by Andy Cox
Guardians of the Galaxy opens with one of the most nakedly manipulative sequences in recent cinematic history as a small child is forced to bid a reluctant farewell to his dying mother. Reminiscent of those TV adverts encouraging us to give money to sick kiddies and adorable puppies, the scene is intended to make us feel pity before using that pity to drag us off to an alien landscape filled with strange planets and exotic aliens whose names describe what it is they do for a living: The Collector, The Broker, Ronan The Accuser, Graham The Mid-Level Manager In A Regional Office Supplies Company. You know…the type of stupid clunky shit that genre fiction stopped doing a generation ago.
Having used a dead parent to manipulate the audience into caring about its blandly human point-of-view character, the film still faces a tough climb up the north face of Mount Exposition. Clearly concerned that his audience might black out at the seventeenth line of dialogue beginning “As you know…” Gunn uses a combination of manipulative sentimentality, impossibly broad humour and old-fashioned values like family and friendship to keep his story relatable. The film’s main protagonist even carries around an old Walkman containing a mix tape of his mother’s favourite songs and while the rights to those 1970s disco tunes must have cost Marvel an arm and a leg, the trans-generational nostalgia they kick up does serve to ease the audience into the kind of dense, pompous and irksome setting that might otherwise have sent them running from the cinema.
A million miles and a billion dollars away from the heavy-handed manipulations of Guardians is one of the finest science fiction novels of 2013. Already familiar to genre audiences thanks to his Clarke Award-nominated Far North, Marcel Theroux’s fifth novel Strange Bodies begins with a man unexpectedly turning up at an ex-girlfriend’s home. What makes this arrival unexpected is the fact that the man is supposed to have died in a road traffic accident and while all of his mannerisms and memories point to the fact that he is the person he claims to be, he looks entirely different. How can a man be both alive and dead as well as both himself and someone else? Theroux answers this question by using science fictional conceits to examine the nature of the self as well as our ideas about life, death and personal identity.
Reading Strange Bodies means learning to navigate a maze of framing devices; one chapter is presented as a diary entry, the next takes the form of a psychiatrist’s notes, then we move on to a letter before slinking back to a diary entry from what might be an entirely different timeframe. Each of these devices provides a very different view of the book’s protagonist and encourages us to wonder whether these fractious snapshots might not actually be of different people. Theroux eventually explains what is going on by invoking the kind of gonzo science and quasi-mystical politics that you’d expect from a secret history of the Soviet Union but as challenging as the book’s understanding of the self may be, Theroux has already laid the groundwork by using his framing devices to coax us into asking questions to which he has all the answers. By asking his readers to meet him half way, Theroux ensures that the journey seems much shorter and the small imaginative leap he leaves us with is made just that little bit easier by the introduction of a major literary figure.
Our guide to the world of Theroux’s novel is the 18th Century poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Doctor Samuel Johnson. His appearance in 21st Century London is designed to both provoke questions about the nature of the self (‘is it really Doctor Johnson?’) and get us used to looking at the world through science fictional goggles. Theroux’s Johnson expresses horror at the type of things that middle-class Londoners keep in their kitchens and wonder at the idea of restaurants that serve nothing but cheese and tomato on flat bread. Warm and incredibly funny, these fish-out-of-water moments detach us from the present and prepare us for thinking about the novel’s hypothetical future. A time from which the contemporary reader and protagonist are just as disconnected as Johnson is from ours.
Despite their differences, Guardians of the Galaxy and Strange Bodies share that quintessentially science fictional need to guide their audiences away from their mundane existence and towards worlds that are strikingly different from their own. However, while Theroux’s Pizza-loving Johnson may well be nothing more than a sophisticated version of Gunn’s disco-loving protagonist, it is worth paying attention to the reasons why these writers want to usher across the bridge of human loneliness in the first place: Theroux uses Johnson as a means of encouraging us to ask questions about life, death and who we are as people while Gunn wants us to be aware of some stuff that’ll help us to make sense of the next Avengers movie. Just because science fiction shares a set of common techniques, it doesn’t mean that all science fiction is equally worthy of your time.
TIME PIECES
NINA ALLAN
Some Roses and their Phantoms
We moved house this summer. Knowing that our trips to London will be less frequent in future, one of the things I did in the weeks leading up to the move was to pay a visit to the Surrealists at Tate Modern. There are paintings there I’ve known and loved since my early teens, and the artists who created them have been a source of inspiration ever since. One of the works that means most to me is the 1943 painting ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, by Dorothea Tanning. It is an extraordinary, resoundingly fantastical work, both menacing and somehow uplifting, that depicts a confrontation between a young girl and a giant sunflower in a hotel corridor. The girl’s clothes are torn, seeming to suggest that an act of violence has recently occurred, and the sunflower itself seems alive, sentient, its stems and petals simultaneously reaching towards the girl and blocking her path. The Tate also owns Tanning’s later work, ‘Some Roses and their Phantoms’, a surreal still life in which once again flowers seem to have acquired a malign animation.
While looking at these paintings, I found myself reflecting on how little known they are in comparison with the works of Tanning’s more famous partner, the German painter and pioneer of the Dada movement Max Ernst. There is no evidence that Ernst is the ‘better’ painter – indeed from a personal standpoint I would argue that Tanning shows the greater technical refinement. Tanning supported herself with her art from a young age, and her career trajectory – she outlived Ernst by more than three decades – was longer. Yet of the two, Ernst is still the artist more people have heard of.
I’ve been aware of such inequalities for years. During my early period of fascination with the Surrealists, information on Ernst was presented to me by the yard; information on Tanning I had to search for. Following my trip to London I decided to conduct a small experiment. Posing as a casual browser, I looked up general biographical information on both artists online, I was shocked to discover that although Ernst’s lengthy Wikipedia entry covers his association with Tanning in just a few lines and does not even identify Tanning as an artist in her own right, more than half of the biography section in Tanning’s entry is devoted to her relationship with Ernst. Even the photograph used to illustrate the article shows her beside Ernst, with Ernst positioned slightly towards the foreground.
C.L. Moore
A year after Tanning painted ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, the science fiction writer C.L. Moore published her novella No Woman Born. In it, she tells the story of Deirdre, a beautiful dancer who has perished in a theatre fire and is then brought back to life as what we would probably describe today as a cyborg. Her brain – fortunately undamaged – is housed within an elaborate mechanical construct, a new metal body that Deirdre has learned to control and animate with the power of her mind. For Harris, who knew her before the fire, the new Deirdre is something unearthly, something more than human. But in spite of the physical reconstruction she has been subjected to, Deirdre still retains the cast of mind and grace of being that made her remarkable. When Moore describes the new Deirdre’s finely moulded head as resembling a sculpture by Brancusi, I cannot help thinking again of Dorothea Tanning, who would have known Brancusi’s work well, and whose representation of animate form tended more and more towards similar abstraction
s as her vision progressed.
There is nothing of the surreal in what follows, though. Moore’s story is a tightly argued piece of science fiction that interrogates the nature of artificial intelligence, the rights of engineered life forms, and what actually constitutes a human being. Maltzer, the scientist who has designed Deirdre’s new body and helped to reintegrate her mind with her altered form, insists that she has lost everything that made her not only a proper human being but more specifically a female human being. He tries to persuade Harris that Deidre must be prevented from taking up her art again, because if she does, her formerly adoring audiences are likely to brand her a freak and turn on her. “She has enough already,” Maltzer says. “She can live normally as other people live, without going back on the screen… She’s too fragile to stand that.”
Maltzer’s attitudes may be horrifying, but they are not significantly different from those of the male biographers, art directors and book publishers who have either consciously or unconsciously sought to denigrate or annul the work or even the existence of so many female artists and writers across the centuries. What Maltzer wants, in the end, is to maintain control over Deirdre. In cloaking his desire to suppress her creativity behind a mask of concern for her mental and physical wellbeing – in ‘not wanting her to be hurt’ – he is reminiscent of the doctor-husband John in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s groundbreaking weird tale of 1892 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. In seeking to censor not only Jane’s physical independence but her very thought processes, John is revealed as yet another respected professional who finds it difficult to accommodate the fact that his wife’s talents may be equal or superior to his own.
As science fiction, Moore’s story is remarkably prescient, and in Moore’s lush, imaginatively unfettered approach to speculative materials we see the beginnings of the genre-defying science fantasies of her modern-day counterparts. But No Woman Born could equally be interpreted as a depiction of a woman’s struggle to be herself, without censure or curtailment by men. Such censure and curtailment are especially to be condemned when they originate with a loved one or partner. Moore shows us one woman’s struggle to free herself from the bonds of such a partnership and enter new territory, to be what she knows she is, rather than what her man desires and demands that she should be. Deirdre’s loneliness in her struggle is palpable, yet she knows she must continue, regardless of whether others will summon the bravery to follow her.
When C.L. Moore’s husband and collaborator Henry Kuttner died in 1958, Moore stopped writing science fiction, concentrating on TV scriptwriting instead. When she married again in 1963, her second husband, Thomas Reggie, discouraged her from writing altogether. Compared with the many well known male contributors to Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction whose careers were spawned at the same time, and in spite of the fact that she was recognised by her peers as one of the most original voices among them, there is remarkably little biographical information on Catherine Moore. We are told that Thomas Reggie ‘forbade’ her from writing, that he vetoed her attendance at the ceremony that would have made her a SF Grandmaster on the grounds that Moore – whose health was failing – would find the celebrations in her honour ‘too confusing’. I have not thus far been able to discover any readily available documentation that puts Moore’s side of the story, or gives a fuller account of how and why these acts of oppression were perpetrated.
I was interviewed by telephone last month for the Spanish newspaper El Pais to coincide with the Spanish publication of The Silver Wind. A part of the discussion was given over to what my interviewer, the journalist and writer Angel Luis Sucasas referred to as the ‘international new wave’ of women in science fiction and fantasy, writers like Lauren Beukes, Karin Tidbeck, Sofia Rhei, Nnedi Okorafor, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Aliette de Bodard – the list goes on. On the one hand, talking about these writers and their achievements felt immensely gratifying, a reminder of how much ground has been fought for and won by women in SFF in recent years. As I said to Angel at the time, the idea that women do not write SF – that women do not write, period – was always a pernicious myth, and women artists are simply not prepared to put up with such blatant sexism any longer. Reflecting on our conversation later though, I felt bound to ask myself whether we truly are the first generation of women SFF writers not to be at least partially defined by our male partners, editors, commentators or industry professionals? I really think we might be, a fact I find both cheering and utterly dismaying. We are getting there, yes. But why the hell has it taken so long?
MARIELENA
NINA ALLAN
Illustrated by Tara Bush
Marielena. My love, my muse, my demon. Since I was forced to leave my country, I am dispossessed of her. Ma-ri-el-ena. I say her name to myself in the dark when I can’t sleep, rolling the syllables around on my tongue like so many dark pearls. Because she is lost to me I see her in everyone. In the financier with her Jimmy Choos and her green Cross briefcase. The foul-mouthed publican, her forearms like an Olympic rower’s, her hair so red it dims the traffic lights – stop, stop, stop. The Pakistani student – Dolce & Gabbana spectacles, black hijab. The child with her dirt-smeared cheek and scabby knees. Marielena taunts me in her manifold guises and then slips away, hiding herself in the shadows. I strain to catch her voice, but all I hear is the noise of traffic and the shouts of youths, kicking a crumpled beer can down the street. Marielena’s absence is my greatest punishment. She sees my desertion as a betrayal, but I had no choice.
You imagine you understand how it begins. You – with your passport from birth and your front door key, your insurance against life, death and hijacking – think of palace coups and mobs with guns, young men in dirty bandanas and shouldering Kalashnikovs. How about a voting booth, a press conference, a gaggle of bland-speaking politicians wearing Western clothes? That’s how it’s done these days, believe me. Why shoot when you can legislate? The guns come out right at the end, for those who don’t get the message or who won’t get lost.
I chose to get lost, to come here. Marielena insisted I should stand my ground. It’s your country, she said. These people, they’re just fly-by-nights. She meant our new government. We will outlive them all. Anyway, she said. You’ll shrivel up and die in a place like that. What are you going to write about? And you know I hate the cold.
“I can’t outlive anyone if I don’t have a head,” I reasoned. Marielena fell silent. She didn’t say the word coward out loud, but I knew she was thinking it.
I imagine these decisions must be simpler when you’re a demon. Human death is like a bruise – it soon fades.
“You will come, though,” I said to her. “We’ll stay together?”
She kept her silence at first, and I thought she was sulking. Then she turned on me with fire in her eyes and asked me how I expected her to live in a country that had sold its soul. Not to the devil, oh no, but to the annual APR and the FTSE, whatever that was, to McDonald’s and Madonna and the iPhone.
The devil, now, she said. That might have been interesting.
She told me she’d suffocate, then refused to discuss the matter any further. I thought she’d come round in the end. She had to. We were a team.
They kept us waiting in a secure enclosure at the airport. (If you thought secure enclosures were only for cattle, you would be wrong.) On the other side of the barrier, a woman who had failed the preliminary entrance stipulation was being escorted by two armed border guards towards a waiting plane. The woman was screaming and crying and rending her clothes. The border guards kept on going, just doing their job. I saw Marielena’s fury in that woman’s eyes, as I knew she meant me to. Her anger and her terror and her wordless farewell.
Muse and monster, Marielena, how is her loss even bearable for me to contemplate, much less suffer?
What do I think of when I think of my country? The special lamb dish my mother used to make, with apricots. Apricots, and shaded courtyards, and the stony road that leads you from the village right into the
city. The city, with its markets and its protocols, the bookstore and Turkish cafe, the tiny forbidden record exchange, where at one time you could put on headphones and listen to albums by the Bee Gees and Nirvana, Mahalia Jackson and Amália Rodrigues, Salif Keita and Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega.
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river. I could have fallen for you, dear Suzanne, if not for Marielena. She would have torn me apart, piece by bloody piece, had she ever suspected.
The smell of scorched earth and ripening figs, the tawny back of the midday sun, beating with a golden hammer on the terracotta roof tiles.
Tabby cats, swift ectomorphs, their mangy hides speckled with dust motes, patrolling the backyards of restaurants, jousting for scraps.
Foreign newspapers and tobacco root, chess games at dusk. Incense, incensed, insensible.
Myself, running home from school, haranguing my mother with my first ecstatic, eager, arrogant words of poetry.
I wake to rain.
Is this a new kind of temple that we come to, this damp concrete edifice where the Border Agency keeps its offices, its grey walls slick with drizzle, its acolytes in their nylon uniforms, deciding our fates behind a toughened glass screen with a tick in a box?
What do they make of our dramas, these men and women? You hear stories – stories of a Sudanese pastor, setting himself on fire outside the town hall in Leicester, of a computing graduate from Eritrea, revealing her genital mutilations to Customs and Excise at the port of Dover. Stories of pepper spray and mass hysteria, of dirty hypodermics and hatchets and electric steak knives. It is because of stories like these that the reinforced glass has been installed, the panic buttons and the sprinkler system, as effective against self-immolation as it is against illicit smoking in the agency toilets.