* * * *
* * * *
Copyright © 2007 Tony Lee
[Back to Table of Contents]
SCORES—John Clute's Regular Review of the Latest Books
* * * *
There seem to be as many ways to avoid 2007 as there are 2007s to avoid. Which is perhaps just another way of saying that sf is (or can be) a literature of escape. But as 2007—all of them—is the case of the world we live in, what is avoided when an sf story is told as though we had never gotten here is a story that says we ourselves are not actually happening. Jack McDevitt's enjoyable but tunnnel-vision-retro Cauldron is set 250 years hence in a world very mildly extrapolated from a seriously comfortable version of the future of the world that techno appartchiks in a seriously comfortable 1970 or so might have envisioned it in their dreams, leaving the planetary suicide they helped create completely unregistered, save for an occasional Brunneresque pull-quote about how, in the year 2255, we're just beginning to pull back from environmental points of no return it seems, to most sane people in 2007, that we have already irretrievably transgressed. Sarah Hall, whose earlier work has not been fantastic, pulls a retro feminist parable, involving a dystopian takeover of Britain by faceless sexist fascist minions of Christian America, out of some hat Joanna Russ or Suzy McKee Charnas or Sally Miller Gearhart might have worn thin thirty years ago or which Margaret Atwood might have clamped the tattered nap of to her bristling head a decade later, and writes in The Carhullan Army an extremely powerful exemplary tale whose foundering in the belatedness of its take on today is a genuine shame: because it's a melancholy experience to read a book this good sunk so far into a past it claims to be our future that our final response to the dreadful warnings it issues must be nostalgia: Gosh, if only it were that bad that easy. Only Michael Chabon is utterly clear that his second novel of 2007, Gentlemen of the Road, which is set in a Land of Fable tenth century, relates to the year of its publication mainly through the honour it accords to our need to be told stories of escape.
* * * *
The Carhullan Army
Sarah Hall
* * * *
* * * *
The Carhullan Army is presented as a sequence of seven statements, seeming laid down on tapes which have only partially survived, which constitute a testimony or confession of a ‘female prisoner’ from a time when Britain is governed (despotically, we may at once assume) by a regime using the ‘Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act’ to oppress spirits such as she. “My name is Sister,” she begins, which is the only name she ever gives us, and she later makes it clear—as the seventh (badly fragmented) depostion skitters through events leading to her final capture—that she considers herself a prisoner of war. That she is detained we know from the first page of the novel, which comprises a brief lemma describing the contents to come. Her ultimate fate is not mentioned in this lemma, but as we begin to read the seven tapes we begin to realise the significance of that lemma, which begins with a statement of provenance: “English Authority Penal System archive—record no. 4988: Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock.” There is an archaeological feeling to this: something seems to have happened in Lancaster, maybe a very long time ago, something which transformed a prison into a ‘site’ from which fragments of data can be ‘recovered'. Maybe—the first sentence of this novel suggests—the Carhullan Army wins after all.
Sister begins her narrative, somewhere up the line from 2007, in Penrith, several years after economic and environmental collapses have led to the collapse of democratic government as we know it now:
* * * *
My father's generation seemed to die out quickly, though their lives had been lived in prosperity. The health system cracked apart. Epidemics swept through the quarters in every town and city. There were new viruses too aggressive to treat. Those who did not fall ill seemed just to fade away. It was as if, one by one, they made the decision that the present and the future were intolerable propositions. And maybe they were right.
* * * *
This is eloquent, and it does describe something we do all recognise: but I think what we recognise is the slow stupefaction felt by the generation that my own parents (both born before World War One) belong to, and maybe the generation of those born in the next decade or so: the slow seeping away of reality they experience as the 1970s decade began to cavitate their sense of a story of the world. What I do not think is that so a description adequately characterises the response to the world of 2007 of a typical thirtysomething today: because that response is far more ingenious than Sarah Hall allows, commixing denial and opportunism, amnesia and escape, VR menuising and street-wise indifferentism to the poisonous banalities of our owners: we could go on. It is all hugely complex and enthralling and (sure) dire, and I'm utterly convinced I don't (being too old) really get it. But one thing I do know for sure: the thirtysomething of today is not surprised by today.
Sarah Hall's protagonist is surprised by yesterday. So The Carhullan Army is going to have to work as a kind of allegory of right behaviour seen in relief against the kind of rigid frieze-frame world that Brit sf writers half a century ago seemed to think the future would transmogrify into. In those terms, it is superb. Sister tells us of food rationing in Penrith, and humiliating birth-control devices implanted in women, which any soldier is allowed to examine with his fingers whenever it suits him, and Christian food packets (complete with homilies) from America. She tells us of her slow plans for escape. We follow her south-west into the heart of what was once the Lake District, whose topography and ecology Hall describes, or rather laves, with a succinct but encompassing presentness of diction I found utterly engaging. We reach the Carhullan farm or compound, where sixty or so women have for some years lived off the land. After an initiatory ordeal, she is accepted into the group. There is hard work, and sex (women with women and with a group of neighbouring men), and a tough-minded suss on just how tough-minded and tough-bodied one must be to make utopia in an era of climate change (Hall does mention that sort of thing, but does not really integrate it into the texture of her stark tale). Every once in a while a tone of piety intrudes—"For all their differences of opinion and different roles, the women at the form were a tight community, respectful of each other and mutually helpful"—but in the end the farm sounds like a real place.
As does its skewed but charismatic (and ultimately plausible) leader. The complexity of her treatment of this woman may be Hall's greatest accomplishment in this novel, over and above the taste of the soil; and insofar as The Carhullan Army is an allegory of necessary action against a definable foe, her own decisions are pretty well inevitable. The allegory's typical inability to portray the coils of human ingenuity does mark and cripple the book as a register of what where we live now and how it may feel to continue (Will Self's seemingly ludicrous The Book of Dave (2006), for instance, far more accurately captures the careening feel of these things); but as a frieze it glows. It is exemplary with pain.
* * * *
Cauldron
Jack McDevitt
* * * *
* * * *
Jack McDevitt is too able and smooth and likeable and engrossing a writer to have written Cauldron as much more than a recess from his proper work. 250 years have passed from now. The space programme is in trouble, though it's not 1970s near space that is being abandoned this time, but the galaxy itself; men and women have good or bad marriages in Washington suburbs; global warming is a threat but seems to be under control; commuters travel by flitters rather than automobiles; an exciting talk by an ex-astronaut at a local high school generates a sudden heavy use of the school library; there is no real evidence of the information revolution in the book, no evolution of net culture, no sign of singularity, no VR haven, no Kuttner keep, no genetic engineering, no nanoware, though AIs seem to exist (or perhaps they are only computers gussied up to sound sentient). The cast is almost exclusively white, middle-class, bourgeois, mostly bored in jobs (one of centr
al characters is a real estate agent) it would be difficult to think will survive the next 250 years.
When a new hyperdrive is developed (some good stuff here) a gang of old salts gets finance to travel through McDevitt's back pages (this is volume seven of the very loose Priscilla Hutchins sequence) to various star systems where previous novels had focused. But as the crew (this is the year 2255) have no proper recording equipment, the damage they do to the relics of various dead civilisations across the galaxy is irretrievable. In the end, they reach the eponymous galaxy centre, where the secret of the Berserker-like ‘omegas', whose destruction of any artificial structure with right angles all across the galaxy plagued at least one predecessor Hutchins tale, turns out to be comically simple: the omegas are rescue flares sent out by an entity trapped at galaxy central in the hope of rescue. Ah so.
The book was almost impossible to put down, though not entirely for reasons Jack McDevitt may have anticipated.
* * * *
Gentlemen of the Road
Michael Chabon
* * * *
* * * *
Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which was serialised in the New York Times Magazine in 2007, is not in fact a work of fantastika, except in the sense that any tale tied to coherent story-telling is inherently fantastic. It takes place round about the Caspian Sea, and its protagonists—who rather resemble Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser, though the book's dedicatee is Michael Moorcock, and his array of haunted anti-heroes suffuses Chabon's duo in waves of sagacious embonpoint—find themselves embroiled in the succession to the throne of Khazaria. Each episode in their progress is as jeweled as in a dream, each sustained moment is a bead in the rosary of the psychopomp of Story. It is ago, knowingly. It is away, knowingly.
To reach far Khazaria, you've got to know where you started from.
Copyright © 2007 John Clute
* * * *
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
BOOKZONE—More of the Latest Books Reviewed
* * * *
Dandelion Wine
Ray Bradbury
* * * *
* * * *
Ah, nostalgia (as the old saw buzzes)—it ain't what it used to be...
The joke is older than the book in question, and might even have as many variations on it as the book's remarkable catalogue of reprints makes clear that it has; but it's a joke that recurs in the reviewer's mind, time and again, as he moves happily through a re-read of something consumed greedily and happily while still a child. Not only does re-reading this fiftieth anniversary version strike up nostalgia, the theme of nostalgia is very much part of the collection's warp and woof, as we take a look at Bradbury's Green Town through the eyes of young brothers—the Spauldings (though principally Douglas)—as finally summer arrives.
It's a bygone era depicted, of course (1928), but we will all have an equivalent to it: an equivalent to the happiness of beating dust from rugs and carpets, to the picking of the eponymous flowers ('The cellar dark glowed with their arrival') in order to combine them with fruit to make wine. It is all so beautifully observed: the grandma who loses her nigh-on supernatural skills for cooking good food when she is forced to don her spectacles and use a recipe book; a Happiness Machine; new sneakers; the tracks of a trolley and their significance in boys’ lives; the pleasure and importance of sleep, and love, and memory, change, happiness, time, and of Coming Alive; games of kick-the-can, a lawn being cut—with the mundane and the magical jostling for position and all being viewed as special from a young perspective...
Simple joys are everywhere in Dandelion Wine—the childish zest and lust for life neatly suggesting the darker forces and grim reapers that are present in any small town, American or otherwise, by their very exclusion and absence. If the bottling of the dandelion wine every summer is symbolic of nice things being caught and kept in one safe place, there is plenty of the world's ulterior motives on the dustier side of the glass. Life, in Dandelion Wine, is keenly separated from death. But they are both present in one form or another.
What joys! What sorrows to come! This volume of interconnected stories and vignettes is recommended with a smile. Introduced by Stephen King, with illustrations from the stories’ original publications, this is a veritable delight, available in three distinct versions. The understandably most expensive of these versions also includes another collection, Summer Morning, Summer Night, and some fascinating, contextualised correspondence between the author and his publisher.
Copyright © 2007 David Mathew
* * * *
Tesseracts Eleven
Cory Doctorow & Holly Phillips, eds
* * * *
* * * *
I have in my hands an anthology of ‘amazing Canadian speculative fiction'. “Does the world need ‘Canadian’ science fiction?” is Doctorow's question in his introduction. I like the way that question goes straight to the heart of things. Is that a specifically Canadian trait? Something I should look out for as I read this anthology?
In turn, I have a question of my own: what makes these stories ‘Canadian'? What is this Canadian-ness of which Doctorow speaks, this Canadian-ness which Canadians have so much more of than any other sf-writing nationality? How does it inform their work? And if it doesn't, why is their work being designated as Canadian?
And have you noticed that if you keep saying a particular word over and over it gradually loses all meaning? Canadian, Canadian, Canadian.
As Doctorow notes, Canada is too often defined by how it is not American, but there is something disquieting about the oblique way in which he tries to define Canadian speculative fiction—"quiet, introspective,” “particularly incisive on the subject of what it means to be Canadian,” and most importantly, “we're good at looking, at figuring out what makes other cultures tick.” Doctorow seems to be unintentionally propelling the ‘Canadian’ sf writer into a peculiarly Tiptreeish position: ‘the writers readers don't see', sitting on the sidelines, watching, watching ... though, forgive me, isn't this what all writers supposedly do? Doctorow's contention is that this is “a robust position from which to write science fiction,” given that science fiction is about the present day. What Canadians do, apparently, is to bring their particular cultural awareness to bear on an increasingly fragmented world, hunting out the ‘common threads'.
It sounds wonderful—but do the stories and poems measure up to the theory? They're all stories by people born or living in Canada, and a lot them are low-key and introspective. But were I trying to construct a picture of Canadian-ness from reading them, what would I come up with? The word that springs to mind, regrettably, is ‘pleasant'. These are all very pleasant stories. None disappointed me; one or two caught my attention a little more actively, but none actually prompted that ‘gosh-wow’ moment that I thought the best speculative fiction was supposed to produce.
In fact, too often I felt a sense of over-familiarity in such things as Madeline Ashby's neatly constructed but ultimately ‘yes? well?’ time-travel story, ‘In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock ‘n’ Roll', the title of which probably tells you all you need to know. Or what about Khria Deefholts's ‘Persephone's Library’ or Susan Forest's ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow', both set in a close future in which wider society has collapsed and small groups are variously surviving through religious fanaticism and breaking family taboos. There are others, very similar in nature.
Of those that raised a moment's recognition, I'd single out Kate Riedel's ‘Phoebus ‘Gins Arise', a stern mixture of the fantastic and the small-town prosaic, which deals with the flourishing of one woman's long-suppressed artistic temperament. Claude Lalumière's ‘The Object of Worship’ is a satisfyingly savage little story about the effects of belief. Also, Jerome Stueart's ‘Bear With Me', while it has an annoyingly punning title, is a neat modern twist on the old story of Beauty and the Beast. And it even has a certain ‘Canadian-ness’ about it, if only in terms of setting.
Or am I
looking at this anthology in the wrong way? Is Doctorow's Canadian-ness a red herring? In her afterword, Holly Phillips lays alarmingly firm, almost special-pleading emphasis on how writers are bringing home “those grand ideas, those [ ... ] moral strivings” that once upon a time could only be dealt with in the wide expanses of other worlds. Or rather, as it turns out, most of the anthology's submissions were set in this world (or something remarkably like it) rather than far away in other worlds. The two are not necessarily the same, though I have a suspicion that other editors are finding something similar, which means that it is not a specifically Canadian phenomenon.
In which case, what does this anthology tell me about Canadian short speculative fiction? It tells me that Canadian-based writers are going through a quiet and introspective period, with stories and poems that all strike a very similar low-key note, and that as a reader I still hunger for something a little bit more ... well, gosh-wow, I suppose. And I don't think either thing is a specifically Canadian phenomenon.
Copyright © 2007 Maureen Kincaid Speller
* * * *
Darwinia
Robert Charles Wilson
* * * *
* * * *
The Americas are the New World, and Europe is the Old World. But not in Darwinia, first published in 1998. In March 1912 the ‘Miracle’ took place, and Europe became the new, dangerous, unexplored world. For all of Europe about as far east as the Urals, plus a generous slice of the North African coast vanished amidst a fantastic display of light in the sky.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 18