Literary

Klara and the Sun

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Klara and the Sun is a simple story built upon a deep substrate of subtlety. It realizes its best effects by the very plainness of its presentation. But given a moment’s reflection it becomes clear how profoundly well-imagined is the world he has constructed.

Klara, the viewpoint character throughout, is an AF—and Artificial Friend. A robot built to act as a personal companion for a child or young adult. It’s a very old idea, almost Victorian, from a time when the wealthy, the aristocrat, would pay someone to be companion to a son or daughter. A constant presence that could be relied on to always be supportive and, more or less, guide the subject on a solid path to adulthood. As the novel opens, Klara is resident in the store where AFs are sold, with a view of the busy urban street beyond.

We learn in short order that AFs are solar powered, that they are intent upon finding a place with a customer, that there are different models with different capabilities (Klara is a B2), and that to a significant extent they are emotionally aware. This last detail has always given me pause because emotion is intrinsically hormonal. Living creatures experience emotions because our bodies give us chemicals in response to event, so we know fear and happiness, embarrassment and depression. Without these systems, machines by definition cannot have emotions. (This is a trope in SF that has always troubled me, but it seems wired into things now.) Ishiguro gets us by this small problem by inference that the emotions are programs that seem incapable of serious modification. Even at the end of the novel, in less than ideal circumstances, Klara’s emotional engagement remains consistent. So we can see this as a matter of program response that is self-referential and operates within a relatively broad but constrained range. (There is within this a nod to Turing.)

Details matter, especially in the construction of plausible science fiction narratives, so I point the above out to suggest that Ishiguro has done his homework and built his world well.

Klara is purchased finally by the mother of Josie, who is around 12 or 13, and is not well. She suffers bouts of debilitation. Eventually we learn that this is a consequence of her having been Lifted, a kind of genetic modification intended to enhance a child’s potential, both physically and intellectually. It does not always work out, though. The Mother, Chrissie, has already lost a daughter to this process and now it seems another may die. So the choice of an AF for Josie is shot through with multiple motivations as well a guilt and hope. Klara determines that she is there to see Josie through this.

The setting is the near future. Things are different yet much the same. The social dynamics have found new bases on which to operate, but the results are much as they have always been. Lifting has become the new standard of acceptance and obviously there is a class component. Josie’s best friend, Rick, has not ben Lifted, and so is sort of a misfit in the social groups Josie’s mother wishes her to join. The tension around the process feels very familiar and yet is a disturbingly dissonant option—for some, not all. What emerges regarding Josie’s difficulties, the dynamics between her and her mother and the estranged father, with Klara in the middle for purposes she is not altogether aware of form the ecology of the novel. Klara’s own apprehension of the problem seems at times both naïve and simply off the rails, with her conviction that the Sun is the solution to all these problems. Because Klara is solar powered, it seems logical that she has what amounts to a belief system centered on the Sun as a sort of deity. 

All these components merge into a disturbing yet disturbingly familiar expression of hope and need for purpose that, even as the answers and solutions sought by Klara are often beside the point, speaks to dedication, loyalty, and conviction. Klara succeeds, even thought what she actually does appears to have almost nothing to do with the actual mechanisms with which she wrestles, and experiences…well, perhaps not “life” as we might accept it, but fulfillment of intent that resonates.

Ishiguro has demonstrated a unique method of writing science fiction that “passes” as not. He has been working toward this for decades now, not quite succeeding in the attempt, until now. Just as he managed to recast the Arthurian legends as an unexpectedly trenchant work of mimetic historical fiction that was more concerned with the underpinnings of legend than with the legend itself, here he has given us a thoroughly-conceived work of SF that works as “literary” in the ways our culture accepts the idea. Certainly one can read this is as allegory, Klara herself as a metaphor, and, if one chooses, ignore the dislocations of the world itself. One can pretend this is a kind of riff on The Prince and the Pauper, a page lifted from Pollyana, a gloss on any number of sickly-child stories, even a study of the emotional fallout of adoption and divorce and loss. I suppose it might even work satisfactorily that way.

But it works best when the underlying conceits, which are wholly SFnal, are accepted and engaged. This is a disturbing world, a decade or two removed from ours, strewn with questions about the ethics of genetic engineering, AI, emotional substitution, and the economics of transformative technologies. One could go back through and pick a dropped line and unpack the meanings and marvel as the implications. 

It has long been pondered what it would look like if one day science fiction became simply another mode of literature. I think this may be one of the best examples.

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.

One Size Fits Who

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

We all have a list of books we feel we should read, should have read long ago, and somehow passed by. My own includes such classics as Catcher In The Rye, A Canticle For Liebowitz, A Separate Peace…and until recently, The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.

The title alone suggests and entire era, a movement, a period in history to be both remembered and forgotten. A cultural cul-d-sac that an entire generation rebelled against. Even in my own experience, it suggested a lifestyle of formal acquiescence to a stifling conformity that set an example to be either embraced or scorned.

And yet, I wonder how many of us knew nothing about the story.

So this year I did due diligence and read it. It was not what I expected. 

Published in 1955, it’s the story of a war veteran trying to make a life in the exuberant possibilities of post-war America. He works for a foundation, his work is appreciated, but the fact is he simply doesn’t make enough money to meet the expectations of wife, three kids, and his own notion of success. Upon advice from an acquaintance he applies for a job at the United Broadcast Company. 

Now, he comes from money, but his grandmother has pretty much squandered it all. She still occupies a sprawling house that sits on a lot of untouched acreage, but as to cash reserves, not much. 

Our Hero gets the job, but not the one he expected. Instead he will be working directly with the president of the company on a special project. When he reports to work, he discovers an elevator operator he knew in the army, someone who knows a secret about him he worries might become a source of blackmail. During the war, in Italy, he had a lover, a young woman trying to get by. She has a child by him. The war ends, he goes home to his American wife, and enters the struggle.

Everything turns on these points. Will he succeed at his new job? Will his indiscretion be revealed? Will his grandmother leave him the estate? 

The novel made a huge impression when it was published. Bestseller and then, almost immediately, a major motion picture starring Gregory Peck. And this was Sloan Wilson’s first novel.

Reading it today…

It’s a fairy tale. It’s a wishfulfilment, semi-cautionary yarn about honesty and backbone and what can only be described as the entrenched innocence of that decade of American history. Everything comes out fine. Or if not exactly fine, no one ends up impoverished, imperiled, or negatively impacted in any way they can’t handle. Our Hero walks a thick tightrope between integrity and conformity that pays off. Granted, a few things are left unresolved, but we know it will all be fine. Everything will be fine. He even tells his wife about the Italian lover and the child and after a day or two of near-panic, she adjusts and say it will be fine and they should send money.

All in all, it is a dissection of the components of 1950s corporate aspirations. There is a former servant who tries to pull a scam about the grandmother’s estate—he fails. It’s possible that the immediate superiors of Our Hero will engineer his ignominious ouster from what looks to be a privileged, plum job—they don’t. The community where he lives might not agree to a new school, which would torpedo his nascent plans for a housing development on the land he inherits—the school passes.

Nothing really bad happens to Our Hero. He doesn’t even seem to be suffering much from his war experience, which in some ways reads like the core of another novel which might be much better, particularly as he inadvertently kills his best friend. By his own admission he killed 17 men during the war. No PTSD. Well, one wouldn’t expect that from a 1955 novel, not the way we understand it today, but psychological damage was not unknown, even if it did get little public attention. Still, Our Hero is remarkably well-adjusted.

The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit is a guidebook as much as anything else, but as I say, it is an American post-war fairytale. Warnings about dangerous corners, potholes, alleyways, but all the warnings lead to nothing much, and at the end we know he’s going to achieve everything he wants to.

One can see the rejection coming not a decade later. The lessons, such as they are, suggest the old “work hard and keep your nose clean and you’ll be a success” chestnut, and they must have rung a false note even then. But not a decade after WWII, it must have been a welcome balm to an uncertain public. People would have cheered for this guy. (Compare this to James Jones’ Some Came Running, 1957, which deals with many of the same themes, but much more plausibly, which was also a bestseller and quickly made into a movie.) The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit is a kind of prayer that everyone should have a life worth having with the minimum of resistance, since, one assumes from the war sections, penance has already been paid.

It’s not even that the characters are falsely drawn. The psychology is consistent and believable (mostly) and carries us through the various scenarios without challenging us with implausibility—not even shallowness, really. But then, fairytales must be psychologically true to have any utility. Its tactic, though—and tactic is, I believe, the correct word—is to take us up to the edge of genuine pathos, let us peek over the rim, and promise the harsh catharsis of reality…and then veer off and let things come out the way we might prefer. It teases, all through.

Some books are best read in their day or at certain times in one’s life. I’m not sure what I would have made of this had I read it at, say, 16. In terms of content, it has a certain historical interest (the prices discussed would rattle anyone’s suspension of disbelief today) but would pass today as YA but for the ages of the protagonists. It is rather well-written. 

Anyway, this one I chose to check off my list. Some of the others…who knows?

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. 

Dust and Destiny

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I went to the theater—an Omnimax—to see Dune Part Two. The anticipation for this film since the first one has been a constant background hum. Other films so hungered for have more often than not disappointed. What could possibly live up to the self-generated hype?

My reaction? I was satisfied.

Oh, it was a thrill to watch, don’t get me wrong. For such a long picture, it flowed effortlessly by, feeling much shorter than its nearly three hours. Scene by scene built logically and solidly upon what went before and while everyone knew how it would end, the ending landed with an acceptable sense of resolution that nevertheless left the door open for the next one, but not in a frustrating way.

The changes from the novel mattered not at all. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is its own thing. Based as it is on legendary source material, a challenge for any filmmaker and one that often humbles lesser artists, Villeneuve was clearly not intimidated, but even so it would be hard to live up to over half a century of lore and cultish expectation. He succeeded by telling the core story in his own way and with a visual sensibility that supported his SFnal understanding.

The previous two attempts feel more than anything like run-ups to this.

Let me get this out of the way. David Lynch’s 1984 film is an epic miss. Lynch is not a science fiction guy, but a horror film maker, and it shows in what then were and remain odd choices for characterization. That said, he managed to get large chunks of it more or less right and for its day it was quite an achievement, but it did not flow well and Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul is a stiff suit filled with pronouncement. MacLachlan is a fine actor so I do not fault him. There were other choices Lynch made that with a slightly more SFnal attitude might have worked, but he kept giving us monsters. The underbudgeted SyFy Network production is underrated by too many. Whatever its other faults, it told the story much more smoothly and far more comprehensibly than the Lynch and some of the choices in cast and presentation were inspired. Paul was closer to what he ought to be, the Baron was closer to what we find in the novel, and on and on. (It failed mainly with Feyd, but then, who could beat Sting? Well…)

Villeneuve, if nothing else, gets science fiction. He seems to understand that it is not something you do by fixing up a contemporary sensibility with a couple of odd bits to make it strange, but that it is wholly strange. Other. He took the original Blade Runner, which is one of the best dozen SF films ever made, and immersed himself in the Otherness of it and produced a film that was fully science fiction. Arrival, which is the closest to a contemporary tableau as he has done in this vein, is all about the doorway into that Otherness and it does not try to reduce it to a suburban trope.

Now Dune.

Everything about this film is a masterclass in how to approach science fiction. And he treated the characters as real. Not mouthpieces. People caught up in enormities of process and disruption and groping for handholds and in their groping make the world different, whether they intend to or not. That is what makes it accessible. They become something other in the face of an ecology removed from contemporary sensibilities. That is what makes it science fiction.

The question, now that this masterpiece has arrived and we who have lived with the legendary attempts to turn a groundbreaking novel from the 1960s into a film, is: why Dune?

Descriptions of what Frank Herbert created have changed over the years. It was an ecological novel. It was a political novel. It is a novel about human-directed evolution. It is a novel about religious extremism. It is an attempt to produce the War and Peace of science fiction.

It is, of course, all of these things. But I think at its core it is a novel about hubris.

Every institution depicted in the novel takes on the accoutrements of final arbiter of human destiny. It is an imperial culture. It has divided its cultural anchors into those who deal with genetic lines and those who deal with technology and mathematics. Thinking machines are outlawed. Anything that might take such matters out of human hands has been eliminated or so constrained as to be powerless. Even transportation is the preserve of an elite. It is a classic Hellenistic culture in its defining customs. And it is a mercantilist society based on guaranteed monopolies, because only the elect can manage such power.

As the story opens, all these strains of self-professed competence are colliding with a break point no one can see because no one can see past their own sense of destiny. Hubris bound to a destiny is the most volatile combination in politics and religion and once those two things combine, you have a critical mass that can only explode.

Paul, at least in Villeneuve’s version, sees all this clearly, and yet cannot stop it. Because he discovers that “destiny” is the ultimate crowd-sourced motivator. In the end he makes the choice every leader in his position makes, which is to try to control it by succumbing to it.

It is one of the better examples of Greek tragedy science fiction has produced.

That is the most compelling thread of the films, the way Villeneuve shows us the inevitability of Paul’s choices as one by one his options disappear in the face of—destiny. Destiny that too many others want to see, others work to avoid, and the entire network of people and institutions around him have carefully constructed to reach, no doubt expecting a different outcome.

We can poke holes in Dune as a parlor game—the ecology doesn’t work, the history is missing important links, the choices the emperor makes are absurd, and on and on—but none of its flaws matter against the central idea of the cyclic tragedy of human-made destiny born of hubris. This is the feature that makes this story fascinating over multiple generations. (Lynch didn’t understand this and tried to turn Paul into a hero on a hero’s journey. He’s not and this isn’t. The SyFy version almost got it, but turned it into a “rise of the CEO” story and at the end the CEO has to step down when he can no longer “see.”)

For perhaps too many people, the affection for Dune rests on its novelties—the great sandworms, the desert vistas, the valiant guerilla fights attacking a much larger enemy, the idea of the Navigators who “fold space”—and for them, these films are a feast. Villeneuve sees science fiction, which in its own way has always been a visual art, urging us to see the future (which is why so many movies and television shows over the years have disappointed, with a few notable exceptions, because they always fell short of where the writers were taking us.) But even for them, that theme, those subtexts, act as hooks on the unconscious, which is why we’re obsessed over this story.

But to my reaction. Satisfied? Not thrilled? One can be thrilled at a flawed attempt, but never satisfied. Many not-great films are still fun to watch. But afterward, when contemplation begins…it has to satisfy to succeed. And this one? Yes, it satisfies.

Hild and the World

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Recently, in discussing my own switch from science fiction to history (one novel, testing the waters), I was asked how different the two were to write, and I had to admit that at base not that big a switch. (Science fiction is perhaps more overtly philosophical.) I realized afterward how true this seemed to be, at least for me. Historical fiction used the same muscles, so to speak, as science fiction, and in some ways was a closer pairing than historical and fantasy. If one intends to be true to the historical period in which the work is set, then it must be admitted that it is very similar to visiting a future and/or alien world. The chief difference, of course, is that in history, we have records and we know what happened.

Or do we? 

The farther back we go, the more work we have to do to imagine living in those times, in that world. Because it really isn’t very much like ours, at least not in the ways necessary to move through it. Obviously, on fundamental levels, people are people—we love, hate, grow old, struggle, and feel all the same emotions—but the trajectory and the triggers vary wildly. First Century B.C.E. Romans did not see the world the same way we do, even if emotionally they may have resonated with it much the same way.

And really, how much of those times do we actually know? Some periods are very well documented, we have a great deal of primary material from which to construct (reconstruct) the world. Other periods and places, not so much.

Nicola Griffith reconstructed Seventh Century C.E. Britain almost from whole cloth. We know certain major dates and names of many of the top players, but the world itself? And in the case of her protagonist, St. Hilda of Whitby, we have the remains of her abbey and a taunting reference from Bede. Taunting because Hilda—Hild—is the only woman mentioned in his history of whom he approves (for anything other than chasteness and religiosity), and praised her as an advisor to kings. 

The first question, pulling back from Bede’s history, would be (one would hope), given the context, just who was this woman?

Griffith then attempted to answer that question by building a world in which Hild’s presence, her character, her essence resulted in that singular mention. She wrote a novel so densely imagined and meticulously constructed that one comes away feeling that if it hadn’t happened this way, it should have.

There have been many novels written to such depth, evocative and persuasive. The closest that comes to mind in relation to Hild would be Mary Stewart’s Arthurian/Merlin novels. In a different vein, a few of James Michener’s. Cecilia Holland, Mary Renault. Few wherein the sheer weight of imagined reconstruction counts so significantly. 

Griffith immerses us not only in the details of court life and the politics of the post-Roman Britain, but the environment. The birds, fish, flora, all become players in the life of Hild, who is put forth by her mother, a canny and skillful political manipulator, to be vital to the king. As a seer, a so-called godmouth, a trusted—and occasionally feared—advisor. Hild learns to notice. Everything. She does not, as those with whom she deals, glean knowledge from the air. She pays attention. She has an almost Holmesian capacity to pay attention and recognize patterns. She is a fully present intellect moving through a culture of people easily overawed by mystical confabulations and the power of the supernatural. 

She steps onto the stage at the point in British history when the Catholic church is making inroads against the old pagan gods. There are Irish priests and Anglisc priests and they do not get along, and the king Hild serves is using the tension to enlarge his territory. He decrees that he will be a Christian king and thus the allegiances change, but as Griffith portrays it, there is no ecstatic revelation among the people. This is a matter of allegiance, of loyalty to the king, a practical thing. Hild is baptized, but remains aloof and somewhat puzzled by this whole Christ thing, and in this way Griffith introduces a level of imperial realism at the grass roots of her Britain that is curiously compelling.

In the first novel, Hild, we watch the child grow to young womanhood and not only become an  influential advisor, but also a powerful warlord in her own right, commanding the loyalty of soldiers, and establishing a reputation as she travels as envoy to Edwin King. She strives to make the realm safe from enemies near to hand. 

Her origin story—daughter of a minor king who is assassinated, cousin to Edwin, a wild card to be played even as she learns to be a player—is captivating. As I say, if it didn’t happen this way, it should have. At the end of that first novel, she has found a place she wants to make her own, make safe, and manages to secure it from the king. She marries Cian, who she grew up with, and the bastard son of her father (no one wants to say so, the refrain repeated “Never say the dangerous thing aloud”), who was her sparring partner as a child and grows up to become one of the king’s best warriors. It would seem all may be well.

The place she has found, Menewood, anchors the new novel of the same name. Everything Hild does is aimed at securing this place and its people, making it safe, making it home. 

Menewood picks up where Hild left off and does not disappoint. The time encompassed by the novel is much shorter than the first one, but so much happens, the entire landscape writhes around her, and she must come back from horrific tragedy and loss to step by step engineer alliances and maneuver armies to finally make secure everything she holds dear. It is a hero’s journey of the highest order and Griffith’s command of landscape and emotion and seventh century politics anchors the story in enviable credibility. Hild becomes a force to be reckoned with, as the saying goes. 

As vivid as Hild is, so too are the people around her. She has true friends, people who love her, those who respect her, loyal companions and willing followers, and she is seen to earn it all. These people are the sort one would wish to impress and inspire, be friends in return, and all of them are distinctly themselves. The earning is hard. The consequences of being significant in this world are harsh. We see, though, that Hild has little choice. At times she contemplates running, but she cannot let those who depend on her down. It is not, in the end, who she is. 

But as engaging as all that is, the added pleasure is that Griffith presents us with a world, an environment, that we want Hild to save and preserve and protect. She shows us the bees, the streams and rivers, the hedgepigs, the horses, the seasons, and trees, the fields and makes it all integral to the lives depicted. For Hild, it is all interconnected, one thing. 

As well, there is a thread of social possibility threaded throughout suggesting that the way things turned out later might not have, that relationships could have been less straitened. There are the beginnings of the kind of behavioral autocracy that came to dominate in later centuries, leading to the circumstances in which the Venerable Bede would only think to honor one woman in his histories for anything other than virginity. None of this rises to the level of polemic. Griffith stays immersed in the substance of the period, but it is there to be found.

And there are battles. Two major ones, and they do not disappoint. But rather than minutely-detailed, stroke-by-stroke descriptions of the carnage, what Griffith gives us (more usefully) is context. Preparation determines outcome. She lays out the necessary groundwork for the coming conflict and gives us the details that go into what leads up to what transpires on the field. The heroics of the combatants, noble as they may be, come to naught if the land is not understood, the supplies are not at hand, and numbers are not properly tallied. Success can be months in the making. It is refreshingly realistic.

At the center of all this, Hild carries the knowledge—what works, what fails, why and how, and that which must be done to secure gains and survive losses—and through her, we inhabit this world. 

At the beginning of this I made a comparison between historical fiction and science fiction. It matters in what we have come to know as world building. In Menewood we find the fruit of that process in the inhabitability of the story told, and in significant ways, Menewood is a built world. We know some, and through archaeology and folklore we know enough to fill in the gaps through the imaginary work of world building. It is not a capricious process. The result must work organically because the story must be reliable in ways we might only notice when the work is done poorly or not all. This novel (along with its predecessor) is master class in how it is done.

Welcome to Menewood.

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.

The Tangled Paths Of History

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have made no secret over the years of my personal dislikes. Certain tropes in fiction usually fail to engage my interest and in some instances actively dissuade me from reading. Zombies are the top of my list—automatic non-starter—with vampires a close second. I’m not entirely sure why. Originally I avoided them because they were mainstays of horror and I am not a fan, but there have been many uses of them in science fiction and fantasy and I still find them, at best, a waste of good story potential and, at worst, a kind of pollutant to what might otherwise be a good story.

I’m not, as I say, sure why, but since there is so much in the world that does not deal with zombies and vampires that I do enjoy, the puzzle is not important enough for me to fully explore. Too often I think they are cheats, the primary one being that they attempt to set up a character[s] that I find wholly implausible and, ultimately, uninteresting.

That said, as with anything else, there are exceptions. In such cases, I find the framing and context lend a value to the idea that compels. (Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake does this for a whole catalogue of supernatural manifestations, and since the story is centered on Anita finding her way through all this, the various para-humans-what-have-you add rather than detract. I confess, to date, with the single exception of Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall, I remain unmoved by zombies.)

That said, I still require…something special.

John M. Ford was a Minnesota writer of considerable reputation and ability who passed away too soon and who left behind a body of work which is now being given a new chance. Among his novels is an alternate history which won a World Fantasy Award and has become part of the literary mythos. The Dragon Waiting has been reissued by Tor, as an Essential, and is not to be missed,

And, yes, it has vampires. Even, after a fashion, zombies.

And wizards and even—again, after a fashion—a dragon. It is that “after a fashion” proviso that helps elevate this book above the usual run of Middle Ages-to-Renaissance settings often (too often) used (often badly) in fantasy. This is a solid piece of historical speculation.

I did not know enough about it to realize until this most recent release that it was an alternate history. It jumps off with the survival and success of Justinian I of the Byzantine epoch. Instead of dying when he did, Ford posits another decade and the time and ability to make his quite real gains stick. How then might history unfold? With a Byzantium Triumphant in much of the West as well as the East.

As the novel opens, however, we are in Wales and a young orphan working at an inn in the mountains meets a captive wizard who is being taken to London to be tried and put to death. Hywel helps with the wizard’s escape and goes with him, wanting to learn magic. He is himself heir to a wizard’s potential. With a shocking beginning, he is introduced to the Arts of Magick, which, he learns, always has a cost and usually a steep one.

We then shift to Florence and the court of the Medicis and meet a young physician, a woman, Cynthia Ricci, whose father is also a physician, one attendant upon Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo is preparing to face an enemy of the worst kind—Byzantium, backing the Duke of MIlan, Sforza, who is also a vampire. Lorenzo is betrayed, her father is killed, and she must flee.

And then north, into Burgundy, and the household of an exiled Greek family still in service to Byzantium but biding its time for a return, possibly to the throne. Young Dimitrios is brought into the Mithraic Mysteries like his father. And then—more betrayal and he finds himself fleeing, having taken another’s identity. He grows up to become a mercenary.

These three come together at another inn where they meet a German engineer, Gregory, who is also a vampire, and circumstances bring them into alliance to work against the machinations of Byzantium.

Vampirism here is treated as a disease and its victims are not helpless killers in service to a relentless hunger. It is, if you will, rationalized into a chronic disorder that in Ford’s hands has political consequences which play out ultimately in England, where the throne is undergoing a fairly rapid change-of-hands during what we would know as the War of the Roses.

I will not go into the plot. The intricacies of invention playing out in this novel yield a satisfying alternate take on how history might have gone given one or two not unbelievable changes, which is one of the principal pleasures of such work. Christianity, for instances, is only one of many religions. The suppressions that dominated Christendom did not happen because of Justinian’s intervention and consolidation of his vision of Rome. Women exercise somewhat more autonomy in this iteration. The cross-currents of empire produce a more interesting mix of cultural expressions.

But it is still an era of cutthroat political maneuvering. Ford’s recastings serve to elucidate the broader streams of change that ran through that entire period.

As to the wizards… there were men who purported to be such then and Ford uses them. We would likely recognize them as charlatans now, glib and deceptive and able to manipulate perceptions just enough to establish reputations and acquire positions. Ford’s attitude toward actual magic is fraught with consequences and high costs and more than once we are told it is better to use trickery than actual magic. There is a sense of magic’s passing from the scene throughout, although it is never explicitly stated, though descriptions of the corruption attendant upon the use of such power offer sobering set pieces of karmic debt collection.

As he points out in an afterward, Richard III of England is used as a handy marker for the end of the Middle Ages and the onset of the Renaissance and so he is used here, but for the end and beginning of ages that were and could be quite different.

Playing with the what-ifs of history is an edifying game, especially when done at this level. Turning the aspects of cultures and conquerors over to see how matters might have been different is another way to appreciate the monstrous and all-to-fragile nature of the past.

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.