What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Jon Lukas is a resident of Pell who tries to play both sides against the middle. He’s hardheaded, self-interested and very unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong.

  Vassily Kressich is a resident of Q, the Quarantine Zone where the refugees lead lives of riot and gangs, and who is so desperate, he’s the pawn of anyone who uses him.

  I used the word “desperate” several times, and I could have used it several more if I were talking about what happens to these people as the book goes on. It’s a novel about desperate people, desperate space stations, desperate aliens, a desperate space fleet that’s out of choices. It’s desperately claustrophobic too, with people hiding in tunnels filled with unbreathable air, not to mention that the whole of Pell is an inescapable trap. It’s marvellous that Cherryh manages to pull a happy ending out of all that.

  That said, Downbelow Station is a book I re-read only because I’m in love with the universe, kind of the way one puts up with one’s spouse’s irritating relations.

  DECEMBER 9, 2008

  23. “Space is wide and good friends are too few”: Cherryh’s Merchanter novels

  Merchanter’s Luck (1982), Rimrunners (1989), Tripoint (1994) and Finity’s End (1997) are all stories of individual spacers in the time immediately post–Downbelow Station. They’re all excellent books, and they are where I suggest people start with this universe, so that when they get to Downbelow Station they are already invested in the universe. The title of this post comes from “Sam Jones,” a song that Cherryh wrote and Leslie Fish sings, and which I think of as another story in this set.

  Imagine the universe of Traveller or Elite. Then imagine it made sense in depth and had up-close personal human stories happening in it. These books take place in merchant ships and space stations. The very occasional living world glows like a jewel in the dark. The ships started off slower than light coming out from Earth building stations as they went, and built up a culture like that, but then pretty much at the same time they discovered other living planets, faster-than-light and rejuv—a drug that keeps people at about the biological age when they start taking it until they’re well over a hundred. Then came the War, between Earth and Union, with the merchanters caught in the middle, until the Treaty of Pell that ended the war and formed the Merchanter’s Alliance.

  In these books we see ships and people of all kinds. There’s an independent whose family were killed in the War barely making it as a trading ship, and a thriving family ship where rejuv keeps so many generations alive that young people can’t hope to have useful work before they are themselves old. There are Union ships and Alliance ships that have been militarised. There’s a Mazianni supply ship and a beached Mazianni trooper who finds herself aboard an Alliance military ship with very mixed feelings. Most of all these are the stories of spacers, with their sleepovers on stations, their thin margins of profit, their shared experience of the deep dark and going FTL through Jump.

  They are also all about the very human need to belong, to have someone to love and somewhere to call home.

  More than anybody else, Cherryh has thought about what it would mean to live in space. I don’t know whether it’s scientifically plausible, but it feels entirely real in its nested implications. They don’t have day and night, ships and stations work all the time, in shifts, they have mainday and alterday which overlap when morning for one is evening for the other. The ships are communities, families, villages, matrilineal with children concieved with partners off the ship but growing up aboard. They dock at the stations and because they don’t have the rotation they use in motion to create gravity, they have to sleep off the ship. This leads to romance in Merchanter’s Luck and to rape and revenge in Tripoint. The way Jump stretches age means there’s a crew member in Rimrunners who started off on sublight ships, and is very significant for the protagonist of Finity’s End, who got left at a station while the ship went on.

  These books all stand alone, with very little overlap of characters with any of the others, though there’s considerable overlap of locations and history. They can be read in any order. And every single one of them has a happy ending, or stops at a point that could in any case plausibly be taken for a happy ending.

  DECEMBER 10, 2008

  24. “A need to deal wounds”: Rape of men in Cherryh’s Union-Alliance novels

  From Signy Mallory to Ariane Emory, Cherryh has a tendency to write female characters who are not just powerful but actually abusive and male characters who are not just helpless but actually raped. What’s with that?

  Rape of men by women is remarkably rare in literature generally and yet remarkably prevalent in these books.

  This is Signy and Talley, early in Downbelow Station:

  “You’re getting off here,” she told him, staring at him who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him by the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. “You’re lucky,” she said. He reacted to that the same way as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful. They had played with his mind on Russell’s. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds … limited murder to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors to blot out the horror outside. She had sometimes nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew.

  Now what that says is that she knows he has been damaged and she has been systematically abusing him all voyage, “dealing little terrors.” Ick.

  In Cyteen Ariane Emory even more directly rapes Justin, with the help of drugs, and rapes his mind, too, in complete violation. The text does see this as a terrible thing to do, and we sympathise with Justin and hate Ari for it. It’s also entirely plot necessary, and far and away the worst thing in the book. Ari also confesses to having hurt Florian. And there’s also the whole issue of azi. Any relationship with an azi is non-consensual, no matter how enthusiastic the azi in question has been programmed to be. They’re not capable of giving free consent. They get tape to make them like it, the same as for anything. This is fundamental to what azi are. This is all entirely necessary to the story.

  In Rimrunners Bet Yaeger kills two potential (male) rapists in the first few chapters. But when she thinks about what happens to newbies on the decks in Africa and what she has herself done, it’s also rape. This is what Bet’s like, and it isn’t graphic or even onstage, but it also isn’t particularly necessary.

  In Tripoint, Marie Hawkins, who is very unstable, has been raped, and she has fantasies of raping her rapist in return, specifically of violating him without consent. Also her son Tom, the product of the rape, has sex forced on him during Jump when he isn’t in a condition to give consent. It’s rape even if he enjoys it—he doesn’t understand what’s going on or who is with him. Again, I wouldn’t say this was necessary to the plot or the themes of the novel.

  So what is going on? Clearly, Cherryh’s seeing rape here as part of a power balance thing. Historically, it has usually been men who have had more power. In a non-sexist future, some women will also have power. Men with power in this universe are fairly hard to find, but when you do find them they quite often tend to be rapists, too: the male Mazianni captains, Austin Bowe, Geoffrey Carnath vs non-rapists Angelo and Damon Konstantin, the captains of Finity’s End and Dublin Again, Denys and Giraud Nye. So it does seem as if she’s working on an axiom that some human beings will rape other human beings if they can get away with it, which has been historically true of men, and it would be sexist to think it would not be just as true of some women if women also had power.

  I do find this more than a little disturbing, but it’s completely logical unless women are inherently nicer than men, which I do not believe. It’s a pretty unpleasant thought though, when you drag it out and examin
e it.

  DECEMBER 21, 2008

  25. How to talk to writers

  Writers are people, and they were people before they were writers. They change lightbulbs and buy groceries just like everyone else. Really. Because they’re people, they vary. Some of them are jerks, but many of them are very interesting people to talk to.

  Writers will usually talk about their writing if you want to talk to them about it. But they can also talk about other things!

  Writers mostly aren’t celebrities. They have a little bit of demi-fame within the community, and that’s it. For the few who are celebrities it’s different, but most writers are only too glad to have their name recognised.

  However well you feel you know a writer because you have read their books or their blog, until you’ve met them you don’t know them, and they don’t know you. They’ll probably be happy to talk to you at a signing or a convention, but they’re not your instant best friend.

  If you happen to be introduced to a writer you haven’t read, do not say, “I’m sorry, but I haven’t read any of your books.” This just causes embarrassment. The normal state of affairs for an ordinary writer is that most people they meet haven’t read any of their books. This may be different for Terry Pratchett and J. K. Rowling. But ordinary writers that you might happen to meet won’t expect you to have read their work. This totally isn’t a problem unless you mention that you haven’t. What are they supposed to say in response? “Oh, that’s all right”? “Go away, you illiterate ass”? There just isn’t a good answer and it leaves the writer spluttering. (Anyone who wants is welcome to my answer: “Oh, that’s OK, you can give me the five dollars now.”) I understand the urge to say you haven’t read them. It comes from guilt. But don’t say it. If you feel guilty just quietly go and buy one of their books later. And there’s no reason to feel guilty. Nobody expects you to have read every book in the world, least of all the writers. Writers see their sales figures. They know that statistically it’s unlikely that you’ve read their books.

  Do not say “Where can I buy your books?” The answer is “The bookstore!” (Or “The dealers’ room!” or “Your usual online bookstore!”) Asking this question makes the writer feel as if you think they’re self-published and sell their books out of the back of their car. (My husband’s boss asks me this every time she sees me.) Ellen Kushner is irate about it in her journal. I think people ask this because they want to demonstrate good intentions, but again, don’t ask. If you want one just go and buy one quietly where you normally buy books.

  If you have read their books and you adore them, do say so if you’d like to. You can’t go wrong with “I really like your books!” or “I really like Specific Title.” The worst thing that can possibly happen is that the writer will say “Thank you,” and you’ll stand there tongue-tied by being in their presence. This still happens to me occasionally when I meet writers I really admire. The last time I met Samuel Delany I managed an actual sentence with words in it, rather than just awestruck gurgling. Most writers can cope even with the gurgling if they have to.

  If you have read their books and you hate them, don’t say, “I have to say, I really hate your work.” You don’t have to say it at all. Again, it leaves the writer with no possible honest and polite reply. If you’re having an actual conversation with the writer about something and it’s actually relevant to say that you hate all alternate history including theirs, or their treatment of dragons, then it can be OK. But marching up to them and saying you have to say it—and it’s something people always feel they have to preface that way—is just a waste of time.

  Pick your time to approach. If a writer is eating or busily engaged with other people, don’t interrupt them just to gurgle at them. There’ll probably be another moment.

  Oh, and finally, if you meet a writer and they turn out to be four feet tall, or immensely fat, or terribly ugly, or old, don’t say, “I thought you’d be taller/thinner/prettier/younger.” As I was saying, writers are people and can have their feelings hurt by this kind of thing just like anyone else.

  JANUARY 29, 2009

  26. “Give me back the Berlin Wall”: Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road

  Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books consist of The Star Fraction (1995), The Stone Canal (1996), The Cassini Division (1997) and The Sky Road (1999). That’s the order they were published in originally in the UK, in the US they were published in the order The Cassini Division, The Stone Canal, The Star Fraction and The Sky Road. Tor have republished The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal in one trade paperback called Fractions, and I bet (without any inside information, just because it makes sense) that they’re fairly shortly going to do the other two in one volume called Divisions.*

  I really like these books. They’re a fully imagined future where the capitalist criticism of communism is entirely true, and so is the communist criticism of capitalism. They’re kind of libertarian (several of them won the Prometheus Award) and they’re grown up about politics in a way that most SF doesn’t even try. These aren’t fantasies of political agency, not at all. But they contain revolutions, political, technological and social, and they have an awareness of history that makes them stand out. MacLeod has written more accomplished books since, but not more passionate ones. Anyway, because of the publication order differences, it’s always possible, when two or three Ken MacLeod fans are gathered together, to get up an argument about reading order. The books are chronologically sequential in the original publication order. But it doesn’t really matter. You can make a pretty good argument for any order—except that everyone always agrees that you should read The Sky Road last. So, out of sheer perversity, I decided to re-read it alone, and to consider whether it works as a standalone novel.

  Surprise: it does. You can start with The Sky Road. And it’s even a good idea.

  The Sky Road and The Cassini Division are alternate futures to the stories in Fractions. And if you read The Sky Road in sequence, that’s a lot of what you’re going to be thinking about. Most of the conversations I’ve had about the book have been about that. But it’s a cracking good story in its own right. It has two storylines, alternating chapters throughout the book. One is the first-person point of view of Clovis colha Gree, a student of history in a distant future, and the other is the third-person point of view of Myra, a disillusioned and life-extended communist about a century from now. They are connected by revelation, and because Clovis is trying to write a biography of Myra—The Deliverer. You want to know how things got from A to B, and slowly, over the course of the book, you find out.

  The thing I never really appreciated, reading it as the culmination of the series, is the way in which Clovis’s story is shaped like fantasy. The woman comes to him through the fair, she is beautiful and perilous, she is something more than she seems, and they fall in love and she takes him into a world of enchantment. Myra’s story is all end-game cynicism, while Clovis’s is, in complete contrast, almost idyllic. There’s also time, history, technology, boilerplate spaceships, computers that are half organic and half babbage engine, the background terraforming of Mars, and all the tortured compromises Myra has made along the way from the ideals she held in 1970s Glasgow. For this book, I really don’t think it matters who appeared in the earlier books. The story more than stands alone. The background of the earlier books just gives it more depth, more history. If you have that context, it hooks on for you, if not, I really don’t think it would matter. The alternate-ness certainly doesn’t matter, except in the way that missed opportunities are always cause for wistfulness. And I’m not sure I don’t like Clovis’s world better than Ellen May’s anyway.

  MacLeod always plays fair with his ideologies. The text doesn’t take a position. He doesn’t extrapolate to meet his own prejudices—well, not more than people do just by being human. In the Clovis parts of The Sky Road, the greens and barbarians have won, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Clovis follows the religion of Reason:

  In the beginning, God
made the Big Bang, and there was light. After the first four minutes, there was matter. After billions of years there were stars and planets and the Earth was formed. The water brought forth all manner of creeping things. Over millions of years they were shaped by God’s invisible hand, Natural Selection, into great monsters of land and sea.

  The conclusion of someone who has lived from Myra’s time until Clovis’s is that the people of his day are more able to withstand the problems and temptations that destroyed the world once.

  I think The Sky Road is my favourite of the quartet because I find both characters sympathetic.

  I’m tempted now to re-read them all in reverse order and see how it goes, but I think I’ll restrain myself. And if you haven’t read them, you should by all means be sensible and start with Fractions, which is even in print.

  FEBRUARY 10, 2009

  27. What a pity she couldn’t have single-handedly invented science fiction! George Eliot’s Middlemarch

  It’s too much to ask, of course. Nobody could, a quarter century before The War of the Worlds, and when Verne was only just beginning to be translated into English. But it’s such a pity, because she would have been so very good at it.

  I started to read George Eliot only a few years ago. She suffered in my mind from a geographical, or rather alphabetical, contagion with Dickens and Hardy. (I have no idea how it is that my grandmother didn’t own any Mrs. Gaskell, when Mrs. Gaskell would have been so very much to her taste. It makes me a little sad every time I read Cranford, to know she never did.) In any case, whatever you may think, George Eliot isn’t tedious or depressing or shallow. What I loathe about Dickens is the shallowness of his caricatures, the way he pushes them around his ludicrous plots not even like puppets (because I could admire a well-done puppet show) but like children’s toys that might topple over at any moment and get a grinning “Aw shucks” from the mawkish and badly played omniscient narrator. Hardy, on the other hand, was a good writer. I loathe him for the morbidity of his imagination and the sheer misery of his stories. Even his “lighter” works are blighted, and his best and most serious ones are barely endurable. But would I have liked Middlemarch any better when I was ten? Maybe it is a book you shouldn’t read until you’re forty.