Science Fiction

Primary Influences

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 3 Comments

Reading and writing are inextricably linked, but it’s a lopsided relationship.  One can be a voracious reader without ever feeling the need to write, but being a writer by necessity demands voracious reading.  There are some who seem to believe they can write without having to read extensively (or at all!) but I imagine this is a self-correcting delusion.  It may be a more obvious problem in this age of self-publishing ease, when one’s shortcomings can make unfortunate and sometimes wide spread public displays, but the simple absence of any kind of artistic æsthetic on which to base the work is fatal to the endeavor.

Besides, what would be the point other than a profound narcissism.  Part of the fantasy of “being a writer” is to join a fraternity whose past membership has provided the delight you hope to offer, a delight you have presumably found in reading.

I imagine that for some writers, the desire grows gradually, a cumulative response emerging after many books.  Specific texts are less important than the experience itself.  For others, there’s a turning point, a moment when the reading experience in a given work sparks the “I want to do this!” response that grows, if nurtured, into a lifelong obsession.

I can pinpoint my own turning point.

foundation covers

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire was the book that decided me.  I bought it at the corner drug store in 1968.  Mr. Leukens had a spinner rack from which I’d been obtaining paperbacks for almost a year by then.  I can say quite honestly and without embarrassment that it was the cover that caught my attention.  That Don Punchatz rendering radiated “significance” in a way other covers failed to achieve.

I’d been reading science fiction in one form or another for as long as I could remember.  Comic books, mostly, but once I’d obtained my library card, the occasional SF novel came home with me.  A lot of them seemed…well, stodgy compared to the movies.  I admit to being disappointed with science fiction that was set in more or less the present day.  I was a kid, after all, I was after the gosh wow! more than the cerebral pleasures that are the chief attribute of the form, at least in those days.  I wanted Forbidden Planet and John Carter not stuff stuck on Earth.

Asimov I knew from another novel, Pebble In The Sky, which I had read earlier in the year.  I still wasn’t connecting authors with preferred experiences, at least not as a guide to find more of the same.  Partly this was because I had no reliable way of getting more by a given author.  Leukens Pharmacy was my primary source and the fact is he had no control over what ended up in that spinner rack.  It was hit or miss.

That month, the only one of the trilogy available was the second volume.  (I didn’t even know what “trilogies” were yet.)

Gradually, I came to regard Avon as the imprint that provided me with the kind of material I most wanted.  Along with the Foundation books, I got a lot of Robert Silverberg, B.N. Ball, James Blish, and later they published the Science Fiction Hall of Fame collections.  Their books had a particular “feel” and quality that seemed lacking (or at least different) from other imprints.  (So in a peculiar way I was initially more aware of publishers and editors than authors.)

Asimov sold the first Foundation story to John W. Campbell in 1941 and went on to write all the stories that comprised these three books by the early 1950s.  I read them out of order.  The middle book first, then the first one, finally, after months of searching, the last one.  The covers above are from a slightly later edition, but basically the same ones I eagerly sought and devoured.

They were everything, at the time, that I wanted from science fiction.

But what was that?

I was 13, almost 14.  My reading had been chaotic though wide and I had a smattering of history (not nearly enough to form any cogent opinions of events) and I had the sense that a lot of fiction, especially in the movies, was disconnected from all that went before whenever the events of the story took place.  Right off the bat, Asimov offered a simple, elegant way to imply a concrete history by the epigrams of his fictional Encyclopedia Galactica (an obvious but nevertheless effective play on Encyclopedia Britanica and American).  That “scholarship” existed on which the chronicler of these wholly fictional and fantastic events could draw provided a basis of  “authenticity” that completely sucked this reader in.

What followed was a self-consciously analytical treatment on the way history might work.  The premise is Cartesian—if one knows enough about enough, then one can make reliable predictions.  The sheer control offered by Seldon was profoundly seductive.

And then, of course, there was the Empire, spanning the entire galaxy, thousands of worlds, a massive civilization bound together by hyperdrive and the Imperial center on Trantor.  Trantor itself was such a startling idea, an entire planet completely covered by a single city.

Gaal Dornick’s arrival on Trantor, on later reflection, was the arrival of any young man from a more rural part of America to New York via Grand Central Station, and the awe of such a massive construct.  (Samuel R. Delany rather elegantly recapitulated this in the opening scenes of his Atlantis: Three Tales with the actual New York.)  In a way, Dornick’s reaction is very like the reaction of a new reader who suddenly “gets” it.

Considerations of cost and the unlikelihood of achieving any fraction of the kind of homogeneity, political or otherwise, never entered into it.  Asimov had loosely based his Galactic Empire on the Roman Empire and that itself was a highly improbable collection of provinces under a single banner.  If you could accept the one (which had actually existed) you could accept the other, especially since as the story opens the Empire is beginning to crumble.  By this device, Asimov acknowledged the latent impossibility of a “galactic empire” by letting us watch its demise from sheer social and political entropy.

New things are born from the ruins of the old, and the rest of the series is about these new things.  What I found so appealing was the inherent historicity of the Foundation stories.

Of course, the idea of mathematically predicting future events with the kind of precision suggested in these stories is fantastic at best.  The notion behind it is not fanciful, there is something to the dynamics of large groups in motion that lends itself to patterning.  Asimov simply worked a variation on actuarial math and raised to dizzying heights.  It is a criticism of which he was well aware, one I already agreed with since I’d begun with the middle volume—the one in which The Mule appears to completely overturn everything Seldon had constructed.  The fey element, the unpredictable, the unaccountable.  Asimov subverted his own premise.

But that opened the narrative up to a more sinister thread, one which has also been geared into history: the secret society, the hidden group which from time to time people believe to be the real rulers.  In this, Asimov was still playing with the plausibilities of accepted historical narrative.

It was easy then to accept that Asimov was writing about the collapse of the Roman Empire—and the perfectly agreeable desire to shorten the inevitable “dark age” following the fall of such a huge and apparently monolithic construct.  But as one grows older and continues the kind of necessarily broad and voracious reading essential to being a writer of any worth, such simple comparisons erode.  The falls of empires probably always follow certain patterns, but in the details they differ.  I now suspect Asimov, if he was being intentional in his subtexts at all, was writing about the vanity of empire rather than of any particular one, and the costs of such things to those who become dependent.  Asimov was a refugee, born in Russia.  Perhaps too young to remember anything of his early childhood there, no doubt he heard the stories, and of course there was World War One, the first death blow of a European Order that went back a millennia at least.  By the time Hitler was trying to establish a new Roman Empire (at least in terms of territory if not intent), it was obvious that the old regimes were done for, and the future was about to be in the hands of the bureaucrats, apparatchits, and opportunists in a way never before seen.  In such a world, the idea of preservation itself might be seen as the only worthwhile enterprise—the preservation of knowledge, which would make Seldon’s Encyclopedists the first moral actors in a post Imperial age.

I think Asimov was writing about the world he lived in rather than either the Roman Empire (or Republic) or the Galactic Empire.  Naturally, insofar as science fiction is always really about the present, viewed through the distorting lens of a future tense.  But more than that, because he was establishing priorities.  Empires rise and fall—the Foundation itself becomes an empire (much as America did after WWII, if not in fact at least in influence) and all empires become pieces on a larger chess board in a game played by those behind the scenes—but what matters is the continuity of knowledge and access to it for all those people who must survive the changes in political fashion.

I couldn’t possibly have recognized all this when I first read these books.  Some of my peers, and certainly many of the adults around me then, dismissed them as they did all SF as “mere” entertainment, idle speculation, and, at worst, a waste of time.  But for me, what may or may not have been latent in the text was sufficiently present to inspire.  The seriousness with which Asimov approached his subject was very different in tone and effect from, say, Doc Smith.  Insofar as I have ever been scholarly, the Foundation series spoke to me on that level, and triggered the response that led me to start writing my own stories.

It’s telling that in Asimov’s autobiography, In Memory Still Green, he claims that he had no idea what he intended to do after writing and selling that first Foundation story.  But he had put a hook at the end of it which demanded a second story, thinking himself clever that he had in some way trapped Campbell into having to buy the sequel in order to answer the question, without quite realizing that he then had to deliver.  He goes on to claim that he never could work from an outline, not then and not later.  Maybe not on paper, but there was an outline in his head somewhere that provided a reliable template.

Of all the SF I read back then, I find few I can reread with any pleasure.  This is one of them.  It still enthralls me.  I can still see the vast deeps between the stars and the terrible force of history unfolding and enfolding across time the matrices in which we nevertheless decide for ourselves what we want and struggle to accomplish.

That, at least, is my story.

Culture’s End (The Ends of Culture)

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 9 Comments

Once in a while, work comes along that, while not doing anything apparently new, turns a settled form inside out and frees possibilities.   In writing, this generally means that, in the wake of such work, the things it is possible to say and the ways in which they are said broaden.  Branchings occur, reactions, new growth, inspiration ripples along.

Iain M. Banks triggered—at least for me—a renewal of an old science fiction mainstay, the Space Opera.  Practically from the beginning of the modern form in the 1920s, interstellar adventures have been woven into the DNA of the genre, replete with strange planets, exotic aliens, and occasional examinations of political systems, albeit not on a very sophisticated level.  Everything from the Roman Empire to a kind of United Nations model has been used, sometimes to unintentionally silly effect.  Given the suppositions on hand, it is not a small task to plausibly imagine such a universe.  Some of the best works have ignored the details, lest unwanted hilarity result, suspension of disbelief sabotaged by, of all things, the wallpaper.

Space Opera lost some of its cachet in the Seventies in the wake of Star Trek, which combined much of the long history of the form in a single popular television show, and made it difficult to write anything that didn’t look like Star Trek.  In written SF, Space Opera receded in prominence.  Then in the early Eighties, with Neuromancer by William Gibson, Cyberpunk muscled its way into prominence and one of those moments of expansion occurred.  For the next two decades, it seemed,  reaction to Cyberpunk dominated the field.

But in 1987 a novel was published in England (a year later in America) that signaled the coming resurgence of good ol’ fashioned Space Opera.

Consider Phlebas was a thick, densely-detailed, elegantly-penned adventure that seemed to have come from the mind of a literary writer who had no real idea there had ever been such a thing as Space Opera.  But that was impossible, since it handled the conventions of the form with such grace and sympathy as to suggest a lifelong devoteé.  Iain Banks simply didn’t write from a traditional æsthetic, even when it seemed he did.

One of the most interesting choices he made in the novel was putting his major invention—the Culture—in both a background position and as an antagonist.  One might be forgiven if, from reading just this book, one thought the Culture was a throw-away idea, never to appear again.  Because the other civilizations depicted, several of which are at war, are so vividly and thoroughly imagined that any one or five of them might have served as the solid foundation for a series of breathtaking novels.

To be clear, what the Culture subsequently became, in novel after novel (and a handful of short stories) was not a hero’s preserve.  The Culture seems often like the Good Guy, but just as often they are a meddlesome, arrogant, dangerous collection of diplomatic bullies.  What Banks constructed with the Culture is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of an interstellar empire.  It is what it needs to be in any given circumstance.  And like any real government, expedience is its chief operating mode.

But.  And this is a large exception.  Because the Culture actually has no material needs—it is what we’ve come to term a “post scarcity civilization”—its political motivations are a bit more abstract.  The Culture has a moral compass, one which it seems to ignore as often as it follows, and has, in complete contradiction to the famous and also often ignored Prime Directive of Star Trek, no compunction about interfering with another civilization at all.  In this way, Banks created the perfect sociopolitical tool to examine what might be termed Moral Expedience.

Rather than confirm the essential uselessness of Space Opera, Banks made it relevant by making cases for right action within a vast and complicated set of interlocking political, social, and ethical systems.  Philosophy 101, in many cases, but deftly handled and often pointedly specific in its potential relevancies.

By further expanding the players to include wholly autonomous machine intelligences—ships that owned themselves and acted according to their own interests, AI advisers, habitats both awake and involved—he opened the dialogue on the question of rights as a, if you’ll forgive the seeming contradiction, concrete abstraction.

If one of the primary attractions of science fiction is the examination of the question “How, then, shall we live?” then one could do much worse than Iain M. Banks as a complete buffet of fascinating riffs, postulates, improvisations, and dialogues on exactly that question—which, at its heart, is the primary concern of what shall be done with virtually unlimited power?

All this would imply a dry, discursive study, plodding expositions, info-dumps that slow the action (what there may be) to a near halt.  That would be a mistake.  Banks’ skill has been to lay all this depth and contemplative meat, bone, and gristle into exceptional adventures with high stakes and finely-drawn characters.  Everything in a Banks novel is profoundly personal.

Space Opera has enjoyed a come-back since that first Culture novel came out.  Banks is now one of many well-respected practioners of the form.  It may be that the field was ready to revisit it anyway.  But without Banks, it may be wondered how satisfying such a visit might have been.

As we shall be wondering when there are no more Culture novels.

Iain M. Banks has announced his last novel (not a Culture novel) because he has terminal cancer.  The 59-year-old writer of eleven Culture books and sixteen other novels says he has perhaps a year to live and his new novel, as yet unreleased, will be his last.

An appreciation of Banks’ Culture stories is only the half of it.  He has enjoyed the enviable ability to write so-called “mainstream” works under “Iain Banks” all along.  His first novel, The Wasp Factory was an experimental work that bordered on SF, reminiscent of both J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.  He has written thrillers, literary novels, satires.  Since 1984 his work has made a significant impression in the U.K. and has gained a large following in the United States.

He is only 59.  If there is any justice, he will be long remembered as a pivotal voice in Western Letters.  Treat yourself.  Go read one of his novels.  Then read another.  Repeat.

Clarity

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

One of the most perverse aspects of American culture is the contradiction between our self-professed guiding ethos and what many of us actually do.  This is the country of the self-made, the independent thinker, the individualist.  We build elaborate mythologies extolling the virtues and victories of our heroes, who are all of a piece, wholly their own creatures, dependent on no one and nothing to be what they are.  Daniel Boone to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the self-sufficient American is our national role model.

Yet a look at our actual history shows that we as a people are surpassing great joiners.  We attach ourselves to collectives, to movements, to institutions, and borrow ideologies from them, speaking with a group voice and shunning those whose independence of thought causes them to criticize whatever party our fellows have joined that gives them a sense of worth.  We have been known as the most religious country on Earth, per capita, and any close look at the religious movements that have swept this country over more than two centuries shows a deep approval of support for such causes even at the expense (sometimes especially at the expense) of those who are genuinely independent in thought and action.  Americans often readily bury their freedom of conscience in support of all manner of mass social incarnations, be they labor unions, political parties, or churches.

For a nation founded on an idea of letting people be who they wish to be, America has a questionable track record, with periods of tolerance punctuated by spasms of intolerance, but always with an apparent acceptance of a preference for belonging that runs counter to our professed pride of independence.  This also runs counter to the related “virtue” we like to boast of being hard-nosed skeptics.  To be sure, many of us are, and most of us exercise a degree of skepticism at least in certain areas of our lives, but again we are inconsistent, especially, it seems, when it comes to religions.

Lawrence Wright’s new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollwood, & the Prison of Belief, delves into one of the most quintessentially American religions of the 20th Century.  Generated in the 1950s out of the imagination of one man, it has grown to international proportions, and along the way has been subject to as much if not more controversy than any other movement of comparable size, in some ways akin to Mormonism.  (In significant ways, Scientology and Mormonism share a great deal—both creations of single individuals who then went on to uproot a community of followers, creating an insular ideology that separated members from the wider world, based on cosmologies invented almost from whole cloth, establishing themselves in the minds of their adherents with such visceral force that no amount of fact seems capable of dislodging faith in the central tenets, fact in both instances far more easily produced and demonstrated than in most other religions.)

Going Clear

Many books have been written about Scientology, the majority by or about former members whose objectivity may be doubted.  This is not, on the inside, a religion that seems content to allow its membership the kind of options we expect from more mainstream faiths.  You may join the Baptists, stay awhile, and then, if it doesn’t suit, leave.  According to most accounts by ex-Scientologists, there is no apparent regard for such an option, and those who do leave are rarely left alone.  (By contrast, when a Mormon repudiates the faith, the opposite tends to happen—they are closed out and shunned.)

Wright has no axes to grind.  He is an investigative journalist telling a story.  He did exhaustive research, covered as much material as he could, found many people to talk to, both in and out of the church, and has produced what may be to date one of the most evenhanded treatments of the subject yet published.  The evolution of the movement, from the imagination of its founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, is charted clearly, as is the growth of the church from the size of a club to a cult to a major religion boasting millions of members.   One of his guiding questions, however, has to do with volition:

If Scientology is based on a lie…what does it say about the many people who believe in its doctrine…?

Throughout the book, this question hovers in the background.  We see people from all walks of life encounter Scientology and then surrender themselves to it, sometimes for life, sometimes for a few years, for a myriad of reasons.  Wrights finds people who swear by the efficacy of the doctrines, who use it to be better people.  He seems to find just as many who have apparently few other options for self-discovery and actualization.  After long enough, it becomes difficult if not impossible to conceive of life outside the church.

The ones that cause the deepest stirrings of concern are those born into it, at least those born into it within the deepest circles, the Sea Org and administration.  They grow up never knowing enough, if anything, about the outside world to be able to function anywhere but within the church.

There are orders of renunciates the world over, retiring groups who close themselves off from the world at large.  Their existence calls into question criticism of Scientology for doing essentially the same thing.  However, as the story of the interior world Hubbard created unfolds, we see a disturbing absence of all the aspects of free will, free choice that we take for granted.  Yes, strictly speaking, these people joined on their own and stay by choice.

But so, too, did the followers of Jim Jones or David Koresh.  A close look at Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church reveals a similar break from the standards of free association we associate with the exercise of rights.  Coercion takes many forms and the most effective are those that manage to convince people to place the chains on themselves.

And yet…and yet…

The doctrines created—invented—by Hubbard come straight out of science fiction.  Hubbard was a pulp writer in the 1930s, he wrote fantastic fiction (as in content not necessarily quality), he was a colleague of Heinlein, de Camp, others who established the idioms of what we know today as science fiction.  When you read the ideas that informed Hubbard’s central mythos for the church, it is straight out of science fiction, but of an earlier era where some of the constraints of science, even in passing,  did not pertain.  It is difficult to take any of it seriously.  Much of it flies in the face of physical fact (the universe is 14 billion years old, not 4 quadrillion) and defies the logic of evolution.  It combines elements of pop psychology with Antlantean mythology with flights of fancy that would be ridiculed today by savvy readers if the attempt were made to foist it onto them.  How can anyone swallow this stuff, we may ask, incredulous at the apparent gullibility of adherents.

But, then, the same could be said of the basic doctrines of any religion.  Joseph Smith was a con artist and his frauds were documented, yet people virtually worship him as the avatar of their theological universe.  Fact has little bearing on the need to join and believe exhibited by so many people.  Cordons sanitaire are drawn around the primary ideologies of any religion, exempting them from even the most mundane of critical analysis.

Few have been so closely guarded as those of Scientology.

What is striking, though, is the apparent ease with which such movements attract followers in a place where supposedly the defining cultural motifs all promote the idea of not being gulled, not being fooled, not be led unquestioningly.  Wright has no answers to such dilemmas.  What he has given us, however, is a clear-eyed look at method and process and, it may be hoped, a possible antitode to self-imposed slavery.

Breakneck Mousetraps—Past and Future in Cloud Atlas

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 8 Comments

It begins in the past.  Not one past, but three, and then a kind of present.  Then a future.  Two futures, but the furthest is so much like the past as to be functionally the same, only reversed.  The great ship of the technologically advanced is the image fading in the center of this novel, as if the reader has risen to a height of inevitability that can do nothing now but sink back through the layers that cannot support it.  The hyperbolic arc of human trajectory achieves its limit, turns, and falls back to the point where the mirror reality of that insubstantial future rests.  We cannot stay in that future because it is built on anticipation and hope, contending with dread and cynicism, which rob it of any force of inevitability.  It looks real, substantial, has within its possibilities everything we know and everything we are and everything we can be and everything we should not be.

There were once places in the world (and maybe this is still the case) notated on maps as Obscured By Cloud.  Unknown. Protected areas, mostly, in the islands around New Guinea and New Zealand, valleys where the weather systems conspire to keep a permanent layer of cloud cover over them, and which, in somewhat belated attempts at responsible behavior, colonial governments placed off limits.  They are not mapped.

Much like the future, even though we have now more than a century of “futurism” behind us, attempts at forecasting, and not simply confined to science fiction.  We might be tempted from time to time to believe that the future is knowable, even set.  Perhaps we’re not wrong in that, but likely not in the way we might think. Divining the future is very like doing cartography on clouds.  The effort is substantive even while the results are necessarily transitory, because in doing so we learn something about the essence of “cloudness” and perhaps something of the predictability of form.

One of the secondary characters in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas explains it this way:

…The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.
* The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will…Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too.  We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up—a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams.

Which is what Mitchell has accomplished in this curious novel of nested narratives, linked by the most tenuous of threads, like the fraying tag-ends of clouds pulling apart.  The connections between the six distinct—and distinctive—fictions are circumstantial, coincidental, and, on some level, genetic, but unlike novels in which such connections coalesce into resolving tissue upon which the entire plot depends, none of these surface connections does much more than influence the atmosphere.  They are clouds contouring the background against which a bigger game is being played.

Cloud Atlas

There is a journal written by a notary on a long sea voyage, which is discovered by a musician who is composing a sextet that will be the crowning achievement of his short life, which is recorded and printed by obscure labels and found by a reporter working to uncover major corporate corruption, whose story informs a book proposal an unlikely specialty publishers reads while trying to free himself from bizarre circumstances, whose life becomes a film seen by a clone-cum-messiah in a corporate future, who is herself the source of a Buddhist-like liberation faith in a future witnessing a collapse of civilization back to the level found in the first narrative.

Another connection is a curious birthmark shared across time, a suggestion of reincarnation.  Mercantile concerns dominate the cultures throughout, the making of money a driving force in all but one. Servitude.

On the surface, the novellas comprising the total work, except for these superficial connections, seem as disparate and unique as the styles in which they are written.  The journal, written with the stiff formality of a somewhat pretentious educated young man of the 1840s; letters written by a refugee from the Lost Generation to his best friend; a detective story told in third person; a manic tell-all written by an aging publisher with the possibility of a movie in mind; an interrogation session, question and answer; and a first-person oral tale by a semi-literate inhabitant of a future past the collapse of global technical civilization.  Mitchell displays enviable skill in each idiom, moving smoothly not just between periods but among the voices of both the times and the genres in which his narrative(s) unfold.  (A cloud is always a cloud, regardless its particular shape.)

What links them that they should appear as a unified work, as a novel?

Mitchell, in each and every one of them, is writing about slavery and emancipation, and the costs of both.

Certainly the manifestations are unique to each period, but the essence is there throughout, in some more blatantly than in others, but with rigorous consistency.  Freedom, he shows us, means different things to different people, but bondage is the same regardless.

The result of Mitchell’s considerable craft and intelligence is a largely thematic work that doesn’t read like one.  Except for a few passages scattered throughout in which circumspection melds with introspection, the stories of these various actors scattered across time are their own, not the theme’s.  To do otherwise might perhaps suggest the inevitability (and perhaps desirability) of the very bondage under examination. If not approval, at least acceptance.  It would have been easy enough to lose control of his material and produce exactly that validation by writing about his disapproval too obviously.  Instead, we find a work in which the judgment is rendered through the lives depicted and not through the author’s too-pointed explications.

Consequently, we have another rarity—a successful work on a profound theme that is actually fun to read.

Mitchell’s pasts are vibrantly-realized, just as the futures are both exotic and familiar at once.  As his “theorist” continues, however, in the passage on actual and virtual pasts and presents:

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past.  The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

As has always been the case, fiction is about the present—distorted through the lens of past or future in order to make a particular case about Now.  (Nowhere is this distortion more obvious and sometimes poorly-used than in science fiction, but only because of the inherent exoticism of the seemingly unknowable.  Mitchell admirably escapes this pitfall.)

Which suggests that in a world wherein actual slavery has been and is being abolished but virtual slavery is on the rise, it is worth trying to distinguish between virtual emancipation and actual emancipation—which is the struggle each one of the people in Cloud Atlas engages.  As he carries his theme into the future, he inverts our gaze and shows us that no matter how elusive and indefinite our terms, virtual slavery, if unrecognized, will become actual slavery.  In between, we must define what constitutes emancipation and choose between the virtual and the actual.

But the shapes change.  Much like clouds in competing fronts.

It is perhaps no accident that the title appears within the novel in relation to only one thing, a piece of music.  Music by its nature is infinitely malleable, even while it remains ostensibly the same.  Mitchell gives us our map in Zedelghem, Belgium.  If we required any further evidence of his thematic telos, here it is.  The Cloud Atlas Sextet is composed in a place where, historically, one of the largest complexes of concentration camps was built, and which today remains a largely military area.  The ironies implicit multiply under scrutiny.

All of which unfolds and is watched over by the silent judges of history, the dead.  In the beginning piece, an alcove is discovered by the narrator of Adam Ewing’s Journal on the island upon which he has been awaiting the repair of the ship he is to take home.  Within this alcove, the discovery of which nearly kills him, he finds carved faces along the wall, obscured from above.  A collection of memorial carvings, icons, the faces of past denizens of this island.  He tells no one, other than those who might read his journal, fearing its destruction (because memory is one of the things conquerors most seek to obliterate).  In the far future, where the world is returning to this pre-20th Century condition, the faces are once more present, gathered in a cave where their caretakers go to pray and be in the presence (the Present) of a past (virtual) they no longer remember (actual).  The icons of the dead frame the time passing and give us our final connective thread.

History as vapor made momentarily stable, visible.

Multitasking

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 5 Comments

Me-Colored EyeHow many books do you read at the same time?

Once in a while, a book so grabs me that I can’t read anything else till I’ve finished it.  (Also, once in a while, I have to read a book that is by its nature a struggle and if I read anything else during the effort I’ll never get through it.)

There are days I miss the ability to do multiple things at once—read, listen to the radio, watch television, carry on a conversation.  I think we all remember a time when we could do this, but I also wonder if we remember how much we actually got out of it.  I know that if there are voices around me now, spoken or sung, reading is impossible.  I write to music—instrumental music—but that’s the limit of my cross-discipline multitasking.  (I’m writing this to Glen Gould’s performance of Beethoven’s 1st Piano Concerto.  I find myself recognizing passages during the pauses between thoughts, but the rest just flows by, creating a kind of aural creative cushion, a continuity that fills in the gaps left by interrupted imagination.)  I rarely read to music.

But I do generally have three or four books going at the same time.

Right now I’m reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and at the same time working my way through Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia.  (Does that count as a kind of musical background?  Nah!)  In between, I’ve been reading short stories in current issues of Asimovs SF  and I’m about to start research into Madame de Stäel for the next book in the trilogy I’ve been working on.

The trick is to mix them up.  I almost never read two novels simultaneously.  History and a novel, essay collections and a novel, science, politics, etc.  From time to time they color each other, to interesting (but I’m not sure to superior) effect.  I recall once reading Michael Moorcock’s marvelous The War Hound and the World’s Pain and C. V. Wedgewood’s history of the Thirty Years War more or less at the same time.  Whatever else I might have been reading got overwhelmed by the totality of those two books.  Sort of like reading Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead and a biography of Admiral Halsey together, or just a good history of World War II in the Pacific.

While we read with our entire brain (especially fiction, in which the internal creation of images is strongest), it seems we can compartmentalize detail.  I wonder sometimes if when I put down one text and pick up another, what I’m doing is giving my subconscious an opportunity to process the first text.  It feels curiously relaxing sometimes to go from one to another, like changing up an exercise routine.

I am a slow reader.  I read roughly 80 books a year, cover to cover (probably if I added in the total page count of articles, short stories, partial reads, and such it might get closer to 120, but nevertheless) and it can sometimes take me a seemingly inordinate length of time to get through a book.  (Having done two works now with a reading group—Ulysses and Dante’s Commedia—the upper range now stands at seven years to get through a text.)  Many factors are involved, the chief being the time to sit down and read.  Life interferes.  Where once it seemed I had a whole day to go through a book, now I read them in 20 minute to 2 hour chunks.  And the depth of the text places its own constraints on how quickly it will be absorbed.  (I can read a standard murder mystery in a couple of days, but I’m looking at a book on my shelf that I know will take a month at least—Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, a history of the United States from 1815 to 1848.  The older I get, it seems, the more attention I find I must give to such books.  I zipped through William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in high school and did it in less than a week.)  “Processing time” is more necessary, but the urge to keep reading is abated only by picking up a different book for a while.

I have yet to confuse texts.  I always manage to keep whatever I’m reading this way separate.  That might change were I to read similar books simultaneously.  (In fact, I do recall confusing sources during a period of intense research into the Civil War, wherein I switched from one text to another regularly in an attempt to glean a collective comprehension of the period.)

Almost all of my reading, however, is linear (as probably is most people’s).  There are some I’ve known who open books at random and read in the middle, then the beginning, then somewhere else (though not novels, but I wonder how this might work in history?) but not me.  Beginning to end.  Yet I keep them all separate—multi-linearity?—which might seem difficult, since I put one down to pick another up and each return is like starting over.  Yet…

It makes for an interesting, often fascinating journey.  Dancing down the Yellow Brick Road on the way to Versailles at the height of the Sun King’s reign and finding the legation from Vega waiting in the trans-Plutonian consulate fora.  Metternich and Monroe are over there in corner, at the end of the buffet, discussing the Euro with Aragorn while Peregrin and Meriadoc introduce Nero Wolfe to delicacies from Canopus.  There are serious issues under discussion among the gathered dignitaries, not least of which is the true location of the Maltese Falcon and whether or not the heirs to the Dukes of Burgundy have right of return, for which cause Chingachgook represents them to the Culture Minds who may or may not intercede.  The whole arrangement of the imaginative universe could be altered.  Everyone is waiting for arrival of the next book in the series.  in the meantime, we read widely to grasp the multiverse in which existence itself is given meaning…

Bound and Determined

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 5 Comments

A staple of YA science fiction is the story of the Young Person who begins quite normal and average and through circumstance becomes entangled in Epic Events and ends up an Important Person.  Yes, it’s a coming-of-age arc because the plot requires maturation.  In the best of them (from Heinlein to the present) the protagonist isn’t the only one maturing, but the society/culture of which he or she is a part.  The events of the story perforce drag the whole civilization along, sometimes kicking and screaming, to a new level in order to deal with the New Thing that must be dealt with.  And of course at the end of the novel or trilogy, rapprochement of some kind is achieved, balance gained, and good things are in the offing as a result of the timely, clever, and ultimately mature intervention of the newly-minted adult at the center of the story.

(Of course this is not limited to science fiction, but in all honesty, in what other genre are the stakes regularly so incredibly high?)

In the last decade, with the steady resurgence of YA science fiction, good examples of this abound.  (In particular, I’m thinking of Nini Kiriki Hoffman’s Catalyst, a short, elegantly efficient novel about exactly this kind of growth arc.)  It’s a reliable form, even in the dystopic vein of The Hunger Games.  One thing essential in these is success.  Success for the protagonist, successful resolution of the conflict driving the story, success for the universe in which it’s set.

Which makes Joe Haldeman’s trilogy beginning with Marsbound a bit of a shock.

We begin in the mid 21st Century with the Dula family, who have won a lottery ticket to go join a small experimental colony on Mars.  Carmen, the protagonist, is 17 going on 27, and while certainly curious about Mars is less than thrilled at the idea of leaving everything behind for five years on a world where going outside without an environmental suit will kill her.  Her mother, father, and younger brother, Card, also go along.  On the beach near the space elevator they will ascend to orbit and their waiting ship, Carmen meets Paul, an astronaut and the pilot of their transit ship.  He’s 31.  Nevertheless, the two of them start up an affair on the space elevator, which leads ultimately to their marriage by the end of the novel.

On Mars, through a maze of set pieces whereby Carmen runs afoul of the colony authority figure, she discovers—or is discovered by—a colony of heretofore unexpected neighbors.  These aliens are not native to Mars but have been planted there millennia in the past to serve as eyes and ears for the Others, tremendously old beings of unimaginable power who are absolutely paranoid of budding civilizations that might threaten them.  Carmen becomes a de facto ambassador first to the local group and then, by extension, to The Others, although this latter position is problematic at best as it presumes a cultural and intellectual equivalency that does not exist.

The second novel, Starbound, chronicles the “diplomatic” mission sent the 25 light years to The Others’ homeworld, a mission that includes Carmen, her husband Paul, two other scientists from the Mars colony, and a triad marriage of spies from the U.N., two husbands and their wife.

Things begin to deviate here from the expected arc of a traditional YA.  The interpersonal relations among these people, stuck together on a cramped starship for a very long journey, and the background stories that emerge even as the relationships, both personally and professionally, complicate paint a world that is much darker, much more byzantine, and much more ambiguous both morally and historically than might be expected.  The Earth from which these people matriculate, in other words, is very like our own with all the inconvenient, illogical, ugly wrinkles of detail implied.

Nor does the meeting with The Others unfold as one might expect.  Humanity is not triumphing here.  Carmen does not “save the day” through some particular of personal intuition, charm, or insight.  They find themselves confronted with a Fact that cannot be comprehended and has no reason at all for mutuality with humanity.  Because human nature is, collectively, what it is, Earth makes decisions that lead The Others to simply shut them down.  At the end of the second novel, they have simply turned off the power on Earth, instantly sending humanity back to an 18th Century existence—except, of course, all the guns that use powder and shot still work.

Nor is this effectively redressed in the final volume, Earthbound, which title works ironically in opposition to the first two, which are both about voyages, expansion, growth.  Here it is about surviving in prison.

What interests me about this trilogy is Haldeman’s decision to present, in YA fashion, an implacable universe.   In contrast to, say, Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, the “trial” humanity faces is not won by the plucky, sharp-witted young hero, because winning isn’t even an option.  Placation, perhaps, but humanity has nothing with which to claim even a seat at the table.  Haldeman gives us dispassionate aliens whose only concern is whether or not humanity might try to hurt them several thousand years hence.  (The similarities between the two works, while largely superficial, are intriguing.)  Haldeman has decided to throw a bucket of ice water in the face of the kind of aspirational SF we’ve grown accustomed to.  The last book of his trilogy is a thorough-going downer.  Carmen survives, yes, but one gets the feeling this is only because someone needs to tell this story from beginning to end.

Haldeman is a very careful, meticulous craftsman, and he’s done something very interesting with the character of Carmen Dula.  Marsbound begins sounding very like YA.  Carmen is 17 and her first-person narration sounds like an adolescent.  As the novel progresses, though, she grows up, and, almost unnoticeably, so does her voice.  This is an impressive feat, make no mistake.  She reaches adulthood, even a kind of motherhood, without any of the false notes of jarring transition one might expect, and the voice, within the context of the story, remains strong and convincing.  Artistically, this may be Haldeman’s best achievement here.

But it does serve well as a dialogue between the personal and the problematic.  The choices Carmen makes in her own life are set in contrast to the choices she and the rest of humankind must make faced with a situation of which there is no textbook, no precedence, and therefore no obvious answers.  The notion that the traditional cataclysms of mismatched cultural encounter provide guides is subverted by the supreme disinterest The Others have in any kind of imperial ambition.  They don’t want what we have, which has been the basis for all our past clashes like this.  They don’t want anything, except perhaps to guarantee that another race—ours, for instance—never brings its wanting to their doorstep.

What they have in aide of this disinterest is the ability to yank any carpet we may have out from under us.  Instantly.

Which brings Carmen and her band of above-average-companions face to face with that thin veneer of oh so fragile civilization we’ve all heard about.

At a guess, I suspect Haldeman has, on one level, decided to puncture the Heinlein myth in science fiction, that myth which is admirably summed up in the first few pages of his Time Enough For Love:

Our race could now lose fifty planets, close ranks, and move on.  Our gallant women could replace the casualties in a single generation.  Not that it appears likely that this will happen; thus far we have encountered not one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own.

Haldeman’s response, in a word, is “bullshit.”  That he has chosen to do this in YA, I think, is both interesting and laudable.  Optimism and confidence are well and good, but should be grounded on some notion of reality based in experience.  Science fiction has always been a kind of quasi-philosophical test bed for experiences we’re unlikely to have but which may occur in some form for humanity eventually.  It behooves us, therefore, to occasionally eschew the fist-pumping self-congratulatory delusions of our own imagined greatness and deal with the Unknown as it is likely to be and, at least at the outset, really is—namely Unknown.

Within that larger context, however, Haldeman has presented an interesting arc of maturity for his characters.  Fully human, recognizably flawed, they are nevertheless intelligent and thoughtful and manage themselves and their relations with a degree of forethought that I think is a fine model for young readers to encounter.  Yes, they do stupid things, but then learn from them and don’t continually do them.  Yes, they try things out, because experience, sensation, curiosity are essential to living full lives, but they don’t (usually) charge into things without some idea of responsibility.  They tell themselves No as often as they indulge themselves, and they seem to realize that how they conduct themselves personally, with each other, is just as important as how they meet the larger, almost incomprehensible challenges beyond.

When I finished Earthbound I tried to think of a better way he might have done it that would not have transformed the whole thing into a flight of fantasy, a puff-piece for fragile egos, and I thought to be true to the premise, there was no other way.  He’s giving us the universe as it, at least philosophically, is—which cares not a fig for our concerns or even that we’re here, and which, if we make trouble on too big a scale, is as likely to swat us like a bug as yield to our demands.  It’s not so much a downer ending as it is sobering.

Sobriety is a good thing, especially when one doesn’t know what one is doing.

Apocalypsis

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

China Miéville seems to be going down the list. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, police procedural, Kafkaesque urban surrealism…each novel works some new twist on established forms to produce, if not a definitive work, at least an iconic representation of type.

Of course, he’s not just trying to recapitulate what’s been done.  He’s not just re-presenting particular types.  With each work, he seems to be stretching the boundaries—the limits—of the form until they break, and presumably Something New emerges.

(And in some instances, he’s turning forms inside out and demonstrating both their deepest flaws and the possibilities of new attributes. For instance, Perdido Street Station would seem to be an urban fantasy adventure.  It is set in some Other City, that could be London if certain mythic veins had emerged as dominant in our history as opposed to what did establish itself as the Known.  But fantasy requires at its heart an Organizing Principle around which clashes of good and evil make sense in archetypal fashion.  Miéville excised that heart and we’re left with a fantasy world with no such central thema.  The result is chaos, which I think is a point he was trying to make.  But that’s a discussion for another time.)

In a sense, he’s revisited some of that in Kraken, which seems to fit—uncomfortably, perhaps—in the recent spate of X-File type stories about a secret realm of supernatural action requiring special police.  Charles Stross

has been doing a fun series concerning the so-called Laundry, a subdepartment of MI-5.  Recently, the debut novel by Daniel O’Malley, The Rook, kicks it up a notch.  Again, Miéville is mining familiar ground.

But even the name of his special police unit is a give-away that he’s fishing deeper waters: the FSRC, or Fundamentalist and Sect Related Crime.

The main team consists of a “normal” policeman, Baron, a young “witch”, Collingswood, and former Believer and theological academic, Vardy.  Certainly an odd combination, and they do not get along.  As the story proceeds it becomes clear that they don’t get along because they hold essentially incompatible world views.  Nevertheless, they have to work together for a common purpose.

Which is one of the threads Miéville follows, basically that it doesn’t matter what you believe, how you see the world, why you disagree with that fellow over there, at the end of the day we all have to coexist.  Somehow.

Because the London Miéville gives us is a polytheistic stew of essentially incompatible perceptions that nevertheless congeal into a community wherein people—and many, many gods—have to get along.

(Baron, Collingswood, and Vardy are a microcosm of the larger problem.  A “mundane”, a “paganistic supernaturalist”, and an “anti-supernaturalist theologian” all thrust together and forced to cooperate.)

In typical Miéville-ean excess, the plethora of gods are not limited to what we have come to recognize as old pantheons.  Gods are everything, everywhere.  The very brick and mud possess a certain deity-geist.  The Sea itself is sentient.  Nor is this a congeries of paganistic polytheism in which people worship many gods, but rather a congress of many faiths that are essentially monotheistic, each sect ardently holding to their god and no other, even as they all seem to acknowledge that all the others are, indeed, gods.  Where in Perdido Street Station he presents a milieu that has no gods of any kind, only the effects of participatory deism shorn of guiding principles, in Kraken he gives us a world so filled with gods, both past and present, that some organizing principle is required to keep them all in their places and not tear the world apart with their jealousies—or the jealousies of their congregants.

Into this he thrusts Billy Harrow, a curator at the London Natural History Museum.  His specialty is molluscae and in particular the prize specimen, a giant squid, Architeuthis, an intact corpse Billy himself worked on to preserve.  Then one day he comes in to lead a tour, enters the room where the proto-kraken is supposed to be, floating in its tank of preservatives, only to find it gone.  Tank and all.  Vanished.

Which brings in the FSRC and thrusts Billy into the midst of what turns out to be an underground religious turf war revolving around a potential apocalypse.   Because, you see, the Architeuthis is a god, with worshipers, and they seize Billy as a prophet in the cause of getting their god back.

Billy’s descent into this previously unguessed religious underworld allies him to an apostate theological enforcer and between two of the most powerful adversaries in London theomantic circles, one of whom is supposed to be dead but seems to be making a comeback.

The basic rôles are all in play.  Dane, the apostate enforcer, is a Peter-figure trying to make up for lapses in faith by rescuing his god; Marge (Marginalia) is a Magdalen figure trying to save the human man at the center of events she initially rejects but comes to understand in ways none of the adherents can; Fitch, a Pauline messenger who in spite of his belief in neutrality involves himself to the undoing of his own ethic; and Vardy, a former believer who wants so ardently to believe again that he would burn the world down to remake it as a place where fact never overwrote faith.

But Billy is key.  Admirably, Miéville does not indulge the pitiful cliché that so ruined things like The X-Files, that of the scientist who cannot observe, deduce, conclude, and adopt a new paradigm in the face of overwhelming evidence.  Billy, initially dismayed, angry, defiant, displays intelligence and adaptibility and before the novel is halfway through becomes a Player.  As he must.  Why?  Doesn’t the name give it away?

Billy Harrow.

Among all the other meanings of the word “harrow” there are two that are relevant.  The first, the most obvious, is the religious connotation, reference to the “harrowing of hell” wherein Jesus went to hell to free those who had been wrongly condemned.  (And, consistently, but not in any way predictably, Billy fulfills the implications of his inadvertent status—he dies to save the world and then returns, but not the way one might expect.)  The second, lesser, is as a verb, namely to Vex.

Because Billy is named a prophet, not only by the followers of the squid god but by the fabric of London itself.  Why?  Because of a story he told about himself, that he was the first test tube baby.  In a very clever bit of fictive legerdemain, Miéville gives us an immaculately conceived savior.  At least, that’s the story, because, you see, it’s not true.  Billy made it up.  It’s a story.

Which matters not at all to those who would use his perceived prophethood to their own ends.

Which, in turn, is Miéville’s point:

“It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps you now know.  It’s all a matter of making an argument.”

So states the last aching want-to-be fundamentalist as he sets about trying to overwrite history and unmake a century-and-a-half  of scientific fact that successfully displaced his faith.

…He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years.  And that was unbearable to him.  He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right…he did not want to eradicate the idea of evolution: he wanted to rewind the fact of it.  And with evolution—that key, that wedge, that wellspring—-would all those other things follow, the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth…

Which brings what up till then had been a thoroughly entertaining supernatural adventure up into the realm of metafiction.  For Miéville, at least in this formulation, there is only persuasion.  Words.  Argument.  The codification of ideas underlies all potential belief, all justification, all reification.

And when persuasion fails, when a given argument proves insupportable in the face of a better one, then the fanatic turns to obliteration.  Apocalypse.  End it All, and start again on a clean slate.  Make a new argument where now none exist.

Interestingly, Miéville seems to suggest that the most ardent fundamentalists are those who have lost their faith—and want it back.  They’re willing to destroy everyone else’s reality to have it.  The ongoing, continual dialogue that constitutes positive coexistence would be anathema to someone who sees nothing but surrender in compromise and salvation in nihilism.  The London of co-extant doctrines, faiths, cults, sects, and divergent and curious theological constructions, uneasily but successfully managing to get along with itself, would be the ultimate blasphemy to someone who wants—needs—only One Truth, without competition.  Or the need to persuade.