Eve's Alexandria

A Lingering Sense of Incompleteness

People rent time machines.

They think they can change the past.

Then they get there and find out causality doesn't work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn't mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn't have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.

That's where I come in. I go and get them out. [...]

[T]he reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his worst moment, over and over and over again.

Genre-bending, once more with feeling: Charles Yu's tale of a time traveller longing to reconnect with his father, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), offers a nuanced and enjoyable - if at times rather more nakedly sentimental than it really needs to be, at least for my taste - blend of litfic and sf sensibilities. It's not perfect, but it certainly shows up one of the other novels in a similar vein that I read last year for the tediously unimaginative nonsense it was (why yes, I am still catching up with blogging about last year's reading, because my OCD knows no bounds).

It is, however, one of those books that's much better experienced directly than explained through a review, I think; a non-trivial amount of its best moments involve lengthy footnotes, trips to blank pages, and other self-referential quips that don't translate well into short illustrative blockquotes. Thus, this will be a somewhat more succinct post than I usually go for. In theory. (If you want to sample Yu at greater length, he has a short story, 'Standard Loneliness Package', here.)

As noted in the header quote, our protagonist - also named Charles Yu, unhelpfully for clarity of review-writing purposes - is a time machine operator and repairman. His job is largely a solitary one, giving him lots of time for the sort of angsty self-reflection/navel-gazing that tends to make me roll my eyes (sample: "Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth, I'll look at the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I'm not even particularly good at being myself"). His only company is a "nonexistent dog" called Ed, glossed rather charmingly as a "weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection" which has been "retconned out of some space western", and TAMMY, the time machine's operating system.

Echoing Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker's Guide, the central thing artificial intelligence has given TAMMY is depression, apparently stemming from a crush on protagonist-Yu, although he interprets it as existential ennui, and - being the solipsistic lead in a litfic/sf hybrid - only really thinks about it at all to the extent that it might inconvenience him:

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.

Here is where I found How to Live Safely... more successful than many others of its type. Protagonist-Yu's half-sympathetic, half-exasperated observation of TAMMY is amusing (I particularly liked "You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry"), but in its dismissiveness it also offers an unwitting and not always flattering counterpoint to protagonist-Yu's own angst. For the most part, it seems to me, the self-referentiality of the narrative comes down on the side of self-awareness rather than self-centredness - by which I mean not that it's all ironic detachment, but rather, that it invites, or at least allows space for, a little readerly eyerolling every now and then. We can enjoy the story and feel protagonist-Yu's pain over his relationship with - and the loss of - his father, while also recognising the ways in which his reverent attachment to said pain makes him a bit of a jerk.

After all, protagonist-Yu would know: he works in an industry that gives people the means to wallow in their past mistakes, after all; "a typical customer," he tells us, gets into a device that could take her absolutely anywhere, and invariably chooses "the unhappiest day of her life". The novel is interested in time machines for their own sake - and this is important, and goes a long way towards making the novel successful in both its genres - but primarily it is playing with them as literalised emotional metaphors. Perhaps because he's a debut novelist, though, author-Yu can't resist making this more explicit than it really needs to be:

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. [...] The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped.

This notion gives rise to some poignant images: protagonist-Yu's mother, for example, has used the technology to exile herself in an endless loop of an imaginary evening meal, a happier construct back in "a kind of imperfect past tense" before everything went wrong for the family. Protagonist-Yu himself, meanwhile, revisits (in memory, in 'reality', in science fiction) his younger self's interactions with his father, in an effort understand them - to understand him - differently with the benefit of hindsight. These episodes - long months of being largely irrelevant alongside his scientist father's tireless work designing the world's first time machine form, and then what happens when his father demonstrates the prototype to potential corporate backers - form the climax of the novel.

While at the time I remember finding the relentless foreshadowing of doom that precedes the actual explanation of rather tedious and unnecessary - again the sign of a debut novelist, I suspect, feeling the need to lay things on rather thickly - looking back (ha) now, the overriding impression I retain is of being moved. At least in part because, when it counts, author-Yu approaches the most difficult moments with a delicate, fragile restraint. The real sadness, ultimately, is starting to forget how much it hurts, and thus to lose touch with its significance: "Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience".

In a broader sense, narrative - both this particular narrative, and the act of creating narrative in general - is itself a time machine, as we're told early on, by way of an explanation as to why this story is being told as science fiction:

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element, backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense.

The playing out of this idea makes for some entertainingly trippy moments. "This book, this autobiography, this self-instruction manual (self-coercion manual, self-creation manual)" is rather wonderfully described as "a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons", and it is something protagonist-Yu is both writing and reading - and experiencing - at the same time:

I'm still performing the read/write/self-edit process as faithfully as I can, in fact, even this parenthetical aside has been worded exactly as I am recording it, right up to the words I am typing right now and now and now and now, I am typing what appears to be somewhat digressive and extemporaneous rambling, all of which is starting to make me have serious doubts in terms of the whole free will versus determinism situation

This is a short excerpt from a much longer passage, a gleefully unwieldy run-on sentence that gives a wonderful sense of a self in free-fall. As an expression of how it feels to be - as protagonist-Yu is - trapped in an emotional loop, helpless before all the myriad things in life it is impossible to control, I found it much more compelling than any number of episodes of staring gloomily into the mirror. A footnote adds:

NB: This is how the text actually reads in the copy I am working from. The text also includes this explanatory (and somewhat self-referential) footnote, including this second sentence, which is itself a second-order meta-explanation of the already explanatory first sentence. It is unclear what the function of this self-referentiality is, other than to raise doubts in my mind as to the actual provenance of this manuscript, although I do note that this third sentence, just like the rest of this footnote, is also in the text that I am copying from, verbatim, which makes it seem almost as if I am, in a way, telling myself what to think, that my future self has produced a record of the output of my consciousness, of my internal monologue. Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought.

This is consistent with Libet (1983).

(What really makes this is the mischievously unexplained abbreviated reference at the end.)

When not cleaning up after would-be time travellers, protagonist-Yu spends most of his time moping around with Ed and TAMMY in Minor Universe 31, a world in which, due to problems at the construction stage, "physics was only 93 percent installed", resulting in a somewhat unpredictable environment and a population with "a lingering sense of incompleteness".

Author-Yu has lots of in-jokey fun with the meta-commentary on this. Minor Universe 31, we're told, consists of 17% reality, with the rest being made up of "a standard composite base SF substrate". It is a realm of considerable physical, social and narrative stratification - from the "unincorporated areas" of reality (so-called because they have "no particular look and feel, no genre"), to the highest echelons in which inhabitants go to considerable trouble to create and maintain an ersatz version of the 'real', genre-less regions:

Considerable expense is required for the upkeep of these highly stylized 'reality' gardens, with the verisimilitude of one's personal family garden being a point of pride and a symbol of status among this stratum of inhabitants.

He goes on to note that the borderlands between these upper-class areas and their immediate SFnal neighbours is the land of, effectively, the sort of slipstream story experience that author-Yu is writing; he anticipates the grumpy (but often justified) neither-one-thing-nor-the-other critique often levelled at such stories with the ease of familiarity and fondness:

Although technically SF, the look and feel of the world in these borderline neighborhoods is less thoroughly executed than elsewhere in the region, and outcomes of story lines can be more randomized, due to a comparatively weaker buffer from the effects of 31's incomplete physics. As a result, the overall quality of experience for the residents of these striving areas is thinner, poorer, and less substantial than of those in the middle and upper regions, while at the same time, due to its mixed and random and unthemed nature, less satisfying than that of reality, which, although gritty, is, at least, internally consistent.

A more positive reading is offered later on, with talk of "microscopic, but highly dynamic exchange of materials at the thin permeable boundary layer between the two regions". I am in enthusiastic agreement: more genre-bending like this, please.

~~Nic

Steady on the Earth

I try. I really do. But I can't make myself alone with the numbers in an empty room, and suddenly I'm screaming.

The next thing I know, I'm throwing Father's papers into the fire. Running back to the table, gathering them in armfuls, tripping across the rug, throwing them on the flames, screaming as I watch Father's strange, beautiful writing disappear. Screaming it out of existence. I trip over Mama's embroidery, her sheets with their cheerful little rows of embroidered stars, moons, castles; cheerful, colourful flowers and keys and candles. I hate the embroidery. It's a lie of happiness that Father convinces her is true. I drag it to the fire.

I lingered over Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue (2012), for two reasons. The first reason was that I wanted to savour it; it's the concluding part in a loosely-linked series, whose first two volumes I adored for the crystalline clarity of their prose and the rich humanity of their characters. Bitterblue, as the title would suggest, takes up the story of the young princess whom the dynamic duo Katsa and Po saved from her abusive father, Leck, in Graceling. Eight years on, Bitterblue is learning to be a queen and a woman, and she and her people alike are trying - not entirely successfully - to move on from the horrors of Leck's reign. It's a compelling and at times difficult tale, and in retrospect it seems unsurprising that we've had to wait almost three years for it. (Spoiler: it was worth it!)

My second reason for dallying with the novel was wrapped up in the fact that Cashore writes the sort of stories that reward time spent on them - they demand reflection, and sometimes argument. At the end of my review of Fire at Strange Horizons, I said, "Cashore makes space in her work for challenging readings; indeed, she creates questions that invite them", and this remains true of Bitterblue. Like the earlier novels, Bitterblue is profoundly interested in the moral and emotional consequences of power and how children deal with the legacies of their parents; but it is also more specifically concerned with memory, truth, and the stories we tell ourselves to understand who we are.

The story's central tension is over how the land of Monsea should respond to its difficult past. Monsea is one of several kingdoms in a world where many people are born with a Grace, an exaggerated, superpower-level talent of one sort or another: things like speed, or baking, or singing. King Leck's Grace was for persuasion; as a young Bitterblue, in the novel's prologue, puts it, "When he speaks, his words fog people’s minds so that they'll believe everything he says. Usually, he lies". In Graceling, we saw Leck's downfall; in Fire, its prequel, we were shown how his ability shaped his early life, granting him instant dominance over everyone around him and thus stunting his moral growth, by denying him the need or opportunity to develop empathy. Bitterblue looks at the fall-out of a man like Leck having enjoyed, for decades, the unilateral power afforded by a throne - and it does so first and foremost through the experiences of his daughter and her mother.

The prologue is only a snapshot of how it felt for Bitterblue to be at Leck's mercy, but it is a chilling - and possibly triggering - portrait of domestic abuse, that entwining of violence and mind games:

When he grabs Mama's wrist and yanks her towards the wall-hanging like that, it must hurt. Mama doesn't cry out. She tries to hide her pain from him, but she looks back at me, and in her face, she shows me everything she feels. If Father knows she's in pain and is showing me, Father will take Mama's pain away and replace it with something else.

He will say to Mama, "Darling, nothing's wrong. It doesn't hurt, you're not frightened," and in Mama's face I'll see her doubt, the beginnings of her confusion. He'll say, "Look at our beautiful child. Look at this beautiful room. How happy we are. Nothing is wrong. Come with me, darling." Mama will stare back at him, puzzled, and then she'll look at me, her beautiful child in this beautiful room, and her eyes will go smooth and empty, and she'll smile at how happy we are. I'll smile too, because my mind is no stronger than Mama's. I'll say, "Have fun! Come back soon!" Then Father will produce the keys that open the door behind the hanging and Mama will glide through.

What Bitterblue does is broaden out the picture, letting us discover along with the now-teenage protagonist the nature and extent of the harm Leck has done, and watch his victims wrangle with each other, in near-silent agony, over how such painful facts are to be borne. The latter issue - the shaping concern of the novel - is starkly simple on the face of it, and subject to endless complications once examined more closely. Bitterblue herself longs to know the truth:

"Leck is still lodged in too many people's minds," he had said to her. "His Grace is a sickness that lingers, a nightmare you must help people to forget."

But how was forgetting possible? Could she forget her own father? Could she forget that her father had murdered her mother? How could she forget the rape of her own mind?

Others are more wary about the value of dredging up the past. The view of Bitterblue's advisors - who, far from coincidentally, were also high-level functionaries in Leck's day - is that the best way forward is not to look back:

"It's deliberate, Lady Queen," they'd told her, "a deliberate philosophy of forward-thinkingness. You're right to encourage it."

"But—"

"Lady Queen," Thiel had said gently, "we’re trying to lift people out of Leck's spell and help them move on, you understand? Otherwise, people will wallow in their own upsetting stories."

There is a seductive kind of sense to this, however paternalistic and self-serving its expression. There is a very real danger that Monsea could end up consuming itself in the quest for the truth, because the nature of Leck's power was such that (coerced) complicity in his crimes was widespread ("'What did Leck ever do for himself?'", one character says to Bitterblue. "'You don't think he marched around smashing windows and grabbing books? I told you, these things were stolen by someone else.'"). There is much to be said - and much that is said, in the course of the story - for showing mercy to those who were both victims and perpetrators (tools) during the reign of terror.

And yet. As Bitterblue comes to realise, failing to confront the truth of what happened does not make that truth go away; rather, it denies victims' suffering, turning what remains of society into a house built on sand and lies, one fragile and riven with secret divisions. The community can only move on if the boil is lanced - even if that means, as for Bitterblue, discovering that people she trusts were deeply involved:

"Well," said Giddon again, "Leck is well known for his behaviour with his animals. Cutting them, letting them heal, then cutting them again. What if he liked to hurt people, then let them heal? If it was a part of the way he liked to conduct his politics - as sick as it sounds - then it would've made sense for him to have had healers at his side all the time."

"They've lied to me, you know," whispered Bitterblue. "They've told me they don't know the secret things he did, but if they were mending his victims, then they saw, plainly, what he did."

Giddon paused. "Some things are too painful to talk about, Lady Queen," he said quietly.

"I know," she said. "Giddon, I know. Asking would be unpardonably cruel. But how can I help anyone now if I don't understand what happened then? I need the truth, don't you see?"

Bitterblue is not alone in wanting to know the truth. Initially, though, she wants to know primarily because the secrets concern her own father, and she essentially sees the whole thing as a private pain to which she has a privileged access. She is aware on an abstract level that Leck also harmed others, but this is not something that factors in to her consideration of the issue. Which is why choosing to make her the focus of the novel is more than simply the fantasy genre's usual obsession with characters who hold 'rightful' inherited authority: the fact that Bitterblue is the queen means that her story is about learning that this issue is bigger than she is, and that what the people of Monsea have been through and still are going through is far beyond her own suffering.

The fact that Bitterblue does not have a grace, and must therefore rely on her own resourcefulness, intelligence, and compassion in working towards a solution, is also important. The effects of Leck are too big and too deep to be beaten up or magicked away with superpowers: what is needed is a human response to a human problem, and Bitterblue approaches it through a combination of sleuthing (amongst other things, she uses her love of mathematical problems to crack the code of Leck's encrypted journals), strength of will, and most importantly by listening to people.

In a neat thematic echo, a significant part of the process by which Bitterblue goes about investigating the past involves her lying and keeping secrets, as well as simply uncovering the secrets of others. Frustrated by the omissions and obfuscations of her advisors, the limitations of her knowledge and the restrictions of her position ("Sometimes she felt lost behind this desk in the middle of the room," we're told, "this desk that was so big for her smallness"), Bitterblue starts to sneak out into the city at night, disguising herself and - obviously - hiding her identity in order to get a different view of what is happening in her capital. She finds her way into a "story room", essentially a pub in which people gather to talk about Leck and what he did to them, and begins to eavesdrop on their stories, night after night.

This sharing - people standing up and bearing witness to what happened - is a potent and vital process because Leck's power worked in part by taking people's perceptions apart and rebuilding them to suit himself, leaving them unable to trust their own memories. As Thiel, one of Bitterblue's advisors, puts it, "[O]ne of Leck's cruelest legacies is that he left us unable to remember some things and unable to forget others. We are not masters of our minds". In a particularly difficult passage, Bitterblue reflects on how this affects what she remembers of her mother:

Her memories of Ashen were a series of snippets. Many of them were moments that had transpired in Leck's presence, which meant that Bitterblue had not even been in her right mind. When they'd been without Leck, they'd spent much of that time fighting Leck's brain fog away. Leck hadn't just stolen Ashen from Bitterblue by killing her. He'd stolen her before that, as well. Bitterblue could not imagine the person Ashen would be today, were she alive. It was not fair that she should find herself doubting, at times, how well she'd ever known her mother.

Discovering and speaking the truth, therefore, is an act of rebellion and reclaiming, an attempt to resume control over one's life and identity. As might be expected, as Bitterblue becomes more and more involved in this underground - and more and more involved, in a different sense, with Saf, an intense young man whose chosen method of responding to Leck's legacy is stealing back the stuff Leck stole during his reign, and returning it to its original owners - the lies become more of a problem.

There is a real sadness in the fact that the alternative identity Bitterblue creates for herself is someone whose mother is still alive, someone who is control of her environment and has practical skills that benefit others in tangible ways (she's a baker). Bitterblue finds herself "trapped behind unknowable things, [...] trapped behind things she knew but couldn't admit she knew". Her situation resonates ever more strongly with the arrival in Monsea of Po, who has kept his grace - mind-reading - a secret from most of the world, a clear betrayal of the trust of those closest to him, for all that it has been done for ostensibly the right reasons. Both Po and Bitterblue must eventually be confronted with the effects of their lies; here is Saf's reaction:

"You seem to have this daydream," Saf said, "that when we were spending time together and I didn't know you were the queen, we were friends. Equals. But knowledge is power. You knew you were the queen and I didn't. We have never once been equal, and as far as friendship goes," he said - then stopped. "Your mother is dead," he said in a different kind of voice, bitter, and final. "You've lied to me about everything."

"I told you things that were more precious to me than the truth," she whispered.

In general, I found Saf and Bitterblue's relationship a little less compelling than I did Katsa and Po's in Graceling, or Fire and Brigan's in Fire. Perhaps that was because it's rooted in false pretences, but it's also because Saf felt a little over-familiar, a little too much of a type: the brooding kind-of sort-of bad boy who turns up a lot as the love interest in stories about teen girls. Still, on balance I thought the way it all resolves is brave and very fitting, and the way Saf serves Bitterblue's story, bringing out by her loneliness and her hopes for the future - as woman as well as queen - is done wonderfully well:

She had an imagination, and she wasn't shy of her own body; she'd made discoveries. And she knew the mechanics of two people. Helda had explained it to her, and she was pretty sure her mother had too, a long time ago. But understanding want and understanding mechanics did not go far toward elucidating how you could invite someone else to see you, to touch you in that way.

She hoped that all the kisses of her life, and all the things beyond, would not be with lords who only wanted her money.

This is a lovely expression of self-conscious but unashamed adolescent female desire; I love the tentative, trembling, hopeful boldness of "invite someone else to see you", in particular.

The issue of secrets and lies is important not just for theme but for character. Bitterblue's story - like Fire's in Fire - is also one of choosing to learn from a parent's example, of trying to avoid repeating the mistakes and sins of the previous generation. Not unnaturally, Bitterblue sometimes fears she shares more with her father than she wants to believe, that she has learned patterns of behaviour from him - lying to get her own way, for example - even if she has not inherited his power. On her first night in a story room she sneaks out in a stolen cloak, and slips a coin from someone's change at the bar into her pocket so that she can buy herself a drink to fit in.

Throughout, Bitterblue maintains a deep and passionate sense of self-awareness and self-analysis. Even when - especially when - she has acted thoughtlessly or lashed out or misjudged something (she is, after all, a teenager still learning the world), Bitterblue knows all too well what she should have said, or works it out shortly afterwards. This is characteristic of Cashore, whose approach to storytelling could with some justice be summarised as her protagonists being very, very insightful about themselves and each other. Time and again, Bitterblue has conversations and comes away with fresh insight into those she just spoke to; she reflects carefully over what she could have done better, and refines her approach in the future. This early example is typical:

Left alone, Bitterblue shuffled papers, signed things, sneezed at the dust - tried, and failed, to talk herself out of a small shame. She'd done it on purpose. She'd known full well that he wouldn't be able to bear her question. In fact, almost all of the men who worked in her offices, from her advisers to her ministers and clerks to her personal guard - those who had been Leck's men - flinched away from direct reminders of the time of Leck's reign - flinched away, or fell apart. It was the weapon she always used when one of them pushed her too far, for it was the only weapon she had that worked.

Amid all the larger emotional notes and bursts of action in the book, these moments add up to a quieter but no less important triumph. When Bitterblue comes across a sculpture of herself, created by a captive graced sculptor back when Bitterblue was still a child and hidden away in a locked section of the palace, Cashore once again offers us a startling clarity of insight into her central character:

The sculpture-Bitterblue looked so defiant. The little soldiers on her palm were ready to defend her with their lives. Bitterblue was amazed that a sculptor had been able to imagine her that way once: so strong and certain, so steady on the earth. She knew she wasn’t those things.

This, this is what I read Cashore for: a young woman imagines herself as she wants to be, and the qualities she goes for are defiance, certainty, strength. I, too, want to be steady on the earth, and words just can't express how much I wish these books had been around for me to read when I was a teenager.

 ~~Nic

[Inevitable snarky postscript about the cover: Like Katsa on the cover of Graceling, Bitterblue has fallen prey to the 'Shadowed Anonywoman Wears Clothes That Are All Wrong For The Weather' look. I mean, seriously, not only has the poor thing gone out into the icy, storm-swept mountains in short sleeves and a cloak apparently devoid of fastenings against the cold - she hasn't even had chance to fasten the laces on her (heeled, obviously) boots. *headdesk*]