Locus, December 2012

by Locus Publications

  So the most useful space in which to consider Le Guin’s fiction isn’t quite the fantastic, and isn’t quite not. Early in her career, she tells us, she felt torn between the dictates of modernist realism and the ‘‘limitless realms of the imagination.’’ Her imaginary middle-European country of Orsinia (the name echoes her own) proved to be a useful mediation, and perhaps incidentally helped pioneer a tradition of setting-based fantasy without supernatural figures or events (now fairly common in writers as diverse as K.J. Parker and Ellen Kushner). The first Orsinian tale here, ‘‘Brothers and Sisters’’, describes the plight of a number of young people seeking to find lives for themselves in a small village whose only options seem to be dangerous quarry work or unproductive farming. It introduces us to the Fabbre family, members of whom reappear in ‘‘A Week in the Country’’ (the best of the early Orsinian tales here) and ‘‘Unlocking the Air’’, in which the isolation of village life is replaced by the problems of survival under a repressive political regime. By the time we get to ‘‘Unlocking the Air’’, published more than a decade after the other Orsinian tales, the country has become a convenient backdrop for a story more concerned with Le Guin’s developing passion for investigating the nature of storytelling, with individual sections proclaiming themselves to be ‘‘a story,’’ a ‘‘history,’’ ‘‘a fairy tale,’’ or even ‘‘a stone.’’

  The other setting most prominent in the first volume is Oregon, especially the rather bedraggled beach town of Klatsand from Searoad, which is as close as we get in Le Guin to a Sherwood Anderson-style portrait of a community through sketches of its inhabitants. The best of these is ‘‘Hand, Cup, Shell’’, in which an eager graduate assistant is dispatched to interview the aging widow of a famous educational theorist. The characters in the story are virtually all women, who come to realize how they have defined themselves and their perspectives through men, from the graduate student’s supervisor to the famous educationist himself. It’s one of the more understated but insightful expressions of the sophisticated feminism that marks so much of Le Guin’s fiction. But there are times when the Klatsand stories strain at the strictures of realism: in ‘‘Texts’’, a seasonal visitor begins to decipher messages, sometimes impenetrable, in everything from the line of seafoam on the beach to a lace tablecloth. Those constraints of realism are torn a little further in ‘‘Ether, OR’’, in which the town is again viewed through almost naturalistic sketches of its residents, but the town itself has a disarming habit of wandering all over the state. There’s a touch of the waggish humor here that we would also see in such stories as ‘‘The Flyers of Gy’’ or ‘‘The Silence of the Asonu’’ from Changing Planes. In general, Le Guin hasn’t gotten enough recognition for wit or humor, but it’s laced through these stories from the Barthelme-like high-rise climbing satire of ‘‘The Ascent of the North Face’’ to the meatheaded tourist who doesn’t realize what he’s seeing in Australia in ‘‘The First Contact with the Gorgonids’’.

  Another favorite Le Guin technique, which also helps define that odd space which encompasses both the fantastic and the mundane, is what we might call the fantasy of perspective. As I said, she’s a pioneer in bringing the rhetoric of the anthropological field report into SF, and then shrewdly contrasting it with other narrative forms as in ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’. But sometimes the shift in perspective is nearly the whole story. ‘‘Direction of the Road’’ may take place in Le Guin’s Oregon, but it’s an Oregon defamiliarized by being shown to us from the fully worked-out viewpoint of a tree. ‘‘Mazes’’, one of the most predictable of these tales, is basically a rat-in-a-maze tale from the intelligent rat’s viewpoint, while ‘‘The Wife’s Story’’, though more finely nuanced, does something similar with the werewolf tale. ‘‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’’ takes this a step further by offering glimpses into the world of ‘‘therolinguistics,’’ or decodings of animal communication patterns, which not only offers us radically different perceptions of our own world, but which is already a classic in the emerging field of animal studies in SF. Le Guin also uses this technique to cast a slant angle on familiar tales from Genesis (‘‘She Unnames Them’’) to Sleeping Beauty (‘‘The Poacher’’). Point of view is crucial to many of these tales, even to one of my favorite SF pieces here, ‘‘The Shobies’ Story’’, in which an interplanetary crew undertakes the first experiment in instantaneous interstellar transportation, or ‘‘transilience,’’ and find that they aren’t all quite having the same experience.

  After a while, though, the experience of reading any retrospective as excellent as the Selected Stories reduces you, if not to babbling, to just delighting in some of your favorites (‘‘Sur’’ is one of mine, among her shrewdest feminist satires and a fine adventure tale to boot), discovering some new treasures, and recognizing that a few old favorites might not stand up as well as you’d expected. There are dozens of essays to be written about Le Guin’s achievements in these stories, and dozens that have already been written, though none that quite encompass what we see here. Le Guin space isn’t a region of SF or fantasy, though both SF and fantasy are a region of Le Guin space, and it’s a space that encompasses us all.

  •

  Either of the novellas that make up the first two-fifths of Elizabeth Hand’s collection Errantry would easily be worth the price of the book. ‘‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon’’ managed the neat trick of being the best story in Gaiman & Sarrantonio’s allstar collection Stories a couple of years ago, and only gains added resonance through rereading. Hand worked for a while at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and that experience, along with her interest in outsider art, yields what is almost certainly the best novella ever written about ‘‘crypto-aviation,’’ that oddball fringe history having to do with early efforts at heavier-than-air flight. The story involves a quirky museum employee whose specialty is making models based on wacky old ideas from the museum’s ‘‘nut files.’’ Learning that the even quirkier former curator who had hired him is dying of cancer, he hatches a scheme to fake evidence of one of her pet theories – that an eccentric inventor had actually flown a bizarre aircraft briefly in 1901, prior to the Wright Brothers, and that the flight had been captured on a now-lost film – by recreating the film using his model. It never quite verges into fantasy or SF (though there are bits to permit such a reading), but the story ends up feeling a little like both, and it’s this negotiation between modes that has become increasingly one of Hand’s trademarks in the past few years.

  ‘‘Near Zennor’’ is a more conventional horror story, apparently inspired by the case of William Mayne, the distinguished British children’s writer whose career was marred by his conviction on several charges of child abuse. A widower finds among his late wife’s papers a series of letters she had written as a teenager to Mayne-like writer named Bennington. He visits her childhood friend in England and learns of an odd experience they had in Cornwall with another girlfriend – who later disappeared – and of their visit with Bennington at his nearby home. For motives never made explicit, he decides to retrace their steps, leading to a chilling, Algernon Blackwood-like experience of his own. Something of the same flavor of a rarely glimpsed hidden world is also at the center of ‘‘Hungerford Bridge’’, in which a dandy-ish old friend of the narrator insists on taking him to a remote part of London’s Embankment to share with him a vision of a fabulous animal which – the friend insists – can be seen only by a rare few, and only twice in a lifetime. It’s a fairly slight story, little more than a sketch, but it’s a neat embodiment of the ache to see things beyond that is nearly palpable in Hand’s fiction, and that, along with her consistently luminous prose, links her to an earlier tradition of Machen-like immanence.

  Of course, it’s tricky to look for influences in Hand’s work, given the eclecticism of her various cultural milieux, which often seem to have as much to do with painting and music as literature. She’s written earlier stories and novels that a
re informed by everything from Victorian painting to Warhol to the Ramones, and there are a couple of stories here that are at least as eclectic in their allusions. Two of them seem to carry deliberate echoes of rock songs. ‘‘The Return of the Fire Witch’’, which originally appeared in the Jack Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, seems to combine a far-future science fantasy setting with imagery from King Crimson, thus giving Hand leave to improvise her tonal gifts right into the coloratura range, resulting in something that echoes the more baroque stylings of Clark Ashton Smith, but with a decidedly more feminist edge. ‘‘Summerteeth’’ is a ruminative sketch of an artists’ colony whose title may be drawn from the Wilco song. ‘‘Errantry’’, which returns to Hand’s familiar setting of Kamensic Village with its population of former high school prodigies turned failed rock musicians and desultory artists, concerns a group of such friends who decide to investigate a local recluse known as the Folding Man, from the origami-like folded paper figures he leaves around town, but much of its key imagery derives from a 15th-century Uccello painting (which also provides the book’s gorgeous cover).

  When Hand does turn to more familiar genre materials, or at least to plots made a bit more predictable by their use of genre materials, it tends to be with stories of transformation or metamorphosis. ‘‘The Far Shore’’ concerns a washed-up ballet dancer who agrees to be the winter caretaker of a remote summer camp he knew well as a child (the echo of The Shining is directly acknowledged), and who finds a strange, half-frozen naked boy in the snow who seems to come from nowhere but has a strange affinity for the flocks of birds migrating through the area. The title character of ‘‘Uncle Lou’’ is an eccentric, colorful, and mysterious travel writer who lives near Hampstead Heath, but his real secret is revealed only to a favorite niece when she accompanies him on a visit to a local zoo. ‘‘Winter’s Wife’’ alludes to the Icelandic legend of the Huldufólk, as a popular carpenter and dowser in a coastal Maine village returns from Iceland with a strange new wife, but by the end it shifts into a satisfying, if slightly familiar, tale of an environmental predator’s poetic justice. Even when Hand’s characters turn out to play familiar roles, though, they are never simply tools of her plots (which in some cases are pretty hard to find, anyway), and her narrators are never merely recorders of events. Almost all of her characters are trying, sometimes desperately, to make, or maintain, or rediscover connections of some sort, and there’s a quiet heroism in that, so that even when this frazzled nobility doesn’t always make it to the surface of the plot, the characters continue to haunt us.

  •

  At its best, Adam Roberts’s fiction combines a scholar’s deep understanding of SF with a fan’s enthusiasm and a sense of playfulness that arises from the interaction between the two. He’s not by any means the first to do this sort of thing; Robert B. Parker parlayed his critical insights on Hammett, Chandler, and Ross MacDonald into the Spenser novels, and Brian Aldiss’s history of science fiction revealed a good deal about how his fiction very consciously manipulated some of the familiar tropes of the field. Roberts has also written a mostly solid history of science fiction, so we might take the subtitle of Jack Glass: A Golden Age Story as a pointed allusion to a particular period in SF history, and in fact it is – though his definition of the Golden Age in the Palgrave History of Science Fiction covers the period 1940-1960, thus cleverly sidestepping recent debates about whether the true Golden Age was the ’40s or the ’50s. In fact, despite its space opera trappings, the novel has much more of the flavor of the ’50s, and in particular of Alfred Bester. But ‘‘Golden Age’’ is meant also to evoke the heyday of classic murder mysteries, and we’re given to understand up front that it consists of three classic crime scenarios – the prison escape, the country-house murder, and the locked-room mystery – all linked together by the master criminal and murderer Jack Glass. Near the beginning of Part II, Roberts offers a sly allusion to sources – and to a couple of his SF contemporaries – when his teenage girl detective mentions not only Poe, but ‘‘The woman from the Christ family, whatever, and Dickson-Carr, and Queen Ellery, and Jay Creek, and Rajah Nimmi’’.

  In the opening section, which is nearly a standalone novella compared to the more closely linked second and third sections, we meet ‘‘Jac’’ as one of a group of seven prisoners serving a brutal 11-year sentence in a hollowed-out asteroid, which they must excavate not only to find needed water but to expand living spaces, thus turning it into a marketable commodity for the corporation that has contracted to manage their incarceration. It’s an opening that clearly evokes The Stars My Destination, though Jac is far more educated and ingenious than Gully Foyle, and Roberts reaches even further back toward Bester’s own source in a few particulars: the asteroid serves neatly as both Dumas’s Chateau d’If (from The Count of Monte Cristo) and Bester’s Gouffre Martel, and Jac’s gruesome means of escape recalls that of Edmund Dantes hiding in a body bag. The visceral brutality of this opening section hardly suggests the antic flavor of the rest of the novel, and with its Shawshankian portrayal of Jac as a soft-spoken prisoner inexplicably forming and polishing a piece of glass – you just know he’s got a plan – it’s also the most predictable.

  The novel really takes form and becomes a good deal more fun in the second section, when we are introduced to the privileged sisters Diana and Eva Argent and Diana’s loyal servant Iago, in a solar system dominated by Florentine-like power families, with most of the population, the ‘‘sumpolloi,’’ living in slum-like ‘‘shanty bubbles’’ (Roberts has an unfortunate affinity for palate-freezing neologisms like ‘‘Worldtual’’ and ‘‘plasmaser’’). Eva is a scholar working on her seventh doctorate studying ‘‘champagne supernovae’’ (a real astronomical phenomenon), while Diana plays at being a brilliant solver of murder mysteries, one of which lands in her lap when a servant is murdered under inexplicable circumstances. Diana is ingratiating enough as a girl detective, though her dialogue is a grating combination of ’70s Valley Girl and Nancy Drew, even after her character develops some real gravitas as her social consciousness gets raised. (The so-far unnamed narrator also speaks like this in these sections.)

  We eventually learn that the chief maguffin of the novel is a kind of FTL device, which may or may not exist and may or may not be in the possession of Jack Glass (another echo of Gully Foyle, with his super-explosive PyrE), and we meet some impressively creepy villains, chief among whom is the chilling Ms Joad, who becomes Jack’s nemesis. By now the novel has moved into full pursuit-and-capture space opera mode, and it’s a hoot. Roberts seems clearly more comfortable ringing tricksterish changes on Golden Age SF tropes than on classic murder mysteries (the solution to the murder in the middle section is somewhat lame, though the final murder ingeniously takes advantage of a hard-SF conceit), and Jack himself never fully comes into focus in his transformation from vengeful ex-con to self-appointed savior of humanity to a final wimp-out, but by now we’re having so much fun that it hardly matters. Like Jack himself, Jack Glass finally saves itself by reining in its more ponderous ambitions, and thus gives us an almost nostalgic glimpse of the sort of SF we once read just for fun.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER

  Bad Glass, Richard E. Gropp (Del Rey 978-0-345-53393-7, $15.00, 417pp, tp) October 2012.

  The Inexplicables, Cherie Priest (Tor 978-0-7653-2947-9, $14.99, 368pp, tp) November 2012.

  Dodger, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday Children’s 978-0385619271, £18.99, 368pp, hc) September 2012. Cover by Paul Kidby. (Harper 978-0-06-200949-4, $17.99, 360pp, tp) October 2012.

  Devil Said Bang, Richard Kadrey (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-209457-5, $24.99, 400pp, hc) September 2012.

  The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman (Tor 978-0-7653-2940-0, $25.99, 368pp, hc) November 2012.

  Richard E. Gropp won the Del Rey Suvudu Writing Contest with first novel, Bad Glass, which explores a strangely plague
d Spokane WA (in a time not too far from the present) through the first-person viewpoint and some of the work of lead character Dean Walker, who sneaks into a mostly evacuated city under military guard and lockdown, in hope of making his name as a photojournalist.

  He begins with descriptions of two photos, boxed and featuring ordinary typewriter text rather than the fancier Apollo type of the main narrative. The first of them – ‘‘the photograph you know’’ from its online appearance in a forum about Spokane – features a corpse in a grim concrete room, a dead soldier whose violated body sprouts a surreal appendage, an image summed up as ‘‘insanity, printed and framed. Pure insanity.’’ Some added comments, after the description, serve as an intro revealing that Dean has many more, ‘‘Countless inexplicable images locked up on my hard drive.’’ The next example, taken on a road outside the city, shows a living soldier (complete with a ‘‘pink bunny sticker’’ on the butt of his assault rifle) standing in front of a defaced sign that once said ‘‘ENTERING SPOKANE.’’ The juxtaposition of bizarre magic with quirky humanity in these pictures turns out to typify Dean’s (and the author’s) eye for detail, not just confined to the supernatural.