Hybrid

Year in review

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I read 94 books in 2024. 

Not what I was shooting for, but not by any means unsatisfying. Upon retirement, I imagined myself spending at least two or three hours a day poring over all the books and devouring the things I’ve always intended to.

Well. That didn’t happen.

But as things get more settled, I might exceed my goal of 100 a year. (The highest number I ever reached was my senior year of high school. I had taken a speed reading course the year before, I was cruising through texts at an average of 2000 words a minute, and I cut class most of my senior year. I spent most of those days at the local library—seriously—and got to where I was doing a book a day. I plowed through many of the so-called classics that way and I might have read 300 books that year. Now, I can’t read that fast anymore and I’m much happier for it, because what I read at the more modest pace of maybe 150 to 200 words a minute means more, has more impact, and stays in my memory. Lately I’ve been revisiting some of those classics I read back then and it’s like reading them for the first time. I remember I read them, but not much else, with a few exceptions.) That would be a respectable number, I think. 

I did a lot of filling in this past year. Books I’ve owned for decades and never got around to, some works of SF that are important if not seminal works that I simply passed up. To that end, I read several of the original Ace Specials, edited in the late 60s-early 70s by Terry Carr. While a couple of them did not quite pass the test of time, I was pleasantly surprised by the D.G.Compton’s—Chronocules, Steel Crocodile, The Silent Multitude, and Synthajoy. I found them very mature works, dealing with human interaction in ways much more sophisticated than a lot of popular SF at the time, with premises that, while certainly science fictional, did not dazzle with hi-tech glitz, but supplied a satisfying substrate for the real action, which is how we treat each other. Compton, I believe, holds the record for the most titles published in the Ace Special line. As well, I read a couple of Bob Shaw’s, a writer who has unfortunately been largely forgotten today. The Two-Timers and The Palace of Eternity are sophisticated stories of seemingly minor shifts in the given tapestry of our lives with outsized effects. 

I also filled a couple of Michael Moorcock gaps with The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Distant Stars, and The Warlord of the Air. Moorcock can be uneven, but he possesses a singular approach to science fiction that, when effective, elevates his work to a remarkable degree. 

I also tackled a lot of Robert Silverberg. There is a lot of Silverberg. He is one of the most prolific writers, in any genre, and he crossed genres significantly. In his early career, he wrote a great deal of popular SF, potboilers really, and some of it has not aged well. When Silverberg is firing on all cylinders, he can be brilliant. But the volume of work…well, not all of it rose to such vaunted heights, and we shouldn’t expect it to. But in some ways, work which was once seen as cutting-edge and groundbreaking, especially socially, has worn poorly. But among those I read this year that I think remain remarkable I would put Downward To The Earth. It’s a riff on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Silverberg has claimed Conrad as one of his favorites, so it’s not surprising that he would take a page from him from time to time, and this one is rather well done. Another worthy tale is Sailing To Byzantium. It’s elegant and picturesque and in the end poignant. 

There are novels one should read at the right age or, really, when they first appear if possible. I read several older works that, for a variety of reasons, simply have not held up well, despite clever ideas. Sad, really, because I can see in many cases where I would—at age 15 or 16 or 26—have been utterly enthralled by them. Some of this has to do with the natural changes of style that come with the passing of time. We’ve learned how to write this stuff better. Some of it has to do with the priority given to aspects of certain stories we know were they done today would be differently deployed. Times have changed, tastes have evolved, and for better or worse I am someone who has a difficult time Going Back. I can’t read a lot of older work that I know I loved when I first encountered it, because, well, it doesn’t flow anymore. Expectations have mutated, grown, what have you. (I have this problem with period novels. I know people who can happily get lost in the works of Trollope or Galsworthy, but I trip over the prose and stumble. Oh, there are writers from those periods I can read, there are exceptions, but a great deal of popular work from previous eras just doesn’t work for me and it’s not the fault of the work itself.) I will confess here that there is one type of novel I simply grind to a halt with and that is the broad satire. I attempted to read John Sladek’s Mechasm (another of the original Ace Specials) and it’s Vonnegut-esque, which would be a recommendation for many people. But it’s…well, smart-alecky. Tongues visibly in cheeks, caricatures, and just…clever ideas packaged as a series of absurdities. I’m willing to cop to tone-deafness on my part, but too often I’ve been in the middle of work like this before realizing I’m trying to read smart-ass prose as if they were deadly serious. I’m working on that.

Then there are writers whose approach to subject—their strategies, if you will—fails to engage. I have blindspots about this. I read things others tell me are just marvelous and I find them clunky and all but inaccessible. But so many people extoll the virtues of these writers so much that I suspect many of us who are simply not impressed say nothing for fear of spoiling the party. 

One classic, so called, that was surprising in many ways? I finally read The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. Sloan Wilson’s first novel and  cultural touchstone of sorts. My review is here, so I won’t go into it. I read a few books that in their day were heralded as important. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which I found clever if not altogether revelatory. And then there was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. I understood something about Lem after this one that I hadn’t quite realized before. Lem did not like mot science fiction, especially American SF, and this novel offered a clue as to why that may have been. Lem, I believe, didn’t think humans were…improvable. That we might develop amazing technologies, even make major breakthroughs in science, but we ourselves? Hopeless. I think he may have reacted negatively to the kind of Higher Frontier cheerleading a lot of SF indulges. 

I continue to be impressed with the tor.com series. I’ve read a number of great books from them and not yet encountered a bad one. This year continues with the latest entry in the Murderbot seriea, System Collapse. A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather pushed the boundaries of Steampunk in interesting directions, although I’m beginning to feel that category ought to be retired, at least in many instances. Just because a story is set in a more or less Victorian milieu it should not automatically be regarded as steampunk. Sometimes it’s just alternate history. More often, it seems, it’s an example of horror. Be that as it may, another fine work from tor.com is Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements, a very satisfying kind of space opera. Top of the list from that publisher, though, is Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction, a sobering contemplation on the economics and sociometrics of poaching and the costs of solutions.

Continuing my desultory attempt to catch up on what may have been my Golden Age, I read a couple more Clifford Simak novels—Cemetery World, in particular—and James Blish novels. Blish is another mixed bag. Some of his books have aged poorly, while some are surprisingly still very good. Titan’s Daughter is a mixed bag novel reminiscent of Wells’ Food of the Gods. A thriller of sorts. And Mission To The Heart Stars would seem to be a response to Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, both dealing in different ways with the idea of humanity having to pass muster before a galactic civilization that holds our fate in its grasp. 

Two of the most surprisingly pleasurable reads (for completely different reasons) this year were C.S.E. Cooney’s World Fantasy Award winner  Saint Death’s Daughter and the Booker Prize winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The first because normally I would never have picked it up, but it’s a title in my book group’s roster (this month actually), the second because…well, an SF novel written by literary writer that, being SF, won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet.

Saint Death’s Daughter is a sprawling bit of world-building that, despite its excellent background construction and detail, is very focused on its characters, who are wide-ranging and unique. Despite some touchpoints that suggest this world is some past (or future) iteration of our own, it quickly becomes irrelevant to the plot, which is twisty and engaging and in certain ways compellingly perverse. It deals with necromancy, includes ghosts, resurrection, and an original take on magic which, by the end of the novel, left me wondering if this were fantasy at all. The world is not Earth, not in any traceable way, and I began to see the traces of a nanotech explanation for much of the so-called magic. But it is written in the manner of a fantasy. It appears to be a fantasy and, as such, is not something I would normally pick up. But it more than paid off the investment in a 640 page novel. 

Orbital on the other hand is exactly the sort of thing I would pick up, as much out of a desire to see how well it was done as for its content. I should be used to finding well-done SF written by otherwise non-SF writers by now. These are artists who have come of age steeped in the brew of science fiction that has soaked contemporary culture. It’s not like the “slumming” that one used to find from mainstream authors who attempted the form that they might otherwise have felt a subspecies of Good Writing. It has become much more acceptable for someone like Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel or Mat Johnson to produce a work of unapologetic science fiction (even though some publicists still balk at embracing it), but I’m still cautious and surprised when one is done well. In fact, very well. To be sure, Orbital is easily read as mainstream literary, the SFnal elements smoothly entwined with all the rest to make it feel contemporary. But if one of the chief values of science fiction is how is elucidates the human changes wrought by science and technology which are themselves game-changers—paradigm-shifters, if you will—in anticipatory modes, then Orbital qualifies, and it is the respectful flower of internalizing SF as a valid literary form with significant implications.

This past year I’ve read more SF than the last several. Largely, this was a consequence of having to devote myself to more research, but also because my nonfiction-for-pleasure has increased, and in that regard some of the highlights of 2024 have been: 

Christendom by Peter Heather; Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson; The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell; The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir; White Holes by Carlo Rovelli; Plato At The Googleplex by Rebecca Goldberger Goldstein; Orientalism by Edward Said; The Witches by Stacy Schaff. Again, some catching up going on there, books I should have read but never got to.

So, 94 books. I may tally fewer this coming year as I have several on my pile of epic proportions. That and I don’t know yet how my next couple of projects will distort my strategies. But all in all, I’m pleased with this last one. I have not mentioned several others, many of which were quite good but other than noting that I read them would add little to this summary. One of these years I may start linking to a spreadsheet so everyone can keep track.

I’ll end by pointing out that the last few years have seen declines in reading rates across several demographics. This saddens me. I know the pressures of daily life can make reading seem like a luxury—or a chore—that one cannot afford, but given the state of, well, everything these last several years, I think it is a necessary survival habit. The level of ignorance—specifically, the degree to which people simply do not know things—demonstrated quite publicly by too many people is having a corrosive effect on life itself. Regardless how bad one’s school experience my have been, reading is one of the most civilizing skills available to us. Not just the casual cruising of an internet feed but the kind of reading that stretches the imagination. Take a book, turn off the feeds, sit down, and dig in reading. It seems more and more that we’re going to let the world burn because we just don’t know any better.

Have a better 2025.

So Together, So Alone: Souls In Orbit

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

As William Gibson once suggested, the future is here, it’s just unequally distributed. We live in the dreams of past wishful thinkers, what with all the technological marvels surrounding us and permeating our daily lives. We’ve become blasé about much of it. Many of us walk around with the equivalent of a tricorder in our pocket and I heard an interview the other about an eight-year-old in Gaza hunkering down in the midst of chaos with her laptop and cellphone. We walk the hallways of tomorrow and often fail to appreciate the wonder of it all.

But the oldest of media can bring it home how wide our world has become and leave us with an ancient estrangement about ourselves and our place in the now. Words on paper. Stories. People coping with the strange and trying to make it “normal” even as they acknowledge how utterly amazing it all is.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is about a group of astronauts during their tour on the international space station. A mixed group, Russians, an Italian, American, Irish, Japanese…an international bunch with experiments to run and tests to conduct and marvels to experience, within a microgravity environment their bodies tell them is not as it should be. And below on Earth a massive typhoon forming in the Pacific which they can do nothing but watch grow and move toward land.

What are their thoughts? Their reactions? What do they tell themselves about all this humanly anomalous circumstance? 

The time is not very far in the future. We know this because a mission is on its way to the moon. Such a mission is scheduled but not for a while yet. The next phase in the human expansion into space.

But mostly an expansion is the conscious space of accommodating this future and its implications. Each of these people have private reactions, philosophical methods for dealing with who they are and where. Orbital is an elegant examination of becoming. It is a literary novel about something once upon a time you would only find between the covers of science fiction novels. 

Orbital has also won the Booker Prize.

For some, this is in itself is a moment of dissonance. A space story has just won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet. 

Well, of course. We’ve been moving toward that for decades. And reading Orbital produces no surprises on that score. It is a beautiful novel and does something for the 21st Century both necessary and unexpected. It establishes a bridge between dream and reality, between what once could not have been and what seems inevitable. But it does so with the full recognition that we carry all that we are into tomorrow, wherever we are or wherever we go. It is a literary work for the science fiction age, which is a period more and more people are actively embracing and living in.

The question then is: is Orbital science fiction? We’ve gotten into the habit of using that label for work that features new technology and some sort of life-and-death adventure, possibly aliens, certainly the Unknown. As far as it goes, one could argue all of that is at hand (except perhaps the aliens—but on a certain level, aren’t we all aliens to each other?) but folded within a rich fabric of simple human coping. “We’re going to be living here,” it says, “at least some of us, and some us will visit, but even if we don’t, this is now part of the space we inhabit as members of the human race…so what will it be like to be ourselves in that extended world?”

On another level, Harvey has captured the awe we will be challenged to manage when we come face-to-face with the new territory. Mitigated of course by the price and consequence of going there. These people in this fragile container, cycling through sunrises that test their internal circadian, and watching the world of their birth from a vantage that allows a perspective most of us must actively work to achieve and which they can find by simply looking out a window, must learn to accommodate their attachments to Earth with the limits of a new physical proximity and the trade-offs to come.

The details are well realized, the science if solid, and so it had to be for the emotional impact to unfold with the truth of recognition. Here we are. There we will be. The universe is ancient and new. What now will we do? 

And we glimpse that while the questions and answers emerge with a timeless familiarity, they are not after all quite the same. 

23

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It’s interesting that one of the axioms of retirement is that once entered one will have time to do all the things the day-job obstructed. Like read as much as you like. And like so many such things, it turns out not to be true. The habits of decades are still in force, and while maybe you get more chores done, you find reordering all those deeply-rutted paths more difficult than you thought.

I’m sure in some ways I am reading more, but not the way I’d hoped. I average around 70 books a year, cover-to-cover, with a great deal of spot reading, fragmentary, excerpts, short pieces, dipping into and out of research or sidetrips. I suppose if I did a page count I might find myself in the 150 plus range (total book equivalent), because this past year I did a lot of that, as I’m back at work on a new historical novel and much of my reading is taken up with research, most of which is not whole books.

But other things have also gotten in the way. Well, that’s an ungenerous way to put it. Since my dad’s death, my time spent on mom has gone up considerably—and quite happily—and of course I’m still trying to settle into a new routine.

That said, I read—cover-to-cover—66 books in 2023.

Setting aside the research material, some of which I do include in this tally, quite a lot of it was spent on old novels either read back in my adolescence or for various reasons never read at the time. Catching up, so to speak, on the work that was part of my youthful encounter with, especially, science fiction.

There were a few writers I remember bouncing off of back then. I never quite connected with, for instance, Avram Davidson. I read Rork!, which is a colonial adventure with some curiously subversive takes on the whole idea of imperial encounters; The Island Under The Earth, which I’m still not sure I quite understood, but a sort of mythologically-oriented fantasy; The Phoenix and the Mirror, the first in his loose series about Vergil, again a fantasy (of sorts) and truly magnificently done, a pleasure to read; and A Clash of Star Kings, which could have stood a little more fleshing out, but given the publishing requirements of the time, he delivered a rather fascinating take on the idea that the ancient MesoAmerican “gods” were warring aliens. The pleasant surprise, even with the material I did not quite get, was the beauty of the prose.

I also reread a couple of D.G. Compton novels. Compton died recently, one of those artists one loses touch with and assumes has long since passed away. He published four novels via Terry Carr’s old Ace Special series, the most, I believe, by any single writer, and I know I read them back then (as I read all the Specials because, after all, they were special) but I barely remembered them. They were perhaps too sophisticated for me at the time. But I read Synthajoy and The Silent Multitudes and found both remarkably made narratives about the disjunction between expectation and new technologies or events. His handling of character was quite uncharacteristic of the majority of science fiction of that time (the Sixties) and psychologically fascinating. I will be reading another one for the reading group I host.

Other older titles I read included the complete Cities In Flight by James Blish, which in the end left me a bit disappointed. I thought it began very strongly with the mines of Saturn and the advent of longevity in They Shall Have Stars, but by the last book (chronologically), Triumph of Time, I thought it strained against the limitations of form available at the time. The characters and social milieu did not, in my opinion, match the more cosmological aspects Blish was attempting, but he was never an epic writer in the sense we think of it today. Somewhat more successful was his quasi-fantasy set Black Easter and The Day After Judgment, which dealt with an actual apocalypse and its aftermath. Thematically related to his classic A Case Of Conscience, Blish seemed to have been in his element dealing with the collisions of theology and materialism.

A writer who worked with such themes in quite different ways was Michael Bishop, who also passed away recently. Bishop should, in my opinion, enjoy a much larger and wider reputation than he seems to. At his best, he was compelling and richly engaging. I decided to read those of his early titles I never got around to and with that in mind I read A Little Knowledge and Under Heaven’s Bridge, which he cowrote with Ian Watson. Both examine the impact of aliens on human philosophical concerns, both in different ways. Neither was a great work, but you can see the greatness to come. I also reread his excellent novella Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana which, among other things, took a hard look at South African apartheid. Published before the collapse of that system, it is an uncomfortable read that deals with police-state mentality and brutality and tragedy of enlightenment within a system designed to snuff it out. It carried unfortunate resonances into today in unexpected ways, which the best fiction will always do.

We read Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca aloud. The elegance of her prose allows entree into a psychologically engaging family drama that involves murder and shattered illusions and the demands of expectations based on half-truths and lies. What begins as a rather pedestrian romance becomes inexorably a portrait of dysfunction and questions the sacrifices we make in order to find a place in the world with people we wish to love.

Another read-aloud we did was the superb satire The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Russian to its core, it was Bulgakov’s last novel, unpublished during his lifetime, and it is a romp. The devil arrives in Moscow, takes over a theater, begins granting wishes, and thoroughly upends daily life for certain people and leaves the state with a puzzle it is incapable of solving. Delightful.

We also read a couple of Willa Cather novels, O, Pioneers! and My Antonia. Cather is among those authors I’d always intended to read but for one reason or another never got to. But I confess, when I was tearing through the so-called “classics” in high school, neither of these would have stayed in my memory very clearly. I’ve had to grow into a state of mind to appreciate them, so it’s just as well I waited. These are the kind of novels kids like me dismissed because “nothing happens.” Which is to say, the careful setting of character in landscape and examining the evolution of them in concert requires a certain interest. Not that I didn’t encounter such work back then and enjoy it, but it would have been the exception. I’ve now reached the point where I look at some of the works I praised as terrific then and have to admit that, really, nothing happens in them, other than a lot of frenetic running around.

However, I also finally opened up a novel whose virtues are so widely extolled that one feels like a literary troglodyte when its charms fail to excite. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. A few years ago I read Love In The Time Of Cholera and quite liked it. This, unfortunately, left me a bit perplexed. It’s not so much that nothing happens, but rather for all that does happen fails to change anything. Except, perhaps, the women. They change. They alone in this vast epic exhibit a capacity for change, for growth, for evolution, but then all of it is constrained to the task of adapting to men, who do not change and whose inability to do so distorts the lives of these women whose marvels and talents we will never see because they are in bondage to a stagnant domesticity. If this were written to suggest a criticism of such male intractability, then it might be something, but I found the narrative guileless in its acceptance that this is how the world is and one cannot alter it.

The older I get, the more I find my sentiments engaged by the women—writers and characters—who struggle to be themselves and stop conforming to long-desiccated expectations. Which is why I look forward these days to the next novel by Becky Chambers (whose The Galaxy and the Ground Within I read this year and found amazing) or Ann Leckie (Translation State, marvelous), or Malka Older (The Mimicking of Known Successes, a novella of remarkable invention)or S.B Divya (Machinehood).

One of the most remarkable novels I have read in a long time was Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea. Extraordinary visualizations, great characters, and a rich intellectual conceit. I reviewed it here not long ago.

Once again playing catch-up, I read Greg Bear’s last trilogy, War Dogs, killing Titan, and Take Back The Sky. On the surface, military SF, but that’s just the veneer. Beneath is a twisty interstellar puzzle, a clash of civilizations, and questions around the nature of knowledge and how to discern truth is an ever-changing environment. Bear died last year. I have only a handful of his yet to read. However one might have thought of his perspective, he was a boundary-pusher.

Of the nonfiction I read this year, the stand-outs are A Spectre Haunting by China Mieville, a well-considered reassessment of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. While Mieville is sympathetic, he is no sycophant, and this book would be a good bridge into a reasoned examination of Marx and socialism itself. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, a very good narrative examination of the history of those long ago creatures who somehow have never let go our popular imagination. Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood, a long history of the early republic, one of the Oxford History of the United States entries.

But perhaps the best history read this year was Blood and Ruins by Richard Overy, a history of World War II. Overy casts a wide net, spanning the period between 1931, when he claims the events we now call WWII began, and 1945. He examines the military history, of course, but then he gets into the backgrounds, deeply, and the economics, and then the law, the underpinnings of all the tensions and terrors. He goes well beyond the actual fighting to look at the state of humanity at each stage and provides that ever-so-rare thing, context. It is a brutal read, and very long (I’m guessing a good 300K words) and in the end the book I would presently recommend to anyone who wants one book on the war. He has done an admirable job of maintaining objectivity. Whether he succeeded at that is debatable, but he is not partisan.

The research I’ve been doing has mainly to do with the colonial period of the St. Louis region. Kaskaskia, Cahokia, the Osage. I’m spending a lot of time on minutiae in the constructions of the next Ulysses Granger novel, which I am halfway through a first draft. Some of the books I did not cover here, I have done reviews already on the Proximal Eye.

The pile awaiting my attention is as usual stacked too high, and once in a while I find myself wishing I could recover some of my speed-reading skills from 50 years ago. But I enjoy what I read now and back when I was breezing through texts at 2500 words a minute, I did not. Nor did I retain as much as I’d like. So this suits me. I’m enjoying the meals now.

Have a great 2024, filled with wonderful books. I wish you all good reading.

Across Boundaries

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain In The Sea, is a superb example of asking a simple question and then exploring the ramifications at length. The question? What is intelligence and how would we recognize it in other species?

The novel concerns the discovery of an octopus species that exhibits the kind of behavior till now deemed impossible—unlikely at best—given the nature of octopus biology. Dr. Ha Nguyen accepts an invitation from the head of a global corporation to come to an isolated island in the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, Con Dao, to study an anomaly. Con Dao is a protected area, cordoned off by advanced defensive systems to keep predators—human—from coming in and wiping out the ocean life in aggressive sea farming.

On Con Dao she meets two people with extraordinary capacities, one an android, the other barely human after a life of harsh conflict.

The android, Kamran, is the only one of its kind, a remarkable construct built by the woman who owns DIANIMA, Dr. Minervudottir-Chan, the corporation that has brought Dr. Nguyen to Con Dao. Humaniform, erudite, somehow not intimidating, they are set to research the octopuses together. Also on the island, Altansetseg, the security officer, a woman of long experience with the scars and the cynicism as proof, who operates an extensive remote drone net that proves startlingly powerful. Nguyen, Kamran, and Altansetseg develop an alliance centering on the creatures who have found a home in the bowels of an old shipwreck just off-shore.

Other characters in various locations come into play as berserkers, radical actors, fey factors in relation to DIANIMA, which impinge on the whole question of artificial intelligence and emergent sentience. Rustem, the outlaw hacker, who is hired by enigmatic people wanting to hack a code that has to do with (perhaps) autonomous AI; Eiko, a kidnapped worker enslaved to an illicit fishing trawler run by an AI system. But the main subjects in this are Kamran, Nguyen, Altansetseg, and, later, Minervudottir-Chan.

And the octopuses. Against all theory, they seem to have created a community, and developed the ability to communicate symbolically. The details of this are one of the chief pleasures of the novel.

One of.

These people all come together from isolated lives constrained by shells of self-defense and a frustrating inability to get past themselves in order to join community. Any community. They get by, they associate, the have colleagues. But Dr. Nguyen herself makes use of an advanced AI in order to indulge the forms of a relationship without there being an actual person involved. Kamran is alone by virtue of being the only one of its kind. Minnervudotir-Chan is perhaps the most isolated, having as excuse exactingly high standards for any kind of relationship, and finally resorting to build her own creature to meet them…which, of course, Kamran doesn’t. Altansetseg is buried inside a shell created by her entire life as a warrior. Vulnerability for her would be a form of self-destruction.

And yet they are all brought together to make contact with a creature that was supposed to be by nature all alone and has now, apparently, learned to make community.

The layers of revelation and interpenetration in this novel engage the desperate need to Be latent in all of us. And while Nayler does a remarkable job examining that, he is also giving us a material to consider the question of self-awareness at the heart of any discussion of AI. Before we can answer the core questions about AI, we have to answer it for ourselves. We have to recognize also that we need to extend that question to nonhuman life in all its forms. How, basically, can we expect to recognize self-aware intelligence in a machine if we can’t recognize it in biological forms other than our own?

Humans are rather chauvinistic about that. Perhaps understandably so. The question is meaningful only if we want connection, and we of course want it in terms we can understand. The only example we’ve studied in any depth till recently is…ourselves. So the template, the criteria, already presumes the markers of recognition.

“When we try to compare one animal’s brainpower with another’s, we also run into the fact that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

Given that, communication runs aground on the same problem. No one scale on which to measure. And that has to do with expression, never mind meaning.

The Mountain In The Sea is an alien contact novel, make no mistake, only the aliens turn out to our preconceptions and limitations, as defined by the encounter. Every single character in this novel is an alien and they are all trying to connect, whether they realize it or not.

2022

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have been remiss in not doing these annual reviews more regularly. I have no excuse. Other words get in the way sometimes. 

But this, one year into my “official” retirement, I have no excuse not to do. So.

I read, cover-to-cover, 89 books in 2022. Compared to 48 in 2021. I try to make it through 70 to 80 a year, but some years…well. A handful in ’21 were doorstops, but really, I have no excuse for not getting through the nearly 100 books I read only partly. 

Of the 89 this past year, 40 were some species of science fiction. That’s up in percentage from the past few years. A handful were rereads, like Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Neveryon, Heinlein’s Space Cadet, Laumer and Dickson’s Planet Run, Greg Bear’s Heads. As I’ve noted before, I rarely reread. I read slowly, compared to some, and I have too many books on my TBR pile to choose to go over something I’ve already been through. This past year, I’m finding that to be a mistake.  (I started this a few years back with Charles Dickens. I’d read most of his work in high school, came away hating it, and deciding that I needed to revisit that impression. It has been…instructive.) 

Planet Run by Keith Laumer and Gordon R. Dickson is an anomaly for me. It’s what a friend of mine calls a “shitkicker”—and adventure with not much else going for it but the adrenaline. A crusty old spacer is hauled out of retirement to participate in the planetary equivalent of the Oklahoma Land Rush. He’s seasoned, wizened, world-weary, but gets saddled with the wet-behind-the-ears son of the politician who has blackmailed him into doing this. Bad guys abound, betrayal happens, it would have made an excellent Bruce Willis film anytime in the past 20 years. I read it first at 13 and there is something about it that just does it for me. I’ve read it four or five times since and it is always fun. Nothing deep, nothing timeless (or maybe there is), nothing one couldn’t find in a good Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour (it is basically a western). But it still makes me smile. It is one of the few books I loved as a kid that does not make me cringe to read now.

The Bear…well, Greg Bear passed away November 19th, 2022, from complications from heart surgery. I still have a few unread Bear novels on my shelf, but I read his Queen of Angels for the first time and realized that there are 5 books in that universe, including Heads, which proved to be as wickedly clever this time as the first time. The jabs at Scientology are impossible to miss, but it’s not satire. Queen of Angels was fascinating and a book one wonders if it would be  fêted today. It hues close to a few stereotypes that, while I felt he subverted, might nevertheless be read as problematic today. At its heart are questions of nurture vs nature psychology and the costs of potential intervention—therapy of a more intrusive type.

Of the SF read for the first time, then, right off the top was Gregory Benford’s Shadows of Eternity, which produced a curiously nostalgic reaction for me. Benford “borrowed” an alien species from Poul Anderson and wrote a very different sort of first contact novel that took me aesthetically right back to the Eighties, even as the approach to character and extrapolations of technology are very much of the moment.

I heartily recommend Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station, first in a series (?) that gives as an all-female crew (and supporting cast) in another “shitkicker” that has no lack of adrenaline and ample speculation involving corporations and indigenous rights and a neat Magnificent Seven riff. 

Andy Weir’s Artemis could have come from an outline left behind by Heinlein. Enormous fun, set entirely on the moon, action, problem-solving, and—again—corporate shenanigans. 

I read Ken McLeod’s trilogy beginning with Cosmonaut Keep, continuing with Dark Light and Engine City, which is a large-scale space opera somewhat in the mode of Iain M. Banks an involving interspecies intrigue, vast machinations, and ending on an ambivalent note where what problems have been plaguing the characters seem to be solved but not exactly resolved. He handles the whole time dilation question rather well and manages to tell family sagas and personal relationships against the background of centuries.  (It’s tricky to do these kinds of sagas which center on families without it becoming A Family Saga, with all the kind of homey baking bread sentimentality one usually encounters.)

I want to make special note of Nicola Griffith’s Spear, which is a compact and compelling retelling of the Arthurian—or, rather, the Percival legend—done from an unexpected point of view. Firstly, the writing is, as we expect from Griffith, first-rate. Secondly, she delivers a feminist twist which is only that in retrospect. As always, the story comes first. But story and character are bound up in the double helix of narrative. Griffith is doing some of the best history-based fiction around. The sequel to Hild is coming out soon and we should be prepared for a treat. 

Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace is the sequel to her marvelously complex debut, A Memory Called Empire. It picks up where the first left off and enriches the universe she has built, quite well. This is the kind of immersive world-building long-valued in SF/F, particularly effective because of the juxtaposition of cultures which throws the aspects of each into relief. Martine’s main character is herself something of an outsider, groping for Place in a milieu of which she has too little experience. 

Another epic work in SF I think very important is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future. This is in many ways not a science fiction novel—in fact, it could be argued that a good chunk of it is textbook—but it is speculative, in that none of the specific events detailed have happened but the world is very much ours. It presents a scenario in which the world finally tackles climate change. In that so many things work and come together to positive effect I suppose render the novel SF, but…

Becky Chambers’ new series, Monk and Robot, continues with A Prayer for the Crown Shy, part of the tor.com series of novellas. All I can say is that Chambers is one of my favorites authors. She writes about community is ways I find remarkable and refreshing in science fiction. 

Two novels about radically altered futures I found compelling. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, which is reminiscent (in structure) of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s  The Unraveling. Both novels offer views of future social arrangements quite removed from our own and both present backgrounds of unexpected breadth. The writing in both is amazing and the ideas will linger.

To my great pleasure, John Crowley published a new one, Flint and Mirror, which indulges his penchant for presenting magic as a potential more than a reality and offering a view on the borderlands. This one is a historical, about the Irish Problem at the time of Elizabeth I. Unexpected. 

I continued with Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs series. I haven’t decided yet whether she’s doing history with embedded mystery or the reverse, but the novels have been tracking Miss Dobbs chronologically as the world heads for WWII. The last two so far, war is upon Britain and Maisy finds herself doing more security work than private investigation. We have grown up with these people now, so to speak, and the world Winspear is investigating is marvelously evoked.

Not intending to, really, but I did  a partial reread of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels. I indulged in a marathon review of the movies and wrote commentary and decided some comparison to the original novels and stories was in order. I was surprised both by how well-written many of them were and at the same time how shallow. I recall as a teenager plowing through them with relish. This time it was an academic review that yielded a few surprises, but on the whole I came away feeling I never have to look at them again.

I read Emily St. John Mandel’s new one, Sea of Tranquility. Whatever she might say, this is straight up science fiction, with time travel and an apparent time paradox. Given another fifty pages, she might have made it a very good SF novel. As it stands, it was enjoyable but derivative and relied too much on the good will of the reader. It was reminiscent of several older works by SF writers, most especially Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. My best guess is, her point is to suggest that we all live in closed loops. (She might try to remember next time that gravity is different in other places and that someone who grew up on the moon might have a very difficult time standing up on Earth. Such details, which may seem fussy to literary writers, can make or break a narrative in science fiction.)

I finally read a Paul J. McAuley trilogy I had been meaning to for years, starting with Child of the River. In many ways it reminded of Gene Wolfe’s magisterial Book of the New Sun. Out in the hinterlands of galactic space, an artificial world with a long history that has evolved into a mythic background and a kind of avatar of a past race come to fulfill, etc etc. The adventures and worldbuilding are exceptional, but it ended with the feeling that another book would have been in order to satisfactorily wrap things up.

One last SF recommendation is Annalee Newitz’s new one, Terraformers, which draws on her strengths in anthropology and ecology and tells the story of the denizens of a world that has been remade by a corporation intending to lease it out to rich vacationers. The beings who did the actual work, however, presumably designed to die off when their utility is at an end, are still there and a struggle begins to claim rights. High finance, environmentalism, indigenous issues, and all the related politics combine in a rich, fascinating novel of generational evolution.

I’ve been dipping back into the past and catching up, filling in gaps. A couple of Clifford Simak novels, a reread of Ian Wallace’s Croyd (which is remarkably weird), early Le Guin (Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile), and….

David Copperfield. Yes, the Dickens. I read this one aloud to my partner and came away with a modified view of Dickens. At least in this novel, what to a modern sensibilty comes across as verbosity, is actually very careful scene-setting and social explication. The 19th Century did not offer  movies and the stage was not universally available. I found very little that might be excised from the narrative. It all mattered.

I read Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley, which is a heavy history of the 1930s, from the onset of the Depression to the start of World War II. Brendon takes a global view and examines each major political aspect—America, Europe, Britain, Asia—and gives a narrative of the runaway cart that took the globe to war. The parallels to the present are clear, but also deceptive. Yes, there are movements and conditions, but the failure of solutions then should not be taken as inevitabilities now.

I read Walter Isaacson’s Code Breaker, the biography/history of Jennifer Doudna, the geneticist who has given us CRISPR and whose work was part of the technological foundation thst produce the COVID vaccine is apparently record time. Isaacson, as usual, does an excellent job of making the science accessible. The people, though, shine in this lucid view of modern science.

As is my usual habit, I read some odd bits of history. For my writing, I rarely do project-specific research. Instead, I cast a wide net and gather a variety of details until suddenly they become useful. To that end, I read the following: The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille; There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli; Utopia Drive by Erik Reece; Freethinkers and Strange Gods by Susan Jacoby; A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson; Worldly Goods by Lisa Jardine; Beyond Measure by James Vincent.

And the rather impressive History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling. 

I can recommend all of the above whole-heartedly. 

I also read Sherlockian novels that surprised me. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (yes, him, the former basketball player) is a serious Sherlockian and did two novels centered on Mycroft. I recommend them. Sherlock is in them, of course, but not yet out of university. They are surprisingly good. Or perhaps not so surprising, Maybe the word is uniquely good. There have been pastiches and homages to Holmes and most of them are forgettable if enjoyable. These two I feel contribute meaningfully to the mythos.

Along those lines, the Victorian Age has become almost a genre in itself, and I read my first Langdon St. Ives book by James Blaylock. I’m still unsure what to make of it, but I was impressed. We shall see if I continue the series.

There are a number I have left out. Not that they were bad, but I’m not sure what to say about them here. I discovered some new-to-me authors that I recommend—Sarah Gailey, Daniel Marcus, Nadia Afifi. 

I finally read a classic I had long avoided. High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about it. In many ways it is an ugly story. Children captured by pirates, who turn out to be quite not what anyone would expect. It seems to me to be a study of what happens when childhood fantasy collides with the fantasized reality. In that way, it is well done and evocative.  What it says about human nature and the condition of childhood is complex and layered.

I may have further thoughts later. For now, this review has gone on long enough.

I’m looking forward yo 2023.

Good reading to you all.

Of Time and Depths of Contemplation

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Sea of Tranquility is Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel. Once again, she is indulging in a science fiction scenario, which she also did in what may be her most famous work, Station Eleven. She denied she was writing science fiction, but the novel has been adapted into a streaming series to good effect and is undeniably post-apocalyptic SF. (The reasons literary authors like Mandel find it necessary to disclaim that their work is SF are many and varied and could serve as an interesting study. Suffice it to say that it is a tradition now and originated in the simple reality of market share. That would no longer seem to be valid, given the bankability of SF these days, so we are left musing over sensibilities and pretensions.)

Like Margaret Atwood before her, Mandel seems now to have come to terms with her relationship to science fiction and has produced a work that cannot be plausibly read as anything else. The question then is, how good is it?

As science fiction, it is unremarkable, but not bad. We have now a couple of generations of writers from all genres who have grown up in an aesthetic universe informed by Star Trek, Star Wars, the Terminator, and now the excellent work being done in limited series. It’s bound to rub off, despite the efforts of MFA programs that often regard SF as less than acceptable.

And this leads to the slightly at-variance receptions of readers to such work. For the SF fan, a work like this says nothing new about the universe. For the literary reader largely unfamiliar with SF, it may seem refreshingly outré. Depends on one’s reading history.

The basic set-up in Sea of Tranquility can be traced back to something like Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories, which have as their basic ethic—their Prime Directive, if you will—the mandate to guard the timeline to keep history from changing. There is an organization, agents are recruited, various points in time are investigated, aberrations hunted down and “corrected.” We can see the idea in Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity and in many other works by numerous writers, all of which are concerned with the ramifications of time travel. (Two of the most famous examples come from Robert A. Heinlein—By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies. Heinlein used time travel a number of times, to mixed results. The problems to be grappled with are a rich font of philosophical—not to mention physical—speculation. Presently, the new series based on William Gibson’s superb novel, The Peripheral, is thoroughly exploring the ramifications of time travel.)

The protagonist of Sea of Tranquility, Gaspery Roberts, lives on the moon, in a decaying colony, and leads a relatively aimless life until events bring him to the attention of the institute for which his sister works. She—and they—are essentially the Time Patrol. Gaspery volunteers to help them investigate an anomaly they have discovered, an apparent “hole” in time, which may answer the question, Are We Living In A Simulation?

This is a current—though minor—matter of interest in philosophy and, to some extent, physics. One might reasonably ask, what difference would it make? But there is a certain question of maleability involved, which leads to the ethical issues in keeping the timeline “pristine.”

Mandel then constructs a loop to tell the story of the anomaly and how it involves Gaspery.

The essence of the novel comes down to choices. Everyone’s, really. The engine that drives the novel is Choice. Gaspery’s, certainly, as he becomes a rogue actor, but in every instance throughout the book Mandel examines the consequences of choice. By tying it to the universe at large, through the conceit of time travel (and, secondarily, by asking whether this is all a simulation) she connects it to the fabric of the world itself.

In this, she steps outside the familiar precincts of the purely literary novel, in which choice is certainly important, but only as it affects the people involved with each other. It never alters the stuff of reality. There is seldom this binding of philosophy to physics. That’s the realm of science fiction.

The question then, is Mandel successful in this endeavor?

On the whole, yes. She tells a compelling story. The characters are engaging, their situations distinct and intriguing, and the throughlines are followed scrupulously. Costs are levied and paid, solutions are frustratingly short of desire, and the settings nicely drawn. The central questions are foregrounded (as one would expect from a science fiction novel) and tied to questions beyond the internal concerns of the characters. The world itself is brought into play in interesting ways. It is on a number of levels satisfying.

It is not state-of-the art science fiction, but it does not seem Mandel is trying for that. She’s going for reliably suggestive. That it is derivative (of so much one would not expect her to be familiar with) is not here a detractor. Some of the speculation of what the future may be like is too conservative, but not so much that the story is derailed by incongruities. The major speculations are kept off-stage—mentioned but not examined (there are interstellar colonies, for instance)—and she avoids the pitfall of too much technical detail.

It is the confluence of her characters, coming together in an unexpected way, that keeps us reading. She even suggests an answer to the Big Question, but leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusion.

We are in many ways tied to people and history unpredictably. There are orbits and the mechanics thereof dictating the path of our hearts. In these matters, Mandel has given us a contemplation of surprising moment.

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.

Reflections In Stone and Story

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

John Crowley opens doors for readers to walk through into worlds that rest on the faint border between the Real and the Perceived. In his most famous novel, Little, Big, doors are explicitly present, and going through them defines the universe. The act of stepping through makes present what is otherwise only felt.

Doors—entrances—are offered as opportunities, both for the reader and for the characters.
Often they are narrow and only shadows can be glimpsed through them. To know, one must step through.

Stepping into a Crowley novel…one finds a complete world, unexpected and fascinating.

While his reputation is as a fantasy writer, he has produced equally immersive literary mainstream novels, albeit with historical settings—The Translator, Four Freedoms, Lord Byron’s Novel—and there is ample historical connection in his best fantasies. His facility for blending history and fantasy is impressive.

His newest does this magnificently. Flint and Mirror takes on the subject of Ireland and England.

Hugh O’Neill, ostensible heir to the throne of High King of Eire, is gotten out of Ireland as a boy to spare him from the purges of his uncle, who has claimed the title The O’Neill and is murdering competitors. Young Hugh finds himself in the Court of Queen Elizabeth I, ward of an English lord, companion to his son. Advisor to the queen Dr. John Dee sees an opportunity to bind the boy to Elizabeth by way of an onyx mirror. Dee makes of it a kind of communicator through which the Queen may influence the boy.

Dr. Dee is a pivotal figure for Crowley. Dee (1527 to 1609?) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and occultist and an advisor to Elizabeth I. He advocated colonizing the New World and he encouraged the idea of Empire. At one time he possessed the largest library in England. Dee is a fulcrum in Crowley’s sweeping Aegypt Cycle (The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Daemonomania, and Endless Things) which represents his examination of the End Of Magic. Dee fills a similar role here, representing the last practitioner of an ancient art that bridges the worlds of humans, angels, and myth.

Hugh has another advisor, though, an Irish poet, Mahon, who shows him the buried heritage of the Irish past and opens the door for him to glimpse the ancient spirits of old kings. Hugh acquires a shard of flint, which serves a similar purpose for him as Elizabeth’s mirror, and with these two objects he embarks on a quest of bridge the two kingdoms and secure Irish liberty.

Eventually, Hugh rises to the position of The O’Neill and even wields the authority (if not the title) of the High King. His wars with the English represent one of the points in that fraught history where Ireland might have thrown off the English yoke.

Crowley’s history is impeccable. He tracks events as close as may be to what happened, adding the layer of competing magics to illuminate questions of belief and destiny and show how the old yields to the new. Hugh creates a disciplined army that, for a time, was a match for the English forces. Ultimately, though, Ireland depended too much on Spanish intervention, and when that proved insufficient and eventually impossible, the effort collapsed.

What part did magic play? Inspirational, certainly. Materially? What comes through with almost tragic clarity is the consequence of its failure, and in this Flint and Mirror is a study in transitional systems. Belief systems, mostly, but the question lands heavily on history as a resource in the present.
Resource, organization, calculation. These things always seem to overwhelm dependence on tradition, destiny, reliance on belief at the expense of pragmatic assessment, and here it is no different. But the additional matter of an overturned investment in folklore and the efficacy of occult resurgence is most poignant. The fact that Hugh and his contemporaries were also in a struggle to retain their Catholicism in the face of English Protestantism complicates Hugh’s attempt to rely on a mythic tradition predating Christianity.

The questions of transition and tradition are spread throughout the novel, deftly serving the narrative without becoming pedantic. This period of Irish history mirrors the unfortunate life of Dr. Dee, who, after leaving England to find a better position in Poland, returned to a country that no longer had much use for him. His house plundered, his sinecure rescinded, and a new king who was afraid of the occult left him in his final years much reduced, cared for by a daughter, and nearly forgotten. We cannot even be certain of the year he died as the records were occluded and even his gravestone stolen.

In the end, though, nothing remains as it began, and the empire Dr. Dee urged his Queen and his country to pursue no longer exists anymore than does the Eire of Hugh O’Neill.

Equations and Kindness

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Over the course of my “literary” life, I’ve encountered numerous divisions, prejudices, aversions, proclivities, and preferences. Most of them come down to taste—this school parts company from that one, fans of one writer cannot abide this other one, subject matter produces occasional extreme reactions. Then there is the endless sortings according to style or period or region. Genre can be a minefield of antagonisms, categorical dismissals, harsh critical responses, or simple disinterest. Taste, aesthetics, predilection—all personal, really, even when a case is made of a more substantial kind involving theory, academic attitudes, or even ethics, but by and large it comes down to a kind of triage: what do you want to spend your time on, that satisfies or fulfills?

In my youth, the most prominent division among those of us reading the so-called Classics was best exemplified by those who loved Jane Austen…and those who did not. I fell into the latter category. For years, Austen, for me, was a mannered, formalized, high-end kind of soap opera. I would hear people declare her genius and scratch my head. Many years later, having indulged my personal interest by way of thousands of novels and short stories in science fiction, I came back to Austen and discovered a vein of brilliance I had theretofore missed. While the “soap” aspect was certainly there, the fact is she was writing insightfully about systems. Social systems, mainly, but there were ancillary systems. She examined the social milieu of her day as sets of constraining protocols, barriers, and arrangements that dictated individual choice. 

I describe that in order to explain how most divisions among the wide range of literary forms are often arbitrary, petty, and at best only serve to point us in preferential directions—here be what you like. Read widely enough, we find what we like in places we thought devoid of our preferred pleasures, and hence the distinctions are…porous.

Most of them are harmless and serve at times as sources of productive discourse. One, however, has always dismayed me, because it extends beyond the literary to permeate many other aspects of our lives. What C.P. Snow labeled the Two Cultures—the division between art and science.

As if the two are incompatible, that somehow science is anti-art, and by extension anti-human. (It is one of the underlying dismissals by some of science fiction.) At some point since Newton, this idea has become more entrenched and has led to some arguably toxic consequences. 

In the 20th Century, many people recognized the negative aspects of this division and sought to bridge the divide. Notable among them were Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, Rachel Carson, Lynn Margulis, Lisa Randall, and Michelle Thaller. The ability to write and convey science in language accessible by the lay public has become something apparently deserving of celebrity status, as in the case of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. 

While it is understandably difficult to convey the details of certain aspects of science, perhaps one of the problems has been that for too long it was just accepted that these things are too complex for the nonspecialist to grasp. It’s difficult to know because examples of excellent communication for the general public do seem to be rare. (Not as rare as it seems, but to know that one would have to be inclined to look, and if through life one is constantly told not only how hard science is but also, in some instances, how “inhuman” it is, the odds are good that one has been set up to be disinclined to pay attention.)

I think it is safe to say that never before has a public understanding of science been so important. After all, public policy, which has always required an understanding on some level of science, is now being directly impacted by such comprehension. 

So the so-called Popularizer has never been more important.

But in order for the message to reach people, it is fair to say it must be made relevant to our humanity.

Enter Carlo Rovelli.

Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist (his field is quantum gravity) who over the last several years has published a handful of exemplary books, beginning with Seven Brief Lesson On Physics which, in a very short space covers much of the important history and nature of modern physics. In each of his books, threaded through the explications of science, is a humanness that renders the work emotionally accessible.

His latest, however, is something different. There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness is a collection of essays which share the theme of a scientist looking at the world at large and revealing the empathy through which the intellect sees. There are historical pieces about Newton and Einstein and revolution and geology, and political pieces touching on policy and the consequences of both understanding and ignorance, and travel pieces ranging from Africa to Scandinavia. Throughout it all, we see through the eyes of a scientist who loves and is delighted and laughs and is occasionally afraid—who is, basically, human.

The problem science presents for some people is the point at which it seems to throw up a wall and tells us no, you cannot do that, you cannot go there, you cannot have a particular way. Entropy is unsympathetic, and the apparently non-negotiable rejections of certain preferences can be off-putting. What Rovelli does is show us another door, because while science reveals a universe with certain restrictions, it shows us new possibilities all the time. It offers more options than we knew existed. 

But it is also important, if we are to increase our understanding of the world, to learn science as a human art.

That divide I spoke about, between art and science, is the most artificial of divisions. It grew out of the point at which philosophy seemed to lose relevance in the face of answers provided by science that fulfilled certain demands for useful answers. We forgot somewhere along the line that Aristotle was as much a scientist as a moral philosopher, and that he saw no meaningful distinction between the physical world and human ethics.

Rovelli talks about that and many other “points of departure” where some healing is in order, and perhaps a few new bridges. 

And he writes well. He observes very well. He conveys the essential humanness of science and somehow makes it a warmer thing to contemplate. There is hopefulness in his observations. Joy as well, and above all a kindness rarely encountered in any specialty.

Once we read this, I would recommend continuing with his other books. This is fun material as well as challenging and enlightening. Rovelli conveys an almost childish exuberance when talking about science and his own field. It is infectious and perhaps these days being caught up in the delight of exploring—which is, after all, where science begins—might just see us all through to a kinder place.

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.