasingly as the novel went on, I found myself more interested in the women's stories behind Galileo's: the fierce lover, Marina, whom Galileo never married; the saintly eldest daughter dying in service to God, and the one who never speaks to him again once the convents doors are closed on her; the intelligent mother doomed to be the harridan who haunts her son and fights with her not-daughter-in-law. I was disappointed, then, when they disappeared from the story - if not unheralded, then certainly a long way from truly explored or appreciated.

But Robinson's Galileo is a Galileo who might be, a Galileo that those observing him need and want. He is a scientist, a father, a pioneer, a martyr, a heretic, and a patriarch who can't even do patriarchy very well. He is a Galileo that we have created with the agendas we bring to reading and writing about him. Which is why the narration is in first-person plural:

"Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them."

He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look at it - that's a sign. Sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.

And even writing about it, six months on, I find I am moved all over again.

I'm sure that the history you tell yourself is still a tale of mangled potentiality, of unnecessary misery. That's just the way it is. In all times people are greatly lacking in courage.

But sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they keep trying. This too is history. We are all history - the hopes of people in the past, the past of some future people - known to them, judged by them, changed by them as they use us. So the story keeps changing, all of it.

~~Nic

* I've learned to take quite detailed notes...

Drolletariat

Our further transportation took the form of three mule carts. Adam Kaganovich, giddy (I suppose) with the fear and the excitement, pretended to take offence at this. "Carts! Donkeys! You cannot expect us to put up with such rusticity, comrades! Comrades, remember that we are science fiction writers!"

"That you are science fiction writers," said the Lieutenant in charge of us, "is precisely why Comrade Stalin wishes to see you."

The fifth entry in my Arthur C Clarke Award reading takes us to Soviet Russia, with Adam Roberts' funny and perfectly formed satire Yellow Blue Tibia. It has attracted quite a bit of favourable attention since its release (Niall collects numerous links here), most notoriously from Roberts' fellow Clarke shortlistee Kim Stanley Robinson, who declared last year that Yellow Blue Tibia should have won the Booker Prize (Robinson's original article is here, for anyone who has a subscription to New Scientist). On the minus side, Catherynne Valente recently excoriated Roberts for some distinctly cavalier errors of fact and tone in the book.

She also hated the fact that the title is a pun (on which more below). But, then, if you don't like puns you're onto a bit of a loser with Adam Roberts, as pretty much anyone who's ever met the man - or, egads, seen his Twitter stream - will attest. (The puntastic title of this post also comes from the book; it made me laugh, and seemed appropriate.) Yet even for this most irreverent of author-critics, Yellow Blue Tibia displays a real relish for silliness. On a shortlist well-endowed with books that are deeply interested in the writing and taxonomy of genre fiction, in the process of fictionalising - I'm thinking particularly here of The City & the City and Galileo's Dream - Yellow Blue Tibia stands out for a meta commentary that is both playful and insightful. Neither Miéville nor Robinson, after all, have nearly as much fun with farce.

The story begins in the late 1940s, with a group of science fiction writers travelling to a deserted dacha, in response to a mysterious summons from Stalin. Watched closely by guards, they crack tense jokes, make nervous observations (one notes that "the sunrise resembled a frozen explosion: clouds strewn about the sky like shreds of raw meat") and try not to speculate on what their fate is to be. Stalin greets them in expansive mood - at which their anxiety abates not at all - and informs them that they are to remain at the dacha until such time as they have created a politically useful science fiction: "an extraterrestrial menace" to "inspire" the people to greater efforts in support of Communism:

"I have learnt many things in my time," said Stalin. "And there is one thing I have learned above all. Nothing is so efficacious in advancing the cause of universal Communism as struggle. When the people have an enemy against which to unite, they are capable of superb heroics. When they lack such an enemy they become slack, they fall prey to revolutionary elements, and generally backslide. The Great Patriotic War has surely taught us this above all! We all remember the thirties - do we not?"

We murmured in agreement. Each of us, I am sure, trying hard to make our murmurs as non-specific as a murmur might be. Remember the thirties? The difficulty was not remembering the thirties. The difficult was ever being able to forget the thirties.

After some debate about whether Soviet Russia could ever be at war with space-faring aliens - any race that journeys among the stars, they reason, must be a socialist one, or else how would they be capable of the collective effort required? - they duly dream up an outlandish alien invasion plot, egging each other on to ever more spectacular episodes. An American rocket destroyed; "some portion of the Ukraine" blown up. "Writers, you see," Roberts has his narrator Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky say, in the first of several observations about the writing of science fiction,

daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in this respect. A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancée; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.

It is a game to them. Then, without warning, the project is wound up, and the writers - sworn to secrecy - are returned to their lives. After almost forty years of silence, an apparently chance encounter with Frenkel, one of his fellow veterans of the dacha, leads Skvorecky to wonder whether what they wrote might be starting to come true. It's a brilliant premise, and Roberts explores it through what is in retrospect the only right way: by dragging his hero - the sort of narrator who describes bright sunshine on a bitterly cold day as "sarcastic" - through a series of unfortunate events and running jokes, each more farcical than the last. Toegther with a dash of scientific romance - whence the title, a pun based on an English-speaking character's mangled pronunciation of the Russian phrase for "I love you".

Much of the farce, alas, depends on cumulative effect and so is rather tricky to show in action; my particular favourite was the sequence where Skvorecky is interrogated by a local policeman who prefers to turn the tape recorder off when making his increasingly elaborate threats, then back on for serious questions (you can see, I imagine, where that one ends up, but it's still funny). While I don't doubt that Yellow Blue Tibia has much more to do with comedic stereotypes of Russia than with actual Russia - which, as Valente points out, raises issues of cultural appropriation - these scenes of petty officials' absurdity escalating into the outright surreal did put me in mind of some of Gogol's short stories, in terms of both tone and tools.

At various times, he has two sidekicks: American love interest Dora and OCD taxi driver and nuclear physicist Saltykov. While Dora is a charming character - a kindly soul with a "melodious and rather attractive" laugh, who bonds with Skvorecky over stargazing and (naturally) the joy of the imagination - she gets rather less to do, existing solely in relation to our narrator. I also share some of Valente's misgivings about the repeated references to Dora's considerable weight. While the crueller jokes at her expense are undoubtedly more of a reflection upon the limitations of those who make them - the narrator, immediately enchanted by her smile, not among them - than on Dora herself, it does get wearing, and the plot point that relies on Dora surviving a stabbing because of her layers of fat is a step too far. Saltykov comes off rather better; the humour at his expense - his many foibles include a pathological unwillingness to run red lights, even with the KGB in hot pursuit - is gentler (and intended to be funny), and there is more of a sense that he has a life that goes on when Skvorecky isn't around, even if it probably consists mostly of locking and unlocking his car door the correct number of times.

"Walls have ears," Saltykov said brightly. "Or is it: walls are ears? I forget. The latter would imply that we are inside a gigantic ear. Either way it would be foolish of me to blurt out a name like Project Stalin, or to mention the impending alien attack upon Chernobyl." He stopped. A troubled look passed over his face. "I have," he said, "said more than I meant."

But whether he is unexpectedly onstage in front of a bunch of UFO true believers, captured by the KGB, or recuperating from an accidental lobotomy, Skvorecky is the central figure: the plucky (and lucky) little man against the system, underestimated by the many forces in pursuit of him. At every turn he talks satiric circles around his dimmer, more powerful persecutors, managing to annoy the crap out of them just enough to break their concentration so he can slip out of their clutches:

"One thing I hate in this world and you are fucking it. You are an ironist."

"An ironist?"

"Fundamentally, you take nothing seriously. You believe it is all a game. It was the same in your novels; they were never serious. They had no heart."

And here the meta is, as Niall argues, more personal: this isn't just about the writing of science fiction, it's about the writing of Adam Roberts' science fiction. Because on the evidence of Yellow Blue Tibia, it's not that Roberts doesn't care - nor, I think, is he out to use humour (or science fiction) purely as a literary game, as vehicles for making 'serious' points. Rather, he and his not-so-alter ego alike are hugely invested in the silly, the arch, the wildly made-up for their own sakes - in the exuberant imaginative enterprise of fiction as fiction. Or, as Skvorecky puts it, as he finds himself ever further down the rabbit hole:

Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar. Of course if that were true, you'd think I'd be more comfortable with the sensation.

Not entirely surprisingly, Skvorecky gets beaten up quite a bit along the way. (It's tempting to suggest that this stands for negative reviews...) But the more he unravels what is going on, the more Roberts draws in the ways that dreams shape the world, often quite out of proportion to their literal reality. Forever looming over this, of course, is Communism, the "dream of a whole people" that the bad guys are so anxious to prevent people waking up from, even after it has been so comprehensively betrayed by barbaric repression; a collective reaching after utopia that changed the world.

This being science fiction, Roberts can play with the very concept of literal reality, and show us imagination altering it as part of the plot. Dora has the ability to change perceptions and collapse possibilities into reality - although, rather irritatingly, she appears to exercise this skill entirely unwittingly. Skvorecky's ever more implausible survivals are accompanied, perhaps, by the death of selves in alternative timelines. And whether or not the aliens are real, and whether or not the writers created them, is a question bubbling throughout the latter half of the novel. Science fiction: making the world:

"We were just writers."

"Writers create."

"Not realities, though. Only fictions. Science fictions."

"What you have to do," said the creature that I knew as Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, "is consider the total spread of realitylines. That what you need to think of as reality is the whole spread. Reality is a matter of probabilities. Likelihoods, and possibilities. That's the idiom of fiction. That's what we artists are good at doing. What were we doing? We were laying a line about which actual realities, coral-like, could grow."

Or, as the meme would have it: In Soviet Russia, sf writes you!

~~Nic

Take My Love, Take My Land

A craft was nothing without a crew to run it and pilots to defend it. A craft was made up of people. The Ketty Jay was staffed with drunkards and drifters, all of them running from something, whether it be memories or enemies or the drudgery of a land-bound life; but since Yortland, they'd all been running in the same direction. United by that common purpose, they'd begun to turn into something resembling a crew. And Frey had begun to turn into something resembling a captain.

As of last night, I've read all six books on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist; bathed in the glow of my bookish achievement, though, I've rather overlooked the fact that the announcement of the winner is on Wednesday evening, and I've only discussed three so far. Hmm. I wonder how much blogging I can fit in between marking essays and teaching classes tomorrow...? (Ahem.)

Onto book four, then, at a somewhat brisker pace. Chris Wooding's steampunk romp, Retribution Falls is, to cut a long story short, remarkably like the late-lamented Firefly, only with airships and a captain who is both more of a git and less smart than Mal. (Or, as a more impatient friend of mine put it...)

Wooding hits the ground running - as this blog post, er, hasn't - with a set-piece that Niall felt impelled to turn into a script page here. It's not difficult to see why; go read the chapter and see for yourself [link to a .doc file on author's site]. Our Heroes are being held at gunpoint by a Bad Guy: a smuggler clearly hit with the ugly-evil stick, being "squat and grizzled, hair and skin greasy with a sheen of sweat and grime, features squashed across a face that was broad and deeply lined", who can't resist "turn[ing] towards his audience" and asking his victims-to-be whether they think being shot in the head will hurt. Equally, Our Heroes - or rather, our captain, Darian Frey, whose "wolfishly handsome features", "unkempt black hair", and "lean frame beneath his long coat" mark him out as a loveable rogue as readily as does the "ready, wicked smile that usually lurked in the corner of his mouth" - cannot resist going for the quips:

"If you’re that curious, try it out on yourself," Frey suggested.

Macarde hit him in the gut, putting all of his considerable weight behind the punch. Frey doubled over with a grunt and almost went to his knees. He straightened with some effort until he was standing again.

"Good point," he wheezed. "Well made."

Although Wooding claims never to have seen Firefly, to a fan this feels very much like familiar ground: can't resist a wisecrack, prone to taking a punch or two. Got a(n air)ship he loves more than his own safety, too - the reason he's currently at gunpoint is that he won't give up the activation code for his beloved Ketty Jay. In due course, he and Grayther Crake - recent recruit to the dysfunctional petty criminal crew of the Ketty Jay, now somewhat put out by the way the whole gunpoint business demonstrated that Frey cares even less for his crew's safety - have made their well-timed escape. Just before chapter's end they pause, of course, for a spot of knowing banter:

Crake hit the ground awkwardly and went to his knees. Frey pulled him up. That familiar, wicked smile had appeared on his face again. A reminder of the man Crake had thought he knew.

"I feel a sudden urge to be moving on," Frey said, as he dusted Crake down. "Open skies, new horizons, all of that."

Crake looked up at the window they’d jumped from. The sounds of pursuit were growing louder. "I have the same feeling," he said, and they took to their heels.

He has a knack for the chapter-ending punchline, does Chris Wooding, and for much of its pagecount Retribution Falls is good solid entertainment - a snappy adventure, albeit with a touch more mangst than is strictly necessary, in a well-drawn world of smugglers' havens, gambling dens, uber-rich frontier barons, and the sort of celebrity law enforcement officers who arrive with their own personal wind machines just out of shot, all the better to make their coats go swoosh with. There's a fun magic system called daemonism (and it is magic, despite Crake's protest that "what I do is real. It's a science"), pitched somewhere between spiritualism and Tesla's wackier endeavours. The dialogue frequently raises a chuckle (even if it not-infrequently sounds a little, well, Firefly-ish). Harkins, the nervy, babbling pilot, trips over his own sentences and interjects with comments like:

"I liked the running away plan," said Harkins. "I mean, we've been doing pretty good so far with the running away. Maybe we should, you know, keep on doing it."

When Frey says "I wish, just once, someone would have the guts to take us on from the front so I could shoot 'em", the brand new recruit, Jez - who has been busy proving her calm competence at every turn - remarks, "Sounds like that wouldn't be a very wise tactic, Cap'n," she replied. "But we can hope."

It is, as I say, good fun, and when the plot kicks in - after Frey's greed gets the jump on his sense, and he accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer that turns out, astonishingly, to be a set-up - Wooding wisely stays on the side of adventure, opting for close shaves, haphazard undercover spying and (verbal) sniping matches with old flames over any serious politicking. The crew go on the run, or - as the passage quoted at the top of this post suggests - more on the run, out to clear their names and (more importantly) find out who screwed them over, so that they can screw them over right back. As is to be expected in such stories, the shared adversity smoothes over some of the rougher edges of the characters' relationships, taking them from

"This ain't no family, Crake," Malvery went on. "Every man is firmly and decidedly for himself. You're a smart feller; you knew the risks when you threw in your lot with us."

to the situation described in the header quote: all for one and one for all, or something quite close to it, with each crewmember getting his or her chance to make their mark and earn their place.

Whence my reservations, then, and the bad taste in my mouth? The first reason is a simple one: for a romp, Retribution Falls is a little longer than is strictly good for it (not unlike this post; how meta!), and the essential quality of a romp - speed - suffers accordingly. As the pace waned, somewhere around the fourth or fifth crewmembers' reveal of their Painful Dark Past, so did my interest (see 'meta', passim). My larger problem lies in the treatment of the female characters, all of whom (with the exception of one of the law enforcers, the impressive but sadly under-used Samandra Bree) exist only insofar as they relate to Frey, and all of whom (not even excepting Samandra) are to a greater or lesser degree undermined or outright degraded by Frey.

Looming the largest here is Trinica, Frey's sometime ex - like the overgrown boy he is, he left her at the altar, pregnant with their child - now transformed into "a dread queen of the skies", whose frankly rather cool makeover elicits snotty disapproval from Frey:

The sight of her was a jolt. She was lounging in the chair, small and slim, dressed head to toe in black: black boots, black coat, black gloves, black waistcoat. But from the buttoned collar of her black shirt upwards, everything changed. Her skin was powdered ghost-white. Her hair - so blonde it was almost albino - was cut short, sticking up in uneven tufts as if it had been butchered with a knife. Her lips were a red deep enough to be vulgar.

It's the "vulgar" part that signals it; yes, naughty jilted Trinica has made the grievous error of changing over the past ten years, rather than remaining innocent and pretty and girlish, the very model of proper femininity over whose (pretty, quiet) sadness he can feel suitably angsty and solipsistic. (One of the other characters, in a different context, helpfully provides a succinct description of this type of mindset: "'Regret's just a way to make you feel okay that you're not makin' amends.'") The attitude is revealed more strongly a little later:

Memories overwhelmed him. Searing love and bilious hate. The stranger before him as a mockery of the young woman he'd almost married. He'd kissed those lips, those whore-red lips that now smiled at him cruelly. He'd heard the softest words pass from them to him.

Trinica the "whore" is no longer "young" or "soft". Why? She tried (and failed) to kill herself after his desertion - what is life, after all, without Frey? (afraid you'll just have to imagine my eyerolling here) - and in the process suffered a miscarriage. Oh, it's all about Frey and his precious, precious manhood, callously trampled all over by a young woman's despair. Trinica then fled home and got raped multiple times aboard a dodgy airship before using her body to rise to her present level of Ruthless Bitch Captain - after all, what female character's history or motivation is complete without a spot of rape and use of her wiles? - while Frey passed the time being miffed about his abused sperm, or something. Trinica expounds on this, but the cluestick bounces right off Frey's self-obsessed head.

While Trinica is allowed a few pointed rebukes ("'Same old Darian. Picked on by the world. Nothing's ever your fault, is it?'"), she is also one of the main villains of the piece - for the sake of revenge, naturally, being a woman and thus unable to get over being dumped. She thus exists in the plot primarily to be repeatedly thwarted and then defeated, and while this reader may believe that Trinica has something of a point, the narrative ultimately seems to disagree; Frey stubbornly resists reaching all but the most shallow self-awareness, and Trinica crumbles from hard-as-nails to weeping victim who never got over him. But he doesn't kill her at the end! So that's okay!

Frey's current, neglected girlfriend, meanwhile, is of the 'You're so beautiful when you're angry' persuasion (further eyeroll), barely pausing between slapping him silly and sexing him silly, easy to manipulate because of her irrational girly feelings for him, absent for the rest of the story, and recalled at the end only to be compared with "a discarded trinket". But what really broke me, and cast serious doubt on the obvious defence of the book - that all this unpleasant treatment of women is simply an expression of what a git Frey is, oh how edgy - was a throwaway reference to Jez's part in the audacious final scheme by which the crew of the Ketty Jay win the day:

"Apparently, she had to do some quite appalling things to him to secure an audience with the Archduke's representatives at such short notice. He is quite a filthy old man." She patted him on the shoulder. "You do have an admirably loyal crew, Captain."

Frey could only imagine how loyal Jez had needed to be.

Smart, competent, interesting Jez - the one woman who had until then escaped the objectification and ridicule meted out to the other female characters - reduced to a sniggering, skeevy punchline? So the only adventure women get to have in this world - the only value, ultimately, that they have in this world - is sexualised humiliation. I am wearily unsurprised.

~~Nic

Off the Map

The world is a scaly old snake. She is a cunning old woman, and the last human being that draws a breath on this planet will be a cunning old woman, who raises chickens and cabbages, has no illusions, and has outlived all her children. The world is not sentimental, but pitiless. I've given it to myself to know her mind. I flatter myself that I understand her a little. Maybe I've grown to resemble her. Only she's going to go on forever, and I won't.

It's difficult to escape the suspicion, when reading post-apocalyptic novels, that if you found yourself at the end of civilisation as we know it, the apocalypse itself would be the least of your worries. Being turned into a smear on the wall during an all-out nuclear war, contracting an unstoppable supervirus that liquefies your internal organs within minutes, getting torn apart by zombies: all horrible fates, true, but narrowly surviving such events, and abruptly finding yourself one of the last people standing? The very definition of grim.

The Road was one of the strongest arguments I've ever read for why it might just be better to get the whole thing over with. With nuclear winter closing in rapidly, food stocks dwindling and no means to replace them - the only living things we see reproduce in the books are humans, and they don't do it nearly fast enough to make long-term cannibalism a viable option - the triumph of hope over experience seemed to me an increasingly thin reason not to put the remaining bullets to good use. (Given the tone of the novel's ending, I suspect McCarthy would disagree with my reading, but that's my prerogative as a reader.)

Like The Road, Marcel Theroux's wonderful Far North - the third of the Clarke Award shortlisters to be reviewed here, and my favourite of those I've read - shows us the world ending not with a bang, but a shiver. By force of long, lonely habit rather than any real expectation of trouble ("I've been doing it so long that I'm shaped to it, like a hand that's been carrying buckets in the cold"), our gun-toting narrator, Makepeace, patrols the frozen, deserted streets of a remote Siberian settlement. The town, Evangeline, was founded a generation before by (mostly) American Quakers seeking a 'simpler' frontier life, on land gifted by the Russian government:

The settlers got more land than they knew what to do with. And it seemed a smart bet to us. Our summers in the north were getting longer and our winters milder. No one was overly concerned that what was easing the cold of our winters was making the crowded parts of the globe hot and hungry and restless.

I was born in the false dawn of those early years. The dawn that was really a sunset.

It's never entirely clear what happened to bring all this to an end. The effects of climate change - widespread famine, drought, and the attendant social and political upheavals - seem the most likely candidate, although Makepeace, looking back through the veil of a strict Christian-separatist upbringing, cannot help but attribute the desperation of the starving refugees who staggered into the city to a generalised moral decline of civilisation. This, together with the darker secrets that Makepeace uncovers in the course of the narrative, make it plain why this crisis breaks Evangeline: fear, distrust, hypocrisy, wilful blindness and a pervasive I've-got-mine mentality come together in a conflict over how to respond to the starving outsiders. In short, it is a battle for the town's soul, which no-one wins.

Family and friends all some years dead, Makepeace deploys frontier skills (hunting, tracking, etc, plus melting down bits of metal to make bullets) to scrape by in the old family home, effacing painful memories in the hard day-to-day labour of survival. The bitter aftermath of Evangeline's slow collapse has left Makepeace with somewhat jaded, though not entirely misanthropic, view of the world:

Human beings are rat-cunning and will happily kill you twice over for a hot meal. That's what long observation has taught me. On the other hand, with a full belly, and a good harvest in the barn, and a fire in the hearth, there's nothing so charming, so generous, no one more decent than a well-fed men.

Things change, however, after a chance meeting with an equally lonely Chinese stranger.

[And here I have no choice but to spoil a significant plot twist - albeit one that is revealed twenty pages in to the book - so if you're planning to read Far North and would rather enjoy the surprise, stop reading this review and pick up the book instead!]

Like Makepeace, the stranger's appearances - or, more precisely, the assumptions made about the stranger - are deceptive. Like Makepeace, the stranger is not a man, but a woman.

Making the protagonist female may sound like a gimmick - hey, it's like The Road, but with a girl! - but in fact it's a brilliant move. Firstly, I was delighted to have been fooled, completely, by the opening chapters: to see subverted the unconscious and entirely unwarranted way I had read the narrator's gender (self-reliance, a taciturn aversion to company, utter determination to stand up for oneself and a reference to "buckl[ing] on guns" in the opening line do not necessarily a man make). Since gender performance and the need to pass for a man have been intense concerns for Makepeace during the long years since Evangeline began to crumble - and since Makepeace is clearly and consciously selective, in her narration, about what she chooses to tell or to conceal - it's perhaps not surprising that she should elide her womanhood even in her narration:

Killing always sits heavy with me.

Whether that's because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally soft-hearted for another reason, I don't know.

I've had to fight the womanish things in my nature for almost as long as I can remember. These are not soft-hearted, womanish times.

Being tall, and broad in the shoulders, and deep-voiced, it's been easy enough to pass for a man.

Secondly, and more important for the novel's themes, the post-apocalypse story is fundamentally a different one with a woman at its centre. When the restraints of society collapse, women are prey to an additional set of dangers, not least from those who seek to fill the vacuum by assigning to themselves the role of their womenfolk's protectors - and thus their controllers. The loftier the pedestal, the harder it is to get down from, unaided.

Pregnancy, likewise, is a motif in Far North; not because women all become earth mothers the instant they start living off the land, but because in the absence of reliable methods of prevention it's almost inevitable, and when it happens it's a source of both great hope and direst vulnerability. Pregnancy is a risky enough business even when society hasn't vanished and taken centuries of medical advances with it; under these circumstances, it verges on Russian roulette. In at least one - likely two - instances pregnancy is also a daily reminder of powerlessness and rape; in another it's a bittersweet reminder of fleeting intimacy.

Of course, neither rape nor pregnancy are a woman's whole universe; but, while I share Niall's weariness with many authors' (and film-makers') reliance on rape as a rather lazy (not to mention exploitative) shorthand way to shape the personality and motivations of their female characters, I disagree with his suggestion that this is what Theroux does in Far North. Makepeace has such a strong, distinctive voice - such pragmatism, thoughtfulness, and generosity - that she is never reduced to the sum of her past trauma. Her recollections of the past also make it clear that it was not the rape alone that made her the tough and resourceful person she is: she already was that person, and it is the life she's lived since, much more than an act of violence, that has honed such qualities in her. "Me, I was a cuckoo. I never belonged in that world", she tells us; she was not "soft and scholarly" like the rest of the town, but was rather the "hard and practical" one who, for example, accompanied her father on a long trek through the taiga to visit the indigenous Chukchi people.

Unlike most of the inhabitants of Evangeline, moreover, she had and has no interest in romanticising the unspoiled, crisply described landscape, or the isolation and 'simplicity' of frontier life. It just is. The arctic year is an implacably hard one, "nine months of cold and three of living hell-for-leather". She remembers how adults around her would comment on how lucky she was to be free of the pressures and immoralities of modern city life, but to her this meant little:

I've never known another landscape. I grew up with bears in the woods behind our house, and wolves, and poisoned toadstools, and a rotten bridge that might well have had a troll under it, so the storybooks never seemed that far-fetched to me. What seems far-fetched is life in a city, or my father's tales of Chicago, or the plane which I saw with my own eyes breaking up on that hillside.

Nor does she share their distaste for technology; in fact, she is exhilarated by it: "what a piece of work man is! What can't we do when we have a mind to?" she says. "I feel a kind of awe at my ancestors, living surrounded by more kinds of knowledge than will fit inside any one man's head." When she sees a plane go down near Evangeline, she becomes "fidgety with hope" that life is going on, elsewhere, and sets out into the world to find it.

What she encounters in her travels - and what she learns about Evangeline - confirms, repeatedly, a figurative gloss on the book's title: this is a land so far north that no compass will work there, including - apparently - many people's moral ones. But amid the slave camps and the deserted, poisoned city ("all concrete and right angles [...] [it] looked like it would stand to attention for eternity"), she finds that fellow-feeling, and even trust, are not impossible. The treatment of her friendship with a man she meets by chance, Shamsudin (whose name means 'sun of the faith' in Arabic), is particularly interesting - and unsentimental - in this regard: wary, distant, often prickly, but ultimately about two people coming together in sympathy and life-affirmation.

Towards the end, one or two of the plot twists feel more contrived than really suits the measured style of the story up to that point, and the book never really stops being bleak - but Theroux does not wallow in suffering for its own sake. Makepeace is more than strong enough as a character to carry us, and herself, through; her spirit buoyed me up, and her reserves of patience and persistence persuaded me that her will to go on was not delusion but an unquenchable thirst to know, to see, to explore.

Unafraid of death, she is unafraid to live, for the time being.

~~Nic

Once More Into the Breach

She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

As I noted a few weeks ago, it's Arthur C Clarke Award season again. I've already reviewed one of the shortlisted books, Gwyneth Jones' Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant. Next up is the much-praised The City & The City by China Miéville, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel over the Easter weekend, and almost certainly won't stop there - it's nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula alongside the Clarke.

Highly thought of, then. For my part, I'm a huge admirer of Miéville's work; this is the third of his books that I've read (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar), but the first since we started this blog. (Victoria, meanwhile, discussed The Scar way back in the mists of our early days.) I was spellbound by Perdido Street Station from the very first chapter, and nearly ten years later, its opening scene lives on in my imagination: not so much for the vivid evocation of the noisy, pungent bustle of the city of New Crobuzon, but for one detail within that vista. The scene begins as follows:

A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building's rough hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting before it.

Some people find Miéville's prose on the purple side; I can't get enough of it. I love the writing here: the lively way the basket moves (spasms, skitters, scrabbles), the sense of depth in its descent and the texture of the world it interacts with (concrete dust). But when I was first reading the book, I loved the conclusion of its journey even more:

He tugged three times at the rope and the basket began a bobbing journey into the air. It rose above the lower roofs of surrounding buildings, buoyed upwards by noise. It startled the roosting jackdaws in the deserted storey and inscribed the wall with another scrawled trail among many, before it disappeared again into the window from which it had emerged.

There: "another scrawled trail among many". New Crobuzon is a city that - for all that it is extravagantly, gloriously invented - feels lived in. As someone who grew up reading secondary-world fantasy, Perdido Street Station came as a very pleasurable shock; whereas so many fantasy trilogies take place in cardboard worlds with thousands of years of implausibly unchanging history, Miéville gave us an environment that feels grimy with use, and in which the central plot is far from the only story taking place.

The City & the City finds Miéville operating in the rather different milieu of fantastical crime fiction, with correspondingly stripped-down prose. By way of comparison, here's the beginning of the new book's first chapter:

I could not see the street or much of the estate.

We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us.

Miéville still packs in the telling detail - dirt, vests, morning hair, rubber-necking at what we soon discover is a crime scene (this being a crime novel, it of course opens with the discovery and investigation of a corpse) - but the language chosen is more static and rather less baroque. A polaroid rather than an orchestration, then, but nonetheless careful in the way it reaches for a mood: still grimy, less vibrant.

That first line, as it transpires, is significant: this is a book centrally concerned with what we see, what we miss, and what we disregard. The narrator - here and throughout - is Tyador Borlú, a detective with the brilliantly named Extreme Crime Squad in the run-down city of Besźel.

Besźel, which may or may not be somewhere in eastern Europe, has the rather unusual distinction of co-existing with another city, Ul Qoma; not opposite-banks-of-the-river coexisting, mind, but sharing-the-same-streets coexisting. To (almost) all intents and purposes, Besźel and Ul Qoma are two entirely separate entities, each with its own government, language, laws, culture, and communications infrastructure - and each studiously intent on ignoring the other.

While many buildings and streets, and even whole areas, are 'total' (that is, belong solely to either Besźel or Ul Qoma), others are shared, liminal spaces - 'crosshatched' - where the possibility of cross-city encounters is ever-present ("There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents' whispered strictures to unsee the other"). The dangers of such areas must be guarded against:

The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.

In this way, people from the two cities can live next door to each other and never interact; indeed, they may never even consciously notice their neighbours, so saturated are their respective ways of life with the importance of unseeing. When Besź and Ul Qomans do notice each other, it is largely by accident and a source of considerable alarm to them; witness Borlú's flustered reaction in the passage quoted at the start of this post when his preoccupation about the case leads him to make a mistake in a less familiar part of town. The taboo is reinforced by the much-feared secret police, Breach, who swoop in to interrupt any transgression of the cultural border, even to the point of disappearing the culprits.

In short, the peoples of the two cities are divided not by walls, but by attitudes born of tradition, a vast edifice of belief and prejudice; this is the way it's always been, and thus shall always be, even if some - there are always some - play with the boundaries:

There are places not crosshatched but where Besźel is interrupted by a thin part of Ul Qoma.  As kids we would assiduously unsee Ul Qoma, as our parents and teachers had relentlessly trained us (the ostentation with which we and our Ul Qoman contemporaries used to unnotice each other when we were grosstopically close was impressive). We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way round in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong.

More serious, from the point of view of the authorities and everyone steeped in two-cities tradition, are the activities of the Unificationists, a banned organisation working to unite Besźel and Ul Qoma:

They had been accused of furtively propagandising among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at unseeing, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponise such urban uncertainty.

Ignoring what is deemed undesirable, then, is second nature to the people of the two cities; what, precisely, is undesirable to a given individual is dependent on what city they were born into, and thus which cultural tradition they were brought up in. Difference and division - the sense of who they are not - are crucial to their identities. As an allegory, it's clear, clever and versatile, such that there are almost as many suggested interpretations as there are reviews: this is Belfast, this is Berlin, this is Jerusalem, this is racial segregation, this is all of us ignoring the homeless. It put me in mind of certain cities in medieval Spain, where different religious communities co-existed - under separate bodies of civic law and devotional practice, languages and literary traditions - and where conversion meant assuming a new identity and leaving behind one's family. Not to mention the hefty power relations and spiritual pollution involved in such breach activities as mixed marriages.

Miéville's exploration of the dynamics of such a strong division in operation - how it survives, how it is policed, how it works within an individual's mind - are fascinating, not least because he does it through what initially appears to be a fantastical world, in which the people of the two cities literally cannot see each other. But this fantasy world's layers are gradually peeled back to reveal that what is really at work here is not magic, nor even an especially repressive state - Breach turns out to be an understaffed and far from omniscient arm of the bureaucracy - but simply human psychology and human prejudice. As one character puts it:

"Nowhere else works like the cities," he said. "It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch; it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does."

Like the people of Besźel and Ul Qoma, we make and remake the world around us, sometimes without even properly realising what us leave out. Ignoring things doesn't make them vanish, though; what we don't want to see is still there, it is just marginalised and oppressed. When the detectives are interviewing witnesses, I found one person's dismissal of Ul Qoman speech as just "random noise" very telling; the assumption that one's own language (or way of life, or skin colour) is the default and everything else a meaningless or even threatening deviation from it is a prime example of this mentality at work on an unconscious, kneejerk level. (How often are the words of the powerless - women, people of colour - dismissed as 'gossip' or 'chatter' or 'gibberish'?)

As a narrative conceit, too, the divided cities have rich potential. Borlú's murder case, he soon realises, is one whose solution and implications lie not in one city or the other, but in both: victim and perpetrator(s) alike have breached; the more he investigates, the more clear distinctions are effaced. The need to navigate the complex web of bureaucracy and taboo surrounding the divide adds several layers of complication to both Borlú's job and the plot, as when he receives an unprompted phonecall from someone in Ul Qoma - offering information, but also danger by the simple fact of their conversation:

My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel - the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit.

Despite all this, the novel never quite gels as more than an (extremely) absorbing thought experiment. The investigation never really grips - this may be something to do with the fact that I don't really read crime fiction - and Borlú is the only character who gets any notable personality. But while Borlú's intellectual curiosity and wide reading makes him a more open-minded narrator (that is, vulnerable to doubt and thus failing to unsee) than the average Besź might have been, it can make for some stilted prose:

I did not understand him the first time he said it. In Besź the word 'right' is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.

In part, my mild disappointment with the novel can be put down to the inescapable sense that I hold Miéville to a higher standard than I do most contemporary novelists: an interesting failure from Miéville like this is still an intellectual firework, and well worth reading. In part, though, I just wasn't interested in the story that Miéville chose to use his dazzling conceit to tell. There are so many folkloric possibilities to this setting that I would rather have seen - one of which is alluded to, in fact:

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.

Lots to chew over, then; but very little of it in the story.

(Thanks are due to Niall and Abigail, who were in the room while I wrote this and with whom I talked over some of these points as I wrote.)

~~Nic

The Arthur C Clarke Award, 2010: Shortlist

My turn to get all excited about a bookish award! The shortlist for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award has been announced, and it looks like this:

Gwyneth Jones - Spirit

China Mieville - The City & the City

Adam Roberts - Yellow Blue Tibia

Kim Stanley Robinson - Galileo's Dream

Marcel Theroux - Far North

Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls

The general feeling seems to be that this is a solid shortlist; I agree. It's not the most adventurous list the Clarke has ever produced - but, on the plus side, there's no obvious candidate for this year's What Were They Thinking prize (see, previously: this, this, or - ack - this).

I've read three already: the Jones, the Mieville and the Theroux. All are strong contenders. I reviewed Spirit last year - a feminist The Count of Monte Cristo in space! - and longer considerations of the other two will follow in the next week or so. Post-apocalyptic loner-in-the-landscape tale Far North I liked a lot, once I got over the comparions with The Road; The City & the City, meanwhile, has a brilliant central conceit and provides much food for thought (and debate), but is let down by being hitched to an unremarkable thriller novel.

Of the rest - which, again, I'll review here once I've read them - I'm most looking forward to Yellow Blue Tibia, which has had generally excellent reviews. Galileo's Dream is a doorstep about intellectual history, although it sounds less of a slog than Anathem was last year; I've read two of Robinson's previous novels (one rather good - review in the works - and one rather annoying), and I live with a die-hard Robinson fan, so that should be interesting, one way or another! The Wooding is apparently a fun romp with more than a passing resemblence to Firefly, which sounds like a perfectly acceptable way to round out a shortlist.

Links to many other reviews of the books have been gathered by Niall (the aforementioned Robinson fan). Three of the previous shortlists were also reviewed here at Eve's Alexandria: 2009 round-up and links (the missing Al Reynolds review is here); 2008 round-up and links. There doesn't look to be a round-up post for 2007, which Vicky and I did together, but the individual reviews are all linked from the left-hand sidebar - scroll down beyond the 'Past Posts' menu.

~~Nic

Time in the Raw

"You're a very special young lady, Abigail Gentian," was what my mother told me on one of the many occasions when her ageless face addressed me from one of the house's panes. "You're going to do great things with your life."

She had no idea.

Somewhat belatedly (busy month), here is my final post on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. (Previous posts are all linked here; the winner, announced at the end of last month, was Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time.) Last but not least, then - more sort mid-table - comes the widescreen, epoch-spanning space opera House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds.

The considerable scope of the book is signalled right in the (splendid) first line:

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian.

(Yes, I realise that's two lines, but I like them both!)

The narrative moves back and forth between three first-person points of view: there are chapters that look to the past, exploring memories of Abigail's past in her Gormenghast-esque home, growing from a pampered prolonged childhood into discomforting knowledge of her family's recent history; and chapters that look forward - six million years forward, give or take - to the epic journeys through space and time of Campion and Purslane, whom we gradually learn are two of Abigail's many clones (known by the rather lovely term "shatterlings").

The shatterlings of the Gentian Line, originally 1000 strong, spend their lives - which have been boosted by genetic modifications to something very close to immortality, it seems, although their numbers have suffered some attrition over the millennia through misadventure of various sorts - making great meandering circuits of the galaxy. These last for hundreds of thousands of years at a time, and are a mix of extremely well-equipped tourism, planetary engineering for hire, and occasional bouts of do-gooding/civilisational interference. At intervals (really long intervals), they meet to pool their memories of what they've experienced.

[Appropriately, it's now over a week since I started writing this post. Deep time blogging! Anyway...]

Some minor tweaks to the way their brains deal with memories go some way towards helping the shatterlings adapt to this way of life; but since, as one puts it, "'Our minds just aren't engineered to experience that much time in the raw'", more is needed. Their most important coping mechanism - and a recurring motif in the book - is their sleep technology, which allows them to spend as much or as little of the journey between two points in stasis (which they call "going into abeyance"). They are old, then, but not that old, and they meet other humans - or former humans; most organic life in the galaxy consists of beings that have evolved from humans - who are older:

"You were born that long ago [six million years], but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?"

The Gentian clones are not identical in the way that, say, twins are; rather, we're told, Abigail has modified each of them during their development, playing up some characteristic (physical, mental, emotional) in certain individuals, and different characteristics in others. They're not even all the same sex, which is a bit disappointing - an all-women space opera would've been something to see - although, given the way the plot works, perhaps not all that surprising. (People who know much more than I do about genetics tell me that this is impossible unless Abigail herself has a rare variant of Kleinfelter's syndrome; however, since Kleinfelter is the name of Abigail's nurse/guardian in the flashback chapters, I assume Reynolds is at least acknowledging the problem, although he never directly addresses it.) Thus, Campion is a man and Purslane a woman.

As the story begins, Campion and Purslane are making their way to a scheduled Gentian meet-up, with two passengers in tow: a robot (or a "Machine Person") named Hesperus, and an irritating aquatic critter called Dr Meninx (another product of evolution from humankind). The party is in no great hurry, and seem to spend much of the time having minor adventures (some of which turn out to be more relevant to the overall plot than others) and getting more and more delayed. But then, Campion, we soon learn (from Purslane), has spent the millennia turning procrastination into an artform:

He did not just put things off until tomorrow; he put them off for tens of kilo-years, until his delays and evasions consumed significant chunks of an entire circuit. His motto might have been Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?

They have other reasons to drag their feet; the pair not only tend to travel together - frowned upon by  Line custom, as each shatterling is supposed to see the world alone - but they are in a relationship. Purslane justifies this in flowery, but revealing, terms:

"I just don't think that an experience is worth anything unless you can remember it afterwards. [...] To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an
incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that's worth more than one plus one."

Within the (suffocating?) communal identity of the Line, individuality and uniqueness are pursued through life as two halves of a pair; ironically, of course, these experiences can only remain uniquely incomplete if Campion and Purslane edit their memories before they share them with the rest of the Line (thus, too, selfishness seeps into the communal self).

One of the aforementioned adventures sees Campion - always looking to trade information, to further the Gentian Line's collective knowledge of the galaxy - swallowed (voluntarily and temporarily) by a sort of giant FutureLibrarian. This produces one of the great out-of-context lines of our time ("The peculiarities of the curator's digestive tract became apparent as I took in more of my surroundings"), although even in context it's entertainingly bizarre. This taste for the random, for the exotically batshit imaginative, is probably the most appealing aspect of the book; early on, we encounter "an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings". Reynolds does some very fun stupidly-giant-canvas description:

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

Indeed, there is little here that does not happen on a Giant Scale; I was particularly taken with the Dyson clouds: the practice of 'damming' stars by surrounding them with "thousands of ringworlds", since "there is nothing shinier [than ringworlds] in the known universe. That mirrored inner surface reflects everything, including neutrinos that would happily sail through fifty light-years of solid lead." The idea of using a wormhole as an enormous flamethrower (by anchoring one end in a star, and taking aim with the other)? Also very cool. Even the inevitable climactic chase sequence, good guys vs. bad guys, takes place over thousands of years, with the help of stasis/sleep technology...

When Campion and Purslane finally, belatedly, reach the gathering, the book shifts abruptly into thriller territory: the Line, they discover, has been attacked by forces unknown. Fewer than a hundred of the shatterlings survive to reconvene - with Campion and Purslane's timely help - on the planet described immediately above. A murder investigation - relatively speedy by the shatterlings' standards - is soon underway, with fingers pointed both within and without the Line.

The mystery's set-up is intriguing; but its resolution is, invariably, rather talky in execution, and almost a month after finishing the book I find it hasn't really stayed with me. A broader problem that I had with the novel, though, is that our two main narrators - Campion and Purslane - aren't nearly individual enough to justify the alternating viewpoints. Yes, I know, they're clones. Very possibly, indeed, this is part of Reynolds' point: the shatterlings aren't nearly as individual and autonomous as they think they are, and the ritual of sharing memories repeatedly draws them back into the fold from any divergence that may have taken place during a circuit. Perhaps this is signalled when, near the end of the book - near the start of the shatterlings' tale - Abigail is advised,

"They're not you, no matter how much you might wish them to be. They're your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they're going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they're going to surprise and disappoint you."

Perhaps, in response to this, she deliberately sets out to make them superficially different, so as to give them less apparent cause to rebel and go off like fireworks? Regardless, though, as a reading experience it rather lacks something, and it becomes increasingly difficult to shake the impression that Campion and Purslane get separate narratives simply so that we still know what is happening with both parts of the plot when they are forced apart.

Furthermore, whether or not Campion and Purslane are distinct individuals, they seem curiously wedded to heteronormative gender (here is Purslane under stress: "I pulled myself tighter against [Campion]. He felt fixed and solid, an anchor I could tie myself to"). So does the plot, large parts of which turn on female Gentians being threatened and/or rescued by their male counterparts. (There is one woman who does her own thing - a splendidly, horribly inventive extended torture programme in pursuit of information about the murders - but she is, alas, only a minor character.) This is, as I said above, disappointing, although I suppose it does function as an example of how the Gentians are in some ways hopelessly old-fashioned - if remarkably successful, still - in an otherwise mostly post-human universe. On which Niall has some excellent points: in many ways the shatterlings are still children, sleeping away the millennia while everyone around them experiences life directly, and grows up.

A fascinating scenario, then - I love the idea of the shatterlings as "fugitives from the past, envoys to the future", as one of Abigail's contemporaries puts it - but the story drawn out of it never fully engaged me, or quite did justice to the material. I did enjoy the way that the resolution to the murder mystery tied in with the flashbacks, but it was not enough.

If you want a taster of Reynolds, some of his short stories are available to read online (I really liked "Signal to Noise", from his collections Zima Blue and Other Stories, but unfortunately that isn't online).

~~Nic