What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  This is an important book, certainly one of the most important books of the last twenty years. It’s a book I tend to assume everyone interested in science fiction’s potential will have read. And it’s also about as good as books get. Nevertheless I know a lot of people haven’t read it, so I’m going to discuss it as far as possible without spoilers.

  It’s a very intense book both emotionally and intellectually—in that way I’d compare it to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Cyteen. Like those books it is about what it means to love, and what it means to have your life path readjusted and hack your brain with technological mediation. They’d make a wonderful thematic trilogy of, “Look, this is what SF can do and the kind of questions it can ask!” Cyteen (1988) doesn’t have a Net but the other two do, and how interestingly different they are! Carter’s Net has the cameras transmitting what they see and feel, and everyone else consuming that, it’s had a neuro-viral plague that transformed everyone who caught it to an Army that ended the Guardian regime, and it has no clear distinction between what’s in the Net and what’s in the brain, when one can be hacked by the other. It has Postcops, people who wake up running software named after Emily Post who go around doing law enforcement for the day before, resuming their normal lives the next day. It has Greyspace, where feral AIs have their own ecologies. It has Weavers, who are doing slow complicated fixes for things they don’t want to see, like homosexuality and Christianity—a “nun” chip in your head for the first that stops you feeling any desire. They’re working on subtler fixes, where people just lose their faith or desire. And this is just in the primitive Fusion cultures, because there is also Africa, where technology is incomprehensibly higher. It is part of the human condition to be imprisoned in separate skulls, but for Maya it is something to long for. Technology has made everything fundamentally different. If there’s a small s “singularity,” they are on the other side of one, they are forced both closer to each other and further away by the technology that links their brains, takes over their brains, edits their brains. Yet Carter writes about them as people we can know and care about. Their Net has changed not only what love means, but what it can mean, yet I have had conversations about Maya’s dilemma at the end of the novel that are all about love—in passing through Carter’s changed world, we come to re-examine our own axioms. (I think what Maya decides is just right. I will acknowledge that this is not the only valid point of view.)

  It’s also worth saying that Carter’s prose is always astonishing, whether it’s hilarious:

  I menued the chip’s colour to a grey that matched the fabric. I stepped back and checked the effect in the mirror. The transformation was amazing. Ten minutes ago I’d looked like a typically encrusted old-time Netcaster. Now I looked like a dangerous lunatic with no fashion sense. Stop me before I accessorize again.

  Or philosophical:

  “We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we’re a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God’s creation left right and center. Well, Maya Tatyanichna? You know what we have wrought. What is your judgement? Which is better? A tiger, or a poem about a tiger?”

  The first paragraph of the book has been so extensively quoted I won’t type it in again, even though I always turn back and read it again at the end.

  The book is so mind-blowingly much itself that it isn’t really like anything. But it was reading Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration that made me think of reading this now, because there are thematic similarities. The comparison Carter explicitly invites and the one I think is the most ultimately satisfying is with Moby Dick.

  I wish it were in print.

  JANUARY 8, 2010

  93. Saving both worlds: Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt)’s The Interior Life

  The Interior Life (1990) is really not like anything else. It was published by Baen in what seems to have been a fit of absentmindedness, as Baen are generally really good at branding, and you could go a long way without finding something less typically Baen than this. The Interior Life is a fantasy novel about an ordinary American housewife who begins to hear voices in her head from a fantasy world. She never goes to the fantasy world and nobody from the fantasy world ever comes to this world. The story passes seamlessly between Sue in this world joining the PTA and painting the kitchen to Lady Amalia in the fantasy world battling the forces of Darkness. The weird thing is that this works. The stories reinforce each other, they drag you along by ratcheting, you want to follow both halves of what is happening, and the mundane details of Sue’s life are not only enhanced by the fantasy in her head but made fascinating by it.

  I expect that if you did a survey, people wouldn’t say that they valued masculine virtues above feminine virtues, and likewise they wouldn’t say that the depressing is inherently better than the uplifting. Nevertheless, in written fiction this does seem to be people’s unconscious bias. There are more downer books than heartwarming ones, and those heartwarming ones there are get scoffed at and diminished. Nobody calls Nineteen Eighty-Four a “guilty pleasure.” Similarly there are a lot of books in which characters go to the library for tech support and very few where they go to the library for cookbooks. The Interior Life is grounded in the feminine virtues of nurturing and support, and it takes this seriously in a way that a lot of feminist SF and fantasy doesn’t quite manage. From Tehanu to Thendara House there’s a self-consciousness in the way we’re told these things are important while being shown that they’re not. Heydt avoids that entirely by writing about them with a heartfelt sincerity.

  It’s also a cheerful positive book—not just a book with a happy ending, but a resolutely upbeat book. It’s a really enjoyable read. No wonder it sank without a trace.

  The Demouria portion of the story would, on its own, be a fairly standard world-saving fantasy. The Sue portion alone wouldn’t even be a story. It’s odd that there are so few stories about people cleaning their house and joining the PTA and organizing dinner parties for their husband’s work colleagues and helping their kids with their homework, even in mainstream fiction. There are stories about people who escape from that, and there are stories about people who do that effortlessly in the background of having adventures, and there are stories about people, men mostly, who suddenly have to do it and notice that it’s hard work, but this is the only book I know that focuses on keeping house in this way. I like that it isn’t about Sue abandoning Fred and her boring life but rather getting on top of her life and making it one that she likes. This could have been published as a mainstream novel of beating depression by having an active fantasy life—and yet, it’s a fantasy novel too. If the fantasy helps save Sue, Sue also helps save Demouria. It’s an odd combination, and yet it’s very effective.

  The narrative switches between worlds without missing a beat, sometimes several times in the same paragraph—by the time you’re switching between the PTA tea party and the coronation you don’t even notice that it’s odd. Heydt has said that she intended to use different typefaces to represent the different viewpoints, but this didn’t work out—fortunately it wasn’t necessary, all the cues are there and it is never hard to follow.

  The story is very firmly set in the late eighties: the forward-thinking PTA are considering building a computer lab for the school; computers are new and expensive and weird; CDs are just getting started, most people still listen to records. The medieval fantasy world has not dated in the same way.

  I tend to get into the mood to pick this up when my kitchen has got out of control—and by the time I finish it, I generally have it back in control. As well as being a nice, if relatively standard, fantasy quest, it makes me feel good about housework. I read it in the first place because it was given to me by a friend because Heydt was a friend on Usenet. (She published this as Blake for odd reasons that don’t matter, she later publis
hed other things under her own name.) I never saw a copy new, and I seldom see a copy around used—and when I do I grab it to give to someone. It’s a pity that the Tiptree Award for works of gender relevance wasn’t instituted until 1992, because this book would have been an interesting and thought-provoking nominee.

  JANUARY 11, 2010

  94. Yearning for the unattainable: James Tiptree Jr.’s short stories

  I own a copy of the second (1979) edition of James Tiptree Jr.’s collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise, which contains an insightful and interesting introduction by Robert Silverberg. Silverberg’s introduction, while generally terrific, is wrong about two things. He’s famously wrong about her “ineluctable masculinity”—in this second edition he backs down as graciously and sincerely as anyone ever has. If you want a model of how to acknowledge your public mistakes with grace, you could do a lot worse. The other mistake he makes is in assuming that Tiptree will someday write a novel, and that novel will be even better than the short stories he’s praising.

  Tiptree did cobble together a couple of novels later in her career, and I quite like them, though they do not have the novel nature. Some people are natural short story writers, and I think this may have been a more inherent and significant thing about Tiptree than her gender. Tiptree wrote some of the best short stories the field has ever seen, stories that are unforgettable, the kind of story that gets under your skin and keeps coming back. There’s a weird belief that short stories are somehow inferior to novels, are beginner’s work, when in fact they are their own thing. Some writers excel at all lengths, others have natural lengths. Tiptree’s natural length was the short story. She seldom extended even to novellas and novelettes. She built whole memorable universes and characters to inhabit them in remarkably few words, and that was part of her genius.

  Warm Worlds and Otherwise is out of print, but her “best of” collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, is still available, and I recommend it. Re-reading a short story collection I always find myself identifying themes and motifs. Tiptree wrote a lot about aliens and being alienated, but the strongest theme I can see is the yearning for the unattainable. All of these stories have characters yearning for what they cannot have, whether it’s Timor and his lost paradise planet in “The Milk of Paradise,” or P. Burke and her perfect robot body in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” or the humans and their desire for alien sex in “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” or the unbearable biological imperatives of the aliens in “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death.” What unites Tiptree’s stories is the skillful blending of SFnal concepts with this overpowering yearning for something forever out of reach.

  I’ve read Julie Phillips’s biography of Tiptree and while I thought it was in many ways brilliant, I couldn’t help feeling that Phillips underestimated the value of Tiptree’s work. Phillips is interested in how Alice Sheldon constructed the persona of James Tiptree Jr., and that is indeed interesting. Phillips is interested in the way that being Tiptree let Sheldon write, where before she hadn’t been able to, and not just write but communicate with other writers. I’m much more interested in the way that science fiction let her write, in the way she could find a way to write about her experiences as someone alienated from the world and find that writing welcomed. Delany talks about how science fiction can transform a sentence like “she turned on her side” from the boring restlessness of a sleepless night to the activation of the cyborg. In the same way Sheldon’s inchoate longing for something impossible to articulate was alchemised through Tiptree’s science fiction writing.

  Tiptree’s stories really are brilliant—I loved them when I was a teenager, I love them now. She did things that hadn’t been done before, she expanded the edges of possibility for the field. Phillips wasn’t really interested in Tiptree’s influence in our genre, and so far as she was she wanted to talk about the Tiptree Award and gender and so on, which is all really related to Sheldon personally, and not so much to Tiptree as a writer. Tiptree did write “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Morality Meat,” but gender and “female issues” were far from central to her concerns. I think one of the things being Tiptree gave her was permission to step away from this sort of thing, permission to write as “normal” (it was 1970) and unmarked, to be who she was, to be a person away from the confines of being a female. There’s this thing that happens with acknowledging and sequestering women’s stuff at the same time, and she escaped that.

  Tiptree was constantly pushing the boundaries of science fiction. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) prefigured cyberpunk—it’s one of the three precursor stories, with John M. Ford’s Web of Angels and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider. “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” made a space for Octavia Butler’s later writing about aliens and sex and identity. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” did the same for Varley—for a lot of the writers who came into SF in the later seventies and the eighties Tiptree was part of their defining space, and the genre would have been very different without her. Science fiction is constantly a dialogue, and her voice was one of the strongest in the early seventies, when everything was changing. She wasn’t a New Wave writer, and in many ways she was very traditional. “And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways” could have been written by Murray Leinster, except for the end. She wrote what she wrote and expanded the possibilities for all of us. Science fiction would be very different without her.

  JANUARY 18, 2010

  95. SF reading protocols

  Genres are usually defined by their tropes—mysteries have murders and clues, romances have two people finding each other, etc. Science fiction doesn’t work well when you define it like that, because it’s not about robots and rocketships. Samuel Delany suggested that rather than try to define science fiction it’s more interesting to describe it, and when describing it, it’s more interesting to draw a broad circle around what everyone agrees is SF than to quibble about the edge conditions. (Though arguing over the borders of science fiction and fantasy is a never-ending and fun exercise.) He then went on to say that one of the ways of approaching SF is to look at the way people read it—that those of us who read it have built up a set of skills for reading SF which let us enjoy it, where people who don’t have this approach to reading are left confused.

  If you’re reading this, the odds are overwhelming that you have that SF-reading skill set.

  (As I’m using it here, “science fiction” means “science fiction” and “SF” means “the broad genre of science fiction and fantasy.”)

  We’ve all probably had the experience of reading a great SF novel and lending it to a friend—a literate friend who adores A. S. Byatt and E. M. Forster. Sometimes our friend will turn their nose up at the cover, and we’ll say no, really, this is good, you’ll like it. Sometimes our friend does like it, but often we’ll find our friend returning the book with a puzzled grimace, having tried to read it but “just not been able to get into it.” That friend has approached science fiction without the necessary toolkit and has bounced off. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s not that they can’t read sentences. It’s just that part of the fun of science fiction happens in your head, and their head isn’t having fun, it’s finding it hard work to keep up.

  This can happen in different ways. My ex-husband once lent a friend Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. The friend couldn’t get past chapter 2, because there was a tachyon drive mentioned, and the friend couldn’t figure out how that would work. All he wanted to talk about was the physics of tachyon drives, whereas we all know that the important thing about a tachyon drive is that it lets you go faster than light, and the important thing about the one in The Forever War is that the characters get relativistically out of sync with what’s happening on Earth because of it. The physics don’t matter—there are books about people doing physics and inventing things, and some of them are science fiction (The Dispossessed…) but The Forever War is about going away to fight aliens and coming ba
ck to find that home is alien, and the tachyon drive is absolutely essential to the story but the way it works—forget it, that’s not important.

  This tachyon drive guy, who has stuck in my mind for years and years, got hung up on that detail because he didn’t know how to take in what was and what wasn’t important. How do I know it wasn’t important? The way it was signaled in the story. How did I learn how to recognise that? By reading half a ton of SF. How did I read half a ton of SF before I knew how to do it? I was twelve years old and used to a lot of stuff going over my head, I picked it up as I went along. That’s how we all did it. Why couldn’t this guy do that? He could have, but it would have been work, not fun.

  These days I much more often have this problem from the other end—the literary end. The best example of this I remember came from Making Light in a thread called Story for Beginners. A reviewer wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link’s “Zombie Contingency Plans” (in the collection Magic for Beginners) into metaphors. They’re not. They’re actual zombies. They may also be metaphors, but their metaphorical function is secondary to the fact that they’re actual zombies that want to eat your brains. Science fiction may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there. I had this problem with one of the translators of my novel Tooth and Claw—he kept emailing me asking what things represented. I had to keep saying no, the characters really were dragons, and if they represented anything, that was secondary to the reality of their dragon nature. He kept on and on, and I kept being polite but in the end I bit his head off—metaphorically, of course.