Archive for ‘science fiction’

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November 3, 2012

Lavie Tidhar, Osama

I’m quite a fan of Lavie Tidhar, both as a writer about science fiction and a writer of it (in his case the two are frequently tied together). I also suspect, and it’s possible that I’m completely wrong about this and ascribing to him my own motives, that his relationship to some of the more problematic forms of genre fiction is as combative and as fond as my own, and that working through that relationship forms a big part of his writing.
From this weekend’s column:
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Most science fiction fans are probably familiar with Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history set some years after World War Two – a war which, of course, was won by the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. Within the novel a number of characters are familiar with a book titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a (in that universe) science fictional alternate history in which the allies won the war.

Lavie Tidhar’s Osama begins with a similar premise. Joe, a detective in Laos, is a reader of a series of pulp novels titled Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante in which a number of familiar incidents take place. There’s the bombing of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, for example; and the absurd story of a shoe bomber. One of the books is titled Sinai Bombings. Another is called World Trade Centre(“What the hell was a world trade centre?” wonders the narrator). Clearly, Joe’s world is rather different from our own in ways that only gradually become clear as the story unfolds.

(I just really like the cover)

This nesting of books within books becomes more complex when a beautiful woman shows up in Joe’s office. It is soon clear to a reader with even a passing familiarity to the genre that the story has entered the realms of noir fiction. Providing no information or reason for her interest Joe’s enigmatic visitor hires him to find the author of the Osama books. It’s a journey that takes him  across the world as he follows up various leads and finds that the line between fiction and reality, in the Osama books as well as in his own world, are not always as obvious as he might like.

Tidhar’s adherence to classic genre tropes has sometimes made me uncomfortable in the past and it does so again here. It seems clear to me that he is not using these tropes uncritically. Yet seeing the literary gender relations of an earlier age replicated over and over can be jarring, particularly when we’re still struggling to get this right in our own time. Even though, as one reads Osama, it becomes clear that the author needs to replicate these genres in order to undo them.

Because Tidhar is evidently interested in the uses to which literary genres can be put. He’s certainly not trying to be subtle about the noir influence here – at one point he quotes almost directly Raymond Chandler’s famous “down these mean streets” line about the character of the detective. The Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante books are purportedly published by a pulp press in Paris that is best known for pornographic works – and Tidhar’s descriptions of the cover art will sound familiar to those of us who like our literature disreputable. “Load of rubbish, innit”, claims a book seller. Yet Joe’s story is interspersed with extracts from the Osama books, and they are hardly the over the top thrillers we might reasonably expect. Instead, there’s a factual tone that seems more fitted to newspaper reportage, and that sometimes veers towards deadpan. “The threat of political violence in Dar es Salaam had been classified as Low. That was later revised.”

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; this is a terrible cliché, but a true one. Terrorism is rarely mentioned in Osama. Instead, the subject of the Osama novels is given a label more befitting Batman. By showing us our world from the outside and in between the covers of a genre novel Osama plays out questions of how stories are told, and how they invest symbols with particular meaning. Bin Laden himself never makes an appearance in this story that bears his name, but at one point Tidhar rather cheekily juxtaposes descriptions of the famous picture of him, a version of which adorns the cover (“the man with the long beard and the clear, penetrating eyes”)  and of God (“Old man with long beard, yes?”). For a novel that derives its meaning from the meanings with which we invest Bin Laden, this seems entirely appropriate.

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Posted in Left of Cool, science fiction | 1 Comment »

October 13, 2012

Jeff Noon, Channel Sk1n

It’s hard for me to explain quite how important Jeff Noon’s work was to my reading when I was younger. I was about fifteen when I discovered Needle in the Groove, and I fell in love very quickly. It’s been at least five years since I read a Noon book, and I was a little apprehensive about Channel Sk1n; it turns out however much I’ve changed in the last decade-and-a-bit Noon’s prose still works for me. The following (a version of last week’s Left of Cool column) is rather fangirly.

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I was a teenager when I first discovered Jeff Noon. I found his Needle in the Groove (music, drugs, alternate Manchester) and Vurt (virtual reality, drugs, alternate Manchester) in a library and very quickly fell in love. This was before the arrival of the online bookstore and at the time the best I could do was to scour local bookshops and make pleading noises at friends and relatives travelling to the UK. It was a sort of global treasure hunt, and within a few years I’d almost collected the set. I read 2002’s Falling Out of Cars mere weeks after it had been published, and finally felt that I had caught up.

It took me a while to realise that Noon had also brought me back to science fiction. Because while all of his novels might be considered science fictional, that was never, for me, the point of them. The point was Noon’s prose, which broke and stuttered and fragmented itself into poetry.

So I was thrilled earlier this year to discover that the author had written another novel, his first in a decade. Channel Sk1n is a novel about the media, information and the idea of celebrity. Noon’s protagonist, Nola Blue, is a pop star of the most plastic, manufactured variety. So much is she a product of her industry and manager that she has trouble recognising herself. Yet her last song hasn’t done as well as it ought to have, and it appears that her days of celebrity are close to an end. Then Nola becomes infected with a strange virus that connects her with the television signals that play so big a part in the world in which she lives, so that her body begins to broadcast TV. Nola’s skin literally becomes the screen.

There’s another major character. The world of Channel Sk1n is one that is obsessed with reality television, and no programme is more popular than The Pleasure Dome. The Dome is a structure that holds one person, chosen from many competitors, in isolation for weeks at a time. The Dome picks up on each of their thoughts and displays them in constantly changing colours and shapes upon its surface. It is the ultimate form of voyeurism. In addition, other channels broadcast every movement of the person inside. When the book opens, the Dome’s inhabitant is Melissa Gold, daughter of Nola’s agent. Trapped in the Dome, it seems Melissa can do very little to influence matters outside; yet she achieves the impossible. It all culminates in a dreamlike, paradoxical climax that may be more powerful than anything Noon has ever written.

As with all of Jeff Noon’s work, it’s tempting to sit back and let the words flow over you. Channel Sk1n is more pared down than much of the author’s earlier work, but the blurring of lines between prose and poetry is a constant. Occasionally it bursts into static, pages filled with symbols that might easily be mistaken for a formatting error. This works particularly well in context because Channel Sk1n is only available as an ebook. It’s tempting to read into Nola’s loss of identity as a musician through her connection with the music industry some of the same impulses that may have led Noon to self-publish this book.

Noon’s move towards self-publishing means that his back catalogue will also soon be made available in electronic form. Some (notably Cobralingus, which always sat rather awkwardly within the confines of the traditional printed book) will even be enhanced by the new format. Readers who discover the writer through Channel Sk1n will not have to spend years hunting down his works.

We’ve reached a point as a culture where the reality-TV-dystopia is a genre in itself (and hopefully someone somewhere has coined a less clunky name for it). I’m not sure yet whether Channel Sk1n brings anything substantially new to the debate, but it’s a smart, strong piece of work.

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Posted in Left of Cool, science fiction | 1 Comment »

October 2, 2012

Here be Myrmidons

On twitter earlier today I worried that my columns for the National Geographic Traveller seemed more likely to dissuade people from travel than otherwise – in the October issue (out now!) I discuss the usefulness of cruise ships to potential murderers, and November and December’s projected pieces aren’t particularly cheerful either. In last month’s column, of which a longer version is reproduced below, I go a step further and suggest that travel writing and travel writers themselves are inherently suspicious. I’m fortunate to have a tolerant editor.

The Hav books and The Islanders are glorious, complex things, and I’d love to write more about them free of time and wordcount constraints.  An earlier version of this piece contained a section on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities; in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that I left it out.

 

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The publication of Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav caused some confusion among readers. Written in 1985, this travel narrative took the form of a series of dispatches from a historical city; twenty years later Morris would revisit the city with the publication of Hav of the Myrmidons. Ursula K. Le Guin explains in her introduction to my edition of Morris’ two Hav books that aspiring travellers were surprised by the difficulty of getting to Hav. Why anyone should have wanted to visit a place that was, according to Morris, in the throes of a violent revolution remains a mystery, but the real problem was that Hav had never existed.

To set a book in a fictional place is nothing new. Fantasy writers have been doing it for years, providing elaborate maps, family trees and histories for worlds that never existed. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien, for example, know that The Lord of the Rings was only a miniscule part of his universe. Tolkien’s Middle Earth has its own creation myth as well as multiple entire languages created by the author.

All this takes dedication (and a certain level of obsession). But to create a new city in our own world is something else entirely. For Hav to be plausible, Morris has to rewrite all of human history. She inserts the city into the Iliad and the Bible; she makes it an important point on the Silk Route, and the site of an historic meeting between the Attaturk and Lawrence of Arabia. Ibn Battuta writes of the city, as does Marco Polo.

Marco Polo is a useful clue here to the nature of Hav. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has the Italian explorer describing to Kublai Khan a host of fictional cities, each a meditation on the words and signs we use to experience, think of and talk about other places.

The invocation of Marco Polo is not the only way in which Hav flaunts its fictionality. Morris rather cheekily has a character express indignation at the marginalisation of the city in the histories of the writer Braudel, and later has her narrator describe it as looking “like a city of pure fiction”.

It’s tempting to see the Hav books as straightforward imitations of travel writing, but of a place that doesn’t exist. But the “Jan Morris” who is the narrator of a travelogue is not the same as the Jan Morris who is the author of two works of fiction. Sometimes it seems clear that “Jan” is a creation of parody. Both books are full of genre-specific cliché – native bazaars, inefficient foreign bureaucracies, lost glories of the past, the inscrutability of Chinese immigrants. “Jan” is constantly attempting to write herself into this history; she strives to find historical affinities between her own  (Welsh) background and Hav’s early Kretev settlers, insists that she has inside knowledge that is unavailable to others, and shows contempt of other tourists whose experience of the city is less ‘authentic’ than her own. We know this character; we see her in travel literature all the time.

No reader, even one confused by Last Letters from Hav, would mistake Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago for a place on earth. The Dream Archipelago is the setting for many of Priest’s works, including 2011’s The Islanders, which presents itself as a kind of gazette. The introduction explains the geography of the planet, with large landmasses in the north and south and a belt of islands scattered across the tropical and temperate zones of its single ocean. This is followed by a series of short chapters, each about one of the islands. They are arranged in alphabetical order; each contains essential details about the island’s geographical peculiarities, its currency and its history. This seems comfortably factual, but we know from the beginning that things won’t be that easy. Chaster Kammeston, the supposed writer of this introduction, points out that the book simply cannot contain every island in the archipelago when experts cannot even be sure how many there are. There are also problems of islands with similar names and co-ordinates, of different forms of island patois that give the same name to different things (or different names to the same thing), so that it’s hard to be sure if one island is distinct from another.

Then too there are cartographical fictions that are made on purpose. We learn that the island of Tremm, off the south coast of Mequa, does not appear on any map. This island is a secret military base, and there’s no official record of its existence. Later we learn of the visual distortions caused by the planet’s winds, so that the aerial view of some places changes according to circumstances – an effect that calls every map into question. These details that undermine everything we can know about the islands are scattered across the book.

Most disconcerting of all are the hints that the book itself is not all it claims to be (and what sort of name for a gazette is The Islanders, anyway?). Kammeston, in the introduction, says that the book is well-meaning and “will do no harm”. Yet his introduction seems less and less likely as we read through the book and find that it implicates Kammeston himself in a murder, and later contains news of his death.

Though they both write travelogues of fictional places, Morris and Priest use very different strategies. Morris immerses us in the certainty of really knowing a place, then hits us with the revelation that our knowledge isn’t real. Priest adopts the most fact-centred of formats but undermines it constantly. Places cannot be known, both books suggest. All travel writing is a lie.

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Posted in Nat Geo Traveller, Paper Trails, places, science fiction | Leave a Comment »

May 20, 2012

Hergé, Flight 714

Last week I discovered that Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? and Hergé’s Flight 714 had been published in the same year. Naturally this led to great silliness.

 

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At some point in school, when we were about twelve or thirteen, some of my classmates discovered Chariots of the Gods?, a book by Erich Von Däniken. I suspect the discovery of this book, or of others like it is a teenage ritual of sorts. I suppose one could pontificate about the teenager’s attraction to finding his or her place in the world, to questioning ideas that were previously taken for granted, and how this book might seem attractive to someone in this position.

Von Däniken’s book points out strange phenomena found in ancient cultures across the world and suggests that they might be explained by the ancients having access to advanced technology. This is not a particularly new idea – even now one encounters people who cite the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as evidence that ancient Indians had flying machines and nuclear weaponry and that therefore Our Culture is Better. But Von Däniken’s theory was that the gods and other supernatural figures of myth and legend were in fact alien visitors to the Earth.

Chariots of the Gods? was published in 1968. Another book published in 1968 had probably been read by most of the classmates who were so taken with Von Däniken. If so, their enthusiasm is rather surprising since this other book would already have introduced them to some of the same ideas. The book I’m referring to is Flight 714, one of Hergé’s Tintin adventures.

A strange book need not necessarily be an obscure one. The Tintin books certainly weren’t short of sheer weirdness – consider the dreamlike scenes at the beginning of The Shooting Star, in which the end of the world seems inevitable. Yet Flight 714 is one of the less popular books in the series, and I’ve occasionally had to argue with people who had forgotten its very existence.

Tintin, Haddock and Calculus are on their way to an astronautical convention in Australia, when they fall in with the unscrupulous billionaire Carreidas. Finding that Calculus is the first man in years to make him laugh, Carreidas invites the travellers to fly to the conference with him in his personal plane. Unfortunately, a plot is already afoot to hijack this plane. The travellers are taken to a mysterious island in the Lesser Sundas where the evil Rastapopulous attempts to extract information from Carreidas regarding his considerably large bank accounts.

Thus far, this all sounds like a typical Tintin adventure. Until the travellers escape through a cave, down which the native Sondonesians refuse to follow, claiming (in broken English, obviously) that it is not allowed, and that “gods” who “come from sky in fire lorries” will punish them. Meanwhile, Tintin appears to be receiving instructions telepathically from some force. It turns out that the island is a centre of human-alien interaction; its temples built to resemble the space suits and ships of visitors who arrived thousands of years ago.

An earthquake, some explosions and a volcanic eruption later, the island no longer exists. Our heroes are hypnotised into forgetting the whole story, and apart from a few puzzling memories and a piece of metal never seen before, the whole thing might never have happened.

Which brings me to the title of the book. Flight 714 is the plane that our protagonists would have caught had they not become mixed up in Carreidas’ adventure – and the flight they are seen boarding in the last panel. Yet this flight is mentioned only twice or thrice in the book; it is never seen by the reader. So why this title? Perhaps we’re meant to think about what would have happened if Tintin and his companions had taken the original flight. Perhaps, like the characters themselves, we’re meant to forget that the entire story ever happened; this would certainly explain the confusion exhibited by some Hergé fans when the book is mentioned to them. I suspect that aliens are involved in some capacity.

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Posted in comics, Left of Cool, science fiction, silliness | 2 Comments »

May 4, 2012

Sheri S Tepper, The Waters Rising

I wanted to like The Waters Rising. Tepper’s book had been dismissed by practically everyone who had talked about it at all; I’d have liked to be the one to discover some brilliant, redeeming reading of the text, and one that would cause its inclusion in the Clarke award shortlist* to make sense to me.

Dan Hartland and Maureen Kincaid Speller have both reviewed the book in the past week – I share most of their opinions about the book’s flaws. I did occasionally wonder if the theme of the book had something to do with free will; Xulai and Abasio both struggle in the later parts of the book with the idea that their lives and futures have been manipulated in such a way as to give them very little choice. And in one of the scraps of the world’s history that we gather, it is discovered that a large portion of the population was wiped out by machines able to find and eliminate people who were thinking the wrong thoughts. Charles Stross suggests in a recent post that his Rule 34 (also on the Clarke shortlist) is in part about a world where, among other things, “ our notion of free will turns out to have hollow foundations”. It’s just possible that Tepper planned to do something along those lines. If so, it would not change the fact that the book is directionless, bizarre, and flaps around for ages before suddenly cramming all manner of lunacy into its final quarter.

But what I really want to think about is Dan Hartland’s comment about feeling forced to read a text as satire. While reading the book I found myself thinking (or tagging bits of text with) “you’re joking” so many times that I had to eventually consider the possibility. Dan concludes that the novel as a whole is too incoherent to allow for a reading as sustained satire, but I can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the point of this book is an author trying out what she can get away with.

“In order to allay suspicion, I am about to sing something pastoral and suggestive of bucolic innocence.”

There’s nothing particularly notable about the prose, except that the human-horse interactions (and human-chipmunk interactions) are rather too Narnia. What is interesting though, is the text’s approach to providing information – the shifts in perspective from one character to another seem designed to conceal rather than reveal information. The result of this is a situation in which it is obvious to the reader that some form of manipulation is happening, and that the book knows far more than it’s willing to tell just yet. I found myself admiring the sheer audacity of it.

So if this blatant teasing with information is one of the things Tepper is trying to get away with, what are the others? There’s the talking horse which so upset Christopher Priest; presumably because talking animals traditionally fit better with fantasy than science fiction. But there is a reasonably scientific (by the rather elastic values of science that most SF employs) explanation for this in-text. Plus, as Farah Mendlesohn says, “any sufficiently dilapidated far future planet is indistinguishable from fantasy”. Sometimes the far future planet in question is the Earth. (The “any sufficiently advanced technology” maxim might equally be used to excuse the fantastic elements that are not explained – souls that glow and shapeshifting animals among them). Ultimately the strongest argument I can make against the text’s being science fiction is the one Adam Roberts makes here - its flavour is not sfnal. (And once again I’m reminded that applying rasa theory to the Western concept of genre might be rewarding; I wonder if Roberts is familiar with it?) And – keeping in mind that intent means very little – I wonder how much of this determined non-SFnality, in a book about global warming and genetic alteration, was deliberate.

‘Here, madam, you seem a pleasant cephalopod, please accept this with my compliments.’ 

The Sea King is another element of the book that makes me wonder. Because SFF has done giant squid so often by now, that each new giant squid seems as much or more comment on the genre than a plot element in its own right.

Then there are things like this:

“Oh, mares,” said Blue**, shaking his head. “They always have to be whinnied into it. Or . . . subdued.”

“Why, Blue,” cried Abasio in an outraged voice. “That’s rape.”

Blue snorted. “I have long observed that human people do not care what they do in front of livestock, and believe me, what some humans do during mating makes horses look absolutely . . . gentle by comparison.” He stalked away and stood, front legs crossed, nose up, facing the sea.

“Isn’t Abasio your friend?” the Sea King asked him.

“Friends do not call their friends rapists,” said the horse without turning around.

 

It seems incredible to me that I’m supposed to take this seriously. I must assume I’m not.

 

None of this necessarily adds up to any sort of unified reading of the text as parodic; but then, as I said above, I don’t think it’s supposed to be. But I think we might be being trolled, and on the whole I’d feel more kindly towards the book if this were the case.

 

 

 

*The award finally went to Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb, a book I thought was excellent. It’s nice to be proved right.

** the talking horse

 

Posted in animal creatures, cephalopods, genre, science fiction | 2 Comments »

April 11, 2012

Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars

Before I watched John Carter last month I reread A Princess of Mars for the first time in many years. I realised I’d forgotten most of the plot but very little of the feel of the place – for all its problems (and they are legion) Barsoom is a truly epic setting.
Because I am a lazy person, this month’s short column for Kindle magazine was about A Princess of Mars.

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For most of human history we have known very little about space – for that matter, we still do. Dreams of space travel once focused primarily on the moon, the heavenly body most visible to the naked eye. But then telescopes were invented and we began to learn more about the planets, our knowledge growing with improving technology.

In the 1870s the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli discovered a strange feature on the surface of Mars – the appearance of straight lines. He called these “canalli”, or “channels”. When Schiaparelli’s findings were translated into English the relatively innocent “canalli” was translated as “canals”, the latter word carrying the connotation that these lines were man- (or martian-) made. This was probably the reason behind the flowering of fiction about Martians at the turn of the twentieth century.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars is one such work of fiction, published in 1912. It tells of John Carter, a former confederate soldier and now gold prospector who, while fleeing from savage apaches (racial sensitivity is not one of the strong points of this book) stumbles into a mysterious cave and, in an incomprehensible series of events, has an out of body experience and is transported/astrally projected to Mars.

Carter’s early hours on Mars do at least pay lip service to the fact that it would be difficult to survive on a planet other than one’s own. He has trouble adjusting to the difference in gravity, and does not speak the language of the natives – Mars, or Barsoom, is home to various species of alien but they share a common tongue. This state of affairs does not last for long. Soon enough he is adopted by the four-armed green Martians (known as the Tharks), and it seems a matter of days before he has mastered their language, and begun to rise in their ranks. If all this seems something of a cliché, it’s because A Princess of Mars is one of the founding texts of the genre. It’s also why Carter is the least interesting thing about this book. Things get a lot more fun when the titular princess, the humanoid Dejah Thoris of Helium, shows up. In what is a rather scattered plot, Carter and Dejah Thoris escape, bring down a rival ruler, and unite the green and “red” (humanoid) Martians.

Yet the plot isn’t really that important. What makes A Princess of Mars work is Barsoom itself – a dying planet with a failing civilisation. We’re told very little of the history of Barsoom. We learn that there were once more humanoid races; that, like Earth, Mars once had seas. We’re told almost nothing of the strange old men who operate the machinery that keeps the Martian air breathable.

It’s easy to see why in John Carter, Andrew Stanton’s 2012 adaptation of the novel, the director should have chosen to jettison most of the plot, cobbling together a new one and focusing on the visual depiction of the planet. Because A Princess of Mars isn’t really a very good book, but Barsoom? Barsoom is glorious.

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Posted in kindle, racism, science fiction | 1 Comment »

April 11, 2012

A signal boost (with some added self-promotion)

Fabio Fernandes and The Future Fire have started a Peerbackers project to finance a collection of colonialism-themed SFF from outside the first world perspective.

Much widely distributed science fiction and fantasy is written by American and other Anglophone authors, and treats subjects close to the hearts of straight, white, English-speaking men. There’s nothing wrong with this sci-fi itself—we love lots of it—but there’s clearly something missing. Having white Anglo cis/hetero/males as (the only) role models is not an option any more. We aim to redress this balance, not only by publishing speculative stories by people with different viewpoints and addressing concerns from outside of the usual area (seeWorld SF), but also by explicitly including fiction that addresses the profound socio-political issues around colonisation and colonialism (see Race in SF). We want to see political stories: not partisan-political, but writing that recognizes the implications for real people and cultures of the events and actions that make up science fictional or fantastic histories, as well as our own history.

This looks like being an exciting project, and Fabio and Djibril are Good People. You can donate to the anthology here (where they also explain how much they hope to raise and how they plan to spend it). Hopefully some of you will also consider submitting work for consideration.

 

As for non-first-world sf that already exists, Zubaan’s Breaking the Bow, now has a cover which you can see here. This collection has been a long time coming – I’ve been suppressing my excitement about it for over a year now. It’s an anthology of speculative fiction based on the Ramayana and contains stories by Kuzhali Manickavel, Manjula Padmanabhan, Lavie Tidhar, Tabish Khair and Tori Truslow, among others, and is edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh (who also has a story in the anthology). There’s also a story by me; please do not read it though you may admire my name in the table of contents.

I’m still not sure when this is due out, except that it’s “soon”; but I get to share this because now that it has a cover it is a thing that exists.

Edit: I knew I’d forget something. The cover is by Pinaki De, who has been responsible for some of my favourite covers in Indian publishing over the last few years. 

Posted in culture, personal, science fiction, signal boost | Leave a Comment »

December 31, 2011

China Miéville, Embassytown

For the sake of completeness – I realise I never reposted this review (originally written for Global Comment) here. This version is slightly longer than the original.

 

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When China Miéville’s The City and the City won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2010, there was some debate over whether or not the book was really science fiction. With his new book there can be no doubt. The City and the City was a crime novel set in a fictional part of Eastern Europe: Embassytown is set on another planet.

Arieka (the planet upon which the city of Embassytown is located) is home to a race of aliens known to Terran settlers as “the Hosts” or the Ariekei. What they look like is never very clear. Miéville’s previous books have often contained creatures that cannot be adequately described except through fleeting glimpses – notably the Slake Moths of Perdido Street Station and the Grindylows of The Scar. We do know that the Hosts have “fanwings” which aid in communication, and that they have two mouths.

This last is important because the language of the Ariekei is unique. Firstly, they cannot tell lies. In this language there is no real boundary between the signifier and signified; the word is the thing itself. It’s a clever inversion; two tongues but only one meaning rather the the other way around. This inability to lie makes the use of metaphor rather complicated — the thing to which the comparison is being made must already exist in the world. The Terran narrator of the book, Avice Benner Cho (her initials ABC) is a simile. She is “the girl who ate what was given to her”; a description vague enough to be of use in many contexts.

Secondly, this language relies not only on sounds but on the mind behind them. The two mouths must speak simultaneously, and they must mean what they say, but they must also be motivated by the same consciousness. Most Terrans cannot speak the language: two may speak simultaneously, but unless they share the same mind to the Ariekei it’s so much gibberish. Hence the importance of the Ambassadors, pairs of Terrans who are genetically identical, and raised solely for this purpose. The Ambassadors are seen not as two people but as a single entity; with names like CalEb and MagDa, their individual components only meriting half a name. The events of Embassytown are set off by the arrival of an Ambassador of an entirely different kind, whose voice affects the Hosts in unexpected ways.

This is a setting that allows Miéville to explore various ideas around language and consciousness. There is, for example, the strange place that lying assumes in Ariekei culture. The nature of Ariekei language (referred to throughout as capital L Language) renders it “incapable of formulating the uncertainties of monsters and gods”, and so the Hosts have no religion. However, they do have “festivals of lies” at which people compete in trying to use Language to tell falsehoods. Lying has taken on an almost religious significance here; something beyond Language, impossible and yet apparently conceivable. This raises the question of whether it is even possible for something to be “beyond words”, a notion contested early in the book by Avice’s partner Scile, a linguist. The possibility of a language in which word and thing are the same brings to mind the first sentence of the Bible. If the Ariekei think of lies in semi-religious terms, various Terrans regard Language as an almost pre-lapsarian means of communication, and one that must, by virtue of its unsulliedness be preserved.

Equally, there is the question of the mind (and since religion has become involved, the soul). Are Ambassadors made up of two separate people, or are they one? Does Avice’s friend Ehrsul, an “autom”, have a soul? Can the Ariekei recognise individual Terrans as sentient beings (and not strange, half-minded creatures)? And are even regular human minds ever really that unified?

The issue of colonialism is also raised in the relationship between the Hosts and the Bremen Empire to which most Embassytown residents belong. The Hosts have advanced biotechnology, while the Terrans have the ability to travel and trade, a relationship that seems egalitarian. Yet the Terrans are backed by the larger might of an empire. Later events bear out the existence of a power imbalance, with connections made between colonialism and drug addiction (it is easy here to make a connection with imperialism in Asia) and the Hosts confronting their status as postcolonial subjects.

But this is itself is a bit of a problem for me. Because once you begin to read Embassytown as a book (partly) about colonialism and religion (and if you don’t subscribe to this reading all this is irrelevant), we have a book in which aliens who have their wonderful, prelapsarian innocence destroyed stand in for the brown people and the humans who travel around the universe spreading their culture are the white people. I don’t know how this connotation could be avoided (by making the Terrans not Terran? By having the Ariekei have a more visible cultural impact on the various groups who visit their planet?) Miéville deals with a rather fraught set of questions better than most, but it’s there, and it makes me uncomfortable.

Miéville answers very few of the questions he poses, exploring ideas without coming down on any particular side. It can feel slightly scattershot – there are more questions and leaps of thought from one idea to another than there is deep engagement with any single idea. And yet there are times when this works. Science fiction is often praised for an ability to literalize metaphor, and this is very clearly more a novel of ideas than one where plot, setting and character are central. But here we have something different. So much of the structure of the universe of Embassytown is unknown even to the characters that inhabit it – we learn early on that this is not the first universe there has been, and about the “lighthouses” in the immer, created by unknown peoples. Some of the most fundamental questions about the universe remain unknown. Such a universe is one in which questions can be debated; not necessarily one in which they can be answered.

Miéville’s language has always been both elaborate and richly allusive, and in a book about language this is even more evident. He coins words like “shivabomb” and “pharotekton” without explaining them, and in working out their etymologies the reader is reminded of just how dependant on metaphor our own language is. A number of words are derived from German, since the “Bremen” empire is involved. The indescribable alternate space through which people travel vast distances through space is called the “immer”, German for “always”, while the space we habitually exist in is the “manchmal” or “sometimes”. But “immer” also allows for the word “immersion” to describe space travel.

It’s when the characters are talking about language that Miéville stumbles a little. I’m not sure the concept at the centre of the book (how Language works) holds up, but I was willing for the duration to suspend disbelief and treat it as an intellectual exercise rather than a matter crucial for the functioning of a plot. Avice’s circumstances make it seem natural that she should be able to speak knowledgeably about language (and I appreciate the author’s willingness to use critical terms). Yet some of her explanations seem rather unnecessary. “The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on.” Indeed, and it’s an apt analogy, but the reader who is familiar with such basic structuralist terms as “langue” and “parole” has probably figured this out. The linguist character, Scile, repeatedly explains things that the text is already making quite clear.

Yet Embassytown (mostly) works. It is unabashedly an intellectual exercise, and at times its characters seem rather lifeless. But it is bursting with ideas, language well used, and is occasionally a good story. These things make it easy to forgive much.

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Posted in China Miéville, Global Comment, language, science fiction | 1 Comment »

December 4, 2011

Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

Short bit on this for last weekend’s column – and continuing the November children’s literature theme.

 

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Characters in stories, particularly children’s stories, always seem to find becoming a writer ridiculously simple. Jo March from Little Women, for example, only has to show up with a manuscript before she becomes a successful pulp writer, only giving it up when the man she admires tells her it is tarnishing her soul.

What I can never get enough of, though (and I suspect that this is partly because there simply aren’t enough written) are books about readers. Not just quiet, geeky types who we’re told like to read – I mean people actively reading and reacting to specific books. One of the earlier examples of this that I can think of is Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where Catherine Morland is completely absorbed in writers like Ann Radcliffe. Austen’s own book, Persuasion, forms an important part of the main character’s consciousness in Antonia Forest’s The Ready-Made Family. This year saw the publication of Jo Walton’s Among Others, in which the main character’s love of science-fiction is as big a part of her development as the actual events of the book. These works tend to assume that the reader has some familiarity with the books that the character is reading; for example, Walton’s book often quotes directly from The Lord of the Rings and expects the reader to know this.

And then there’s Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. This book, published in 2009, is about a twelve year old girl named Miranda. Among the things we learn about her is the fact that she has a favourite book, one that she has reread over and over. Readers who are familiar with the book in question will recognise it immediately – indeed, the references were so obvious to me on my first read that I didn’t even realise that the title had never been mentioned – it is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

When You Reach Me is set in New York towards the end of the 1970s. Everything changes for the narrator on the day when a strange boy hits her friend Salvador without provocation. She and Salvador grow apart and she finds new friends, one of them the boy who hit him. “The laughing man”, an elderly homeless man who speaks what appears to be nonsense, appears in their neighbourhood, and strange, naked men are seen running near the school. This is also around the time that Miranda begins to receive strange notes, left in places that no one can possibly have access to, and offering “proof” of their validity by telling her about things that will happen in the near future. The writer of the notes claims that he is coming to save the life of Miranda’s friend. He (or she?) asks her to write a letter about everything that is happening, and to be as detailed as possible. The book is the letter, the “you” the mysterious sender of notes, and eventually it becomes clear that Miranda has figured it all out.

This is where her favourite book comes in. A Wrinkle in Time sparks off discussions about time travel (readers familiar with it will know why) among the characters, and it is soon obvious that time travel is the only solution to the mystery at the heart of the book. If it seems a little implausible that Miranda should have so much trouble understanding the central conceit of her favourite book, the discussions that result make sure that we’re all very clear on how time is supposed to work.

But When You Reach Me is remarkable for more than the time-travel conceit and the references to L’Engle’s book. The winner of the 2010 Newbery award, it is quiet and realistic, with characters who are flawed and wonderful. It engages in some clever conceits (the way the chapters are ordered, for example), but it is fundamentally good storytelling. And the truth, when it becomes clear, arrives with an emotional impact far stronger than the book’s earlier restraint would lead you to believe. It’s gorgeous; but read A Wrinkle in Time first.

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Posted in children's literature, Left of Cool, science fiction | Leave a Comment »

December 2, 2011

Hari Kunzru, Gods Without Men

Or: in which I manage not to refer to James Wood and “hysterical realism”. A version of this appeared in last weekend’s Sunday Guardian here.

 

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In Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men the desert is not a featureless place. It becomes the subject of Native American myth; the setting for conflict between white men and Indian tribes; the location of a cult striving to make contact with aliens. It is the site of visions for a Mormon miner and an Aragonese friar separated by a century, and of military exercises for the U.S Army. The Pinnacles, a rock formation comprising three columns, to the priest symbolise the holy trinity and to the locals a gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. It is, in short, the backdrop for a history of the United States, from “the time when animals were men” to the present.

If there is a central strand to this polyphonic novel it is the story of the Matharus. Jaz (Jaspinder) Matharu is the son of Punjabi immigrants who disapprove of his marriage to the Jewish-American Lisa. Despite this, the couple seem happy until the birth of their son Raj. Raj is autistic, and the attendant difficulties this brings put a strain on the relationship. Then on a trip to the Mojave Desert Raj vanishes from his stroller.

Raj is not the first vanished child in the story. In the late 1950s Joanie Roberts, a member of the Cohort guided by the Ashtar Galactic Command, cannot locate her daughter Judy among the crowds camped around the Pinnacles. Judy had last been seen talking to a strange glowing boy. In the 1920s the sight of a white-skinned glowing child walking with a Native American man leads to accusations of kidnapping and a group of white men gather to chase this man and hunt him down. There is another child involved – this particular victim is chosen in part because he has fathered a child on a white woman.

Without this background of missing children (both glowing and otherwise) the story of the Matharus is still a fully realised one. We switch between the perspectives of Jaz and Lisa, seeing them from inside and out, realising that they each have their prejudices and irrationalities. With Raj’s disappearance the couple is subjected to a media circus – complete with badly-punctuated, rage- and conspiracy-filled youtube comments, talk show hosts who complain that Lisa is insufficiently emotional*, suggestions that the parents were to blame and that the couple, being wealthy New Yorkers, are fundamentally unsympathetic. Kunzru is presumably invoking the media discourse around the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. Lisa deals with the situation by turning to spirituality. Jaz’s reactions to his son are entirely plausible within the framework of a realist narrative. Theoretically one could ignore the aliens completely.

But it would be a terrible shame to overlook the rest of the book in favour of the Matharu plot thread. Kunzru’s ability to switch registers between eighteenth century priests, twenty-first century pop stars and everything in between is truly impressive and fully on display. It’s not entirely clear what some of these characters, particularly the pop star, add to the plot. Yet the very fact that there are so many points of view adds to the presentation of the pinnacles as a sort of palimpsest of (mostly paranormal) meaning.

A minor but important aspect of the book is Jaz’s Wall Street job , which involves working with a computer programme called “Walter”. Its inventor, a Kabbalah enthusiast named Cy Bachman, claims to be searching for “the face of God”. Walter connects everything, bringing together seemingly random and unrelated events and points of data.  Even the unbelieving Jaz begins to think that these are part of a larger pattern and that he is meddling with something fundamental – he thinks he may have caused the collapse of one country’s economy, and the Wall street crash follows soon after. But are Walter’s data points really part of a larger pattern?

This stringing together of seemingly random events to create a meaningful whole might work as a metaphor for this novel. As might the act of “running the old way”, a talent possessed by Mockingbird Runner, the man chased across the desert. As he runs, his strides lengthen so that the footprints his pursuers find are impossibly far apart. But the footprints are part of a single trail. This is a book filled with people looking for patterns. And weaving all these disparate stories together are two figures; Coyote, the malevolent trickster figure of Native American legend and (as far from local as anything could get) the glowing alien child.

The Balzac quote with which Kunzru begins his book (and from which he gets his title) is apposite. In the desert there is everything and there is nothing. We make meaning, or we don’t. And so Kunzru is able to end his book by saying of the desert, which has been at the centre of multiple grand narratives that “there was nothing out there at all”. 

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* For Indian readers, there’s a bit of a parallel here to some of the criticism directed at the mother in the Aarushi Talwar murder investigations.

Posted in Guardian20, myth, science fiction | Leave a Comment »

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