What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  “Maybe you’re right and people can’t live like this for very long. But the best evidence—with so much lost and so many people dead—is that they can’t live the old way at all. Individualism is dead because it didn’t work.”

  Barnes doesn’t seem to have much faith in human nature, and he seems very fond of those cold equations that say the characters have to do the hard thing for everyone’s good. Of course, the writer makes up those equations for themselves.… I think there’s a general tendency in SF to make those human equations very cold and the choices very extreme. Here it’s “We had to do horrible things to our children so humanity would survive!” How can you possibly blame them for that! What kind of a softie are you, anyway? I think this does tend to get valorized, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.

  However, Orbital Resonance is a brilliant and very readable book. It’s from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl called Melpomene Murray, writing about the events of the year before, when she was thirteen. Barnes does the teenage girl point of view absolutely flawlessly without an instant of any kind of problem. Melpomene lives on the Flying Dutchman, cycling between Earth and Mars with off-Earth industry and cargo. She lives with her parents and her brother and she goes to a very interesting school. She takes her life for granted, but the book is in the form of a school project intended to explain life in space to people on Earth, and as the book goes on you discover that very human, very real Melpomene lives in a highly designed society, and one designed to produce consensus, cooperation, and good corporate employees—and she likes it that way. Orbital Resonance is as much a dystopia as anything you can find, but because Melpomene is our point-of-view character, and because she likes it, it’s easy to miss that and mistake it for a bouncy growing-up-in-space novel with a happy ending.

  This is the same universe as Kaleidoscope Century. Earth has been ravaged by the mutAIDS plague, which killed George Bush Sr. in the middle of his second term. Then there was a horrific war that was waged against biosystems, and now Earth is scrambling just to survive—these space habitats are an essential part of the survival of the human race. They had to make these kids be like that! They had no choice! And anyway, Melpomene doesn’t mind that she’s been manipulated, once she works it out, she’s having fun.

  But those people born on the ship are really different from the ones that came from Earth. The worst thing they can call someone is “unco” which stands for “uncooperative.” But we see them having fun. They race around the outside of the asteroid. They have parties. They have best friends and boyfriends and eat pizza and express their emotions freely. But when a boy from Earth comes along and can’t move well in the gravity and thinks there are rules you follow only when other people are watching, everything goes the way you expect—for about three pages and then it completely turns that inside out. That’s why I love this book.

  Their school really does sound like fun. One of the things that really works is Melpomene’s matter-of-fact attitude to working singly, in pairs, in teams, in pyramids. Two of her school friends are paired in math and the overall result pushes one of them down one place but brings the other up five, so they’re delighted and hug each other. And their gym sounds wonderful—not only do they play games in complex gravity but the games have comprehensible rules and sound as if they’d be fun too. One of the climaxes of the book comes during a game of aerocrosse, where you have multiple teams and multiple mobile goals in microgravity, and double crossing is part of the game—but double crossing within the rules.

  I generally don’t like future slang, but I’ll make an exception here. Barnes has a good ear, and doesn’t overuse it. He also knows that slang tends to produce words for “very” (“lim” here) and “good” and “bad” (“koapy” and “bokky”) and he limits it. I will admit that Sasha is still saying “pos-def” for strong affirmatives (positively-definitely) years after reading the book. It feels like language and it doesn’t jar. I also adore the names—these are kids born twenty years after the book was written, and they have names that mark them as a generation, long Greek names (Theophilus), weird nifty names (Randy is Randomly Distributed Schwartz) and the occasional recognisable name like Tom or Miriam for leaven. So many people get this wrong, and Barnes does it pitch-perfectly.

  Melpomene is writing the story of the events of one week, a year before. This is what I call “first-person reflective,” meaning that the first-person point-of-view character knows how things will come out and can comment on her actions from a later perspective. Barnes makes very good use of this to show us how it does come out before we know how it gets there. This is a very good book to read if you’re interested in how to write characters and how to make stories interesting. The pacing of revelation—the way it tells us what it tells us about what happens after that week in particular—couldn’t be better.

  This may be Barnes’s best book. (Or that may be A Million Open Doors.) It’s a book almost everyone who likes SF will enjoy, and if it gives you a lot to think about as well, then that’s all to the good.

  FEBRUARY 28, 2010

  99. The joy of an unfinished series

  A long time ago I wrote a post on series that go downhill, and whether it’s worth starting a series when everyone tells you that it isn’t worth carrying on. Just now, Kluelos commented on that old post asking about unfinished series, saying:

  If you’re one of us forlorn David Gerrold fans, you know the agony of waiting forever for sequels, so that’s the opposite point, I guess. Is it better to endure a long wait, maybe never see the next book (I will never speak to James Clavell again, because he died before writing “Hag”), than to have the next book even if it is worse than disappointing? I dunno.

  Well, if you come face-to-face with James Clavell in the afterlife, my advice is to tell him first how much you like his books, before asking if he’s had time up there to finish Hag Struan.

  I have an immediate answer to the question too, it’s definitely better to endure a long wait and have a quality sequel, or no sequel, than have a bad sequel. A bad sequel can spoil the books that came before. A good sequel after a long wait enhances the previous books. No sequel, whether because the author died or lost interest in the series isn’t ideal, but it doesn’t spoil anything. “We’ll always have Paris.” Besides, there’s something about an unfinished series that people like. I’ve been thinking about this recently. When you have a finished series, it’s like a whole book. It’s longer, but it’s the same emotional experience, it’s complete, over. An unfinished series on the other hand is much more likely to provoke conversation, because you’re wondering what will happen, and whether the clues you have spotted are clues or red herrings. People complained that The Gathering Storm wasn’t the one final volume to complete the Wheel of Time, but they’re clearly loving talking about it. And I’ve noticed a lot less conversation about Harry Potter recently, now that everyone knows as much as there is to know. The final volume of a series closes everything down. With luck, it closes it down in a satisfying way. But even the best end will convey a strong sense of everything being over. An ongoing series remains perpetually open.

  One series I read where the author died without finishing it was Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I started reading it while he was still writing them, but I read the last book after he had died. It did colour my reading of Blue on the Mizzen, but one of the things I kept thinking was that O’Brian was rather fond of killing off his characters, and nobody could kill them now. I have a term for this, “forever bailing” from Four Quartets. There will be no more books, but the characters will always go on traveling hopefully.

  Some people find it off-putting to discover that a book is part of a long series. Other people are delighted—if they like it, there’s so much more to discover. I’ve heard people say they’re not going to start A Song of Ice and Fire until it’s finished, but I think they’re missing half the fun. My post on Who Killed Jon Arryn won’t be worth the pixels it’s written in
when everything’s all down in black and white. If you read the books now, you get to speculate about where the series is going.

  Anyway, reading unfinished series gives you something to look forward to. The first book I ever waited for was Silver on the Tree, the last of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising books. There were other books I’d read that had sequels I couldn’t find—indeed, that was a normal condition for me. (I waited twenty years for Sylvia Engdahl’s Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. This is my record, so far.) But Silver on the Tree was the first book that hadn’t been published yet when I started to want it, and that had a publication date that I waited for. The second, a few months later, was The Courts of Chaos. I’d gone from the normal chaotic state of turning up in a bookshop and being thrilled with whatever had come in since the last time, to a state of constant and specific anticipation of what was forthcoming. I was thirteen.

  Right now, like everyone else on the planet, I’m waiting for A Dance with Dragons. I’m also waiting for Tiassa, the Vlad Taltos book that Steven Brust is writing even now. And I’m waiting desperately for The City in the Crags or whatever it ends up being called, the next Steerswoman book. (Rosemary Kirstein said at Boskone that she was working on books five and six together, so maybe they’ll come out quite close together too.) I’m waiting for Deceiver, the new Atevi book, and this one, excitingly, is actually finished and coming out on May 4. And there’s Bujold’s new Vorkosigan book Cryoburn, which I know is finished, but which doesn’t seem to have a release date that I can find. There’s Connie Willis’s All Clear, the sequel to (or as we say where I come from “the other half of”) Blackout. That’s coming in October. And there’s Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, due sometime early next year.

  I travel hopefully, and there’s always something to look forward to.

  MARCH 9, 2010

  100. Fantasy and the need to remake our origin stories

  Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances. Once our stories were set down in a way that made it hard to revisit them for different purposes, some of us turned to telling different kinds of stories, some to faking new origin stories, and then a whole generation to outright fantasies of origin—Tolkien, Lovecraft, Peake, Eddison, Dunsany, Mirrlees, Anderson, etc. Since then, fantasy has been retelling and reinventing their stories for our own changing purposes, because that’s what people do, what people need to do. If they don’t do it, they tend to go a bit mad. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and I put this theory together over dinner at Boskone, and yes, there was alcohol involved.

  Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (2007) is a book about the innumerable tiny subcultures of pre-modern France, and how wildly diverse they were until surprisingly recently. He discusses the way many of these little cultures changed their origin stories every few generations, without really being aware of it:

  History in the usual sense had very little to do with it. In the Tarn, “the Romans” were widely confused with “the English”, and in parts of the Auvergne, people talked about “le bon Csar”, not realizing that “good old Caesar” had tortured and massacred their Gallic ancestors. Other groups—the people of Sens, the marsh dwellers of Poitou and the royal house of Savoy—went further and traced their roots to Gallic tribes who had never surrendered to the Romans.

  Even if this was oral tradition, the tradition was unlikely to be very old. Local tales rarely date back more than two or three generations. Town and village legends had a rough, home-made quality, quite different from the rich, erudite heritage that was later bestowed on provincial France. Most historical information supplied by modern tourist offices would be unrecognizable to natives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a four-year expedition to Brittany, a folklorist returned to Paris in 1881 to report—no doubt to the disappointment of Romantic lovers of the misty Armorican peninsula—that not a single Breton peasant had ever heard of bards or Druids.

  In 1760, James McPherson faked a long epic poem in pseudo-Celtic style. Ossian became very popular. It was much more appealing in the eighteenth century than actual Celtic poetry, because it was so much more to their taste. This seems to me related to the way it’s often easier for the work of someone in a majority group writing about a minority group to appeal to the majority, than it is for work directly coming out of the minority group. People enjoy just the right amount of strangeness, and authenticity is often too strange. Ossian’s Ride provided a bridge for eighteenth-century readers towards Celtic originals—though today it seems such a clear fake it’s hard to believe anyone could have believed it real. As well as McPherson in Scotland there was also Iolo Morgannwg, the Welsh antiquarian and forger, who has irrevocably muddled the entire field of scholarship. Through the nineteenth century (and even more recently) there were people in Wales busily faking not only documents but whole archaeological sites.

  Were they doing this because they needed to rewrite their origin stories, but with their origin stories written down and already too fixed to alter?

  Our myths, our legends, aren’t necessarily true, but they are truly necessary. They have to do with the way we interpret the world and our place in it. Origin stories, and perhaps fairy tales too, can be the story you need them to be, if you can change them.

  A while ago I was involved in a discussion of Arthurian retellings, where I jokingly said that nobody updates them to the present. Nobody tells the story of General Douglas MacArthur as Arthur. Nobody says that when Cromwell left Ireland he’d killed everyone except for seven pregnant women hiding in a cave.

  There are other kinds of origin stories. The stories we tell about how Paleolithic people lived are one. In the fifties, Paleolithic people lived in nuclear families with a hunting father bringing back food to a mother who cooked and looked after the children. In the sixties, they lived in larger more communal groups, with frequent festivals with art and music and sex. In the seventies, the women’s contribution via gathering started to be noticed. In the eighties, we heard about the alpha male with a harem driving out the other males. In the nineties, we heard how the other more geeky males came back while the alpha was off hunting and impregnated the females. In the last decade we started to hear what an advantage it was to the cavepeople to have gay uncles. It’s not that any of these stories are true or untrue, it’s the way we tell them. I think the same can be said for the stories of the origin of the universe. It’s not about the evidence, it’s about interpreting the evidence to make a useful story.

  With the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy, it becomes harder to revise origin stories, or any stories. Once canonical versions exist, retellings are a different thing. Several things happened—one was the advent of something quite new, mimetic fiction. This caught on in a huge way in the nineteenth century, people were for the first time reading stories about relatively realistic characters set in what was supposed to be the real world, with no fantastic elements at all. There were the fakers. Later came the new mythologies.

  Tolkien said:

  I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate quite simply to: to England; to my country. (Letter to Milton Waldman 1951, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Carpenter, 1981, p. 144)

  It has always seemed strange that after centuries where people wrote very little original fantasy there should suddenly be this explosion of it at about the same time. First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, came new children’s fantasy—no longer retellings and revisions of old fairy tales, which now had canonical versions, but new stories. Alice in Wonderland. The Jungle Book. Five Children and It. Peter Pan. There hadn’t been a separate children’s literature, and what there had been was mostly morality tales. T
hen, a generation later, came the fantasists writing for adults—Lovecraft and Tolkien and Peake don’t have much in common, but they lived at the same time and they reacted to their time with a new mythology. Dunsany’s a little earlier, but a lot of what he wrote, and certainly where he started, with Pergana, also looks like a new mythology. Eddison too, and Mirlees—none of these people were influenced by each other (well, Tolkien had read Dunsany) and they were writing very different things, yet they all feel as if they were trying to achieve the same goal, trying to tell an origin story.

  Fantasy, post-Tolkien, has been largely involved with retelling Tolkien, or revolting against Tolkien. That isn’t all it’s been doing, but that’s one of the things that’s been central. I think one of the things that caused the huge popularity of first Tolkien and then genre fantasy is that it provided a new origin story that people needed and liked.

  Horror hasn’t got stuck with this kind of problem. Horror has kept revising the stories into the present and relevant—there’s no canon that stops it being reinvented to be useful. Those sparkly vampires are a sign of health, not sickness.

  MARCH 26, 2010

  101. The mind, the heart, sex, class, feminism, true love, intrigue, not your everyday ho-hum detective story: Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night

  It’s always the books I like the most that I feel I haven’t done justice to when I write about them.

  Gaudy Night was published in 1936. It’s still in print, and more than that, it’s still relevant. It’s not science fiction or fantasy by any stretch, its genre is cosy detective story. It’s about a series of incidents in a women’s college in Oxford in which someone is trying to provoke a scandal. But what it’s really about is the difficult balance between love and work and whether it is possible for a woman to lead a life of the mind wholeheartedly, and whether it’s possible for her to do this and have love and a family. Sayers examines this seriously and with examples. You might think that the issues might be dated. Some of the attitudes are, but on the whole the fulcrum point of “having it all,” marrying as an equal and not as a helpmeet, is still an interesting question.