Friends

Languages Of Family

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ann Leckie’s Raadch Universe is one of the most useful conceits in recent science fiction. Not that there aren’t plenty of background templates to choose from—Iain M. Banks’ Culture, C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance//Union, Martha Wells’ Murderbot universe—but Leckie’s stands out in the way the separate polities interpenetrate and shift and establish themselves based on the intrinsic diversities each entity exhibits. There are nonhumans—the Geck, the Rrrrrr, the Presger—and human and parahuman, and they all, even among themselves, have distinct modes of expression and subsequently unique interests.

Translation State is her fifth entry in what has been thus far a consistently fascinating foray into interstellar…well, it’s all there: war, politics, philosophy, sociology. But for me the stand-out interest has been from the beginning personal identity. In this new novel, it is everything. Leckie is exploring what it means to express autonomy and possess agency.

Enae is facing life outside the home she has always known. Maman has died, the family is gathering to sort out who gets what, and Enae learns that there is nothing to inherit. Maman had spent it all. Another family has purchased the home and, for all intents and purposes, the family name to use as a resource in their rise to prominence. Enae has been cut loose.

She has been in thrall to maman, the one kept home to perpetually care for the elder of the house. Constantly criticized and yet provided for, she has lived in a kind of purgatorial condition, without much of a life of her own. Now, seemingly overnight, she must leave the only house she has ever known and find her way to a new life.

She is not tossed out. The new “owners” see to her material resources, but eventually Enae must leave. A new cousin talks with her about options and suggests he can procure her a position in a diplomatic capacity. She accepts. The first task she is given is to try to find a missing person—missing for decades, almost two centuries. No one realistically expects her to find this person or even find out what happened, and Enae is told as much and that as long as she shows an effort, she will retain this new position and be able to do pretty much as she likes.

That is not who she is, though, and she takes the task seriously. Much to everyone’s surprise, Enae makes headway. But the clues she follows embroil her in a political situation involving the Imperial Raadch, the Rrrrrr and Geck, a refugee group, a local polity with a stake in controlling the refugees, and the very mysterious and dangerous Presger.

The Presger have been a presence throughout the Ancillary stories. The only direct contact between them and any other group has always ended in brutal destruction. The Presger eviscerate—ships, beings, systems—for no comprehensible reason. Over time, a hard-established treaty has come about setting precarious boundaries. On the Presser’s part, an entire cadre of Translators was created just for the purpose of communicating with non-Presger entities, and it is the Translators that are the only direct contact anyone has ever had (and survived) with the Presger. The Translators themselves are not Presger.

It was one of them that went missing. During those missing years, it reproduced. And it is the result of that reproduction—Reet—who now is at the center of the diplomatic chaos Enae has precipitated by being thorough in actually trying to solve the mystery.

The Translators insist on recovering Reet, claiming him to be a Translator juvenile who must be brought back into their fold lest others suffer. Reet, however, has been raised as a human by his foster family and that is what he feels he is.

A petition is filed with the Treaty Administration, things become locked for the time being while matters are sorted out, and in that setting Leckie gives us a look into the manifold interpretations of human, nonhuman, AI, and the balancing act between communal necessity and individual choice. Along the way, the lineaments of her rich universe are revealed in ever more intriguing detail.

Leckie deftly raises the stakes as simple situations unfold into more complexity until we are embroiled in an interstellar thriller with terrorists, political brinksmanship, interspecies conflict, and potential war. And yet it remains throughout focused on family.

The central motivation of each character in this is about family. The boundary between that and the body politic is blurred almost to the point of erasure. Which is, of course, the point.

Within this is the question: can you be what you want to be, no matter what? In Reet’s case, genetics (biology) dictates he is not what he has always felt himself to be. The ambiguities of that are well-explored in the course of the novel, whether what he has always felt/believed is defensible in the face of apparently unalterable factors. Secondarily, given the validity of those Other Factors, does he have the right to reject the claims of others on his choices?

This is set against the vagaries and challenges of a treaty intended to keep wildly disparate civilizations out of each other’s way, and however the decision comes down will impact everything going forward.

No pressure.

But the vital interests here are focused down hard on what constitutes family, either biologically or circumstantially, and everyone involved must deal with the ramifications. In their separate ways, each group portrayed is trying to establish the grounds and the methods for familial inclusion and care.

The fey element thrown in is the one group that adamantly disbelieves another one involved actually exists, believing it is a fiction for political leverage.

Science fiction has been shoving alien species up against each other practically since its inception, but of late the emphases on how and the bases of interaction have shifted to examine the place we all live. Leckie has produced a work that explores those possibilities in ways no other genre can.

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Check out the upcoming event sponsored by Left Bank Books:

https://www.left-bank.com/event/ann-leckie-translation-state-launch-event

Reformed Colonizing

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In some form or another, the idea of terraforming has run through science fiction for decades. The term was coined by Jack Williamson back in his 1942 story Collision Orbit, which involved the hammerblow of an asteroid impact. Gradually the idea seeped into the general body of science fiction as the problem of actually stumbling on a habitable world to settle became apparent and more intrusive measures were proposed. By the late 1980s it had blossomed into an accepted practice. 

Most of the early examples dealt with Mars. The fascination with colonizing the Red Planet had always been there. After the hoped-for suitability of Mars was thoroughly dashed by actual probes, other solutions informed new stories.

The difficulties are nicely laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The sheer expense of the endeavor rose to daunting prominence. More solutions came to the fore. Nanobots, microfauna, slamming a planet with iceballs (comets). Proposals from the other end of the problem were offered, literally changing the settlers themselves to fit the new environment. (Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus among others.)

Venus offered a different set of problems and possibly the best attempt to dramatize them is Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy, which is a generational saga about the terraforming and colonization of Venus. Other worlds in the solar system, as our knowledge of them grew, offered yet more technical problems to overcome and gave settings for many good tales.

Of course, the central ethical problem at the heart of all of them remained largely unaddressed, namely the whole concept of colonization. Science fiction of the exploratory variety took it as given that humanity would expand into a universe assumed to be there for the taking. The possibility of other species already being there provided the fodder for the usual exercise in imperial conflict. (Asimov famously avoided the whole issue by depicting a universe devoid of all other intelligent life but human.)

Whether we should or shouldn’t go forth and colonize is probably a pointless question. We will if we can, because “should have” has never been a factor in dismissing the idea. (Whether we should or shouldn’t go to the expense is a different question, whether as a matter of building the capacity or engaging a conflict for territory.) We will. 

So, the question then becomes how to go about it without being, well, evil. It can be argued that a good deal of the “space opera” after the 1970s has as at least a subtheme this concern, most prominently fueled by the discussions prompted by Star Trek’s Prime Directive. 

Accepting migration and settlement as a given, the ethical themes emerging from questions of how, why, and to what end offer a rich pool of conceptual interest for science fiction. The impulse behind much Golden Age SF and almost all space opera was based on the westward wave of conquest and settlement of the so-called Old West. Similarity of motifs abound. Contrary voices emerged slowly as the ongoing conversation within SF continued till the present time wherein a healthy critique of post-colonialism has come to prominence. The costs are now under examination.

Annalee Newitz has established a reputation as a sharp observer, both in fiction and nonfiction. She applies all her accumulated savvy to her new novel, The Terraformers, which combines several strands of the ideas into one excellent work that begins by setting aside the question “Should we do this?” She takes it as read that we will.

But then she sets up a scenario in which all the consequences and related issues come into play to challenge preconceptions and address responsibilities in clever and amusing ways. 

sask-E is a planet under development by a corporation that eventually intends selling lots to prospective inhabitants. A luxury development, in fact, potentially very profitable. To prepare it, various stages of work must be done to turn it into something suitable, which is a time-consuming job requiring specially adapted populations of workers for each stage.

These populations are intended to die off once their stage of the work is completed, but longterm plans are never so neatly executed.

In the months leading up to the big premier of the new world for prospective buyers, ERT Ranger Destry Thomas follows a trail of clues to an enclave of survivors from the prior era of world-building and discovers that extinction is not inevitable. A thriving city of Homo diversus escaped their intended obsolescence and built a city beneath a volcano. Destry and her colleagues now have a set of decisions to make that set all of their various obligations at odds.

The Rangers are supposed to be nominally independent, observers and enforcers of a set of environmental rules the corporation, Verdance, is required to follow in the remaking of such worlds. The ecology is intended to be pristine and the footprint of colonization kept at a manageable minimum. It’s a delicate balance.

But this, a whole population of sapients who aren’t even supposed to still exist, throws a wrench into the works.

What follows is a generation-spanning struggle between the various factions over who (and in what way) has a right to live on Sask-E. 

Newitz has built a far future universe in which uplift is a feature—we have sentient moose, among other animals—and the ethics of coexistence are threaded throughout. What might in lesser hands have become a confusing mish-mash of characters and situations is here deftly managed to excellent effect. The definition of innate value is the point here and to that end we are given as broad a cast of characters with significantly different needs, wants, and proclivities as one could wish for in a novel that attempts to tackle what one might see as post-post-colonialism. 

Once people are involved…

The exigencies of the corporation and the machinations of its designated agents, even with the initial “good faith” attempt to remake a planet over which no native life has claim, spiral into the abyss of expediency, made worse by the pathologies too-often in play among certain personality types. When “making a profit” and “delivering a product” run directly into questions of innate rights and moral necessity, the resulting wrestling match is instructive.

The Terrfaormers is at base a critique of colonialism, but done in a way more subtle than most by setting up the conditions from the beginning to focus on the regard—or lack thereof—people have for each other, especially when walls between them are erected to allow a set of goals to take precedence over any and all incommensurate circumstances that may—that will—arise.

As in her first novel, Autonomous, Newitz displays a thorough grasp of the interplay between competing issues when Market Forces are confronted by moral imperatives. Throughout, there is attention to compromise too-often absent when the full stage of narrative possibility is reduced to the confines of a soapbox. Instead of a diatribe on do’s and don’ts, we get instead a well-reasoned examination of processes in play. Granted, Newitz has a preferred outcome, but she doesn’t let that get in the way of showing the whole stage.

Besides all this, it is hard not to appreciate a well-imagined and realized flying moose.

Ministering To The Present…For The Future

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Among the most attuned voices in the climate change discussion, outside of straight-up science, Kim Stanley Robinson has long held a commanding position as a legitimate observer. The power of fiction combined with clear-eyed assessments and a grasp of practical as well as philosophic morality is nowhere better demonstrated than in his long career addressing “real world” issues through the lens of science fiction. 

Go back to the Mars Trilogy, the core of the three novels is climate. The politics, the economics, the science, all anchor the characters to a set of questions demanding attention. Iy is possible to see that early work as a stand-in for what could be reclamation work here on Earth.

Over time, book after book, Robinson has focused on one major conceptual question—what is the optimal relationship between humans and their environment? Even his interstellar exegesis, Aurora, is about this. In a way, it’s a central question—for science fiction primarily, but really for any literature to greater or lesser values of relevant—mainly, what is it possible to do without a viable environment in which to do it?

In The Ministry For The Future, Robinson brings it all to the fore and gives a novel that is as much handbook as dramatic narrative. In many ways, this is a species of “thirty-minutes in the future” with all the immediacy of the current climate conference in Egypt. He sets it a decade or so hence. After a harrowing opening, the book settles into “how do we deal with this” mode and for all its didacticism it is engaging and often riveting—mainly because he never loses sight of the people directly involved.

And that opening is masterfully horrific. The first line sets the tone—”It was getting hotter.” We then watch a massive heat cell boil a large section of India. 

Quite literally boil. There is one survivor, Frank May, who is there as part of an international mission. We follow Frank through the rest of the book, the outraged, scarred activist, who finds himself in an unlikely relationship with Mary Murphy, the freshly-appointed head of an agency within the UN which gets dubbed in the press as the Ministry for the Future. The agency has the unique mandate of being a voice for the future and becomes pivotal in the challenges facing the world with climate change that is no longer deniable.

Between the two of them we are given entrée to both ends of the political and social dynamics of dealing with a global problem. Robinson shows us all the major components that must be dealt with, including a solidly-explicated look at the economics involved (a difficult topic to make interesting at the best of times, but vital and here, in Robinson’s hands, far more engaging than one might expect), and walks us through the multiple scenarios that might pull us back from the brink.

This is not the kind of miracle-working overnight fix one often gets in science fiction. (The problem with those is, scale aside, that while the science may be good, the sociology is usually hopelessly utopian.) This is a look at one possible road to a viable set of solutions and even here the roadblocks are enormous and the politics maddeningly frustrating. This is as much an explication of the challenges as any kind of anticipatory celebration of potential problem-solving.

And for all its didacticism, it remains a very readable novel. He never loses connection with the characters and he lets us care about them as the best fiction does. The science, the economics, the politics, all the elements requiring thorough explanations to make the drama meaningful are salted through the story in a manner that breathes life into the concerns and the people dealing with them. We find ourselves invested in what all these people are doing because we understand what they’re doing. In that sense, this is a celebration of humanity at its best. The catastrophes are of human origin and so the solutions are ours as well and Robinson is telling us—showing us—that we have this.

If we so choose.

People, Problems, Politics, and Possibilities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I remember as a child I once asked my dad where all the smoke from the smokestacks went. Into the air, obviously, but after that? I don’t remember exactly what he answered, but it was reassuring, something about how it just got diluted until it sort of wasn’t there anymore. Years later we would have debates about pollution and climate change and it was clear that he simply could not grasp how, the Earth being so big, that we mere mortals could possibly have the kind of impact environmentalists were claiming. It was frustrating and oddly appealing, because reassurance works that way.

One of his arguments rested on the production of CO2 and methane by the Earth itself, among other particulates such as my be spewed out by volcanoes, and how meager our own output was by comparison. Like other such arguments, its legitimacy rested on those factors left out, like accumulation over time. Some of the first work done on what we now call Anthropogenic Climate Change was down in the first half of the 19th Century. The problem was already apparent to some, but of course the question then was, so what? We have to stay warm, we need energy to build things, how are we supposed to do this thing called civilization if we don’t burn things? While this begs many questions (what is it you want to do? how do think “civilization” should manifest? just how much “progress” do we actually need in certain directions?) the fact is no one could construct solar panels in 1850.

And all the other localized signs that spoke to the hindbrain and the skin that told us nothing was changing. Winters were still cold (depending on where you were) summers still tolerable, water seemed plentiful, and so on. Everything is fine in my neighborhood, why the alarmist talk?

Now more of us are aware that self-deception has played a seriously negative role. Yes, politicians and industrialists have reasons to deceive us about these things, but the fact is many of us have been for decades inclined to believe everything would be fine.

With more frequent hurricanes, droughts, floods, and receding glaciers and our collective eyes on all of it almost obsessively (via media, documentaries, book after book) it has become impossible to calmly ignore the reality. And now we are here, a couple of degrees of global temperature away from the stuff of apocalyptic science fiction. Even the big corporations, while still often trying to underplay the crisis, are investing more and more in renewables and alternatives.  (I’m convinced we’re not farther along that road because the corporations took too long to figure out how to bill consumers profitably.)

Now that the ice sheets are receding and the oceans rising and the number of devastating storms is rising, before panic and collapse set in, what is there to be done?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry For The Future, offers a set of possibilities.

Robinson has been writing ecologically-concerned science fiction all his career. The Mars Trilogy is nothing if not a study in potential human impact on an environment. It is clear from even a cursory perusal of his work that he knows from whence he speaks. What humans are doing, what we will do, what we will have in the wake of our collective doing inform the basis of almost all his work. And in a field that has often offered but seldom achieved viable glimpses of the future, his work carries an efficacy difficult to discredit.

The Ministry of the Future follows the work of a department established by the United Nations sometime in the near future (there’s overlap with the present) whose task becomes to speak for the citizens yet to be. Which eventually includes wildlife in an attempt to include all life in a concept of Citizen in order for them to be granted legal standing. The director of the ministry, Mary Murphy, is Irish, and reminds one a bit of Samantha Powers. She has talented people, many of them visionaries, some of them capable of surprising solutions not always legal.

In the wake of one of the worst ecological disasters in history—a heat wave that descends on India and ends up killing twenty million people—the mission of the Ministry acquires an urgency and a momentum that carries through the rest of the novel. Along the way we see solid analyses and examples of the consequences of climate change and glimpses of the costs of doing nothing.

But as well we see on offer solutions. Robinson pairs gloom and doom with possibilities and potentials in a series of elegant portrayals of what can be done. In this, he covers a wide range of the various aspects of the situation with skill and authority, from geo-engineering to economic revisions to migration policy and the kind of international coalition-building that will be essential. His projections of where we may be politically in thirty or forty years are compelling, suggesting the power of SF to predict the future has some legitimacy.

Though these are just possibilities. Grounded in real science and technology and in a pragmatic “read” of human political tendencies. Some of the factors he examines are less tractable and in some instances brutal. But given the Givens, as it were, he gives us a plausible picture of the next few decades and what it is possible to do. Whatever may actually happen will be different, but within the 560 pages of this novel are a suite of approaches that rise to the inspirational.

Regardless of what may happen, one thing emerges from the novel that is inarguable—any solution will necessarily be a collective endeavor.

As well, Robinson skillfully gives a personal story. Mary encounters the lone survivor of the India heatwave and over the course of the novel a relationship evolves that is one of the most heartfelt and poignant to be found. Through this, the personal challenges of the world as it will change emerges. He keeps the larger story firmly grounded in the personal throughout.

One comes away with the conviction that not only can we solve this problem, but that we will become better for having met the challenge, and afterward we might actually have world worthy of the best in us.

In Times Long Past…

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

In the afterword to Nicola Griffith’s new novella, Spear, she runs down the lists of source material and permutations around the Legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Or, more precisely, those around Percival, who in many tellings is the more important figure. The king is all very fine, of course, but it was Percival who found the Grail. In some versions, it is Percival who returns Excalibur to the Lake. In still others…

The point being that such stories, myths and legends, are all repurposed tales that meet multiple needs and adapt to the times in which they are (re)told. Tracing them to a single point of origin is not only virtually impossible, but is irrelevant. The purpose of myth is reification.

Among others. But on that point, reification is always tied to the present. Which lends myth its ever-ancient timelessness and relevance.

Which is always one of the fascinating things about it, that timeless-timely utility.

It’s also what makes a good retelling immediately exciting and accessible.

Most (if not all) myths begin in some version of “A hero will be born.” The story then is “from where” “to whom” and “then what?” Perseus is emblematic, and possibly the most visible in significance. The Greeks may not have begun the genre, but they certainly perfected it, and for a long time pretty much owned it. All the Great Heroes of the Aegean and Adriatic region have remarkable beginnings. Often a cave is involved. Some education in the wilderness. Then the confrontation that defines their purpose. They are, essentially, Of Nature, since everything about them is from Outside, “inside” being more or less whatever passed for civilization. (For our purposes, the primal exemplar of this outsider could be Enkidu from the Gilgamesh story.)

The utility of myth cycles is in their adaptability. Repurposing a story to reveal, reify, revise, or otherwise reestablish the scope of meaning is what gives them power across time. The nature of the actors can change, roles might be swapped around, identities modified or even completely recast.

And in some instances, the central hero is changed. Focus moves from one to another, giving us a shift in perspective, a realignment. Something new, something not considered before. And yet, the story remains essentially the same, at least in regards to the events and the goals.

The Arthurian cycle is endlessly adaptable this way. Who is the hero? Arthur? Merlin? Lancelot? Guinevere?

Percival?

All of them, depending on which example you look at, fit the role of Outsider. But the one that is most ideally crafted for that part is Percival.

In Spear, Nicola Griffith gives us a Percival who is perfectly outside. In this iteration, she is Peretur, of “mixed” parentage, raised in the essential cave, schooled by a wise adept, nurtured to become the hero the world needs.

She comes of age, chooses a path, and sets forth from the hidden place of her childhood to journey to Arturus’s court at Caer Leon to join the circle of Companions to the king. She decides, chooses, does battle, grows confident…

This is a hero to cheer for. Her first victory is in learning her true name. Her next is establishing for herself what she is. And then making a place for herself in the world. A place of her choosing.

Quest is also a major element of most myths. Going, struggling to find, fulfilling vows, remaking the world along the way. In this new retelling of this story, there is a quest, though it is not what most of the participants believe it to be. In this way, Griffith shows how the defining character of the goal is not a specific thing but a fulfillment of purpose, and grail at the end is self-knowledge.

Spear is a marvelous reworking of the Arthurian tale. The components are given different origins, different explanations, the settings are deftly placed in what we know of the “real” world, and the nature of what may have been the place and people from which the cycle emerged are treated with the kind of demythologizing care of the historian. There is a texture to this, a fabric of authenticity that gives entree to the world. In the end, such reassessments only add to the power and charm of the story. In so doing, Griffith offers us a variation that reifies overlooked or hidden aspects of what makes the legend important. For us.

Along the way, she gives us a damn good adventure.

In the afterword, there is a tantalizing discussion of sources, variations, and a brief history of the cycles over time. It establishes the long practice of repurposing of which Spear is only the newest example. Which is all well and good, but the best thing about this one is that is opens the possibilities of the story to offer meaning to a wider audience. It is not a tale aimed at Just These People, but for many more not usually considered. Griffith discusses that as well.

Spear is a successful recasting. Even the nature of the Quest at the heart of centuries of Grail stories is given a new raison detre, bringing is from the cosmic to the personal in a touching reveal utterly consistent with Griffith’s purposes and the traditions of the story cycle.

All this aside, it is first and foremost a thoroughly delightful and satisfying work.

Hild, A World, A Novel

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

(This is a repost, done to correct  problem in the original)

 

It is completely fitting that science fiction writers should write historical fiction.  Both forms deal with the same background—alien worlds.

Because we live in a story-saturated era where access to the ages is easily had with a visit to the library, the local bookstore, the internet, movies, it is easy to assume we know—that we understand—the past, with the same cordial familiarity we experience our own personal history.  That people lived differently “back then” seems more a matter of fashion and technology, not a question of thought process or philosophy or world view.*  People lacked central heating and air conditioning, cars, television, telephones, indoor plumbing, antibiotics…but they lived essentially the same way.

Well, one could make a case that they did,  but you have to ask the question “In what ways did they live the same way?”  Therein lies the heart of good historical analysis and extrapolation.

Because while we can connect with people of the past in many very broad ways—they were human, they loved, they hated, they were greedy and generous, they were driven by passions, they dreamed—the specifics can school us in the range of the possible.  What does it mean to be human?

Far more than we might imagine.

But that’s where the novelist comes in, the writer who takes the time to grapple with those myriad distinctions and give us a look into those differences that are still, regardless of how remote they seem from our personal understanding of “human,”  part of who we are, at least potentially.

I mention science fiction at the beginning because at a certain level, if we’re dealing with something deeper than costume drama or plot-driven adventure fiction, the exercise of finding, comprehending, and actualizing on the page an entire period from the past—Republican Rome, Hellenic Greece, the Mesopotamia  of the Sumerians, the Kingdom of Chin, or post Roman England—is much the same as building a world out of logic and broad-based knowledgeable extrapolation.  In some instances, extrapolation is all-important because the fact is we simply do not know enough to more or less copy a record into a fictional setting.  Instead, we have to take the tantalizing scraps of what remain of that world and supply the connective tissue by imagining what must, what probably, what could have been there.  And in the process we discover a new world.

If done well, that newness becomes a mirror for us to perceive what we have overlooked in ourselves.  (Which is what good fiction ought to do anyway, but in the well-constructed historical it is a special kind of revelation.)

Seventh Century England is rich with the unknown, the ambiguous, the seductively out-of-reach.  It existed between one deceptively homogeneous era and another, between the Roman Empire and the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire.  More, it held some of the last vestiges of the once vast Celtic Empire.  It was a land where shadow-pasts vied for hegemony over the mythic substrate defining meaning for the warlords, petty kings, and mystics serving them. Pagan religions found themselves competing with this new Christianity, which had been around a while but was finally beginning to make significant headway among the competing kingdoms, looking for the leverage it needed to make itself an “official” religion with the authority to shove the others aside.

Into this came a woman who eventually mattered enough, given the overwhelming patriarchal structure of the day, to deserve a mention from the Venerable Bede (who saw women much as most men of his time did, necessary creatures in need of guidance and by dint of their sex lesser beings).  In Book 4 of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People we’re told of St. Hilda, who was by any measure of the era (and even ours) astonishing.  “Her prudence was so great…that even kings and princes asked and received her advice.”

A good novel starts with a good question and in this case it would be: Who was this woman and how did she get to this place?

A question to which Nicola Griffith impressively supplies an answer in her new novel, Hild, (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux).

Hild, later St. Hilda of Whitby, lived from 614 to 680.  She was a second daughter of minor nobility whose father died, leaving the family at the mercy of rival kingdoms.  Later she founded an abbey, where she remained the rest of her life, and was a teacher of prelates and princes.

Note that.  Seventh Century, at a time and in a place where women were little more than property, Hild could not only read but commanded respect.  That alone would make her fit subject for a big historical novel.  Certainly she would serve as the basis for a cathartic life-lesson to modern audiences about the innate power of women and the need to find and act upon one’s own identity.

But Griffith avoids this in some ways too easy path to sympathy for her character and does what superb history should—provides context and shows her character in situ, living as she would have.  Hild had her own problems to face and they are not ours.  Through the course of 560 pages of well-chosen and seemingly hand-polished words, Hild is given to us as a person, fully realized, of her own time.  This is a different world and these people did not see it as we do.

The success of a novel is in its ability to bring the reader entirely in and hold them, enmeshed, for the duration.  Griffith’s past novels have demonstrated that she can achieve this in both science fiction (Ammonite, Slow River) and noir thriller (The Blue Place, Stay, Always).  But in some ways those novels presented less of a challenge in their immersive requirements—they were closer to home, nearer to our own world, and allowed for reader assumptions to come into play.  (This is deceptive, of course, and is more a question of laziness on the part of the reader than on any artistic shortcuts a writer might take.)  Hild represents an order of magnitude greater risk on Griffith’s part, a kind of dance through a mine field of possible failures that could cause reader disconnect or, worse, a betrayal of her characters.  It is a great pleasure to note that she made no such missteps, got all the way to other side, world intact, with a character very much herself.

This is what historical fiction ought to do.  Take you and put you in a world that is quantitatively and qualitatively different and still engage your sympathies.  As we follow Hild from birth, through her education (under the guidance of her mother, who is herself remarkable) and into a young adulthood in which she comes into possession of some authority, we find ourselves shifting out of our comfort zones with respect to the givens of the world.

Hild is the first book of a trilogy, which will cover Hild’s whole life.  If the next two books are done with as much care, diligence, and grace as this, we are all in for a remarkable experience.

And out of the richly-wrought tapestry of difference, we really do find a connection across the centuries.  Just not where one might ordinarily look for one.

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*World view is itself a phrase fraught with change, for to have one requires we have some notion of The World, and that has changed constantly over time.  What world?  How big?  Who is in it?  Look at the changes in the past five centuries, which some historians identify as the modern era.  We have gone from a flat earth at the center of a solar system which defined the limits of space to an uneven sphere orbiting an insignificant middle range star of a small galaxy that is one out of billions and billions of galaxies, with no evident limit to what comprises the universe.

On Time and Attention

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

My word. It’s November and this is the first post I’ve made since…May. Shame on me.

It’s not that I haven’t read anything worthy of comment. On the contrary, I see several titles on my read list I had ever intention of reviewing here, but…

It has been an unpleasant year. The deaths have mounted. Friends.

In June, Harlan Ellison passed away. I’m told he died in his sleep, a remarkably peaceful exit for such an iconoclastic, enormous personality. I’ve met few others for whom it can be said that he made every second count. That he considered me a friend still humbles me.

Before Harlan, Vic Milan died. He was one of the first professional SF writers I ever met. We were roughly the same age.

Then in the last month or so two friends outside the field died. Both were younger than me.

I have no larger point here other than to say that attention to other things has been difficult to maintain. This blog, these reviews, originally began as a personal amusement and a significant amount of time this year has been swallowed up in not being amused.

We were invited to attend Harlan’s memorial in September. It was an expensive trip, not only because we had a bit over a week’s notice, but there was no way to not go. We had been to Los Angeles only once before, to our first world SF convention in 1984. This time we were going to be in the heart of Beverly Hills.

We spent four days in L.A., met with Susan and close friends that Friday evening at Mel’s Diner, and attended the memorial at the Writers Guild West Theater Saturday evening.

I’ve already written about Harlan and the unexpected friendship. I won’t add to it here except to mention the warmth of those attending.

It takes it out of you after a while. There’s a childhood conviction that heroes should not die. That the very stuff of being a hero includes immortality. The adult knows better but the 8-year-old bristles with injustice.

I’ve managed to begin writing short fiction again. That was more difficult—and remains hard—than I expected. It requires time and attention, both of which seem less available.

And then there are the books that need reading.

I read Jo Walton’s new An Informal History of the Hugo Awards and came away delighted, amazed, and a bit intimidated. At several points, she mentions how often she rereads. Some books she rereads annually.

I can name the novels I’ve reread easily because they number so few. I read slowly. In high school I became a speed reader. At one point I estimated I was reading close to 3000 words a minutes, which would be somewhere around seven or eight pages. I tore my way through the Classics that way at the public library and read scores of SF novels.

Most of which I have forgotten.  After a dozen years my retention crumbled. I intentionally slowed down. I read pretty much at a snail’s pace now, which meansd it might take a week or more to get through a decent-sized novel.

But even when I could read at a heady clip, I rarely reread. There were too many new books to get through.

I’ve missed the boat on that. The last few years I’ve been hosting a reading group and I’ve had to reread some of the novels and it has been an unexpected revelation. I still don’t know when I’ll ever have time to seriously tackle a thorough reread, but I hope to.

On the plus-side, I have on my desk James Mustich’s magesterial 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die.  It’s an impressive catalogue. I did a quick tally and it turns out I’ve read roughly a quarter of them already. If I add in books by the same authors as those mentioned, it edges up toward 300. To be fair to myself, there are at least 300 books listed that I have never heard of.

There’s no time. And often we lack the requisite attention. We must cherish those times when the two coincide. I have been fortunate in my associations and my encounters. People, books, music. It is a trap to bemoan what you can’t get to when there are things you can and have. I look around at my office at rows of books I have read bits of or never opened. There’s a sense of wealth, in a way, to owning books. There is a greater wealth in knowing people.

Some of them have left the scene. It doesn’t seem that long ago that they were such vibrant, striking impacts on the intellect. In the case of writers, they linger. You can know them again, even if they’re gone.  We can’t know everyone. We should perhaps be careful choosing friends, but I think too often we have no choice. Friendship happens, it’s not a conscious decision. Had we set out to meet and befriend those who became most important to us, likely we would have failed.

Or not. Some people are simply that open.

I’ve reached a point, though, where I have to make such choices, because I am, through the loss of friends, aware in ways I never was before how little time there is.

I’ll try to be a bit more attentive to this blog, though, because I think it is important to note the impacts of friends and words.

Read deeply. A good book always offers more than what is on the page.

 

Star Wars and Reality

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Back in 1977, Samuel R. Delany—perhaps one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th Century, certainly conceptually in the top 10 of any honest assessment—wrote a review of the first Star Wars film for Cosmos magazine. In it he pointed out that the universe George Lucas had given us was essentially caucasian, largely midwestern, and predominantly male. While Princess Leia was without a doubt one of the more subversive cinema creations in SF—definitely not a princess, kick-ass, occasionally crude, with all the can-do anyone could possibly want from men with the Right Stuff—she was the only female in the movie other than the tragically short-lived Aunt Ru and the odd extra in the command center on the rebel base.

To quote from his review:

“Sometime, somewhere, somebody is going to write a review of Star Wars that begins: ‘In Lucas’s future, the black races and the yellow races have apparently died out and a sort of mid-Western American (with a few South Westerners who seem to specialize in being war ship pilots) has taken over the universe. By and large, women have also been bred out of the human race and, save for the odd gutsy princess or the isolated and cowed aunt, humanity seems to be breeding quite nicely without them…’

“When these various reviews surface, somebody will no doubt object (and we’ll recognize the voice; it’s the same one who said, earlier, ‘…it’s got a good, solid story!’) with a shout: ‘But that’s not the point. This is entertainment!’

“Well, entertainment is a complex business. And we are talking about an aspect of the film that isn’t particularly entertaining. When you travel across three whole worlds and all the humans you see are so scrupiously caucasian and male, Lucas’s future begins to seem a little dull. And the variation and invention suddenly turn out to be only the province of the set director and special effects crew.

“How does one put in some variety, some human variety? The same way you put in your barrage of allusions to other films, i.e., you just do it and don’t make a big thing.

“To take the tiniest example: wouldn’t that future have been more interesting if, say, three-quarters of the rebel pilots just happened to have been Oriental women—rather than just the guys who didn’t make it onto the Minnisota Ag. football team. It would even be more interesting to the guys at Minnisota Ag. This is science fiction after all.

“[…]

“In the film world in the present, the token woman, token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile their smiles with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of that variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.”

–Samuel R. Delany’s review of Star Wars in Cosmos, 1977

In the wake of The Force Awakens he noted that at the time of the above-quote review, he received almost 2 lbs of hate mail.  Even then, the splenetic refusal to countenance any intrusion of reality into this realm was seen as a violation not to be tolerated by a perversely-attuned minority.  (I find it interesting that he apparently received  no mail in support of his viewpoint.)

No, you cannot use all the weird aliens to excuse the absence of a diverse human presence, because everyone knows they are completely fictional and represent nothing other than window-dressing required to make this a space epic. The film was made by and for human consumption and should speak to us. If you make a film in the given world, be it contemporary or a historical piece, you cast it according to the story you’re telling and are constrained by history, location, and so forth as to how it looks, but this is science fiction and ought to reflect “humanity” in all its variety, because we decide what the story is and what the parameters are.

The whiteness of the original Star Wars is a failure of imagination. Maybe not a conscious one, but the fact that the default failed to include a panorama of humanity is a worse indictment of assumed cultural limits than had it been an overt bit of propagandistic racist fantasy.

The fact is, not many of us noticed back in the day.

Now that the new generation of Star Wars films is indulging that overlooked variety, we all may, however briefly, feel a twinge at the oversight way back when.

Samuel L. Jackson’s casting as one of the putative heads of the Jedi Order was bearable to certain people because, like Leia, he was only one example and as a singular instance could be excused or even ignored. And of course the Natalie Portman character was another Leia, and she was only one. This has always been done in instances like this—only one. Avoid the suggestion that this might be common or acceptable across the whole spectrum of a culture. We can have the one-off female competent, self-made, boss, what have you. The one-off minority as well.

But when more than half the humans you see on the screen are not white…

So some folks are bleating and writing nasty things and all but demanding that All Those People Be Banished because they disturb the unexamined pool of privileged self-deluded unearned superiority lying at the center of their being, their sense of Who They Are.  (Note, most of this complaining is done in camouflage, cloaked as a gripe about supposed SJW intrusions.)

The rest of us feel our instance of embarrassed realization and then move on to the next level of enjoying what is now on the screen with a kind of “Well, of course” reaction.

We saw a similar reaction from certain quarters to Ann Leckie’s apparently unsettling pronoun shift in her Ancillary novels, as well as commensurate screels of pain as women and minorities swept SF awards in the last few years. The kind of thing one might expect from sports fans when their team losses—or simply doesn’t show.

The initial reassessment—for most of us, I hope—settles into a new standard of acceptance, we sit back, strap in, and enjoy the ride with a new vantage available. For some, the unease never seems to abate.

In this, it would seem that reactions to the human diversification in the Star Wars universe tracks real-world reactions to being confronted with racial and gender disparities. Most people wince a little, take a moment or two to accommodate a revised paradigm, and then move on to the important aspects of what is on the screen. This is both good and bad—good, because it suggests people are generally adaptable and willing to expand their sphere of appreciation to include previously overlooked or excluded groups and “normalize” their presence; bad, because such normalization can result in a false conclusion that such exclusions or oversights are “fixed” and we need not worry about them anymore.

A process which has brought us to our current awkward point in the history of human justice.

But we’re talking about Star Wars here and with that in mind I want to examine the cutting conclusion Delany made in his original review of the first movie—that the white palette in which it was painted was, in the end, dull, a failure of imagination. Bad science fiction.

There is a subcategory of SF which deals with apocalyptic scenarios and for many decades one of the chief features has been the downfall of Western Civilization, often in the face of a newly-dominant Eastern polity. For that, read White losing to Non-white. You can choose your starting point. Maybe Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column. But the literature is filled with it. The plucky resistance is almost always white, generally some form of American. Now, it’s not fair to blame any given example for the consequences of the whole, but this trend has informed a larger dialogue that has to do with unexamined cultural and racial assumptions. While in any given example arguments for the soundness of the premise can be made, collectively they make a powerful argument that White equals Good and Not White equals either helpless, evil, or stupid, probably all three together.

One of the most powerful images in these new Star Wars films is that the Bad Guys are all white. If that isn’t clear just from the maskless humans on-screen, the storm troopers have always been white, and one of the more subversive messages throughout the film series has been the idea that the storm troopers are clones—not just white (symbolically—the uniforms subsume any secondary racial variances Fett may have exhibited, the ultimate colonial dominance) but all the same down to their DNA. And that this model fails.

Snoke? Who can say? Post-syphilitic, corrupted madman, with pale eyes and the sallow skin of the very ill. All the rest of the leadership of the First Order is white.

They abandoned the clone model for storm troopers and opted for direct brainwashing, apparently, which fails, apparently. But the only storm trooper who claims his own identity and leaves to join the rebellion is…not white.
There is, especially in this new film, an aggressive advocacy that the usual heroes are not the ones we’re looking for. And Luke Skywalker’s deconstruction of the Jedi as not only a useless but dangerous legend during his session with Rey ought to have driven the message home.

But I would like to address the criticism that, essentially, past iterations of Star Wars have displayed a marked lack of imagination in key respects. Personally, I find them fun on a twelve-year-old level. Compared to films like Blade Runner or the more recent Arrival, this franchise is intellectually and even thematically weak tea. I’ve always contended that they are not, in any significant sense, science fiction at all, but fantasy decked out in SF accoutrements. Even so, the pretense of science fiction seems to have forced the films to be, from time to time, quite subversive of the classic fantasy, starting right off the bat with Leia, who is anything but a damsel. In the first three films she continually defied the stereotypes and refused to be a victim.

But that self-possession has now been expanded to become a norm of this universe, so none of the women, who are now everywhere, adhere to stereotypes, and this is when the wolves of conformity and privilege begin to howl. We have always had examples of the lone exception and they have even been applauded, but when we see what had been an exception normalized, then the assumptions of privilege come under threat.

And they come under threat because they have usually gone unchallenged. It may be the surprise at being shown this side of things that causes the unfortunate reaction, but if we’re talking about science fiction, even the pretense of it, this should be a welcome revelation rather than motive to retreat into the ordinary safety of unrecognized exclusion. You don’t want to be made aware of the problems associated with being a thinking, feeling human being living in the world? Then why are you even a fan, however tepidly, of science fiction? Because SF has always been about dislodging assumptions in the real world via the fulcrum of the SFnal world deployed.

Granted, for the most part it has been a relatively safe way to confront such things, because the field of revelation is usually not ours. It’s the future, out in space, on another world, and in this case in a galaxy far, far away. But that’s never been why it possessed power, because the whole point was to imagine a different reality, one we could conceivably enter.

The question then becomes, if that’s the cool part, why would it bother anyone that some of the most discardable aspects of our given world would be dispensed in a speculative milieu where we might, presumably, do better? Why would anyone want that world to be a preserve for the petty absurdities of this world? And if that’s what you’re looking for, well, then perhaps you don’t understand the nature of the thing you profess to love so much that you would turn it into a gated community with covenants to keep Those People out. Or merely in Their Place.

Do I think we will no longer have racism in the future? No. But I can imagine.

Because if our imagined dreams someday come true, we will meet real aliens, and in that moment we will have to understand that we’re all human and the minor variations among us will be one of our greatest strengths. To continue to insist that those variations are somehow unacceptable to express as human and normal in a film made today and are important enough to become outraged at their portrayal shows a profound lack of imagination.

2016

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Tardiness comes in direct proportion to chaos. The year ended and all was in flux.

However, reading goes on.

I did not finish nearly as many books in 2016 as I tried to. At least, not other people’s books.  I did finish drafts of two of my own.  My desk, at the moment, is clear, and maybe I can do a better job in 2017 of keeping abreast here.

A good deal of my science fiction reading was pretty much for the reading group I host at Left Bank Books. That group affords me opportunity and motivation to read novels I might not otherwise get to.  So I reread Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination for the first time in three decades, but I also read The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time ever. I do not regret the delay. It is a mature novel, with a great deal my younger self may well have missed.  As to the former, it came very close to not holding up.  I had forgotten (if I ever realized it this way) just how brutal a novel it is, and not just in the character of Gully Foyle. Bester’s achievement way back in the Fifties remains remarkable for its unyielding insistence on a fragmented, painful, chaotic, and historically consistent future.

I also reacquainted myself with Tiptree, in the form of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. It seems fitting in this period of reassessment and revolution, when the face of science fiction is—has—changed and brought forth a volatile reaction to that change.  Tiptree was doing much of what is being so rancorously challenged within the field today, but as she was a singular voice and not a “trend” she provoked different challenges then while becoming accepted generally as a brilliant writer and a jewel in the crown of SF stars.

I also reread (for the first time since it came out) Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside, which I reviewed in the previous post.  I was much too inexperienced a reader the first time to appreciate everything Silverberg was doing, so I probably forgot the book as soon as I finished it.

It is true that some books must be “grown into”—I am currently rereading Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble On Triton for the book group and realizing that, while I read it eagerly the first time, I probably missed almost everything important about. Likewise with another reread, Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is ostensibly a novel about colonialism.  I say “ostensibly” but that does not mean it isn’t.  It very much is about colonialism, all three of the novellas which comprise the whole.  But it is as much about how we colonize ourselves, sometimes to our loss, as it is about colonizing foreign soil, in this case another world with a native population that strives to adapt but may have found in the end their only options were extinction or counter-colonization.  As always, Wolfe’s subtlety is rigorously slippery, his points less direct,  corrosive of expectation.

Titan Books has rereleased Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles, a story cycle that is the very definition of indirect.  Moorcock took as his template the Romantic poets—Byron, Shelley, et al—and displaced them into a near future chaos in the form of his “hero” Jerry Cornelius, who wants to save the world only to resurrect his dead sister so they can be together.  The prose are rife with Sixties hip, but not so overwhelmingly anachronistic that the novels aren’t just as readable now as they were then.  The response to them is perhaps necessarily altered and certainly the themes play out differently. Moorcock may have been the grown-up in the room at the advent of New Wave.  He did go on to write some marvelously rich books after these.

I finished Ann Leckie’s delightfully subversive Ancillary trilogy.  I need to do a full review soon.  Treat yourself.

A smattering of other SF titles I can recommend whole-heartedly:  Lavi Tidhar’s Central Station; Sylvain Neuvel’s Sleeping Giants; Carter Sholz’s Gypsy; Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

And Nisi Shawl’s wonderful Everfair.  An alternate history steampunk done the way steampunk ought to be done.  I owe it a full review, but let me say here that this is one of the best first novels I’ve read in a long time.

I read two China Mieville books this year, one very good.  This Census Taker I have to count as a failure.  It has good writing fascinating bits, but failed to come together the way I’ve come to expect from Mieville.  The other, newer one, is The Last Days of New Paris, which is excellent.  This pair allowed me to understand that one of the primary passions Mieville indulges in his work is cities.  His best work portrays a city as a complete character.  This Census Taker lacked that.

Of the non science fiction read this year, I did Moby-Dick with my other reading group.  I resisted doing this book.  I’ve never liked it.  I find it turgid, convoluted, often opaque.  There is also a darkness to it that can be suffocating. Over several months we tackled it, dissected it, ran through various analyses.  I conclude that it is a superb work, fully deserving of its reputation.  It is A great American novel if not The American Novel, because America is its subject, though it takes place on a whaling ship far at sea.  It is not a flattering picture, though, displaying throughout the contradictions, hypocrisies, and shortcomings of the then young nation which continue to plague us.  It does this brilliantly.

I still don’t like it.  I find little pleasure in the actual reading.  That, as they say, is my problem.

A colleague and coworker, Kea Wilson, published her first novel, We Eat Our Own. I commend it.  I reviewed it here.

A novel that straddles the genre boundaries somewhat that caused some controversy upon its initial publication is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.  This is a post-Arthurian quest story with much to say about memory and community and the price of vengeance.

This was a big year for nonfiction.

Robert Gleick’s new tome, Time Travel: A History is an exceptional soliloquy on the concept, science, and cultural use of time travel, beginning with Wells and covering both the scientific realm and the popular fiction realm, showing how they have played off each other and how the idea has evolved and worked through our modern view of the universe and our own lives.  Previously in the year I’d read his magnificent biography of Richard Feynman, Genius.  Gleick is a great explainer and a fine craftsman.

As well, Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons About Physics.  They are brief, they are accessible, they are to be enjoyed.  And, along the same lines, Void by James Owen Weatherall, about the physics of empty space.  It’s far more fascinating than it might sound.

I can recommend Peter Frankopan’s Silk Roads, which is a history of the world from the viewpoint of the Orient.  The shift in perspective is enlightening.  Along the same lines I read Charles Mann’s 1491, which was eye-opening and thought-provoking—and in some ways quite humbling.

I also read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land, especially in the wake of what I think I can safely call the most surprising election result in recent history. This book is a study of the right-wing culture that has developed in many startlingly contradictory ways.  I believe this would be worth reading for anyone trying to make sense of the people who continually vote in ways that seem to make no sense—and also for those who do vote that way just so they might understand what it is about their movement that seems so incomprehensible to many of their fellow citizens.

I read a few short of 50 books in 2016 cover to cover.  I will be reviewing some of them in the future.

Here’s hoping for a good year of reading to come.

 

 

 

A Bit of Comfort and Caution

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

This is my new blog.  I’ve attached a link to my old one, the Distal Muse, so you can get over here.

Why a second blog?  Simple.  I’d like to put my reviews and literary opinions here, apart from the Muse, which has become more of a hodge podge of commentary over the years.  A site dedicated just to my readings and my thoughts on literature might find a welcome audience among those who could care less what my politics are or my opinions on music or film or people in general or things as they are.

For now, this is a placemarker.   I have work to do in my office and it might be a week or two before I start posting.  In the meantime, you can still check out the Distal Muse.  I will be back.  Try to do this up proper, a real honest-to-goodness lit’rary stopover.

So…welcome.