An mp3 of the Everywhere

I've been meaning for a while to record a reading of my story "A Map of the Everywhere", first published in Interfictions, because when I've done a reading of the story, the response has often been somewhat different from the response to the text on the page -- many people have told me they hadn't realized the story was humorous until I read it aloud. Here, then, is an mp3 of me reading the story. It's not particularly high quality -- the microphone I have is one step up from something in a Cracker Jack box. I'm also a better reader with an audience. And there are some glitches in the first minute or two. But for what it's worth, here is "A Map of the Everywhere".



Here's a direct link to the file.

Readercon 20

I was only able to be at Readercon for parts of Friday and Saturday this year, so I missed many good events and didn't get to spend much time with all sorts of people I would have liked to have spent time with, but what I did get to do and see was great, probably the best overall experience I've had at the one science fiction convention I try not to miss each year.

I arrived on Friday in time for the Interfictions reading -- twelve of us reading very small bits of our stories in less than an hour, which was a lively good time. There was even room for questions afterward! People had great fun with the format, and it provided a vivid picture of what the anthologies are trying to achieve -- a great diversity of structures and approaches to fiction united by a shared sense of play.

The next event I attended was a panel on people of color in science fiction and fantasy, a panel moderated by David Anthony Durham, with panelists Cecilia Tan, Anil Menon, Tempest Bradford, and Eileen Gunn. It's a topic I find particularly interesting, important, and challenging, and one Tempest and I have talked about a bunch with each other. I was pleased that when the topic of Nisi Shawl's Filter House was raised in conjunction with a discussion of SF awards, Tempest (who was a member of the Tiptree Award jury that made Filter House a co-winner this year) was willing to bring up my review of the book as an example of how the stories can be misread and misunderstood. Tempest said that one of the things she so admired about the book is that it represents a black woman's concerns and experiences without making concessions to a perceived white readership. This then makes it, she posited, a particularly difficult book for somebody who is, for instance, a white guy, to appreciate, and especially to review. I didn't respond during the panel, because if my own inability to really appreciate the book is based on a blindness created by my identity, then I'm the last person who would be able to say that is the fact -- otherwise, it wouldn't be a blindness. Of course, I would like to think that is not the case, and that my struggle with the book is aesthetic, but I don't believe in the idea of a universal reader who is capable of disinterestedly evaluating every text (and even if I did believe in such a ridiculous idea, I would have a big problem with assuming that a white male was such a thing. White guys have gotten away for too long with thinking our experience is somehow the universal and important one). When I read the explanations by the Tiptree jury of their excitement about Filter House, I had a sharp sense of speaking a different sort of language -- I recognized the book they described, certainly, but I did not recognize the way of reading and evaluating that they offered as one that I am comfortable or even perhaps capable of for myself. That suggests to me that I am the wrong reader for the book ... but I'm not entirely sure what that means.

The difficulty I face in completely accepting Tempest's take on Filter House (and other books that similarly, and admirably, broaden the range of represented experience) is that I don't know what to do with it within the narrow and limited realm of critical evaluation. Such a view circumvents critical evaluation in a way that may, in fact, say more about the act of evaluation than anything else. The question is not only one of identity, either -- a review by someone who has little experience with science fiction of an SF novel has sometimes led me to think, "Wow, you just don't get it, do you?" Heck, I think that a lot of the time of reviews, even good ones... If a reviewer slams, or even just expresses reservations about, a book that we've found particularly affecting, is there anything that would make us think the reviewer was anything better than obtuse? At best, I feel pity for people who dislike books I really love, because they aren't able to experience the profound joy I have experienced with them. And I expect the same has, at best, been thought of me...

I am torn by the idea that a person's lack of appreciation for a certain text suggests that they have not worked hard enough to appreciate it, or have the wrong experience (either of life or reading) to appreciate it, because on one hand I think this idea is obvious -- most eight-year-olds can't make much of James Joyce -- and on the other hand I think it dodges the possibility of critical evaluation by saying that any evaluation which is not fundamentally positive is invalid.

I'm too much of a postmodernist to believe there is such a thing as objective evaluation, but I am also a great fan of negative reviews, because even when they are of books I cherish (cue the soundtrack: "Wow, you don't get it, do you?"), I am suspicious of an environment of pure appreciation. Thus, there must be room within a discourse for negative evaluation if such discourse is to have any hope of being about the art at hand. And yet it's also self-evident that readers are extraordinarily different, even when they might seem similar in all sorts of ways -- one of the things that makes talking about books so addictive is that even when you know a certain reader's proclivities and history inside-out, there will be books that reader responds to in ways that seem surprising.

Accepting subjectivity and the immense variability of reading experiences is tough for a book reviewer, though, because the rhetoric of reviews requires an illusion of objectivity, or at least an appeal to certain traditions of aesthetic evaluation -- the ability to say, without irony, that something is "good" or "bad" according to a set of precedents and traditions. Yet all precedents and traditions are the product of people interacting with each other, and thus of systems and powers that can be historicized and analyzed.

Which brings in another big question -- that of power. (And yes, I adore Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power and think anybody who doesn't is obtuse and judging from the wrong precedents and traditions!) A review is an assertion of authority and power: the authority and power to evaluate a book. Given the dynamics and history of power in the U.S. and in the literary world, I think it's foolish to pretend that a review by a white guy of a book by a black gal does not contain some potential problems, regardless of whether the review is on the whole positive or negative. Most reviewers, particularly of SF, are white males, and that's deeply limiting, because people from different backgrounds and experiences will better compensate each other's blindnesses and offer a more varied and interesting range of readings. Similarly, in referencing such white, mainstream writers as John Gardner and Flannery O'Connor in my review of Filter House, I may have reified power structures I profoundly disagree with: the examples that seemed to me to offer the clearest indication of the aesthetic criteria I was applying could perhaps even more easily be seen as valorizing the mainstream/genre dichotomy and, worse, the idea that white writers are superior to non-white writers. Yikes.

Anyway, I don't have settled thoughts on any of this, but the riffing I've done here on it shows one of the strengths of Readercon's panels and panelists -- every year, I've come away from at least one panel or discussion with lots to think about, and sometimes some really productive self-reflection. This year felt to me like the high-water mark for that.

On Friday night, I went out to eat with Liz Gorinsky, Michael Tax, and Eric Rosenfield, which gave Eric and me the opportunity to continue some of our endless discussion of genre, this time with good input and questions from Liz and Michael. Readercon was Eric's first SF convention, and it was fun to see him wrestle with how it compares (or doesn't) with non-SF get-togethers. I'm sure there will be some more posts on Wet Asphalt about all this as he continues to sift through his experiences. Eric was also one of the most prolific Tweeters of #Readercon (an amusing cult).

On Saturday, I started the day with Charlie Finlay's talk on "The Genre Roots of American Mainstream Fiction", which proved, I thought, how difficult it is to extend the idea of SF as a genre much before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories -- and especially 1927, when he began publishing readers' letters along with their mailing addresses, allowing fans to get in touch with each other (Delany offers 1911, when Gernsback published Ralph 124C 41+, but I'm even narrower and more conservative. For good discussion of the early letters columns of SF magazines, see Justine Larbalestier's essential The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction and the additional material on her website). What was wonderful about Charlie's lecture -- aside from his lively delivery -- was the range of his references, and the marvelous writers and books he discovered in his research for the Traitor to the Crown trilogy. We're going to do an interview about this soon, so I'm not going to say anything more about it right now.....

Chip Delany and I got to have lunch together, which was great fun, because we had never met in person when he knew who I was (I had met him first in 2006, I think, at Readercon, when I talked to him briefly at the Wesleyan University Press table and told him his book The Jewel-Hinged Jaw had had a tremendous effect on me at an early age. He nodded politely and clearly thought I was a weirdo.)

A few hours later, Chip and I were on a panel with Dennis Danvers, David Hartwell, Fred Lerner, and Veronica Schanoes about "Academic Attention: Good, Bad, or Ugly". We began by naming our academic affiliations, and I began by saying I have a master's degree from Dartmouth College in Samuel R. Delany. The panel really got going once we were able to discuss some of the different experiences we'd had with science fiction in the academy in terms of how the subject has been seen within different disciplines, our particular experiences at certain institutions, and the changes in reception to the idea of SF as worthy of academic attention over the last 50 years or so. One of the strengths of the panel, I thought, was the diversity of ages -- Veronica and I have had quite different experiences from folks who tried to do academic work on SF in previous decades. At the end of the discussion, I said that in my experience, though, there is a real difference between how SF is viewed by literature professors vs. writing professors. We didn't have time to really explore this idea, which was a disappointment, because I'm very curious what other people's experiences have been with regard to such a split. The only times I've ever been told I could not do something related to SF in an academic setting was in certain writing workshops. I think, perhaps optimistically, that this is changing, though.

After the panel, I spent time in the bookshop and hanging out with various folks, including the great and glorious Victoria Blake of Underland Press, the newly generic Adam Golaski of New Genre, the wise and worldly Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld, the fantastic and science fictional Gordon van Gelder of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the small-ly beerish Jedediah Berry of Small Beer Press. Because finances are a little perilous at the moment, I worked hard not to go crazy in the bookshop, though I could not resist buying a copy of Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, a book I have been anticipating for years -- I have a copy of the issue of the Century magazine with "Jack Daw's Pack" in it, and "A Crowd of Bone" is one of the most linguistically astonishing stories I know. To have those included now alongside the previously unpublished, novel-length story "Unleaving" in a book of breathtakingly beautiful design was simply irresistible.

Then I spent an hour saying goodbye to people and headed north, back to the Great State of New Hampshire, where we've had 40 days of rain, but where the sun is currently shining, hopefully as a harbinger of good things to come...

G.I. Joe

Of course, most of my reading time is spent in my wood-panelled library, smoking my Meerschaum pipe and contemplating the imbrication of hegemonic discourses. Over the past two days, however, I decided to set aside some light reading I was doing (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which I tend to think of as the Goodnight Moon of philosophical texts) and instead plunge into two books someone at Del Rey had sent to me: G.I. Joe: Above & Beyond and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, both written by one Max Allan Collins.

The two novels are media tie-ins -- the second is a novelization of the screenplay for the upcoming film of the same title, and the first is a prequel to that. I haven't read too many media tie-ins (the only other that comes to mind is the novelization of Batman, which I read when I was about 13), but I am open to new experiences, and the fact that these two are about G.I. Joe sealed the deal.

Before I inhabited a wood-panelled library and smoked a Meerschaum and contemplated the imbrication of hegemonic discourses, I grew up in a gun shop (literally; it was attached to the house). I was seven years old when the G.I. Joe action figures hit the market -- and I got them all. I was not allowed to read comic books (they rot your brain), but an exception was made for the G.I. Joe comics. I watched the animated TV show every Saturday morning. I was hardcore.

I was also a bit of a young literalist -- early on, I decided it was problematic if my action figures killed each other, because I didn't think they could become zombies. My friends lacked this qualm; they routinely killed and resurrected their toys. This made no sense to me, and so I tried hard to avoid playing with my friends. I didn't want their zombie Joes infecting mine. Instead, I spent hours and hours creating complex détente situations.

As you can see, then, reading the new novels was something I simply could not avoid. I was particularly interested to see how the various creators (screenwriters, Collins) handled the problem of killing people. (The animated show had a simple solution: explosions and gunshots are not deadly. This was a dangerous message to the youth of America, but a useful trick for keeping the many important characters alive for the next episode.)

The novels (and, presumably, movie) handle death mostly by killing people who are not regular characters. There are, for instance, in The Pit, many random, unnamed Joes who serve as cannon fodder while the the action figures still get to make it through okay (with various cuts, bruises, etc.). There is one exception to this, but I shan't reveal it.

Both books are origin stories, with Above and Beyond being the tale of Duke and Ripcord's first encounter with the G.I. Joe team and The Rise of Cobra being the tale of how they join G.I. Joe and what creates Cobra (though Cobra as we know it does not appear until the final pages). Above and Beyond is a better novel -- more focused, with an effective and affecting downer for an ending -- while The Rise of Cobra is very much a screenplay that has been fleshed out in prose. I was very curious to know the movie's take on the characters and story, so I was fascinated by the novel, but without having yet seen the film I can't say if it offers anything the movie doesn't.

The changes made to the characters and background of the 1980s G.I. Joes are not terrible -- the group has been globalized instead of being part of the U.S. government: they are now a super-secret force approved by various countries to use any means necessary to destroy particularly cunning evil-doers, and the crew has been internationalized. Backstories are different, too, given that originally many of the main characters had been in Vietnam. Some of the biggest changes are to the stories of The Baronness and Cobra Commander, but to say any more about that would be to give away some of the biggest surprises of the two books...

The 1980s version of G.I. Joe feels to me like a mashup of Doc Savage, Rambo, and The A-Team. The new version still has a whiff of the Doc Savage novels, but with a big dollop of the James Bond movies during the Pierce Brosnan era added. The Rise of Cobra has an especially Bondesqe villain trying to take over control of the world and destroy it at the same time. Above and Beyond is more restrained, with a villain who merely wants to take over all of South America. As with Bond, the ideal audience seems to be adolescent heterosexual boys and maybe some lesbians -- the women are inevitably described as "attractive", while the men are muscular or smart or evil or something else, but never "attractive" (entirely contrary to my own experience, since even at a young age I thought those boys were hot!), and the books are full of soldiers who have lots of fun weapons and who never use a word stronger than "ass" or "bastard". Talk about fantasy!

A political analysis of the books is beyond my abilities, though it could be amusing -- the 1980s G.I. Joe helped post-Vietnam War kids feel good about the military and its endeavors and fear an imaginary all-powerful terrorist force that only a special branch of the U.S. military was skilled enough to combat. In Above and Beyond, the U.S. military and the Joes intervene in a fictional South American country when the saintly free-market-loving president is assassinated and the socialist rebels (who want to nationalize all the country's oil, presumably to make it more like Alaska) are blamed, though it is obvious from the beginning that a power-hungry, apolitical old general is really to blame, allowing a reconciliation between the free-marketeers and the socialists at the end that is brokered in a church -- God and guns being, apparently, the things socialists and capitalists can agree on. The Rise of Cobra is more of a War on Terror allegory, a super-heroes vs. super-villains story, but instead of vigilante super-heroes, the Joes are actually sanctioned by the leading countries of the world in their extra-legal activities (well, except for a brief moment when they have to go rogue, but it all works out for the best, so everybody loves them again in the end). Thus, the world's most powerful and organized and wealthy terrorists must be defeated by the world's best soldiers, with everybody scrambling to see who has the best gear and the best one-liners.

It's enough to make the eight-year-old in my heart swoon!

But now that I have digested the child within, I am returning to my wood-panelled library and my pipe...

Readercon

It's the 20th year of Readercon, and I'll be there on Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. I'll be on a panel Saturday afternoon titled "Academic Attention: Good, Bad, or Ugly?", a topic that premiered at Readercon 1. My fellow panelists are Dennis Danvers, Samuel Delany, David Hartwell, Fred Lerner, and Veronica Schanoes. I'll also be at the Interfictions reading on Friday afternoon. Otherwise, I'm keeping my schedule open so I can go see panels and such things at a whim, or just hang out in the bookstore or bar. It will be fun to catch up with old friends and meet some new folks, too, I hope. I'm not a big convention person, but Readercon is one I always hate to miss.

The Edge of Heaven

The Edge of Heaven [Auf der anderen Seite -- literally, "On the Other Side"] won the screenplay award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was Germany's entry for the Oscars in 2007*. Some critics have faulted the film for being an obvious and schematic allegory of Turkish-German relations and, more specifically, of Turkey's application to become a full member of the European Union, but while this interpretation does seem at least partially valid to me, I also think it obscures many of the mitigating elements that provide thematic and cinematic complexity to the schema and are, themselves, the real achievements of the movie.

The Edge of Heaven is an example of what David Bordwell calls network narratives:

The central formal principle is that several protagonists are given more or less the same weight as they participate in intertwining plotlines. Usually these lines affect one another to some degree. The characters might be strangers, slight acquaintances, friends, or kinfolk. The film aims to show a larger pattern underlying their individual trajectories.

Think Babel, Crash [not the first one], Short Cuts, etc. Perhaps because it is in some ways novelistic, I find this a compelling structure, making a first viewing pleasurable even if I end up not thinking too highly of the film itself a few hours or days after watching it -- both Babel and Crash caught me in their nets when I first saw them, though 12 hours later I realized I actually thought Babel was weaker than González Iñárritu's earlier work (which I'd liked, with reservations) and Crash was just weak.

The network narrative of The Edge of Heaven offers a kind of 21st-century riff on Dickensian coincidences. But there's more than that -- the film is propelled by reversals and surprises that are caused by or correlated to missed connections rather than achieved ones. These missed connections lead, in the film's last section, to a new foundation of actual connections, but not of an expected sort -- the real achievement of writer-director Fatih Akim's script is that it doesn't hide how tenuous these new, positive connections are. Indeed, the film's final scene is entirely one of ambiguous potential, not actual connection. The first shots of the movie are chronologically part of this ending, suggesting the film is not so much about connections and coincidences as it is about the effort to live with them and to give them meaning. Like any of us, the characters are only aware of some of the connections between them; the film gives the audience an omniscient (or, at least, more informed) view than is available to us in life.

Elise Nakhnikian wrote an insightful comparison of Babel and The Edge of Heaven that shows where some of the strengths in Edge of Heaven reside, and how the network narrative, in this case, is supported and deepened by the filming, the acting, the soundtrack choices, etc. I was especially captivated by the simple grace of the cinematography -- I didn't notice a single shot requiring a track dolly, a crane, or a vehicle mount, and yet the movie never feels static, because the camera is often among movement, whether looking through the windows of a train or the windshield of a car or capturing people as they wind their way through busy streets.

The characters in The Edge of Heaven are, in many ways, types -- the young political radical, the disillusioned literature professor, the humane whore, the dirty old man, the college lesbian... Each character starts from that point, but none ends up there: they become particular humans, and their fates are often surprising -- the disillusioned literature professor does not end up in a doomed relationship with one of his students; indeed, he seems to have little need for a love life at all, because his interests and attentions are elsewhere. This sort of characterization mirrors the process of getting to know people -- we begin by fitting each other into broad categories, and then the categories fade as each individual comes into clearer focus.

It would be possible to sum up The Edge of Heaven with a statement of some theme or another, but any such summary would ignore the moments of real power within the story -- the performances are all richly affecting, and the writing and editing strengthen them by not basking in the emotion. No moment goes on too long, and much is left to our imaginations, because Akim respects the audience enough to assume that we are capable of understanding what would happen next, and of building such moments in our minds. It is this effect that allows the depth of characterization many critics have pointed out with the film -- the scenes that are offered suggest and evoke many other scenes that are easily imagined; we are given what is most necessary. Such a technique is easier to notice than it is to achieve; to know just which scenes will evoke others in the audience's imagination is a task most writers of any sort fail to master. (Unfortunately, most movies and books seem perfectly content to not even try.)

I fear I have made The Edge of Heaven sound more abstract and cerebral than it is. Let me say this, then: When I first watched it, I began by expecting to last for maybe fifteen minutes before shutting it off. I was tired, I just wanted some escapist fun, and The Edge of Heaven didn't look much like escapist fun. I was right about that: it is not escapist fun. But I was wrong that I would only last fifteen minutes. Within ten minutes, I was caught up in the film's composition and performances. Its fierce intelligence becomes gripping, the narrative's networks evoke suspense, and the effect is repeatedly emotionally searing. It is, simply, extraordinary. And so, the next day, I watched it again, and it was even better on a second viewing.

*I hadn't seen the list of German entries to the Oscars before looking it up just now, and for my money, The Edge of Heaven, which did not get nominated, is superior to the previous three entries, one of which (The Lives of Others) won, and is roughly the equal of Nowhere in Africa (which also won).

"Mimetic Fiction"

While reading (and enjoying) a recent review at Strange Horizons, I became obsessed with a single word: mimetic. Writing about Vandana Singh's story "Thirst", Dan Hartland says, "Indeed, 'Thirst' is a largely mimetic piece, which opens itself to the fantastic only towards its close..." and then at the end of the paragraph finishes by saying, "two planes often opposed to each other in fiction co-exist and co-mingle, rendering metaphor, allegory and mimesis one". He calls another of Singh's stories "essentially a mimetic story about the search for truth".

There's a minor tradition within the science fiction community of using mimetic and mimesis to mean the opposite of the fantastic. The oldest such uses that I could find (with a quick and profoundly less than exhaustive search) date to the early 1970s, and the casual employment of the term in those contexts makes me suspect that it has a longer history within the SF world as a way to point toward what more generally gets called within that community "mainstream" or (less frequently) "mundane" fiction.

All of these terms are problematic for various reasons, but what struck me this time about the words mimetic and mimesis was how their meaning in this context relates to and in some ways contradicts a few others I can think of -- the classical idea of mimesis as "imitation", particularly "imitation of nature"; Erich Auerbach's influential mid-twentieth century study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature; and, particularly, Ronald Sukenick's use of "mimetic fiction" in various essays collected in one of the many books I currently have out from the library, In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction.

Despite its history within the SF world, I'm not convinced that "mimetic fiction" is the best term for that thing for which there is, admittedly, no perfect term. Using mimesis to describe this thing, though, seems even less perfect to me than most of the other terms, because I'm more persuaded by Sukenick's use of it to mean fiction that tries to hide its illusions. In an essay on Gerald Graff, Sukenick makes this wonderfully efficient statement: "Mimetic fiction depends on the suspension of disbelief; nonmimetic fiction does not."

Almost all genre fiction, of course, depends on the suspension of disbelief, so if we accept Sukenick's definition, then the vast majority of SF is, in fact, mimetic.

This use of the term makes sense to me because it does two things. First, it does not deviate significantly from how the term has traditionally been used -- mimetic fiction in this sense seeks to give the reader a feeling, at least while reading the text, that there is a fundamental reality to the world conjured by the words. Sukenick writes:

The key idea is verisimilitude: one can make an image of the real thing which, though not real, is such a persuasive likeness that it can represent our control over reality. This is the voodoo at the heart of mimetic theory that helps account for its tenacity. Though such schizoid illusions are fostered by concepts of imitation, one cannot have control "over" that of which one is a part, or even formulate it completely -- one can only participate more deeply in it.

It doesn't seem to me that we have to accept Sukenick's preference for fiction that shuns verisimilitude in order to see that his distinction between mimetic and non-mimetic fiction is a useful one, which is the second reason I find it persuasive -- it describes in a more coherent and less problematic way than other terms I can think of what feels to me like a fundamental difference between types of writing. It illuminates some of what is different between, for instance, Tender Buttons and Dubliners -- but also some of what is similar between Dubliners and Tarzan of the Apes.

There is a good argument, too, that using mimesis as a way to distinguish SF from non-SF hides (or at least obscures) some of what SF seeks to do -- we're back at the suspension of disbelief. The creation of believable worlds from at least ostensibly unbelievable material. Such fiction relies upon verisimilitude, which is a point made by writers and critics for decades: that SF is realism on steroids. It seeks to create in the reader's mind what John Gardner called a "vivid, continuous dream". It may not be the representation of what we believe to be "reality", but it is an attempt to represent an imagined reality in a way that the reader does not reject as preposterous. This is worldbuilding. Philip K. Dick once offered advice on "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" -- a nonmimetic writer might offer exactly the opposite advice.

Even the classical notion of mimesis as "imitation of nature" can apply to SF -- particularly to core science fiction, which deliberately tries to extrapolate from known science, and is often based on ideas of nature as we currently understand it. But even in something like Judith Berman's "Rather Cranky Post on Verisimilitude in Fantasy", we're still talking about the imitation of nature.

There is a need for a value-neutral term for non-SF. I'm just not convinced that "mimetic fiction" is what it should be.

Update (7/7/09): Hal Duncan has posted a thoughtful extension of some of these ideas in connection with some other discussions that have been going on around the intertubes.

The City and the City by China Miéville

If The City & The City is not my favorite China Miéville novel, that is only because I encountered Perdido Street Station at exactly the time I was ready for the riches it offered, and so the powerful, unforgettable experience of reading it will forever overshadow the experience of reading anything else Miéville writes. I think Iron Council possesses many virtues Perdido Street Station does not, but the latter is the novel that lives deep in my heart. It would simply be impossible for me to love a China Miéville novel more than Perdido Street unless I didn't think of it as a China Miéville novel.

And it is almost possible to think of The City & The City as not a China Miéville novel. For one thing, there are no monsters -- at least not in the sense that we are used to monsters from his previous books. This is a great surprise -- what Miéville fan, after all, doesn't know that China loves creating monsters? For another thing, the writing is lean and straightforward, with few of the meaty descriptive passages of earlier books.

But China Miéville is not only the writer of the three Bas-Lag books -- he is also the writer of the stories in Looking for Jake and the YA novel Un Lun Dun, and those works give a certain hints and glimpses toward The City & The City. (Full confession: I never finished Un Lun Dun -- just not my sort of book -- and have not yet read Miéville's first novel, King Rat.)

Writing about The City & The City in any depth will take more thought and readings than I have yet had time to give it. I also want to refresh my knowledge of the works of Bruno Schulz, one of the writers who was an influence on the novel and who provides an epigraph to it ("Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, mendacious and delusive streets.") I first read Schulz right around the time I first read Miéville, but I read the stories as I was also first encountering the films of the Brothers Quay, and so my recollection of them is, for now, entwined with my memory of the films.

In any case, I'm also not sure how to say anything about The City & The City without giving away information that some first-time readers may not want to know. This is a problem when discussing any narrative, of course, but it is a particular problem with this book -- not only because it is, plotwise, a mystery novel, but because even revealing the basic premise could reveal more information than some readers would like -- and not just the readers who are particularly averse to "spoilers".

But saying anything meaningful about the book is impossible without giving away the premise, so in the rest of this post I am going to do so. I don't think such information lessens a first encounter with the book, but who knows. I have been surprised by people's reactions to such things before... Thus, you have been warned: Premise approacheth!

Here's the premise: The City & The City is a sort of alternate history novel in which there is a (modern, contemporary) city in what seems to be Eastern Europe that is actually two cities in one, and yet residents and even visitors are forced, through various means, to perceive only one at a time, even though everybody knows there are two (and maybe three). The cities are not separated through magical means -- this is not, as it may seem at first, a novel of alternate worlds imbricating. The two cities, Beszel (which has an accent over the z that my computer doesn't want to put there) and Ul Qoma, are separated by carefully cultivated and disciplined perceptions, and the cities have developed physically and culturally over a long time to meet those perceptions. How they have done so, and to some extent why, is beautifully and cleverly developed -- indeed, Miéville makes the premise as believable as I can imagine anybody ever making it; my brain kept trying to unsuspend its disbelief with lots of objections, but most of them were answered somewhere along the way. It's the most impressive bit of bizarre extrapolation I've encountered since I read Christopher Priest's Inverted World a year or two ago.

Some reviewers have pointed out that this premise is a kind of literalization of a metaphor (or series of metaphors) that will feel appropriate and even familiar to most city dwellers, and that's true, but I think there's more to it. The first half of the book constructs the premise; the second half deconstructs it, but it does so in a particular way. (Despite revealing the premise, I don't intend here to reveal the answers to some of the mysteries that are central to the novel's plot, so pardon any vagueness that ensues. If those mysteries were essential to what I want to say about the book, I wouldn't hesitate to discuss them, but they aren't.) What we get is not just a novel about the two-city premise, but a novel that is also about the effect of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking. It overlapped well with another book I was reading along with it, David Neiwert's The Eliminationists, a journalistic look at fascism, parafascism, and certain types of extreme rhetoric.

Concepts can affect habits of perception, and those habits of perception can be manipulated in a wide variety of ways for a wide variety of purposes. Conspiracy theories can be a tool of misdirection and control -- used to divert attention from systems (and even conspiracies) that are more banal, insidious, and obvious than the baroque fantasies of the paranoid. I don't know of another novel that explores this idea more elegantly than The City & The City.

Ideas are, indeed, the engine of this novel. China Miéville's previous books prove that he is capable of creating complex and fascinating characters; that The City & The City's characters are not particularly fascinating is not, I think, a fault. This is a novel that exploits a different tradition, or, rather, series of traditions -- the tradition of such writers as Calvino and Borges (and Schulz) on one hand, and of police procedurals on the other. This mix brings ideas and plot to the foreground, and in this case the ideas are given life and expression through the setting in a way that is perhaps best conveyed through characters that are items within the mix rather than the focus of it. In other words, it seems to me that complaining about the lack of depth to the characters in The City & The City is kind of like complaining that "The Garden of Forking Paths" is not a Richard Ford novel.

In fact, the focus and structure of The City & The City solves a problem I have had as a reader with even the Miéville novels I most love -- at some point or another, their plot seemed to distract from their virtues. The mystery structure of The City & The City foregrounds the plot, but the second half of the book shows the mysteries to be directly related to the metaphors that are the core of the novel's philosophical explorations. The plot -- the step-by-step solving of the mystery, including shoot-outs and chases -- is itself a representation or perhaps even a manifestation of the novel's metaphysics. Thus, the pleasures of the novel's first half are the pleasures of exploring the basic premise (the double city) and of delving deeper into a murder mystery; the pleasures of the second half are the pleasures of seeing how the basic premise and the murder mystery combine to explode each other.

I am hardly the first or only person who has been known at times to state that weird fiction has a relationship to what might be perceived as metaphor that is different from the relationship mainstream or allegorical fiction has to what is necessarily perceived as metaphor -- in science fiction and fantasy, the monster is a monster first and foremost, not a representation of the id/ the evil at the heart of humanity/ the moral panic of the moment/ fathers-in-law/ whatever. This concept is fine as far as it goes, but the best SF makes it so simplistic as to be nearly meaningless, and The City & The City is the sort of book that does just that -- the basic premise is wonderful purely for its own sake and for the sake of the care with which it is conceived and explored, but the metaphors it suggests (for urban life, for certain historical and political realities, etc.) are just as important to what makes the novel work so well -- The City & The City starts with the literalization of a metaphor, but it doesn't end there, because ultimately it is not literalizing one metaphor but is, rather, literalizing an idea that is rich with metaphorical potential. It's the difference between writing a story based on the idea, "What if a guy woke up one morning and discovered he was a giant bug?" and writing the story that follows the opening sentence, "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin."

One of the great joys of China Miéville's novels is their clear ambition to use popular literary forms for complex, intelligent entertainment, and to do so by bringing together disparate influences, sometimes purely for the fun of bringing together disparate influences, and sometimes to interrogate those influences and see what they reveal. Such an approach appeals to my own prejudices -- for instance, I love the fact that Borges was first brought to English-language readers in a translation by Anthony Boucher for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The City & The City is a cousin of that fact.

There is much more to be explored with this novel and the world within it -- the systems of authority and privilege; the representation of academia; the prose style; the suggestions it makes about how ideas of tradition and progress sculpt themselves into our streets and buildings; the relationship of Beszel and Ul Qoma to Berlin and the Balkans and so much else out here in consensual reality; the connections between texts and secrets; the etymologies and archaeologies; the allusions and suggestions. The elegance I noted before is a particular aesthetic quality -- the grace of a simple idea expressed in a way that is itself not complex, but that reveals complexity. The City & The City is an entertaining mystery novel with a setting built from a weird and evocative notion; The City & The City is a richly philosophical structure that uses the reader's imagination as a tool of inquiry. That the two sides of the previous sentence are not mutually exclusive is one of the pleasures of excellent fiction. The City & The City is an example of such excellence.

Amanda Palmer's Michael Jackson Tribute: "Billie Jean"

I hate to admit it right now, but the only Michael Jackson song that ever really appealed to me was "Billie Jean". I encountered the video many times on the old MTV when I was a kid, and I thought the tiles and steps that lit up underneath Jackson's feet were just about the coolest things I'd ever seen.

Amanda Palmer, though, I have adored since I first encountered her as part of the magnificent Dresden Dolls (I shall be forever grateful to Sonya Taafe for suggesting they might appeal to me).

Amanda Palmer was in West Hollywood to play a concert the day Michael Jackson died. For a tribute, she quickly put together her own version of "Billie Jean", now available as an audience member's video at YouTube (there are two up there [so far], and I've linked to the one with the sharpest video. I discovered the other one via, of all places, Talking Points Memo, then watched this one). There's about 3 minutes of talking beforehand, then the song begins. If you don't like Amanda Palmer, this performance is probably not going to convince you to change your mind, but if you do ... well, it's definitely worth a listen.

And while I'm here, I should also mention that folks looking for complex and nuanced appreciations of Jackson should check out recent, related posts by K-Punk and Steve Shaviro.

Rick Bowes on Stonewall at 40

Knowing Rick Bowes is a privilege for many reasons, but one of my favorites is that he is a wonderful historian of New York City. Walking the streets with Rick becomes a magical tour through the wondrous and terrible changes the city has seen over the centuries. Having lived in Manhattan for most of his life, Rick has also sometimes been an eyewitness to history, including the history made in the early hours of June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village: The Stonewall Riots.

Richard Bowes is the author of such books as Minions of the Moon, From the Files of the Time Rangers, and Streetcar Dreams. He has won the World Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Million Writers Award, and been nominated for the Nebula Award. He reportedly likes writing but hates being a writer.


In History's Vicinity
by Richard Bowes

It's odd to be old enough to remember history. The Stonewall Riot always makes me feel like a citizen of Concord awakened by musket fire on that crisp April morning and wondering what the commotion was.

In 1965 when I was 21, I came into Manhattan from college on Friday afternoons to see a psychiatrist on the Upper East Side.

On my way back to Penn Station and Long Island, I'd walk down Third Avenue. In the East Sixties, guys stood casually on street corners, paused significantly in doorways, gave sidelong glances: all very discreet. Eyes tracked me from the windows of the bird bars: The Blue Parrot, The Golden Pheasant, The Swan.

In those bars Piaf sang on the jukebox, men in suits sat at the bar. The legal drinking age was eighteen, but in straight places I still got carded and sometimes was refused service. Gay bars were much less fussy and the patrons could be generous.

The first gay bar I ever went to was one in Boston called something like the Tea Cup or the Sugar Bowl. I was sixteen and the drinking age there was twenty-one. They wouldn't serve me but didn't care if guys gave me their drinks.

Down the Avenue from the bars at Fifty-Third and Third was a world famous chicken run. Young boys stood in the cold in sneakers and thin jackets, waited under awnings, stared out the windows of seedy coffee shops and knew just who I was.

Those bars, those coffee shops, were criminal enterprises subject to police raids and being shut down. The men cruising and boys loitering could be arrested on a whim. Serving minors and serving as a place minors could be had for cash was no bigger a crime than catering to a gay clientele.

Mart Crowley's The Boy's In the Band was the first American play to deal overtly with the lives of the kind of men who drank in the Bird Bars. It opened on April 15, 1968. By the time the movie came out in 1970 its world of gay self hatred and closeted sex looked like a period piece.

Between the play and the movie's openings the Stonewall Riot had occurred. If I'd known the Stonewall was going to become an historic site I'd have paid more attention. In fact, it was one bar among many. Gay kids poured into Greenwich Village from all over the city, the country, the world. The nation was all on fire and every oppression but ours got protested.

The Stonewall Bar was badly ventilated, crowded, and filthy, the toilets were an abomination, the bartenders were hostile and the drinks were watered. But that was true in all the Village gay bars. Manhattan ran on methadrine, speed was easily obtained there, and the drags danced like furies. The crowd was very young. The scent was beer, sweat, amyl-nitrate, and cheap cologne.

My grandfather from Ireland used to say that if every man who boasted he'd fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 had actually stood at the Dublin Post Office, James Connolly and Padraic Pearse would be sitting in Buckingham Palace at the moment he spoke. In my case around three o'clock on that famous Saturday morning I was walking down St Mark's place with Allan, a guy I'd recently met. A kid we both knew rushed up and gave us a garbled story about The Stonewall. That's when we became aware of distant sirens.

In that time and place civil disturbances were what bullfights were to Hemingway's Madrid and we were all aficionados. The kid ran off to spread the news. Allan and I headed west, crossed Astor Place and went down Eighth Street, which was still the heart of the Village.

The book and music stores were dark but the bars were just closing and the after-hours clubs were opening. The street was full of people all looking west.

Near the corner of Sixth Avenue was what we recognized as the rear area of the riot. In the doorway of the Nathan's, a blond kid in short-shorts and mascara held a bloody towel to his forehead and a friend held him. From the upper floors of the massive, darkened Women's House of Detention across the Avenue, some inmates were yelling, "The fucking pigs are killing all the faggots."

Police cars with flashing cherry tops barred the way. All along Sixth Avenue, firemen hosed down piles of burning trash. Paddy wagons and Tactical Patrol buses were parked two deep and the riot cops were angrier than I ever saw them.

Here coherent memory breaks down. From Sheridan Square I looked down Christopher Street and caught a glimpse of the front of The Stonewall Bar. Broken glass was everywhere. A car had been turned on its side.

The riot had broken down into guerilla tactics: roving bands of kids chanting slogans, burning trash. That weekend I saw a cop smash his club across the back of a guy who I think was just coming home with groceries, I heard people shouting from their windows at the cops to go away.

By Monday it was over. But events in this tumultuous city in that time of war and turmoil very soon began to be defined as having happened before Stonewall or after.

And it was kids like the ones on Fifty-Third and Third, not the suit johns in their uptown bars who had given us those nights.

Men with powdered hair and silk britches could have signed declarations and petitions to King George forever. But on that Concord morning it was men and women, not the most attractive or socially poised, not with the purest of motives or the loftiest of intents, people like me and perhaps like you who found themselves pushed one unendurable time too many.

Twists of the Tail: The View from a Cat

The resident reviewer of all things feline (and catcher of all things rodent) at Mumpsimus Central is Ms. P. Martha Moog, whose incisive review of Predator vs. Aliens many readers will remember. She recently decided that the recent Wildside Press reissue of Ellen Datlow's Twists Of The Tale: An Anthology of Cat Horror made for good bedtime reading, as you can see:


Ms. Moog does caution readers that the stories (from such writers as William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others) are sufficiently frightening that it's probably a good idea to do as she did and sleep with a crate of small arms ammunition beside you.

Zombie Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee recently came back from the dead to read from his new book (link via Maud):

Seeing Coetzee read on Thursday night thus presented a spectacle to make any postmodern literary critic lick their chops: an almost pathologically private man reading his own "fictionalised memoir", with Summertime achieving a further distancing effect by means of the fact that the book takes the form of a series of interviews with people from Coetzee’s life carried out after Coetzee’s death.

Coetzee fans will remember that in the previous books in the trilogy, Boyhood and Youth, the young John Coetzee discovered a radioactive meteor in provincial South Africa and soon after began experiencing the distancing of signs from their signifiers. In search of signifiers less free-floating, he set out across the wilds of the veld and had many interesting encounters with metaphysical conceits that both tormented him and provided balm to his increasingly abjected soul. By the end of the second book, though, his quest seemed to have failed, as he was captured by an evil allegorist and tortured with harrowingly simplified logics that succeeded in revealing the death instinct to be the mask of symbolic order. All ambiguity appeared to be lost, killed in the dungeon of the allegorist. The author was finally dead.

But wait! In the third installment, we discover that our intrepid hero has come back from the dead to seek revenge, justice, and contingent truths! Will he triumph over the textual practices of enemies more powerful than any he has encountered before? Will traditionalist gangsters plug him in the aporia? What are the interpretive implications of his mantra, "They're coming for you, Elizabeth Costello!"

And most shocking for Coetzee fans may be the scenes of their hero consuming dead flesh as he fuels himself for the final battle in what is sure to be hailed as the greatest novel since Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies Again! Don't miss it!

Miscellanea

I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...)

I probably owe you an email.*

Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz.

Some things I've noticed out on the internets:

• Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abigail Nussbaum and me. Then another related post on "The Absence of the Abject". And then two posts on "The Assumption of Authority" (one, two). They're wonderfully provocative and wide-ranging essays, but as the whole is now over 20,000 words long, I haven't been able to keep up with it. But I shall return to it over the course of the summer...
• Jeff VanderMeer has been working for what sounds to me like one of the coolest teen camps in the world, Shared Worlds, and as part of that asked a bunch of writers and other creative-type people, "What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"
• I accompanied Eric Schaller and family to a magnificent concert by David Byrne a few weeks ago. Byrne's earnest dorkiness has been a balm to my soul since I was a kid. He's been on The Colbert Report a couple of times in support of his tour -- here, performing one of my favorite of his new songs, "Life is Long", and here performing "One Fine Day" (in which everybody seems a bit tired). The Colbert studio isn't quite Radio City Music Hall, but still...
• Tor.com has, in less than a year, become one of the best science fiction sites, and they've now launched a store that includes "special picks" from their great array of bloggers. (And, interestingly, though the site is allied with Tor Books, it's striven to be, as they say, "publisher agnostic", so it's not just about Tor's books.)
• Speaking of major SF sites, I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders's post at io9 titled "4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction" because it includes new comments from each of the four writers discussed: Mary Doria Russell, Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, and Samuel R. Delany.
• I really loved Jeff Ford's post on the books he survived in primary and secondary school English classes.
• I seem to have written yet another Strange Horizons column.
  

Meanwhile, I've been reading a bunch of books I haven't written about. Some just for fun -- I went on a bit of an alternative history kick, reading C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch (available as an authorized PDF download here) and L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. The Patriot Witch attracted me because I've read some of Charlie Finlay's short stories and enjoyed them, and the book is set during the American Revolution, a time period about which I will read almost anything. The fantasy elements seemed a bit bland to me, but the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord were well done, reminding me of Howard Fast's April Morning, a book that, along with Johnny Tremain, was a favorite of mine when I was young. I'll probably read the next book in the "Traitor to the Crown" series because now I'm curious to see if the fantasy element develops in less familiar ways.

Lest Darkness Fall is, as many people through the decades have said, great fun, a kind of Connectic Yankee for readers who want their protagonists to be endlessly resourceful, optimistic, and lucky.

Somewhere in there, I also fit in Jack Vance's Emphyrio, an engaging example of a certain sort of classic ethnographic science fiction, something halfway between Lloyd Biggle and Ursula Le Guin.

I did a bunch of that fun, light reading because on the side I've been delving deeply into various books about British and American colonialism and imperialism for a story I keep telling myself I'm going to write: a steampunk alternate history about a mad scientist, a U.S. and British fight over Nicaragua at the beginning of the 20th century, and the atrocities it all leads to. Among the various books I've been dipping into for my researches are Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century by Daniel Headrick, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule by Michel Gobat, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956 by Anne Orde, The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War by Derek Jarrett, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock, as well as such books of their time as Winston Churchill's My African Journey (pointed out to me by Njihia Mbitiru, who's been a big help in goading me on to write this story that I keep talking about) and The Ethiopian: A Narrative of the Society of Human Leopards. Also a couple of books I've been familiar with for a while, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson and Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins.

Clearly, I don't want to write a story -- I want to write an annotated bibliography!

Now, though, it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to work...


*Speaking of email, I've severely neglected the email address once associated with this blog (themumpsimus at gmail) because it became massively overloaded with spam (partly because I had redirected some ancient addresses at it) and sometime at the beginning of this year I made a resolution to clean it out, find real messages I'd missed, etc. I removed the link to it from this site so that people wouldn't inadvertently use it, but I expected to get it back up and working within a week. Then I kind of kept procrastinating. Every time I thought about it I suffered trauma. Now cleaning out and organizing the inbox is such a Herculean task that I may just give up and start over with a new, clean address. I don't know. I will fight through my anxieties and figure it out soon, though.

D-Day at 65

I graduated from high school in 1994, and my father's graduation present to me was a trip to Normandy for the 50th anniversary of D-Day. It was as much a present to himself as to me -- he was the one who was obsessed with World War II, the one who would enjoy all the various military museums we would see over the two-and-a-half week tour. I wouldn't say I was thrilled, at 17 years old, at the prospect of the trip, but I recognized it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and there would be some free days in London, a city I'd been to once before, and Paris, a city I had never seen, so I went along with the idea.

We began in London, which, it seemed to me then, was likely to be the highlight of the trip, because I got to see excellent productions of Sweeney Todd and Oleanna (the latter directed by Harold Pinter), go to bookstores, and indulge my love of cities. But it wasn't until we took a ferry across the Channel to Cherbourg that I began to realize how truly unique this trip was.

I was the youngest member of our tour group and my father was also among the youngest members. The tour was one he had found via the Battle of Normandy Museum in Bayeux, and it had mostly attracted veterans. We traveled to five of the six landing beaches and to various towns, historical sites, and museums, and all the while I heard the stories of the men who had been there 50 years before.

My journal for the trip is not particularly illuminating, mostly because I did not have time to chronicle everything that happened, and half-way through the trip I was utterly exhausted. Adding to this was my own struggle with my presence there -- I was at the time a self-proclaimed and self-righteous pacifist and was deeply bothered by the inevitable expressions of triumph that accompanied many of the events we attended, so a lot of the journal is me trying to state to myself how much I hated the idea of war and all its attendant celebrations. But through it all, some occasional moments of interest appear. Here's one passage written on June 10 about June 7:

We went to Avranche -- all 12 buses of the tour. The whole town was waiting to greet us, as if they'd just been liberated. We let the veterans get off the coach first, since they were the people the Avrancheans came out for. It was tremendous. There must have been a few thousand people waiting for us, lining the sidewalks, standing on balconies, hanging out of windows, all with huge smiles and excited handwaving and vigorous greetings. They asked all of the veterans for autographs. A little kid, five or six, came up to us and held out his yellow balloon for my father to sign, but dad said, "No no. I'm not a veteran." The kid looked ready to cry.

The veterans and the town marched down to a town square where there were some speeches, music, and lots of wine. Patton's grandson gave a short speech and then led the "Star Spangled Banner", changing a few notes.

We went back to the hotel and the deputy mayor of Vologne [the town where we were staying] was waiting to greet us. He pinned a medal on one of the veterans, as a symbol of the town's thanks, and then gave me a cigarette lighter from the French senate, since I'm the youngest of the group, and I think Roger (who arranged all this) [and was our liason in the town] said all sorts of things about me. [Though I remember the deputy mayor was crestfallen when he learned I did not smoke!] I was really surprised and touched. The mayor herself wanted to greet us, but was doing stuff in Paris with the heads of state who showed up for D-Day.

The day before, we had been at the ceremonies on Omaha Beach (I remember being pleased that we had better seats than senators Robert Dole and Patrick Leahy). I had forgotten my camera back at the hotel, but my father had brought a video camera; perhaps later today I will dig out the tapes, which I haven't ever watched. My journal for the day doesn't say much -- I remember being in awe, incapable of words, and most of the words I wrote down as I tried to mark some memory of the day were about people who were complaining about one thing or another and so were annoying me. Annoyance, that petty emotion, I could express; all the more profound emotions of the experience escaped my vocabulary.

The strongest memory I have of one of the veterans was a man named Harry who lived in northern California and had been with the 741st Tank Battalion. What I remember is sitting beside him on the bus and listening to him talk about watching the DD tanks sink in the heavy waves of Omaha Beach. He said by the time he landed in a regular tank, the entire beach smelled like blood. But he survived -- and went with the battalion on to Paris at the end of August and then into Belgium to support the 2nd Infantry Division, just in time for the Battle of the Bulge. After that, the battalion continued on into Germany, crossing the Rhine at Remagen.

What struck me about Harry was how ordinary and humble he seemed. Some of the vets were boastful of their kills, but not Harry -- he talked reluctantly of what he'd done and seen fifty years ago, and more than once I remember him telling me something to the effect of, "War is a terrible thing" and "The Germans were just kids like us." Some of the vets seemed to wish they could go back to their youth, to their time of heroism; not Harry. The beach had smelled like blood.

I returned home from Normandy numbed by the whole experience -- I was getting ready to go to college, I had more on my mind than it could bear, and I didn't know where to put those two and a half weeks. I've spent a long time trying to contextualize them for myself, to fit them in to who I am, to sort out my relationship with my father so that I can better live with the memories. Even in 1994, though, and mostly because of Harry, I knew that part of my responsibility was and would always be to remember as much as I could of what I saw and heard there, out of respect for those men and what they experienced.

In 1995, Harry sent my father a copy of a history of the 741st written in 1982. His letter accompanying it says the history is good as far as it goes, but there's a lot that's left out. He says his wife, Rose, has often told him he should write a book, but he hasn't had time.

My father didn't keep the envelope that accompanied the letter, and so I don't have Harry's last name. (I never wrote it in my journal.) He was going to be 75 that December, he said.

My father died a year and a half ago, and I don't know if Harry or Rose are still alive. I remember that he said he hoped I would return to Normandy for the 100th anniversary. "None of us will be around then," he said, "except for you."

I'll be 67 in 2044, and if I'm alive I'll be in Normandy on June 6 -- for Harry and Rose, for the 741st, for all the people I was privileged to spend those weeks with in 1994.

NH Governor Signs Marriage Equality Law

Because of what is called, I believe, in technical jargon "bureaucratic wrangling", it took a little bit longer than expected -- but yesterday the governor of New Hampshire, John Lynch, finally signed into law a bill allowing same-sex marriage.

This has a direct effect on the lives of some of my family and friends, so it was pretty big news. That the state went for the idea does not surprise me too much -- we're notoriously conservative economically up here, but socially relatively liberal -- but Lynch's support is a surprise, even if it took a lot to get him there. The added language providing super-duper-double-extra-gay-proof-yay-for-God protection against churches having to perform same-sex weddings is mostly window dressing to mollify people who think their churches are suddenly going to be overrun with people they hate (Gene Robinson will be comin to yer cathedral, spreadin teh gay on yer altar!), but as the commenters at John Scalzi's blog (and elsewhere) have been discussing, the added language is a little bit more than redundant and may, depending on how the law is interpreted in the coming years, have some significant inequalities hidden in it. Nonetheless, it's a great step forward for us until there is full federal recognition of couples' rights.

Cool beans! (as we say up here in the frozen north).

Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree, Jr.

Much of reading, particularly fiction, is a matter of faith -- ye olde "willing suspension of disbelief". Science fiction, when it is more than an adventure story outfitted with spaceships and Bug-Eyed Monsters, often requires a more specific type of suspension of disbelief, a type that can create a paradox: fiction that is markedly more imaginative than most suffers from a failure of imagination. This failure occurs when the reader focuses on the story's extrapolations, but decides that they are incomplete, or simplistic, or ridiculous. If the reader perceived the story as surrealist fantasy, this wouldn't be a problem, and might even be a virtue. If the reader didn't place much emphasis (in terms of having faith in the imagined circumstances of the story) on the story's probabilities and extrapolations, then the problem would be, at best, minor (thus, stories about alien canals on Mars are perfectly readable if we haven't invested our willingness to surrender to the story on the likelihood of there being alien canals on Mars).

This was the problem for me in reading James Tiptree, Jr.'s first novel, Up Walls of the World, a book full of visionary potential that never communicated as visionary actuality to me because I could not get myself to buy into its basic premises about cognition or language. (This may have been exacerbated by my knowledge that Tiptree, who was Dr. Alice Sheldon, had a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, and so I expected more nuanced presentations of consciousness.) I was interested in the novel partly because I've read and enjoyed much of Tiptree's short fiction (and think a handful of her stories are among the true gems of the science fictional jewelry shop), and partly because I've been reading Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's thoughtful new book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, wherein Up the Walls of the World is called "an inexplicably neglected masterpiece of recent sf" that is "unparalleled in its use of the sublime mode" described by Patricia Yeager ("Toward a Female Sublime" in Kaufman, ed. Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism).

Beware critics wielding inexplicably neglected masterpieces! I read John Brunner's Total Eclipse a few years ago because Fredric Jameson, whose criticism I often find interestingly provocative, proclaimed it unjustly neglected. Like Up the Walls of the World, it offered some good stuff to think about, but ... masterpiece? Oh dear no.

I can see why Csicsery-Ronay sees Up the Walls of the World as an exemplar of certain types of what he calls "the sf sublime", a concept I do not have time to get into here because it would take a lot of words (to touch on some of what Csicsery-Ronay means by the concept, see Adam Roberts's excellent review of the book at Strange Horizons). Think vastness and sense of wonder. Tiptree's tale tells of two worlds: a late-'70s/early-'80s U.S. and a planet of ever-blowing winds and people composed partly of energy, who live in the winds and not on the surface of the planet. There's also a planet-destroying space monster looming. The protagonists in the late-'70s/early-'80s U.S. are all involved with a military-funded psionics research project. The protagonists on the wind planet are trying to figure out how to escape the planet-destroying space monster. The two worlds connect via a beam the partly-energy people send through space into the brains of the people involved with the psi project, and their consciousnesses are exchanged. Then, eventually, all their consciousnesses are uploaded into the planet-destroying space monster, which has become a sort of interstellar lifeboat for minds.

From this reductive summary, you can perhaps begin to see why if you have doubts about Tiptree's assumptions about cognition and consciousness the novel might not be able to make you suspend your disbelief. My problem was that once beings started exchanging consciousnesses, I couldn't repress some doubts, and once those consciousnesses were uploaded into the space-monster lifeboat my entire reading experience became one of doubt. Sensory words no longer made, well, sense to me, and yet Tiptree employs them (mostly) unproblematically -- beings without any corporeal body are still receiving sensory information. That was a minor doubt, though; my major ones centered around emotion. How, I wondered, could beings that have been divorced from their bodies be governed by the same emotions they would have in their bodies -- love and fear, for instance, which are preserved in exactly the same form (according to the narrative) as they take in the embodied beings. This makes no sense. Removed from a nervous system and an endocrine system, emotions would, surely, at least be less predictable, stable, and familiar, wouldn't they? I mean, if an iron rod shot into the frontal lobe can cause a personality to become nearly unrecognizable, surely a consciousness beamed across thousands of light-years into a giant space-monster lifeboat wouldn't be exactly the same as it was back when it was in a body in a familiar environment...

And that's not to mention the entrenched ideas about gender roles each of the characters brings with them -- but those are challenged, at least, though the challenges seemed to me simplistic and, again, less imaginative than they needed to be to be convincing.

More significantly, the language of the book in the second half of the novel seemed inadequate. Tiptree ignored a problem many science fiction writers, quite understandably, ignore: by definition, the indescribable is indescribable. (As annoying as some of Lovecraft's narrators' pleas of the limits of language to describe horror can be, at least those narrators rarely, if ever, seem to think they've described the indescribable ... they just go on and on about how indescribable it is.) A science fiction writer who wants to describe something that is beyond or alien to human conception is stuck, because the tool the writer has to do such a thing is the tool of language -- human language, rife with human assumptions and limitations. The writer must create metaphors and images based on what the reader (presumably a human) knows, but therein lies the paradox: the indescribably alien is not describable in familiar language. Somewhere I read that Tiptree said she would have liked to revise the novel to make the space monster's consciousness seem more intelligent, since she understood what someone (I think Gardner Dozois) was getting at when he said the sections of the book devoted to that consciousness reminded him of, as much as anything, Cookie Monster. This is, yes, a problem. But it's only the most obvious iteration of a problem that plagues the entire book -- many theorists would say that consciousness and language are inextricable, but even if you don't go that far, it is, I would posit, self-evident that language and consciousness are deeply related, having at least the ability to reflect and influence each other. (Unless you view language and consciousness as utterly [and unutterably] separate ... but if this is your deepest belief, writing and reading novels is probably not the best activity for you...)

Up the Walls of the World is written in a mix of direct, indirect, and (occasionally) free indirect discourse, but this approach is too simplistic and clunky (not to mention familiar) to help a reader like me, plagued by doubts about the novel's representation of consciousness, suspend disbelief. Virginia Woolf needed a complex representation of consciousness just to represent a day of Mrs. Dalloway's life in London, but representing consciousnesses traveling thousands of light years into utterly unfamiliar circumstances doesn't cause language to bend, burst, or bust?

One facet of the problem here is that the story is presented so rationally. Rational presentations encourage readers to read rationally. It's an obvious statement, but sometimes needs to be stated nonetheless. Part of the brilliance of Philip K. Dick was his ability to add enough irrationality into otherwise rational story structures to prevent readers from being able to reason with the narrative -- you cannot read Eye in the Sky or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Ubik or A Maze Death and connect all the dots to plausibility. Such novels make problems of perception a part of their entire raison d'etre. Tiptree seems to have learned a bit from Dick -- at different points of Up the Walls of the World, I thought of all four of those PKD novels -- but she wasn't able to reach his heights because she clung too tightly to a narrative structure that encouraged a kind of reading that the book has trouble satisfying.

Until the last 100 pages or so, I was actually enjoying my argument with the book, but another of the problems with the novel is that it is too long; some of Tiptree's best work is at the novella length, and it is not difficult to imagine that Up the Walls of the World would have been more powerful and effective if she had cut it down by a third or half. Certainly, a doubtful and disbelieving reader such as I probably finds the novel more tedious than a reader willing to doubt less and believe more, but "A Momentary Taste of Being" this is not.

I noted above the paradox of a tremendously imaginative book suffering from a failure of imagination, and as I was wrestling with questions of why I found it impossible to suspend disbelief for this particular narrative, when I have happily entered into other narratives that are equally or less plausible, I began to think about familiarity and formulas -- for instance, in reading a basic space opera, I am perfectly willing to suspend disbelief about the possibility of faster-than-light travel, about the simplicity of the cultural representations, the implausibility of the economics, etc. and simply go along for the ride. Partly, this is because there are certain SF tropes that, handled in familiar ways, become almost as invisible as repeated speech tags in dialogue. But there's something else, too -- something having to do with the ways a writer manipulates expectations and, partly, how the writer guides our perception of plausibilities -- Csicsery-Ronay notes, for instance, that "[Hal] Clement's Mission of Gravity is so famous for the plausibility of its heavy planet Mesklin that few readers remark on the absurdity of its centipede-like alien protagonists behaving like buccaneer capitalists communicating with human beings with no information loss." The emphases within Mission of Gravity make clear that the book is very much about its speculations and science rather than the plausibility of its characters' behaviors. Up the Walls of the World, though, seemed to me to be about its character's psychological and emotional states as they encounter (and merge with) what is alien to them, and so no amount of imaginative power in other elements of the novel allowed me to overcome my perception of the book's psychological and emotional imaginings as faulty.

I also want to note one other curious element of the book -- one of the main protagonists (the one, in fact, who basically saves everyone's lives*), Margaret Omali, is the daughter of a Kenyan man who "went crazy" and performed genital mutilation on her when he brought her and her mother back to Kenya. The viewpoint protagonist, Dr. Daniel Dann, fell in love with Margaret the moment he saw her, idealizing her as an Egyptian princess with "Nefertiti lips" and "a long blue-black arm of aching elegance" that "when he wraps the [blood pressure] cuff onto it he feels he is touching the limb of some uncanny wild thing." (One could speculate about the influence of Alice Sheldon's childhood on these items, but I won't.) It's entirely plausible for a 50ish white guy in late-'70s/early-'80s America to exoticize a woman in this way -- heck, it's unfortunately still plausible today -- and it's also plausible that a certain sort of Kenyan father might want his daughter to be "circumcised" in the traditional way -- but I am a little bit queasy about the reason Tiptree seems to have chosen to include these details. For the plot, she needed to make Margaret "cold" so that her greatest desire would be for her consciousness to emulate a computer program, and she needed Daniel Dann to find her astoundingly attractive and also a bit alien. This unfortunately just strengthens the stereotype of Africans as "wild", "alien", and either hypersexual or frigid -- themselves problematic concepts, regardless of geographic stereotypes. These choices, too, seem to me to be failures of imagination. Imagine, for instance, an alternative: What if Margaret's mother had been made "crazy" by her allegiance to the patriarchal idea that a wife should do anything to live up to her husband's expectations. Also, because of received stereotypes of Africa she'd had no motivation to question, what if she decided that her husband wanted her to perform a traditional ritual on her daughter -- and so what if she was the one to mutilate (or have mutilated) her daughter -- and, furthermore, when she presented him to her husband, her husband (a modern man with a complex relationship to the traditions of his ancestors) was aghast and deeply, irrevocably saddened. It wouldn't have solved all the problems, but it would have preserved the necessary plot points and added some complexity to the situation and to the characters.

We could say that the limitations of Up the Walls of the World are limitations of its era and genre, but even recognizing that, it's important to imagine other possibilities than the ones Tiptree chose, or else we will accept the limitations when we should challenge them and let them spur us toward deeper imaginings of our own.

*or, rather, consciousnesses, because what meaning is there to the word "life" without some sort of embodiment

Outtakes from an Introduction

I've told the story of how I came to write the introductions to the revised editions of Samuel Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine (the latter due to be published, last I knew, this fall). The intro for JHJ that appears in the book, though, is very different from the first one I wrote, because from conversations with the editor at Wesleyan University Press, I got the impression that I should write a light, accessible, personal introduction for a general audience, something similar to Neil Gaiman's intro to The Einstein Intersection. No big deal. I had a sort of funny story about first encountering JHJ at much too young an age, so I built the introduction around that.

Chip Delany's reply was something to the effect of, "Great intro! Wrong audience!" Oops. (And, he asked, is JHJ really that difficult? No, certainly -- but I do tend to like to be dramatic...) It turned out that Chip had hoped for an introduction that was more along the lines of the long, scholarly introduction Ken James wrote for Longer Views. He told me to think of my audience as someone who has recently gotten a Ph.D. and is wondering why she should read this book.

I did my best to conceal my panic -- I don't, after all, have a Ph.D. myself, and I wasn't entirely sure I could write two introductions of 3,000-6,000 words each that would be even remotely coherent. In the end, though, I'm quite proud of how they turned out, and the research and thought I put into them ended up being some of the most pleasurable of my life.

After I turned in the final JHJ intro, Chip suggested I should put some outtakes from the first one up here. I'm not sure these are really worth preserving, but perhaps they will offer some amusement, and in any case I think it will prove that the change in perceived audience for the intro was nothing but a good thing...

The simple answer is the parentheticals.

First, though, we need the question. For that, I have to tell a few stories.

When I was in graduate school recently, my uncle asked me what course I was most enjoying. I said a course in postmodern theory. (He has spent enough time around academics to know roughly what I was talking about.) He said he had one question he'd always wanted to ask somebody in such a course, but he'd been afraid of offending them. I said he had no need to worry about offending me. "Well," he said, "what I've wondered is if any of that stuff has any value other than as some sort of game or in-joke. Is any of it really ... saying anything?"

I could have been a smart-aleck and replied that that was a very important problem in postmodern theory, the separation of this thing we call "language" and this other thing we call "meaning", but I wasn't feeling smart-alecky right then, and the uncertainty at the heart of his question had been bugging me quite a lot, too. My answer was one I have more or less stuck to since then: I don't immediately reject as worthless the complex and often convoluted sentences created by writers associated with that thing that has come to be known as Theory, because while certainly I have read plenty of essays and books that seem to hide vapid banalities in a labyrinth of neologisms and ornate syntax, some books and some essays use the labyrinth not to hide anything, but to house it most comfortably.

The question is: Is it worth the effort? The answer is: Yes, sometimes.

(But that's not the question we were searching for.)

[Then follows the small bit of personal stuff that actually made it into the intro, about me first encountering JHJ when I was a kid in the local college library, just discovering science fiction.]

And so now we come to the question for which I have already offered an answer: What does a reader need to pay the most attention to so as to begin understanding Delany's critical prose?

The simple answer is the parentheticals.

There are many different types of parentheticals with Delany. There are the ideas and comments put in parentheses. There are the footnotes and endnotes, many of which become mini-essays of their own. All of those are relatively easy things to work through, though. The challenge comes with the parenthetical statements within sentences, and the paragraphs that function as parenthetical remarks about other paragraphs. There is no simple trick to being able to comprehend the ideas that spring from other ideas and lead in directions of their own. It takes practice and patience.

Which brings us back to my uncle's question about contemporary critical theory in general: Is any of it really saying anything?

There is a corollary question: Does it have to be so difficult?

The simple answer to both questions is: Probably.

If you decide that a piece of writing is saying something, and saying something of value, that is because you have a context from which you can understand and value its ideas and a set of skills that allow you to understand how those ideas are expressed. When I first encountered The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, I was just a nerdy little kid, and I had neither the context nor the skills nor the experiences to get any more from it than I would have gotten from a textbook on nuclear physics. I returned to it after I had built up a context: I knew more about Delany, I knew more about science fiction, I knew more about reading and writing. Not a lot more, but enough to begin. I had read stories by Thomas M. Disch, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ. I had read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed and thought it was the greatest novel ever written (because it was the most intellectually thrilling novel I had ever read, and I assumed nothing could be better). I knew a few general things about the New Wave in the 1960s, having by then read some of Judith Merril's best-of-the-year anthologies and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. I had begun to think about politics and gender and sexuality.

I'm sure other people could make sense of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw with a different sort of context, a different basic collection of references and general ideas, but this was the one that worked for me.

[...]

It can be interesting to chart what changes and what doesn't in Delany's ideas, but it is equally important to look at what changes in the culture from his earliest essays to his most recent, and how that is reflected in his analyses. One of the many things Delany has given us is a record of what it was like to be thinking about writing, reading, and living in a time when the perception of those things by the broader culture changed. The influence of such people as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan was at first limited to the academy, but the influence exploded outward quickly enough, affecting everything from teaching styles to product design, so that now, forty years later, The Economist magazine can run an article suggesting that the ideas of Foucault, Barthes, and Jean-François Lyotard have been absorbed and assimilated by marketing researchers and venturing capitalists.

Beyond providing evidence of how Delany's writing metamorphoses, and beyond the fascination of controversies past, the value these essays hold for us now is their continuing ability to provoke thought. When I said that the secret of beginning to understand Delany is to pay attention to his parentheticals, what I was suggesting was that it is important to pay attention to how you, the individual reader, absorb his ideas. Don't get stuck on particular sentences -- you can come back to them later -- but instead let the flow of ideas inspire ideas of your own. If you start daydreaming while you read, don't worry about it, just remember where your thoughts took flight. When you come back, you will come back to the page as a different person with a different mind, and you will be able to pick up from where you left off, and go for a little while longer, until either you can't fit any more ideas in your head, or you start to dream again. Either result should be cherished.

Is any of it really saying anything—

Is any of it really saying anything to me?

That is the question each of us asks of anything we pay attention to, and the things we pay the most attention to are the things that cause us to answer the question with a strong Yes.

The way I answer that question is obvious. With The Jewel-Hinged Jaw finally back in print, you now have the chance to answer the question for yourself.