by Andy Cox
The worm men are frightening at first, but the premise of the book, that they can’t dig up into your home if it’s on the move (because the sun poisons the land against them), was unconvincing, and felt like an arbitrary way to set this world in motion. For me that world is in some ways too similar to our own: there are mammoths, but also snakes, cows, horses, goats, rats, etc. Maybe it is our world, or maybe it’s just parallel evolution, but the inclusion of Earth Prime animals in a fantasy novel always feels to me like a wasted opportunity. It’s ironic that fantasy is often less adventurous than science fiction when it comes to these things.
Promisingly, events later in the book suggest that the Hollow Gods of the series title might play a bigger role in future volumes. More weirdness and magic would certainly have made this book more appealing, and it might prove easier to take an interest in the lives of these mostly unpleasant characters if they were set in opposition to gods who are even worse.
GREEN PLANETS
edited by Gerry Canavan & Kim Stanley Robinson
Wesleyan University Press hb, 307pp, $85
Lawrence Osborn
Green Planets is a collection of papers jointly edited by a professor of English literature, Gerry Canavan, and Kim Stanley Robinson. It explores “the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism” and “considers how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis”. Canavan introduces the volume with a historical overview of environmentally conscious SF. He offers some explanation of terms that will be used and sets the scene for the structure of book, which is built around opposing understandings of utopia and dystopia in language appropriated by Samuel Delany from W.H. Auden.
Part 1 is entitled ‘Arcadias and New Jerusalems’ and contains four chapters exploring the long-standing opposition between pastoral and urban utopias. Christina Alt’s opening chapter offers a depressing comparison of two of H.G. Wells’s stories – depressing because Wells first presents a pessimistic vision of the future of humanity in The War of the Worlds and then offers an eco-fascist vision of an earth cultivated to serve human interests in Men Like Gods. Michael Page illustrates the perennial struggle between evolutionary optimism and apocalyptic pessimism with the aid of Simak’s City and Stewart’s Earth Abides. Gib Prettyman explores the Taoist dimension in Ursula Le Guin’s utopian fiction. Rob Latham concludes Part 1 with an examination of New Wave critiques of eco-imperialism in hard SF.
The second part, ‘Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies’, consists of five chapters focused on the dystopias corresponding to the utopias of Part 1. It begins with Sabine Höhler’s study of Garrett Hardin’s Exploring New Ethics for Survival, which is perhaps slightly off-topic as Hardin was an ethicist rather than a SF writer and this book was really an apologia for his right-wing ethical stance. This is followed by Andrew Milner looking at an Australian example of climatic apocalypse, Adeline Johns-Putra analysing Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, and Elzette Steenkamp exploring ecological concerns in South African speculative fiction. Of these three chapters, I found Johns-Putra’s the most thought-provoking in that it uses SF to challenge gendered understandings of caring in environmentalism. Part 2 concludes with Christopher Palmer looking at the effect of the ubiquity of apocalypse in recent literature.
Part 3, ‘Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon’, is an attempt to explore the interstices between the utopias of Part 1 and their corresponding dystopias. Eric Otto looks at Paolo Bacigalupi’s strategic use of dystopias to commend their opposite. Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman offer a study of what they call science faction – recent speculative extrapolations from current science to earthly life after the (near) extinction of the human race. Although such material is only tenuously connected with SF, I found this chapter the most thought-provoking in the book. Bellamy and Szeman demonstrate the inherent conservatism of these extrapolations: by highlighting the supposed ease with which with the environment would recover after the end of the human race, the books they analyse present ecocatastrophe as a mere misstep, something that might be avoided by the appropriate technological fix. In Chapter 12, Timothy Morton uses Avatar as a peg on which to hang some rarefied thoughts on ecology and post-Enlightenment philosophy. To conclude the section, Melody Jue links Lem’s Solaris and Greg Egan’s ‘Oceanic’ to bring an ecological dimension to the surface/depth dichotomy in SF.
In addition to the essays that make up the bulk of the volume, there is an afterword in the form of a dialogue between Canavan and Robinson, which concludes on an upbeat note rejecting the charge of pessimism that is sometimes levelled at ecological SF. Last, but not least, Canavan has compiled a fairly comprehensive annotated reading list for anyone who wants to pursue ideas raised by the volume.
Given the multi-author nature of the work, it was inevitable that the quality of contributions would vary. There are some dull and uninteresting contributions. Indeed, one or two are little more than extended book reports. But those are more than compensated for by the chapters that throw up ideas you will want to develop in entirely different directions from those taken by the authors. In conclusion, the book certainly fills a gap in the market and offers an invaluable starting point upon which, hopefully, other scholars will build.
CALL AND RESPONSE
Paul Kincaid
Beccon Press pb, 391pp, £16
Paul Graham Raven
While introducing a section devoted to Christopher Priest (who else?), Paul Kincaid makes a claim which is a reliable marker that one is reading a critic rather than a reviewer: that writing a positive review is a far greater challenge than a negative one.
Kincaid is referring to his closeness to both Priest-the-man and Priest-the-author, to a familiarity with, and instinct for, the totality of an oeuvre which, counterintuitively, makes communicating one’s conceptions of the work under consideration that much harder. In my own case, the challenge is not born of an excessive closeness to Kincaid’s oeuvre (he’s too damned prolific for me to keep up with, as the TOC of Call and Response amply demonstrates) so much as a more reflexive concern: how to praise the work of a fellow critic without it looking like said praise is rooted primarily in the similarity of our critical positions?
Kincaid and I appear to have both a text-level aesthetic and a generic ontology in common: we tend to like the same books for similar reasons, and our conceptualisations of the ways in which genres are (self-)constructed have a considerable overlap (even though I mutter about modality where he fulminates on fuzziness; he’ll come round eventually, I’m sure). But while it’s very pleasant to find oneself in concord with a critic one admires and respects, there is a sense in which this is precisely the least valuable sort of criticism one can read. If there is a point to criticism beyond the simple commercial recommendation (or otherwise) of the review then it lies not in having one’s a priori prejudices and preferences affirmed. On the contrary: the best criticism, the criticism that sticks with you, is the criticism that challenges your preconceptions, changes your thinking. As such, and perhaps paradoxically, Kincaid’s is the wrong criticism for me to be reading; we attend the same church, you might say, and sometimes even harmonise from the same hymn-sheet.
So why, then, is Call and Response a valuable book, as well as a pleasurable one? It is this case to be made, the case for a less subjective sort of praise, that problematises the positive review: how to separate the ends from the means, the conclusions from the discussion. Or, to put it another way: how should one make the case for the value of the work to a hypothetical addressee who may not agree with its conclusions?
Fortunately for your not-so-humble interlocutor, Kincaid makes this easy, as it’s a question he wrestles with constantly and earnestly, whether in the abstract (as in his introduction) or in the concrete (as in the reviews and essays which follow it); there is a dutiful current of reflexivity in Kincaid’s writings, manifest in both the foregrounding of his personal and subjective relationships with particular boo
ks, oeuvres and authors, and his unshowy considerations of his own positionalities. Shorn of anthropological verbiage, what this means is that we don’t just see Kincaid’s opinions, but the criteria upon which they were based; we get to observe and share in the process of their interrogation. We see how the sausage gets made, in other words.
What might seem surprising, at least at first, is that this transparency and rigour is the hallmark of a critic who has concluded that the purpose of criticism, “as both a reader and a critic, is to help me explore the books I read.” Doesn’t that sound solipsistic and selfish? Doesn’t it sound like exactly the sort of ivory-tower attitude that “reviewers” so deplore in those with the lofty temerity to call themselves “critics”?
Of course it does – because it’s a conclusion taken out of context. And that, to me, is the reviewer/critic dichotomy in a nutshell: the reviewer attempts, consciously or not, to isolate a text in a sort of literary laboratory where its qualities can be examined with a false sense of objectivity; while the critic knows, instinctively or otherwise, that literature is neither created, consumed or discussed in a cultural vacuum, and that the text without context is mostly a mirror in which we glimpse our own face and mistake it for the author’s. Kincaid is an anthropologist of SF; he understands that all accounts are partial, all positions subjective, and that all authors – himself included! – walk the world with Barthes’s bullet lodged in their chests. He thus achieves the nearest possible thing to objectivity, by merit of operating on the assumption that objectivity is unachievable.
The value of the work, then, lies in the exposure of the process. We read Kincaid not to be told what to think, but to be shown how we might decide for ourselves.
THE VERY BEST OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME 2
edited by Gordon Van Gelder
Tachyon Publications pb, 419pp, $15.95
Duncan Lunan
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been going since 1949 and has always aspired to print the “very best”, putting its emphasis on literary and artistic values. The first “best of” anthology appeared in 1952 and they continued yearly for the next twenty years, with a long succession of retrospectives and themed anthologies thereafter. Selecting the “very best” from all that, as Gordon Van Gelder did for the magazine’s sixtieth anniversary in 2009, had to be a tall order, and perhaps it was inevitable that he would be dissatisfied with it. After five more years, evidently the impulse to continue was irresistible.
The book needs little more justification for its existence – sixty-five years’ worth of top quality fiction could hardly be mined out in a single volume – but Michael Dirda goes further in his introduction, arguing the need for it to counter “presentism” in the new generation of readers for whom the genre is characterised by film and TV productions. To someone of my age it might seem incredible that there are science fiction fans who’ve never heard of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (for example), much less read it, but it seems there’s a need to take their education in hand.
For old hands some of the stories here will be familiar, and some will be favourites. The former would almost certainly include ‘The Prize of Peril’ by Robert Sheckley, Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies’, ‘The Anything Box’ by Zenna Henderson, ‘The Country of the Kind’ by Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison’s ‘Jeffty is Five’.
For me the latter include ‘The Narrow Valley’ by R.A. Lafferty, ‘The Third Level’ by Jack Finney, George Alec Effinger’s ‘The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything’, and ‘Maneki Neko’ by Bruce Sterling.
I read most if not all of them first in books, which illustrates how hard the magazines were to get back in those days, in Scotland. (The major distributor then was John Menzies, who seemed to believe that no-one wanted to read them outside the cities, and that nobody would buy them outside the main line railway stations.) But it also illustrates the extent to which the magazines were at the cutting edge of the field, with The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction always near the top of the range.
The stories here by C.M. Kornbluth, Brian Aldiss, Jack Vance, Kit Reed and Jane Yolen aren’t personal favourites of mine, but that’s explained by personal tastes and the names guarantee good writing.
What’s harder to explain is that almost all the stories in the second half of the book seem unfamiliar, although they date from 1984 onwards and I was reading the magazine regularly for most of the time.
Again the writers form a distinguished list, including Lucius Shepard, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Robert Reed, M. John Harrison, Geoff Ryman and Elizabeth Hand. It’s not just a Golden Age thing because the Effinger and Sterling stories which I like are from 1984 and 1998, and one of the best is Stephen King’s ‘The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates’, which dates from 2008. Nor (before anyone suggests it) is it because the Effinger story is the only one involving space travel, as witness the others above which I do like. Neither Van Gelder’s foreword nor Dirda’s introduction mention the fact and presumably it’s a coincidence, because one of Van Gelder’s earlier themed anthologies was of Fantasy & Science Fiction stories about Mars.
Nor can I put it down to a bias for science fiction rather than fantasy, because two of my four favourites above are fantasy – five counting the Stephen King, and personal taste definitely counts there because I’ve always preferred King’s short fiction to his novels. Seemingly he was editing The Best American Short Stories and decided to write one “just to see if he still had it. Sure seems that he does, no?”, which gets a “yes” as far as I’m concerned.
I suppose the unfamiliarity is just because I can’t remember every story in the six hundred or so issues of Fantasy &Science Fiction which I have read, and because I don’t share Van Gelder’s personal tastes all that closely. But it does have the advantage that I’ve been able to read many of these stories as if they were new to me, and to those for whom they really are new, they will serve as a good introduction the magazine itself.
BARRICADE
Jon Wallace
Gollancz pb, 256pp, £14.99
Barbara Melville
In Barricade, our fleshy yet entirely artificial narrator Kenstibec shares a story of a road trip gone awry. He travels across a post-apocalyptic Britain, observing the disturbing aftermath of the war between the humans and the human made. The “Ficials” – genetically engineered life forms – are super strong and unfeeling, barricading themselves in cities and unleashing violence on their former human masters. Humans – or “Reals” – do their best to survive outside, indulging in tribalistic behaviours, and destroying Ficials wherever possible. With the help of an armoured car, Kenstibec’s mission is to transport fellow Ficial and journalist Starvie from Edinburgh to London, a journey threatened by all manner of unfathomable chaos.
So, at its heart, what is this book about? Perhaps it’s asking if one can still be human without emotions? Or perhaps it is exploring the line between mimicry and mastery? For me, these questions resonated the first few times authors asked them, but not now. Barricade shares themes with Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and just about any recent action film involving AI and transhumanism. Of course, old ideas are fine to revisit but they need to be expertly spun. This doesn’t happen in Barricade, leaving me wondering if this book needed to be written. It has that unfortunate debut author quality of finding a new way of saying nothing new. Overall this book is poorly executed, amateurish and misanthropic.
There are the usual suspects: poor exposition and naff dialogue. Reams of clumsy over-description makes it read like a novella that’s been padded to fit an ambitious word count. Much of this padding is gross and pointless violence, including the sexual abuse of Starvie, a female “Pleasure Ficial” designed to be desirable. This brings me to my biggest complaint: her characterisation is hateful. She is vapid and irritatingly cinematic, like some Hollywood goddess who fights and fucks with ne’er a hair out of place. Several m
ale characters – who I feel are also being massively short-changed – treat Starvie like a sex doll. Now one could argue that surely she is an object – she is a Ficial after all – and that this is a deliberate exploration of a devastating misogynistic world, rather than a symptom of a misogynistic book. However, this doesn’t sit right with me. Even if this was the intention, it’s still sickening to read, and there are no male Pleasure Ficials at all. Furthermore there are several descriptions like this one:
“She lowered her head, then tossed it back in a cascade of curls, brushing at it with her fingertips, her face vacant, her lips pouting.”
This is Kenstibec’s narration – the narration of an entirely asexual, emotionless being who makes several points of saying he just doesn’t get sexual attraction. So why-oh-why would he observe and then report on her cascading curls and pouting lips? This is one of many sexually charged comments on Starvie’s looks, in particular her hair, which by the end of the novel I wanted to incinerate. There is no indication he has mimicked or learned this language from somewhere else. In fact, the rest of his narration, while occasionally reflective, tends to bland and functional. So if it’s not coming from the narrator, it has to be authorial or editorial intrusion. That, for me, is a very scary thought.
This book is immature in both its ideas and execution. I kept being pulled out of the story to ask: what on earth is going on here? Why do I feel so slimy? I also feel rather sad, because in spite of my objections, I do believe Wallace can put one word in front of the other, and that Kenstibec had the makings of an interesting narrator. With a good rewrite and an edit, this book could have been so much more – at the very least a story well told, if not a masterly thought experiment. But alas, I can’t change what has already happened. So while I’m not sure I look forward to Wallace’s next book, I am certainly very curious. I suppose, in all likelihood, it couldn’t really get any worse.