Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before—flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, and that the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it, or simply what you need.
M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces, and finds invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the shower of sparks . . .
DARRAN ANDERSON
The Salvage Yard: Real-Life Experiences Revisited in Science Fiction
The end of the world took place in 1944 for the monks of Monte Cassino. The Benedictine abbey occupied a hilltop near the German Gustav Line. When Allied reconnaissance reported that Axis soldiers were occupying the site, it was relentlessly bombarded from the sky. Onboard one of the bombers was the twenty-one-year-old gunner Walter M. Miller Jr. Years later, he would write his sole novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959); a tale of monks keeping the memory, or even myth, of civilization alive in a postapocalyptic future, after mankind had almost rendered itself extinct in a nuclear war. Miller would claim that it “never occurred to me that Canticle was my own personal response to war until I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble. Then a lightbulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? This rubble looks like south Italy, not the southwest desert. What have I been writing?’”
Rarely is the real world explicit in sci-fi, but rarely too is it absent. Few writers are allegorists, but nevertheless it is present in fragments, shadows, echoes, and elements within the atmosphere. Writers are always providing a curious refracted form of autobiography in their writing, as well as a survey of their environment. However warped or subliminal, it contains their fixations. We can learn a great deal from the webs of mythology in Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny’s books or the issues of sovereignty, freedom, and fluidity in Ursula K. Le Guin’s, provided we don’t lean too heavily into literalism; they remain fiction writers after all. We do not need to know that Arkady and Boris Strugatsky survived the Siege of Leningrad before working as professionals in Soviet institutions or that Liu Cixin grew up during the Cultural Revolution to value their writing, but context deepens our appreciation of the texts and the worlds they emerged from.
Given the science component of science fiction, there is still a tendency to see the genre as a vehicle for rationalism, which would be true perhaps if humans were entirely rational agents. Certainly, there have been SF writers, like H. G. Wells, who have followed existing threads and human tendencies into the future (while displaying their own predilections and prejudices) or, grounded in physics like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, have speculated on the probable impact of technological, biological, and environmental developments. SF has had something of a symbiotic relationship with actual progress; a significant number of leading rocket scientists and submariners, for example, began because of reading Jules Verne.
Our understanding of reason has its limits however. The processes of the imagination, whether a collage or some dialectic development, are still obscure. Chance plays a major part. Russell Hoban was moved to write his postapocalyptic masterpiece Riddley Walker upon one day discovering a medieval painting of a Christian martyr at Canterbury Cathedral: “There are places that can heighten your responses, and if you let your head go its own way it might, with luck, make interesting connections. On March 14th, 1974, I got lucky.” The dazzling airships that reoccur in Philip José Farmer’s books came from a single inexplicable blimp that passed over his head as a child. Meteor showers and comets gave us alien invasions and global pandemics. A mistranslation and a distortion through a telescope gave us canals on Mars and the ancient civilizations that built them.
In the writing of M. John Harrison, we find the mechanics exposed for our benefit. His is the messy, unmappable salvage yard. A living thing that we are already part of. The preservation of the past not as an inert museum but as a teeming, shifting, dangerous form of geology that intrudes and continually alters the present. Too often popular visions of the future become relics of what the future used to be (the Raygun Gothic style of the 1950s or the rain-drenched neon of 1980s cyberpunk). Our love of them is not progressive at all, but nostalgic, and nostalgia is not what it used to be. The past, we should not forget, is a perilous place. When China Miéville conjures the river of New Crobuzon, he is writing of the Victorian-era Thames and London: “Sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships, and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water.” There are ghosts to be found in his work, the ghosts of real-life places like rookeries, markets, and red-light districts. It would be easy to discern overtly-divided cities like Belfast in his The City & the City, but really it demonstrates how we inhabit all metropolises, via our blind spots and cognitive dissonances, surrounded by inequities and periodic glimpses of bedlam.
Barrel vaulted ceiling of Canterbury Cathedral, photographed from below in 2009. Credit: Edo Tealdi/iStockPhoto.
Perhaps the most intangible entity we can conceive is the tabula rasa—the truly blank slate. Even obliteration leaves traces. When Billy Pilgrim time-travels in Slaughterhouse-Five, he is doing so through the memories of his creator Kurt Vonnegut, who was once imprisoned in a subterranean meat locker while the citizens of Dresden burned and melted in their thousands above him. There are many writers who never forgot their experiences of war, such as Brian Aldiss, whose extraterrestrial jungles have more than a hint of the Burmese rainforest he once fought in. When people forget or pass away, the environment remembers. The dreaded area known as the Cacotopic Stain in Miéville’s Bas-Lag books, legendary in fearful rumor, mirrors our own Chernobyl. Yet even nature’s memory is finite. Frank Herbert’s Dune evolved from a real-life study of the spread of the Oregon Dunes, titled “They Stopped the Moving Sands,” the kind of conditions that might one day cover a planet and erase a civilization.
The impulse to write is rarely for a singular reason, but escape is certainly a major factor. Writers dream up scenarios in defiance of experience even while being shaped by it. There is Mary Shelley, inventing Frankenstein, in a parlor game turned visionary nightmare, stuck indoors in Byron’s Swiss villa while volcanic ash blocked out the sun. There is Jack Vance, bored below decks in the Merchant Marine, somewhere in the South Seas. There is Octavia Butler, writing in the hours before dawn before going to a string of dead-end jobs. There is Thomas Disch, working as a night watchman at an undertaker’s before writing his mortality-fixated tales. There is Iain M. Banks working on an oil rig off the Scottish coast, yet to dream up a city built from rusting hulks and oil platforms tied together. Where were they escaping to? Their imaginations firstly, and then, via their creative abilities, a different future. William Gibson’s line, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” is endlessly quoted, but it’s much more than a perceptive pithy remark. It is an admonition and an exhortation to go out there and, sifting through the wreckage and the refuse, find the future and shape it, before it finds us unawares.
The Dark Fairy Tales of Angela Carter
Beauty and the Beast illustration by Walter Crane (1845-1915). Angela Carter’s fairytale retellings often blur the line between person and animal, human and creature.
Fairy tales are fundamental to the fantastic tradition, and yet for many decades they were neglected by speculative storytellers, viewed as irrelevant and auxiliary, more bedtime story than serious literature. Through her seminal
collection The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (1940–1992) did more to challenge this misconception than any other author. Her explorations of these ancient tales, through the multiple lenses of Surrealism, feminism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Symbolist poetry, are erotic, dark, and dangerous. Yet despite her massive influence on writers both of her own generation and ones to come, Carter remains a rather obscure name to many.
One of her better-known fans is bestselling author Neil Gaiman, who has spoken of the huge influence Carter’s work had on his own: “The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me,” Gaiman told the Guardian. “Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb.”
A brave and fierce young girl might find herself surprisingly at home in the company of wolves. Original illustration by Dea Boskovich, 2018.
While critics often described the stories in The Bloody Chamber as “fairy tales for adults,” Carter herself decried this simplistic reduction. She did not see her project as retelling these stories, but more as mining them, sampling from their imagery and archetypes, finding flow from their dark undercurrents.
Carter repeatedly revisits that common fairy tale trope of an innocent girl menaced by both men and beasts (with a quite intentionally ambiguous overlap between the two). But her tellings subvert the traditional moralities and unsubtle warnings these patriarchal tales deployed. Instead, as critic and cultural historian Marina Warner writes in The Paris Review, “[Carter] rewrites the conventional script formed over centuries of acclimatizing girls—and their lovers—to a status quo of captivity and repression, and issues a manifesto for alternative ways of loving, thinking, and feeling.”
This approach is most evident in “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride,” which both find their base material in the story of Beauty and the Beast, as well as “The Werewolf” and “The Company of Wolves,” which trace their ancestry to Little Red Riding Hood.
And yet to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of these stories does not fully do justice to Carter as a writer, whose most formidable talent was as a prose stylist. The searingly erotic and terrifying language of her tales; the haunting and vivid imagery; the beautiful brutality. Carter’s facility with language is what gives these stories their staying power, elevating them from mere retellings to singular works of art. Critically acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood writes in The Observer, “She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber—her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.”
Consider this passage from “The Company of Wolves”:
You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveler in nets as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends—step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague.
Here, through the power of Carter’s prose, the fairy tale becomes again what it once was: a metaphor for the frailty of human civilization, the terror lurking just beyond the firelight’s edge. And yet, what might seem maudlin is continually undercut by Carter’s wisdom and practicality; lines such as “My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not? In pursuit of just such a miracle as this, had we not traveled from the land of bears and shooting stars?” (“The Tiger’s Bride”) and “The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem” (“The Werewolf”). And then, also, there is her frank indecency, unflinching at human physicality: “The moon had been shining into the kitchen when she woke to feel the trickle between her thighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? must have nibbled her cunt while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affectionate nips too gentle to wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin” (“Wolf Alice”).
Beauty and the Beast illustration by Walter Crane (1845-1915).
Along with The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s best-known works include the novels The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), and the short story collection Saints and Strangers (1985), all of which combine fantastic and speculative elements with a deeply literary sensibility. Despite—or perhaps because of—her utterly unique and original voice, Carter was not hailed as a major talent of British literature during her own lifetime. Her body of work was not small, encompassing novels, short stories, drama, and nonfiction. Yet she was never nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious novel award, an oversight that rankled her friends and supporters at the time and appears more egregious with every passing decade.
Carter died from lung cancer in 1992, only fifty-one years old. Shortly after her death, Salman Rushdie, internationally renowned author of The Satanic Verses, wrote: “In spite of her worldwide reputation, here in Britain she somehow never quite had her due. Of course, many writers knew that she was that rare thing, a real one-off, nothing like her on the planet . . . But for some reason she was not placed where she belonged—at the center of the literature of her time, at the heart.”
Rushdie predicted that her passing would secure her “place in the pantheon,” saying that with her death, “I have no doubt that the size of her achievement will rapidly become plain.” His assessment proved correct—at least among a dazzling literary cohort that includes David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks) and Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Stone Gods), both of whom count Carter among their influences. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Angela Carter, Jeff VanderMeer writes that “Carter stands among the greatest of all twentieth century fantasists, eclipsing lesser talents such as Bradbury or Ellison.”
And yet, among readers, Carter remains somewhat obscure. Few speculative fiction fans cite her as one of their favorites. Her short stories are not reprinted nearly as often as they should be. And her novels are more often taught in English courses than mentioned in top twenty lists and the like. This iconic author’s star still has plenty of room left to rise.
DAVID BARR KIRTLEY
Funny Fantasy’s Myth Conceptions
When I was in third grade, my best friend told me I had to read the Myth books by Robert Asprin. As class was starting one day, he handed me the second book in the series, Myth Conceptions, which he had borrowed (I suspect without asking) from his older brother. He said he hadn’t been able to find the first book, Another Fine Myth. (Every book in the series has the word myth in the title, used as a pun.) The cover showed a blond boy, a tiny dragon, a scaly demon, and a green-haired woman in a miniskirt facing off against a military general holding a giant axe. It was the sort of cover that thrilled me beyond all imagination and that, I was already starting to discover, sent my teachers into paroxysms of rage. I opened the book, holding it under my desk so the teacher couldn’t see it, and read the first sentence: “Of all the various unpleasant ways to be aroused from a sound sleep, one of the worst is the noise of a dragon and a unicorn playing tag.” I could not possibly have been more excited.
“What are you reading?” my teacher asked. I showed her the cover, and she gave a long-suffering, world-weary groan. “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, put it away.” I put the book away . . . for about five seconds, then as soon as her back was turned I opened it up again and kept reading. This process was repeated several times, until she finally threatened to confiscate the book. The thought of losing my newfound treasure was like a dagger through my heart, and I did finally put the book away, though I didn’t
pay any attention to anything that happened in class. All I could think about was the book. At the end of the day I ran home as fast as I could so I could keep reading it.
Before long I’d read all the Myth books—of which there were about eight—countless times. The series relates the adventures of a naive young wizard named Skeeve who finds himself apprenticed to a demon named Aahz. This was long before Harry Potter, at a time when reading stories about young wizards was a fringe interest that marked you as an outsider and a nerd. Fantasy was a ghetto that attracted a lot of misfits and iconoclasts, and unlike today’s YA fantasy, which generally seems pretty bland and safe and librarian-approved, the Myth books had an anarchic streak a mile wide. Aahz is rude and horny and greedy, and he lies constantly. Harry Potter learns magic from tenured professors; Skeeve learns magic from a degenerate demon whose scheming quickly gets them strung up by a lynch mob, and things only go downhill from there. Aahz teaches Skeeve about magic, but more importantly he teaches him about the way the world really works, and I absorbed those same lessons. In a way, Aahz was like the “bad influence” older brother that I—an only child—never had.
The seventh book in the series, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link, contains a foreword by Asprin in which he relates the story of how the Myth books came to be written. In those pre-Internet days there was simply no information available anywhere about what it was like to be a working fantasy and science–fiction writer. A few authors like Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Larry Niven included brief essays about their process, and I hoarded these, reading them over and over, but Asprin’s was by far the funniest and best. (His afterword to the first Thieves’ World anthology is almost as good.) As much as I was interested in reading fantasy and science fiction, I was just as interested—if not more interested—in learning about how people wrote fantasy and science fiction. I now host the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and have interviewed hundreds of fantasy and science fiction authors, and it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that that whole project is about trying to capture that same thrill I first experienced hearing Robert Asprin talk about how he created the Myth series.
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