Paper Knife

Bridging the Gaps III – 20th May 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:37:00 +0000

Stuff that caught my attention on the internet.

Yet more contributions to the ongoing discussion about the ‘exhaustion of sf’, this time from Karen Burnham, at Locus and a response from Jonathan McCalmont.

Submissions for the 2013 Kitschies are now open and the judges have been announced.

Still not quite sure why John Gray was talking about Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels on Radio 4 last week, but he was, and this is a transcript of the broadcast.

“To celebrate the release of [The Aylesford Skull, James] Blaylock has put together a list of forgotten or ignored works of literature that have inspired his own writing, and should be must-reads for anyone interested in science fiction or the fantastic.” Ignore the overly prescriptive title: the selection of titles, however, is well worth checking out.

New story from Steven Millhauser in the New Yorker: Thirteen Wives

From David M Barnett, in the Guardian, When Horror Stopped Being Supernatural

From LARB, Science Fiction in China: An Interview with Fei Dao

Is That All There Is? Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:37:00 +0000

According to some reviews I’ve seen, Wolfhound Century (Orbit, 2013) by Peter Higgins is pretty much the best thing since black bread and pickled herring. The level of enthusiasm has actually been quite off-putting. I tend to be immediately suspicious of any novel that generates a lot of word-of-mouth buzz on publication, for the simple reason that all too often the text in question turns out to be not that remarkable after all when considered at a more thoughtful distance. And thus it proves with Wolfshound Century. This is not to say it is a bad novel, but it is a novel with problems, not the least of which is that it is actually only half a novel with problems, ending as abruptly as it does.

One might initially cast Wolfhound Century as yet one more fantasy-police procedural hybrid, perhaps a pale follower of Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, with Inspector Vissarion Lom as the Arkady Renko stand-in. The police procedural element seems so well-worn these days I find it hard to get enthused about such things any more. Lom seems to fit the bill as a plain-speaking type whose bluntness has got him into trouble and seen him denied promotion. There is the added frisson that he is working within a deeply oppressive system that he’s clearly not entirely happy about but one might say he does his best to do his job without compromising his integrity more than he has to. But then, so do other detectives.

If the narrative mechanism doesn’t excite, then what about the setting? Higgins’ novel is set what initially appears to be Fictional Russia, that is, a Russia that is familiar to me from portrayals in film and novel. It seems to tick the boxes one might expect: oppressive state system, secret police, political opposition suppressed, informers, an assortment of radical and reactionary groups vying for supremacy, poor food, everyone drowning their sorrows. In all, it’s reductively grim-grey, with possibly extra added cliché.

Except, as the reader gradually comes to realise – and the realisation is painfully gradual, thanks to the narrative’s pacing – this is not Fictional Russia, but something else, perhaps Alternative Russia. My knowledge of Russian history is not sufficient to tell how closely Wolfhound Century nudges up against an historical narrative that we are familiar with although I know enough to see echoes and resonances on occasion. Then again, I wonder if this matters, given that the novel is, if anywhere, set in Liminal Russia, a place that hovers on the brink of existence. Late in the novel, two of the major characters find themselves in the marshes beyond the city of Mirgorod:

This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood ash and fallen leaves (255).

It’s a lovely description, a beautiful piece of observation, and it also gives a very strong hint as to what is really important in this novel. In fact, the clues are there from the beginning if we did but know how to read them.

The novel begins with a stake-out. Lom and his colleague, Ziller, are acting on a tip-off, waiting for a hand-over. When it comes, it’s not what we might expect.: a small cloth bag. Inside ‘[t]here was nothing but a mess of broken twigs and crushed berries and clumps of some sticky yellowish substance that might have been wax. It had a sweet, heavy, resinous perfume’ (6). We should already be alert for difference, thanks to the passing casual references to ‘the giants’; they simply walk through the foreground of the scene, leading carts and horses, a natural part of the landscape of Podchornok, clearly, but what are they? Simply part of the story.

Suddenly, Lom finds himself summoned to Mirgorod by Under Secretary Krogh, who apparently has a job. what Krogh might want with a provincial investigator is anyone’s guess. It’s only during the interminable train journey to Mirgorod that we learn what is unusual about Lom, namely that he carries a sliver of angel flesh embedded in his forehead, a sight that terrifies even the most brutal of gendarmes. Its function, though, remains mysterious at this point, as indeed do the angels. Even once Lom arrives in Mirgorod, the story seems set to follow its inevitably banal course as he is asked to track down an elusive agent provocateur, Kantor, only to find his way blocked by other departments. Clearly, there are wheels within wheels though Lom is beginning to form a suspicion as to what is going on.

And it is at this point that the story suddenly takes off. In very short order, such stability as Lom’s prior existence possessed is stripped away, an old friend is horribly murdered, and Lom, his angel flesh removed during torture, is on the run, accompanied by Maroussia Shaumian, a young woman who believes that Kantor is her father. We’ve long since left Fictional Russia, the world of detectives and torturers, for Liminal Russia, a world where the forest is at war with the city.

Suddenly, we begin to wonder a little more about Lom, who comes from Podchornok, ‘the last town before the forest began’ (19), the man who loves the ‘proper forest. Dark. Mossy. Thick.’ (19). The man who distinguishes between ‘forest rain’, redolent with the scents of the land and the forest, and ‘steppes rain’, ‘sharp and cold’ which seems to hint at the straight edges of the built. Lom’s is a primeval landscape, and it would seem that Lom is indeed fitted to deal with something primeval, certainly something older than the city, something with a raw, elemental power that the city’s reasoned response is unable to counter. Critcally, Lom is not afraid of the countryside.

Lom and Vishnik, Mirgorod’s official historian, have both witnessed strange visions in the city, which Vishnik believes are alternative versions of the future city vying for supremacy. Vishnik believes the visions are caused by an angel which lies out in the forest, alive despite falling from the sky. Obviously, other angels have fallen in the past but have died. Kantor and Chazia, head of the secret police, are desperate to gain custody of the angel. Others, people from the forest, are determined that this angel should die. They are concerned about the whereabouts of something they call the Pallandore, which will help with this. The angel, though, is also aware that something is going on and seems to be attempting to counter the threat from the forest.

Lom, seemingly protected by water, and Maroussia, a woman with forest connections, are obviously destined to act against the angel, but before we can find out what is likely to happen, the novel stops, almost dead in its tracks. One assumes there is a sequel, if only because I cannot believe the novelist went to so much trouble only to grind to a halt, the story half told. It is possible, I suppose, that we could read this ending as open, ambiguous, left to the imagination, but it feels to me that there is more to come. This raises more questions. If, as I suspect, this is one manuscript chopped in two, one wonders why this decision was made when, to my eye at least, it might have been more productive to excise several chapters from the beginning of the novel. While they set the scene they also slow the pace of the novel. Little happens until Lom begins to experience his visions of the diverging futures of Mirgorod and the world of the forest begins to impinge on the city. Lom as a police officer is a distraction from Lom caught up in a confrontation between the intuitive magic of the forest and the rational power of the angel. That’s where the interesting story is.

So, I am left with a dilemma here. I have what seems to be half a novel, half of which is amazingly good stuff, half of which is rather ordinary. How to pass a judgement on it? I’m not actually sure I can, given I feel it is so incomplete. I can’t find it in me to forgive the novel’s faults just because the good parts are so good. But in the engagement between the different forms of power is so interesting it is worth putting up with the banalities and longueurs, and to accept that one is going to have to read the sequel.

'We were all monsters and bastards and we were beautiful' – Rachel Hartman's Seraphina.

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 11 May 2013 05:37:00 +0000

I had an odd moment of déjà-vu when I began reading Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina. Its narrative tone reminded me intensely of something else, and I eventually realised that it was Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1939). At first glance, it would be difficult to find two novels with less in common but I do think they have certain similarities, which raises some interesting questions about the way in which children’s (or teen or young adult) fiction has or hasn’t changed over the last seventy years. They also have one very obvious difference which will be addressed in due course.

Utley’s novel is either a ghost story or time-travel, depending on how you choose to frame it; its main character, Penelope Taberner Cameron, is sent to recuperate with relations who live in the ancient Derbyshire farmhouse of Thackers (Dethick, in reality, and now owned by Simon Groom, one-time Blue Peter presenter). Utley’s childhood memories and her great love of the history and country customs of her home county are very much to the fore in her evocation of life at Thackers, and her emphasis on the persistence of old practices, domestic and religious.

The house was once owned by the Babington family, and during the reign of Queen Elizabeth became the focus of a plot, organised by Anthony Babington, to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots from imprisonment at nearby Wingfield Manor. It is to this historical moment that Penelope finds herself travelling, a process managed simply by her walking into a room or turning a corner in the passage and finding she has gone back in time. Through her the reader learns the story of Anthony Babington though, perhaps wishing to spare her child readers some anguish, the story closes before Babington is imprisoned in the Tower of London and then executed in a fashion so horrible Elizabeth ordered his co-conspirators to be hanged instead. Instead, we are left to breathe easy because snow has concealed the tunnel’s entrance, while Francis, Anthony’s younger brother, who has fallen in love with Penelope, as she has with him, is, we are told, making plans to go to Paris, as the young men of Catholic families so often did.[1]

Seraphina, on the other hand, could be described as an out-and-out fantasy. It deals with the life of Seraphina Dombegh, the only child of a father who is both emotionally absent and over-protective, and a mother who died giving birth to Seraphina. Through her own determination, Seraphina has pursued an education – she is a talented musician – and has found herself a job as assistant to Viridius, the court composer. What drives the novel, however, is the need to discover the murderer of the Prince of Goredd, a mystery in which Seraphina, although by her own admission, a nobody at court, becomes involved. Goredd’s death threatens the peace that has been established between humans and dragons, some of whom live among the humans, taking on human form.

So, let us begin with the similarities between the novels.

Both are told in the first person, though from what point in the narrators’ lives is hard to tell. The tone in each case is detached, cool, leaning towards the analytical, as though they are observing the experiences of their younger selves with a certain wry amusement at the follies of youth.

Both protagonists are solitary, bookish, imaginative, the difference being perhaps that for Penelope it is actively her choice and she doesn’t seem to mind either being alone or else being thought odd. Indeed she seems to be proud of her strangeness; in a family of three children, and the youngest to boot, it marks her out, makes her distinctive. Seraphina, on the other hand, is by her own admission incredibly lonely. Her solitary life has been forced on her by her father, for reasons which have only recently become clear to her. Throughout her life he has seemed to obstruct her every wish and she has, according to her own account, been forced to find ways round his prohibitions, often forcing him into acquiescence by directly challenging him.

In older children’s books, serious illness often prompts the transformation which places the child in a position to begin their adventures. In the case of A Traveller in Time, both of Penelope’s visits to Thackers are precipitated by illness, while for Seraphina, witnessing the Treaty procession in which the dragons shed their human form brings about the first of her mysterious visions, and causes a physical transformation, namely the appearance of scales, and hence the revelation that her mother was a dragon and she is thus part dragon. However, whereas for Penelope it is a time of excitement and discovery – her Aunt Tissie knows about the ghosts, is aware that Penelope can see the Babingtons and is thus a kind of guarantor for her safety in that other world – for Seraphina, the dangers only multiply as she must now conceal her scales as well as learn to cope with the side-effects of her visions, which are severe. Her guide in this new world in which she finds herself is her uncle, Orma, a dragon constantly under scrutiny for his undragonlike behaviour (of which more in due course) and thus less helpful as a guarantor of her safety, though he is not entirely without resources.

Another thing which marks both narratives is what one might call privileged access. In Penelope’s case, she has extraordinary contact with all levels of society at Thackers and though it is initially noted that she should not be in this place or that, it is remarkable how quickly everyone accepts her intermittent presence, even though her tie to the place is through Cicely Taberner, the housekeeper and a servant, albeit a very powerful one. One might argue that Penelope’s friendship with Francis Babington grants her a kind of social passepartout but even that friendship is effectively a narrative contingency. The narrative does to some extent acknowledge Penelope’s extraordinary privilege, and at least one character is deeply suspicious of it, although cast as the villain of the piece for making the point that this is all wrong, but Uttley mostly seems engaged in trying to elide or excuse the point.

Seraphina, on the other hand, although she might well have more right to claim some sort of privilege, given her father’s role, given her talent, given her job (and through that access of a sort to the members of the royal family) can’t stop pointing out that she is a nobody. Of course, she has been taught to be as self-effacing as possible as a survival mechanism, but there is something about this constant underlining of the fact that becomes wearing in the narrative. (We see a form of this privilege again in the way in which Seraphina’s dragon blood manifests itself, with her scales neatly, conveniently, appearing on those parts of her body that can be covered; no visible disfigurement will impair her ability to function.)

And the point is, in both narratives, that Penelope and Seraphina need this level of access in order to tell their stories. It’s a matter of narrative contingency but in the case of Penelope in particular we’re being asked to take a rather large step in terms of willing suspension of disbelief in accepting this situation, though it can in part be balanced by the belief that Penelope is dealing with ghosts or, just possibly, figments of her own imagination. For Seraphina, this is real, and indeed in deadly earnest, as her own safety may depend upon it.

And, finally, there is the upstairs-downstairs romance with, in Penelope’s case, the added difficulty of its also being across time and therefore doomed to failure. Which, of course, it should be, the implicit moral in A Traveller in Time being that one must know one’s place, in time and socially. There is no way that Francis and Penelope could ever have married, even had they been in the same time period. The message is clearly that one can dream but that is all one can or should do. Anything else would be inappropriate. For Seraphina, however, things are different: Lucian Kiggs, the bastard prince, can show an interest in her, an interest which she can in theory reciprocate, though of course her mixed parentage may well get in the way of this. On the other hand, Kiggs’s illegitimate status may offset that. Nobility of birth is in this instance trumped by outsider status.

So far, so good. This is a narrative pattern that has demonstrably persisted for more than seventy years, and probably longer than that. It’s a serviceable narrative template, conventional, familiar, if not that demanding and for Uttley’s novel, it provides the solid structure to support the all-important domestic and historical detail. But I find myself wondering why Hartman is still using it.

However, it is here that the stories do begin to diverge, on what might be called the political level. The Babington family and their loyal servants, including the Taberners, are already out of step with the times by keeping to the old Catholic ways, and an educated reader knows that the weight of history is already against them. The plot to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots will be discovered, the fate of Anthony Babington, and indeed of Mary herself, is already known. Without transforming A Traveller in Time into an alternative history, which is clearly not Uttley’s intention, there is no other way the story can be played out. Whatever Uttley’s political and religious views might be, I am sure her attachment to the story has more to do with its Derbyshire setting and childhood memory than with any need to make redress for the treatment of Catholics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Uttley knows how her story will play out and is content to interpolate it into the broader sweep of history, without questioning its presence.

In Seraphina, things are much more complex and troubling, politically and theologically but first it might be worth looking at the world in which Seraphina lives. The setting might be most aptly described as ‘cathedral city gothic’. At times it reminded me of Elizabeth Goudge’s Towers in the Mist and The Dean’s Watch, and on occasion Lucy M Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, while at other times there is a quick dash of something steampunkish in the quigs’ love of mechanisms. On the whole, though, we’re dealing with something ‘medieval’ in the sense that it has all the visible trappings of medievalism: characters wear ‘houppelandes’, there are knights, albeit banished ones, and the presence of a Christian church much engaged with saints. Goredd (and note the Celtic inflection of that double d) seems to be a mature medieval world which has persisted for many centuries, although technology seems to have remained mostly in stasis among the humans, and yet, at the same time, there is something that smacks of children’s fairytales; take, for example, the almost ethereal loveliness of Princess Glisselda, whose name smacks of something from Disney. This society may be coherent within fictional terms, but I doubt it persists beyond the book.

And here indeed be dragons. Dragons that can transform themselves into human shape if need be. Dragons that have signed a peace treaty with the humans. Dragons who have sophisticated technologies. Dragons who live among humans, though rather as we might equip a cat with a bell to alert its potential prey, and a leper with a bell to warn people away, so dragons come equipped with bells to alert us to the fact that they are not what they seem when they are moving among humans (except, of course, for the few given permission to conceal their origins). I wonder how many people raised an eyebrow when they read ‘Orma didn’t need facial hair to pass (12)’ or at the point where Orma speculates as to whether the saints whose writings inveigh against human-dragon miscegenation (and this word is used specifically) ‘had experience with half-breeds (36)’. We are no longer in a world where a girl can dally artlessly with an historical character but in a world where something altogether darker is taking place.

But how are we supposed to read the dragons in this novel? Hartman’s choice of terms like passing prompts me to think first of the Jim Crow laws and light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. Similarly, when I see ‘half-breed’ I immediately think of how this word is used with reference to Native Americans, and in particular how half-breeds have often been seen as outsiders in native and Anglo-European society. Should I read the quigs, the dragons who cannot transform, as representing for undocumented immigrants and border-crossers? For that matter, given that faint hint of Celticism in Goredd, do we read the dragons as Welsh, oppressed yet again by the English? And that’s before we get on to the form of Christianity practised in the novel, a mix of the Celtic and the Catholic, filled with many obscure saints, not a few of whom appear to be dragon-slayers, or useful when one needs to invoke religion in order to attack the Other. One might in passing think of the right wing’s appropriation of St George’s flag; one might think also of how a crudely God-fearing community turns against a belief

Dragons are of course the traditional fairytale enemy of humanity. We have dragons who must be appeased with human sacrifice, and dragons who dispense wisdom, dragons who represent order, dragons who symbolise chaos. In Seraphina, we have two extremes. On the one hand, the quigs lurk on the edges of society, like beggars, barely able to communicate with anyone, shunned by pretty much everyone where possible. They are, if you like, the descendants of Tolkien’s Smaug – only the nature of the hoard has changed. On the other, the dragons are disguised as humans, but not so far as I can see, lower-class humans. They have a diplomatic or academic role, mediating between dragons and humans, studying humans. They are represented as unfailingly logical, baffled by the morass of human emotions. They appear to be thinking machines made of meat. They are essentially Other.

The reader’s contact with dragons is of course mediated through Seraphina, the half-breed, positioned as the bridge between the two groups, but it is a very particular view. For all that Seraphina protests that she is a court nobody, for all that we are told that Orma is not a conventional dragon, we are nonetheless dealing with people who possess privilege, who are variously protected, people who are atypical within their communities, and we are then expected to use this as the point from which to extrapolate ideas about all dragons. Even in fictional terms this is too easy, too reflexive.

One might argue that Hartman is making the point that this is what we already do, but that argument can be countered by saying yes, so why do it all over again? One cannot overlook the fact that this novel is told exclusively from a human point of view; even Seraphina is identified from the beginning as a human with dragon scales rather than as a dragon with human skin. We never see the dragons on their home ground. To parley with humans they must mimic humans. The frame of the argument is always human, never dragon. To sympathise with the dragons is not only to fraternise with the enemy but also, perhaps, to become like them. On top of that, the view we receive is broadly that of the governing classes, the insiders. The ‘lower orders’ are anxious about the presence of dragons, even though many of them are far too young to remember the war with the dragons, thus it is not clear what their anxiety arises from. The Sons of St Ogdo roam the streets, pretty much looking for dragons to beat up. One is, I think, invited to substitute other names in that sentence, and to an extent the analogy exists, but it is a crude, one size fits all, approach, and one could wish that Hartman had been bolder in dealing with this. Her intended audience would, I’m sure, be sufficiently sophisticated to handle it.

As if this external struggle weren’t enough, we must also deal with Seraphina’s struggle with the voices in her head. They are not, as we might suppose, hallucinations or visions but actual voices, the thoughts of other human-dragon … what do I call them? Mixed breeds, half breeds, hybrids? Shall I be coy and say ‘those with dragon blood in them’, as though they’ve had a transfusion? Is there even a word for them? Does there need to be? Except, of course, we must delineate the differences, with words, with labels. hartman settles for ‘half dragon’, a term with pros and cons, depending on your viewpoint.

As it turns out, there’s a fairly large group of half dragons, passing for human, some even in the court itself, but also apparently representing human diversity in that they are male, female, not all from Goredd (at one point Seraphina notes how one of them, Lars, speaks Goreddi as though his mouth is full of pebbles; there is no sign of her attempting to speak Lars’s own language, which seems to be related to German, so we can throw another binary opposition on the rapidly developing pile). As Seraphina’s hallucinations are transformed into people it is perhaps worth noting that some of them at least exercise autonomy so they aren’t precisely Seraphina’s ‘gang’ but the sense of her authority persists.

And on top of all that, there’s also a murder mystery to solve, almost the least interesting thing about the whole novel, although it is a competently executed mystery thriller. On the other hand, there is no denying that the novel’s ending is as convenient as that of A Traveller in Time. Seraphina and Kiggs may be in love with one another but he is also Princess Glisselda’s fiancé and she is now a terribly young ruler of Goredd and needing all the help she can get. For now, Kiggs and Seraphina must bide their time; this is another relationship which must remain invisible.

So, what to make of Seraphina, a finalist in the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for first novel? Entertaining? Yes, very. For all it seems to reach right back to Uttley’s novel, I like the narrative tone, and Seraphina is, in her way, a narrator appealing in her determination to succeed and in her honesty about her struggle. Intelligent? That’s more problematic in that Hartman is dealing with difficult issues, which I applaud, but in ways that frequently make me deeply uneasy. It’s a well-written novel, one overflowing with thoughts and ideas, but one which always pulls back just when things are getting satisfyingly complicated.

Which leads me finally to ‘progressive’. Is this novel actually progressive? Superficially, it might seem to be, given the issues it appears to be tackling, but as I hope I’ve shown, superficiality is very much the problem. We skate across the surface of the issues rather than going into them in too much detail, and we tackle them from a very particular point of view: bluntly, a white Euro-American point of view. The subaltern dragon is mediated through the mimic human. The assumption, no matter how little it is actually articulated, is that human form trumps dragon form. Dragons need to learn from humans, particularly about such complex things as emotions, but humans seem not to need to take anything from dragons. Even the dragons regard humans as superior.

And then there is the narrative structure: however embellished it might be we still have a narrative shaped by privilege, and a romance that can never come to fruition because of the relative imbalance between the statuses of the two participants.

In all, this is a novel that could have gone far but doesn’t go far enough.

[1] I have found it difficult to establish what happened to the historical Francis Babington, though he was later described as being ‘unthrifty’, which is presumably in part why the house and lands passed out of the family during that time.

Bridging the Gaps II

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:37:00 +0000

More things I found on the internet.

Animated Short Film about the History of Typography

John H. Stevens follows up on Paul Kincaid’s near-legendary article on the ‘exhaustion of sf’, discusses ‘exhaustion as an ever-present part of the artistic process’ and speculates on what happens next.

Worlds Without Ends has a nifty compilation of all the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlists.

And while we’re about the Clarke Award, Tom Hunter, the Award’s director, has gathered together most of the coverage of this year’s award, won by Chris Beckett for Dark Edens here.

Jess Nevins in the LARB on a new edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Classic Stories, ed. by Roger Luckhurst. I’ve not yet seen the edition but Luckhurst apparently situates Lovecraft as part of the Weird. Nevins disagrees. I’m agnostic until I see the introduction.

And Roger Luckhurst himself on ‘H.P. Lovecraft and the Northern Gothic Tongue’

A short story by Karin Tidbeck, Sing, available at the Tor website, and well worth reading. The below-the-line comments, not so much.

Thought-provoking article at Strange from Rochita Loenen-Ruiz: So what do you think of my story where I made use of another person’s culture?

Peter Heller – The Dog Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

Those of us who were children during the 1960s and 1970s will undoubtedly remember Robinson Crusoe, a French-made serial dubbed into English, and accompanied by a haunting signature tune. While Crusoe’s self-excoriation about his sinful past sailed straight over my head I was fascinated by the way he set about making a life for himself on the island, using whatever he could salvage from the shipwreck and what he found on the island itself. It was, I suppose, an early lesson in self-sufficiency, reinforced in part by the endless reshowings of the series.

Ever since, I’ve been particularly drawn to sf stories about people surviving some sort of catastrophe and building new lives for themselves, scavenging, growing food, and so on, the so-called Robinsonades. It is no coincidence that John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids has long been one of my favourite novels, particularly the portions when he describes going back into a mostly empty London to scavenge, though I also have a soft spot for Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Forgotten Enemy’, with its protagonist holed up in a library: this always seemed like the perfect notion to me. Insofar as I ever had a survival plan when I was young, it always involved a library.

But I grew older and began to realise, as if Wyndham hadn’t already made this plain, that survival was a dangerous business. Indeed, it became clear, too, that survival was a man’s game (though Wyndham was very clear that women needed to learn skills as well, if they didn’t already have them). The role of women was going to be to keep house and restart civilisation by having more babies, because of course there is nothing more sensible when in the middle of a catastrophe, with limited resources, than to start planning for the resurgence of the very political systems that got one into trouble in the first place (and Wyndham had one or two things to say about that as well).

This in turn led me to suppose that carving out a life in the wilderness, going it alone with a few chickens, a dog, a cat and a garden, was probably a better way forward than being part of a group that wanted to annex my body for its own grubby imperialistic reasons. And yes, I’d probably die of starvation in a couple of years but what the hell … it would be on my terms (and I hadn’t even read Thoreau at that point). Obviously, my attitudes have shifted as I’ve grown older and had more time to think about it. I understand now why so many people kill themselves at the beginning of The Day of the Triffids, faced with the realisation that there is no way they will be able to cope. The way forward becomes less clear-cut as the possibilities for social annihilation multiply. It was always going to be a nuclear strike, simple, sudden, but with devastating consequences but nowadays it seems more as though we will be undermined by a mix of illness and infrastructure collapse. Though the great swine flu epidemic of 2009 turned out to be anything but, speaking as one of those who did catch it, was incapacitated for a fortnight and has never felt 100% well since, it was brought home to me then just how quickly things can fall apart. Couple an epidemic with fuel shortages brought on by a lack of tanker drivers, and before you know where you are, chaos and collapse. Think about a unvaccinated generation with no immunity to, oh, how about measles?

All of which is a long preamble to thinking about Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, shortlisted for this year’s Clarke Award. This is set in the near future, a future so very close it might as well be today as everything looks pretty much as we might expect. Some sort of flu epidemic has wiped out most of the population of North America, and probably beyond as well. Many of those who did not die of influenza died subsequently of other diseases, less easily identified. It’s not clear what happened to the rest of the world as communications failed generally as people succumbed to the epidemic. To all intents and purposes North America is cut off from the rest of the world.

Hig, the novel’s first-person narrator, lost his wife and unborn child to the epidemic – in fact, it will turn out, at the end his wife asked him to smother her rather than prolong her suffering – and as the world descended into chaos, he and his dog, Jasper, took refuge at the airfield where he kept his small plane, and stayed. Over the years since the epidemic – now about seven or eight years ago – he has established a life of sorts, defending his patch from marauders, maintaining a few crops, supplementing vegetables with what he catches by hunting and fishing and what he manages to scavenge. He flies regular patrols to maintain the perimeters of his world and keeps an eye on a struggling Mennonite community nearby, helping out when their technology fails. The community isolated itself after it became clear they all had a mysterious blood disease, as a result of which other hunters and scavengers, fearful of contagion, have left them alone.

There is distinctly something of the Thoreauvian about Hig, with his house, his bean rows and his dog, a little social commerce with the neighbours, and the journal, though this is balanced by an acute sense of territory rather than place. While Thoreau welcomed visitors, for the most part, and at worst was irritated when they interrupted him, for Hig, visitors represent danger. We’re in a world where good fences emphatically make good neighbours; people want to live with a lot of space around them, so they can see the scavengers and marauders coming. Bangley, who arrived on the scene, bringing with him a small arsenal and a keen appreciation of military tactics, is constantly trying to teach Hig to think more strategically, to plan ahead, to look for weaknesses, whereas Hig is shown as being purely reactive.

Yet, to be blunt, Hig and Bangley, the Apocalyptic Odd Couple, are living in what might charitably be called the world’s biggest man-cave, with enough solar-driven bits and bobs to keep them self-sufficient for as long as they want. Hig may mutter about fuel going off (and actually, I was glad to see a certain amount of practicality seeping in) but he’s pretty much got enough to keep him flying for as long as he wants, while Bangley, the surrogate father and protector polices the boundaries of their world. All of this enables Hig to get on with his main task in life, which seems to be to mourn the loss of his wife and the world as it once was. Again, this is where the Thoreauvian ideal stumbles. While Thoreau was acutely aware of the way in which the modern world was intruding on the old ways, and was not necessarily happy about it (though he did admit that the coming of the railway made it a good deal easier to visit further-flung libraries), neither did he indulge in a pityfest. Thoreau had an acute understanding of what he needed to do in order to survive and did it. Hig, on the other hand, seems to be constantly on the brink of a sighing complaint about how difficult it all is, even though he is clearly a competent man. Hig’s argument might be, I suppose, that he has nothing to live for, whereas for Thoreau, the living itself is the thing.

Which is perhaps a good moment to stop and think about this account that Hig is keeping. Before the epidemic he was a building contractor in the summer, a writer in the winter. It’s not clear what Hig wrote or how much was published, though we do learn that he loves poetry, which he still reads and quotes in his journal. Yet, when I started the novel, the story felt to all intents and purposes as though it was being told by someone who had, for whatever reason, decided they must keep an account of their experiences for posterity, but for whom writing didn’t come easily. Which seems odd if Hig is supposed to be a writer. How much more wish-fulfilment is at play here, we might wonder, alongside the Robinsonade. Even Hig’s nature writing seems to be a little … wonky, maybe, as if he looks but doesn’t really see.

But perhaps that is the point about Hig; nothing really comes naturally to him, as he notes later, when talking about learning to fly. He’s had to work for everything, and that includes the writing. Yet, given how much he has presumably written already, one might assume that, as with the flying, as with the hunting and the fishing, he’d have it figured out by now. But Hig is no Thoreau, nor indeed is he Saint-Exupery, for all he tries to describe what it means to fly, “freed from the sticky details” of daily life. And yet, given Heller’s own track record of adventure writing – he has several works of “literary non-fiction” to his name – and given the fact that Hig is clearly intended to be an expert hunter and fisherman, one might have expected something a little less … trite, perhaps.

This does, however, point towards a more significant problem with this novel, its narrative structure. When writing an account of an expedition, one is inevitably writing after the event, aware of what happened, and in what order. The story has, in effect, written itself as the participants went along. As a way of writing a novel, however, this is an approach that is apt to create problems rather than solve them. As a consequence, the reader is almost halfway through the novel before the first heavily signalled significant event finally occurs, precipitating Hig into something that might be a midlife crisis, requiring him to fly off into the blue, leaving Bangley behind to mind the shop on his own, thus heavily signalling another significant event.

It is the death of Jasper, Hig’s elderly dog, that prompts him to go in search of the airfield from which he once heard a call sign, just to see if anyone has survived, although three years as elapsed since he last heard it. Why now, so far into the novel, when this would have been a wonderful hook for an adventure. As it is, Hig merely exchanges a stale idyll, with Bangley, for a new and exciting one, involving another old man, Pops, and his daughter, Cima, with whom, perhaps inevitably, Hig falls in love, because without someone to love, he is nothing, and this is really what it’s been about all along. Stripped first of his attachment to his wife, Melissa, and then his dog, Hig is one big emotional hole, looking to be filled, and this occurs at length. It’s hard to overlook the desperate convenience of meeting the perfect woman in the middle of nowhere, with her ornery but fundamentally decent father, who just coincidentally also has a military background, taking up the slack while Bangley’s absent.

It’s not too long before it’s decided that they will all return to Hig’s airfield, going via that mysterious airport he was originally heading for, to pick up fuel and just check what was going on. This short section turns out to be the most compelling and yet most infuriating portion of the book. We can never know for sure what motivated the old couple who have booby-trapped the airfield but it’s pretty much academic once Pops has blown them both away. For someone who is apparently rather squeamish about killing people, Hig is very apt at aligning himself with people who have no compunction in doing so whatsoever, and indeed is perfectly capable of doing so himself, but requires that slight hesitation to show he’s essentially decent, that he worries before he shoots.

It’s not too difficult to guess what the second significant event will be, given that Bangley has been left on his own for several months, and that Cima turns out to be a doctor. In fact, the only real surprise, given Pops is pretty much Bangley all over again, is that Bangley in fact survives to tell the tale and everyone lives happily ever after, freed of their ghosts, with Hig having acquired himself a wife and two surrogate fathers into the bargain.

But what to make of this novel as a whole? In terms of structure, it’s not a terribly good or interesting novel, unless you have a taste for the maudlin and underplotted; it’s the kind of novel you might hunker down with if you were feeling miserable too but the life-affirming portions of it read like the fantasies of a self-diagnosed sensitive adolescent boy rather than the supposed thoughts of a man who has, allegedly, turned dead human beings into jerky for his dog.

As science fiction? It isn’t, not according to any criteria I’d care to exercise, and as long-time readers of this blog will know, I have a very flexible definition of science fiction. On the other hand, the mere fact of its appearing on the Clarke Award shortlist has effectively made it into science fiction, at least in the short term, which I find mildly alarming.

What we have here is nothing more than a guess at a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a flu epidemic and subsequent disease mutations, with a bit of climate change thrown in for good measure, all of it really little more than vague hand-waving that might have been culled from the headlines of a broadsheet newspaper. I have little sense of the author having seriously thought through what this world might look like. It just is, because he needed it to be. As so often in these situations science-fictional tropes provide a spot of window-dressing for something else the author wants to say; so long as you don’t look too closely, it might just about pass muster, but all it takes is a mild breeze of scepticism to set the scenery swaying.

In the end, the science-fictional elements in this novel exist simply to strip the landscape of people so that a favoured few survivors can play out a fantasy version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a better outcome – apocalypse-lite. As to how it came to be on the Clarke Award shortlist, I wouldn’t like to speculate, but I’m having trouble seeing anything in it that suggests “best”, “radical”, “innovative” or any of the other assorted criteria that have attached themselves to the Clarke Award. On the other hand, even if it is as various people have suggested, this year’s ‘what were they thinking?’ candidate, it is better than Sheri Tepper’s The Waters Rising or even Drew Magary’s The End Specialist, which seemed to occupy a similar ‘this needs an sf backdrop to make the point” niche. Where it really belongs is on a shelf alongside Jonathan Livingston Seagull, fiction to make you feel good, assuming you can survive the associated dental caries from the sweetness of it all.

Nina Allan reviewed The Dog Stars, at Strange Horizons. She was also unimpressed..

Bridging the Gap

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

Time for another round-up of interesting things on the internet and elsewhere.

First of all, I must draw your attention to Speculative Fiction 2012, edited by Justin Landon, of Staffer’s Book Reviews and Jared Shurin of Pornokitsch. It’s the first of what many of us fervently hope will become a regular annual collection of online essays and reviews about sf, the fantastic, and other genre material, all conveniently collected in one place. It is a fantastic anthology of articles and reviews, some by people whose work I already admire intensely, some by people whose work I’m reading for the first time and already looking forward to reading more. And if it seems that I am being just a little bit circumspect in discussing the collection, that would be because I’ve got a couple of pieces in it myself and I must recuse myself from reviewing something I’m part of (though Niall Harrison offers us a hypothetical not-review here – the real problem is that most of the people who would normally review a volume like this are actually in it). I am though immensely proud that my work has been included in this inaugural volume.

My criticism appears in print as well as online but I’m very conscious of the fact that, for example, newspaper-based literary critics regularly bash blog-based critics, implying that their work is less worthy of consideration because it’s published online. Equally, I’m well aware that some book bloggers work with a set of critical criteria that seems to begin with gushing and end with squeeing and in between offers little but uncritical adoration of each and every volume the blogger lays eyes on. More than all of that, I know that there are so many book blogs out there it’s almost impossible to keep up with what’s going on. Speculative Fiction 2012 reminds us that there’s a lot of good-quality critical writing happening online and provides pointers to where it’s happening.

Nominations are already open for the 2013 volume, to be edited by the Booksmugglers, Ana Grilo and Thea James, who discuss the terms of their editorship here and provide a nomination form. Nominate early, nominate often, nominate diversely.

One of the pieces chosen for Speculative Fiction 2012 was my review of the New Yorker sf issue, published in June 2012. Laura Miller’s article from that issue, ‘The Cosmic Menagerie: What did the first fictional aliens look like’, is currently available and well worth a read.

In other news, Radio 4’s Woman’s House will feature an article asking what’s happened to the tough women in sf. I confess I feel a certain trepidation about this, but we’ll see.

I won’t get my Clarke shortlist reading done before the announcement on Wednesday but Pornokitsch offers an imaginary judgement.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

I saw this film last Sunday afternoon and my initial response was that it was weird but that I liked it. However, I’d need time to process it. Several days later, it’s still weird, I still like it in some ways, but having had time to think about it, there are things about it that make me uneasy. In many ways it defies categorisation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’m not sure whether that’s because it is actually sui generis or simply because it doesn’t really know what it is all about.

On reflection, my unease really began with the aurochs.

“I don’t think most people had ever heard the word ‘aurochs.’ So we figured we could make them whatever we wanted to make them.”[1]

This much I do know: aurochs were wild cattle that lived in Europe, Asia and North Africa. The last actually died in 1627, in Poland, apparently. The nearest we have to them now are probably things like the wild cattle of the Camargue (though apparently not the Heck cattle that were an attempt to backbreed for aurochs characteristics). In other words, as I understand it, aurochs did not have tusks, or snouts, or indeed look like giant pigs with horns. And that’s before we get on to the plausibility of aurochs being frozen alive in the Arctic ice, to be released thousands of years later by global warming, at which point they set off across the US, apparently in search of Hushpuppy, the child at the centre of this film.

Does any of this matter? I think it does, not least in terms of how best to interpret this film. On the one hand, if the viewer accepts the film as emerging from the six-year-old Hushpuppy’s own perspective on, or misunderstanding of, what is going on around her it makes sense that she might imagine an aurochs as something that is a cross between a cow and the piglet grubbing around her own house. On the other, based on the quotation above, one also has a sense of the film-makers playing a little fast and loose with terms and definitions, arguing that it’s ok, that no one will know. Which is, perhaps, to insult one’s viewers, and if they insult one’s intelligence in a relatively small way, what’s to stop them insulting the viewer’s intelligence in other ways as well?

The film centres on the child, Hushpuppy, acted with extraordinary intensity by Quvenzhané Wallis, who fully deserved her Oscar nomination for such an amazing performance. Hushpuppy lives in the bayous of Louisiana with her father, Wink, her mother having long since moved on. Wink’s views on raising a child are, to say the least, unorthodox. Hushpuppy lives along in a caravan mounted on supports of some sort while her father lives across the way in a shack. The caravan seems to be where he lived with her mother and he moved to the shack later to avoid the memories. Hushpuppy lives surrounded by her mother’s things and decorates the surfaces of the caravan with pictures of the woman she can’t remember. Outside there are chickens and dogs and a pig, and of course the forest and the bayou.

For the observer, Hushpuppy’s life might seem to be harsh – Wink seems to either believe in tough love or else simply doesn’t have a clue as to how to raise a child – yet we might admire her for her apparent self-sufficiency. We are clearly intended to see her as a child of nature, deeply attuned to everything going on around her, alert and attentive to changes in the world, all this manifested in the way she listens to creatures’ heartbeats. She is curious and observant, undoubtedly, for how else does she survive, but this metaphysical presentation of Hushpuppy clearly comes from outside; what Hushpuppy herself thinks, we don’t really know.

Similarly, one might wonder if she sees the landscape as we, the watchers, do. We’re invited to revel in the gorgeous scenery – and it is exquisitely filmed – as Hushpuppy and Wink travel up and down the bayous in their homemade boat; but for Hushpuppy, this is surely familiar. It’s home and home is not a thing children tend to romanticise, not until they’re adult and away from home. It’s safe, it’s familiar; those are different things.

And what about the neighbours? This is more complicated. The film opens with scenes of people leaving, furniture piled on station wagons and other beat-up vehicles but I couldn’t get a sense of why they were going other than it seemed to be something to do with a general concern with rising water. These were the people who were going to retreat behind the levee, a long snaking concrete barrier, with some sort of refinery behind it, practical but also symbolic of people kept out. Those who remain in the bayou, christened the Bathtub, Wink and Hushpuppy among them, form a close-knit community. Miss Bathsheba attempts to educate the children to fit them for survival in a world that is becoming increasingly threatening and difficult to understand. The adult survive by hunting, fishing, drinking and convincing themselves that come what may they will survive. One might think of them as a ship of fools, beached for now, or looking for a different form of allegory, one might turn to Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’, with its flight from reality which even so contains the seeds of destruction, but neither really fits here.

These people are presented to the observer as drunk and deluded, familiar caricatures of southern country folk, unable to live more than a day at a time. One starts to wonder who or what exactly the “Beasts” of the Southern Wild might be. Equally, one might look at them and see people who know precisely how to survive within the environment in which they’re living, while trying hard to avoid romanticising their situation as living close to nature. But how does Hushpuppy see them? These are the people she’s known all her life. They are as much as anything family to her. She presumably would not see the stereotypical moonshine-drinking country people with which the audience is presented, though we are of course also invited to find them familiar and comforting, what we expect the denizens of the bayous to be. Even their tenderness towards Hushpuppy can then be used to show that they are the salt of the earth. And they are also magical – there is one moment when Wink tells the story of, as he puts it, Hushpuppy’s conception, how he and her mother met and fell in love, how she was so elemental she could walk into the kitchen and the pots would boil without her having to light the hob. It’s wonderfully done and yet there is also that uneasy moment of feeling we’re in some sort of magical realist territory. like water for gumbo. We see the man Wink might have been if things had gone differently, but we also see a life unreasonably idealised.

Hushpuppy’s self-sufficiency is shown when her father inexplicably disappears – for how long we don’t know but we see Hushpuppy making shift for herself in a kind of timeless present – it could be days, it could be hours – until her father suddenly reappears. For the audience, it’s obvious he’s been in hospital – he’s still wearing his hospital gown – but this is something foreign to Hushpuppy. When he refuses to explain what’s going on she appears to wilfully set the caravan on fire before she runs away from him then turns and lands a heavy blow on his chest. As Wink collapses, the film links this to the sudden collapse of an ice shelf in the Arctic, which Hushpuppy seems also to hear. And of course, the storm is coming. I can see a case for Hushpuppy linking the storm and her father’s sudden collapse but the link to the collapsing ice shelf and the coming of the aurochs eludes me, and this again feels like the film-makers forcing the connection, laying down an extra cosmic environmental connection.

Some flee the storm, while others, including Wink’s friends, stay behind. It is obvious that we are to make the connection with Hurricane Katrina and yet I do so with misgivings for this is a sanitised portrayal of the aftermath of a hurricane. In a time of almost instantaneous relay of news and citizen journalism, we know what the aftermath of a hurricane looks like, and we know in intimate detail what the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in particular looked like. Yet, in the bayou, while there was a storm surge and everything is under water, there is barely a dead body, human or animal, in sight. A horse is stranded on an island here, a few chickens are rescued there, and then later a small group of girls huddled together in a shack, but for the most part the devastation consists of the picturesquely elegant subsidence of the waterside shacks. Wink’s boon companions have survived, every one, having spent the storm drunk in the bar, inevitably.

The reunion, though, is touching as is the feasting, the moment of everyone drawn together round the table as the bounty of the bayou is emptied onto the table. And then, in the subsequent days, the adults and children gather together to build a fantastic ark, part house, part greenhouse, a small floating paradise. But the bayou has been poisoned with salt water and to the community the only way to deal with this is to blow the levee and drain the water out. The authorities are finally alerted to the presence of the group and they are forcibly evacuated to some sort of refugee camp, for their own good. This presumably is the nod to the presence of FEMA in Louisiana, with ‘Brownie’ doing ‘a heck of a job’. Looking at the people confined there, we’re invited to see them as animals in cages, out of their natural environment. Miss Bathsheba has already commented that they can’t survive away from the bayou, and there is a truth in this, one might argue, insofar as they follow a very specific way of life, but given its current state, can they now survive there? Yet what is the alternative? Surrender control to people who presume to know what is best for them and die slowly of boredom and inactivity in a sterile environment. To see Hushpuppy gussied up in a smock dress with Peter Pan collar and her hair neatly combed and arranged is to see a child who is almost a parody of herself, the cute little African-American doll that white people could just eat she’s so lovely. But she’s not Hushpuppy.

There is, then a moment of relief as the group makes its break for freedom, stealing a bus, taking Wink with them when he resists, insisting that he cannot be a burden to Hushpuppy if she is to survive. It is of course heartwarming for the viewer to see the group apparently muddling through to the right decision – we’re invited to see their flight as chaos and comedy but I think it is as valid to read it as a desperate action to reclaim agency and control over their lives while they still can, though even then one can also feel the film-makers approving of this alternative reading.

Which brings us finally to the most overtly mythic portion of the film. As Wink lies dying in a wrecked shack, surrounded by his friends, in some sort of bayou pieta, Hushpuppy and the trio of young girls she rescued (and we must note a distinct lack of young boys in this brave new post-flooding world, another issue that is neatly stepped around) set out to swim to the light that they see flashing across the water, oddly reminiscent of the flashing light on Gatsby’s dock. Hushpuppy is, for some unclear reason, convinced her mother is there. We have no idea why the girls go with her though they seem transformed into water nymphs. They are picked up en route by a pontoon ferry boat that suddenly appears out of nowhere and the captain delivers them to the flashing light, which turns out to be a floating bar, the Elysian Fields. This is so far beyond Hushpuppy’s experience the joke is clearly for the watcher; we must accept that this is something external to her viewpoint yet it is so deeply implausible. Here the exhausted girls dance with the women, rocking against them, cuddled, cherished, while Hushpuppy finds herself in the kitchen with a woman whom she fervently believes is her mother yet who seems not to recognise her. Again, we are in the magical realist kitchen as the woman expertly fillets an alligator tail and turns it into fried morsels which Hushpuppy will take away with her.

It’s on the return journey that Hushpuppy and the aurochs finally encounter one another, as they pursue her and her friends across the marshes, back to the shack. We’ve already seen that the aurochs seem to have a sense of community, an awareness of one another’s needs, through a scene where one seems to fall and is helped back to its feet by the rest of the group. Now, as they approach the shack it is as if two communities, both struggling to survive, meet face to face. And here it seems clear that for the moment the aurochs are ‘real’ in that those taking shelter in the shack can see them. Hushpuppy faces down the leader of the aurochs and we must assume they recognise a kindred spirit when they kneel to her before turning away.

What to make of this sequence? Honestly, I have no idea. Are these Hushpuppy’s fears made flesh in the shape of mysterious creature from the past? Or the fears of her father and his friends for her continued survival? Or are they simply aurochs? I have no idea. It’s a hugely powerful moment in the film and yet there seems to be nothing to be reached in terms of any understanding. Or maybe we are supposed to be simply overwhelmed by the fact of the aurochs, representing raw nature. Really, I have no idea.

Wink dies, as of course he must, it having been heavily foreshadowed all through the film, although for one brief moment I did wonder if the piece of fried alligator, cooked by his former wife, that he eats for Hushpuppy’s sake would be endowed with magical properties. Mercifully for the film, it was not. Wink’s body is sent off in his burning boat by Hushpuppy, as per his request, and for all the world like a Viking funeral, and we are left with … well, with what.

The film’s final shots show a small group of adults and children, Hushpuppy among them, setting out on foot, banners flying, to cross a causeway over which the water is already slopping. We have no idea where they are going, other than into the formless, shapeless allegorical future of the film. It is, as I said at the time, life-affirming, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is intended as such, but with distance I find myself wondering what sort of positive affirmation I can and should take from this film. The indomitability of the human spirit? Yes, of course, but there can be as much of an agenda in pushing this idea as in undermining it.

If we choose to read this as a Hurricane Katrina film, one might as easily read guilt for what was not done as affirmation of what was done. And, as bell hooks, points out in an interesting article on the film, ‘No Love in the Wild’,[2] the mythic is slippery. Quoting Maurice Berger, she notes that “Myths provide the elegant deceptions that reinforce our unconscious prejudices. Myths are the white lies that tell us everything is all right, even when it is not,” before going on to observe herself that “Deploying myth and fantasy we are shown a world in Beasts of the Southern Wild where black and white poor folks live together in utopian harmony. No race talk, no racial discourse disturbs the peace.” By the same token, I see a form of desperate tough love, hooks sees one more film portrayal of the black man as brutalising force – can I justify my reading? Well, I might, but I’m honestly not sure I should. (The film’s entry on Wikipedia provides a decent summary of the film’s critical reception, for and against.

And this, I suppose, is what I now take away from the film, that the themes, images and ideas contained in it are slippery, much more slippery than the film-makers apparently realise, or at any rate than they are going to let on. It is ok on one level to simply watch the film and let the gorgeousness of the imagery wash over one (and I can’t deny that I tend to uncritically watch film as spectacle in a way I would never read a book) but to accept this film at face value is to buy into a number of very problematic ideas.

[1] Ray Tintori: “Exclusive: The Secret of the Aurochs (Those “Beasts of the Southern Wild”)

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/17/exclusive-the-secret-of-the-aurochs-those-beasts-of-the-southern-wild/

[2] bell hooks “No Love in the Wild” http://newblackman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html

Emptying the Inbox

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

A few links to keep you amused until the next “proper” post …

At last, a full video of Heartwood: Robert Holdstock and Telling the Matter of Britain, held at the British Library on 2nd September 2011, chaired by Graham Sleight, featuring Stephen Baxter, Donald E Morse, Lisa Tuttle and, standing in for Brian Aldiss at the very last moment (like thirty seconds before the event) Paul Kincaid.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is apparently bringing out one of its Digital Editions on Science Fiction. More information here but it looks interesting.

OMNI Magazine available online

Welcome to the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction, a new online journal from the Eaton Collection at the University of California at Riverside.

Coelacanth genome sequenced – because coelacanths will never be anything but utterly cool.

Also recommended: Channel 4 documentary on the rediscovery of the coelacanth. I can’t describe how happy it made me to finally see film of a living coelacanth.

Blessed Are The Cheesemakers – Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:37:00 +0000

On 1st April, I promised (absolutely no joke) that soon, soon I would be reviewing the rest of the shortlists for the Kitschies’ Red and Golden Tentacles for 2012. I had already begun with my review of Juli Zeh’s The Method back in February but there simply hadn’t been time to read everything else before the deadlines. Consequently, these reviews should not be seen as an exercise in determining after the event who should have won but the novels will be considered in the light of the awards’ rubric, namely that “The Kitschies […] reward the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic."

I want to think a little more about that rubric before I get down to critical business because I have to admit that when I was writing the Zeh review I had a certain amount of trouble with the idea. Intelligent – no problem; entertaining – well, The Method is not precisely a barrel of laughs, so I interpreted that as meaning ‘a satisfying read’, and in fact I find the satisfaction grows every time I think about the novel, so I think I got that right.

But “progressive”? It’s a term I associate primarily with US politics but in terms of fiction? The Method is an intensely political novel, and I had no problem reading it in those terms, not least because of its strong advocacy against state interference in matters of individual choice. At the same time, as I read the shortlists I found myself frequently asking ‘how is this progressive?’, only to realise that for some reason I’d automatically assumed that in this context “progressive” must mean “experimental” and refer to the way in which the novel was written rather than the subject matter. Which, given the fact that the novels I’ve read so far are fairly traditional in their construction, i.e. linear, was a little puzzling.

Having said that, “progressive” is a slippery term – to describe something as progressive is to suggest that it advocates change, improvement, reform, enlightened ideas, and so on, or alternatively, that being progressive is to be opposed to wanting to maintain the status quo. All of that could apply to form or content.

So, in part, as I work my way through these shortlisted novels, I’ll be thinking about what “progressive” might mean.

A Face Like Glass (Macmillan, 2012), shortlisted for the Kitschies' Red Tentacle, is the first of Frances Hardinge’s novels that I’ve read; it was not love at first sight. Indeed, to begin with I was rather afraid it was turning into “Silas Marner, with cheese” or possibly, given the tunnels and the fact that Grandible the cheesemaker reminded me of Badger, “Wind in the Willows, with cheese”, hardly surprising given he uses “Face 41, the badger in Hibernation”, or even “The Waterbabies, with cheese”. None of these possibilities came to pass (mercifully, I have to say) but I was still uncertain as to why this novel was proving so difficult to get through, especially when there was so much about it which ought to delight me: subterranean world (perhaps a little too obviously called Caverna); the faux-Dickensiana (so sue me, but I do like that kind of thing); the urban, if not Gothic, fairytale flavour of the whole thing; a fascination with wordplay, particularly in the construction of cheese names; and of course, Neverfell, the heroine of this story, named for the vat of cheese into which she did indeed fall.

While I enjoyed Grandible’s initial travails, hunting the mysterious presence in the cheese tunnels, it is Neverfell’s first appearance, after being hauled unceremoniously from the vat of curds, which remains with me. “It didn’t answer, but sat quivering like a guilty blancmange and staring from under pale soupy eyelashes” (4). One could pause for a moment to ask oneself what a guilty blancmange might look like, but to pause is to begin to question, and to some extent this novel relies on the reader’s being constantly willing to hurry onto the next fresh wonder, rather like Neverfell herself, once she takes centre stage seven years later.

In a recent interview, Hardinge herself describes Neverfell as being like a “caffeinated squirrel”, rushing ever onwards to the next new thing. At the beginning of the novel Neverfell is described as having “made her mind into a scrapbook, busy filling it with the fragments, stories, rumours and reports she could scavenge from talking to the delivery boys […] and failing that the wild scribblings of her own imagination” (8). But set that alongside her living “in a quiet pragmatic terror of those rare times when her persistence or puppy-clumsiness pushed Master Grandible into true anger” (9). Only a few pages in I already found it difficult to believe that Neverfell was capable of doing anything quietly, and indeed I’d argue that to the end of the novel, the biggest problem she has, insofar as it is a problem, is that she cannot dissemble or conceal her inner thoughts; not just in terms of facial expressions, hence the “face like glass”, but on some deeper level, and nor can she hold back, at least not without a very conscious effort in doing so.

On the one hand, I wonder how it is that Neverfell has preserved her zest for life through seven years of comparative seclusion with a man who seems to be remarkably taciturn but who, unlike Silas Marner, has not been particularly softened by his adopted child’s enthusiasm for everything; on the other, as she clearly has survived intact, one begins to wonder if Neverfell doesn’t in fact fall into the category of child prodigy, despite Hardinge’s dismissal of prophecy as a driver in fiction. Yet it’s hard to get past Neverfell’s arrival in Caverna, or indeed her preservation for so long as anything other than an implicit prophecy of Caverna’s downfall, simply because of her physical presence as an Outsider in a place that has shut itself off from the world. Having said that, there is something almost painfully honest in Neverfall’s continual embracing of unsuitable but suitable family figures: Maxim Childersin, Madam Appeline, Zouelle, even while she has failed to recognise the understated but genuine regard in which the likes of Master Grandible and Erstwhile hold her. Of course that is also a well-known trope but here it seems to work, perhaps because Neverfell is so open, has so little experience with which to compare what she sees around her.

For the reader, at any rate for the older reader, much of what we see is only too familiar. There is a clear divide between the upstairs world of the artisans and the downstairs world of the drudges. Having withdrawn from the world, the artisans have transformed themselves into a craft aristocracy, reminiscent of the medieval guild system, with the peasant drudges firmly at the bottom of the pile, and the servants really not much better. Again the fairytale element comes into play as the servants and drudges finally rise up against their masters, with the cunning twist that their insurrection is the means to a rather different end, not a means in itself.

And yet, for all that the artisans might be considered to be doing a day’s work in creating wines, perfumes, cheeses, there is a sense that much of this work is a matter of vanity rather than genuine endeavour, given that most of it is intended for export to the outside world which they otherwise eschew, and that their withdrawal into Caverna was a purely economic decision to begin with. Indeed, for anyone who may retain a romantic idea of the guild system, preserving the rights of the trained worker, Caverna represents a parody of that idea: William Morris would despair though possibly not actively turn in his grave. One of the strengths of this novel is the way in which Hardinge highlights the insularity of Caverna, and the dangers this brings with it. It needs a Neverfell, blissfully unaware of the effect of her facial honesty, to bring down a world so controlled that everyone must learn facial expressions in order to survive, and where the naked truth is literally intolerable.

A major weakness, though, is that A Face Like Glass seems to be overloaded with plot (and detail as well; I felt they were often fighting with one another for supremacy, and frankly the detail, which I enjoyed more, seemed to be winning. Or maybe I just like novelty). I lost track of the number of times Neverfell was either kidnapped or on trial, or trying to escape. At one point I became briefly but completely lost as to exactly who had got her this time, and occasionally felt that capture was substituting for lack of other possibilities. I wonder too about what could be called Neverfell’s political awakening. It is both splendidly utopian and yet somehow unrealistic, or possibly I am too old, too sceptical, and frankly too cynical to fully buy into it, no matter how much I would like to. I couldn’t help thinking that the Kleptomancer’s subtle takeover of Caverna was rather more realistic, the sort of thing that is all too often concealed behind utopian irruptions

I also found myself faintly uneasy yet rather taken with the response of the Outsiders who first meet the drudges of Caverna when they emerge. Of all things, I found myself wondering abut the faeryfolk in Hope Mirrlees’ Lud in the Mist: read “cheese” and “wine” for “fruit” and you might almost be seeing the other side of the equation in which the arrival of fruit brings with it chaos, much as its leaving Caverna is a matter of business for a society constrained by an overwhelming desire for conformity.

It’s difficult to sum up my feelings about A Face Like Glass. There were questions I had which were not answered, moments when I felt intensely irritated, other moments when I was barely hanging onto the story’s thread. At times the politics seemed naive. And yet, and I admit to being faintly annoyed by this at times, once I finally got into it, there was something oddly compelling about the story, most likely Neverfell’s very unpredictability. One could make a case for that being mapped into the storytelling itself though I think that would be to excuse the fact that the novel itself is mildly out of control: just because your protagonist is running wild this doesn’t necessarily mean that the narrative should as well. There was also a sense of richness which didn’t always sit well with my own more austere literary digestion. Playfulness sometimes teetered on the brink of tweeness, and sometimes fell over, especially in the choice of names. Having said that, I don’t recall us ever criticising Dickens for this. In the end, I have to settle for a qualified enjoyment of this novel, liking it in spite of myself.

To read Tom Pollock's interview with Frances Hardinge, go here

Making an Emotional Investment – surviving the announcement of the Hugo Award shortlists

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 05:37:00 +0000

I’ve spent most of the week stewing on thoughts of award shortlists, or more precisely on thoughts of reactions to award shortlists. While I wasn’t writing them down because I was busy elsewhere, Jonathan McCalmont and Paul Kincaid seized the day and both wrote fascinating posts about sf awards (Jonathan here and Paul here), and the Hugos in particular. Initially, I felt their posts would make mine redundant but, on reflection, I think there’s room for this post as well, particularly as I believe I’m coming at the topic from a slightly different angle.

I first properly paid attention to the Booker Prize in 1984, the year that J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun was shortlisted, and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac won. Indeed I paid attention because Empire of the Sun was shortlisted. Insofar as I can now reconstruct what my younger self thought about it, it was probably something along the lines of myself as a rather earnest sf fan, a bit fed up with people being rude about science fiction, believing that Ballard’s being shortlisted in some way demonstrated the worth of sf because he was after all ‘one of us’.

Without actually reading Empire of the Sun, I was already fairly sure that the Ballard was the best novel (probably basing my opinion on book reviews I’d read and on discussions on tv and radio). I recall being incredibly disappointed that Ballard hadn’t won, as indeed were many people I knew at the time. There was a sense somehow that we, along with Ballard, had been rejected; that Empire of the Sun, although not science fiction, was considered somehow tainted because of Ballard’s connection to the genre, and therefore not good enough.

Some years later, by this time having read both the Ballard and the Brookner, I was now genuinely baffled that Hotel du Lac had won because, to my mind, it was and remains a pallid little book, limp and uninteresting, in terms of technique and subject matter, whereas the Ballard was clearly the better-written book and far more interesting as well.

In fact, only as recently as last year, when letters between Richard J Cobb, chair of the Booker judges, and friends including Hugh Trevor-Roper were published, was it revealed that Ballard was almost certainly robbed, and effectively so were several other people. Keith Jeffery reviewed My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others edited by Tim Heald and, among other things, made this observation about Cobb’s handing of the Booker Prize: ‘he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.’

On the one hand, this confirms that instinctive sense I had then, and when I read the Brookner, that something was critically wrong with the award that year. On the other hand, viewed at this distance, I find myself less surprised than I might have been in, say, 1990, had I learned then that Cobb had been machinating, not because it appears to have been the kind of thing that Cobb did, but because I understand now that judges, juries, chairs of awards, often have hidden agendas, sometimes so hidden that they don’t even realise themselves that they have them. The only thing that is unusual here is that Cobb boasted openly about his actions to close friends. I’ve not see the letters so have no idea what his grounds were for keeping Amis and Carter off the shortlist, any more than I know why he manoeuvred to avoid the award going to Ballard, though that he did so clearly indicates that some of the judges that year thought Ballard should get it. Having said that, the great tragedy here is the fate of Flaubert’s Parrot which many think should have been the novel for which Barnes won the Booker rather than The Sense of an Ending in 2011.

But let’s unpick this situation a little further and think not about Richard Cobb’s actions, despicable as they may now seem, but about my response, then and now. What we can see from my response then is that it exhibited a considerable amount of emotional investment in the award because J.G. Ballard was an sf writer, ‘one of us’. Had I known then, as I know now, that Ballard saw himself as having long since moved on from sf, I might well have thought rather differently. I might not have actually been that interested in the Booker at the time, although I would probably have read both novels later and still been somewhat surprised that the Brookner won.

Going back to Ballard, I suspect I’d have been upset had someone told me then that he did not see himself as an sf writer, and hadn’t done for a long time, and I might well have regarded it as a betrayal – because, of course, I also had a heavy emotional investment in sf, and would have found it difficult then to imagine why anyone might abandon it, not least because, to my eye at least, Ballard was still writing things that looked science-fictional. And Empire of the Sun did seem science-fictional to me in terms of the alienating effects of Jim’s experiences, still does. I suppose I might even have been pleased that he’d lost, a suitable punishment for losing one’s faith, but I suspect that I would have rather he had won anyway, so that people paid attention to the novel.

Because, of course, what I was most upset about was the perceived snub to us, the ‘science fiction’ community, and to me as a science-fiction reader. While I was not then aware of the artistic struggle to place sf firmly in the literary mainstream I was only too aware that many people thought that sf and fantasy were rubbish, childish, whatever. At that stage I couldn’t adequately articulate why this was not the case but I could and already did annoy people by pointing out elements of the fantastic where they surfaced in realist writing. I’d clearly already identified the idea of a science-fictional or fantastic sensibility in apparently realist writing although I couldn’t yet put it in quite those terms.

Empire of the Sun winning the Booker would have given me more ammunition for the argument with (as, indeed would Flaubert’s Parrot, had it won, though from entirely the other standpoint) but Hotel du Lac’s victory crushed that hope – and yes, I probably did take it that personally. So even as I discovered the Booker, I was already disillusioned by it. I followed it religiously for a number of years, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still follow it after a fashion, but I lost my sense of personal investment in it almost in the process of discovering it. Nowadays, I view it cynically, waiting to see which novel possessing clearly fantastical elements is proclaimed as ‘literary’ or ‘mainstream’ because it is too well-written to be sf or fantasy. Clearly, I still haven’t quite got over my original disappointment.

However, the Booker doesn’t interest me in the way it once did. I don’t have a personal stake in it at all, not even when there is something that is clearly fantastical in the running. It is little more than a snapshot of what a particular group of people think about a particular group of books that they were sent to read during a particular year. They probably do a conscientious job of looking at them all and doubtless give careful consideration to what goes on the longlist and the shortlist. And I know that in the same way as I know that it is a snapshot of people’s tastes, drawn from a particular pool of books, and also a marketing exercise. What I write about the longlisted or shortlisted books makes no difference whatsoever except insofar as if I rave about a particular book, maybe two or three readers of this blog, whose tastes tend to chime with mine, might decide to give it a whirl.

It is easy enough to disengage oneself from the Booker because it is so remote. For a few years when I was young I had a kind of investment in it because I felt that familiarity with the shortlist would make me look cultured in the eyes of some but as time has gone on, I have realised that there is more to being knowledgeable about literature than having an encyclopaedic knowledge of Booker nominees, winners and their novels.

This theoretically should hold true even for awards closer to home, such as the Hugos, the Nebulas, the Tiptree, the Clarke Award, the BSFA Awards and the Kitschies, especially the juried ones, where most of us have no actual input. And yet, as we saw last year with the Clarke Award shortlist, the furore surrounding it was extraordinary, probably way out of proportion to the award’s actual significance in the wider literary world. It seemed like everyone I knew had an opinion … and expressed it forcefully.

What seemed to be at stake was that ‘we’, a shadowy innumerable group of sf readers, or stakeholders if you like, felt that the judges, the people we saw as representing us, had somehow let us down by being less ‘expert’ than we perhaps felt they should have been. Although we had no involvement in their becoming judges (this is the prerogative of the committees of those organisations who nominate judges) we nonetheless saw them as embodying our tastes and shaping the award we saw as representative of our tastes in sf, and in this instance failing us by not including the novels we felt they should. This is clearly nonsensical when viewed dispassionately, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we tend to view the juried award as a more accurate barometer of what is good, significant, award-worthy, whatever, than the popular award. Until, of course, it doesn’t yield the kind of result we think it should, at which point it somehow becomes flawed.

And yet, what else can it be but flawed, albeit often in small, almost invisible ways? Because, as with an award like the Booker, judges have their prejudices and biases, ones they may not even be aware of. In fact, I’m prepared to argue that to some extent at least this is actually a necessary part of the process. Without disagreement it is difficult to reach agreement. The Clarke Award has the same non-voting jury chair from year to year, lending a greater neutrality to the business of facilitating discussion among the judges, but even so it must be up to the judges to make the decision as to what they are going to look for in a worthy Clarke Award winner, and that must inevitably vary each year as the membership of the jury changes.

In which case, I must ask what it achieves to become as exercised as so many of ‘us’ did over the shortlist last year if we cannot actually do anything about it? It is a question that troubles me because I cannot find a sensible answer to it. Indeed, I’m not sure there is one. On the one side, such an intense level of debate demonstrates that the Clarke Award is an important part of the intellectual landscape of sf, and that it is seen as a significant index of what is happening in the field in the UK. However, on the other, are we so emotionally engaged that we are unable to step back and reflect more soberly on what the shortlist is saying?

Having said that, I tried to do this with the Shortlist Project last year; in the process I realised that I also had certain expectations of the award and the shortlisting process. They weren’t necessarily unreasonable but it became clear to me that I needed to question my own assumptions about the award. At the end of the project, I still felt the shortlist was almost wilfully aberrant in its inclusions and exclusions but at the same time I did at least feel I’d tested my own perception of the award, and that it wasn’t quite what I’d thought it was.

In fact, I think the Clarke Award is probably as transparent as it can be, given its particular structure. Publishing the full list of submissions demonstrates clearly what the jury had available to it to work with, which eliminates certain criticisms. If they haven’t already thought about it, I think providing a formal mechanism for people to draw attention to the novels the jury might have missed when calling in submissions would be a useful thing, if this is not already under consideration. The Tiptree Award does this and it strikes me as a useful way to enable ‘us’ to engage productively with the Clarke Award, satisfying us that the Award did know about this title or that, and removing a certain element of post-shortlist argument that invariably seems to surface.

For my own part, I have been thinking about how to engage with the shortlist, given that by the time it is announced, it is pretty much futile to spend too much time asking why X or Y was left off when really, the only question that can be asked is ‘why were these books shortlisted?’ Sometimes, the answer, as in the case of the infamous Tepper novel, must remain ‘I have no idea why’ but at least extends to the jury the courtesy of supposing they must have had a good reason even if it remains opaque to the outside observer.

This year the response to the shortlist has been more muted, whether because we are all still taken aback by last year or because the shortlist doesn’t seem to have set people on fire, I am not sure. There are seemingly obvious omissions – Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass is not included, and nor is M John Harrison’s Empty Spaces, both of which would have seemed to be shoo-ins. However, again I am reserving judgement until I have read the entire shortlist.

But if I can only address the Clarke Award as a done deal, wondering why they did that, the Hugos are a whole different kettle of fish. My emotional investment in the Hugos probably died in 1995, the year that David Gerrold’s ‘The Martian Boy’ won the Best Novelette category. If you were in the Glasgow YMCA the morning after the ceremony and saw a young woman kneeling on the floor of the foyer, banging her head against the floor, that was me, in despair, and none too particular who knew about it.

Having looked back at the shortlist I cannot for the life of me think now what it was I wanted to win, though probably Le Guin’s ‘The Matter of Seggri’ but I do know I thought Gerrold’s story was not only cloyingly sentimental, it was cynically eliciting a particular response from his audience when it was well known that he had himself adopted a boy and the story was based in part on their relationship. I suspected that this was in turn why the story won the Hugo. We’re almost all of us suckers for a happy ever after. However, whereas I accepted that the Booker had some fierce politics going on under the surface, I suppose I still hoped that the Hugo voting was based mostly on literary merit. And clearly it wasn’t. After that, while I didn’t exactly ignore the Hugos, I found myself less and less certain what they were for. I’d tended to regard them as representing a benchmark for good sf writing but by this time I felt I could no longer rely on them to serve that purpose and I wasn’t sure where to go next with them. Mostly, I ignored them.

Given that I now find myself as part of a loose online community that regularly discusses sf, including topics such as the Hugo awards, I’ve found myself thinking about them again. The arguments go back and forth about the point of the Hugos, especially whether they’re a popular vote for the author rather than a recognition of a story’s intrinsic merit. It is probably impossible to provide empirical data to show that, for the novel at least, it is an author-driven rather than text-driven award, but my sense is that this seems to be so, not least because the same authors so often seem to appear on the shortlists.

Paul Kincaid and Jonathan McCalmont both discuss the nature of the Hugo voting constituency as well as the structure of the awards themselves, not to mention the problems of trying to change them, so I shan’t bother recapitulating that yet again. Instead, I want to think again from the point of the emotional investment and how, rather than looking at the shortlists and thinking ‘jesus christ’, I can usefully engage with the Hugos as a stakeholder of some sort. Again, Jonathan McCalmont outlines some possibilities, the most important of which is actually nominating. I can’t deny the sense of what he is saying and I’m as guilty as the next person in this respect. I’ve not bought a supporting membership in recent years because, bluntly, however important I might now consider the Hugos to be, a supporting membership is a luxury I haven’t been able to afford, not as a self-funding postgraduate student with a small debt mountain to my name (though I hope this may change in the next year or so).

On the other hand, I also have the impression that Hugo nominators are drawing on a very limited set of resources for their nominations (except perhaps in the short story category this year, which is just bizarre) which is why the same names seem to resurface so much, especially in the novel. Last year I noticed one or two people flagging up interesting things that ought to be nominated for Hugos, though less so this year (although I have been rather distracted these last few months so many have missed it this year).

On the other hand most activity of this sort seems to be people drawing attention to the eligibility of their own work, again as Jonathan noted, rather than to that of other people. It seems to me that one thing I can at least do is to flag up material I come across, not just before the nomination process closes, but all through the year, to keep the issue firmly in people’s minds. If there is to be a genuine investment in making the Hugos ‘our’ awards, the way so many people seem to think they should be then this also needs to be part of the process. It may not achieve immediate results, and it’s certainly not enough on its own but it might help to push the argument beyond the usual expressions of horror at this time of year. And frankly, that would be welcome.

Award announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:46:00 +0000

And the final post of this weekend session of blogging features assorted links and announcements.

First, congratulations to all the winners of the 2012 BSFA Awards, announced at Eastercon in Bradford last night.

NOVEL: Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

SHORT FICTION: ‘Adrift on the Sea of Rains’ by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)

NON-FICTION: The World SF Blog, Lavie Tidhar, chief editor

ARTWORK: Blacksheep for Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Also, the winner of the Philip K Dick Award was announced on March 29th, at Norwescon.

Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)

Special citation:

Lovestar by Andri Snær Magnason (Seven Stories Press)

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust.

And, to round things off, the Hugo Award shortlists were announced over the weekend. Rather than my listing them all, I suggest you follow the link and read the full details here.

Coming soon: reviews of the Kitschies Red and Golden Tentacle shortlists.

The Godless Boys – Naomi Wood

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:30:00 +0000

Naomi Wood’s The Godless Boys (Picador, 2011) was mentioned a number of times early last year as a possibility the Clarke Award shortlist, along with Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. I never included them on the actual Shortlist Project list but always intended to read them and append my thoughts to the main body of the project. I covered Zone One yesterday; it clearly engages with genre tropes even if it’s also doing something else, and I enjoyed it a good deal. I could see it as a Clarke Award shortlist outlier. However, I cannot say the same about The Godless Boys, for all sorts of reasons, which I shall now enumerate and discuss.

Genre, literary and mainstream, whatever they mean as terms individually, are all part of a reading continuum so far as I’m concerned. I’m fairly eclectic in my tastes and move happily back and forth along that continuum. I understand that different writers use the same tropes and devices in different ways and I try to be open to what they’re doing. Whitehead used zombies to satirise elements of contemporary culture but he did so from the point of view of understanding thoroughly how the trope works and, indeed, adding to it in a rather poignant way (which may make him the only person I can think of who has written sympathetically about zombies). Though his novel primarily addresses the problems of rebuilding civilisation using the fragments of a civilisation that was not fit for purpose to begin with, while also being quietly elegiac for that which has been lost, the different elements of story solidly support one another in their overall endeavour.

The Godless Boys employs another staple of the sf genre, the alternative history. The premise here is that at some point in the late 1940s (there is no indication that World War II ever occurred), an upsurge in religious fervour led to the election to government of a fervently Christian political party. This led to people having to be registered as Christian or non-affiliated, which in turn led to increasing discrimination of the non-affiliated, in a manner deeply reminiscent of the ways in which Jews were treated in pre-war Nazi Germany in our own timeline, mixed in with elements of the USA’s Jim Crow segregation rules and various other bits of discriminatory behaviour taken from recent world history. This leads to the rise of the Secular Movement in the early 1950s, whose acts included firebombing places of worship and results in members of the Movement being deported to an island off the north-east coast of England.

A reader’s understanding of how a trope works can sometimes come into conflict with an author’s use of that trope. Had Wood simply set her novel in a different place, that is, if she’d devised an alternative history, used it as a background without comment, and got on with the story, I might have briefly wondered where the point of divergence had been and got on with the story itself. If the background is sufficiently secure in the writer’s mind, I would argue that it is also secure on the page and the reader will only momentarily pause to wonder.

As it is, Wood spends so much time fiddling around with dates, establishing a chronological history for the Movement, the reader’s attention immediately turns to wondering when the point of divergence occurred. In all, it becomes a distraction from the actual story; one spends too much time worrying over how a religious party might have come to power in 20th-century Britain, or rather England, given there is no indication that anywhere else exists in this alternative timeline, as though England exists under a glass cover, cut off from the rest of the world. And so the reader becomes overly preoccupied with things that shouldn’t really matter. As if that were not enough, she also provides a timeframe for the novel itself, providing dates for sections, once again suggesting that she herself is not really clear where in time this novel exists.

Indeed, one might ask whether it exists in time at all, for the novel itself is set almost exclusively on the island, or rather, the Island. It has no other name and, for that matter, no geographical location other than that it is somewhere off the coast of north-east England, a ten-hour boat trip from Newcastle, and thirty years back in time from 1986. Of course, no such island exists, though the situation on the island reminded me oddly of the Channel Islands during German occupation.

The island, of course, is a classic metaphor of isolation, a microcosmic society, a prison. Yet, once again, I found myself asking all those difficult questions about its social organisation and its economy, dependent as it is on those who exiled its inhabitants for pretty much everything. The deprivation is of course a punishment but the motives of the ruling party remain unclear; why send them into internal exile? Why not expel them from the country altogether, other than that it wouldn’t make much of a story.

Except, of course, that it would, because the prevailing political and religious climate, the island’s isolation, are revealed in turn to be irrelevant to the actual heart of the story. They provide things to do, reasons for people to be where thy are, and they make life difficult, but in truth, this story does not need religious extremism any more than it needs to be set on an island. at the heart of the story are teenage boys with nothing to do and a teenage girl looking for her lost mother. This is a novel about grief, mourning, emotional deprivation and failures of communication, and that could be set anywhere. Indeed, it is noticeable that once Wood stops fussing about establishing the setting and the nature of the community and focuses on the relationships between the members of the Malades, a gang of teenage boys led by Nathaniel Malraux, the other islanders and the stowaway, Sarah Wicks, who has come looking for her mother, the storytelling does begin to improve. Wood is much better at evoking that small but significant detail that evokes the nature of a relationship than she is at telling a story that exploits setting and society. Which prompts one to ask why she settled for this unconvincing alternative history of secular persecution and island exile in the first place.

Yes, the Malades exist in order to ferret out evidence of English spies, of people having returned to Christian worship, driven by Nathaniel’s need to avenge his father’s death – Nathaniel wears his father’s work boots, which he literally has yet to grow into – but this is merely a convenient peg on which to hang their existence rather than something central to the novel. Indeed, the Malades owe as much to Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange as they do to anything else. Again, they could come from anywhere or belong anywhere. They need neither an alternative history or an island in order to spring into being.

In the end, this novel simply doesn’t make sense. It feels as though a series of unwise choices were made, forcing the author to tread a certain path, to the point where it was simpler to go on than to turn back. There is a sense of growing confidence in the writing as though the author has finally realised what she wants to write about by the time she gets to the end, but what to do with the material she has accumulated along the way? Easier to retain it than to start again? It’s hard to blame the author after all that work but it does mean that the novel as it now exists feels as though it’s been pulled and pushed all over the place before being wrangled into something that will pass for a novel. That can’t have been satisfying for the writer and it certainly isn’t satisfying for the reader. Not even a helpful subtitle – A Story of Love and Violence – can entirely rescue it.

I suppose the point is that whereas Whitehead understood how tropes work and used them to his advantage Naomi Wood has used tropes to try and paper over the weaknesses in the story, to provide instant background and story setting, without fully appreciating how this might impinge on the actual plot (which is, god knows, thin enough as it is). There is, to be fair, some potential in this novel, but it remains hidden behind the frantic hand-waving and pick-and-mix approach until it’s far too late to be of any use.

Zone One – Colson Whitehead

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 17:37:00 +0000

First we take Manhattan …

I have never found zombies especially interesting. Indeed, in terms of genre tropes, I’ve never been quite clear what they are actually for. Once you get past the idea of their being the ‘living dead’, with an unfortunate taste for live flesh, and especially ‘brainssss!’ there is not a lot to be done with them except to get rid of them. This in turn leads to orgies of shooting or setting fire to them (and indeed, Zone One, will fall victim to that though not as much as other zombie novels, and it will show some concern about the brutalisation of zombies). This in turn becomes mind-numbing, which may or may not be the point. It is extremely hard to feel any emotional connection towards a zombie, unless it’s someone you knew well in real life, and even then any connection is quickly destroyed by the way the zombie itself must inevitably behave, even towards someone it once knew. So, the presence of zombies tends to prompt one of two things. Either they become a usefully slow-moving and endlessly disposable background against which to play out a drama which may be utterly irrelevant to their presence or else they carry some sort of metaphorical burden for the rest of the novel.

And so we come to Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (Harvill Secker, 2011), an unequivocal zombie novel. However, there is a curious tagline on the cover, which runs ‘A zombie novel with brains’. On the one hand, it is of course playing with the one thing we all ‘know’ about zombies, their alleged love for brains; on the other it’s difficult to avoid the implication that Whitehead’s novel is different, special even, because, not to put too fine a point on it, Whitehead is not known as a genre writer but as an inhabitant of the ‘literary’ end of the island, in the same way that Harvill Secker is not known for publishing genre. Goodness knows whose idea it was to include this tagline, given that Whitehead is a man who, as his article in the New Yorker last year showed, has a well developed appreciation of horror films and their tropes, but I already dislike the air of sniffiness it generates, with its suggestion that Whitehead’s novel is somehow better than other – genre – zombie novels. The trouble is, based on the small sample of zombie novels I’ve read in the last two or three years – the first two volumes of Mira Grant’s lamentable Newsflesh Trilogy and Alden Bell’s curious but frequently irritating The Reapers are the Angels – Whitehead’s novel is head and shoulders above both.

In this novel, as in others, zombification comes about because of infection and is spread in part by the dead biting the living. We are given no idea of how the plague began, though we incidentally learn much about the havoc it has wrought. However, what is noticeable from the very beginning of the novel is that rather than having his protagonists make long journeys in search of other survivors, enabling him to present the broader post-apocalyptic situation, a typical trope in recent zombie novels, Whitehead’s protagonists are instead much more limited in their movements, hunkered down as they are in a military-run refugee camp in Manhattan, part of a force whose job is to clear the island of zombies and make it safe for human residents again. Government, such as it is in these parts, has retreated to Buffalo, NY, but regaining control of New York, Manhattan especially, as it is an island, would be good for morale, and indeed for public relations. (As we shall see, PR plays an important part in this zombie apocalypse.) Zone One is the lower part of Manhattan, now cordoned off behind a hastily thrown-up barricade, and already cleared of ambulant zombies. It is the job of the civilian volunteers to go from building to building, clearing out the so-called ‘stragglers’ (and I’ll come back to them shortly).

Being tied to a particular place, at the mercy of poor communications, emphasises people’s vulnerability, inevitably, but on top of this Whitehead’s narrator, ‘Mark Spitz’ (we never learn his ‘real’ name, insofar as that matters, given that much of this novel is engaged with what it means to be forced into a new life, and a new identity), is introspective and has been all his life. It is as though he has always viewed his life at a distance, being emotionally detached from all of it, waiting for the moment when he will finally engage with the world. For Mark Spitz, as we will begin to realise through the course of the novel, that moment came during his period ‘in the wild’, fighting zombies, surviving, finding his way to the refugee camp. Since then he has merely existed, biding his time, waiting from day to day for … well, for what? One might argue that for much of his life ‘Mark Spitz’ has lain dormant, waiting like an insect pupa for the very particular circumstances that will allow him to realise his full potential. Occasionally, a different person shows himself. Mark Spitz is a nom du guerre bestowed after Mark refuses to jump off a bridge to save himself, because he can’t swim, and instead shoots his way out of a trap, singlehandedly killing seventy-something zombies in the process. Mostly, though, Mark Spitz gets by; the only real indicators that he is in any way distressed are his comparative silence and his belief that he sees white ash falling around him all the time.

While Mark Spitz may be geographically confined, there are no such restrictions on his thoughts. In the three days that we travel with Omega patrol (Mark Spitz, Gary from Connecticut, and Kaitlyn)– their last three days together, as it turns out – we travel back and forth through Mark’s memory, gradually learning his story and something of his companions’ stories as well.

One thing to be aware of is that being confined to Manhattan and its environs is, for Mark, something of a dream come true. The novel opens with a lengthy passage concerning his memories of childhood visits to his Uncle Lloyd, who lived in Manhattan: ‘in the long stretches in between visits he daydreamed about living in his apartment’ (3). In part it is because Uncle Lloyd’s flat contains everything missing from Mark’s life. While Uncle Lloyd has all the latest devices, Mark’s parents have ‘a coffee machine that didn’t tell time, dictionaries made out of paper, a camera that only took pictures’ (3). One might speculate whether Mark isn’t really in love with Uncle Lloyd’s heavily consumerist lifestyle. On the other hand, one might equally ask why it is that Mark’s parents are so resistant to these markers of progress? It’s not money, so far as can be told, nor even a fully articulated resistance to rampant consumerism, so much as a sense that they just don’t need these things. As a result, Mark exists in a state of consumerist feast and famine, seeing these wondrous things only when they visit his uncle.

Yet, it isn’t just about the gizmos and gadgets. Mark describes watching the skyline from the windows of his uncle’s apartment, ‘feeling weird about the pull the skyline had on him’:

He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth. (4)

As Mark walks through the streets of the deserted city, he has an acute awareness of what it was once like.

He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another’s shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term. Yesterday’s old masters, stately named and midwifed by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks. Behind the façades their insides were butchered, reconfigured, rewired, according to the next era’s new theories of utility. Classic six into studio honeycomb, sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubicle mill. In every neighbourhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t any place else. It was New York City. (6)

That’s a long quotation but it seems to encapsulate much of what is going on in this novel, and is reflected in Mark Spitz’s thoughts as he and Omega patrol go about their work. They clear stragglers. Stragglers are zombies who might best be described as having become stuck in time and space. For whatever reason they have returned to a place, a memory, that holds significance for them and have become frozen in a pose that is a part of that memory. One can only guess at what has prompted them to do this. They seem to be harmless but, if Manhattan is to be reclaimed, they must be removed, so Omega patrol, like all the other patrols, sweeps each office block, each apartment block, up to twenty stories high, putting a bullet through each head so they cannot come back to life, then bagging and disposing of the corpses.

Mark is constantly aware of the ways in which buildings have been altered, retrofitted, converted. He’s sensitive to the reiterated layouts of flats and offices, as well as to the consumer choices people have made. He is also acutely aware of the fact that however familiar each situation seems to him, for the people he finds this was their unique experience. It is, though, also a powerful reminder to Mark of what he might have become; although he finally worked in Manhattan he never quite made the move to live there too, instead returning to his parents on Long Island, saving for the transformation that never came about. The reader suspects that it would never have happened at all, but now we will never know.

Mark Spitz ‘believed that he had successfully banished thoughts of the future’ (26), but it is obvious that for all his silence, he hasn’t banished thoughts of the past, and late in the novel, revisiting a restaurant he went to many times with his parents as a child, Mark Spitz addresses the fact that he is himself a straggler of sorts, fluttering around Manhattan, unable to bring himself to leave. He wonders what sort of straggler he might have been, already knowing the answer: ‘What did he love, what place had been important to him? Job or home, bull’s-eye of cathected energy. Yes, he loved his home. Perhaps he’d end up there, installing himself in his worn perch on the right-hand side of the sofa’ (155). It makes it easier perhaps to understand by Mark prefers to live in a constant state of ‘now’, suspended in time.

However bizarre it might seem, Mark Spitz is a survivor. He has always seen himself as a student, doing just enough to get by, yet one could as easily interpret this as a knack for knowing instinctively what a situation demands in order to survive as comfortably as possible without too much effort: ‘There was a code for every interaction and he tuned in. … He staked out the B or the . B chose him: it was his native land, and in high school and college he did not stray over the county line. At any rate his lot was irrevocable’ (9). In perilous situations this is translated into ‘a knack for last-minute escapes and improbable getaways’ (26) – think of the bridge shoot-out with a huge crowd of zombies. It is a skill uniquely suited to his present situation but does this mean that between times Mark Spitz functions like a zombie? That most other people do too? It is perhaps not surprising that Mark Spitz takes some time to realise, after Last Night, that anything is wrong because to all intents and purposes his neighbour seems much as it always is.

One wonders too how Mark Spitz will function in a future which already has its own theme tune, in which low-grade looting by volunteers is allowed, but only from the goods of the reconstruction’s official sponsors, and to a certain price level. This is a reboot of civilisation being organised by creatives and business types; as such it seems to have little purchase on reality. When Ms Macy, all stilettos and highly buffed nail polish, visits from Buffalo to note progress, she is disappointed to find broken windows and shot-out locks and is more concerned with changing the decor of the apartments to be commandeered for the new inhabitants of Manhattan. It is difficult to imagine that someone could be so out of touch as Ms Macy and yet, to judge from the reports we see, Buffalo is some sort of fools’ paradise, about to be rapidly disabused of its belief in its own rhetoric that things are getting better by the moment.

As Whitehead shows, rebooting civilisation is not about anthems and changing the decor but about tiny achievements, like growing a field of corn and harvesting it, working from the bottom up rather than top down, which suggests already that this attempt at regeneration if not doomed to failure is going to turn out rather different to how the government imagines. Those who try to stay in the countryside or attempt survival by holing up in an apartment are referred to as ‘homesteaders’, the implication being that those pioneer skills are what’s needed in order to survive, not corporate sponsorship. Having said that, it’s also clear that one cannot survive in isolation yet big gatherings bring bigger dangers, attracting the zombies.

Disintegration, when it comes, is swift and as dreadful as one might imagine, though not always in the way one might imagine. Alongside the zombie invasion comes the revelation that this was only ever a PR stunt: lives being wasted to provide a little of that vital morale-boosting PR copy . We’ve been with Omega patrol for one novel, spread over three days and this sudden intimacy has brought us to care about these people, however artificial the circumstances. Yet, when the system fails, we run with Mark Spitz because what else can we do? It’s been three short days in the middle of something incomprehensible. We’re no closer to knowing why there are zombies, what the zombies want now that there are more of them. Maybe they all wanted what New York City represented and have been migrating across the country, struggling to reach this beacon of prosperity, success and consumer durables. Perhaps plague has stripped them of everything except their deepest consumerist impulses, and here they are, unstoppable.

Perhaps that is why this is a zombie novel with brains. Whitehead undoes those flights of survivalist fantasy in which the survivors win the day, examining the standard tropes in which humans can and finally will outnumber the zombies, set up a new civilisation and go on as before. He seems to be suggesting that something so new, so radical is required that it can barely be articulated, though it is perhaps embodied in the unlikely shape of Mark Spitz and people like him. On the other hand, it certainly does not lie with corporate sponsorship, feelgood anthems and all the other trappings of a modern consumer culture.

There is of course an argument to be had that Whitehead is being a little too obvious in his targetting – zombies as the product of an overwhelming consumer culture – and this is perhaps true to an extent, insofar as this is obviously intended in part to be a satire, but I think it is redressed by Mark Spitz’s commentary. He is fully aware that he is as much a zombie as those stragglers he encounters but he is always acutely aware of the fact that they were once living people, like him and his parents, with hopes, fears, aspirations which, however absurd to others, meant something to them, and it is his understated tenderness in accounting for that which protects the novel from that accusation. He may be a straggler but he is also a living witness, providing a poignant testimony of that which has been lost.

This is the first of Colson Whitehead’s novels that I’ve read but I doubt it will be the last. My response to his writing seems to be of a piece with my response to Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men; in each case I was drawn to a novel with sort of genre connection but the quality of the writing prompts me to seek out their other novels, irrespective of subject. I’ve not been disappointed with Kunzru so far; I’m hoping Whitehead won’t disappoint me either.

The Kitschies, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 12:26:00 +0000

Belatedly, a note about the 2012 Kitschies, which were awarded last Tuesday, at a very lively ceremony at the Free Word Centre in Islington.

The Kitschies are given annually for the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic. Deliberately, they eschew the use of ‘best’; the emphasis on ‘progressive, intelligent and entertaining’ has thrown up some interesting shortlists since the award got started, something I’m going to have to explore in more detail when I have time.

Anyway, this year’s winners are:

Red Tentacle (Novel): Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker (William Heinemann)

Golden Tentacle (Debut): Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo (Jo Fletcher Books)

Inky Tentacle (Cover Art): Dave Shelton's A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, illustrated by the author (David Fickling Books)

The Black Tentacle: the discretionary prize for an outstanding contribution to the conversation surrounding genre literature, was awarded to The World SF Blog

So far, I’ve only read Juli Zeh’s The Method (which I reviewed here) but I have the rest of the Red Tentacle and Golden Tentacle shortlists piled up around my study, so will be reviewing my way through them in the next few weeks.

I was particularly struck by the presentation of the Inky Tentacle, for cover art; the presenter-judges made the point that they were looking at book design, cover as part of book, etc. Which made me think of that piece I wrote way back when discussing the 2011 BSFA Artwork shortlist and my problem with judging the nominations. The Inky Tentacle seems to directly address my dilemma then. And what a relief to see cover designs that did not feature hyperrealist depictions of impossibly posed young women and men pretending to be elves, thieves, assassins, whatever. I’ve always disliked the hyperrealist covers and could wish that the latest trend for them could be stifled asap).

So, a very enjoyable evening – how could it not be with rum, tentacles, Nick Harkaway’s suit, and a lively crowd of people who like good fiction?

On Wednesday, Nick Harkaway published his more detailed thoughts on winning the Red Tentacle, and Lavie Tidhar discussed his feelings about the World SF Blog winning the Black Tentacle. Both articles are thought-provoking and well worth reading.

Ghost Planet – Sharon Lynn Fisher

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:37:00 +0000

It’s not often that I write about novels that I think are just plain bad; life is short and there are so many other things I could be writing about. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris lately, and the book I’m going to discuss is part of the literary hinterland.

I taught Solaris this term, as a result of which I not only read it again after many years (both translations) but also finally got around to watching the Tarkovsky film and overcame my dislike of George Clooney sufficiently to watch the Soderbergh remake as well, and indeed to enjoy it, despite George Clooney.

It was while I was in the middle of this minor Solaris jag that I came across Sharon Lynn Fisher’s Ghost Planet (Tor, 2012). According to her article on SF Signal Fisher was inspired first by seeing the Soderbergh film, which in turn sent her back to Lem’s novel. And it just so happened she had a title – Ghost Planet, a rather banal title if we are honest – in need of a story. You can probably see where this is heading.

In truth, I knew my engagement with this novel wasn’t going to end well when I read ‘Where Lem pretty much left it up to the reader to decide on the true nature of the alien intelligence, I wanted to explore and flesh out this concept.’ Because, though I may have misunderstood Lem in this, I had rather thought the point was that hitherto it had been absolutely impossible for the human scientists to comprehend the ‘alien intelligence’. Indeed, the entire novel was based on a double inability to communicate and comprehend; as the scientists experiment with Solaris, so it is experimenting with them, and has chosen to do so through making material the fragments of thought and ideas that weigh most heavily on its ‘subjects’: in Kelvin’s case this happens to be his dead wife, Rheya/Harey

Fisher goes on to say ‘I stuck with the idea that the nature of the ghosts was obscured (in my story, due to the fact they were created by a symbiotic planetary ecosystem without consciousness). But I wanted their true nature to be at least somewhat discoverable and accessible.’ Which is surely not only having one’s cake but also eating it. And, as it turns out, first smothering it in marshmallow fluff before consuming it and then sliding into a sugar-induced orgasm.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The story is simple. The first-person narrator, is Elizabeth Cole, a psychology postgraduate on the run from a failed relationship, who has managed to get herself a posting on Ardagh 1, ‘more commonly referred to as “the ghost planet” by people on Earth’, just in case we’re in any doubt as to what is likely to be going on here (and what an ugly piece of writing that is – it’s the sort of thing that overly precocious teenagers write before they learn better). The point is that new arrivals on New Seattle very quickly acquire a companion, a companion somehow created by the planet itself. Usually it’s a dead lover, spouse or relation to whom they’ve been close, though in certain circumstances, it can be someone else with whom the new arrival has formed a bond of some sort along the way. Garvey, for example, made a drunken pass at a young woman who turned out to be a lesbian (though in this instance, they’ve formed a strong if prickly companionate bond, so that’s ok, isn’t it?). With Elizabeth, it turns out that Grayson Murphy, who would have been her supervisor on Ardagh 1, was also once her tour guide somewhere in Ireland, and for some reason, she has apparently stuck in his mind. To say this is convenient is to be even more disingenuous than the novel turns out to be.

To begin with, no one, certainly not Elizabeth, realises that she has become a ‘ghost’, not until she fails to pass through a security scanner, almost simultaneously with the arrival of the news of her death. This discovery initiates a complete volte-face in Grayson Murphy’s behaviour as he initiates the Ghost Protocol, designed to cope with the ghosts by ignoring them completely, in the hope they will go away (although it is also clear that some humans and ghosts maintain relationships away from the public gaze) and treating them harshly. By all accounts, this is not working too well but it is seen as rather better than what happened previously, with settlers being sent back to earth as shattered wrecks. For the ghosts, their material wants are provided for by ghost depots which carry second-hand clothes and poor food. (I think we may be expected to draw all sorts of political parallels from this but the colonial subtext is hand-wavingly crude.) Hitherto, the ghosts have mostly complied meekly with this but, given the story is narrated by Elizabeth herself, we can guess that it’s not going to happen this time, otherwise what would be the point of having the whole novel? Thus, Elizabeth easily tramples through the protocol to find out what she needs to know. Because Something needs to be done about this, not least because she can’t bear the thought of losing Murphy.

Those familiar with the various versions of Solaris will see how this situation has arisen but whereas we see Kelvin and Harey/Rheya struggling to make sense of her existence and the ways in which she is transformed by her new relationship with him, and he in turn being forced to literally face his guilt about Rheya/Harey’s suicide, Fisher manages to reduce this to a script that more or less goes ‘oh, he’s so handsome, I couldn’t bear to lose him, how dare he ignore me, we must overcome this Ghost Protocol and live happily ever after’. That might also be an interesting story if it could rise above the basic tropes of the romance novel, which seem to be ‘flirty flirty, no, I can’t possibly go to bed with you, oh dear, that was a mistake, we mustn’t do that again but you know we can’t keep our hands off each other’ and so forth.

It is, though, very difficult to believe in either Murphy or Elizabeth as high-flying postgraduate scholars. Yes, of course, Murphy has staked his career on devising the Ghost Protocol, which Elizabeth is now trying to undermine, but the tension between them, such as it is, is more about how well and how often their bodies can fit together (remarkably well, it seems, and as often as the plot demands; the term ‘ghost’ is quite definitely a misnomer and ‘when in doubt, fuck’ is very much the order of the day.

By this time, the story needs some sort of conspiracy to keep it going, and along with the revelation that it is in fact possible for humans and ghosts to become detached from one another comes the mysterious private facility to which Elizabeth is taken after she is kidnapped. One starts here to think of Philip Pullman’s General Oblation Board in His Dark Materials, and the separation of children and their daemons. Indeed, the ‘evil’ scientist Mitchell has a very interesting plan to separate humans and ghosts and use the ghosts as slave labour which, fortunately, is stymied at the last minute. Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Murphy, reunited, are rescued from imprisonment and join a group of renegade ghosts, who practise the Ghost Protocol on their humans. I know, what an about-face that is.

Throughout all this, Elizabeth and various others have been working towards a notion that the relationship between the ghosts and the humans is meant to be symbiotic rather than based on rejection, and that the human refusal to engage is destablising the planet. Where the protocol is ignored, relationships are fertile – literally, as plants start springing up out of cracks in the ground and so on. Oh, and of course, thanks to the devilish Mitchell, Elizabeth is now pregnant by Murphy (echoing Rheya’s pregnancy and abortion in the Soderbergh film), which is a bit of a problem when her ex-lover, Peter, turns up. Luckily, with his being a journalist, he is equipped to help them expose what is happening on Ardagh 1 and to ensure that everyone lives happily ever after, because of course this is a romance.

So, is this what should have happened to Kelvin and Rheya/Harey? In a world in which Kelvin is played by George Clooney, inevitably. There is a sense that this novel is for those who didn’t get the ending of the Soderbergh film, an ending which is rather more sophisticated than the rest of the film would initially suggest, but I can see that the ‘well, did they, did they not live happily ever after, dead or alive’ ending would not satisfy those who like certainties. And Ghost Planet is undoubtedly a novel concerned with certainties. From the moment one starts reading, it’s clear that this novel can end in only one way, and for all the intermittent obfuscation along the way , the blood and tears and bruising and death are always temporary. It is a win-slightly painful win situation.

In the end, Ghost Planet is novel as frightfully efficient storytelling machine, with all its plot points lined up neatly, its characters popped out of their moulds and trimmed, its language oiled and functional, the whole thing so overworked as to be stripped totally of absolutely anything that might make it interesting. It’s not terribly good science fiction, and it’s definitely a dull and predictable romance. There are occasional flashes of something that might have been but that’s all.

I imagine Stanislaw Lem spinning in his grave.

The Method – Juli Zeh

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:47:00 +0000

As part of the run-up to this year’s Kitschie Awards, the organisers invited me to write a review of one of the shortlisted novels. I was delighted to accept. Their selection was Juli Zeh’s The Method, shortlisted for the Red Tentacle Award, and just in time this is my review.

The Method – Juli Zeh (trans. Sally-Ann Spencer)

Harvill Secker, 2012

At the heart of Juli Zeh’s The Method lies a deceptively simple question: how much personal autonomy are we prepared to surrender for the greater good of achieving a perfectly healthy society? A surprising amount, Zeh suggests; her novel portrays a society which has mostly surrendered its individual freedoms to the greater good. Thanks to following the Method, a system developed by Heinrich Kramer (and I’m sure it is no coincidence that the title suggests a questionable dieting plan), everyone is now fit and well. There is a downside, of course, in the need for constant monitoring in order to maintain this happy state – much of this is achieved through statistics collected via a mandatory microchip implant and through regular check-ups, not to mention monitoring of exercise machines and so forth, but this is surely a small price to pay for good health. But health control goes further than this: no caffeine (hot water enlivened with a few drops of lemon juice substitutes for this), no tobacco, no alcohol (though both substances seem, mysteriously, to be available, as and when necessary) and the wider environment is also controlled and monitored. Parts of the great outdoors are proscribed as being too dangerous. The cleanest, most closely monitored apartment blocks become the epitome for modern living. Yet surveillance goes further than all this in that one is encouraged only to form lasting relationships with the immunologically compatible. Other liaisons occur, although frowned upon, and must be kept quiet (though one would assume that constant monitoring might indicate increased heart rates and so forth). This is clearly a risk-averse society.

The question for the reader, then, is whether The Method represents a utopian or dystopian future, but strangely this seems not to be an easy matter to resolve. On the one hand, who would not want a generally healthy society; the attraction of old-style Benthamite utilitarianism underpinning The Method lies in that idea of maximising happiness and reducing suffering. Dystopian anxiety arises only as a result of the way in which that maximum happiness is brought into being. The Method, for all its promises of general well-being through the absence of illness, can only achieve its ends through a deeply intrusive form of social management, the constant gathering of information. What is missing from the Method, is John Stuart Mills’ insight, that there is a distinction to be made between the higher intellectual pleasures and the lower physical pleasures, between happiness and contentment. Thus, on the one side, in Zeh’s novel, we see people like the cleaners in Mia Holle’s apartment block, who find their pleasure in unquestioningly upholding the process of the Method itself, and those, like Mia, who accept the presence of the Method, and are prepared to pay lip service to it, but for whom the Method is not the be-all and end-all of their existence. Mia happily embraces Cartesian duality: her body is a machine made of meat, which she is happy to maintain in such a way as to keep the system happy. Her mind, however, is her own; without material substance it can be of no interest to the state. This, then, is the form of her resistance to the state. She colludes with it on one level in order to avoid notice on another. And this, to some measure, is what we all do; we keep our heads down and keep going.

Closer scrutiny suggests that the Method has its problems, not the least of which is the confirmation bias of its founder, Heinrich Kramer. This is made clear to the reader in the way that Mia’s relationship with the state has become unbalanced because of her grief over her brother’ suicide. The Method is built on reason and demands of its participants that they are at all times rational. Mia’s lack of reason, her irrational grief for her brother, her inexplicable desire to withdraw from society and be left alone, pose a threat to the state. The Method has no place for mental imbalance of any kind – presumably because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind.

Depression […] is a corrosive force. People with depression reap the benefits of society’s generosity and goodwill, while making a religion of self-pity. Nothing could be further from their minds than overcoming their affliction. They are missionaries of unhappiness: a contagion. (88)

Yet, isn’t grief expressed a healthy mechanism for coping with loss rather than a contagion? Many people will at times in their lives suffer brief periods of depression as a result of life’s events yet Kramer has constructed a system which can see them only as parasites. Mia is, effectively, one such.

It is the suicide of her brother, Moritz, which decouples Mia from society. Moritz publicly challenged the Method, although one might wonder just how serious he was in his intent – he smoked, he drank, he went beyond the controlled environment, he used the state-suggested potential marriage partners as little more than unpaid prostitutes and yet one looks in vain for some intent beyond living well as the best revenge. One might ask why Mia Holle is so invested in someone who is, to the reader’s eye, engaged in little more than gesture politics. But that, perhaps, is the point: in a system so heavily monitored, how else can one put the message across? On the other hand, might it not be that Moritz Holle just enjoyed a good time? In truth, his most political act is his suicide, the moment when he recognises what personal freedom actually means.

In the Method, there is simply no room for Mia to grieve in the way she would like to, withdrawing from society for a period in order to come to terms with her loss. It is her desire to do so which brings her into conflict with legislators and with Heinrich Kramer himself. Accompanying her through this is the Ideal Inamorata, a figure, an idea, bequeathed to her by her brother, or perhaps a sign of her own madness; either way, the Ideal Inamorata becomes her sparring partner in a series of intense discussions with lawyers and judges. Mia slowly comes to understand that Kramer now needs to test his own system, to find out how well it works, and that Mia, by refusing his system, will act as that test.

There is no certain ending to this novel. We are left with Mia stripped of her protection, struggling to become the freedom fighter her brother saw himself as, ill-equipped to deal with a system that is so overwhelming. Exercise of personal autonomy is not enough in a system in which most people are entirely happy with the status quo. One is constantly struck by the way in which Mia becomes the tool of others whose personal agendas are more clearly defined than her own, which is merely to survive, as well as by the fragility of a world in which health is paramount yet the black market works well in delivering tobacco and alcohol to those who want it, suggesting in turn that the Method is little more than a facade itself.

It’s always difficult to find pleasure in the dystopian without an upbeat resolution to look forward, and some may consider this the case with The Method. Yet, I’d argue that this really is not what the novel is meant to be about. Zeh is not seeking restoration or a new beginning so much as she is laying out the arguments for and against – and both are persuasive. This has always been the problem with forms of utilitarianism: as a philosophy it is deeply seductive, so long as it conforms with one’s own view of what happiness entails. But happiness takes so many different forms.

At a point when some American state legislatures are curtailing women’s reproductive rights to the point where they are trying to insist that all women of childbearing age keep themselves in a state of healthy readiness in case they become pregnant, and where the British government is seriously considering restricting access to some medical procedures for those who are overweight, heavy smokers or drinkers, on the grounds that they haven’t demonstrated sufficient desire to maintain their health, Zeh’s novel presents powerful arguments against a system that simply doesn’t allow for humans to be … well, human.

If you’re looking for a utopian happy-ever-after, this is almost certainly not the novel for you. However, if you like novels that are intensely argued and which step beyond the conventional rhetoric of the dystopia, The Method is undoubtedly worth considering. The language and the writing are both very plain, and the whole thing is intricately constructed, with a constant to-ing and fro-ing of argument, examining the issue from all sides. Indeed, this is one of the things I most like about it, that it doesn’t slavishly follow one viewpoint but instead constantly tests the ideas under discussion. It may be low-key but I think it tackles important issues in a way that feels more plausible and convincing than some novels with what one might call high-production values. So far it seems to have received little attention in the English-language press and what notice it has received has tended to default to an easy designation of it as a dystopian novel, but I’d argue that there is rather more than that to The Method.

Sunday links …

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 10:12:00 +0000

A couple of articles on AfroSF ed. by Ivor W. Hartmann, from Ralph Goodman and Emily Cleaver. My review coming soon from Interzone.

New magazine of Indian SF looks worth checking out.

Fascinating piece from the LARB on the flâneur in literature, featuring Teju Cole’s Open City and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.

And a piece debating whether the first sf magazine was actually Russian.

In a parallel universe, I am probably a cartographer of some sort, given the pleasure I take in maps in this one. I’ve been reading Simon Garfield’s highly enjoyable On the Map for light relief. Quite by chance, illustrations from the Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem appeared on the ever-astonishing Bibliodyssey this week.

Oh, and because a map needs monsters …

Watching Father Brown

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 06:37:00 +0000

When I heard that BBC 1 had a new adaptation of some of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, I was naturally curious as to what they were going to do with them. It is of course impossible for any tv company to make a straight adaptation of anything; there has to be a spin, an angle, some sense of novelty. To an extent, this is understandable. To suggest that TV adaptations should involve a simple book-to-screen transfer is to be naive and to fail to understand that one is dealing with two entirely different media. On the other hand, I also know that if given a free hand, the dramatist and production company can and will run riot. One only has to look at the more recent Miss Marple productions, featuring Julia McKenzie, to see what I mean: Miss Marple’s character is shoehorned into stories where, previously, she had never been, and frequently in a most unsatisfactorily bitty way. A number of the late Poirot adaptations similarly played extremely fast and loose with the original story, with no discernible artistic benefit. In one instance I could barely bring the original to mind, the adaptation was so distorted. File that one under ‘because we could’.

Yet it is also possible to adapt stories for other media in such a way as to make it clear that we’re stepping beyond the text without entirely butchering it in the process. The Radio 4 dramatisations of Sherlock Holmes were very satisfactory, contained as they were within an ongoing discussion of the business of adaptation itself. Radio 4’s recent dramatisations of Simenon’s Maigret stories are framed by discussions between Simenon and Maigret about the story, blurring the boundaries between author/narrator and character in such a way as to suggest that Maigret was in the bar with his friend, who goes home to write down the stories. Yes, it’s Holmes/Watson again but I like the anecdotal flavour and, given this is Maigret, it underlines the curious way that Maigret tends to go about his business.

The radio adaptations of Father Brown stories are often framed by a narrative in which Father Brown is presented as a great detective, a remarkable and newsworthy man whose fame precedes him, particularly when he is travelling abroad. This, though, is a label he always self-deprecatingly brushes aside. In the short stories, Father Brown often doesn’t appear until part way through the story, although the reader is quickly attuned to the idea that he is in the background somewhere, and the sense of his having any kind of fame is soft-pedalled. On radio it’s difficult to be invisible when you’re the titular character so the adaptations have tended to focus on Father Brown’s ongoing relationship with Flambeau, the criminal whom he thwarts in ‘The Blue Cross’, but with whom he establishes a friendship, based on their intellectual equality. Flambeau is, eventually, ‘saved’ and crosses the floor to become a detective rather than a criminal. Who knows the criminal mind better? Well, Father Brown, for one, as he explains in ‘The Secret of Father Brown’ how he solves crimes by committing them; that is, he works out how they would be done, placing himself in the mind of the criminal. For, as he notes, a priest is by no means unaware of evil in the world.

And this, of course, is one of the interesting things about Father Brown. We might think of him as a person who is always in the right place at the right time, the place where he is most needed. Indeed, there are moments when Chesterton seems to suggest that Father Brown is a corporeal representative of divine intervention, somehow sent to bear witness to crime and then reveal it. It is as if he can only exist where an act of evil is being carried out. We can, if we want, think of him as a man of the people, or even, if feeling a little Poeish, as a man of the crowd, absorbed by it, constantly on the move, occasionally emerging, blinking, to alter the balance of things. Father Brown is firmly established as both a metropolitan character and one who is remarkably peripatetic. Unlike other fictional detectives, he doesn’t seem to be tied to one locale, and is likely to pop up anywhere, in Britain or across the world, and most often in urban or small-town settings, although he seems to me to be drawn to modernity.

And so, to the BBC’s version of Father Brown. The priest is played by Mark Williams, probably best known for The Fast Show, though I gather he was in the Harry Potter films as well, and he is also currently playing Beach the butler, in Blandings, in the rather dubious BBC adaptations of Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth stories. While we are told by Chesterton that Father Brown is a short, stumpy priest, Williams is, to judge from his appearances in Blandings, a tall, broad man, and yet he manages to convey that sense of smallness, roundness and unobtrusiveness that is essential to being Father Brown. He is unremarkable and unremarked on, though constantly alive to what’s going on around him. He is eminently watchable and I find him highly plausible as Father Brown.

The BBC, however, has very bravely decided to reposition Father Brown in a version of England in which the Reformation either didn’t take place at all or in which it had rather less effect on British history than in our own timeline. How else to account for the fact that Father Brown presides over a surprisingly large Catholic congregation in a Cotswold village, holding services in a particularly fine 15th-century church, which acknowledges the effects of the Reformation in being devoid of wall paintings. There is even a mythic element to this as well as Father Brown is supported by a trinity of women: maiden (Susie), mother (Lady Felicia) and crone (Mrs McCarthy), and a Loki-ish trickster figure, in the shape of Sid, Lady Felicia’s chauffeur, aspiring spiv and loveable rogue. The forces of law and order are represented by Inspector Valentine, the long-suffering local inspector (in our timeline, Valentin is the French inspector who comes to England to hunt for Flambeau, in ‘The Blue Cross’, and exercises an intuitive approach to detection very similar to Father Brown’s own. However, in our timeline, Valentin surprisingly commits murder and then suicide in the following story, something I doubt Hugo Speer’s Valentine would ever consider).

‘Kembleford’ too is also possessed of that particular brand of flexible topography that exists only in tv series, in that it’s pretty much whatever the scriptwriters du jour want it to be, with a village green one day, an up-to-date hospital another day, and a police station that might comfortably serve several counties. We are a long way from the world of a priest who is ‘formerly of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London’, as Chesterton describes his Father Brown. Indeed, one begins to suspect that Kembleford is in the next county over to Midsomer, given the number of murders per head of population.

The BBC’s is a post-WW2 Father Brown but whereas he is not geographically peripatetic, he seems to have been cut loose in time. We assume that in the BBC’s timeline, World War Two still ended in 1945, and the very latest the stories seem to take place is October 1953, the date on the fake-call up papers displayed by one character in the last episode, who claims he is about to serve in the Korean war. There is a Polish refugee camp in the village – Father Brown’s daily, Susie, is a Polish refugee who works for him and various other people around the village – and the locals feel strongly about the presence of a German priest who comes to the village at one point, but this seems to me to be something that might be regarded differently in 1953 than, say, in 1948. Yet this is a world in which rationing seems never to have happened. One story relies on a murdered character eating pear drops, at a time when they would have been unavailable (sweet rationing was not stopped until 1953). In another instance, there is a ‘guess the number of sweets in a jar’ competition, and in a third example, large boxes of sweets form part of a competition prize. Similarly, the ladies of the village seem to be indefatigable bakers yet there is no mention of it being difficult to do this because of sugar rationing. For that matter, one remains unclear how the local nunnery has managed to sustain a cottage wine-making industry in these straitened times, let alone how it is that Father Brown never seems to be short of meat. There are odd moments when our reality intrudes – the plate of salad and spam that Susie attempts to serve the Father is quickly swept aside by Mrs McCarthy who comes bearing a triumphal casserole with dumplings.

Other things are curious. In one story, a child is ostracised because of a skin condition; her father works at the local atomic research establishment and they fear she is contaminated with radiation. Again, this might place the stories in the early 1950s, but equally, one might argue that the fears expressed by the villagers are much more developed than they would be at this point in our own timeline, when the UK atomic research programme was little more than some huts at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Most inexplicable of all, at one point, an academic tells his daughter, in her early twenties, that when he was her age, he was reading Rousseau and Derrida. Given that in our timeline Derrida did not publish until 1967, something quite remarkable has clearly happened in this alternative universe and either Derrida was publishing in his pram or else was born about thirty years earlier than one would have expected.

And because this is an alternative timeline, the Father Brown stories themselves have undergone remarkable transformations. There are five wholly new stories, unknown in our timeline, while such familiar stories as ‘The Blue Cross’, ‘The Flying Stars’, ‘The Wrong Shape’, ‘The Eye of Apollo’ and ‘The Hammer of God’, have all undergone changes, some subtle, others less so, to the point where, in one or two instances, the only familiar thing remaining is the title itself. ‘The Eye of Apollo’ has undergone a most grievous transformation, its prophet Kaylon no longer party to an elegant murder plot involving the presence or absence of a lift and instead reduced to defenestrating his partner in a most humdrum sort of murder because she disapproves of him surrounding himself with nubile young women.

At the same time, the BBC has not lost sight of the fact of Father Brown’s vocation as a priest, and does its best to raise a series of ethical conundrums. In fact, the series does this rather well on occasion. Father Brown’s visit to St Bridget’s Home for Unmarried Mothers leaves him as stunned as it might do the viewer, with its unflinching portrayal of the cruelty to which unmarried mothers were subjected and the effects of having their babies taken from them. In another instance, the murdered man is, we learn, bisexual and promiscuous, but Father Brown pauses to talk to the victim’s male lover and offer him spiritual support. It is constantly stressed that Father Brown is a maverick, if not quite a renegade, and he has regard for all God’s creatures, Catholic or not. This issue-driven approach, I presume, stands in for the more intellectual theological discussions in the short stories as written in this timeline. It is perhaps reductive in some ways but I don’t think we are left in any doubt as to Father Brown’s faith, even if he represents it in unorthodox ways, and the series presents an intriguing if slightly wonky snapshot of post-war modernity, and the struggle to make something new.

On a more practical level, the writing of the series is uneven, as one might expect when the stories are parcelled out among a group of writers, but there is also a sense that the series ‘bible’ is less well developed than it might be. Sometimes Father Brown is a whimsical figure; at other times his darker nature emerges, but there is a distinct lack of consistency from story to story, as though the series editor was blinking rather too often. One of the best episodes is ‘The Bride of Christ’, not so much for the story itself as for the presence of Sister Boniface, devotee of the works of Agatha Christie and keenly aware of Father Brown’s reputation as a solver of crimes. The comic interplay between Lorna Watson and Williams was genuinely a pleasure to watch, as was the sly and knowing interrogation of the whole business of tv detection.

I, however, was waiting to see what they did with Flambeau, who had remained conspicuously absent. Flambeau is a master of disguise, so at the point in ‘The Blue Cross’ where the alternative Father Brown finds himself in a railway carriage with three other men one is obliged to play ‘spot the suspect’. Given Flambeau is French, obviously it has to be the most English of the Englishmen. However, while the Flambeau with whom readers are familiar is a thoughtful man who, for the most part, seeks to avoid violence and has a mysterious ‘past’, the alternative Flambeau (I can only describe him as Cumberbatch-lite) shifts between being the thoughtful intellectual and a gun-toting sociopath, with an emphasis on the latter. Which is not my Flambeau. On the other hand, clearly there is already a second series in development, and clearly he will play a part in it.

So, what are we left with? On the one hand, this is a series that seems to wander all over the shop, in a hand-wavingly post-war setting that has little grasp of the realities of post-war Britain, let alone a developed understanding of the history of Catholicism in England, hence my less-than-entirely-serious suggestion that this should be regarded as alternative history. It’s a series that brings together a lot of very conventional tropes of detective fiction and Catholic priests and gives us Father Ted in St Mary Mead. There is probably very little about it that Chesterton would recognise as deriving from his creation, yet ironically, I think the one thing he might actually recognise is Father Brown. He might be sequestered in the depths of the country but Father Brown remains in touch with reality in a way the other characters simply don’t.

It's awards shortlist time again!

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Very exciting news today.

The 2012 British Science Fiction Awards shortlists were announced this morning and I am thrilled to say that The Shortlist Project, my series of linked reviews of last year’s Clarke Award and BSFA Novel Award nominees has been shortlisted. I am incredibly excited about this. Thank you to everyone who nominated me.

To add an extra frisson to the process, Paul Kincaid has also been nominated in the same category, for his near-legendary review-article, The Widening Gyre. Nobody seems quite sure if spousal units have ever been independently nominated in the same BSFA category before; we think it may be a first. We promise there will be no bloodshed!

This is the full list of nominations in all categories. They’re all good strong shortlists.

Best Novel

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)

Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

2312 by Kim Stanley-Robinson (Orbit)

Best Short Story

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld #69)

“The Flight of the Ravens” by Chris Butler (Immersion Press)

“Song of the body Cartographer” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Phillipines Genre Stories)

“Limited Edition” by Tim Maughan (1.3, Arc Magazine)

“Three Moments of an Explosion” by China Mieville (Rejectamentalist Manifesto)

“Adrift on the Sea of Rains” by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)

Best Artwork

Ben Baldwin for the cover of Dark Currents (Newcon Press)

Blacksheep for the cover of Adam Roberts’s Jack Glass (Gollancz)

Dominic Harman for the cover of Eric Brown’s Helix Wars (Rebellion)

Joey Hifi for the cover of Simon Morden’s Thy Kingdom Come (Jurassic London)

Si Scott for the cover artwork for Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden (Corvus)

Best Non-Fiction

“The Complexity of the Humble Space Suit” by Karen Burnham (Rocket Science, Mutation Press)

“The Widening Gyre” by Paul Kincaid (Los Angeles Review of Books)

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge University Press)

The Shortlist Project by Maureen Kincaid Speller

The World SF Blog, Chief Editor Lavie Tidhar

And as if that weren’t enough, the shortlists for the Kitschies were also announced today. The Kitschies, presented by The Kraken Rum, reward the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.

The 2012 finalists for the Red Tentacle:

Jesse Bullington's The Folly of the World (Orbit)

Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass (Macmillan)

Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker (William Heinemann)

Adam Roberts' Jack Glass (Gollancz)

Julie Zeh's The Method (Harvill Secker)

The 2012 finalists for the Golden Tentacle:

Madeline Ashby's vN (Angry Robot)

Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (William Heinemann)

Rachel Hartman's Seraphina (Doubleday)

Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo (Jo Fletcher Books)

Tom Pollock's The City's Son (Jo Fletcher Books)

The 2012 finalists for the Inky Tentacle:

La Boca for Ned Beauman's The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)

Oliver Jeffers for John Boyne's The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket (Doubleday)

Tom Gauld for Matthew Hughes' Costume Not Included (Angry Robot)

Peter Mendelsund for Ben Marcus' Flame Alphabet (Granta)

Dave Shelton for his own A Boy and a Bear in a Boat (David Fickling Books)

Looks like there’s a lot of reading ahead!

Reading van Vogt's Slan

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:37:00 +0000

I’m just about to start teaching the second term of a first-year course in science fiction. Coming up is a seminar on fandom (I am also giving the lecture on fandom as subculture), and listed as secondary reading is A E van Vogt’s Slan (1940). I am of course familiar with the slogan, ‘fans are slans’, but it suddenly occurred to me that I’d never actually read Slan. So, being a conscientious academic, I fixed that last night.

First reaction: hmm, hasn’t aged well, has it?

Second thought: I wonder how it was regarded at the time. That is, other than as some sort of rallying cry for young bookish adults of the early 1960s, who perhaps saw themselves as outsiders, smarter than the people around them but with their mighty intellects having so far gone unrecognised.

Exceptionality of some sort or another is a theme that figures over and over in certain strands of sf, appealing to the disaffected reader. In particular, I found myself thinking about how many stories I’d read that featured telepathic abilities: it is easy to see how telepathy seems particularly attractive if you can’t figure out how the world works and are not picking up clues. To be able to figure it all out by searching someone else’s mind – well, who wouldn’t want to?

I recall being very taken with James Schmitz’s Telzey Amberdon stories when I was young – Telzey Amberdon was everything I felt I wasn’t: attractive, cool, wealthy, omnicompetent, and above all, clever. As a gawky, confused post-adolescent, I very much wanted to be Telzey Amberdon. What I did not notice at the time was just how insufferably smug Telzey actually was. Anne McCaffery’s Menolly, protagonist in one set of her dragon stories, sweet and innocent, and constantly amazed that everyone admired her skills, is nothing more than Telzey without the ego; one might indeed see the Menolly stories as being about developing an ego. All very life-affirming for the teenage reader

I was similarly devoted to The Tomorrow People on British tv, 1973-79, which focused on a group of young people who are supposedly the vanguard for the next stage of Homo sapiens, known inevitably as Homo superior. In adolescence, they develop special ‘psionic’ powers, such as telepathy and teleportation, and an equally smug attitude. Homo superior pretty much says it all. Ordinary humans, that is, you and me, are known colloquially as ‘Saps’, with that nicely judged mixture of affection and disparagement. Looked at from an adult distance, one notes again the smugness of the ‘superior’ adolescent, now coupled with disdain for our failure to be like them.

I read Zenna Henderson’s ‘The People’ stories as an adult, but while I found them very attractive in their way (a distinct flavour of Ray Bradbury lingers around them) the glamour of wish-fulfilment no longer exerts itself over me in the way I suspect it might have done when I was younger.

And of course, lurking behind all this is Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, published in the United Kingdom and the United States in the mid-fifties, the now-classic text on alienation, and before that, L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, which first came to the attention of science fiction readers in 1950, when he published an article about it in Astounding. What I had forgotten was that van Vogt himself was involved in Dianetics, and was briefly Hubbard’s head of operations in California in 1950.

But to go back to Slan. I’m not sure what I expected of it, but now I’ve read it, I mostly feel a sense of … disappointment? Actually, no, not even disappointment so much as mild surprise at just how banal plans for world domination through nuclear weapons and telepathic hypnosis can turn out to be. And that’s not something I ever thought I’d find myself saying.

The story opens with a young Jommy Crosse and his mother entering Centropolis. The city’s name immediately suggests that we are in some sort of tightly structured future setting; how far into the future is never made clear, so far as I can recall. We also learn that Centropolis is the capital of the world, so clearly political structures have changed considerably, yet one can’t help thinking too that this feels like a US-centric future and that this mysterious world capital is probably somewhere in North America, below the 49th parallel.

We quickly learn too that Jommy and his mother are telepaths, though Jommy being only nine, his skills are still rather limited. On the other hand, being a slan we learn he is already nearly twice as intelligent as any human child his age. The expositional lump already sits heavy in the gut; almost immediately the reader comes to realise it will be with her from now until the end of the novel.

Yet, in its own strange, broken way, there is something oddly compelling about this novel’s beginning. Thrown into the deep end, weighed down with information, on one level the reader still has no idea what is going on. Slans are not a good thing, that’s for sure, even if we don’t yet know what they are. Van Vogt’s opening has a flavour of Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer about it as Jommy samples the thoughts of those about him, particularly once he is forced to flee, after his mother is murdered.

Jommy’s flight across the city is very well-handled; it’s tense and exciting, particularly as Jommy learns to make sense of the mind-traffic around him, and use it to help him, and then manages to conceal himself within the walls of a building. Likewise, van Vogt does well with his uncertainty as he comes to realise that someone else knows about his hiding-place and is certain he is still there.

That’s the problem, though – after this brief tour de force there is nowhere else for the story to go but down. Jommy finds himself in the hands of Granny, mad and devious but also canny enough to figure out how she can exploit a young slan; at the same time, Jommy himself, despite his comparative youth, realises quickly that he needs Granny as camouflage for the next few years. They become locked in an unhealthy relationship, like Fagin and Oliver, as Jommy uses his skills to thieve for Granny and she … well, she gives him the space to transform himself into a miniature Count of Monte Cristo, educating himself, reconstructing her home, building himself an escape tunnel.

Jommy’s relationship with Granny is one of the oddest aspects of the novel. He hates her, he uses her for his own ends, abuses the relationship, and yet, in the end, she seems to represent family for him, no matter how warped the relationship might be. He can never quite bring himself to discard her and her presence, malign and resentful, at least until he hypnotises her, persists throughout the novel.

Jommy himself seems to be implanted with all sorts of strange mental imperatives. Almost immediately after he finds himself on the run, he discovers that there are slans in the city; he hears their thoughts but realises that they cannot detect his presence, although they can communicate with one another. Unlike ‘true’ slans, by which Jommy presumably means people like himself, these slans do not possess the mysterious tendrils in their hair which are the marker of the slan. When he reveals himself to them, he is puzzled by their response, which is to attempt to capture him, the understanding being that few if any true slans still exist and they represent a danger to whatever it is the ‘tendrilless’ slans are up to.

The political dimensions of this relationship between true slans and the other sort is not made entirely clear, at least not until the end of the novel, and even then it is facilitated with a lot of hand-waving. For now, Jommy’s task is to find other true slans who, according to his parents, must be in hiding, as they were, preparing for the time when they assume the task of running the world. The question becomes, who is in charge of the ‘tendrilless’ slans. Or, rather, that’s one question. Another is why Kier Gray, ruler of the world, hates slans so much, and why John Petty, his chief of police, hates Gray and slans in about equal measure. The biggest question of all is where are the other true slans.

The novel returns to Jommy at intervals, as his search continues, as he retrieves his father’s scientific secrets and makes use of them, as he battles with the ‘tendrilless’ slans, who appear to have infiltrated the world monarchy to a very high level. In the end, it comes as no surprise to discover that Kier Gray is himself a slan, a fact that has been heavily signalled throughout the novel, if only by his peculiar behaviour every time slans are mentioned.

Along the way we gather some sense of why it is the slans are so feared; propaganda has it that they are a machine-made mutation, created by Samuel Lann at some point in the past. Their super-intelligence is apaprently causing all human enterprises to wither away, because no one can be bothered to do anything knowing that slans have either already done it or will do it better hen they do get around to it. The revelation that slans are the result of natural mutation makes everything fine (though the fact that their continuing survival is down to incest, as Lann begins his ‘breeding progam’ with a boy and his two sisters seems not to be considered a problem). Likewise, the ‘tendrilless’ slans are an intermediate developmental stage, created in order to allow the mutation to persist undetected until such time as acceptance of their presence allows the full tendrilled version to reappear. So that’s alright then.

The novel works from the presumption, unsurprising, given the author’s background, of the right of the slans to assume control of the world and contains very little in the way of reasoned discussion about the continuing engagement between slans and humans. The human response is, invariably, one of great hostility, historically based, reflected through the constant hunting and killing of slans, or so the reader is told. Van Vogt is very vague about this and in fact the only instance we ever see of a slan being hunted is the relentless pursuit of Jommy Cross himself. The only other slan with any significant presence in the novel is Kathleen Layton, ward of Kier Gray himself, who from the novel’s opening pages is in a constant state of jeopardy, threatened by Gray’s lieutenants, who variously want to find out whether slans and humans can interbreed (the received wisdom is that they cannot). Clearly, she is intended to eventually become Jommy’s love interest though she does possess a certain level of agency, when the plot demands it. One wonders why she chooses to stay given that she is quite capable of leaving if she wants.

The novel becomes increasingly absurd as the story unwinds. The science is nonsensical, Jommy’s motives are ever more confused, his disregard for humans ever more pronounced. Yet the situation is resolved in his favour and could even be regarded as a happy-ever-after of sorts, no matter how repugnant the novel seems to a human reader.

I’m not sure whether one is supposed to walk away from the novel with the message that it’s okay to be a complete shit so long as one is part of the brave new world of superhumanity but this seems to be, in essence, what van Vogt is suggesting. Jommy Cross’s behaviour is excused because he is a slan and thus, by definition, better than everyone else (and for reasons that are not entirely clear, that includes other slans as well – Jommy is nothing if not messianic in his aspirations).

I’m left with one question. In the light of all this, why on earth would fans want to be slans? Yes, of course, I see the appeal of being Homo superior, slan, outsider, disaffection, smarter than the rest of humanity, whatever, but van Vogt’s vision of the future makes it quite clear that slans, at least as personified by Jommy Cross, behave in a staggeringly high-handed way, with no regard for others. While one might tolerate the superior smugness of Telzey Amberdon and the Tomorrow People, given their comparative youth and lack of experience, Slan goes far beyond their earnest endeavours to make the world a better place. The idea that humans and slans might co-exist peacefully is given very short shrift; this is apparently only ever going to be achievable if humans are hypnotised, with all that implies. On the other hand, I suppose, if you feel the world is against you, this is an entirely admirable approach.

I'm now wondering if any of my students will have read it by Thursday, and what they will make of it.

Women walkers?

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 06:37:00 +0000

Just a small thought today, as I’ve been doing some intense sleeping to get over a cold.

I’ve just finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, which is thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is going to be with me for a long, long time, I think. But all the way through I was struck by something.

Take this extract from the book’s acknowledgements:

I have, inevitably, followed in the footsteps of many predecessors in terms of writing as well as of walking, and to that end wish to acknowledge the earlier print-trails that have both shown me the way and provoked ‘deviations and differences’. The atmospheres, moods and textures of this book arise out of the places through which I have been fortunate to move, but also out of the prose of J.A. Baker, Robert Byron, M.R. James, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman MacLean, Cormac McCarthy, John McPhee, Vladimir Nabokov, Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Raban, Tim Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Nan Shepherd, Rebecca Solnit, Gary Snyder and Colin Thubron […].

Macfarlane mentions more writers in the text, including Edward Thomas, Gilbert White, Coleridge, de Quincy, and Dorothy Wordsworth. I wish now I’d made a list. All these writers who have dealt with the business of walking, and so few of them seem to be female.

And that’s what struck me all the way through the book (and obliquely, in reading Smith of Wootton Major): in literary terms, walking seems to be such a male activity. And yet, every day women walk as much as men. (In Smith Smith’s wife, Nell, travels to visit her daughter to mark her grandson’s birthday, but it’s a firmly domestic visit.)

It may be, I thought, that women haven’t historically been as free to walk as men but nowadays … ? And Nan Shepherd, it should be remembered, devoted herself to walking a specific area, over and over, rather than undertaking a long-distance journey.

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes working at his desk late one evening and then deciding to go out and walk for a while. I tried to picture myself just getting up from my desk and wandering out into a snow-covered Folkestone to walk. And I couldn’t.

In part, perhaps, it’s because Macfarlane makes the artistic choice of stripping his perambulations of any domestic baggage; he has a partner and children who figure in the acknowledgements, and occasionally in the text, but we don’t see the negotiations that presumably went on about accommodating his travels alongside family time. That this is occluded is in itself revealing, rather as Thoreau’s Walden elides his social commerce with Concord.

So, perhaps we can skip the bit where I get up, wander into P’s study, say ‘I’m just going for a walk’, and the bit where he says ‘in this weather? At this time of night? Are you mad?’ and the bit where my favoured daily walk is badly lit at night and it’s not unknown for both women and men to be attacked there, in daylight as well as after dark, and imagine I have gone for a walk … Except that walking in suburbia, and that’s small-town, edge of town, suburbia rather than Metroland, is very different to rural walking, or grand walking. I could go on …

So, I suppose I’m wondering where the women walkers and diarists are … and here I specifically mean walkers rather than riders or any other form of traveller. The Wife of Bath and the Prioress had their ponies, Dervla Murphy travelled by horse and by bicycle, Christina Dodwell travelled by canoe, Robyn Davidson by camel … I could go on and on and on … but I cannot think of a single example of a woman who walks as much to meditate as to explore; or do they not write it down? Or do publishers prefer them to be engaged in an epic struggle with an external mode of transport?

Clearly, there are also certain tropes and rhetorical devices of travel writing at play here. Equally clearly, something is missing …

Addendum: I tried to illustrate this post but when I googled 'woman walking', the images were almost invariably sexualised images of women in landscapes, the emphasis on clothes and skin rather than walking. To portray a woman 'walking', one opts either for an old woman hobbling along, a woman in a non-European country preferably leading a cow or goat, or a 'businesswoman' striding along in heels that would cripple me if I tried to stride in them.

Happy second birthday to Paper Knife!

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 11:08:00 +0000

Two years ago, I sat down to write a post about the BBC’s new adaptation of M.R. James’ ‘Oh Whistle And I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, or rather, the non-adaptation. Two years on, my Christmas presents included the BFI boxed set of M.R. James adaptations, with the 2010 version as an extra. Somehow, this blog never strays too far from James.

But along the way I’ve managed posts on a number of other topics, including a mammoth reading of the shortlisted books for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award, all rolled together in The Shortlist Project, which now finds itself in turn on the nomination longlist for the BSFA Award for Non-fiction. I’m now waiting to see if it gathers enough nominations to make the shortlist. My fingernails are somewhat nibbled.

And so Paper Knife begins its third year of activity. I’ve no idea where it will be by 28th December 2013 but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Walking with Tolkien and Macfarlane

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 06:37:00 +0000

This will be almost the last Tolkien-related post for a while, for which I am sure we are all grateful. However, in amidst all the hoo-ha about The Hobbit, I wanted to say a little something about Smith of Wootton Major, my favourite story by Tolkien. It was originally published as a tiny hardback, almost a board book, which turned up in my classroom library when I was ten or eleven, and which fascinated me, for its size and for the Pauline Diana Baynes illustrations, I think, rather than for the story, which I did not especially remember. It was only some years later, when my interest in Tolkien was already well alight, that I rediscovered the story, made the connection, and finally got my own copy of the little hardback. I reread it over Christmas, in the midst of the new Tolkienfest, and though it has perhaps lost some of the charm it had when I was younger, or more accurately, I am older, more critical and probably more cynical too, I still rather like it.

The setting is quasi-medieval, with a dash of Norse saga. The village of Wootton Major (which is, of course, bigger than Wootton Minor) is famous for its craft workers, in particular, its cooking. There is a Kitchen which belongs to the Village Council, and the Master Cook is an important personage within the village. His House and the Kitchen are adjacent to the Great Hall, used by the village for its meetings and celebrations, for which the Master Cook caters.

Doubtless, William Morris would have approved of Wootton Major. Quite apart from its seeming to be driven by an annual round of festivals, it is in every way the perfect medieval fantasy. With a Village Council to keep it running smoothly and no visible feudal lord, Wootton Major’s workers are able to get on with being good at what they do. There is commerce, clearly; Smith, who is at the heart of this story, travels regularly to buy raw materials, and the finished goods go somewhere other than the village, but the ugly details of capitalism are not foregrounded. Instead, everyone is happy and well-fed, warm and well-clothed, not least because this is an allegory rather than an attempt at fantasy realism. The emphasis on artisanship and creativity are clear indicators that we are in familiar Tolkien territory, theorising about the nature, significance and formation of fairy stories. As ever, art and good workmanship go hand in hand.

We first meet the Smith of the title when he is a child, an attendee at the Twenty-Four Feast, a festival which comes about only once every twenty-four years, to which twenty-four children are invited, and which is marked by the creation of a Great Cake, the production of which is considered to be the Master Cook’s finest moment. At the story’s opening, the village is in turmoil, first because the Master Cook had gone off for a holiday, something that had never happened before, and then because he had brought home an apprentice from outside the village. Not of course that there is anything wrong with the Cook having an apprentice, or with his coming from outside the village, but one immediately scents village disapproval. When, a few years later, the Master Cook suddenly retires and leaves, it does not occur to the village to appoint Alf, the apprentice, to the post of Master Cook. Instead, they appoint a mediocre local man, whom Alf assists, and indeed does most of the work for.

Nokes’ lack of imagination is specifically reflected in his Great Cake: ‘Fairies and sweets were two of the very few notions he had about the tastes of children. Fairies he thought one grew out of; but of sweets he remained very fond’. And so, Alf makes a cake with delicate mountain peaks, and a delicate fairy queen on a pinnacle, and Nokes takes the credit. In the cake are twenty-four little trinkets, but also a mysterious silver star that Nokes found in an old box. Alf identifies it as a ‘fay-star’ and disapproves strongly of Nokes’s dismissal of fairy things but approves putting the star into the cake.

The star is swallowed by a small boy, unaware of what has happened, but on his tenth birthday something happens:

He looked out of the window, and the world seemed quiet and expectant. A little breeze, cool and fragrant, stirred the waking trees. Then the dawn came, and far away he heard the dawn-song of the birds beginning, growing as it came towards him, until it rushed over him, filling all the land round the house, and passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with how this sort of thing works that Smithson, later Smith, becomes a famous worker of metal. The goods he makes, although primarily ‘plain and useful’, are ‘strong and lasting, but they also had a grace about them, being shapely in their kinds, good to handle and to look at’. Pure William Morris, though unlike Morris, Smith doesn’t have a factory behind him.

But Smith is not simply a skilled and inspired worker of metal. ‘For Smith became acquainted with Faery, and some regions of it he knew as well as any mortal can: though since too many had become like Nokes, he spoke of this to few people, except his wife and his children.’

And thus we reach the section of the story that currently interests me most, not for what now seems like rather heavy-handed allegorising of the creative process (although Tolkien suggested that this was not intended to be an allegory) but for the fact of the journeys themselves, the explorations of this mysterious country of Faery to which Smith has access.

For Christmas, I received a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s much-acclaimed The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Macfarlane’s intention is to explore the ancient tracks that cross the British landscape and the surrounding seas, and establish a connection with the world beyond Britain. It’s a fascinating enterprise and Macfarlane writes well. One might, I suppose, seek to invoke the word ‘psychogeography’ but if one does, one needs to reach for a meaning other than Iain Sinclair inscribing increasingly frivolous lines across London and south-east England. One might think of Alfred Watkins’ work on ley lines, and his perception of them as marked tracks across the landscape rather than their subsequent reinvention as lines of mystical energy. One might think of Watkins as an artisanal mapper of trackways and it’s possible to think of Macfarlane in the same way, although he does also have a taste for the mystical, which is more pronounced in this book, perhaps, than The Wild Places, to which it forms a loose, a very loose, sequel. But having said that, Macfarlane seems to know when to pull back from the absurd while maintaining a sense of wonder about the world.

Smith, we are told, travels under the aegis of the fay-star, and ‘was as safe as a mortal can be in that perilous country’. He is favoured, if you like, but after several strange encounters, ‘he understood that the marvels of Faery cannot be approached without danger’. Nonetheless, ‘his desire was still stronger to go deep into the land’. On the surface, this seems quite reasonable and yet I confess to a sense of unease when confronted with this deliberate attempt to penetrate all the mysteries of Faery. Of course, one might argue that it is the work of the artist to keep going despite obstacles and obstructions but I can’t help thinking there is an art, too, in knowing when not to go on, and this is something that Smith, for all his gentle and unassuming ways, does not grasp. He is rebuked by the young maiden with whom he dances – we already know her to be the Faery Queen but he will recognise her only years later when summoned to the Queen’s presence.

She wore no crown and had no throne. She stood there in her majesty and her glory, and all about her was a great host shimmering and glittering like the stars above; but she was taller than the points of their great spears, and upon her head there burned a white flame.

She is as far as can possibly be from the doll on the Great Cake, but dismisses this as being better than ‘no memory of Faery at all’. Though in truth, I see Tolkien’s Faery Queen as being closer to the Catholic perception of Mary as Queen of Heaven. After this final meeting, having achieved his heart’s desire, ‘he knew that his way now led back to bereavement’. In fact, although Smith will travel no more to Faery, we are led to understand that his desire to create will continue to be satisfied with hammer and tongs, the understanding being that he has seen his fill and can now distil the life of experience.

And yet, this seems to me to contradict the philosophy at work in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In LOTR Frodo recalls how Bilbo used to say ‘that there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”’ These are journeys fashioned by chance and happenstance but Smith, for all that he is a learner and explorer, is driven by a goal, to penetrate as far into the land of Faery as he can, and he assumes this as by right.

Macfarlane also has a goal of sorts, as expressed in his Author’s Note, ‘ of walking a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route into the past, only to find myself delivered again and again to the contemporary’. ‘Delivered’, passive, rather like a parcel, subject to the whims of others. Macfarlane goes on to describe his book as being ‘about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move’. There is in turn a subtle distinction, I think, between ‘reconnoitre’ and ‘explore’, a hesitancy that Smith’s perambulations through Faery seem to lack. Macfarlane’s landscapes are real rather than allegorical but it occurred to me as I read on that his landscapes are as inaccessible to me as are the landscapes of Smith’s Faery. I can trace his perambulations much as Macfarlane himself is inspired by the journeys made by the poet, Edward Thomas, but does this bring me any closer to what Macfarlane himself is doing?

And the answer is ‘no’, but it is a complicated no. I can follow Macfarlane’s walks in the belief that this somehow enriches and transforms me by proxy, but it would be a mistaken belief and a foolish enterprise. Alternatively, I can be inspired to walk in my own way, shaped by what I encounter, but to do that I must needs put down Macfarlane’s book and walk away from it, finding my own path. I can follow hints to an extent, maybe sampling some of the texts he’s read over the years (and it turns out that I have been familiar with a number of them over many years) but my discovery must be mine. And it is a surprisingly vague and unmappable enterprise.

But the distinction between Smith and Macfarlane is, I think, an assumption on Smith’s part, or Tolkien’s, that walking is a mapping, a marking out of territory, whereas Macfarlane sees it as a rediscovery of the mappings of others.

Which is where I pause for now, but I anticipate returning to Macfarlane in 2013.

The Hobbit, or Madly in All Directions

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:37:00 +0000

The trouble with the internet is that it’s all too easy to feel you’ve been to see a film even before you set foot in the cinema. Having spent the last week or so bombarded with information and opinions about The Hobbit pt. 1, it was almost an anti-climax to be settled in a seat at the local cinema, waiting for the film to begin.

And before you ask, there will be no discussions of cinematic technicalities. I saw the film in 2D on the poky second screen at my local cinema, because that was what was available. The cinema was less than half-full and the proprietors presumably thought that The Life of Pi would be more popular (tigers, oh my!). I am not as upset about this as you might suppose. I wear glasses because, among other things, I suffer from a marked lack of depth perception, and I find that my prescription glasses and 3D specs don’t play nicely together. Perhaps Erebor or the goblins’ stronghold would have been more exciting in 3D but I was quite happy to sacrifice the full experience if it meant I didn’t feel queasy and vertiginous throughout the film. (The Mines of Moria in 2D were quite bad enough, thank you.) On the other hand, I’d have liked to have seen it on a bigger screen.

However, because it is, as we know, a long film, my local cinema thoughtfully provided a short intermission part way through. It felt like going back fifty years in time though they mercifully no longer play the National Anthem at the end of the film and expect everyone to stand (and you think I’m joking, don’t you? I’m not).

So, full water bottle – check; iron rations – check. Are we sitting comfortably? We should be for we will be undeniably sitting here for some time. Cue music, roll credits, and it’s time for ~~Back to Middle Earth I~~ The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

1. The Film of the Book

The question, I suppose, is what should I expect of a film that is an adaptation of the first third of an average-sized book for children, and that clocks in at ten minutes shy of three hours. I was less bored in the first hour than a lot of people seem to have been but the film undeniably picked up once Bilbo finally raced out of his front door, waving the dwarves’ contract in his hand. Not quite how it happened in the novel, as I recall, when Bilbo had to be chivvied away from the breakfast table by Gandalf, hence his hatless and pocket-hankerchiefless condition, but then, this is certainly not the film of the book. In fact, having rewatched Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring last night, I was struck by how similar in many ways the two films are in their construction.

In each case, a settled and affluent hobbit is suddenly propelled out of a comfortable existence by external forces, in both cases orchestrated by Gandalf the Grey. In Lord of the Rings, of course, the Ring itself is another external factor, but in The Hobbit, at any rate in the film, Gandalf’s twin motives in involving Bilbo appear to be a conviction that Bilbo is too settled (great emphasis is laid on his being the son of Belladonna Took, a most redoubtable hobbit, coupled with Gandalf’s distaste for Bilbo’s concern for doilies and crockery), and the need to find a species with which Smaug is unfamiliar, thus further emphasising the idea of hobbits as creatures out of myth and legend, who’ve effectively vanished out of history. That was not, I think, present in the book, but Jackson, as many commentators have noted, is busy doing infill for Lord of the Rings.

In each case, too, there is a sense of the ‘hero’ being ineffectual when it comes to surviving beyond the borders of the Shire. In the novel of Lord of the Rings, Frodo seems incapable of commanding his group of hobbits on the journey to Buckland and then on to the Prancing Pony at Bree, although he is at least able to keep moving; in the film he seems to be remarkably passive, inclined to put on the ring at every available opportunity and place himself in harm’s way. Bilbo, by comparison, is cheerfully open about his incompetence throughout Hobbit 1, and redeems himself in the eyes of Thorin through an act of physical bravery, whereas in the novel, although he was aware of his physical shortcomings, he was able to counter this through his cunning and a facility with words. That ability is only intermittently on show in Hobbit 1, most notably in Riddles in the Dark, the famous encounter with Gollum, and first, in the encounter with the trolls, except that it is left to Gandalf to split the rock and send in light rather than Bilbo’s words keeping the trolls busy until daybreak, as though Bilbo can’t quite be trusted to perform this feat alone. And of course, he can’t be. The film’s arc demands that he gradually redeem himself in the eyes of the dwarves; to do too much too soon would be to topple the story’s tower of tropes before its time. Instead, Bilbo has to go to Thorin’s aid and kill a goblin before he is worthy of notice. There is a not-fully-articulated argument going on here about the value of brains over brawn.

2. Rereading The Hobbit

I thought, given I couldn’t remember when I last read it, that I should refresh my memory of The Hobbit before seeing the film. And that in itself is suggestive. As a teenager I read and reread Lord of the Rings to the point where I can no longer read it at all because I still remember most of it too clearly. I probably haven’t read it in its entirety for something like thirty years. I was never particularly enamoured of the geneaologies when I was young and now, even if I were to reread The Silmarillion I could never recapture the intense concentration of the teenage reader, who could have absorbed and retained all this material if she’d so desired. And yet, although I was delighted to discover that Lord of the Rings was about hobbits, I rarely reread The Hobbit. It remained vague in my mind– a dark place, filled with woods, trolls, heavily bearded men, dwarves and, best of all, a dragon.

Coming back to it, I enjoyed it a lot more than I’d expected to, though this reading is fuelled by academic interest rather than simple pleasure. In particular, many of Tolkien’s sources are clear to me in a way they were not to my younger self. Beorn, the bear-man, the shape-shifter, is familiar to me now as a figure in Norse sagas. The dwarves are more problematic, part Nibelungen, part Disney, but I can understand more clearly why I find them so difficult. Other sources are more elusive. I knew George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin when I was a child, thanks to readings on tv, but if I made a connection between it and The Hobbit at the time, I must have forgotten it over the years. Yet, the connection is quite clear – in MacDonald’s story, the goblins live under the mountain. They hate humans, from whom they are descended, and are planning a war on them. Curdie, a miner’s son, rescues Princess Irene when she is captured by goblins, and the two of them set out to thwart the goblins’ plan, assisted by Irene’s great-great-grandmother, an ethereal presence in the novel.

Familiar too, and I’d genuinely not noticed this before, is the set-up of Lake-town, which reminds me so much of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, published in 1926. I’m thinking here not of the strange interweavings of human and faery life but of the venality of the men who run Lake-town.[1] Indeed, the novel of The Hobbit is suffused with commercial calculation, some of which surfaces in the film. If Smaug is dead, who does his hoard belong to? There are many groups interested in it, and this much is made plain in the film. Peter Jackson makes rather more play of the irony in the fact that the dwarves, the group best known for their interest in gold, are the ones who seek a home as well, and we are prompted to believe their motives are, mostly, pure. Whether this will change in Hobbits 2 and 3 remains to be seen. The novel is, I think, more ambiguous about this matter. There is a greater sense of confusion about motives, but also, the traffic between different groups is more confused. The relationship between elves and men is built on commerce, the purchase of alcohol and, we guess, other things as well. The elves of Mirkwood are rather more hard-headed than many of those we will later encounter in Lord of the Rings. Yes, they love singing and song-making, and Bilbo responds to this, but they seem more robust, more tangible, than the ethereal beauties of Lothlorien and Rivendell.

At the same time, there is a strong sense of The Wind in the Willows about this story. Bilbo’s snugly appointed hobbit hole is reminiscent of Rat’s riverside abode while the dwarves’ perception of their home underground reminds me strongly of Badger’s home, reaching back into the hillside, down through history. A certain element of the obsession with food and feasting can, I think, be traced back to this book as well.

3. Trouble with Dwarves

One of the mildly amusing running jokes throughout Hobbit 1 was Gandalf counting up the number of dwarves every time they got themselves out of trouble, making him not so much a wizard as a slightly harassed schoolteacher trying to keep track of his pupils on a school trip. Add that to the recent internet ‘hobbit dwarves flowchart’ and it’s clear there are too many dwarves.

If anything, the film is easier than the novel, given that most of the dwarves have distinctive visual quirks, generally in the department of facial hair. In the novel few of the dwarves, other than Thorin, Balin and, because of his size and the eating jokes, Bombur, emerged as distinctive personalities. As a child I never did sort them out. To judge from the rhyming pairs of names (many of them pulled from Norse saga), but the odd number of dwarves, with Bombur almost invariably the last name, my guess is that Tolkien supposed that children would enjoy chanting the lists: ‘… and Bombur!’. Possibly I was not the child for whom this was intended.

And yet this points to a deeper problem with the dwarves, one that neither Jackson nor Tolkien himself seems able to properly address. Are the dwarves to be taken seriously, or are they intended simply to be comical? Clearly, the back story is entirely serious. The dwarves are a displaced people who want their ancestral home back. In part their love of gold, the attendant greed and desire for more, have proved their downfall in that the presence of too much gold attracted Smaug in the first place. But the dwarves are dispersed in a way that no other group is, in either novel or Hobbit 1. The Men of Dale move down to Lake-Town, the elves always retreat to the forest, and hobbits live quietly, unobserved, in the idyll of the Shire. But always they are in groups. It is the dwarves who seem to lose contact with one another all too easily.

And yet Tolkien frequently portrays the dwarves simply as a troupe of Disney characters, concerned with eating, drinking and generally messing about; this is a group that apparently doesn’t know how to conduct itself in the wilderness whereas Bilbo, used to being unobtrusive, knows how to avoid attracting too much attention to himself.

Jackson takes his cue from Tolkien with both hands, so we have extended sequences of bad table manners, jokes involving flatulence and belching and, dare one say it, a general sense of reluctance to engage with threats if they can send in the burglar first. It might almost be cowardice, but dwarves are brave, etc. It is a far cry from Lord of the Rings where, although Jackson had (lack of) height jokes, dwarf-tossing jokes and so on, Gimli was also the embodiment of courage, bravery, ferocity and, finally, loyalty to his friends. Perhaps the trajectory that Jackson plans to follow is one of a people finding self-respect again (though it must be noted that Gimli’s drinking manners remain a little messy; it must be all that facial hair).

4. For Children or Adults?

To go back to Tolkien’s dwarves, his uncertainty as to what to do with them seems to me to suggest a deeper unease as to what The Hobbit is supposed to be: children’s story or something else. The tone veers from rather patronising Victorian children’s story to medieval romance to Norse saga and back again. Given that Tolkien was already an inveterate scribbler of stories for his children (see, for example, The Father Christmas Letters) and one has the sense that his first intention was to write something else for his children. But clearly, Tolkien got sidetracked somewhere along the way. We move from an opening assuring us that the hobbit hole was not a nasty hole (foreshadowing the abode of Gollum, perhaps) to a point where Bilbo stands at the deathbed of Thorin Oakenshield, a sequence that seems to come from a completely different story, although soon enough Tolkien pulls us back, with a ‘whether you believe it or not’.

This uncertainty seems to persist in Jackson’s film. Plate-juggling and snot jokes are interspersed with wargs, fight scenes with goblins, wargs, attack bunnies and more wargs, oh, and elves. It’s all very decorative but too often it feels like fan service for those who loved the original franchise. The battle scenes in the goblin stronghold are preposterous and at times horribly jokey considering they’re mostly about slaughter. They may be bad guys but this film frequently holds life very cheap, especially if you’re a goblin. One detects a distinct whiff of that nineteenth-century fear of the teeming masses, faceless, endlessly replaceable, running out of control at the drop of a hat, needing to be cut down to size..

But whereas Tolkien intermittently finds a sense of grandeur, mostly at the points when the story reaches back to the Norse stories, whenever the action flags for Jackson he gleefully reaches for the CGI and we have another battle.

However, there is one point where Tolkien and Jackson come together.

5. Riddles in the Dark

In narrative terms, the encounter between Bilbo and Gollum is a disgression from the main action, namely finding the dwarves. Bilbo has managed to conceal himself in the tunnels of the underground fortress, and is sneaking around, trying to figure out how to rescue the dwarves, when he finds the ring and meets Gollum. When he discovers the ring’s ability to render him invisible, he will use it to rescue the dwarves, but at this point no one knows of the ring’s deeper significance. Viewers of the film cannot escape the significance of Bilbo’s finding the ring; Jackson’s challenge then is to make the encounter seem as fresh and new as it would have been for a first reader of The Hobbit. Rather as I felt the first sight of the Black Riders in LOTR 1 and the encounter at the ford were test pieces for Jackson’s ability to get LOTR onto the screen in a form I recognised (though this was balanced by the embarrassing failures of the Nazgul and the Ents), Riddles in the Dark would provide some sort of measure of the quality of The Hobbit.

Riddles are an intrinsic part of Anglo-Saxon literature. The asking and solving of riddles is akin to sacred ritual, and the riddle-telling process is taken very seriously by both Bilbo and Gollum. You note how familiar they both are with the process, the ease with which they solve the first riddles, and how even when Bilbo wonders aloud, ‘what have I got in my pocket’, which is not a riddle at all, Gollum is nonetheless bound by the rules of riddle-telling to honour the question.

In the novel, it’s a beautifully constructed sequence —the dank setting, the two riddlers manoeuvring in the darkness, physically and verbally, Bilbo not sure where Gollum is, the play with words as intensely anxious as the need to know where the creature is. Thankfully Jackson stays very close to the original, and very close to the actors. No huge vistas here, just two incredibly skilful actors doing their jobs as well as possible. While the rest of the film is undoubtedly entertaining, this sequence is the moment at which the adaptation is most faithful to the book while simultaneously bringing out the drama of the story without fiddling around with it unnecessarily.

6. You Want Back Story With That?

Hobbit 1 (and I must stop thinking of it as Lord of the Rings: The Phantom Menace) covers the first 121 pages of a 317-page novel, and draws to a close with Thorin acknowledging that Bilbo the Burglar might be a decent sort of chap after all, something he will not do for another 200 pages in the novel. As noted, it’s a three-hour film, more or less, and there are three of them. While smearing the story of The Hobbit across three films, like butter spread too thinly on bread, Jackson is also attempting to bring together the Lord of the Rings back story and show how the situation as it pertains at the beginning of the novel came into being. It’s an interesting idea but oh, I don’t know … . It seems to me more as though Jackson can’t quite bear to let go of Middle Earth and came up with this merry wheeze to keep things going. In fairness, I doubt that this was Jackson’s intention but there is an element of fan service about the whole thing, fan service to Jackson himself. Whereas in the three Lord of the Rings films, the cutting between storylines revealed the simultaneity of the different stories in a way that is often hard to distinguish in the novels, in Hobbit 1, the drawing together of such very disparate threads seems to generate more confusion than it dispels. Perhaps it will make more sense in subsequent films but too often I felt Hobbit 1 was struggling to keep those elements in play.

7. An Ending of Sorts

So, I enjoyed seeing the film, and I’m looking forward to the next one when it eventually shows up, but whether it is The Hobbit is another issue altogether. Not that I think it particularly matters, to be honest. Jackson’s Hobbit was always going to be different from Tolkien’s Hobbit; the interest lies in how different.

[1] Mirrlees and Tolkien lived for a number of years within a brisk fifteen-minute walk of one another’s houses in Oxford; I have never been able to find out if they knew one another, though I’ve always suspected they didn’t. On the other hand, I would be astonished if Tolkien did not know Lud-in-the-Mist. I in turn frequently passed Tolkien’s house when I was a child, without realising it. And I only found that Hope Mirrlees lived in Oxford when I read her death notice in the local paper. It was years later that I found she too lived fairly close to my family’s house.

The Weird – Mimic – Donald A Wollheim

noreply@blogger.com (Maureen Kincaid Speller) — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 06:37:00 +0000

“It is a curious fact of nature that that which is in plain view is oft best hidden.”

Edgar Allan Poe knew this well, as “The Purloined Letter” demonstrates. The thief hides his stolen letter in the most obvious place – the letter rack – but he does something else which is often overlooked in recalling the story– he camouflages the letter. However, the thief’s attempt at misdirection is, like the Prefect’s search, a little too thorough, and this is what enables C. Auguste Dupin to identify and recover the letter.

There is a certain flavour of the overly-thorough-attention to detail in the recounting of Donald A. Wollheim’s ‘Mimic’ (1942). The story’s narrator works as an assistant to a museum curator, specialising in insects and much of his narrative is devoted to describing the many ways in which insects disguise themselves. ‘There is a moth […] that looks like a wasp. […] It knows somehow that it is helpless and that it can survive only by pretending to be as deadly to other insects as wasps are” (281).

In particular, the narrator is keen to talk about army ants, those ferocious predators who travel “in huge columns of thousands and hundreds and thousands” (281). Everything is afraid of army ants because of their sheer relentlessness but, the narrator tells us, other things travel in those columns, in disguise, relying on mimicry to bring them the illicit protection of the ants’ superior strength.

It would be a poor reader who didn’t realise that they were being directed to make a connection between the narrator’s interest in insects and his description of the man in black he remembers from childhood, “always dressed in a long, black cloak that came down to his ankles, and […] a wide-brimmed hat down far over his face” (280). Like a beetle, one might think. There is that same sense of sheathed uniformity, of being swathed in shiny chitin. It may also be, as the narrator suggests, sheer luck that he happens to be in the street as the story proper finally begins to unfold, as the janitor rushes into the street, calling for help, but it’s difficult not to think of it as an authorial convenience. To my mind, Wollheim is working hard to ensure that the reader sees a certain picture. And yet, if we are thinking about mimicry, isn’t this what any accomplished mimic would be doing – firmly misdirecting the gaze.

In the story, the man in black has been found dead, but as becomes apparent he is not entirely what he seems to be. “For several instants we saw nothing amiss and then gradually – horribly – we became aware of some things that were wrong” (282). The man in black is, it would seem, some sort of enormous insect that has learned how to co-exist alongside humans in the city, mimicking human appearance and, to some extent, human behaviour too. Even then, it is still not quite what it seems, being female rather than the male it presents itself as being.

The story has a number of weaknesses, not the least of which is the narrative psychology that accounts for the ‘man in black’s reaction to women: the narrator speculates that the creature was afraid of women because they notice men, and look more closely. I had assumed, once I had realised what was happening, that the ‘male’ is afraid of the female because of some behavioural quirk – maybe she eats him after mating? – but Wollheim goes with “feminine jealousy”. Not that this accounts, either, for the “sharp, round hole newly pierced in his chest just above the arms, still oozing a watery liquid” (282). Perhaps one should look to events at the end of the story for a clue to the perpetrator’s identity, but no proper answers are offered, even then.

Something that does work, and works well, is something the story leaves unsaid. As the offspring of the mysterious man-beetle, released from their confinement in a metal box, escape from the room, the narrator looks out of the window to follow their flight, and sees something else lurking in disguise on a nearby rooftop. His observation transforms the urban scene into a landscape of terrifying potential. Nothing can be relied on to actually be what it appears to be. As the narrator puts it, “Nature practices deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely” (283). At a stroke, the city, a civilised place, the antithesis of the wild countryside, becomes a place in which the natural world is once again a threat to humanity.

If, as has been suggested at various times, the Weird is a product of modernism, something most at home in the urban landscape, then this story fits right in. It is difficult not to be haunted by the last few paragraphs of the story. In particular, no journey through the back streets of a big city can ever be the same again. In common with Leiber’s “The Smoke Ghost”, no train journey can be entirely free of fear.

And yet, let us back up and think about this story again, starting with the title. I fear my postcolonial training got the better of me when the title immediately made me think of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and also Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Of Mimicry and Men”. Naipaul and Bhabha are talking in their various ways about cultural displacement and a discourse of emigration, settlement, adjustment, fitting in – but fitting in in such a way as to be only a little different; in Naipaul’s case, his narrator actively exploits the way in which women find him exotically different while striving at the same time to fit in as much as possible. Bhabha talks in terms of “colonial mimicry” as the “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”.

It’s a long way from a Wollheim short story, perhaps, but I was also struck by a line early in the story, when the narrator describes the man in the black cloak: “He was a sight from some weird story out of the old lands” (280). What old lands? “Mimic” is set in New York, gateway to the USA for emigrants from Europe, risking all in the hope of passing inspection at Ellis Island and settling down to make a new life in the Land of the Free. Returning to the narrator’s comment that “Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely”, one is obliged to wonder what is in fact happening here, for surely, the point is that the man-beetle no longer fits in, is no longer just sufficiently different to fit in. We might recall that as a child the narrator jeered at him because of his fear of women but we might always note that the man-beetle has never quite fitted in. He is already a little too old-fashioned; he belongs elsewhere but not in a way that’s entirely comfortable.

It’s tempting to speculate as to what is going on. Did the need to remain camouflaged require the man-beetle to travel with the other emigrants as they left Europe rather than stay behind and become conspicuous. But what about the rate of evolutionary change? How long does it take for the man-beetle to adapt? Longer, apparently, than the people. They have become assimilated, changed their appearance at least, become recognisably Other, whereas the man-beetle has not been able to keep up with the pace of change and is increasingly unable to conceal itself among humans. Or rather, it can no longer mimic the people amongst whom it once lived and is now classified by others as a creature that lives at the margins of society rather than being part of society. Its mimicry no longer properly works and thus it is increasingly vulnerable to other predators. There is, of course, also a hint that America’s modernity is more than it can cope with. It has become what Bhabha would call a ‘partial presence’, transformed almost inadvertently by the fact that natural adaptation doesn’t seem to move as fast as cultural adaptation. Its presence is revealed by its failure to respond to changes.

Bhabha quoted a passage from Lacan as an epigraph to his essay: “The effect of mimicry is camouflage … It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly lie the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare”. And this, perhaps, is at the heart of the man-beetle’s situation. Its camouflage is so perfect it can work only for a brief moment of time before it is detected. In its perfection is its downfall.

Wollheim clearly presents his story as a narrative about successful mimicry, but the point is that this success is now and must inevitably be historic. The mimicry has been detected, by what we can never be sure, because it is insufficiently mottled. The horror and the weirdness remain in that the reader is still left not knowing what else might be lurking in the city, but there is an implicit reassurance that, given time, each instance of mimicry will be identified because of its perfection. At the heart of this story is not success but failure.