The State of the Art: verdict = poor
I was quite disappointed by this collection, unfortunately. It lacked any… panache.
“Road of Skulls” is hardly a story, barely a vignette – seems like a riff on Waiting for Godot without the existential angst. The last couple of paragraphs are clever, bit they made it feel more like a prologue to a novel than a standalone story.
“A Gift from the Culture” is about someone having left the Culture to live on a normal planet, and then getting blackmailed to do something only a Culture person could do. It had a lot of potential – how a relationship might work with such a disparity of backgrounds, how someone from the Culture might respond to being blackmailed… but in the end it did not live up to any expectations.
There’s another vignette in “Odd Attachment,” where a first contact scenario is played out from the point of view of the vegetative alien, who would rather being thinking about his lady love, actually. Amusing enough, but not exactly mind-blowing.
The story that had the most impact on me was probably “Descendant,” entirely focussed on one man, his thoughts and his interactions with his spacesuit as he trudges around a barren little world trying to find the one settlement on it, after being blown out of the sky. Melancholy in a readable way.
I found “Cleaning Up” a bit frustrating, because while it had a fun premise – alien gifts start appearing on the earth, how does the West deal with it when the Soviet is still a threat, etc – the characters were so unpleasant as to be almost unreadable.
The absolute lowlight for me was “Piece.” Less a story and more an anti-religion diatribe. The author is recounting two experiences of having been the oh-so-intelligent and smug atheist intellectual confronted by two religious nuts, over the span of 15 years; one an old man, a Christian who dislikes science, the second an otherwise intelligent Muslim man (this is the perspective the reader is presented with) who objects to The Satanic Verses. The conclusion may be trying to suggest that it’s not quite as obvious as the protagonist is suggesting, but it does nothing to redeem the story.
The second last story is the novella “The State of the Art,” another piece about the Culture. Here, the Culture comes into contact with – wait for it – Earth, in 1977. The focus of the story is on Sma and her experience of Earth, as well as her interactions with some of her fellow Contact personnel and the ship Arbitary. While it was interesting enough to consider how the Culture might view Earth, especially perhaps at that time – Apartheid going strong, genocide in Cambodia, war in Ethiopia, etc – in the end it once again felt more like an excise for a rant about everything that is wrong with the world, wrapped up in a story that only just better than average. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am – I expected way more from Banks. Maybe I was setting the bar too high; maybe the short form just doesn’t work for him.
The last story is “Scratch,” and I didn’t really read it for the same reason that I haven’t read the last twenty or so pages of Joyce’s Ulysses (well, also I just didn’t get up to it): stream of consciousness does absolutely nothing for me, and when it’s several people’s worth of consciousness, even less.
So there you go. Disappointed.
Blue Remembered Earth: a belated mini review
So… I read this ages ago, and while I talked about it on Galactic Suburbia (well, rambled incoherently, probably) I just haven’t got around to writing about it properly. The longer I left it, the harder it was to come to it. Until we get to now, when my pile of books that I want to review is growing rapidly, so obviously the thing to do is to go back to the beginning and get this one done.
Natch.
I’m sure I had lots of interesting things to say, but I have of course forgotten many of them in the intervening months (it was November that I read it). What I haven’t forgotten is how much I liked it – and before Sean or someone teases me about being Reynolds-obsessed, I wasn’t a huge fan of his last novel, Terminal World, so let’s just accept that I can indeed be objective and move on.
The novel opens with the death of a family matriarch, an event which spins all sorts of interesting consequences especially for one grandson, Geoffrey, and for his sister Sunday as well. They are led by various cryptic clues to caches hidden by their grandmother over an extended period of time – which eventually lead them to discover a secret which will change their family, their family’s business, and the way humanity views its future.
Geoffrey is an intriguing protagonist. He is the black sheep of the family, evincing little interest in the family business – essentially freighting stuff around the solar system – and generally annoying his more committed cousins. His interests instead lie with elephants, conserving them and getting to understand them better. This is such an off-beat love for a science fiction novel that I was immediately delighted, I have to say. His elephantine interests do end up having some bearing on the plot, but not as much as I might have expected; it’s mostly just what he’s into. I also really liked that the family is African; Tanzanian, to be precise. This is just something that is – Africa as a whole has come through into the 22nd century doing fairly well, and taken its place as a developed continent, leading the way in some areas.
This is near-future Earth (by Reynolds standards) – the 22nd century. It’s post-global climate crisis, which wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been but still quite traumatic thankyouverymuch, and there are some moves underway to improve the ecosystem. Much of the solar system is inhabited, to one degree or another – Mars and the Moon quite substantially, understandably thinning out as you move away from the Sun. The economy is going fairly well in most places; politics doesn’t get a huge amount of pagespace. There is new and interesting technology in terms of communication, and transport, and living underwater. This all sounds fairly familiar – either from our world or from standard science fiction – and a nice enough place to live, and it is… until you start realising how insidious the Mechanism is. The Mechanism would have Orwell spinning in his grave. It knows where you are and everyone else is at any given time, it knows what you are feeling, and if you are feeling aggressive it is able to stop you before you act on that aggression. It is CCTV and Google knowing your search history and ID cards taken to a scary degree. And what is perhaps most scary is that Reynolds does not give it a central place in his narrative. It is simply there. It’s accepted as a part of society by most of humanity – not a good part or a bad part, usually, but a necessary part, an obvious part. And if you buck against it – well, you’re a problem.
Overall… interesting, well-rounded characters; well-paced action; nicely developed society with pleasing as well as ominous aspects; and it’s the first in a trilogy. I am really looking forward to the next two.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet
I came to this book really expecting it to be speculative fiction. I don’t know why; I’ve been meaning to read it for years and all that time, I was quite convinced that it had a fantasy element to it. And I guess it sort of does, in that it’s an entirely unlikely story, but it’s not the out-and-out fantasy, or even the Charles de Lint-ish fantasy, that I was expecting. I really liked it though, and I thoroughly enjoyed the marginalia – in fact it’s this element that really makes it stand out.
TS Spivet is twelve years old. He’s also a cartographic genius, and obsessor. He maps everything: from the way the water moves across his parents’ property, to the motion vectors of a man on a bucking bronco. His artistic skill extends to drawing insects and animals and probably anything else that captures his interest. But it’s maps he loves the most.
Life is already difficult for TS as the story opens. His parents are being difficult, which is nothing unusual really; his father appears disappointed in him for not being more like his outdoors-y brother, his mother is obsessed with insects, and… well, that would be a spoiler. It’s just not all sunshine and joy. And then the Smithsonian calls, asking him to come and visit them because of his amazing drawings that have made their way to that hallowed institution. So TS takes off, across the entire US, to get to the Smithsonian where he feels he might be appreciated and where he can do some good.
(This is where I was expecting some fantastic element. I think I was hoping for something like in Libba Bray’s Going Bovine. It didn’t happen. It’s still a good story though.)
TS is an… interesting… character. I hadn’t expected to be quite so enthralled by a twelve year old character, and the reality is that he doesn’t act like one. He’s an innocent, in his expectations of people and his trusting nature, which is occasionally abused by adults who are just trying to get their own way. But at the same time he has, and develops, a canny sense of the world.
I enjoyed the story as a whole, of TS’ journey – and I have no idea about the places in America he travels through, but I hope Larsen has captured something of their true spirit, because it certainly feels that way. However, probably my absolute favourite part was reading about TS reading his mother’s journal about one of her husband’s ancestors, Emma Osterville. A woman like TS in many ways, precocious and fascinated by the natural world, who becomes a geologist. In fact I was so taken in by this story, and it had just enough plausible elements, that I did indeed google her… only to discover that she is as much Larsen’s creation as TS. Oh, so sad.
Aside from the somewhat-fey TS, the element that really sets this book apart is its physical nature. Many of the pages look like this, with marginalia and arrows added in – usually just on the sides but sometimes top and bottom too. They elaborate on various points of TS’ life and family; they include a number of his maps and other drawings; and generally provide a commentary that would otherwise be difficult to include but without which this would not be nearly so rich. Think Terry Pratchett’s footnotes, but more visual.
I can definitely recommend this to readers of young-adult fiction. While it isn’t fantasy, it does have that vibe about it; it will also appeal to those who dislike fantasy, and want more ‘mainstream’ literature. The prose is easy to read, elegant, and occasionally poetic; the illustrations add a great depth and joy.
It’s Showtime (a review)
Disclaimer: I am friends with the publisher of this book, Alisa Krasnostein.
I’m not a big fan of horror, so I am not the ideal reader for this collection which, although not overwhelmingly scary, uses horror tropes to tell its stories. Nonetheless, it is a quite readable quartet.
The first story, “Stalemate,” is probably the scariest, and that’s because it is the most mundane. Which is saying something, because three out of four of these stories are defined by being set in domestic settings (by which I mean only non-exotic, like another planet or a medieval castle). It’s a suburban kitchen, with a mum and her grown-up daughter, arguing over all the tired old things that parents and grown-up kids argue over, with the added bitterness that Mum is there to help the daughter while she is sick. Of course, it turns out that things aren’t quite as mundane as they seem – and this revelation makes things all the more awful because of the very setting, and the consequences. It’s terrible.
My favourite story is “Thrall,” because it does the most clever things with the horror ideas it’s working with. It’s the story that is least obviously ‘domestic’, involving as it does a Hungarian castle; but even then, it opens in a dingy suburban cafe, and the castle is a tourist trap. Dragomir is a vampire, returned to Hungary to get a bit of rest. He has called a thrall to him – a woman whose ancestors pledged their allegiance to him many centuries before – to help him get ready. The narrative is fairly simple and straightforward. What really makes the story intriguing though is people’s reactions to Dragomir, and his reactions to them. Harris has gone with a much more ‘realistic’ vampire, in that he is very much a man of his times – his original times. He is shorter than the average 21st century man. He despises much of the modern world. And, in return, much of it despises him, too.
“The Truth about Brains” makes the reader into zombie territory, and the heady days of summer in the suburbs. Again the characters revolve around the family, this time an older sister impatient with her brother who, as the story opens, has kind-of sort-of accidentally been turned into a zombie. The narrative backtracks to explain how that happened, and then explores the consequences for the sister, the brother, and the other people involved. I think I found this the least convincing of the stories, mostly because the characters didn’t work for me. It could also be that I just don’t like zombie stories.
The last story is the longest, and relates to Harris’ novel The Opposite of Life, which I’ve not read. “Showtime” involves Gary – a not-that-happy-with-it vampire – and his friend Lissa, a librarian, heading to the Melbourne Show, location of rides, craft, wood-chopping exhibitions… and a haunted house. Harris does well to bring those unfamiliar with this version of Melbourne up to speed, with crafty hints at Gary and Lissa’s shared past of dealing with less-than-friendly vampires, and how this friendship manages to exist at all. It captures some of Gary’s angst and rue at not being alive, and suggests an interesting take on the implications of being undead (sunlight isn’t deadly but more like a beta-blocker; he has no adrenaline so rollercoasters are pointless). However, in the end the story fell a bit flat for me, and I think that was partly because I wasn’t as invested as I could have been in the lives of Gary and his vampire brethren existing (as it were) in the shadows of Melbourne.
Overall, this is generally an interesting look at how horror tropes can be used in familiar settings, and it’s certainly a neat addition to the Twelve Planets series.
Galactic Suburbia 55 (belated)
In which we honour the memory of Paul Haines by giving ourselves nightmares, and catch up (mostly) on several months of feedback about how Galactic Suburbia is singlehandedly keeping the bookselling business alive. You can get us from iTunes or download us from Galactic Suburbia.
News
Paul Haines in memoriam.
Death notice and information about memorial service
We discuss posts by Dirk Flinthart and Ben Peek.
If anyone does a round up of memorial posts about Paul, please let us know & we’ll add the link. In the mean time, check out this post about his complete bibliography and how to get hold of his work.
Ladybusiness on coverage of women on SF/F blogs
New Galactic Chat: Claire Corbett
What Culture Have we Consumed?
Alisa: Wives, Paul Haines; The Warrior’s Apprentice, Lois Mcmaster Bujold; Power and Majesty, Tansy Rayner Roberts), Locus Round Table featuring Nalo Hopkinson and Karen Lord
Alex: Solaris Rising (ed Ian Whates); Reign of Beasts (Tansy Rayner Roberts); Pure (Julianna Bagott)
Tansy: Madigan Mine, Kirstyn McDermott, The Opposite of Life by Narrelle M Harris
Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!
Pure, by Julianna Baggot
The cover is as difficult to look at IRL as it is here. I like it, it’s clever, but I do wonder whether it will be detrimental to the cause.
This is unashamedly a dystopia – an post-apocalyptic one even – set in the not-too-distant future. Pressia lives with her grandfather in the ruins of (I think) America, where day to day life is a struggle: for food, for shelter, and not unnaturally for any sort of meaning to life. Not only has infrastructure been destroyed and food contaminated, but the people themselves have been intimately changed by the probably-nuclear destruction a decade or so before. Pressia was holding a doll at the time of the detonations; along with scars and other injuries, its head is now her hand. And she could be said to have got off lightly: consider those who were walking a dog. Or holding another person.
This is the truly breathtaking, and the truly frightening, part of Baggott’s worldbuilding. Her conception of how people might learn to cope with surprising, disfiguring and debilitating changes to their bodies is clever and largely sympathetic. Of course, it’s not like there isn’t precedence for this, since people in our world do exactly the same. There are some people that she imagines as pretty awful, but being part of a ‘Groupie’ – an amalgam of multiple people – would likely send anyone mad, so it’s not surprising that they would be vicious. I was especially fascinated by the Dusts, people who have melded with the ground in some way; it’s a horrifying thought and Baggott fortunately does not overuse them, keeping them instead for relevant moments in the story. The question of how these melds could possibly function is only lightly touched on in the story, but I didn’t find that detrimental; it’s a bizarre concept but it’s become such a normal one for Pressia and the others that I, at least, got swept along by that acceptance.
Pressia’s point of view is countered by that of Partridge, who lives inside the Dome: a place of refuge which protected some lucky people from the detonations, and where they continue to live without fear – of the environment anyway. These are the ‘Pure’, because they are still pure human beings, unlike those on the outside. The different reactions of people on the outside looking at the Dome, and vice versa, is nicely captured by Baggott: the variation of adoration to hatred seems quite plausible. It’s not an original idea, and reminded me particularly of some of Sara Genge’s stories from a few years ago (“Shoes to Run,” especially, if memory serves (which it may not)), because of its depiction of the people outside wondering about the people inside. Anyway, Partridge may have a life of food and education but of course not everything is hunky dory. His family life especially is a mess, for a variety of reasons, and he is growing restless – something living in a Dome can’t really cope with. Interestingly, there’s not really one major crisis that makes Partridge finally act, but a series of small ones, like pebbles leading to an avalanche. And an avalanche there is, and Partridge ends up outside the Dome.
Pure could be split roughly into thirds: the first third, worldbuilding and characters; the second, bickering and a few new characters; the last third (actually a bit less) crazy crazy action. I really enjoyed the first part, because the world is intriguing and horrifying and different (at least outside the Dome) and Baggott realises the daily routine stuff quite nicely. I wasn’t especially fond of either Pressia or Partridge, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying their adventures and interactions with others. The second third, however, definitely dragged. There is some action, and some fascinating new characters such as El Capitan, who even gets his own point-of-view chapters. However in general it felt like a lot of to-ing and fro-ing that didn’t advance the story sufficiently for the space it was given. There are some interesting character moments, especially for Pressia, regarding temptation and the easy way out, but they weren’t sufficiently capitalised on. Finally, the last 100 or so pages (of 434) rushed by seemingly at light speed, as revelations were made and discoveries unveiled and yet more characters came on the scene to have a Really Big Impact. While this was an improvement over the middle, it left me with a rather unpleasant sense of confusion, and of being rushed.
I definitely enjoyed this novel, almost exclusively for the worldbuilding; however I don’t think I will be rushing out to buy the sequel, should it be published (this is the first of a ‘projected’ trilogy).
Solaris Rising: an anthology
I will admit that I am enough of a pathetic die-hard fan that I got this anthology off the back of its inclusion of an Alastair Reynolds story; others in the contents page also grabbed my attention, of course, so it wasn’t a completely ridiculous buy. Since saying farewell to Last Short Story I have got interested in reading anthologies again – well, actually, I was never very interested in anthologies before LSS introduced them to me, and then a few years of that burnt me out. Anyway, I was dead keen about giving this one a go.
Unsurprisingly, but unfortunately, it’s quite a mixed bag. Let me go through the stories. (The short version: there are some good, and a couple of very good, stories; plus a whack of indifferent ones.)
The good:
Ian McDonald’s “A Smart Well-Mannered Uprising of the Dead” is a delightful take on how social media might interact with local culture in order to impact on the political arena. With the events of the last 18 months this isn’t a radical notion at all, but McDonald here imagines a company offering virtual space for the dead – spirit-houses created by the bereaved for the recently departed. And what’s a virtual space like that without forums, and interaction? It’s really just the next step for the departed themselves to take part in those discussions, and to be commenting on contemporary affairs. I really enjoyed the style of this story as well as the content, although it was a bit confusing to begin with; it jumps from posts written by the dead, to interviews with the website’s creator, to discussions between the relatives of the talking dead. And gradually a picture builds up of what is going on in this country (which I think is never named, but seems to neighbour Mali), and the impact of the dead speaking out. It’s a really great opening to the anthology.
On a completely different wavelength is “The Incredible Exploding Man,” by Dave Hutchinson. Rather than jumping around points of view, as with the McDonald, this story jumps around chronologically but centres on one main event: an accident at a Collider somewhere in the US, and its effects on the people in the room. There’s no black hole as some of the more hysterical media suggested when the LHC was turned on at CERN, but a more subtle impact on the physiology and very existence of the people. It’s fast-paced and features some nicely differentiated characters to bring out some of the ramifications of the event.
Paul di Filippo’s contribution, “Sweet Spots,” is similar to the McDonald in that it involves an individual having an impact on society, but different because it has nothing to do with social media: instead, here an adolescent boy discovers that he can see how to influence events by a word, a nudge, an appropriately directed foot… and of course, there are ramifications, some unforeseen. The story harks to some superhero ideas of great responsibility with great power, and it is interesting to watch Arp (the protagonist) come to certain conclusions himself. I can’t say I particularly liked Arp; he was too genuine an adolescent for that! But again it’s a well-paced story with a clever premise.
With Stephen Baxter’s “Rock Day,” the anthology goes rather melancholy, being about a boy and his dog and a world that is not quite right. Baxter draws out the boy’s curiosity and confusion gently and sympathetically, and although the scenario of the ‘Rock Day’ discussed seems too farfetched (I know, crazy thing to say about a science fiction anthology), the consequences fit all too well into a science fictional universe. All of the stories to this point have been recognisably set on Earth. Stephen Palmer takes us away from that – if not spatially then certainly temporally. “Eluna” imagines a society with what at first looks like a radically different way of doing things, which on closer inspection may not be as different as readers might like. It’s about individuality and curiosity, innovation and tradition and sacrifice. And machines.
Adam Roberts begins his story with a disaster, which might be seen as a bold move. But pretty much all of “Shall I Tell you the Problem with Time Travel?” is concerned with disasters of one sort or another, usually of the fairly significant variety, and it does indeed suggest a potential problem with time travel, which I can’t possibly even allude to here without spoiling what is quite nicely revealed as it progresses. Going forwards and then backwards in time as the story unfolds, this is a very enjoyable if quite horrifying little story about one of science fiction’s more beloved tropes. And taking as his inspiration the revolutionary Che Guevara, Lavie Tidhar imagines a world in which that soldier-cum-poet-cum-politician did not die when he did. There’s only one science fictional element to “The Lives and Deaths of Che Guevara,” and although it’s a crucial one the story could be read as a commentary on the politics of the last forty years or so just as much as science fiction. It ranges across numerous countries and contexts, using interviews and magazine excerpts to break up the plot, and is a quirky and entertaining piece.
Steve Rasnic Tem, in “At Play in the Fields,” offers one of the few stories involving non-human characters. He wonders what it would be like to wake up one day and discover that the world has not only been discovered by aliens, but that it’s also a whole lot later – in years – than when you went to sleep. This is a story about a man and an alien, but also about a man coming to terms with these sorts of profound changes through the mundane objects around him. It’s a quite tactile story, and one to make the reader wonder which of the objects around them might survive long into the future – and what this will say about us as individuals and as a culture. On the other hand, “Yestermorrow” by Richard Salter is concerned with time rather than objects; specifically, what it would be like to always wake up not knowing which part of your life today is, because you are living quite literally from day to day – one day waking up as a baby, the next at forty, but you don’t take that knowledge with you. Which of course means you know when, calendrically speaking, you will die. Certainly presents some interesting problems for the police.
Jaine Fenn’s story is one of exploration that initially seems like it could almost be straight out of Star Trek or StarGate SG1 – a gate to another world, can’t get back through, whatever will we do?! However it is saved from falling into tired tropes thanks to engaging characters and a nicely intriguing twist that suggests some rather interesting things about those characters. In style, it mixes up transmission reports with conventional third-person narrative.
There’s a suggestion of postcolonial ideas about “Eternity’s Children,” from Keith Brooke and Eric Brown. A world that is both a long-term killer of human visitors and the long-term ensurer of their longevity is visited by a representative of the company responsible for it; naturally things do not progress in a straightforward manner. It would have been possible for this story to follow the old idea of white-man-seduced-by-exotic-place, but I think it mostly avoids that by the awareness of the main character, Loftus, of what he is about, and his willingness to think beyond his task.
The penultimate story of the anthology is actually the one I read first and may or may not be the main reason I bought the anthology… “For the Ages,” by Alastair Reynolds, is a wonderful far-future story about the big things – the entirety of cosmology and leaving a message for the ages – and the small things – messy human relationships and just how messy they can get. The characters are finely drawn and utterly believable, the task preposterous and glorious and utterly fitting for the hubris of the human race. It’s easily my favourite story of the entire set.
The indifferent:
In “The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three,” Ken Mcleod combines lack of interesting plot (editor searching for stories, French government launches a curious balloon) with lacklustre characters, resulting in a story that utterly fails to compel. The next story was also a disappointment, because although there is a potentially intriguing idea in “The One That Got Away” – ocean creatures are washing up onto the beach in vast quantities, and something might be found within their bodies – Tricia Sullivan does not provide enough political or historical background to explain what is being searched for or why. That could be forgiven if the characters were compelling enough that their quest was an end in itself, but sadly this is not the case.
Looking at a broken father-son relationship, Jack Skillingstead’s “Steel Lake” has both Too Much and Too Little: too much sentimentality, and too much wrong with the father for him to be at all approachable or sympathetic; too little overall point, either in plot or characterisation. Being overly sentimental also characterises “Mooncakes,” a collaboration between Mike Resnick and Laurie Tom. I like stories about spaceships heading out into the unknown and how people cope with the stress of leaving family, but this one left me cold. The ‘all cultures are precious’ line (which I agree with already) was hammered out without a care for subtlety – too much telling, not enough showing – and the family relationship depicted was boring and predictable.
Ian Watson’s “How We Came Back from Mars (A Story that Cannot be Told)” is (maybe) an alien contact story, with a team of explorer (maybe) on Mars managing to get back to Earth a whole lot faster than expected, who then have to deal with the ramifications of people not believing their story, made particularly problematic by the place they arrive back at. It’s an interesting enough premise, but the story tries too hard to be conspiratorial and suggestive without having the atmosphere or characters to pull it off. Sadly, Pat Cadigan’s “You Never Know” also failed to grab me – sad because I usually love Cadigan’s work, and because it means I disliked two out of the three works by women (the third, by Jaine Fenn, is discussed above). The atmosphere – a secondhand shop – and premise – the shop assistant and his experience with a new security system – are approachable and familiar-seeming. The denouement, however, left me confused and grasping for understanding, and not in a positive way.
Sadly, the last story of the anthology definitely falls into the ‘indifferent’ camp. When a writer writes about a writer, it’s hard for me at least not to wonder about the level of congruency going on. For Peter Hamilton’s sake, I hope there is no congruence between the writer in “Return of the Mutant Worms” and himself, because the thought of having an editor bring up an unpublished 21-year-old story and offer to publish it must be nightmarish to many successful authors. Anyway, this is ultimately a smug and unsatisfying little story that does little good for the memory of the anthology as a whole.
One last thing to mention: I found the author notes preceding each story generally a bit tawdry. They seemed to be trying for a mix of bibliography + interesting factoid, and did not often hit the right note; there was too much effort at sounding quirky for it to be genuinely appealing.
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Quite a disparate set of stories in this collection from Le Guin, and actually not what I had vaguely anticipated, which was stories connected to the Earthsea set – and why I thought that I have no idea.
Anyway.
One of the interesting parts about this collection is that it opens with an introduction by Le Guin herself, discussing her attitudes towards some of the stories and I think responding to some criticism from people when they originally appeared in magazines and the like. It also includes a robust defence of science fiction in terms of character (SF has them), ideas, and not always being heavy on the science (Egan, she didn’t know about you). In talking about technology, she has one of my now-favourite put-downs, regarding someone who said that Native Americans had no technology: “As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there.” She also rather defiantly claims BEAUTY as an aspect of science fictional writing, to which I say HELL YES.
Anyway. Again. The stories are a mixed bunch. The first, “The First Contact with the Gorgonids” is a weird one set in outback NT, with an unhappily married woman as the central character and (deliberately, I think) wince-worthy descriptions of Aborigines. “Newton’s Sleep” is about people who have managed to get themselves into orbit in a habitat to get away from the world, which is going to hell in a handcart; they’re mostly quite ordinary, although by necessity all skilled. Ike – Isaac – is a fairly unlikeable character, although I sympathised, especially when things appear to be going wrong. The third story is just odd, and not in an engaging way – “The Ascent of the North Face” does not refer to a mountain (nor an actual face).
“The Rock that Changed Things” is a story that I more easily associate with Le Guin’s style of writing. Based in an entirely non-human society, where there is a very strict hierarchy to the point of almost being separate species, the nurobls spend their time making sure that the obls can live lives in serenity without messy things like tidying or cleaning. They also help fix the rock patterns that are part of the very reason for being of many obls… and then one nurobls notices the colour of a particular pebble. This is a really delightful story. “The Kerastion” is not delightful, because it is more on the heart-wrenching side; it’s also less of a story and more of a vignette into a world where profession is caste and determines every single interaction.
The final three stories are all Hainish stories, like The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s World and so many others. In “The Shobies’ Story,” a crew is setting out to test the effects of fast-as-light travel on sentient beings. As Le Guin herself notes in her introduction, as well as playing with such physical ideas it’s also playing with metaphysical ideas, and the notion of creating reality through storytelling. So, too, is “Dancing to Ganam,” also looking at testing the new fast-as-light ‘drive’ (the Cetians are constantly reproving people for describing it as a drive). In this case, Commander Dalzul has decided that a small crew who are closer together than the Shobies might have a better chance at not having their realities warped. As well as looking at how we tell stories about our lives, I think there’s also a post/colonial message here, about the stories and political ideas etc that people bring with them when observing foreign cultures. And finally, there’s the paradoxical, sweet-bittersweet “Another Story,” whence comes the title of the collection: Hideo’s mother used to tell him the story of the fisherman of the Inland Sea, who went with a sea-princess and returned after one night to discover generations have passed. Hideo goes on to become a great physicist, and tries out fast-as-light travel…. This is definitely my favourite of the stories in this collection, and I love it dearly. It’s also set on O, a planet I’m sure I’ve read another short story about, perhaps in The Birthday of the World; here people have marriages involving four people, two men and two women, based around when they are born. It’s a fascinating view of society.
This has been part of my desire to read All The Le Guin, and it was overall a very satisfying one.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
By Edwin A. Abbott (originally pseudonymously as “A. Square”)
This is not what I expected! I don’t honestly know WHAT I expected, but it wasn’t this. For a start, it is way older than I had thought – 1884! And for another, there is almost no plot. It’s sort of a memoir, sort of a philosophical treatise, about Flatland: a land that exists in only two dimensions. Our interlocutor is a Square – in Flatland’s hierarchy, solidly middle class (Isosceles Triangles are working class, the most-sided Polygons the highest class. Women are Straight Lines). The first chunk is Square explaining how life and society can function in just two dimensions, with a great discussion about how you can tell the difference between triangles and polygons either thanks to their voices (a method only for the lower classes), feeling (slightly more respectable) or sigh (only for the upper classes because it takes years to perfect). After all of that he comes to the point (heh), which is experience of meeting a Solid – a Sphere – who informs him that there is <i>another dimension</i>, and proceeds to prove it. Sadly, this is heresy in Flatland…
This little book – 82 pages! – operates on many levels. On one, it’s an amusing intellectual conceit, to consider how life would be different in two dimensions (there’s also brief discussion of Lineland and Points). Thanks to this, it’s also an intellectual challenge, because as Square himself says to Sphere: if you’re telling me there’s another dimension that I can’t perceive but need to accept basically on faith, is there then a fourth…? Quite apart from the mathematical side, this is a biting satire of Victorian society and manner, in the way that undesirable elements amongst the lower (Isosceles) triangles are described and in how manners and attitudes of exalted Polygons are portrayed.
The question of the women is one I haven’t quite worked out for myself. If I can accept that Abbott is being satirical about the lower classes then I am hoping that he is being satirical about the women, too, because they really don’t come off very well. They are Straight Lines, therefore no angles, therefore… no brains? They’re certainly treated as emotional not rational, to the point of there being basically two languages – how men speak to themselves and how they speak to their wives. I suspect he may indeed be ironic, because in the introduction to the 1884 edition (reprinted here) “Square” responds to some alleged criticism from Spaceland, about being a woman-hater, in which he admits that he is similar to our Historians, to whom until recently “the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.”
An amusing book, and a quick read.
The Clockwork Rocket
One thing must be noted about Greg Egan’s fiction in general, and this book in particular. He, and it, are uncompromising. In reading it the audience must be one of two things: able and willing to understand complex physics, or willing to accept that they do not understand those physics and carry on with the story regardless. If you are not in either of those two camps, The Clockwork Rocket is most definitely not for you and Egan makes no apology for that. This is a book that comes with diagrams. (For reference, I fall into the second camp. It’s a long time since I did any physics seriously.)
This is a story set in a universe different from ours in one very crucial aspect: the speed of light is not a constant. In many respects, this book (the first of a trilogy) represents the working out of the consequences inherent in that seemingly simple fact – to the point where a large chunk of the book is actually just that: a physics student exploring the ramifications of observed phenomena on the possibilities of time and space.However, were this novel merely an amusing exercise for the physics lover, I would not have persevered. Along with the physics, Egan has incorporated some rather profound discussion of gender and reproduction, all within a quite compelling story about saving the world.
Why does the world require saving? Egan takes the ancient fear that comets herald the end of the world and makes it true (…maybe). At the start of the story, the occasional streaking light is seen in the night sky; over time, with more appearing, these streaks come to be called Hurtlers. This increase in number, and in brightness, leads some people to wonder about exactly what is causing them, and whether it might lead to problems for the world in the future. The protagonist, Yalda, is the one to realise that yes, these Hurtlers may actually represent her world’s doom, and she and others start work on an audacious plan to attempt that doom’s subversion. The plot follows Yalda’s initial experience of education, her move to university, and on into theoretical physics and astronomical research, for roughly the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with Yalda and friends convincing people of the truth of the problem, and of their proposed solution: build a rocket, send it out, and have it return in a few years of world time. Because of the non-constant speed of light, if the rocket is accelerated to a sufficiently high speed many generations will pass on the rocket – and those generations will have the time to do the necessary research to avert disaster planet-side. (If it sounds like I’m spoiling a major plot point, occurring late as it does in the book, fear not: this is all mentioned in the book’s blurb. My guess is that it was put there to encourage readers to push on through the theoretical physics in the knowledge that honestly, there really is a plot here, too. Also, if you’re about to raise issues with the physics – don’t. I’m just telling you what Egan sets out in the book, and I do not have enough physics myself to be able to point out possible flaws in his logic.) Naturally, the course of research never does run smooth, so Yalda and friends experience problems – deliberate and accidental – as well as the frustrations familiar to any scientific pioneers. They do eventually get off the ground, and I think it’s fair to say that much of the most interesting plot occurs onboard the titular rocket.
Egan has not transplanted Earth to his new universe. The world of the story, and the people, are just different enough to be disquietingly alien. Plants emit light at night. People have variable morphologies: if an extra pair of hands is needed for a task, it can be extruded. And, most profoundly, children are formed directly from the mother’s body: she becomes essentially a cocoon, and then splits into four, to create new beings. Ideally, she produces two sets of male and female pairs. When each of these females in turn is ready, she and her co (male partner) meld and she likewise splits into four – and the children will then be raised by her co. Like me, perhaps one of your first reactions is to cry ‘incest’. However, there is no sexuality on this planet, so it’s quite a different situation; our ideas of sexual and familial separation are irrelevant. There are a lot of interesting repercussions of this form of procreation. For me, the most intriguing issue raised is the issue of gender. Children are born from one half of the pair, and that one is called the mother; this is similar to humanity, and perhaps warrants Egan’s use of the feminine pronoun. However, the co raises the children – generally also seen as primarily a mother’s job in humanity – and the suggestion that females could take on this role is seen as entirely unnatural. There is also little suggestion throughout the book that there is anything other than this reproductive role to distinguish between male and female; females do not seem to be subordinated in terms of schooling, for example, simply because they are female, although they may be subject to harsh penalties if they appear to be rejecting their biological destiny. This may be similar to some extremist views today about women being fit only to bear children, but here it’s not the only thing they are capable of doing but rather the genuinely last thing they ever will – and in some sense what they are intended, ultimately, to do. It doesn’t need to be explained, I imagine, that the existence of a drug that can stall their reproductive splitting (there needs to be a word like bifurcate – quartofurcate?) is contentious to the point of immorality or illegality (it’s a bit blurry which). Egan is setting some very provocative questions here about the nature of gender and reproduction and parenting (single parents are the norm!). This is not to say that his ideas and choices are always unproblematic; the very nature of reproduction was troubling, for me, although Egan makes it clear there is no pain involved. And all of this, all of this normal way of being, is off balance right from the start by the main character Yalda, because she is a single: when her mother split, only three children were created. She has no co, and is therefore alternately pitied and reviled. Partly as a consequence of this, she gets the opportunity for a more advanced education than might otherwise have been possible – a bit like having an independent income and a room of one’s own. As often happens, the slightly-outsider character allows for a more interesting perception on the society.
Overall, I really loved this novel. Yes, there were pages where I skimmed the intense physics discussions, because vector diagrams just don’t do it for me. But the character of Yalda, and a desire to find out exactly where all of this was heading, kept me reading – and will make me get the second book as soon as humanly possible.
Randomly Yours, Alex 