Decades ago, after reading Bug Jack Barron or The Iron Dream or something of mine like that, Thomas Disch said to me something like “That's good stuff, but don't you ever deliberately try for an accumulation of small effects?"
I answered with a rather bemused no, not really getting it, but now, though that's still not my sort of thing, at least I understand it, thanks in no small part to a novel like The Secret City. The set-up here is that an alien tour group got stranded on Earth a generation ago. Some of them chose to blend in with the “lowly” natives in order to survive, cleverly, or at times not so cleverly, disguised as perpetual human tourists, down to the cameras and Hawaiian shirts, while others sequestered themselves in their Secret City deep in the high mountains, all of them yearning for, waiting for, hoping for, rescue and return to their “superior” planet and culture.
But that's the first generation, and now—and Emshwiller sets the novel in our now—there's a second generation, born on the Earth, raised on their elders’ tales of the home planet, longing for its wonders on the one hand, but skeptical on the other, and sometimes just wishing to integrate into human society more fully.
And then an alien rescue mission finally arrives....
Okay, this sort of set-up is plenty of material for a wide-screen epic science fiction novel or even a trilogy, many of which have already been written. But that's not at all what Carol Emshwiller has done.
The Secret City is unequivocally a novel by the length standards of the Nebula and the Hugo (and certainly deserves to be nominated for them), but not by very much. Literarily, one could make the argument that rather than being a short novel, it's a very long novella, a dialectic that could go on far into many a night, and which I will mercifully refrain from getting too deeply into here.
There are two viewpoint characters and the whole novel is narrated by them in alternating first person segments.
The male is Lorpas, a young second generation alien with dim childhood memories of the Secret City, but brought up afterward within, or more precisely embedded in, human society. Taught to maintain his distance, he has lived more or less as an occasional day laborer, bum, and petty thief.
The female is Allush, a young second generation alien whose parents took her in the reverse direction, from an earlier childhood among humans to the Secret City, which, far from being an alien super metropolis or Shangri-La, is a small, weird, carefully overgrown, culturally isolated and technologically primitive village. She alternates between the approved longing for rescue and return to the home planet and the unapproved desire to return to the land of TV, cars, human technology and society, a life she has known firsthand and remembers as better than the life she's living now.
Lorpas gets in trouble with the law, and decides his only recourse is to retreat to the Secret City, along the way spending time working as a cowboy for a rancher and his teenage daughter, and eventually reaching the Secret City and meeting Allush. They begin to fall in love, there's a violent rival for her affections in the Secret City, they decide to descend together to the human realm. At which point, an alien rescue expedition finally arrives, snatches Allush, and returns home. But one of the rescuers gets left behind, and is taken by Lorpas back to the ranch, while Allush has bewildering experiences on the alien home world, and then—
But that's enough plot summary, the point here being to demonstrate that this is not your usual first contact, aliens among us, hugger-mugger, or action-adventure story. There are only two central characters, and really only four other important ones. Most of the action takes place in small towns and countryside where the Rockies meet the Great Plains, with Allush's relatively brief side-trip to the alien home world, which she herself finds as weird as does the reader, and probably more distasteful.
The Secret City is secondarily a kind of more or less conventional love story, and primarily a story of complexly conflicting identities, and their resulting levels of alienation.
Both Lorpas and Allush have been indoctrinated to see the alien world they've never known as superior to Earth and themselves as superior to the humans from whom they're supposed to remain aloof, so they're alienated from the planet of their birth. But since they've never known the alien homeworld at all, and the only bit of alien culture they've had any contact with is the pathetic pale shadow of the Secret City, they're alienated, in effect, from being alien too.
Emshwiller chooses to set this story mostly in rural areas, small towns, or wilderness, and with this quite narrow and precise focus on character, and thereby has written maybe the most convincing novel of what it would really be like to be an alien among us. Alienated. Touchingly and complexly so.
In a rather cynical way, the literary nature of The Secret City argues for it as a long novella rather than a short novel in commercial genre terms—something that would easily find acceptance in a magazine such as the one you are now reading or its remaining small handful of comrades, or in an original SF anthology—but which as a novel can these days only find a home in the genre small press or its academic literary kin. [Editor's Note: A short story about Lorpas was originally published in Asimov's January 2006 issue.]
But what, you may well ask, as I certainly am, is a novel like Sagramanda, by a writer with the credits of Alan Dean Foster, doing being published by even a more or less flagship genre small press like Pyr? Foster has hit the national best-seller lists any number of times with Star Wars novelizations, and novelizations of all three films in the Alien series, among others, and has had lesser but not commercially negligible success with SF novel series of his own. And Sagramanda is by far the best thing he's written thus far, a chef d'oeuvre for sure, and what's more, colorful, exotic, and reasonably action-packed, too.
The Sagramanda of the future is an enormous and enormously overpopulated city of some hundred million people in a relatively near-future India—not an actual Indian city of today extrapolated into the future, but a made-up city, a kind of composite, say, of Calcutta, Mumbai, and Bangalore juiced up with high tech methedrene and the results of an ongoing population explosion.
Taneer is a scientist who's stolen a recording of some designer DNA code from a major corporation, which, for reasons not revealed until the very end of the novel and which I certainly will not reveal here, is worth billions. He is on the run from its agent, the mercenary corporate assassin Chal Schneemann, a half Indian who loathes the country, with his lover Depahli, an “untouchable.” The caste system, though long since illegal, still has social power, and Taneer, a higher-caste Hindu, is also being hunted by his father, who is determined to kill him for this disgrace to the family.
Sanjay Ghosh is a former dirt farmer from the countryside who's made a modest success in the city as a tourist junk merchant, purveyor of some higher value legitimate stuff and contraband, and sometime fence and go-between for upscale dealers who gets involved with helping Taneer sell his goods for the commission of a lifetime. Jena Chalmetre is a French lunatic serial killer doing her stuff in what she conceives as the service of Kali. Kenshu Singh is a Chief Inspector out to get her before she becomes a media star. And there's a tiger escaped from a nature preserve come to the big city who's learned that its humans are premier prey.
All these threads start separately and stepwise weave together to come to a quite satisfying plot, theme, and character apotheosis at the very end, and along the way Foster paints a very detailed, sensorily vivid, culturally and technologically convincing, portrait of his extrapolated India via characters who come alive with psychological depth.
What more can you ask of a science fiction novel?
So what the hell happened?
Not to put down Pyr, which has published much worthy stuff, but given Alan Dean Foster's track record, why wasn't Sagramanda the coveted object of a hot auction to the highest bidder?
I can think of only two possible answers, one politically reprehensible and ominous, and the other in its literary way just as bad or even worse
Pyr was also the Am
erican publisher of River of Gods, Ian McDonald's truly great novel set in a future India. Which begins to lead to the unsettling conjecture that major American science fiction publishers have come to believe that science fiction novels set in a non-American extrapolated future with non-American lead characters—and particularly Third World lead characters in a Third World county like India become high tech and at the very least co-dominant—will not appeal to a sufficiently large American readership to be commercially viable.
Bad enough if editors, publishers, marketers, and bean counters believe this is so. Truly horrible on a political and cultural level if they are right.
Be that as it may, on a literary level, or more precisely where commerce and literary values collide in a writer's career, there would seem to be some grim lessons here.
When film and television show novelizations began to invade the SF racks, first written by SF writers for light advances and minimal royalties or none at all, the pitch made by editors and publishers to those writers was that this would be a way to build readership—later to be known as “fan base"—for their own freestanding more heartfelt personal work.
Later, as these media novelizations not only became dominant, but, thanks to the Star Trek and Star Wars media franchises and what followed, landed tie-in novelization writers like Kevin Anderson and Alan Dean Foster on the national overall best-seller lists, big money became involved, if not what the writers would garner from selling the same number of copies of a novel where the lion's share wasn't going to the media franchise.
Very few, if any, SF writers seemed to benefit more from this more than Alan Dean Foster. Mucho dinero from those media tie-in novelizations and the building of sufficient commercial fan base for his own self-created SF novel series, and perhaps his free-standing one-offs, too. Foster has racked up great sales figures for the media novelizations, which would seem to have led to good numbers for his own personal science fiction and particularly for the series that built fan base from one novel to the next. Not in the same league as the novelizations, of course, but quite commercially viable.
But now it would seem that, with Sagramanda, his commercial success in the BookScan numbers has revealed its paradoxical dark side, namely the anti-literary trap of “order to net."
The major bookstore chains, all two of them, which dominate retail sales, have software that tells them exactly what a writer's last book sold, and that's what they order of the next one, plus maybe 10 percent if the writer's numbers have been rising, minus 10 percent if they are not. And since only a handful of human buyers are responsible for the annual ordering of tens of thousands of titles, this is pretty much an automated process.
What the chains order in turn determines the publisher's print run and therefore initial distribution, which pretty much determines sales, and entirely determines unit cost, which determines whether a title has a chance of being profitable or not, which determines whether or not it will be bought in the first place, since BookScan, a subsidiary of the Nielsen TV rating outfit, can more or less tell them what the chains will order in advance by tracking what the author's last book sold.
The self-fulfilling prophecy as a self-maintaining circle jerk.
Needless to say, this is extremely detrimental to the careers of mid-list writers with diminishing BookScan numbers, but Sagramanda is an example of what it can do to a commercially quite successful writer like Alan Dean Foster.
Because this is the way the publishing business now works, a writer like Foster is taking a big risk by writing a more literarily adventurous novel than what has put up the big numbers—even if it turns out to be his masterpiece and still commercially viable, too, but with a diminished natural audience—because careerwise he cannot afford to have the numbers for one novel drop very hard. Neither can his commercial publisher lest the orders for the one after that take a plunge no matter how much larger a readership for it might be out there.
We are not talking about literary judgment here, we are talking about mindless computerized number-crunching. If Sagramanda were to sell significantly less than previous Alan Dean Foster product, the orders for his next novel—even were it a return to the more time-tested stuff—would go down, and his major commercial publisher would not want that, and so would not want Sagramanda.
I suspect that Foster has been around long enough to have enough publishing street savvy to know this up front, and therefore must have felt a strong literary and perhaps even political commitment to write Sagramanda come what may. For all I know, he or his agent might not have even tried to place the novel with a major SF line, but deliberately chose a smaller press as a kind of hopeful statement to the chain software that this was a sidebar that should not figure into the marketing numbers, as Sylvester Stallone chose to work for scale in Cop Land for much the same reason.
It is certainly a sorry commentary on the state of American publishing that such a strategy may have been necessary, but a positive commentary on Alan Dean Foster's idealistic commitment to something greater than the commercial bottom line. And it should serve as a cautionary tale for writers against the very bad advice many writers were given in the past and are still given by cynical editors and media mavens today.
Contrary to what writers have been conned into believing, the readership that media tie-ins build is primarily a readership for more of the same, though it may give something of a boost to your other stuff. And the current nature of the biz then all but traps you into the continued production of the aforementioned more of the same, probably to the detriment of your literary development.
But while I'm castigating the publishing industry for this situation, truth-telling compels me to cast a stone at myself. I must confess that all the media novelization tie-ins that Foster wrote, as well as some of his rather sci-fi titled personal series novels, prejudiced me against his work as a critic and caused me to disregard him as a lightweight, more or less a commercial hack. For all I know, having paid no previous serious attention to his work, I may have been right.
But Sagramanda is certainly no lightweight novel and anyone reading it is not likely to ever consider Alan Dean Foster a lightweight novelist again, even if he should produce subsequent lightweight work in the future.
Mea culpa for that one.
But maybe not entirely.
My critical attention or lack thereof may not be the be-all or end-all of anything, but I find it just as hard to believe that there aren't quite a few potential readers out there with a similar prejudgment.
It's a vicious circle, Alan. When you break out literarily with something on the level of Sagramanda, not only may you have trouble getting it to its proper maximum readership for bottom-line commercial reasons, but those very readers—the ones indifferent to your other stuff but who would read this book with appreciation—will tend to disbelieve that such a work could come from such a source until they actually have read it.
Copyright (c) 2007 Norman Spinrad
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR
by Erwin S. Strauss
With the World and North American Science Fiction Conventions over, it's time for more intimate gatherings. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 5 months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.—Erwin S. Strauss
* * * *
SEPTEMBER 2007
7-9—CopperCon. For info, write: Box 62613, Phoenix AZ 85082. Or phone: (480) 949-0415 (10 AM to 10 PM, not collect). (Web) casfs.org/cucon. (E-mail) [email protected]. Con will be held in: Tempe A
Z (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Mission Palms. Guests will include: guest list to be announced. Traditional post-WorldCon unwinder.
14-16—Oxonmoot. tolkiensociety.info. Oxford UK. Tolkien & other high fantasy (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, etc.).
21-23—FenCon, Box 560576, The Colony TX 75056. fencon.org. [email protected]. Dallas TX. Details to be announced.
21-23—Foolscap, c/o Little Cat Z, Box 2461, Seattle WA 98111. foolscapcon.org. For SF and fantasy on paper.
21-23—British Fantasy Con. fantasycon.org.uk. [email protected]. In the UK. Long-running con.
21-23—EuroCon. (+45207) 50181. fantastik.dk. Copenhagen, Denmark. David A. Hardy. European continental con.
27-30—BoucherCon. bouchercon.com. Anchorage AK. The mystery fiction WorldCon, named after Anthony Boucher.
28-30—Arcana, Box 8036, Minneapolis MN 55408. (612) 721-5959. St. Paul MN. For fans of dark fantasy.
28-30—Otaku University. otakuuniversity.com. Mesa Convention Center, Mesa AZ. Deborah Deacon. Anime.
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OCTOBER 2007
5-8—GaylaxiCon, 375 Highland Ave. #201, Atlanta GA 30312. gaylaxicon2007.org. Atlanta GA. Gay-friendly con.
5-7—ConText, Box 163391, Columbus OH 43216. (614) 889-0436. contextsf.org. For written SF and fantasy.
5-7—ConClave, Box 2915, Ann Arbor MI 48106. conclavesf.org. Crowne Plaza Detroit Airport, Romulus MI. SF/fantasy.
5-7—V-Con. v-con.ca. Executive Airport Plaza, Richmond (near Vancouver) BC. General SF and fantasy convention.
5-7—Nan Desu Kan. ndkdenver.org. Marriott Denver Tech Center, Denver CO. Anime convention.
5-7—Galileo. galileo7.de. Swissotel Neuss, Dusseldorf Germany. SF and fantasy media convention.
12-14—ICon, 308 E. Burlington #201, Iowa City IA 52240. mindbridge.org/icon. Clarion, Cedar Rapids IA.
12-14—ValleyCon, Box 7202, Fargo ND 58106. valleycon.com. Best Western Doublewood. General SF and fantasy.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Page 37