Travel By Thought

2011 Books Read and Films Seen

2012-01-27T17:40:00.002-05:00

Again, for the sake of posterity, the lists of books that I read and films that I saw in 2011:

2011 Reading List (Out of 4 Stars)
China Mountain Zhang (Maureen F. McHugh, 1992) ***

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004) *****
Cyberabad Days (Ian McDonald, 2009) ****
Embassytown (China Miéville, 2011) ***
Faust: Part One (J.W. von Goethe, 1808; trans David Luke, 2008)
Filaria (Brent Hayward, 2008) ***
Fleetwood (William Godwin, 1805)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008) [reread]
King Lear (Shakespeare, 1603-1606)
Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984) [reread]
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005) [reread]
Paradise Lost (John Milton, 1667/1674) [reread]
Rich Dad Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki, 2010)
Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen, 1811)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey, 1989/2004)
Spin (Robert Charles Wilson, 2006) *** 1/2
Under Heaven (Guy Gavriel Kay, 2010) ***
Walsingham (Mary Robinson, 1797)

2011 Films Seen (Out of 4 Stars)

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) ** 1/2

Another Earth (2011) *** 1/2

Another Year (2010) ****

Barney's Version (2011) ***

Biutiful (2010) ***

Black Swan (2010) *** 1/2

Blue Valentine (2010) *** 1/2

The Descendants (2011) ****

Drive (2011) ****

The Fighter (2010) *** 1/2

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2010) *** 1/2

Haevnen (In A Better World) (2010) *****

Half Nelson (2006) *** 1/2

Hanna (2011) *** 1/2

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011) ****

Hereafter (2010) *** 1/2

Hugo (2011) ****

The Ides of March (2011) ***

In Bruges (2008) *** 1/2

Incendies (2010) ****

Jack Goes Boating (2010) ***

Jane Eyre (2011) ****

The King's Speech (2010) ****

Lars and the Real Girl (2007) *** 1/2

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ****

Le Havre (2011) ***

Limitless (2011) ***

Mansfield Park (1999) *** 1/2

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) *** 1/2

Meek's Cutoff (2011) *** 1/2

Melancholia (2011) ** 1/2

Midnight in Paris (2011) *** 1/2

Moneyball (2011) ***

Puss in Boots (2011) ***

Rabbit Hole (2010) *** 1/2

Ran (1985) ***

Rango (2011) *** 1/2

Sense and Sensibility (1995) *** 1/2

Somewhere (2010) *** 1/2

Source Code (2011) ***

Take Shelter (2011) ****

Thor (2011) ** 1/2

The Town (2010) ***

The Tree of Life (2011) ***

True Grit (2010) ***

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) ** 1/2

Wendy and Lucy (2008) *** 1/2

The Whistle Blower (2011) *** 1/2

Winter's Bone (2010) ****

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger(2010) ** 1/2

Favourites of 2011

2012-01-05T16:45:00.004-05:00

Without further adieu, my lists of my favourite reads, films, and music of 2011!

Favourite Novels/Books Read in 2011 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004) *****
2. Cyberabad Days (Ian McDonald, 2009) ****
3. Spin (Robert Charles Wilson, 2006) *** 1/2
4. Embassytown (China Miéville, 2011) ***
5. Under Heaven (Guy Gavriel Kay, 2010) ***
6. Filaria (Brent Hayward, 2008) ***
7. China Mountain Zhang (Maureen F. McHugh, 1992) ***

Favourite Films Released in 2011 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Drive ****
2. Jane Eyre ****
3. The Descendants ****
4. Take Shelter ****
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 ****
6. Hugo ****
7. Another Earth *** 1/2
8. Martha Marcy May Marlene *** 1/2
9. Midnight in Paris *** 1/2
10. Rango *** 1/2

Honourable Mentions: Hanna; Meek's Cutoff; The Whistle Blower.

Notable Disappointments: The Adjustment Bureau; The Ides of March; Melancholia; The Tree of Life.

Favourite Films Seen But Not Released in 2011 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Haevnen (In A Better World) (2010) *****
2. Incendies (2010) ****
3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ****
4. Another Year (2010) ****
5. Winter's Bone (2010) ****
6. The King's Speech (2010) ****
7. Blue Valentine (2010) *** 1/2
8. Rabbit Hole (2010) *** 1/2
9. Wendy and Lucy (2008) *** 1/2
10. Somewhere (2010) *** 1/2

Honourable Mentions: Black Swan (2010); The Fighter (2010); The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2010); Half Nelson (2006); In Bruges (2008); Lars and the Real Girl (2007); Mansfield Park (1999).

Notable Disappointments: Biutiful (2010); Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).

Favourite Albums of 2011
1. Allo Darlin', Allo Darlin'
2. Wussy, Strawberry
3. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
4. Sloan, The Double-Cross
5. Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
6. Old 97's, The Grand Theatre, Vol. 1
7. Buck 65, 20 Odd Years
8. Rachid Taha, Bonjour
9. Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose
10. Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest

Favourite Concerts: Allo Darlin'; The Baseball Project; The National; Old 97's.

Favourite Singles/Songs of 2011
1. Wussy, "Wrist Rocket"
2. Allo Darlin', "Kiss Your Lips"
3. Kanye West, "Monster"
4. Sloan, "Unkind"
5. Rachid Taha, "Bonjour"

Honourable Mention: Buck 65, "Stop"; Those Darlins, "Waste Away."

2010 Books Read and Films Seen

2011-01-03T10:35:00.001-05:00

A new year has begun, so it's time to clear the Reading and Films Seen lists. For posterity's sake, the 2010 lists are transferred here.

For my favourite books, short fiction, films, and music of 2010, go to Favourites of 2010.

2010 Reading List (Out of 4 Stars)
Absolution Gap (Alastair Reynolds, 2003) *** 1/2
Asimov's Science Fiction (Jan. 2010) *** 1/2

Asimov's Science Fiction (Feb. 2010) ***
Asimov's Science Fiction (Mar. 2010) ** 1/2
Asimov's Science Fiction (Apr./May 2010) *** 1/2
Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress, 1993) ***
Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1996) ****
Boneshaker (Cherie Priest, 2009) **
The Burning Skies (David J. Williams, 2009) *** 1/2
The City & The City (China Miéville, 2009) *** 1/2
Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Andrew Piper, 2009) *** 1/2
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008) *** 1/2
I Am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954) *** 1/2
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969) ****
Little Brother (Cory Doctorow, 2009) ***
The Machinery of Light (David J. Williams, 2010) *** 1/2
The Mirrored Heavens (David J. Williams, 2008) *** 1/2
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005) ****
The New Space Opera 2 (Dozois and Strahan, eds., 2009) ***
The Quiet War (Paul McAuley, 2009) ** 1/2
Redemption Ark (Alastair Reynolds, 2002) ****
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992) ***
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell, 2010) *****
The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi, 2009) *** 1/2
Wordsworth Translated: A Case Study in the Reception of British Romantic Poetry in Germany 1804-1914 (John Williams, 2009) ** 1/2
Year's Best SF 15 (Hartwell and Cramer, eds., 2010) ***

Films Seen in 2010 (Out of 4 Stars)
8 1/2 (1963) ****

9 (2009) **
(500) Days of Summer (2009) *** 1/2
Alice in Wonderland (2010) ***
Amelia (2009) **
The American (2010) ****
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans (2009) *** 1/2
The Blind Side (2009) ** 1/2
The Book of Eli (2009) ***
Cars (2006) ***
Chloe (2009) ** 1/2
Coco Avant Chanel (2009) ***
The Cove (2009) ****
Crazy Heart (2009) ****
CUBE (1997) ***
The Damned United (2009) ***
Despicable Me (2010) ***
An Education (2009) ****
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) *** 1/2
Get Him to the Greek (2010) *** 1/2
The Ghost Writer (2010) ****
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2010) *** 1/2
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo(2009) ****
Greenberg (2010) *** 1/2
Green Zone (2010) *** 1/2
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010) *** 1/2
Howl (2010) ** 1/2
The Hurt Locker (2009) ****
Inception (2010) ****
The Invention of Lying (2009) ***
Io Sono L'Amore (I Am Love) (2010) ****
Kick-Ass (2010) *** 1/2
Kung Fu Panda (2008) ***
Megamind (2010) **
Monsters (2010) *** 1/2
Moon (2009) ****
Never Let Me Go (2010) ****
Nowhere Boy (2010) *** 1/2
Un Prophète (2009) ****
Public Enemies (2009) ** 1/2
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) *** 1/2
The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) (2009) ****
A Serious Man (2009) ****
Sherlock Holmes (2009) ***
Shrek Forever After (2010) ** 1/2
A Single Man (2009) *** 1/2
Sin Nombre (2009) ****
The Social Network (2010) ***
Splice (2010) **
The Trotsky (2010) ***
Waiting for "Superman" (2010) *** 1/2
Whip It (2009) *** 1/2
The White Ribbon (2009) ****

Favourites of 2010

2010-12-24T14:17:00.004-05:00

This is the Great Post of Lists! Yes, my lists of my favourite reads, films, and music of 2010! Ordered and ranked, no less!

To the listmaking, then . . . .

Favourite Novels/Books Read in 2010 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell, 2010) *****
2. Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1996) ****

3. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005) ****

4. Redemption Ark (Alastair Reynolds, 2002) ****

5. Autumn Rain Trilogy (David J. Williams): The Mirrored Heavens (2008), The Burning Skies (2009), The Machinery of Light (2010) *** 1/2

6. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Andrew Piper, 2009) *** 1/2

7. The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi, 2009) *** 1/2

8. Absolution Gap (Alastair Reynolds, 2003) *** 1/2

9. The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008) *** 1/2

10. The City & The City (China Miéville, 2009) *** 1/2

Honourable Mention: I Am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954).

Notable Disappointments: Boneshaker (Cherie Priest, 2009); The Quiet War (Paul McAuley, 2009); Wordsworth Translated (John Williams, 2009).

Currently In Progress (i.e., Could Get Finished By the End of the Year and So Might Affect the Above Top 10): Under Heaven (Guy Gavriel Kay, 2010).

Favourite Short Fiction Read in 2010 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Charles Oberndorf, "Another Life" (2009) ****
2. Peter Watts, "The Island" (2009) ****

3. Stephen Baxter, "The Ice Line" (2010) ****

4. Sarah Genge, "Malick Pan" (2010) ****

5. Allen M. Steele, "The Jekyll Island Horror" (2010) ****

6. Geoff Ryman, "Blocked" (2009) ****

7. John C. Wright, "The Far End of History" (2009) *** 1/2

8. Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Consciousness Problem" (2009) *** 1/2

9. Chris Roberson, "Wonder House" (2010) *** 1/2

10. Carol Emshwiller, "The Wilds" (2010) *** 1/2

Honourable Mentions: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, "Boojum" (2008); Stephen Popkes, "Jackie's-Boy" (2010); Michael Swanwick, "Slow Life" (2003); Rachel Swirsky, "Eros, Philia, Agape" (2009); Peter Watts, "The Things" (2010).

Notable Disappointments: Neal Asher, "Shell Game" (2009); Peter M. Ball, "On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk" (2009); Damien Broderick, "Dead Air" (2010); Marissa K. Lingen, "The Calculus Plague" (2009).

Favourite Films Released in 2010 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Io Sono L'Amore (I Am Love) ****

2. The Ghost Writer ****

3. Never Let Me Go ****

4. The American ****

5. Inception ****

6. Green Zone *** 1/2

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 *** 1/2

8. Monsters *** 1/2

9. Nowhere Boy *** 1/2

10. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World *** 1/2

Honourable Mentions: Get Him to the Greek; The Girl Who Played With Fire; Greenberg; Kick-Ass; The Trotsky; Waiting for "Superman".

Notable Disappointments: Megamind; Splice.

Still To Be Seen, Possibly, Before The End of 2010: All Good Things; Black Swan; The King's Speech; Rabbit Hole; Somewhere; True Grit.

Favourite Films Seen But Not Released in 2010 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. The White Ribbon (2009) ****

2. Un Prophète (2009) ****

3. Sin Nombre (2009) ****

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) ****

5. The Cove (2009) ****

6. An Education (2009) ****

7. The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) (2009) ****

8. The Hurt Locker (2009) ****

9. Moon (2009) ****

10. 8 1/2 (1963) ****

Honourable Mentions: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans (2009); Crazy Heart (2009); Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009); A Serious Man (2009); A Single Man (2009).

Notable Disappointments: 9 (2009); Amelia (2009); Chloe (2009).

Favourite Albums Released in 2010
1. The Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

2. Kate Nash, My Best Friend Is You

3. The National, High Violet

4. Belle & Sebastian, Write About Love

5. Titus Adronicus, The Monitor

6. Drive-By Truckers, The Big To-Do

7. Of Montreal, False Priest
8. Love Is All, Two Thousand and Ten Injuries

9. Die Antwoord, $O$

10. Junip, Fields

Honourable Mentions: The Apples in Stereo, Travellers in Space and Time; Surfer Blood, Astro Coast; Tokyo Police Club, Champ; Neil Young, Le Noise.

Favourite Band Discovered in 2010: Wussy.

Favourite Concerts in 2010: Drive-By Truckers; Titus Adronicus.

Just Received and Still Listening To (Released in 2010): Black Eyed Peas, The Beginning; The Corin Tucker Band, 1,000 Years; No Age, Everything In Between; The Roots, How I Got Over.

Favourite Albums Discovered But Not Released in 2010: Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation's Dark (2008); The Church, Untitled #23 (2009); Wussy, Funeral Dress (2005) and Wussy (2009).

Favourite Singles/Songs Released in 2010

1. Of Montreal, "Our Riotous Defects"

2. The Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

3. Titus Andronicus, "To Old Friends and New"

4. Kate Nash, "I Just Love You More"

5. The National, "Anyone's Ghost"

Honourable Mention: LCD Soundsystem, "Drunk Girls" (This Is Happening)

The New Space Opera 2

2010-09-19T01:58:00.003-04:00

Editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan continue their efforts to encapsulate and forward the state of SF space opera today with The New Space Opera 2 (EOS, 2009). Their 2007 collection The New Space Opera provided a very strong selection of stories from top SF authors such as Dan Simmons, Ian McDonald, and Alastair Reynolds. The New Space Opera felt fresh and at times exhilarating, with even the substandard stories tapping into the sense-of-wonder and the vastness of scale (in ideas, actions, settings) at the heart of the subgenre. In the introduction to The New Space Opera 2, Dozois and Strahan observe, "The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story" -- a form they believe is "where much of the cutting-edge work in today's genre is being done" (1). Except for a couple of stories, however, The New Space Opera 2 overall falls short of the fresh, "cutting-edge" feel of the first collection, the sense-of-wonder strangely a bit flat and muted.

In fact, many of the pieces don't push far in terms of inventiveness and scope, for ideas and aesthetically. Some pieces proved oddly boring for me, such that the collection as a whole was underwhelming. I am not alone in this response: Rich Horton, for The SF Site, writes, "Many of the stories are, truth be told, a bit routine, or a bit too arch in their attitude towards the genre"; Richard Larson, for Strange Horizons, suggests that several stories "suffer from being too long" and so some "monotony," which led him to "wishing I had more of a visceral reaction to what I had just put myself through." This sense of the "routine" and of "monotony" that Horton and Larson identify describe fairly well my experience of the bulk of the collection. I rarely reacted viscerally to many of the stories, whether owing to the ideas or to the writing, or both. Instead, I found myself puzzled at the relative poverty of imaginative reach and aesthetic daring. That said, as a whole the collection supplies more competent and good stories than decent or outright poor stories, and so I rate it at 3 out of 4 stars.

Here are the stories and my ratings of them (out of four stars), with the five best stories in bold:

1. Robert Charles Wilson, "Utriusque Cosmi" ** 1/2

2. Peter Watts, "The Island" ****

3. John Kessel, "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" ** 1/2

4. Cory Doctorow, "To Go Boldly" ***

5. John Barnes, "The Lost Princess Man" ** 1/2

6. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "Defect" ** 1/2

7. Jay Lake, "To Raise a Mutiny Betwixt Yourselves" **

8. Neal Asher, "Shell Game" **

9. Garth Nix, "Punctuality" ** 1/2

10. Sean Williams, "Inevitable" ***

11. Bruce Sterling, "Join the Navy and See the Worlds" ***

12. Bill Willingham, "Fearless Space Pirates of the Outer Rings" **

13. John Meaney, "From the Heart" ***

14. Elizabeth Moon, "Chameleons" ***

15. Tad Williams, "The Tenth Muse" ***

16. Justina Robson, "Cracklegrackle" ***

17. John Scalzi, "The Tale of the Wicked" ***

18. Mike Resnick, "Catastrophe Baker and a Canticle for Leibowitz" **

19. John C. Wright, "The Far End of History" *** 1/2

General Comments
The best five stories in order are (1) Watts, (2) Wright, (3) Meaney, (4) T. Williams, and (5) Robson; the next several best would be the stories by Sterling, S. Williams, Scalzi, and Doctorow.

   Watts and Wright, far and above all the other stories, deliver pieces that represent what constitutes the defining qualities of what I see as the new space opera: a hard-SF perspective and foundation; taking advantage of and extending key cyberpunk tropes and concerns (i.e., mixings of body and machine, technological transcendence, machine/artificial subjectivities); communicating the vastness of the temporal and geographic scales of (life in) interstellar space; fascinating, complex characters. Both pieces are challenging, aesthetically and intellectually, requiring concentration -- and some work -- from the reader. Both pieces support the scope of their ideas with poetry in the writing: Watts in the edgy, abrasive, weary voice of the narrator, Sunday; Wright in the careful, atmospheric narrating of a far-future mythic romance.

   The stories by Meaney, T. Williams, and Robson possess these qualities as well, only not as consistently or to the same degree. There is the wonder of the centre of the galaxy in Meaney, the opinionated yet empathetic viewpoint of Mr. Jatt in T. Williams, and the devastation of Mark Bishop at the consequences of a horrifying kind of cynical black market in human abduction and smuggling in Robson.

   In contrast, the poorest stories, by Asher, Willingham, Resnick, and Lake (somewhat in order, from poorest to least poorest), don't very much challenge the reader aesthetically or intellectually, or both. They either make questionable narrative decisions, such as the strange and jarring POV shifts in Asher; read as unsophisticated and generic, such as in Willingham; come across as basically a gimmick with little of substance, such as in Resnick; or aim for something intricate structurally, thematically, and with the setting but miss bringing everything together successfully, such as in Lake. Of these four stories, Lake's most directly attempts to tap into the character of the new space opera, and does so honestly, earnestly, but the technical execution makes accessing and getting situated in his story's world and mood difficult for the reader.

   As with any anthology of original stories, responses will vary between different readers, which is certainly the case here. My ratings of several stories, for instance, diverge significantly from those of Liviu Suciu in his review of the collection for Fantasy Book Critic. Suciu assigns 5 or 5+ stars to the following stories: Wilson, Watts, Barnes, Rusch, Asher, S. Williams, Willingham, Meaney, Moon, Robson, and Wright. Moreover, stories by Kessel, Lake, T. Williams, and Resnick receive 4 or 4.5 stars from Suciu. On one hand, his ratings cause me some concern, for they -- in my mind -- potentially misrepresent the quality of certain individual stories and of the entire volume. He praises Asher for his "trademark ultra-high octane sf adventure"; Resnick's story is "pure fun to read and chuckle"; Willingham's story is "Big time fun!!" For me, these positive responses lack a more considered critical approach, in the sense of really evaluating the stories' thematic goals and aesthetic execution.

   On the other hand, Suciu's ratings and reactions speak to an issue I've previously written about and continue to ponder: namely, that readers look for stories to give them a particular experience, an experience in accord with their tastes and the reasons why they read SF in the first place. While I firmly believe that the success of a short story or novel can be judged on objective criteria, and that more attention could be paid to such matters in the assessment of SF literary works, I also acknowledge that one of SF's attractions is the entertainment, even escapism, it can provide. I like being entertained and escaping as much as any reader of SF. Yet I persistently see a kind of overhyping or mishyping of certain works and authors, and I remain perplexed as to why this occurs and intrigued by its consequences.

   In the end, The New Space Opera 2 definitely shows the vibrancy and health of space opera today, especially in the stories by Watts and Wright, which fit the bill of "cutting-edge work" as noted by Dozois and Strahan. With space opera, its the ability truly to go boldly out there into the universe and unleash the imagination that makes the subgenre exciting and, at its best, inspiring. Many of this collection's pieces need more boldness and imagination, I think, but Dozois and Strahan have assembled an anthology that clearly asserts space opera's centrality to what we define as "true . . . science fiction."

Reviews/Commentaries
• Fantasy Book Critic (Liviu Suciu, June 2009)
• Goodreads
• io9 (Christopher Hsiang)
• SF Signal (John DeNardo, Oct. 2009)
• SF Site (Rich Horton)
• Strange Horizons (Richard Larson, Aug. 2009)

Asimov's Science Fiction (Apr./May 2010)

2010-09-13T00:16:00.001-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

This double issue is overall a rather strong one, offering a variety of themes/subjects and styles, as well as a few real surprises. I count one truly excellent story and three extremely good stories, with the rest being average to quite decent. With nine stories, I won't comment extensively on all of them -- just the ones for which I have something to say. Ratings are out of four stars.

1. Gregory Norman Bossert, "The Union of Soil and Sky" (pg. 10-39) ** 1/2
This one is an "alien archaeology" story, a subgenre that I tend to like as the archaeologist and/or archaeological dig on an alien planet affords an effective frame through which to present alien cultures and histories. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Spires of Denon" from the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space are good examples of this subgenre for me. Here, Bossert creates an intriguing world in Aulis and alien people in the Aulans, who are represented by Henry (on the dig team) and who communicate through metaphor and simile by a series of hand and finger gestures. The revelation of what Winnifred and her team actually discover deep underground proves intriguing, as Bossert has ancient Aulan history literally come alive in a definitely alien way.
   Yet I found myself unsurprised, in the end, for as a whole the narrative feels too familiar and predictable, particularly in the plotting. Also, the writing is noticeably awkward in places, with some odd grammar hiccups at times. For example, "'[...] Like biology. And physics; the varitropes move, and that means a source of energy. [...]'" (15): this is inattentive proofreading and unwieldy grammar, especially the mixing of the sentence fragment "And physics" with the semicolon and then a complete sentence following, this entire clause already coming after a sentence fragment (though an appropriate one in the context of the dialogue). Such moments are distracting and reduce the quality of the story.

2. Molly Gloss, "Unforeseen" (pg. 40-48) *** 1/2
A wickedly biting satire of the insurance/benefits industry, narrated by Forbes Kipfer, a claims investigator for Remediable Death Insurance -- in a future when people can be revivified/restored after dying, but only if the insurance claim is not denied. Gloss metes out the details of this future carefully, using the case of the recent death of Madison Truesdale's mother as the window into Kipfer's job and so the politics and economics that govern remediable death claims.
   Kipfer's voice and perspective are distinct and consistent throughout: edgy, jaded, expert, intelligent, exhausted, punchy. He equally well rants cuttingly about the foolishness of people in making their claims ("You have to wonder what in hell people are thinking when they file a claim for their eighty-nine year old grandpa with a history of emphysema or congestive heart failure ..." [41]), and reaches moments of existentialist insight ("What you're left with is people minding their own business and the sky falls on their head" [43]). He can also adjust his preconceptions if necessary, as Madison Truesdale consistently does not fit into what he expects of her situation, in that her mother's death truly was an accident.
   What Goss communicates most engagingly through Kipfer is a sort of postmodern ennui and cynicism, a coldness formed by too much experience of a cynical word but with faint hints of a warmth that might make it to the surface if perhaps not for the industry in which Kipfer works. Kipfer appears to be developing not quite a death wish, but certainly an apathy about death: "[...] I began to think of taking up smoking. Smoking plus living in Thousand Oaks under that cloud of dirty air might take some randomness out of the equation. Anyway, that's what I was thinking" (48). In the end, then, this story is fundamentally one of horror. It affords no happy ending or clear resolution, and the consequences of the literal control over life (or, resurrection) by insurance companies take to a logical extreme the situation we see today, particularly with medical insurance in the US.

3. Eugene Fischer, "Adrift" (pg. 50-61) ***
A good, solid story throughout: intriguing main character (Janet, far away from and in the process of divorcing her husband Caxton, and head of Platform Beryl); a situation encouraging empathy from the reader (Laurent, Therese, and Nagaila, escaping from the Congo, mistakenly end up at Janet's platform, apparent victims of human smuggling gone wrong); a plausible, if undesirable, conclusion (Laurent and his sisters are returned to the Congo). Fischer effectively communicates Janet's mood and mindset, regarding both her husband and Laurent. As well, Fischer's willingness not to give a decisively happy ending lends the story a bit of weight, for the key resolution is with Janet and her sense of quiet optimism about the uncertainty of her life.

4. Tim McDaniel, "They Laughed at Me in Vienna and Again in Prague, and Then in Belfast, and Don't Forget Hanoi! But I'll Show Them! I'll Show Them All, I Tell You!" (pg. 62-69) ** 1/2
McDaniel's piece provides an energetic, humourous take on the classic mad scientist trope/figure, managing to work in a romance and seemingly outrageous technology that actually functions, despite the derision of Dr. Clive Crawley's colleagues. Crawley bestows his "Anti-Senectitude Ray" (64) upon those attending his lecture at the 1954 World Science Conference in Vienna, and then verbally jousts with the same people in 1976 (Prague), 1996 (Belfast), and Hanoi (2034) -- none of them aging a bit. Quietly, the world changes owing to Crawley's inventions, with his career managed by his daughter and son-in-law (via the CIA), though he seems never to receive the recognition he feels he deserves. At least, Crawley retires to "'heaven'" (69), meaning a personal lab/retirement home with "'brains, and even a Van de Graaff generator'" (69). The narrative expresses a clear attachment to and sympathy for Crawley, and McDaniel maintains the up-tempo mood and voice of the story throughout, reinforcing the humour.

5. Pamela Sargent, "Mindband" (pg. 70-103) *** 1/2
Sargent constructs a highly engaging, X-Files like scenario in this novella primarily through her handling of narrative structure and point of view. In a structure that echoes the way a film or TV show might shift between different but overlapping perspectives and timelines, centred around a particular place and/or series of related events, the story moves between a group of characters either visiting or living in Westview as they pass each other on the street, meet in the local café known as the Cozy Corner, or converge at a birthday party at the Westview Bed and Breakfast. Four years ago, in a nearby town called Hannaford, several people died when a bridge collapsed due to their rioting and stamping, caused supposedly by "mass hysteria" (72). Chris Szekely, who survived the collapse and reported on the event, has returned to Westview, and she believes the somewhat mysterious local company, MindData Associates, was involved.
   Chris' quest for resolution, for MindData to admit its culpability, forms the primary narrative drive of the story. Yet Sargent skillfully incorporates other characters into Chris' quest: Marc, retired and divorced, touring America on his own time, maybe looking for a new town in which to settle; Ceci, recently moved to Westview/Hannaford, to help her sister Reine look after their mother, who suffers depression after the sudden death of her husband from a "stray bullet" (77) in Philadelphia; Catherine, Ceci and Reine's mother, slowly working her way out of her depression. These various characters reveal the history of Westview and move the narrative about the town. More importantly, however, they also serve to generate tension and intrigue related to MindData Associates, which has proven to be a lifesaver for the local economy, but which remains a mystery: Reine, like all the locals, knows only "'that they're some kind of communications company'" (83). Chris knows otherwise, or at least harbours strong suspicions to the contrary. She seeks to confront MindData's "President and Founder" (70), Matthew Bigelow Elmendorf, and get answers about the bridge collapse, which has left her with post-traumatic stress symptoms.
   Sargent carefully measures out details and hints that confirm Chris' suspicions, yet she leaves enough shadows to keep matters just a tad uncertain until the story's final stages. Chris' point of view steadily takes over the narrative, and thus the mildly Gothic atmosphere suggested in the opening stages intensifies, especially once Chris enters MindData's offices and converses with Elmendorf. The narrative structure employed by Sargent becomes crucial to Chris' increasingly harried and uncertain state of mind, as Sargent switches between Chris' possibly fallible perspective and how other characters view Chris' odd actions and accusations, focussed in Elmendorf's attendance at Ceci's birthday party at the Westview Bed and Breakfast.
   Like the best X-Files episodes, Sargent's story closes on an unhappy, brooding, tragic note, showing the consequences of the fear and psychological disintegration that come of mysteries unsolved, questions unanswered, traumas unrelieved. Was MindData responsible for the bridge collapse? Chris is certain of it, and her memories unlock the proof. Yet how reliable are Chris' memories, how much can her point of view be trusted? The truth is out there, so to speak, in the cost of people's lives.
   The only off note of the story for me, actually, is the ending. I'm unsure that it fits Chris and what the narrative establishes regarding her personality. I feel that it takes something of the easy way out, even as I appreciate the uncertainties it leaves for the reader.
   Still, this story offers an excellent example of how to handle different points of view with a clear purpose -- here, to communicate and reinforce mood and atmosphere, to generate tension, to suggest answers while raising more questions. How frustrating it must be to know you are right but that no one will ever know what you know and so can never believe you . . . .

6. Sara Genge, "Malick Pan" (pg. 104-114) ****
Here's a story that puts style and voice securely in the service of the personality and state-of-mind of its main character, and by doing so draws the reader into a strange post-apocalyptic future in which ironic allusions to old narratives such as Peter Pan give those old narratives new, darker, literalised meanings.
   Much of the strangeness of the setting, a desolate area somewhere outside Paris, resides in the language Malick knows and uses: "nanners" (104); "big-hungries" (104); "black-stone" (104); "hunter" and "clan(s)" (105). It is a childlike language, direct and simple, which transfers to his dialogue with others, such as members of the Rodriguez clan: "'If I tell you, I go with you. I become Rodriguez! . . . Rodriguez! Rodriguez! Rodriguez!'" (108). Also, Malick's language reflects his perception of his world, which consists of basic needs such as satisfying hunger, becoming part of a clan, protecting Nelly, and staying small to avoid the depravations of big-hungries. From the first to the final word in the story, Genge maintains the style and voice that express Malick's character and thoughts, as well as the nature of the setting, such that each word feels purposeful, necessary, weighted with meaning.
   A great deal of meaning resides in Malick's relationship with the "nanners" that inhabit his body and mind, allowing him to survive harsh conditions, educating him in the correct terms for things (i.e., "black-stone" is "'CALLED CONCRETE'" [104]), and urging him to return to Paris, from where he escaped some time ago. This relationship, in fact, forms the narrative's central tension, as the "nanners" are Malick's secret in several ways.
   Specifically, the "nanners" become the space through which allusions to and the literalising of Peter Pan enter the narrative, widening its field of meaning by engaging the reader with a form of dramatic irony -- i.e., a knowledge not possessed by Malick, even as he echoes the character whose surname he shares. Accosted by Nestor, Nelly's pre-arranged husband and the one person suspicious of Malick's perpetual childhood, Malick admits, "'I'm a boy! I decided not to grow up. . . . I just made me stay small'" (110). With the help of the "nanners," Malick has indeed stayed small, resisting adults who want children to "'grow up too soon'" (110) in a violent, poor, ravaged world. In this respect, Genge takes full advantage of SF's ability to repurpose older narratives (fairy tales, even) through the lens of technoscience while asserting their continued relevance for describing human experience.
   When the "nanners" leave Malick's body and gain independence, dramatic irony shifts also into postmodern irony, a kind of winking acknowledgement within the world of the narrative to an awareness of how Malick echoes Peter Pan. "'What are you?'" Malick asks the new nanner-entity, and they reply, "'You can call us Tinkerbell. It's appropriate,'" at which they "chortle and zip off into the night" (112). Quite literally appropriate, for Malick Pan. As he bargains with Tinkerbell to keep Nelly "small forever" and then leaves to head "toward the city," Malick begins a relationship with a new group of "nanners," determined "he can convince them to keep him small" (114). Thus, Genge turns a modern fable about the resistance to leaving childhood behind into a literalised, perhaps "appropriate" refusal to become part of a deadly, frightening, threatening, post-industrial adult world.
   Who can truly make human life better? Maybe a perpetual boy such as Malick: "About growing up -- he'll have to see about that. He is Malick! He has a thousand ideas a second" (114). Direct and simple, but subversively so. For, who represents a problem more than someone unwilling to participate in the sociocultural roles and paths expected of, if not predetermined for, him?

7. Barry B. Longyear, "Alten Kameraden" (pg. 115-133) ** 1/2
Overall, Longyear delivers a decent narrative, constructing an intriguingly mysterious main character in Kurt Wolff, whose fate becomes entwined with Hitler when he saves the future Führer's life in WW1 and when he meets him again in WW2 as the Allies move into Berlin. I suggest the story is alternate history, though just barely, owing to a twist of the supernatural at its end. Yet that twist does not, ultimately, feel earned by the rest of the narrative, particularly because it falls into the category of it-was-a-dream-all-along (think of The Sixth Sense, only without the shock of realization for reader or character). An odd piece for inclusion in Asimov's, to be honest: not really SF; and, compared, say, to the Sargent and Genge pieces, it does nothing spectacular or inventive, with narrative or style or subject matter.

8. Robert Reed, "Pretty to Think So" (pg. 134-143) ***
The story begins in medias res, as Cory is woken up by his father, Jim, at 3:33am, who tries to explain that "'There's an emergency'" (134) -- and must resort to the white lie of "'an emergency trip to Disneyland'" (134) to get Cory out of bed and ready for the road. Reed moves between a few point-of-view characters in order to establish dramatic irony as reporting on and the truth about the impending end of the world heighten the narrative tension. Cory and Jim represent the ignorant, common person, believing what they hear from the President on the radio; Joan is the Secret Service agent at the White House, who knows what is really happening and how the government strives to keep people such as Cory and Jim ignorant.
   No comet or asteroid is actually hurtling toward Earth; aliens are not invading. Rather, Joan learns about dark matter from an "astronomer" (140) involved with a project called the "Hilo Experiment" (141): not just any dark matter, mind you, but "mirror matter" that has gone "'baryonic'" in a one-way "'cascade'" that cannot be contained, thus possibly allowing an "'alternate realm'" to seep into and consume our world (141). When Reed switches to a conversation between a father and son who are natives of the alternate realm, he injects some ironic humour into the narrative, for the son let his younger brother "REACH INTO THE SHADOWS" (142) and cause the crisis on Earth -- therefore, the younger brother is "A LITTLE BRAT" (143). Yet instead of devastation, transformation occurs, and Cory accepts "the new world" immediately and excitedly, unlike "the cowering reborn entities beside him" (143). This is a punchy, sly, deftly crafted apocalypse narrative that remembers "apocalypse" means "to reveal or uncover" in the original Greek. What might science accidentally uncover in its experiments that could completely reshape human existence . . . for the "'better'" (143)?

9. Steven Popkes, "Jackie's-Boy" (pg. 144-180) *** 1/2
In a post-plague America, where the entire country's ecology is radically changing and reorganising itself, Michael accompanies the talking, intelligent elephant Jackie south from Missouri to Florida to find a rumoured herd of elephants. This story is something of a beast fable, but with scientific grounding: "Human scientists . . . gave her the power of speech" (148); "'We all learned to speak quickly enough but we hid it from the Keepers. . . . They taught us to read'" (164). With Michael as the main character and predominant point of view, Popkes skillfully depicts the world much as an eleven-year-old orphaned boy might, in a mixture of naivety and street smarts and growing-up-fast. Most importantly, the relationship that evolves between Michael and Jackie feels plausible -- their attachment to and love for each other solidifies through their experiences, and turns into an affirmation of the incredible bonds that can develop between humans and animals owing to such affection and love.
   What also feels plausible is the post-plague America that Popkes presents. This is an empty, silent, almost primitive America of broken bridges, deserted towns and cities, and surprising ecological arrangements (komodo dragons harrying travellers on the road into Kentucky; Indian and African elephants roaming in the wilds of Florida). As Jackie says, this new America is "'Evolution in action'" (163). Moreover, "'It's a mistake to think this ecology is complete. Humans left it very recently'" (178). Everything adapts to the changed conditions (people, animals, plants) as America remakes itself socially and environmentally, its eventual form uncertain, in embryo.
   Popkes sets that uncertainty mostly in the background, and strikes a matter-of-fact tone regarding it throughout, in the sense that the "evolution in action" is not inherently dystopian but rather simply is and so must be adapted to. More importantly, Popkes keeps the focus on Michael and Jackie's journey and relationship, giving the reader the satisfaction of the hoped-for happy ending: Jackie finds and becomes accepted into the herd of Florida elephants; Michael becomes accepted, too, by his elephant family and by a group of people dedicated to protecting the elephants from hunters and poachers; they stay together. The successes of the new America and its rearranged ecologies will be local and gradual, but the willingness to adapt of both humans and animals -- separately and together -- offers hope.
   Thus, this story is not only well told from beginning to end, its setting evocative and its characters intriguing, but it also produces the catharsis of resolution and optimism. Put another way, it allows for the wish fulfillment of the reader, as Michael and Jackie achieve what they desire in a world that orphaned them in different ways. The uncertainty of an America in ecological and social flux ("We don't know exactly what's going on," Michael writes to his long dead mother [180]) is tempered by the certainty of Michael and Jackie's happiness, solidified at the end by Michael feeling "like singing" and heading off to find Jackie "with a grin" (180). One needs to appreciate a story such as this: a story that satisfies the reader's hopes for its characters, and does so intelligently, carefully, affectionately.

Final Thoughts
• The April/May 2010 double issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is very strong overall, with one excellent story (Genge), three extremely good stories (Gloss, Sargent, Popkes), a couple of quite decent stories (Fischer, Reed), and three average stories (Bossert, McDaniel, Longyear). Genge's story is definitely the highlight of the issue, while the pieces by Gloss, Sargent, and Popkes all do something captivating with narrative craft and their subject matter.

• For this issue, I find that I am in disagreement with Jason Sanford regarding the quality of Bossert's story. Sanford includes Bossert's story in his list of favourite novellas of 2010 so far, alongside, for instance, Ted Chiang's The Life Cycle of Software Objects. I do, though, agree with Sanford that Asimov's is providing some great novellas this year, making me suspect we'll see a fair number of them appearing on awards lists and ballots next year. My exchange with Sanford about Bossert's piece proved instructive to me for how readers can value different elements of a single story and stories more generally, from personal investments to technical expectations. As I read through and think about the stories in Asimov's this year, I'm finding my attention focussed mostly on technical matters (narrative structure, voice, style, and the like), as well as on looking for poetry in the writing. The best stories, for me, are strong in both areas consistently. With each issue of Asimov's, I believe more strongly that objective measures of quality for SF narrative fiction can definitely separate one story from another, within a single issue and across all the issues together.

• The stories by Gloss, Sargent, Genge, and Popkes each present fabulous examples of the effectiveness of various technical elements when handled skillfully and with purpose -- shifting points of view to create dramatic irony and tension, diction to establish a distinct perspective or atmosphere, style and tone to fashion a tangible voice or attitude or personality, and so forth. Also, significantly, each of these stories wears the science of its fiction without ostentation, instead devoting energy to complex characters and narratives that reach compelling and satisfying resolutions. They challenge the reader with their intelligence and their craft.

• Genge's piece was the unexpected gem of this issue. I did not like Genge's "As Women Fight" from the December 2009 issue of Asimov's, so I was wary of "Malick Pan." While "As Women Fight" felt heavy-handed and lacking in artistry, "Malick Pan" is subtle, accomplished, allusive, evocative. I would not be surprised to see the story garnering some awards nominations next year.

The Burning Skies and SF as Historical Allegory

2010-08-26T15:29:00.007-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

In my post on David J. Williams' The Mirrored Heavens, the first book of his Autumn Rain trilogy, I explored the ways in which the use of the present tense in the narrative supported and expressed the political edginess of that novel's themes. The unrelenting presentism, or nowness, of the narrative, I suggested, reflected not just the nature of the novel's events as experienced by the characters, but also the nature of the characters' world -- which in turn reflects something of the nature of our early 21st-century world and its increasingly rapid pace of life and complex sociopolitical and environmental situations. Specifically, I offered the possibility that one can read The Mirrored Heavens as at least in part a science fictional envisioning of, if not commentary on, the mood of the world as created by the Bush administration in its post-9/11 years. I feel even more certain of this reading after finishing the second book of the trilogy, The Burning Skies.

   The Burning Skies, in fact, heightens the presentism and political edginess of the narrative by steering the story further into the centre(s) of power of the 22nd century, where the stakes become measurably higher and the dangers and mysteries more acute. In doing so, the novel reinforces what I take to be a fundamental goal of the trilogy as a whole: to illustrate the consequences and implications of the global sociopolitical and socioeconomic climate post-9/11 and, now, post-George W. Bush. The picture is a tenaciously dystopian one.

   What make Williams' future such a bad, undesirable place are certain elements of that climate shifted to logical, plausible outcomes. Thus, The Burning Skies offers an opportunity to delve more deeply into the relationship between narrative form and thematic content in the Autumn Rain trilogy specifically and in SF more generally. To do so, I wish to consider how the novel exhibits SF's potential to function as historical allegory -- here, an allegory of mood, atmosphere, and tone, buttressed by Williams' terse, fierce, restless dialogue.

Allegory of Mood. Traditionally, allegory relies upon two levels, or orders, of meaning: a surface or literal meaning, and an underlying or implied meaning -- together serving to refer perhaps to the current social/cultural climate (historical allegory) or to illustrate a concept, argument, or belief (allegory of ideas). Often, the relationship between these two orders of meaning can be one-to-one, with a character, situation, or setting representing an identifiable analogue. In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), for instance, the Queene herself stands for Queen Elizabeth I and Faerieland is an analogue for the social and cultural complexion of Britain at the time, while characters such as the Redcrosse Knight, Una, or Sansfoy personify particular ideas, qualities, or values (i.e., holiness or faithlessness). Think also of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) as well known allegories (of ideas and history, respectively).*

   Also traditionally, critics and historians of literary SF observe that its narratives are about their present sociohistorical context, are about now. Whether taking place in the far future or imagining an alternate history or being set on an alien world, SF narratives reflect and respond to the time in which they are written. Ursula K. Le Guin's 1976 introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) exemplifies this understanding of SF (see here):

Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another.

Le Guin's explicit linking of SF to "our contemporary life" relates both to the primary source of its ideas (or, "metaphors") and to the grounds of its basic perspective, which is distinctly modern (as in post-industrial, rational, materialist, scientific). Novelists, Le Guin writes, "can tell you [only] what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world." Thus, she claims that SF is "descriptive," in that it aims "to describe reality, the present world." Certainly, not every single SF narrative intends to function as an allegory of -- or, commentary on -- its "present world." A great deal of SF does do this, which accounts for a fair measure of its power as a form of cultural critique, or description, but I would caution against requiring all SF narratives to fulfill this goal to the same degree.

With The Burning Skies, however, I think approaching the novel as an intentional allegory of the mood, atmosphere, and tone of the post-9/11 world created by the Bush administration's response to terrorism reveals much of the underlying, implied meanings at work in its narrative.

Battle on the Europa Platform

For the first 257 pages of its trade paperback edition, The Burning Skies in effect constitutes a single, extended action sequence occurring over several hours and moving from end to end through the Europa Platform (an immense, very long, inhabited space station with an asteroid attached to its south pole) as Autumn Rain seeks to assassinate US President Andrew Harrison and elite US razors and mechs seek to save him and destroy the Rain. On the surface, this is a harrowing, thrilling, breathtaking sequence, as Williams whisks the characters (Carson, Sarmax, Lynx, Linehan, Spencer, and Haskell) all over the Platform, from train tunnels to cities to vacuum, displaying the complexity and magnificence of the Platform's construction. Moreover, the stakes in this specific conflict are everything: the political fate of Earth, as well as the evolutionary direction of humanity.

When reflecting upon how Williams sets up and explores these stakes in the movements of the extended action sequence on the Platform, the allegory of mood and tone unfolds. Like with The Mirrored Heavens, Williams' choice to focus on characters who are government agents puts the action squarely in the high levels of social, political, and economic power -- of which the agents are both representatives and pawns. In this respect, the most significant connection between the agents is their nearly constant state of not knowing.

Carson and Sarmax wake up in separate rooms on the Platform, unsure of where they are or even if they can initially trust each other; they do not know where they must go or what they must do, although such information becomes steadily available, as needed. Spencer and Linehan wake up in separate areas of a ship that is part of a group surrounding the Platform, embedded with command and combat teams respectively yet uncertain about their roles and about the developing situation. Take, for instance, Spencer's discussion with a technician as he comes out of cryo-storage:

"Sir," she asks, "what's the name of this ship?"

"The Larissa V," he replies.

He has no idea where that came from. But apparently it's the right answer. He takes the jack, slots it into the back of his neck. Zone expands all around him. . . . (21)

From this point onward, Spencer and the other agents figure out their roles and the situation moment to moment, guessing and guessing again and receiving new information strictly as it becomes relevant. Having "no idea" defines their condition, to varying degrees depending on the character and on the particular point in the action. This management and parsing of data, of knowledge, and the confusions and mysteries and subterfuges it generates and permits, is crucial to the mood and tone of how Williams portrays the nature and functioning of political power in his Earth-Moon system of 2110 A.D. Information is incomplete and fragmented, protected, deferred, unreliable, vulnerable to tampering and deception -- echoing, I think, the state of affairs in the Bush administration and the ways that it engineered information to forward its agendas, resulting in an atmosphere of suspicion, tension, hubris, uncertainty, betrayal.

   Other aspects of the extended action sequence on the Europa Platform reinforce this atmosphere. Perhaps around halfway into The Burning Skies, I realised that Autumn Rain acted persistently through "proxies," hacking all kinds of drones and robots on the Platform to throw in the way of the US agents; the Rain also commandeers the Helios, a kind of weapons satellite, and begins firing it repeatedly at the Platform from a distance. As well, Williams occasionally alludes to the massive cost in human lives owing to the conflict on the Platform, the final "death toll" eventually "numbered in the millions" (261), but does so only briefly as the point-of-view characters rarely stop moving at high speeds. These millions of deaths are seen from afar, impersonally and with little remorse. In these two examples, I see terrorism and terrorists figured as enigmatic and evasive, coming from anywhere and being possibly anyone, moving in shadows, strange and remote, and I see the "war on terror" and its thousands of casualties rendered as insignificant collateral damage in the powerplays for political and cultural (and economic) dominance.

   For the final nearly 140 pages of The Burning Skies, Williams makes a striking change of pace and mood, as matters become more personal and so more intense, anxious, and disturbing. With the Europa Platform destroyed and Autumn Rain seemingly defeated, the US and Eurasian Coalition turn to re-establishing order, which includes a joint occupation of a neutral Hong Kong. This also includes the US moving against the Coalition on multiple, secret fronts, attempting to assume control of the Earth-Moon system in one, swift strike. So much for détente.

   At the heart of this second movement of the novel is the imprisonment and torture of Claire Haskell, also known as the Manilishi, a super-razor prized by the US and the Rain to manipulate the zone. The imprisonment and torture constitute her reward for helping President Harrison survive the Rain's assault on the Platform. Two key elements make her torture disturbing and uncomfortable: one, the isolation and secrecy with which it occurs; two, its invasiveness, for Haskell's mind is hacked against her will. As both unpredictable threat and invaluable weapon, Haskell must be contained as well as mined for information. That mining for information is the torture:

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"I'm operating," he replies.

He's not kidding. He's got her strapped back into the chair, her blood filled with painkillers so she can't feel a thing. She can see through only one eye. The other one's dangling in the zero-G beside her nose. He's plucked it out. The optic nerve is hanging there, along with tangles of circuitry that lead back inside her eye socket. He's got his razorwire extended from one hand into the circuitry. But she sees something else, too: droplets of blood floating in front of her, and she suddenly realizes that --

"You've cut through my skull," she says.

"Trepanation," he replies. "Of a sort." (304-305)

This "messing with her brain" (305) shifts the narrative to an intimately personal focus that, I suggest, is just as violent as the overt action of the Platform sequence. Penetrated by the torturer's "razorwire" through an open hole in her "skull," Haskell is incapacitated and unfeeling: helpless physically and mentally; utterly vulnerable. Much like the stories of rendition and torture carried out by the US government and some of its allies during the Bush administration, the treatment of Haskell by her own government speaks of the arrogance and coldness (as well as perhaps the fear) that promotes and enacts such practices in the name of "national security." The intimacy of Haskell's torture, the literal "messing" with her memories and fundamental sense of identity, suggests on one hand the inhumanity of this practice and, on the other hand, the decline or absence of the sociocultural and even legal values that should prevent it.

Dystopian, indeed.

Military orbital drop ship

Restless Dialogue. Much like Williams' use of the present tense expresses and supports the nature of the future he envisions, his approach to dialogue reinforces the trilogy's underlying allegory of mood, atmosphere, and tone. Several reviews comment on the difficulty, at times, of keeping up with the narrative's intertwining plots and seemingly interchangeable characters. Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic, for instance, writes that Burning Skies' "intricate battle sequences" make it "a little hard for the reader to understand what might be actually happening," while the "constant switching of the POVs might disrupt the average reader from truly enjoying this story." I disagree with this sentiment, as Williams provides distinct cues when changing point-of-view characters and gives his characters individual voices. More importantly, those voices reflect the uncertainty, suspicion, and tension created in a world where, as discussed above, not knowing predominates.

Throughout Burning Skies (and in The Mirrored Heavens), the dialogue illustrates, even articulates, both the management of information by those in power and the processes of confusion and realisation experienced by the characters. It is always terse, pointed, edgy, abrupt. The conversations between Spencer and Linehan epitomize these aspects of the dialogue in the novel. For example:

"The fucking Eurasians," says Linehan. "They're here too."

"Is that what the rumor mill's saying?"

"That's what the officers are saying! What the hell's going on?"

"Sounds like you already know it."

"You were going to tell me, right?

"I only just found out myself," says Spencer.

[. . .]

"They're with us," says Spencer. "Not against."

"You sure about that?"

"Do I sound like I'm sure of fucking anything? I'm just saying what they're telling us up here."

"Down here, too. This is a joint operation."

"Aimed at Autumn Rain."

"Or the Euro Magnates," says Linehan.

"Who may be the same thing by now."

"Who may always have been."

"You really think they've been pulling the Rain's strings?"

"I think you've got it backward, Spencer. What's the story with that chase you're monitoring?"

"Getting weirder by the minute." (52-53)

From their separate parts of the ship, Spencer and Linehan must decipher the realities of the situation into which they have awakened by a combination of speculation, assessment of limited data, and what they hear second- or third-hand. Everything gets increasingly "weirder" as they begin establishing connections between their local situation and the wider context of all else happening around and inside the Europa Platform, so that "'What the hell's going on?'" becomes their basic condition of awareness -- as they progress deeper into the Platform physically as well as into the unfolding political implications of their circumstances. In fact, "only just [finding] out" and not being "sure . . . of anything" defines every point-of-view character's experience in Burning Skies, to varying degrees.

The reader's confusions and discoveries occur simultaneously with the characters', such that the narrative works to manage information precisely as its world does. Confronted with this kind of fragmented, unreliable, and constantly shifting process of making sense of things, the reader becomes enmeshed in the dislocation, disorientation, and unpredictability of the narrative's events -- and so the mood, tone, and atmosphere of the narrative's setting and its allegorical connotations.

What is Real? In a discussion about cyberpunk on his Autumn Rain blog, Williams writes that "the essence of cyberpunk is that it's all about alienation." Alienation, I think, describes quite appropriately the temperament of the historical allegory at stake in The Burning Skies. Here, Williams furthers the updating of cyberpunk to early 21st-century concerns begun in The Mirrored Heavens, with characters alienated from their own memories and essential identity, such as Claire Haskell, and characters alienated in different ways from and by their own government, such as Spencer or Linehan or Sarmax (and, again, Claire Haskell).

The opening discussion between Haskell and her former boss Sinclair establishes this underlying alienation crucial to the tone of the novel's historical allegory:

"Because activating you meant restoring your true memories."

"My true memories?" Her voice is taut.

"Once they were restored, your loyalty would have been a wild card without the proper precautions. As the Rain found out the hard way. What's wrong?"

Tears are running down her face. "You know what's wrong, you sick fuck. How can I tell what my real memories are?"

"Because that's what we linked your activation to."

"Fuck you and your sophistry! How do I know they're real?" (14)

Questions of what is "true" and what is "real" perpetually harry the characters in The Burning Skies. Haskell is the central figure, however, for these questions prove so crucial to her sense of self, a self she can never wholly trust because she can never actually stabilise the boundary between what is "real" and false in the construction of that self. Sinclair's unwillingness to see or acknowledge the frightening moral implications of Haskell's dilemma is discomfiting, distressing, "wrong." It is an obstinacy intimately wedded to Sinclair's belief in the ideological rightness of Autumn Rain -- and thus dismissive of other perspectives and so profoundly alienated and alienating.

The Burning Skies, ultimately, relies upon the reader's awareness and even experience of the mood and atmosphere and discourse of the post-9/11 sociopolitical state of affairs. Its power, as with The Mirrored Heavens, derives from its reflection upon the implications of that state of affairs, implications that continue to unfold today.

In this respect, the novel shows how SF can function as a description of and commentary on -- an allegory of -- what Le Guin called "our contemporary life," challenging the reader to dig below its surface of intense, exciting action and search out the deeper roots of its resonances and meanings. Herein resides the heart of Williams' impressive achievement with The Burning Skies: he lets readers have their cake and eat it too, giving them a gripping story that reveals upon reflection layers of thoughtful, provocative significance.

* On allegory, see M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed. (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), pgs. 5-9.

Reviews/Commentaries on The Burning Skies
• Fantasy Book Critic (Mihir Wanchoo, Aug. 2009)
• Figures (Jess Horsley, May 2010)
• Graeme's Fantasy Book Review (June 2009)
• MentatJack (Apr. 2009)
• MilSciFi (Mike McPhail, Apr. 2009)
• Monsters and Critics (Sandy Amazeen, June 2009)
• Omnivoracious (interview with Jeff VanderMeer, June 2009)
• Only the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy (June 2010)
• A Progressive on the Prairie (June 2009)
• Rescued by Nerds (May 2009)
• SFF World (Mark Yon, June 2010)
• SF Signal (Andrew Liptak, July 2010)
• Worlds in a Grain of Sand (Andrew Liptak, Aug. 2010)

Asimov's Science Fiction (Mar. 2010)

2010-08-19T16:54:00.001-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

Continuing to play catch-up with my reading of Asimov's Science Fiction for 2010, I've now finished with the March issue. This issue proved disappointing in its overall quality, lacking a true standout like the January and February issues, but also lacking a group of at least a few stories that I would consider good to very good. Still, there are two strong pieces and one real gem. Ratings are out of four stars.

1. William Preston, "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" (pg. 12-33) ** 1/2
Preston offers a kind of alternate history vision of a pre- and post-9/11 world in which the boundaries of morality have shifted, needing someone such as the old man and his team to keep the world in balance (known as "'the Work'" [12]), mostly covertly. The tone established by Preston alludes to the feel of espionage and secret ops, with elusive identities and classified missions and the sense of the narrator -- Lanagan, anthropology professor and former member of the old man's team -- always looking over his shoulder, never quite free of the suspicion and distrust of others developed while an agent. Before 9/11, the old man took on various missions throughout the world to deal with tyrannies and injustices, and this aspect of Preston's setting is the strongest feature of the story, I think: a mostly "hidden" (18) group, working off the grid, to hold the bad guys at bay "when official action had proven useless or unavailable" (17). Moreover, this aspect of the setting creates the context for the shift of morality after 9/11 occurs, as the National Security Agency desires to find the old man, who went quiet just before the attack on the towers and has remained so. Lanagan gets put in the difficult position of leading the NSA to the old man, gradually feeding on the tenuous reasoning served by his NSA contact: why did the old man let 9/11 happen?
   I see in this sort of question perhaps something of the trauma of 9/11 that remains unresolved, with Preston exploring the need to find a cause on different levels (individual, national, and international), the need to make sense of 9/11 and why the good guys failed. What Preston does well in presenting this question is to suggest the tensions today between what we can and cannot believe about the historical record (of 9/11, certainly): "Much of what the least credulous believed to be untrue about the old man's adventures was, instead, true. . . . And so a quotidian substructure of lies supported an utterly authentic architecture of the fantastic" (17). (I like the hint of genre self-reflexivity here: i.e., how SF&F, as with all fiction, gives readers "lies," yet also asks, if not demands, that the reader approach the "fantastic" as being "authentic," certainly within the world of a specific story.) Yet placing the burden for 9/11 on the old man's shoulders ultimately seems too easy, and the embedded critique of the manipulation of the world that is "seen and unseen" (34), which confuses everyone about the distinctions between heroes and villains, feels too obvious in the end.

2. Benjamin Crowell, "Centaurs" (pg. 36-42) ** 1/2
A story about an interplanetary first date set up through a mutual friend and planned first by remote/online means, as Ginny meets Serge on Centaurus to go see one of the moon's peculiar rock formations. She's 17, he's almost 16, and they're both properly trained and rated for adventure in vacuum. Crowell captures effectively the perspective of the teenager here, giving attention to Ginny's mixture of expectancy and uncertainty and embarrassment and curiosity and, finally, wisdom gained. There's a kind of lightheartedness in the tone, too, even when Ginny ends up in some danger and must be helped to safety by Serge.
   In one sense, the story focusses on a coming-of-age moment for Ginny, about the miscommunication of intentions and the awkwardness of feelings and desires. It is a moment forged in the accident that puts her in danger, spinning out of control in vacuum during a jump down a sort of well and incurring a small leak in her pressure suit, and for this part of story Crowell demonstrates effectively how to let dialogue and short paragraphs and short sentences generate a mood of anxiety and the impression of things happening quickly. As well, Crowell keeps the story squarely targeted on this significant experience for Ginny and sketches in just enough of the setting to make this a different yet plausible first date of the future. Moreover, "Centaurs" makes for an intriguing title in the context of Ginny's date, suggesting an illusion or fantasy overcome or surpassed.
   Upon reflection, however, I see this story as primarily an "idea story" that does not reach very far beyond its "what if?" scenario (i.e., what would dating be like in the future, with humanity settled in other parts of the solar system?). While constructed and told well, the story ultimately offers nothing truly surprising or illuminating in terms of its overall substance and implications. It doesn't display the skill and wicked inventiveness I enjoyed so much in Crowell's "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime" for the December 2009 issue of Asimov's.

3. Alexander Jablokov, "Blind Cat Dance" (pg. 44-62) ***
Jablokov envisions here a fascinating and somewhat disturbing future in which humanity's meddling in genetic coding creates a world where animals do not see people but do perceive urban settings as their natural habitats -- forests, jungles, and the like. The first sentence smoothly and pointedly establishes this estrangement: "The cougar stalks into the cafe, its skin loose, looking relaxed, even a bit bored" (44). The plot Jablokov employs to unfold this future is essentially a love story, beginning with Berenika having left her husband Mark and then moving through different encounters with her friends Mria and Paolo, each in a new location but also with the cougar present. We learn that Berenika wants to become a "Trainer," like Mark, which is someone who, from what I gather, sets up ecosystems and genetically alters animals to live and survive in various conditions -- part scientist, part artist. As the narrator, Tyrell, says, "That's my job, really. To make things seem like they just happen" (55), which represents the aim of Trainers in their care for and manipulation of the "natural world" (55). Berenika eventually figures out the significance of the cougar and discovers Mark's role in its appearances.
   Yet Jablokov weaves in another kind of love story, too, with Tyrell (something of an employee of Mark's) admitting his love for what he does, his investment in what he calls "this impoverished ecology" (62). Through Tyrell's point of view, the reader can gather from certain hints that what he and Mark and Berenika do forms part of humanity's effort to save the world, seemingly from the consequences of severe environmental degradation. They are scientists quite literally turned to doing the work of Adam and Eve, tending the garden and husbanding the animals of Eden. This is the disturbing element of Jablokov's envisioned future: that humanity can and needs to "take . . . archipelagos of environment and reassemble them into continents in the minds of the animals" (62), to the point where cougars pad through and hunt elk in crowded cafes, thinking such places are their natural, wild habitats. I wonder if love is enough to save and sustain such a world.
   Some moments of fine lyrical skill give the story a nostalgic tone. For instance, "It has no idea it's in a place that serves good Turkish coffee, black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell, a place that makes you wear a ridiculous jacket to serve it" (46); or, "She has a gift of meaningful stillness. Snow glitters in her dark hair. She is a nature goddess only temporarily among the worlds of men" (49). However, I struggled for a bit to understand the narrative point of view for about half of the story, which caused me to be uncertain about what precisely I was reading. In the story's first section, the narrative begins with what appears to be the third person omniscient perspective, but then around a third of the way into this section "I refill Mria's cup" (45) occurs, then a bit later "Mark had led me to expect" (45) happens, and I found myself off-balance. By the end, the story clearly functions as something of a long letter from Tyrell to Berenika. Structurally, though, Jablokov leaves this clarity of perspective and motivation too vague for too long, and the dissonance between the first person and third person proves tricky to overcome at times.

4. Derek Zumsteg, "Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising" (pg. 64-70) ***
The title for this story is delicious in its hyperbole, exaggerating to epic proportions said ticket inspector's dedication to his job in the face of alien cultural and economic takeover. Zumsteg's satire works because the narrative plays it straight, so to speak. Phillip Gliden believes strongly enough in the importance of his job that he will ticket even his new employers for improper use of the "U-bahn" (64) as two of the aliens ride with him to assess how the system operates. During this journey, the aliens discuss ways to "fix" (67) the system, ways that amount to exposing their unfamiliarity not just with the ticketing rules but with the significance humans invest in particular places and the names of such places.
   The debate between Gliden and the aliens becomes an exercise in cultural dissonance, a clash of ideologies, with aliens assuming a frighteningly practical and materialist stance and Gliden a more, well, human and emotional stance. For example, the aliens consider a "'geotemporally appropriate station labeling'" (69) method as more efficient, while Gliden objects that "'You can't remove the names'" (69) of stations because they bear historical and cultural relevance -- the names, he says, are "'parts of the history of our city'" (70). As this debate continues, Zumsteg steadily increases the crowd of people who get interested in the conversation, supporting and emboldening Gliden.
   The hyperbole of the title pays off at the story's end, for Zumsteg, I think, keys into how small or seemingly innocuous things can quickly take on exaggerated importance, for either side in a debate. A ticketing system confusing to an outsider forms the spark of a cultural contest: alien notions of efficiency and control versus human notions of historical meaning and familiarity. To manage this contest and its increasing tension, Zumsteg strikes a good balance between a light tone and the darker seriousness of the battleground at stake.

5. Will Ludwigsen, "The Speed of Dreams" (pg. 72-76) *** 1/2
The best piece in this issue. The form of the story is intriguing: the draft of an 8th-grade science fair paper, by one Paige Sumner (72). The subject of Paige's science fair project is creative, even fascinating: how to measure the relationship between "time in a dream" and "time in real life" (72). The logic with which Paige approaches the problem is in equal measure plausible, amusing, striking, and heartbreaking: her dog Patti, a greyhound, is her test subject, whom she assumes runs races in her dreams; her "Nannah" (74), suffering perhaps from Alzheimer's, is like the proof of her conclusions from the data collected in her study of Patti.
   Two elements in particular make this story so successful and engaging. One is how Ludwigsen captures the perspective and voice of an 8th grader who is "only thirteen" (73), especially the literalness of Paige's assumptions, experiments, conclusions, and application. Ludwigsen relies upon the honesty of Paige's literalness, not just with how she collects and interprets her data but also with how she sees herself and her world, and then everything (science project, self, world) as connected together. For instance, in "Experiment Nine," Paige records that Patti ran in her dream for "6.34 seconds," which is "about the same amount of time that Austin bothered to look at me at the dance while he was all over Lisa" (74). These touches of Paige's life experiences enhance the importance of her science project by giving it a wider context.
   The second element is how the literalness of Paige's scientific investigation produces a surprising, maybe shocking, but wholly logical -- or even proper -- application of its results by the end. Paige's data leads her to conclude, "We get 4.5 seconds of dream time for every second of real time" (76). So, if her Nannah is slowly dying and spending more of her days in dream time, then she gets "4.5 times as much life sleeping as . . . being awake," allowing her to do more as she is "stretching out her life" (76). In "Experiment Eleven," Paige acts on these insights, believing dreams will let her "Live four cooler lives" and do a bunch of "big courageous things" -- she need only take "Nannah's pills" (76). I like when a story catches me off guard in this way, leaves me wide-eyed with horror and nearly ready to shout at the character not to do it. I appreciate when a story stays true to its voice as well as its logic, the latter made distressing at the end by a form of dramatic irony: I know that the pills are a bad idea, but Paige sees only a chance to be "with Nannah" (76) and get more out of life, which is utterly understandable.

6. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, "The Tower" (pg. 78-106) ** 1/2
Meant to be the signature piece of the issue, I suspect, but in the end a disappointment for me. Rusch sets up a rather intriguing premise in the corporatization of time travel and the resulting retrieval and confirmation of historical knowledge (here, whether bones found in the Tower of London were really those of the princes supposedly murdered by Richard III), which of course produces opportunities for espionage. Thomas is a thief whose employer wants him to steal one of the Crown Jewels, and he needs to go back in time to pull of his heist; Neyla Kendrick is the historian and anthropologist hired by Portals to go to June of 1674 to examine the bones of the Princes. Thomas has infiltrated Portals and gets put on Neyla's team at the last minute, with which she disagrees heatedly.
   Up to the point of Neyla's team entering the Tower of today and readying for their jump back in time, Rusch, I feel, handled effectively the shifting between Thomas's and Neyla's points of view, which filled in details of the setting as well as generated an engaging tension between these characters' motivations and positions. I found especially plausible Rusch's framing of time travel as a primarily corporate pursuit, complete with project proposals, a costume department, food safety experts, researchers for various historical periods, industry competition, and so forth. Also, Thomas proves the more intriguing of the characters, for he reveals one wider consequence of such corporatized time travel: the shadowy world of collectors and dealers and enthusiasts who have the opportunity to acquire real historical artifacts, at the right price.
   Once Neyla's team makes its jump and Thomas dashes off to do his deed, however, the story veered away from the more tantalizing aspects of its setting and instead turned into what amounted to a chase scene. Rusch certainly pays attention to the difference of the past, having the characters deal with its "foul air" (94) and "odors" (95), for instance, which causes them tangible physical difficulties. Yet the prose in this second half of the story loses the energy and sense of discovery of the first half; it sacrifices a bit of atmosphere and mood for a focus on action that always seemed predictable. Also, I thought that at times Neyla's characterisation shifted into exaggeration, her emotional reactions to Thomas's thievery somewhat out of proportion to the mission at hand.
   Finally, while Rusch uses the time travel mission to represent a point of development and change for Neyla, in which she realises some of the implications of humanity's "base nature" (106) in her own actions but also for the history that supports her career, I ended the story thinking that this aspect seemed forced. Neyla's revelation about herself and history arrives without the force of the organic, surprising logic of Paige's conclusions in Ludwigsen's story. As a whole, then, "The Tower" aims perhaps more for the satisfaction of narrative and character tensions resolved, with the bad guy defeated and the good guy (or, woman) vindicated, than it does for searching out the more compelling features of its setting. Not a bad or unsuccessful story by any means, but there is a promise unfulfilled.

Final Thoughts
• The March 2010 issue of Asmov's Science Fiction is average overall, with one very good story (Ludwigsen), a couple of quite decent stories (Jablokov, Zumsteg), and a few average stories (Preston, Crowell, Rusch). Ludwigsen's story is the standout piece, and deservedly so.

• In a way, I am surprised at the unevenness of pieces across the first three issues of Asimov's 2010 run. There are certainly a variety of subjects, subgenres, and styles throughout the stories, which demonstrates Asimov's flexibility regarding what constitutes SF, and which shows the breadth of formal ground that SF covers and explores. I would say that at least one connection between all the stories in the January, February, and March issues (maybe excepting Broderick's "Dead Air" in the February issue) is attention to telling a complete story: i.e., a definite point of crisis as the catalyst for the plot; clear or challenging or surprising resolutions; characters changed in some way by their experience in the story. Maybe obviously, but this attention to a complete story appears to be a baseline quality that brings a work into the pages of Asimov's.

• What separate the stories by Jablokov, Zumsteg, and Ludwigsen from those by Preston, Crowell, and Rusch are, for me, substance and style. The former group have a kind of depth of meaning or greater metaphorical range than encountered in the latter group, and the writing in the former group shows not just attention to structure but to moments of poetry or ingenuity that are maybe absent from or not as strong in the latter group.

• Ludwigsen's piece succeeds in every respect. It finishes on a haunting note that left me partly horrified at Paige's rationale for the benefits of a dreaming life and partly quite impressed at Ludwigsen's willingness to take the story in this disturbing yet plausible direction -- for its logic cannot be refuted, as much as one might recoil from its consequences.

Year's Best SF 15

2010-08-10T13:37:00.003-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

I just finished reading through Year's Best SF 15, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (EOS, 2010) and wanted to record my thoughts on the volume, particularly regarding what nuggets about SF short story writing I can glean from it. I'll offer some general comments on the volume overall, and then I'll highlight a few individual stories and discuss what I think makes them especially successful.

   (For my brief post on Year's Best SF 14, see here. I gave that volume as a whole 3 out of 4 stars.)

   First, some details about the volume. Year's Best SF 15 contains twenty-four stories, with nine of those stories written by women (around 38%). Authors included range from veterans such as Bruce Sterling and Nancy Kress, to more recent but established names such as Alastair Reynolds and Peter Watts, to newer/up-and-coming writers such as Mary Robinette Kowal. Stories were published in 2009, and Hartwell and Cramer selected works from a variety of venues/markets: a collection published in India; magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Interzone; anthologies of original stories such as Other Earths (Nick Gevers, ed.), The New Space Opera 2 (Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, eds.), and When It Changed (Geoff Ryman, ed.); online markets such as Strange Horizons. Asimov's wins the race with five stories, while a few venues are tied at three stories (e.g., Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 3). Only one online market was used for the volume, Strange Horizons, though the editors selected two stories from it. Nearly all subgenres of SF are represented: alternate history, space opera, alien encounters, hard SF, near future SF, parallel/enfolded timelines, artificial intelligence, multicultural/postcolonial, time travel, and so forth. Thus, a good range of authors and subgenres, with perhaps too few women writers and with a decidedly heavy emphasis on print markets.

   Here are the stories and my ratings of them (out of four stars), with the five best stories in bold:

1. Vandana Singh, "Infinities" ***

2. Robert Charles Wilson, "This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beacher Stowe" *** 1/2

3. Yoon Ha Lee, "The Unstrung Zither" *** 1/2

4. Bruce Sterling, "Black Swan" *** 1/2

5. Nancy Kress, "Exegesis" *** 1/2

6. Ian Creasey, "Erosion" ** 1/2

7. Gwyneth Jones, "Collision" ***

8. Gene Wolfe, "Donovan Sent Us" ***

9. Marissa K. Lingen, "The Calculus Plague" * 1/2

10. Peter Watts, "The Island" ****

11. Paul Cornell, "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" ** 1/2

12. Sarah L. Edwards, "Lady of the White-Spired City" ***

13. Brian Stableford, "The Highway Code" ***

14. Peter M. Ball, "On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk" **

15. Alastair Reynolds, "The Fixation" ***

16. Brenda Cooper, "In Their Garden" ***

17. Geoff Ryman, "Blocked" ****

18. Michael Cassutt, "The Last Apostle" ***

19. Charles Oberndorf, "Another Life" ****

20. Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Consciousness Problem" *** 1/2

21. Stephen Baxter, "Tempest 43" ***

22. Genevieve Valentine, "Bespoke" ** 1/2

23. Eric James Stone, "Attitude Adjustment" ***

24. Chris Roberson, "Edison's Frankenstein" ***

General Comments
As they state in the introduction, Hartwell and Cramer like their SF to be SF: "This book is full of science fiction -- every story is fairly clearly that and not something else. It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries" (xv). The intention, then, is to provide an anthology of new, original SF that defines, reinforces, and (perhaps) delimits what constitute the "boundaries" of SF today -- "The stories that follow show . . . the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2009" (xv) -- but also in a universal/traditional sense.

   I agree with promoting clear genre distinctions, actually, and one factor of the overall success of Year's Best SF 15 involves how it demonstrates the flexibility and variety available within SF strictly considered, exemplified by the volume's best stories (those I rate at 3.5 and 4 stars). Moreover, the range of authors from veterans to relative newcomers imparts a kind of historical breadth and continuity to Hartwell and Cramer's representation of "the evolving genre": older writers are producing new and intriguing SF; newer writers are producing SF that upholds as well as reinvigorates the genre's core aims.

   In these respects, Year's Best SF 15 certainly does "show . . . the strengths" of the genre, or, more specifically, the vitality and insight with which SF responds to "the changing realities" (xv) of our world. By "strengths," then, I take Hartwell and Cramer to mean primarily the ideas at stake in the stories they selected, such as cloning or alien encounters or climate change and so forth: in other words, their SF is fundamentally idea fiction, which is, admittedly, a traditional(ist) view of the genre. A consequence of this view of SF for the volume, however, is that only a handful of stories reach beyond the idea to real literary artistry as well.

   I rate the volume as a whole at 3 out of 4 stars (the same rating for Year's Best SF 14) because the bulk of the stories are competent, engaging, and intelligent, with a few that are of dubious merit and a few that are truly excellent. "Best" for me proves problematic, as I have reservations about Hartwell and Cramer's judgement of and criteria for literary quality. By literary quality, I am thinking of attention to craft (pacing, plotting, dialogue, characterisation, etc.), of a poetic sensibility, and of layered meanings.

   For instance, I cannot be sure why Lingen's "The Calculus Plague" was selected. It is the poorest story of the collection and not what I would think illustrates the best of SF today. When set beside the stories of Oberndorf, Kowal, Ryman, Sterling, Watts, and Wilson, "The Calculus Plague" proves almost amateurish aesthetically and rather thin intellectually. (The same can be said for Ball's entry.) I wonder if Hartwell and Cramer missed Benjamin Crowell's "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime" from the December 2009 issue of Asimov's, or Deborah Coates' "Cowgirls in Space" and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Spires of Denon" from the April/May 2009 issue of Asimov's; I wonder how not a single story in twelve months of Clarkesworld Magazine caught their attention.

   When an anthology proclaims that it offers the "best" in SF, I expect it to give me the most accomplished and relevant stories throughout its entire range of selections. Intriguingly, though, what I find with the Hartwell and Cramer volumes, as well as with Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction series, is that the differences in accomplishment and relevance between stories deemed the "best" are made starker and more immediate. The best of the best stand out even more brightly, while otherwise very good stories appear pale by comparison.

   I understand that some politics probably affect putting together a collection such as Year's Best SF 15 (i.e., distribution of subject matter, gender balance among the authors, permissions from authors and/or publishers, and the like); I also appreciate how difficult it must be to keep up with all the short fiction published in a calendar year and then mine it for the choice diamonds that comprise the finest works of that year. However, I think it fair to pose questions about notions of "best" based on the stories editors include in their volumes. Posing such questions is fair, for, positively, those volumes ultimately serve to present readers with a record of what can be and is being achieved by the very "best" SF, thereby encouraging conversation about and assessment of the genre's current and potential direction(s).

   This questioning of what constitutes "best" in Year's Best SF 15 thus made me surprised at the basically decent but not overly exceptional stories by the somewhat large contingent of veteran, established writers in the volume: Baxter, Jones, Reynolds, Roberson, Stableford, Wolfe. Of this group, only Kress and Sterling's stories were striking and challenging, aesthetically and intellectually. I have several 2.5-star and 3-star stories in my ratings (14 out of 24 stories), which suggests that the volume is essentially a strong one, as these are by no means bad stories, but also that, maybe, the volume could be stronger with different selections. Or, does Year's Best SF 15 give us an accurate snapshot of the short fiction produced in 2009?

   Finally, based on Year's Best SF 15, there are some writers I have either not read before or read little of whose work I want to explore further, short stories and/or novels: Edwards, Kowal, Lee, Oberndorf, Ryman, Singh, Sterling, and Wilson. One of the truly valuable functions of this sort of collection, of course, is introducing readers to new and unsampled writers.

What Makes a Short Story "Best"?
• To me, the best stories of Year's Best SF 15, in order, are (1A) Watts, (1B) Oberndorf, (2) Ryman, (3) Sterling, (4) Kowal, (5) Wilson, (6) Lee, (7) Kress, and (8) Reynolds. The primary factor that separates these stories from the others, especially (1A) to (4), is literary artistry; the next factor is what I'll call a sophistication of meaning (i.e., intellectually challenging, insightful, and inventive). Regarding literary artistry, the best stories not only furnish beautiful and/or surprising turns of phrase, but generate a distinct tone and a tangible atmosphere through their attention to language. Regarding a sophistication of meaning, the best stories put a clear idea at the centre of the narrative and search out that idea's metaphorical possibilities to say something perceptive about human nature.

• In Watts, there's the fierceness of Sunday's voice and the unrelenting logic with which she confronts events. In Oberndorf, there's the lyricism of the prose that communicates the narrator's nostalgia spread across multiple lifetimes. With Ryman, it's the dreamlike atmosphere of a near-future Cambodia and the empathetic, tender perspective of the narrator. With Sterling, it's the sharpness of the similes and the edginess of the mood. For Kowal, there's the poetry of intimacy wrapped up in the attention to the memory's unreliability. Together, these five stories demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the consistency of voice and/or perspective, for the specific way in which a character sees and reacts to his or her world is crucial to the tone and mood of the telling. Here are some short, representative passages:

And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes -- like a cat, dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in the past was just another way of dying in the present. (Watts, 213)

I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. (Watts, 220)

Our lives were so fraught with our time together: nouns weighed with multiple meanings, verbs sharpened by the years; we were best off, when the mood was right, with incomplete sentences that the other would finish with an automatic goodwill that was also born of all our time together. (Oberndorf, 376)

[. . .] my only company being therapy machines and the nurses who brought my food, the physical contact of the professional hand that never lingered, the touch that was never too light, that never grazed a nerve that mattered. (Oberndorf, 384)

The stars themselves seem to have come back like the fish, so distant and high, cold and pure. No wonder we are greedy for them, just as we are greedy for diamonds. If we could, we would strip-mine the universe, but instead we strip-mine ourselves. (Ryman, 335)

He handled the best wine in Europe like a scorpion poised to sting its liver. . . . She had a cordial yet guarded tone, like a woman who has escaped a man's bed and needs compelling reasons to return. (Sterling, 93 and 102)

He'd always had a sweet tooth and tended to graze on dark chocolate when she wasn't around, but Elise was learning to find the tiny pot belly cute. She wrapped her arms around him and let him pull her close. In his embrace, all the pieces fit together the way they should; he defined her universe. (Kowal, 409)

• The passages quoted above also, I think, provide a sense of the meanings at work in each story. In Watts, Sunday's distaste for her son Dix entwines with their discovery of an alien lifeform and intelligence, set against an apparent timeline of over a million years; the hopes Sunday invests in the alien's possible nonconformity to Darwinian evolution might be disappointed, but the compensation is discovering a willingness to nurture Dix toward a more proper humanness. Oberndorf uses a final conversation between two old lovers, about the past, as a meditation upon the economics of war and the economics of sex and gender and relationships in a future where multiple lives are literally possible, as bodies can be regrown and tailored to one's wishes -- if you're in the military, or if you have enough money. With Ryman, a looming alien invasion becomes an opportunity for the narrator to reassess his priorities in life, taking on a new wife and her three children, even though she doesn't love him, and developing a special bond with Gerda, the youngest child; she brings him to realise their mutual attachment to place and resistance to something for which they lack proof of its actuality, and only she is the reason he goes down anyway into the new underground civilization.
Each of these stories leaves the reader to contemplate fundamental elements of human nature: the struggle to survive and understand, to differentiate humanity from the alien; how memory might finally lead to an appreciation for the life one has lived and is living; coming to terms with change, death, the old passing for the new. They do so within the "boundaries" of SF strictly considered, indicating that the genre's conventions and aims, that its perspective, can achieve the sophistication of meaning of the very best literary works. Other stories in the volume, such as by Lingen and Ball, are thin and insubstantial by comparison.

• For someone writing or hoping to write SF, Year's Best SF 15 affords a great gauge of the sort of work currently getting published in various markets. It lets a writer see what makes for an exceptional story and what makes for an average, mediocre, or unsuccessful story, especially because the volume facilitates placing all the stories in relation to each other. The high standards of the stories of Watts, Oberndorf, Ryman, Sterling, and Kowal are like a horizon a writer can strive to reach, a mountain summit a writer can seek to climb to and one day crest.

David J. Williams Links to Mirrored Heavens Post

2010-08-06T22:15:00.002-04:00

Author David J. Williams has linked to and commented very positively on my recent post on his novel, The Mirrored Heavens, at his Autumn Rain Trilogy site:

• Deconstructing MIRRORED HEAVENS

Some discussion of my post and the novel is underway there, so do check it out.

Thanks for the link and the kind words, David!

Asimov's Science Fiction (Feb. 2010)

2010-08-01T16:59:00.004-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

Time to get back on track with my reading and study of Asimov's Science Fiction for 2010. This will be a single entry, with shorter comments on the individual stories than previously. Ratings are out of four stars.

1. Caroline M. Yoachim, "Stone Wall Truth" (pg. 10-22) ***
The most attractive aspect of this story, for me, is the setting. In a world of tribal warfare, the king can sentence people to the wall, a strange artifact of the past with the seemingly magical power to expose the true colours of a person's soul, particularly the blackness of sin. Njeri, the main character, is the surgeon who cuts such people open on the wall, sews them back together, and returns them to life. This is a world in which morality is made manifest: the wall is the place of judgement; the sewing permanently marks individuals, making them outcasts. Yet, as Njeri discovers, the wall's function has changed drastically from its original purpose, when the Ancients actually used it for "love," exposing "their shadows" to each other and taking "knowledge from the wall" (21). Yoachim closes the story effectively, at the point of Njeri awakening (literally and figuratively) in order to change her society, her world. Overall, a good, well focussed, and engaging story: a kind of allegory about the marring of original intentions, about moral conflict and readjustment; a dextrous slipping from the impression of fantasy to the realisation of SF.

2. Damien Broderick, "Dead Air" (pg. 24-33) * 1/2
An unsuccessful piece on many levels, even after two careful readings. I see how the story works as a dystopian vision of our contemporary world -- racism, television, a consumerist culture that forgets its past for the immediacy of now, environmental breakdown, distrust of scientific authority, and so forth. I see that Broderick provides a basically unlikeable main character and focalizer, Jive Bolen, to express the frantic and disintegrating nature of this nearish future, and to hone in on the disbeliever who eventually has his convictions challenged. I understand these things; I am aware of the satirical tone. What proves unsuccessful is the execution. Jive is distinctly unlikeable, offering little reason for identification or sympathy, and little context is provided for why he is so unseemly as a person. Where I get stuck, however, is the prose. Along with the odd new terms that feel odd solely for the sake of being clever ("pape" for newspaper, "truckee," "petacomp," "thays," "waitron," and more), and with the discordant German phrases, the prose is . . . obfuscating, choppy, crusty, deliberately difficult. Moreover, the central conflict for Jive -- whether the dead appearing on television are truly the dead or an elaborate propaganda hoax -- remains effectively unresolved. The editors' introduction calls the story "a decidedly Dickian meditation" (24), but I see the story as more Van Vogtian than Dickian, such as the Van Vogt of "The Weapon Shop," just without a payoff for the crusty and difficult prose.

3. Bruce McAllister, "The Woman Who Waited Forever" (pg. 34-52) ***
A fairy tale of sorts, set in Italy post-WW2, during the Cold War, about how a trauma of the past can linger in the present, tied a specific place that may or may not be haunted by a benevolent ghost. McAllister reinforces a sense of the exotic by making the narrator, Brad, a son of an American naval officer stationed in Italy -- as Brad learns Italian and to negotiate the class prejudices and cultural traditions of where he lives and goes to school. McAllister also effectively establishes a tangible sense of nostalgia through Brad's voice, especially in Brad's reflections upon his friendship at the time with a local boy named Marco and how the two of them came to learn the story of the abandoned German hospital from Paolo Pastore, the owner of the hospital and the man whose father died there and mother worked there as a nurse near the end of WW2.
   The trauma is how Paolo's father, an Italian soldier, was left to die in front of the hospital from his wounds because the Germans officers would permit treatment only for Germans, and so Paolo's mother was not even allowed to help her husband. Moreover, the trauma seemed to live on in Paolo's sister, Gianna, who was close to their mother and spent most of her days at the hospital. Thus, a meditation on the continuing presence of the traumas of history and what can happen if we forget or disrespect their significance, with a very concrete evocation of place. Occasionally, though, the narrative gives way to catalogues of questions as Brad speculates on who Gianna is and what really happened in the hospital when the nurse pulled the arrow out of Marco's neck, sections that felt a bit forced compared to the ease and assuredness of the rest of the story.

4. David Erik Nelson, "The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond" (pg. 53-57) **
Another basically unsuccessful story, in my view, though it offers a bit more than the Broderick with a setting that appears rather intriguing (a steampunkish alternate America, with clockwork soldiers, called "clockies"; the tone of a Western, with spots such as Two-Ton Sadie's Dancehall). I appreciate Nelson's choice to make the narrative a story overheard by the narrator, Seth Everett, who secretively listens in on the drunken ramblings of Dickie Tucker about a "squid" that put together a "clockwork diving engine" and aimed to explore the world beyond the sea (53). This choice allows Nelson to play with the uncertainty of whether Dickie's story is true or a delusion, and so to leave matters open ended, even regarding Dickie's final fate after being picked up from the church steps by some clockies: "I really can't say," finishes Seth. This choice also allows Nelson to give most of the narrative over to Dickie's voice and its particular rhythm, phrasings, and personality. Yet all of these individually intriguing parts don't fit into a convincing whole, particularly because the reader has almost no context for Dickie's story, for such context is provided neither by Seth nor by Dickie. Are there truly squids in this setting that could devise an "engine" so they could walk on land? Are there truly intelligent squirrels, opossums, and whistlepigs in this setting? The reader cannot be sure at any point. I recognize that Nelson to an extent makes the story about such uncertainty, about the challenge to test and believe in what seems like a delusional fantasy. However, I could not overcome a persistent feeling of dislocation; I couldn't get comfortably situated in the story's world, which prevented me from trusting what I was reading.

5. Aliette de Bodard, "The Wind-Blown Man" (pg. 58-70) ***
A poignant SF fairy tale (of sorts) set in a future China where ancient philosophical and cultural beliefs remain, but shifted to and affected by advanced technology. Shinxie is abbess of White Horse Monastery, where the empire's troublesome dreamers are sent and trained eventually to transcend to Penlai Station, removed from the desires and emotions of daily, earth-bound existence. Gao Tieguai, one such Transcendent, returns from Penlai Station to the monastery, rather unexpectedly and seemingly against the unspoken rules. As a Transcendent, he has achieved nonattachment and the perfect balance of the five "humours" of fire, wood, earth, water, and metal -- a state that has led him not to a detachment from the world, but to a "compassion" (70) and love for the world, which represents a potentially subversive change of outlook for the empire. De Bodard's story resonates with Yoachim's and McAllister's in this respect, turning SF (and fantasy) toward posing questions about history, nostalgia, truth, and the point at which the perception of the world can alter fundamentally. Her prose deftly taps into the atmosphere, rhythm, and thoughtfulness of Chinese tales (Buddhist, Taoist, myths): it is measured, unhurried, soothing; it suggests a depth just tantalizingly out of reach. As well, the setting is one I would like to see more of.

6. Stephen Baxter, "The Ice Line" (pg. 72-105) ****
The centrepiece of this issue, and far and away the best story here. I suspect this novella could appear on awards ballots next year. It's alternate history SF, set in the early 19th century at the time of Napolean's invasion of England; it's also something of an engineer-saves-the-world story, in the tradition of late 19th-century scientific romances and pulps; it's also an alien invasion story and a romance. Baxter expertly weaves each of these strands of SF together into a tale that can be read, on one hand, as an exploration of science's effects upon history and how science makes history, and on the other hand as a kind of homage to early SF and to the naive excitement of early modern science. The main character, Ben Hobbes, is also the narrator. He is an engineer, a rogue, a scoundrel, a man of (dubious) principles, and ultimately a man of honour who understands the significance of the historical moment and the necessity of certain sacrifices. Baxter gives Hobbes a distinct and attractive voice, and he sticks to it throughout, revealing Hobbes' foibles as well as his better qualities.
   Where the story really succeeds for me, however, is the way in which Baxter unfolds the peculiarities of his alternate early 19th century, especially the introduction of the alien Phoebans and the steady unveiling of their longtime involvement in certain historical events (i.e., the Stuart rebellion of 1745) from America to Canada to England to Russia and so forth. Baxter captures the cadence, tone, perspective, and voice of Romantic-era novels and travelogues and diaries, so that Hobbes and other characters react to and treat the Phoebans in a manner wholly plausible for that time. Moreover, the scientific reaction to the Phoebans feels spot on, for Baxter presents it strictly in the terms of the knowledge, attitudes, practices, and materials available to scientists of the early 1800s -- whether engineering, astronomy, physics, and the like.
   In this respect, "The Ice Line" expertly hooks the reader by offering a relatively familiar history and then, relying on that familiarity, ever so slightly adjusting matters to make that history refreshingly unexpected and new. I've been thinking of this technique as "readerly dramatic irony" (for lack of a better term). At base, of course, dramatic irony involves the difference between what the audience knows and the characters don't know. It is an excellent technique for generating narrative tension, between characters and between the audience and the characters. With alternate history such as crafted by Baxter in "The Ice Line," the dramatic irony operates at, well, an historical level: i.e., the reader, ostensibly, knows the history and how it is being adjusted, and thus can recognise the consequence and ingenuity of the author's adjustments to the familiar and accepted timeline of real-world events. Thus, the reader is aware of a great deal more than the characters and so can see their naivety about, say, travelling to and through space to get from Earth to Mars and can enjoy the creativity with they solve and overcome problems such as navigation or propulsion or breathing or recycling human waste. This sort of dramatic irony I think of as "readerly," for the kind of dramatic irony at work relies not so much on narrative tension, as on, let's say, historical tension(s) recognised and appreciated by the reader. SF can do this sort of dramatic irony especially well, which Baxter demonstrates in "The Ice Line" -- a story that becomes, finally, about heroic martyrdom very much in the mold of those caught up in the storm of Napoleon's imperialist ambitions 200 years ago.
   A truly finely crafted novella that shows off the literary heights to which the best SF can ascend.

Final Thoughts
• The Feb. 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is good overall, with one standout story (Baxter), three fairly strong stories (Yoachim, McAllister, de Bodard), one average story (Nelson), and one poor story (Broderick). Baxter's piece, for my money, saves the issue from being merely satisfactory.

• The pieces by Yoachim, McAllister, and de Bodard show how to focus a short work on a single, key idea or point of transition/change, with each story, really, being about transition/change. Yoachim and de Bodard close their stories with their main characters awakening to a new insight that could have profound effects upon their worlds; McAllister traces back to an important experience that altered the main character's understanding of his world and history. Their settings are also intriguing places, suggestively sketched and tantalizing for the wider possibilities they contain -- I particularly wouldn't mind reading further efforts by Yoachim and de Bodard in their settings. As well, each of these stories carefully situates the reader in their worlds, through tone/mood and context.

• Nelson's and Broderick's pieces prove unsuccessful for the opposite reasons, especially in the difficulty they create for the reader to get situated in their worlds, on the one hand to trust the conditions of the world (Nelson) and on the other hand to develop an attachment to or interest in the world (Broderick). Thematically, their stories are also somewhat murky. I can work out the ideas at stake, but they are obfuscated by uncertainty about the reliability of the narrator (Nelson) and by awkward style (Broderick).

• Baxter's piece shows it's done. I rank it ahead of Allen M. Steele's "The Jekyll Island Horror" from the Jan. 2010 issue, though the Steele is superb as well. I find that both stories remake history through an alien invasion (or, infiltration) to be an intriguing connection, for they are each sophisticated meditations on and evocative echoes of the times in which they are set (early 1800s Britain for Baxter, mid-1930s America for Steele) -- and they are each rather self-reflexive about their status as SF. There is real craftsmanship in Baxter: the consistency of Ben Hobbes' voice and point of view; the interweaving of different kinds of SF subgenres, along with a romance; a plausible alternate history; and a deft attention to a kind of dramatic irony relying upon the reader's awareness of early 19th-century history.

The Mirrored Heavens and Forms of SF Narrative

2010-07-29T23:41:00.005-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

I met David J. Williams and discovered his Autumn Rain trilogy several weeks ago in June, when he did a signing and reading at BakkaPhoenix Books here in Toronto. Before that day, I had heard of neither author nor trilogy. Yet I decided to get a copy of The Mirrored Heavens, the first novel of the series -- for I like my cyberpunk, and the BakkaPhoenix staff offered very high recommendations of the book.

   The Mirrored Heavens definitely gave me a refreshing and exhilarating reading experience. The more I think about the novel, however, the more I am impressed by how challenging Williams makes the novel on several levels, weaving together breakneck pacing, significant narrative decisions, a conspiracy-theory atmosphere, and a political edginess into a whole that generates a rather plausible (and disturbing) vision of our nearish future. What interests me most are the narrative decisions and political edginess: the former, because I think they raise intriguing questions about what literary SF can do with forms of narrative; the latter, because I am surprised that reviewers of the novel seem to have shied away from addressing the historical context to which I believe it responds. Moreover, these two elements, in fact, mutually reinforce each other, revealing a novel more complex than it might appear at first blush.

The Present Tense. Every review of The Mirrored Heavens mentions that Williams chose to write it in the present tense, which takes some getting used to but ultimately suits the story Williams tells. Also, almost every review of the novel mentions how Williams' work on videogames influences the plotting and the pacing, with the implication that although this produces great action scenes, it somewhat detracts and distracts from greater depth in the setting and the characters. I want to explore what I see as the broader implications of Williams' use of the present tense, particularly by suggesting that the "videogame feel" of The Mirrored Heavens links the novel to what are arguably the most widespread and accessible forms of SF narrative today -- i.e., film/TV and videogames -- as the novel simultaneously successfully adapts those forms to the medium of literature.

   Putting the narrative of Mirrored Heavens in the present tense, Williams does confront his reader with an initial disorientation of sorts. By default, essentially, literary narratives employ the past tense, reflecting the inherent understanding that narratives come after the fact, so to speak: we tell our stories after the events have occurred; events themselves have no plot at the moment(s) they are occurring, only later when we arrange them as a story, thereby giving them a certain relationship to each other and so giving them meaning, relevance. French literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes identified what he called the "predictive function of the historian," who, in constructing and plotting a history, always "knows what has not yet been told" (see here; my emphasis). In a way, all narrators are historians, telling about what has already happened, choosing what will be told and aware of what must still be told. (Several novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, purposefully cast their fictional narratives as histories: to name merely a few, see Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Scott's Waverley, and Eliot's Middlemarch.) So, when readers encounter a narrative related in the present tense, certain assumptions and expectations are disrupted, even undermined. Hence, this defamiliarizing form of narrative takes some getting used to.

   The effect of Williams' choice, however, pays off over the course of the novel. Action sequences sizzle with energy. Tension heightens with the uncertainty of what characters will do in a specific instant. Information arrives precisely when it is needed and/or available, and its results bear immediately upon events. The story induces a palpable sense of everything teetering just on the edge of chaos.

The Phoenix Elevator

   Here is where I think the novel's "videogame feel" proves truly significant. Distinctions between SF and sci-fi aside, the science fiction to which most people have access and that most people have experienced is visual, especially since at least the 1950s: films, TV shows, and videogames. As forms of narrative, these mediums, I suggest, impart a sense of happening now, even if set in the past (or the future) -- videogames perhaps most obviously and immersively. True, narratives of these mediums are plotted, but their telling is not inherently or always clearly in the past tense. They rely, in a way, on establishing what I'll call a kind of "presentism," or "nowness."

   Mirrored Heavens constitutes an adaptation of such presentism to the medium of literary narrative. It does so not just to lend the story a cinematic feel, but, I believe, to support and underscore the character of the future Williams envisions, which itself reflects the character of our world today. Data moves quickly, almost instantaneously, both publicly and secretively. Life overall seems to be speeding up. International and environmental crises feel increasingly complex and unmanageable. Uncertainty about politicians and their decisions heightens steadily, globally and nationally and locally. Responses to events must be ever more and more immediate. The future of Mirrored Heavens intensifies all of these factors, and Williams augments that intensification with the use of the present tense. Things happen right now in the novel, relentlessly. Williams throws the reader into the story in medias res and holds the reader there until the end -- not unlike, one could say, a videogame or a film.

   For me, Williams achieves this presentism most tangibly in Part II of the novel, in which he shifts between the three main narrative lines of Marlowe/Haskell, the Operative, and Spencer with an accelerating staccato rhythm, pouncing from cliff-hanger to cliff-hanger, ratcheting up the stakes for each character as well as for the disintegrating global situation. (A good parallel would be Christopher Nolan's new film Inception, particularly the second half in which the narrative cuts between the three levels of the dream in a fascinating display of editing and timing that produces incredible tension.) There is certainly the impression of the cinematic here, of a narrative sensibility attuned to how films, TV shows, and videogames move a story along: forms of SF narrative, in other words, with which many people are familiar.

   Yet Williams makes it work in The Mirrored Heavens. On one hand, he makes it work strictly on a formal level, the use of the present tense appropriate to the fast-paced progress of events in the novel. On the other hand, he makes it work on a thematic level, the disorientation caused by the present tense mirroring the disorientation experienced by the characters thrust suddenly into a global war, as well as, perhaps, the disorientation for the reader of confronting and trying to understand a new and different world (which is at the heart of SF as a genre, in any medium).

   I wonder, then, if The Mirrored Heavens can be viewed as an indication of how the visual mediums of SF and their narrative concerns might lead to formal evolution(s) in the literary medium of SF, in which the latter adapts aspects of the former to alternative ways of telling stories. I see this process as a definite strength of the novel.

Political Edginess. Many of the reviews classify The Mirrored Heavens as, in part, military SF; some also note that Williams earned a degree in History from Yale, affording him an understanding of the factors that contribute to war. For example, Andrew Liptak of Worlds in a Grain of Sand writes:

Throughout my studies, I've found that warfare is . . . a complicated and convoluted process of politics, public figures, implementation of policy and foreign relations, before any of the bullets begin to fly. Williams, with a degree in history from Yale, seems to understand this . . . .

I can't disagree with Liptak, for Williams does demonstrate an awareness of the "convoluted" interplay of social, cultural, and ideological factors that lead to and perpetuate war. However, like other reviewers, Liptak basically stops here and does not reflect upon the sociopolitical context to which The Mirrored Heavens responds.

Works of SF, as many acknowledge, are about and refer to their historical moment. Looked at in this light, Mirrored Heavens takes on a political edginess that involves more than a plausible vision of the future of international relations and military conflict, for I am tempted to see the novel, and the world it portrays, as a comment on the consequences of the administration, policies, and actions of George W. Bush's eight-year presidency, which itself can be treated as exemplifying a longstanding strain of U.S. politics reliant upon, essentially, a "war economy."

The future in Mirrored Heavens is decidedly dystopian. Even the four main characters function mainly as anti-heroes, or at least ambiguous heroes, though Claire Haskell most clearly reveals a willingness to question what is morally right and wrong, acting on such convictions at the end. As Nisi Shawl writes in her review for The Seattle Times, the novel thus reveals a "cynicism regarding the geopolitics of the coming century." I would argue that this "cynicism" relates to this century as well.

Belem-Macapa under attack.

Williams offers a future in which the opportunity for true peace gets undermined by competing self-interests at play within a U.S. government pledged to economic and political détente, self-interests that seek to usurp the presidency (known as "The Throne") in order to pursue their own ideological agenda(s) for the world and humanity. Hence, the Phoenix Space Elevator, the physical incarnation of the new détente, is destroyed -- in a possible echo of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, but with the difference that the terrorism is internal. Moreover, the lives of ordinary civilians are cheap, from Brazil to the U.S. to the moon; the death toll mounts and mounts as the individuals, corporations, and nations engaged in the war myopically follow their own motives, as if the regular world is a mere game board. Rays of hope slip through the pervasive gloom by the end, with Claire Haskell and with the president retaining power and resisting the temptation of retaliation. Yet the novel's world is not a nice one, and it bears the flavour of the dissatisfaction, despair, uncertainty, and even anger of the last years of Bush's time in office.

In this respect, Mirrored Heavens knows its cyberpunk conventions and attitudes. JP Frantz, in his review for SF Signal, observes:

Well, if you're looking for cyberpunk, you won't find it here. . . . Yes the world of this future is a dystopia, but the characters here aren't from the bottom of society, fighting against the government or corporations, they are the government, and far from fighting for the little guy, the are fighting to save the status quo.

Frantz serves up a restrictive version of cyberpunk here and so I think misses how Mirrorred Heavens quite consciously redirects cyberpunk to a different register. Many of the fundamental cyberpunk tropes are there: vast urban sprawls (Belem-Macapa, The Mountain); jacking into and out of cyberspace, called "the zone," usually wirelessly in the novel; cyborgs; a hardboiled, noirish tone and mood; a concern for literary style, and so forth. Where The Mirrored Heavens redirects cyberpunk to a different register resides in what I'll call its 21st-century sociopolitical awareness.

   Specifically, that the characters "are the government" is, in part, the point. Williams' "zone" is predominantly a political, and politicised, virtual landscape (not so wholly corporatized, as in William Gibson). His razors and mechs and handlers/envoys are predominantly government (and sometimes corporate) agents, which to me rings of plausibility and suggests a realistic (or, "cynical") rethinking of cyberpunk's proletarian utopianism as championed by Frantz. Instead of abandoning cyberpunk, Williams in fact holds onto its "punk" subversiveness by wielding the subgenre as a critique of the current sociopolitical situation, but he aims to take down a bigger target, so to speak. Mirrored Heavens, in its particular political edginess, is thus 21st-century cyberpunk.

Narrative Politics. My pocket paperback edition of The Mirrored Heavens includes a map showing the major global political entities in 2110; the full text of the Treaty of Zurich, the document that established the world of détente between the U.S.A. and Eurasian Coalition that comes under threat in the story; as well as an appendix of the timeline of world history from 2036 to 2110. These paratextual materials not only exhibit the extent of Williams' worldbuilding, but they also intimate the novel's fundamental concern: envisioning the consequences of the "convoluted" interactions of politics and economics that yield a world of seemingly perpetual conflict.

   This is where, as I wrote above, Williams' use of the present tense and the novel's political edginess mutually reinforce each other. That edginess, and its cynicism and anger, lives in the restless, always forward-moving present tense of the narrative. Williams tosses the reader right into the fire, and he holds the reader there until the smoke begins clearing, a little, at the end. He keeps the reader in the right now, without the expected comfort of the past tense. By the end, when the reader gets a chance to breathe and reflect, the implications of what has just happened can come into focus, though not completely as not even the main characters can grasp the whole picture. The picture is not pretty, for a world of détente proves distressingly fragile.

   Narrative relies upon conflict, of various kinds, to generate momentum and invest the reader in what happens. Politics similarly relies upon conflict to make and remake the world in which we live, from local to global scales. Williams, in effect, demonstrates the latter by turning the former toward a ceaseless nowness. Doing so, he challenges the reader on two levels simultaneously: one, encountering a different narrative form for literary SF that adapts the immersive presentism of videogame and film/TV narratives; the other, a critique of early 21st-century post-industrial, hypercapitalist, First World sociopolitics.

   I'm looking forward to the next two books in the trilogy.

Reviews/Commentaries
• Adventures in Reading (Joe Sherry, Aug. 2010)
• Fantasy Book Critic (May 2008)
• Graeme's Fantasy Book Review (May 2008)
• The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review (July 2010)
• The Seattle Times (Nisi Shawl, July 2008)
• SFF World (Mark Yon, July 2008)
• SF Signal (JP Frantz, July 2008)
• SF Site (Nathan Brazil)
• Worlds in a Grain of Sand (Andrew Liptak, May 2010)

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy

2010-07-12T18:26:00.004-04:00

[WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS]

   Three days ago, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars (1996), the final novel in his Mars trilogy. I took nearly a year to read all three books, with breaks -- for various reasons -- between the first two, Red Mars (1993) and Green Mars (1994). For me, the Mars trilogy stands not just as one of the true masterworks of 20th-century SF, but also as one of the great achievements in 20th-century fiction regardless of genre.

   What follows is not a coherent argument about why I hold such a high opinion of the trilogy, but more a collection of thoughts on the books that should comprise a fairly decent picture of that opinion.

• Three Books As One. The trilogy needs to be seen as a single whole, not unlike The Lord of the Rings. It's not just the consistency of the same core characters in the three books, or the central themes that run through and evolve during the series (colonialism, science and/as politics, memory and nostalgia, the powers and perils of human ingenuity, self-interests vs. community interests, debates about terraforming and economic systems, etc.), or the progress of about 200 years of internal and alternate history that tangibly affects the characters' lives. As a single whole, the trilogy maintains a persistent, unifying vision and tone, a particular feel or atmosphere -- centred in Robinson's evocation of the landscape, colours, conditions, challenges, and alienness of Mars.
   Also, simply, the trilogy constitutes one long story/narrative, and a story/narrative that closes its circle(s) by returning to its beginning at its end, in an act of narrative nostalgia, reader nostalgia, and character nostalgia, with all three elements changed in the journey from beginning to end and reminded of that change. By the close of Blue Mars, the weight of everything experienced by the characters and the reader since Red Mars feels immense, complex, intimate, organic, inspiring, sublime. Humanity has such potential for beauty and wonder . . . it need only overcome itself.

• Walkabout. Around halfway into Green Mars, I began thinking of the trilogy as a distinctly "ambulatory" narrative. Characters constantly move about Mars: John Boone's solo navigation of the new world and its burgeoning cultures, or Nadia and Arkady's flight around the planet, in Red Mars; Nirgal seeing the world for the first time with Coyote in Green Mars; Ann and Sax, separately, exploring the untouched or increasingly alive parts of the planet in Blue Mars. There are many more examples, and together they all constitute a sort of baseline plot structure for the trilogy (at micro- and macro-levels). Robinson unfolds Mars to readers by repeatedly taking them on treks and trips and travels over the planet's entirety, above and below ground, in the air and on the seas, even occasionally into orbit. Most importantly, though, he does this through the individual viewpoints of a variety of characters who see and approach Mars with their own motivations, needs, uncertainties, hopes. So, Mars remains perpetually new and surprising; it keeps changing, physically and socioculturally.
   Doing this also lets Robinson create and develop what I call the "poetry" of Mars. Whether it's John Boone marvelling at the planet's craters and chasms and chaoses (Red Mars), or Sax and Maya picking out and naming the different colours of Martian sunsets (Blue Mars), Mars becomes an utterly fascinating and plausible and concretely detailed alien landscape -- with a beauty all its own, at local and individual as well as global and communal scales. So much of the vision and tone of the trilogy reside in this "poetry" of Mars, whether Robinson spends time carefully detailing the biological/chemical make-up of Martian rock and dirt or the procedures for altering Mars' atmosphere to make the surface breathable. This is how Mars acquires substance, substantiality. This is how Robinson provides opportunities for the reader to become invested in the world, the characters, the story.

• Primal Scene. One of the main characters of the trilogy, Michel Duval, is the therapist/psychoanalyst for the First Hundred. His presence in the narrative allows Robinson to forge many intriguing links between psychological/psychoanalytic and scientific theories of and research into how the human mind, or the brain, works -- memory, aging, identity, personality, and so forth. These links acquire increasing relevance as the remaining (and gradually dwindling) First Hundred confront such issues in their second and then third century of life. Yet Robinson also takes advantage of this psychoanalytic current in the trilogy to forge a thematic link that connects the entire narrative together, which achieves great power by the end of Blue Mars.
   I'm thinking specifically of the murder of John Boone, which occurs as the opening movement of Red Mars (and, hence, of the trilogy overall). Robinson turns this event into a kind of Freudian primal scene: a key defining trauma that remains throughout the series to haunt and guide characters and events, especially as a persistent undertone to all of the political, economic, and cultural debates that gradually define Martian society. It is the first major incident of Red Mars. It motivates characters such as Jackie Boone (John's daughter, with Hiroko) during the Dorsia Brevia conference and second revolution, in Green Mars. Finally, it becomes by the latter stages of Blue Mars the return of the repressed and the forgotten as a means for characters such as Sax Russell to find resolution and catharsis near the looming end of their lives. Boone's murder (and its consequences) is another way in which the trilogy comprises a single, organic whole -- Robinson expertly employing it as a touchstone throughout that influences the development of individuals and of Mars.

• Hard Science. The Mars trilogy represents, maybe, a watershed moment in the ability of hard SF to tell utterly compelling, human, and important stories steeped in the post-industrial empiricist, materialist, and rational worldview that informs the politics, economics, and society of what one might call the "developed world" or "the West" (or similar such, admittedly problematic, designations). A criticism I have seen of the trilogy targets sections of "infodumps" as taking attention away from the narrative, as Robinson liking to display all the research he did for the books. I disagree on both counts.
   Regarding the narrative, I found myself often completely enthralled by Robinson's ability to make the science matter, because he presents the science through the viewpoints of specific characters -- such that he exposes the reader to the range of sciences that affect the terraforming of Mars, but that also affect the political and economic shape(s) of Martian society. Nearly all the central characters are scientists of some sort (and geniuses to boot), and Robinson makes science fundamental to how they see and change Mars, as well as to how they live their lives through relationships or political decisions and the like. Moreover, Robinson shows that science is not static but dynamic, creative, argumentative/biased, even at times fallible. So, the "infodumps" do not detract from the narrative, but ultimately are essential threads in the narrative's fabric.
   Regarding the research, by the close of Blue Mars, I came to see the science (and economics and politics) that Robinson makes so fundamental to the characters and events of the trilogy as a vital means by which his Mars acquires the substantiality I mention above. Robinson gives Mars an incredible concreteness, a truly tangible plausibility. He does so by taking the reader into the minutiae of nearly everything about and on Mars, and then by always giving that minutiae a human and/or sociocultural context. Also, simply, I came away from the trilogy feeling like I learned something, or many things. I am not a scientist, and I claim no special affinity for mathematics, but I believe I now have a fairly decent notion of how the various sciences we use on Earth would play a part in interplanetary colonisation (accounting for advancements since the mid-1990s, of course). Thus, I wonder if the Mars trilogy stands as a kind of benchmark for the aesthetic power and relevance that hard SF can achieve ....

• Utopia. An important consequence of Robinson's adherence to a fundamentally technoscientific viewpoint relates to what one might call the politics, or ideological investments, of the trilogy. These politics are effectively utopian, and somewhat exhilarating for being so. Mars gives Robinson the opportunity to imagine humanity eventually getting things right, overcoming Earth's massive economic and class divisions, environmental degradations, political corruption(s), and so forth. Robinson also establishes -- and makes an argument for -- science as the basic means by which getting things right can be realised. One can agree or disagree with this faith in science as an agent of sociocultural change, and so with Robinson's politics, but the trilogy's utopianism proves, well, uplifting.
   In particular, Robinson reinforces the plausibility of his Mars by showing how his characters steadily see themselves as Martians, especially the generations born on Mars (represented most prominently by Nirgal): they want to and will do things differently from Earth -- economically, culturally, politically, environmentally. Martian society is never a perfect utopia, for that would mean stagnation (as we have known from Thomas More onward). As well, Robinson ensures that the reader always knows of the conflicts and debates constantly at play in Martian culture, especially the tension(s) between self-interest and communal goals/needs. Still, the overriding vision is utopian, and here the trilogy forcefully demonstrates SF's ability to offer new, alternative ways of understanding humanity, to function as a critique of and commentary on humanity.
   (In a recent review of Red Mars, Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone suggests that Robinson's "political sympathies are . . . one-sided" with respect to the pro- and anti-terraforming debate in the novel, and he seems uncomfortable with the "feeling of a political bias in this first volume." Robinson's politics are quite clear throughout the trilogy, but I don't see this as a weakness in or strike against the books. Rather, the politics are part-and-parcel of what the central characters experience as they become Martian and develop a fraught relationship with Earth. Robinson tells the story from the viewpoints of the revolutionaries, the rebels, and their efforts to make a better world: in this way, he unabashedly puts his argument right in front of the reader, which I appreciated and found refreshing, provocative.)

• A Portrait of the Scientist. As the trilogy progresses, particularly in Green Mars and Blue Mars, one of my favourite (and, I suspect, one of Robinson's favourite) characters becomes Sax Russell, for he goes through perhaps the most significant change in terms of his approach to Mars and his understanding of his self. He develops into a sort of scientist-poet, or poet-scientist. From the leading mind behind (and sometimes villain of) terraforming in Red Mars, over the course of Green Mars and Blue Mars he shifts through being a political radical to an icognito double agent to the epitome of the scientist curious about everything, all the while moving toward a balance between the wonder of a terraformed Mars and the wonder of an untouched Mars in its natural state.
   Sax evolves into an increasingly important point-of-view character precisely for these reasons, I think: he represents the optimism of science and its ability to make a better world, to discover practical solutions to problems; he represents the dynamic, creative powers of science; he represents science's inquisitive fascination with the world and with humanity. In Blue Mars especially, Sax weaves together science, politics, economics, environmentalism, language/linguistics, metaphor/simile/analogy, sociology, psychology into a progressively self-reflective awareness of Mars, of others, of himself. At times, I imagined Robinson reaching almost a trance-like state in writing parts of Sax's chapters, capturing the breathtaking movement of a mind making intuitive connections between, say, the finer points of neuroscience and the finer points of the self. Some of the trilogy's greatest passages aesthetically appear in Sax's chapters, particularly as he acquires a more aesthetic perspective on Mars.

• Poetic Moments. Speaking of aesthetics, I will remember several moments of true artistry in the books. Adam Roberts, in The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), suggests that the best of SF since the 1950s is characterised by what he calls "poetic moments," by "striking and beautiful images" (186-87), in film and in literature. Robinson fills the trilogy with such poetic moments.
   I think of Nadia's epiphany of the incredible beauty of humanity, physically and intellectually and emotionally, during the Dorsia Brevia conference in Green Mars. There is Michel back in Provence, returning to the olive tree grove and the old cottage, and reflecting upon memories lost and selves forgotten or left behind, in Blue Mars. I remember the rapture of John Boone as he travelled around a mostly uninhabited Mars, often for weeks on his own, exclaiming at the grandeur of Mars' geography, enraptured by what he saw, in Red Mars. There is a young Nirgal running around the lake of Zygote in his meditative lung-gom-pa stride, in Green Mars. I think of Ann out on her own high, high above the datum on Olympos Mons and discovering lichen where, really, no life should be and, in a fervent change of heart, encouraging the lichen to live, live, in Blue Mars.
   I could cite further examples, from majestic to minor poetic moments, and together they would all speak to how fully realised are Robinson's characters and setting, to how much the trilogy is at its heart an envisioning of the human potential to accomplish -- and be aware of -- the remarkable. Perhaps most remarkable of all, then, is Mars, or at least the Mars painted by Robinson: initially red and barren and harsh, then green and living and pregnant with potential, then finally blue and flourishing and familiar.
   Without the poetry, without Robinson's artistry, I'm not sure the trilogy would stand as a masterwork of 20th-century SF. The poetry binds together everything in the trilogy and gives it all meaning, makes it all inspiring and plausible -- for the sum of the whole is indeed greater than the individual parts. As well, Robinson's artistry (on all levels, from plot to character to setting to theme and so forth) convinces me to count the trilogy among the truly extraordinary works of 20th-century fiction in general -- for it reminds me that a book can indeed change me and show me the beauty of humanity.

I Hype, You Hype, We All Hype

2010-06-15T16:02:00.004-04:00

My previous post on Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, hype, and taste has sparked a bit of discussion in other online places, and I thought I would add some further thoughts related to what I read in those places.

   First of all, author Mark Charan Newton, in his post Good Hype, Bad Hype, offers some valuable insight on the role of hype in the book trade. Good hype, he writes, is the traditional "word-of-mouth" talk about a book, "decentralised" and of "the people" -- which now occurs in "internet forums and blogs"; this sort of hype is good "because it causes discussion, gets people excited and ... is not influenced by corporations." Bad hype, on the other hand, involves a process beginning, essentially, with publishers/publicists and the "marketing blurbs" they use to "get reviewers excited" about and so "raise expectations" for a book, which they hope are passed on to readers; this is hype as seduction, as "marketing speak," and must be distrusted. Newton concludes with the observation that, from an author's point of view, "it's better to be talked about than not talked about" (alluding to one of the fine witticisms of the estimable Oscar Wilde).

   The corollary to Newton's conclusion, I suppose, is that all press is good press, particularly if such "press" keeps an author and his or her books on people's shelves and in people's conversations. In a highly competitive marketplace such as publishing, and more specifically such as the SF&F field, being part of the conversation is certainly crucial, and authors have an array of tools now to do so. My concern in my original post on Boneshaker, though, related to how the conversation about the novel -- to use Newton's distinctions -- predominantly assumed the tone of seductive "marketing speak," misleadingly raising expectations for it. Thus, there can be bad hype masquerading as good hype, influencing readers' tastes and potentially straying from more honestly critical assessments of books (whether positive, negative, or neutral).

   Gav's post on NextRead, Comment: When a good book is just a good book..., makes for a fitting companion piece to Newton's post, as he spends some time delving into the matter of hype from the perspective of the reviewer. He acknowledges that publishers want to "sell" a book as "the best thing since xyz" and considers how reviewers might or should handle these situations, where a publisher's hype may find its way into the "hyperbole" of a review. He suggests, "Bloggers though should probably ... take care that they are actually saying something of substance." Furthermore, he wonders whether reviewing can sometimes involve a "nervousness to be more direct" about a book's flaws, which entails the risk of steering readers away from "a book that we on the whole liked." At the end of his post, Gav closes with a rather self-reflective promise: "For my own part I'm going to try and be more sensitive [to] hyperbole and try my best to keep calling a spade a spade." Thus, he identifies a way in which reviewing can manage expectations for a book, perhaps better serving readers through more honest appraisals.

   Such honest appraisals are important, otherwise the "wrong impression" is communicated, potentially leading readers to believe a book is "the next blockbuster" that could "change your life." In this context, Gav quotes from my original post as an example of what happens when reviews create the "wrong impression," which certainly occurred in my case. I never expected Boneshaker to change my life (I leave that to the bonafide classics, inside and outside of SF&F), but I did expect what a great number of reviewers claimed I would get in the novel: fun, entertainment; fast-paced action; something new and fresh. Reviewers, I discovered, had not called a spade a spade. Hence, I became interested in thinking about the consequences of hype as seen specifically with online reviews.

   Author Sam Sykes also posted on these matters, in Hype: Let's Talk About It, styling hype as, today, "a problem" that for many must be "confronted and destroyed," for it carries the stigma of meaning a "book is somehow awful." Yet authors, he observes, "don't really have a choice but to hype ourselves to at least some degree." Hype, Sykes suggests, shows that authors are "proud of their work and . . . think it's worth your while." Most intriguingly, however, Sykes turns the response to hype back upon readers: "at the end of the day," he writes, "the book will either work for you or it won't. . . . But avoiding it because someone said you might like it? Buddy. Buddy." On this last point, I agree wholeheartedly, for I believe Sykes implies that readers bear a measure of responsibility in how they manage and approach hype. I think, though, that Sykes overlooks how the rhetoric of hype not originating from authors themselves can in concrete ways sometimes distort what makes books "work" -- and thus the need for caution. In this respect, there is hype as, let's say, legitimate self-promotion for authors and hype as the response to and discussion about books that takes place without or even in spite of authors. The latter was my concern.

   Finally, Larry Nolen (OF Blog of the Fallen), summarily dismisses discussions of hype as irresponsible in his post, I see the book blogging equivalent of herpes has become active again. His tone of exasperation with this subject is clear, calling its reappearance an "interminable cycle" and asserting that "it matters so little." The main point of his post, however, focusses on the responsibilities of readers:

The underlying question, one that is barely ever addressed in these hand-wringing posts, is the apparent lack of critical evaluation and thinking skills on the part of the readers. If people want to accept recommendations and publicist blurbs blindly and then bitch about it afterward, it's their own damn fault. . . . So until those benighted, bedazzled readers start taking more responsibility for their role in creating false expectations for a work, all of the questioning as to how "good" or "bad" publicity or "hype" may seem to be a bit misplaced [sic].

Nolen makes an important argument here, bringing together the key elements involved in the hype of a book: authors, reviewers/critics, (general) readers. I doubt many would disagree with Nolen that readers must exercise "critical evaluation and thinking skills" when sifting through "recommendations and publicist blurbs." I don't know if Nolen read my original post, as he links to the posts by Newton and NextRead. Whether he did or not, however, I wonder about his dismissive and exasperated tone, particularly because I consider myself anything but a "benighted, bedazzled" reader.

   When conducting the informal survey of blogs and reviews last year that led to ordering Priest's Boneshaker, I did so, I like to think, with a purpose and with eyes wide open. I looked at several reviews and comments about the novel in a variety of online venues, enough such that I developed what I believed was a fairly good idea of the novel's quality and story. (I also focussed on blogs that consistently appeared in other bloggers' blog rolls, one or two of which Nolen has links for.) Moreover, at the time, I wanted to try something new and different from what I tended to be reading (mostly SF and some epic fantasy), something fun, and Boneshaker's steampunk/zombie "mash-up" seemed to fit the bill best. I never expected Boneshaker to be the best thing since Neuromancer, for my "critical evaluation and thinking skills" were very active. All that hype resulted in Hugo and Nebula nominations for the novel, suggesting that from a certain perspective the hype was not unwarranted, the nominations confirming that enough people see Boneshaker as one of the best SF&F works of 2009.

   All that aside, I am not sure I would characterise my original post as "hand-wringing" or as bitching. True, I identify my disappointment with Boneshaker and with the hype that effectively brought me to the book. True, I outline what disappointed me about Boneshaker in relation to other reviewers' assessments of the novel.

   Yet as I signal in my introduction and closing paragraphs, my aim was to discuss the role played by the internet in possibly reducing the distinction between reviewer/critic and general reader, which occasionally results in misleading hype. I wanted to explore how hype can affect readers' tastes, for online reviewers can carry a kind of authority that readers turn to, if not rely upon. When the rhetoric of apparently critical appraisal of a book shades, upon reflection, more into hype than calling a spade a spade (good or bad), asking questions about such a situation is not "misplaced" but perfectly fair. Moreover, these questions "matter." If critics/reviewers function as arbiters and mediators of quality and taste, what are we to say when their "critical evaluation and thinking skills" were perhaps not brought to bear fully in their response to a book? If they became "benighted, bedazzled readers" instead of reviewers? Why should asking these sorts of questions be thus equated to a venereal disease?

   In the end, Nolen's response to the discussion of hype amounts to cutting off the opportunity for and denying the legitimacy of debate. This response is odd, considering how Nolen likes to urge his readers and other bloggers to challenge their critical assumptions, the possible limitations of their reading, or the purpose and form of their reviews. I, for one, would in fact appreciate his thoughts on this subject.

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, Hype, and Taste

2010-06-11T17:31:00.010-04:00

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS.]

Guy Gavriel Kay, in his June 4th guest blog for BSC on "Under Heaven, and the Book World Under Siege," discusses how the internet has fundamentally changed the relationship between authors and their works, between authors and their readers. "The principle consequence," he writes, "is the disappearance of spaces ... between author and consumer and between author and work." One such space is that of privacy: authors increasingly lack this privacy, Kay observes, as readers/consumers believe they have a "connection" with a "writer online" and so can feel justified in attacking an author for, say, being late with a new novel; yet authors participate in this wearing away of their privacy by blogging about their daily lives, by needing to maintain an online presence in order to market their works and their personality (or, brand). From Kay's perspective, this lack of privacy for authors risks "eroding . . . the space that can be necessary to produce not only good art but a good life." Certainly, Kay reveals a nostalgia for a perhaps simpler time when authors truly enjoyed a kind of distance from readers. Yet, from the perspective of a reader, I see a further implication of the internet's effect upon Kay's "spaces." Namely, we are potentially also witnessing a lessening of the distinction between the critic and the general reader, with the consequence that authors and their works can quickly receive a great deal of hype -- often at the expense of more critical assessments of those works, of more considered reflection upon the grounds of taste.

   My experience with Cherie Priest's Boneshaker (Tor, 2009) led me to thinking about these issues.

   At one point last year, I thought that I should look at current and more recent SF&F, as a way of balancing my attempts to catch up with older works. To do so, I turned to the SF&F blogosphere for an informal survey of what reviewers were touting as the best releases of 2009. Priest's Boneshaker was one of these consistently highly touted releases, excepting a couple of dissenting opinions.

   The novel proved hard to resist with all the positive hype. "This is a hoot from start to finish, a pure mad adventure," wrote Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. "That's a great hook; a steampunk/zombie mash-up is instantly appealing. . . . Boneshaker simply pulls you in and doesn't let go," wrote John De Nardo on SF Signal. Robert Thomson on Fantasy Book Critic wrote, "overall the writing was top-notch led by accessible and skillful prose, crisp dialogue, and cinematic-like pacing," and furthermore "the story was a lot of fun." Katherine Peterson on SF Site wrote, "Overall, Priest has created a terrific story that will please endless science fiction fans in search of a thrill." On the Fantasy & SciFi Lovin' blog, the reviewer wrote, "This is, hands down, the best book I've read all year. . . . Maybe I gush, but 'Boneshaker' is uniquely entertaining. It's inventive, strong on character development, full of action and I can't think of a single thing I would change." These comments paint a fairly representative picture of the tone of response to Priest's novel, indicating some measure of why Boneshaker has received 2010 Hugo and Nebula nominations for Best Novel.

   Colin Harvey of Strange Horizons, however, took a less favourable position on the book. He wrote, "Despite my wanting it to -- and it seems particularly mean-spirited to dismantle such a lolloping, likeable puppy-dog of a novel -- Boneshaker doesn't quite hang together." He cites "world building" that is "no more than skin deep" as a key weakness, pinpointing several questions about the Blight gas that remain unanswered in the narrative and so make "the whole phenomenon . . . not particularly noteworthy." To Harvey, not exploring these questions represents a "lack of intellectual curiosity" in the novel, which "fatally undermines its credibility." Finally, Harvey's dismantling concludes that Boneshaker shows "a lack of any great originality, no real science whatsoever, and a cavalier attitude to the internal logic of her setting" -- despite its admittedly "whizz-bang pace."

   I will be open about my response to Boneshaker: I agree wholeheartedly with Harvey and feel that the consistently positive hype overlooked the novel's significant faults for the sake of a fun, mad, uniquely entertaining genre mash-up full of action.

   Overall, the character development proved basically flat, even for the main character Briar Wilkes; the plot tended to lack tangible and engaging tension; the world building, as well as the lives and histories of the characters, remained predominantly on the surface (despite much of the story occurring underground); the pacing was generally slow; and the writing proved uneven at times (once, the flickering light flickered in a character's eyes; the use of contractions modernizes the narrator's voice, putting it at odds with its 19th-century setting).

   Many of these issues get redeemed somewhat by the novel's final several chapters, when the writing sharpens and when the pacing and tension pick up noticeably, especially because the narrative at last unveils the sources of Briar Wilkes' motivations and affords plausible grounds for sympathizing with her son Ezekiel's desire to know about his parents' past. For me, there lies the rub. The real story, the story of true substance, the story that I actually wanted told appears in those final several chapters.

   While I know a reviewer must not criticize a novel in terms of what it should have done instead of what it did, I find committing this sin difficult to avoid with Boneshaker. Briar Wilkes is the main character and so the focus of the reader's interest, yet she becomes interesting only by the very end as she tells her son the truth of her relationship with his long-dead father. In other words, the most important crisis and choice in her life, the event that makes her a complex and round character, arrives as merely a late, closing reminiscence -- and then she and Ezekiel exit the narrative. The story I then want most is not the one I read of an alternate Seattle with a walled-off section infected by Blight gas and infested by "rotters" (zombies), but rather the one about how Seattle became that way and Briar's role in those events and how she coped with their immediate aftermath (which included the death of her father and the birth of her son). Either that, or, I began to think about mid-way through the novel, Boneshaker needed some extensive flashbacks to give the primary characters and the world more solidity, more weight. I also began to think, in this light, that Boneshaker as it is would be better served as a novella.

     Boneshaker thus proved a disappointing read for me. I felt taken in by the hype, a little deceived about the novel's merits. I wondered not whether I had missed something in Boneshaker that so many others saw, but why others appeared so willing to overlook the novel's faults as a novel and focus instead on "fun" and "genre mash-up" and "action" and the like.

   Then I got to thinking about taste and the role of the internet as a medium for expressing and disseminating it.

   On one hand, SF&F blogs and other such online venues serve a truly beneficial and positive purpose for the genre. They help with exposure to new writers and works, or even to old writers and works: a kind of measuring of the pulse of SF&F right now. When I returned to reading SF&F again a few years ago (for personal and professional reasons), I was thankful to have all these resources available that got me caught up on the most notable authors and publications since about 2000. Yet blogs and other online venues don't just measure the pulse of SF&F publishing, trends, and debates. Perhaps more significantly, they give voice to a multiplicity of communities of readers joined by their tastes -- whether in urban fantasy, space opera, epic fantasy, optimistic SF, specific authors, world SF, and so forth. In this respect, they demonstrate the vitality of SF&F, across the world, which can only be a good thing.

   On the other hand, these blogs and other online venues have acquired a level of authority such that they can function as arbiters of taste as well. Put differently, they take on the role of the critic, of criticism, whether intentionally or not, and so might influence the buying and reading habits of general readers. Criticism, or reviewing, is a craft in its own right. It involves a responsibility toward readers to provide a knowledgeable assessment of a work, negative or positive. With the multiplicity of blogs and other online venues, however, that responsibility can become diluted somewhat, can be overcome by the generation of hype. Put another way, the "space" between critic and general reader lessens, creating potential misperceptions about certain works or authors and then possibly about what constitutes the best of SF&F today.

   True, not all hyped works and/or authors are undeserving of the attention and acclaim. True as well, I recognize that what many reviewers found exciting about Boneshaker shows how the novel accorded with their tastes, which they wanted to communicate to their readers.

   While reading and then finishing Boneshaker, however, I found myself surprised by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the novel, as I thought it proved the exact opposite to all the praise -- praise that highlighted almost exclusively its entertainment value, not necessarily its strengths or weaknesses as a work of narrative fiction. This seemed a case, to me, in which the hype got it wrong, in which criticism was sort of set aside for a fascination with a pretty face, ignoring a bland personality.

   I may thus be more gun shy in the future about hyped books and authors, more wary of the less defined space between critics and general readers, which I rightly should be. Yet I appreciate, too, the democracy of taste that the internet can foster, the sharing of enthusiasm and discovery that makes the SF&F online community such a vital part of the experience of the genre. I only wonder if the genre could also be served well by a more robust criticism, such as written by Niall Harrison and most reviewers at Strange Horizons: a criticism that helps readers find their way to what is truly the "good art" in SF&F today.

Links to Reviews/Commentaries on Boneshaker
• Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow)
• Fantasy Book Critic (Robert Thomson)

• Fantasy & SciFi Lovin' News & Reviews (SQT)

• Only the Best Sci-Fi
• SciFiGuy
• SF Signal (John De Nardo)

• SF Site (Katherine Peterson)
• The Speculative Scotsman
• Spiral Galaxy (Karen Burnham, 21 June 2010)
• Strange Horizons (Colin Harvey)
• Subterranean Press (Gwenda Bond)

• Worlds in a Grain of Sand (Andrew Liptak, 9 June 2010)

Saving Science Fiction From Itself?

2010-03-02T23:37:00.007-05:00

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's essay "Barbarian Confessions," from the book Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (eds. David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover, 2006), is currently available on the Smart Pop Books web site, but only for a limited time (until March 5th, apparently). I was originally linked to it from SF Signal.

   John DeNardo of SF Signal terms Rusch's essay "controversial," which certainly encouraged me to read it. The controversy, I suspect, stems from Rusch's diagnosis of the condition of SF and her recommendations for how the genre can heal and remain healthy.

   The basic aim of this diagnosis involves a defense of tie-in novel series (i.e., for Star Trek or Star Wars, and the like), which is the sort of SF generally looked down upon by what Rusch calls "the Science Fiction Village," yet also the sort of SF that sells well, takes up its share of "shelf space," and -- most importantly, for Rusch -- entertains its readers. (Rusch herself has written several tie-in novels.) SF, Rusch argues, has strayed from and actively resists what makes Star Wars great: "an escape, a journey into a new yet familiar world, entertainment. A good read." Such resistance to "entertainment" began with the New Wave, the result being the predominance of "dystopian universes," "nasty ... world-building," and "insularity," along with the abandonment of "gosh-wow, sense-of-wonder stories." Therefore, according to Rusch, the prescription for SF is "more grand adventure, more heroes on journeys, more uplifting ... endings": the very stories offered by tie-in novels, which Rusch claims are "keeping SF alive."

   For me, Rusch's essay proves especially relevant with regard to James Cameron's film Avatar, particularly a strain of negative response to the film within the SF&F community. I wish to address this negative response to Avatar by comparing it to the consistently positive response to Duncan Jones' Moon, where Avatar represents SF-as-entertainment and Moon SF-as-"work" (Rusch's term). I am fascinated by and deeply appreciate both films for what they do as films and as SF. Yet, echoing Rusch, I believe Avatar will do more than Moon to keep SF alive as a thriving and relevant genre. In fact, Avatar is the kind of film (and possible novel tie-in) that can save SF from itself.

A typical critique of Avatar goes something like, "Beautiful visuals, but the story sucks," and sucks because it's clichéd, scientifically implausible, has cookie-cutter and undeveloped characters, or is simply a rehash of other older (and better) SF works -- and those are just the most often repeated charges. (For a fairly representative response, actually, see John DeNardo's SF Signal review.) Avatar is clichéd as merely Dances With Wolves or Pocahontas in space; Pandora's floating mountains make the film scientifically implausible; Quaritch and Selfridge too easily fill the roles of evil military and corporate hard-ass, respectively, and overall the film is not grey enough with respect to its morality; finally, Avatar does poorly what Ferngully (1992) did better and first. Some bloggers/reviewers even dismissed the film without seeing it, such as posted at The World in the Satin Bag.

Moon, however, garners praise for being "classic" science fiction, as well as for its story, the complexity of its character, and the performance by Sam Rockwell. For example, in his review for SciFi Wire, Todd Gilchrist concludes:

Ultimately, Moon is ... the kind of science fiction that we need to see more of. Not just because it's a story that collects ideas from its cinematic predecessors, deals with copies and clones and still manages to be thoroughly original, but because it's rare that something feels so real and completely fantastic at the very same time.

In this vein, comparisons are often made to "cinematic predecessors" such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Gattaca, especially for Moon's tone/mood and what I will call its hard-SF qualities. Notice how Gilchrist praises Moon's originality and realism, as well as its SF intertextuality; in his review, he also, like many, draws attention to how director Duncan Jones "maximizes his $5 million budget," achieving effects "that work just as well or better than the comparative shots that the most expensive budget could provide." Gilchrist's conclusions about Moon prove intriguing when put alongside those about Avatar, summarized just above, especially in the matter of originality: Moon is "original" in its references to other SF works, while Avatar is clichéd and derivative for doing what other SF works have already done; Moon "feels ... real and ... fantastic," while Avatar's world is implausible, unbelievable.

   My goal is not to argue that one film is better than the other. As I write above, I value both films immensely. Rather, my goal is to offer them as a comparative test case for thinking about the current and possible future condition of SF. Individually, Avatar and Moon exemplify what SF can do as a genre that both transports us to other worlds and shows us the state of our world, and doing so grounded in a fundamentally technoscientific and industrial/post-industrial perspective. One important affinity between the films, for example, is that both use innovations in the technology of film to tell their stories (i.e., Avatar's new 3D cameras; Moon's two separate performances by Sam Rockwell on the screen simultaneously); another affinity is a concern with the effects upon identity of alternate, cloned bodies and existence. Affinities aside, however, Avatar is indisputably a huge, global, popular success, while Moon is (unfortunately) a quietly critically acclaimed film -- and there are reasons why.

   Adam Roberts, in The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2006), proposes that beginning in the 1980s, "the dominant mode of SF altered from written to visual paradigms" (301): film, television, graphic novels. Furthermore, he writes that the "greatest aesthetic impact" of SF films resides in "an idiom of striking and beautiful images" instead of "narrative, character or even, particularly, spectacle" (186-87). For Roberts, SF of the last several decades is highlighted by what he calls "poetic moments" (187), such as the ape's bone becoming a spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey or images from The Matrix; Roberts also references novels, but films provide "the most resonant and beautiful images" (187). Avatar and Moon certainly succeed in the resonance and beauty of their poetic moments. Yet Avatar's "aesthetic impact" constitutes the source, the wellspring, of its massive, global popularity and hence why it is the sort of film that can save SF from itself.

   Recall that Rusch contends SF needs a return to "gosh-wow, sense-of-wonder" entertainment, to "grand adventure" and "uplifting ... endings." Such SF is generally looked down upon by the "Science Fiction Village," which does its best to guard the gates of proper SF and keep out the "barbarians" who focus on "entertaining" and "telling stories ... that the fans like to read." Rusch's brief for tie-in novels as the key to SF's survival is echoed somewhat by Sarah A. Hoyt in her SF Signal essay "The Death of Science Fiction: It Ain't Over Till the Fat Droid Sings" (available here), where she suggests, "perhaps we want to look at how the looser forms of science fiction do in movies and tv and how they reach audiences our science fiction writers can't even dream of." Hoyt urges at the close of her essay, "Allow writers to dream and they will. Allow stories to inspire dreams and the readers will come." To apply Rusch and Hoyt to Avatar, the Village wants to refuse entry to James Cameron's film even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Avatar has reached an audience unattainable by proper SF: uplifting with the entertainment of its grand adventure; inspiring with its gosh-wow visual sense-of-wonder.

   Avatar, like Star Wars before it, has exposed people to the imaginative power of SF on a massive scale and so represents the salvation of SF. I am in no way claiming that a film such as Moon thus represents the death of SF. Instead, I firmly believe that the genre needs and must produce both kinds of film, both kinds of SF. Rusch writes, "We can keep the dystopian fiction and the realistic, if difficult-to-read, sf novels, so long as we do them in moderation. They cannot -- and should not -- be the dominant subgenre on the shelves." A significant implication of Rusch's position is that SF can stir us with hope just as much as it can challenge us with a critical, jaundiced eye. Too much of the latter, however, and SF risks myopia.

   Moon captivates by its darkness, by the brilliance of how it unfolds the horror of a human being turned into a replicated commodity with a predetermined expiry date, free will only an illusion.

   Avatar mesmerises by its brightness, by the exuberance with which the colours and life of Pandora burst in front of our eyes, kindling hope and wonder. We need to see more of this kind of SF, too -- more such barbarians crashing through the walls and into the Village.

   Otherwise, some of the visitors to the Village will look elsewhere for their entertainment.

Postscript
There is an attempt to bring hope and uplift to literary SF: the anthology SHINE, edited by Jetse de Vries, and scheduled for release in April 2010 through Solaris Books. According to de Vries, SHINE will be a collection of "optimistic SF" stories, as quoted on Futurismic. The SHINE blog can be found here.

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Jan. 2010), Part IV

2010-02-25T13:28:00.004-05:00

• See Part I.

• See Part II.

• See Part III.

6. Carol Emswhiller, "Wilds" (pg. 76-82) *** 1/2

Read 2 Feb. 2010. This story is a strange one to find in Asimov's: not clearly either SF or fantasy. Yet it is wholly engrossing and superbly executed. I'm going to call it a fantasy of sorts (maybe even a fable), as its unnamed first-person narrator lives out the fantasy of escaping from and leaving behind the everyday world of rental cars, jobs, neighbours, and so forth, by discovering and then surviving in "the wilds" (77). The world rejected by the narrator is our world, now -- not an SF near-future or alternate past, but now. Emshwiller thus constructs a fantasy of the reconnection with nature and the primal and the physical, wholly unmediated by technology or other modern conveniences: a fantasy of awakening to one's deepest and true desires ("But even as I swallow little snakes, I'm singing" [77]), and so to one's essential self, the world be damned ("I look at my reflection and I see exactly who I am" [82]). For the narrator, such rejection and reconnection relies upon "hiding" as his "way of life" (77): finding the highest, most inaccessible place "away from everybody" (76); building a tower of stones to give himself a better view, but making it look like a "natural formation" (77); eventually, he dresses "in mud" and smells of "ferns" (82), invisible to campers and hikers. Even the woman who shows up at his mountain with a Gucci purse filled with $50,000 worth of $100 bills is escaping and hiding. She's running from the law, certainly, having "'just picked ... up'" (81) an unguarded bag containing the money, then buying herself the Gucci purse, dinner at a "'fancy French restaurant'" (81), and a car -- as she says, "'Stuff I've never had before'" (81). She acted in defiance, then, of a world that alienates her (economically, materially), a world to which she was hidden. However, her motives for coming to "the wilds" are not as pure as the narrator's, for she remains tied to the material(ist) desires of the world, wanting to retrieve the bills scattered about the narrator's mountain, instead of, like the narrator, truly confronting her self and becoming "part of the wilds" (79). All of this is told by Emshwiller with a sharply focussed and consistent voice, the narrator's short and constrained sentences feeling decisive and practical, offering only as much communication as is necessary, but everywhere hinting at loss and nostalgia. What sort of world, we might ask, causes a man to cast it off utterly, to the point of real nakedness and drinking water "as an animal would" (82)? What is so alienating about such a world that a man's true self is concealed from him. The narrator does something I suspect many of us have contemplated or fantasised about doing. Yet the cost of his victory suggests caution at the end, for he achieves a wholly solitary life, hidden from campers and hikers, secretively leaving $100 bills in their shoes and pockets and hats while they sleep, playing "mysterious" (82) songs on his flute at night. I am sympathetic to his desires and choices, even jealous of them. I don't know that I would have the courage to realise them.

7. Allen M. Steele, "The Jekyll Island Horror" (pg. 84-100) ****

Read 2 Feb. 2010. The highlight piece of this issue, signalled by the cover art and for the quality of the story. This piece is alternate-history horror SF, hinting at homage to Lovecraft and mining the conventional conspiracy theory that aliens have already visited Earth but we either don't know it or can't know it because the evidence is mysteriously unavailable. Steele makes use of the device of the frame narrative, but plays with the (expectation of the) distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, for he is the frame narrator who acquired and provides to the "public" (86) the "typewritten manuscript" (86) containing the ostensibly true story of a brief and "terrifying" (86) encounter with an alien on Jekyll Island in "March 1934" (86). Steele-as-narrator sows the somewhat obligatory doubt regarding the truth of Solomon Hess's tale ("I don't know whether to believe this story; that I'll leave to the reader" [86]), which is reinforced by the knowledge that Hess had "written a few SF stories ... during the pulp era" (85) -- and that he served as "personal valet" (86) to William Apollo Russell, a New York publisher who put out "cheap fiction magazines that catered to the masses" (86), such as "Fascinating Science-Fiction" (86). I admit to liking stories that employ this strategy of internally raising questions of reliability and fallibility, of belief and trust. That Steele adds a further layer of uncertainty by including himself in the transmission of the tale only heightens the intrigue (i.e., did this really happen? it's a novelette in a major SF&F fiction market, so it has to be made-up, right?).
Steele handles that intrigue skillfully, spending time first introducing the exclusive, upper-class world of Jekyll Island in the 1930s, to which William A. Russell gains admittance. Russell winters there in early 1934, enjoying "the Jekyll Island social scene" (89), Hess his only servant. All was "relaxed" (91), until some "strange occurrences ... and the horror that soon followed" (91). At this point, Steele effectively builds tension by delaying the climactic encounter with the alien by restricting the narrative to the process of what Hess knew and experienced. There was an "abrupt boom from somewhere high," then "voices raised in astonishment," and then Russell "rushed" into Hess's room, "wild-eyed and out of breath" (91). Quickly, Russell put on his "outdoor gear" (92) and drove to the site of the suspected meteor. The next morning, Russell took Hess the site, going on foot "to avoid being seen" (93), swearing Hess to silence. Russell brought Hess for his "'expertise'" as "'an astute thinker in subjects of a speculative nature'" (95): i.e., because Hess wrote SF and so could offer insight into the "creature" (94) on the Jekyll Island beach that definitely "wasn't from Earth" (94). Steele manages pacing wonderfully as Hess, Russell, and others inspect the alien and hypothesize about its nature, Russell finally suggesting that "'it presents an opportunity that we'd be foolish to miss'" and so could be "'profitable'" (96). Here, Steele makes the story at least partly a satire of class pretensions and hubris, the servant Hess being the only one concerned with "proper scientific observation" (97) while the others climbed atop the alien for a photograph, claiming their prize and property. Of course, they paid for their greed. Eventually, Hess was visited by two men from "U.S. Army intelligence" (100) and given the job not only of keeping the truth quiet but also of watching for signs "that the creature may have returned" (100).
The story, then, shines for its plotting, narrative structure, and willingness to play with layers of unreliability and uncertainty. For me, it also shines for what I will call its science-fictional self-reflexivity. "The Jekyll Island Horror" is a novelette written by an SF author and published in an SF magazine; the SF author makes himself part of the story, acting as an SF author who receives a manuscript from the son of man who was a published SF author; at the heart of the story is the classic SF trope of the alien encounter, an event that Hess could appreciate properly because he wrote and read SF. This science-fictional self-reflexivity generates some provocative questions. Do the conventions, tropes, and discourse of SF prepare us for the possibility of an actual alien encounter? Do they make us more willing to accept and believe that such an encounter could occur? Do they help us potentially approach such an encounter with a mindset not focussed solely on exploitation and personal gain? In other words, Steele's story implies that a science-fictional way of thinking might save us from a deadly alien encounter, a way of thinking that we can acquire from (the history and tradition of) SF stories ... a way of thinking that is not merely and simply "speculative" but practical, useful.

Final Thoughts
• Overall, the Jan. 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is a rather strong, including one truly excellent story (Steele), two very strong stories (Roberson, Emswhiller), one really good story (Tem), and three average stories (Landis, Reed, Shoulders). The strongest story is Steele's; the weakest is Reed's.

• In this issue, the better pieces succeed especially in their plotting and structure, particularly regarding the completeness and resolution of the story at stake. With short stories/novelettes, focus is the key, it seems: knowing precisely the story that must be told, which means centring on the proper and most interesting point of crisis and change for the main character(s). We want to meet characters at a time of significance in their lives, when they experience something that alters them -- or their world -- fundamentally. Also, the better pieces succeed, as I discovered from the Dec. 2009 issue of Asimov's, owing to consistency in voice, tone, and mood.

• In this issue, the metaphorical suppleness of the pieces by Steele, Emshwiller, Roberson, and Tem further sets them apart. I appreciate stories that reveal attention to layers of meaning, and stories that can play with the conventions and assumptions of their genre.

SF Signal Meme: What Book Are You Reading Now?

2010-02-06T22:26:00.002-05:00

I haven't done something like this before, but thought I would follow the meme started by John DeNardo at SF Signal, What Book Are You Reading Now?

(1) What book are you reading now?
Redemption Ark, by Alastair Reynolds.

(2) Why did you choose it?
Last year, I read and loved Revelation Space and Chasm City, so I want to continue with and finish Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy (Absolution Gap is on deck). As well, I am now a dedicated fan of Reynolds' work, so I want to see if I can get caught up with all his novels in the next, say, year or there about. Finally, after recently reading some Earth-based, near-future SF (Beggars in Spain, Snow Crash), I was in the mood for a far-future space opera.

(3) What's the best thing about it?
I'm just about 100 pages in, so obviously I can't speak to the novel as a whole, but Reynolds is doing in Redemption Ark what I enjoyed in Revelation Space: shifting between a variety of point-of-view characters, moving the reader not just among different perspectives but different parts of the setting (geographically, politically, historically) ... not to mention different subjective timelines. Though it's early chapters yet, I'm already curious about the relationships and tensions between the Conjoiners and Demarchists, because the characters are intriguing, distinct. Then there's Reynolds' always fascinating far-future tech and neo-cyberpunk sensibility.

(4) What's the worst thing about it?
Again, I'm only about 100 pages in, but I will say that some of the shifts between different point-of-view characters are not signalled clearly enough, especially when they occur within the same chapter. I've found myself disoriented a couple of times (but I found my way quickly enough). Also, I'm not sure why, but it's taken me at least three or four attempts to start and make significant progress into each Reynolds novel I've read. I wonder if it's about becoming accustomed to Reynolds' style or about the density of information Reynolds establishes right away? Or, both? In any case, once I really get going, putting down a Reynolds novel is not easy.

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Jan. 2010), Part III

2010-02-05T18:03:00.006-05:00

• See Part I.

• See Part II.

4. Chris Roberson, "Wonder House" (pg. 53-69) *** 1/2
Read 31 Jan. 2010. Alternate history SF, (re)imagining the confluence of events and inspirations that created the comic book. I will admit that I thoroughly enjoy this sort of story, which meditates on not just the origins of a form/media (comics) but also treats with playful reverence the origins and concerns of its own genre (SF) -- and does succinctly, never swerving from its tone or its subject, moving the story (and the reader) inexorably to the moment of revelation that is a joy because it is understood, anticipated right at the last second before it arrives. On the planet "Fire Star" (54), Yacov Leiber and Itzhak Blumenfeld have been running "Wonder House Publications" (53) for twenty years, their fortunes rising adn falling (or plateauing) by their ability to publish "terribles" (54) -- i.e., pulp magazines -- that readers desire. Roberson brings us into their publishing house and lives at a moment of crisis and the need for change, as Wonder House's fortunes are in decline, Yacov and Itzhak's editing a bit out of step with readers' current tastes. They brainstorm different ideas for new or renewed stories and series, such as "'war title'" (55) or a "'gun-slinger title'" (55) or a "'character title, like Doctor Buckingham'" (55) or "relaunching Celestial Bureaucracy'" (56), but find various reasons why such titles would not work in the present climate for terribles. In the process, Roberson crafts a history of Fire Star's terribles, which clearly mirrors Earth's history of the the pulps (especially from the Gernsback era of the late 1920s on, I think), bringing that history to a point of transition, for what Wonder House needs is something truly new, truly innovative if it will reclaim its "readership" (57) and marketshare. That something truly new is the simultaneous arrival of SF and comics, as Segal, a young writer doggedly trying to get "regular work writing for terribles" (58), and Kurtzberg, a young artist, bring their "'thing'" (58) to Yacov and Itzhak: a story about a man from the future sent back in time, depicted by Kurtzberg as a "muscular figure wearing a skin-tight costume" (58) . . . and, yes, think Superman, for this man from the future will have "the Hebrew letter Shin" (58) as a log on his chest, which stands for "'Shaddai,'" or "'The Almighty'" (58). Initially sceptical, Itzhak sees the potential in what Segal and Kurtzberg have brought to Wonder House, having the flash of inspiration to put the focus on Kurtzberg's illustrations as the main narrative, with Segal's text used in "'snippets'" (59) on top of the illustrations. "'This could work'" (59), Itzhak says, and the reader agrees, because the reader knows he's right. So, a story about the very moment of the creation of a new form and a new genre of story, and thus a story that is also about Story itself. Roberson's shifting of the origins of SF and comics to another planet and into another cultural register from the default Anglo-American roots of both SF and comics in our history lends his piece another layer of inspiration, surprise. (I particularly appreciate his use of SF to imagine the beginnings of SF . . . and the publication of his story in a magazine that can be seen as the modern-day evolution and inheritor of the pulps, er terribles.)

5. Robert Reed, "The Good Hand" (pg. 60-75) ** 1/2

Read 31 Jan. 2010. This one starts strongly, owing in particular to the hook of the narrator's voice and personality, which are edgy and egotistical in equal measure. We begin with Kyle Betters at the airport, his reservation lost: "The bloodless beauty behind the counter explained that I could wait for tomorrow's flight out of Chicago, or, 'You can sit with the other sheep and pray for no-shows.' Her phrasing, not mine. I chose the flock . . .'" (60). Betters' world is an apparently near-future/alternate Earth in which America has a total economic and political monopoly on nuclear power and technology, especially weapons. (One consequence are "rad-hunters," six of whom are on Kyle's flight to France.) He's on his way to Paris, France, for business negotiations with a French company to which he is selling something, but exactly what "isn't important" (63). While in Paris and representing his company, Kyle also represents America, serving as a target for the political and cultural dissatisfactions, criticisms, and anxieties of the French, including Claude, Kyle's chaperon, and Noelene. Claude says to Kyle, "'Uranium is a natural element. Does the United States claim ownership of a native part of our universe?'" (62). Noelene at one point says to Kyle, "'I say you're sneaky and subtle and tenacious and bloodless. . . . We surrender more and more to the United States. Because every new technology is a threat, and you believe you can make our world safe'" (65). Reed sets up these sociopolitical and economic tensions nicely in the first third of the story, heightening their effect by having Kyle repeatedly disavow any sort of political interest(s) and deepening their implications by having one of the characters draw a link to the Nazi occupation of France during WW2. Reed then deftly shifts the story into a kinetic race for the German border, as Noelene attempts to get Kyle out of France at a sudden moment of international uncertainty, America having apparently bombed France's space program located in Algeria (69). Yet this switch, while adding energy and pace, also, for me, disrupted the interest generated by Kyle's voice and personality, as he loses his edge, his egotism, his . . . centre. Also, while Kyle does acknowledge at one point that "several elements of this story are best left dressed in harmless falsehoods" (63), the story leaves too much out. Reed keeps the focus on the characters and the action, and he sketches a rather intriguing -- and quite plausible -- alternate political/economic world order (that perhaps can be seen to reflect upon the current American anxieties related to terrorism), but I finished the story wanting a more solid anchor in that different world order, for I could see Kyle's personality as in effect a reflection of it, or at least of its negative psychological/moral consequences. In the end, the story lost the steam it generated at the beginning.

6. Carol Emshwiller, "Wilds" (pg. 76-82)

7. Allen M. Steele, "The Jekyll Island Horror" (pg. 84-100)

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Jan. 2010), Part II

2010-01-29T12:54:00.004-05:00

• See Part I.

2. Felicity Shoulders, "Conditional Love" (pg. 32-43) ** 1/2

Read 28 Jan. 2010. This is a well-crafted near-future dystopia in which genetic engineering creates enhanced children -- and can go wrong, requiring special medical and social institutions to handle the mistakes, such as the "Gene-Engineered Pediatric In-Patient Center" (32). The main character, Dr. Grace Stellar, has been working for eleven years at GEPIC, treating and dealing with the children dropped off or "dumped" (32) by their parents: such as Minerva, born without arms or legs, but in the process of having her arms grown by a combination of a special gel and operations. Then there is the new kid, John Doe, genetically modified to be "above the mean for cuteness" (33), yet has what amounts to constant short-term memory loss (think Memento): each time he sees someone, he starts all over again with, "'Who are you?'" (33). Shoulders weaves in intriguing aspects of the wider sociocultural consequences of "guppies" (34), as children such as Minerva and John Doe are called by some: i.e., the police detective Bob Kafouri, who is trying to gather enough evidence to bring down not just individual "'opt-docs,'" but the entire "'industry'" (35). The story's setting feels wholly plausible, and unnerving. Also, Grace makes for an effective main character and point-of-view, for we gradually understand that she is reaching (or has already reached) a kind of crossroads, an internal crisis built up after years of treating and caring for discarded, genetically misengineered kids. John Doe, about six years old and named "Danny" by Bob, serves as the catalyst for Grace finally to take drastic action, as she knows the cruelty of his memory loss will make him a difficult case to find the proper care for. The decision Grace makes is revealed expertly by Shoulders, leaving the reader with a mixture of compassion and a bit of horror. Yet I feel about this piece much like I felt about Landis's: I just read the prologue to the real story; I just got the build-up to the truly interesting matter of how Grace deals with her act of resistance and its effects upon Danny (and Minerva). Again, I am asking a writer to give me a different story than what I read, but, again, my sense is of an opportunity missed for a more challenging, provocative, and dynamic story. For instance, Danny and his memory loss defect contains great potential for exploring more of the implications of seeing/not seeing, recognition/not recognizing, in a society that dumps and disowns its failed human experiments: why do parents and doctors and corporations engage in their various blindnesses? what would make them see the moral, ethical, and very material costs of their hubris? would Grace's act of resistance become a flashpoint for wider social change?

3. Steve Rasnic Tem, "A Letter from the Emperor" (pg. 44-52) ***

Read 29 Jan. 2010. A space opera that focusses on Jacob Westman, a "sensor" (45) who travels to and between the worlds of the Emperor, picking up and delivering messages as well as monitoring and recording communications. He recently lost his fellow sensor and shipmate, Anders Nils, to an apparent suicide, and questions how much they were actually friends: "despite their long service together ... he and Anders weren't even friends, as far as he understood. Suddenly he wasn't sure. Was that possible?" (45). Tem sets up Jacob effectively at the story's start: he's at a point of crisis and doubt, and he generates interest for the nature of his response to Nils's suicide, which is somewhat coldly rational, even a bit selfish. Moreover, Jacob's inability to see the signs of depression in Nils is interrogated by ship command, which is linked to Command proper, giving us a hint of the layers of bureaucracy and monitoring of this interplanetary empire. Jacob goes to the world known as "960G4-32" (47), or "Joy" (46) as the officer Anya calls it, to deliver messages, scheduled to stay only for "two sleeps" (47). Anya's father, Colonel William Bolduan, is about to retire from his post of overseeing 960G4-32, and he is hoping for a personal letter from the Emperor acknowledging his long years of service -- but also because, according him, he knew personally and once fought in a war beside the Emperor. Tem paces this story carefully, keeps the focus solely on Jacob's point-of-view, maintains a consistent tone and voice, and deftly links together themes of memory and communication and truth and "fabrication" (49) and the crafting of (a) story. Jacob delivers the Emperor's letter to the Colonel in a way that brings together his skills as a sensor, his attempt to understand his (failed) relationship with Nils, and his compassion for those at the margins of an empire that may no longer have an actual emperor. The letter he constructs for the Colonel blurs the lines between facts and falsehoods, but is nonetheless true: for the Colonel, and for him. Jacob's truth is a sombre one: stories can also simply stop working for us, at which point we face the question of what is left to keep us living if our imaginations prove incapable of sustaining hopes, illusions, desires. Unlike the pieces by Landis and Shoulders, this one feels complete and resolved, like it told the correct and most interesting story. That Tem leaves the reader considering the very function of story, of fiction in particular, only lends his piece a certain self-reflexive substance that encourages reflection upon how much of our sense of identity and place in the world results from stories, even those we make up.

4. Chris Roberson, "Wonder House" (pg. 53-59)

5. Robert Reed, "The Good Hand" (pg. 60-75)

6. Carol Emshwiller, "Wilds" (pg. 76-82)

7. Allen M. Steele, "The Jekyll Island Horror" (pg. 84-100)

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Jan. 2010), Part I

2010-01-27T01:01:00.000-05:00

I continue with my project of reading Asimov's Science Fiction to learn what kind of story gets accepted in one of SF&F's top markets. The Dec. 2009 issue was, I thought, fairly decent overall, but lacking at least one story of true excellence/brilliance. I'm intrigued to see what the Jan. 2010 issue holds in store for me.

1. Geoffrey A. Landis, "Marya and the Pirate" (pg. 14-31) ** 1/2
Read 26 Jan. 2010. Something of a space opera, this one, featuring a seemingly vulnerable young woman alone on a spaceship with a valuable cargo and the titular pirate who wants that valuable cargo but who has a healthy sense of compassion and honour. Landis sketches in effectively a setting with an interplanetary economy that has left some (mining) colonies bankrupt, desperate, and engaged in illegal activities such as stealing necessities such as water -- the mission of Domingo Bonaventura, our pirate. Landis also establishes and maintains a steady tension in the relationship between Domingo and his captive, May Hamilton (a.k.a. Marya Hayes): sexual tension, as well as the possibility of the need for violence on Domingo's part ("trust" is something of moving target between Domingo and May). The plotting is sharp, with good momentum, especially in the latter stages of the story as Domingo and May face nearly certain death in a spaceship careening toward Earth's atmosphere with little chance to change course. Also, Landis saves a few surprises and revelations for the end that deepen both characters. However, it's those surprises and new layers to the characters that I feel make for the true story . . . and Marya the character who has the most intriguing choices to make and conflicts to resolve, as well as the background I most want to know about (just how did she end up on a ship by herself with a cargo of valuable water? why would she want to "get in contact with a pirate" [42] later on, besides romance?). I realize that I am asking Landis to write a different story. Yet I feel like there was an opportunity missed here, like I read the prologue to the real story -- although this reaction can also be seen as a testament to the world and characters Landis offers in the story, for I do want more of both.

2. Felicity Shoulders, "Conditional Love" (pg. 32-43)

3. Steve Rasnic Tem, "A Letter from the Emperor" (pg. 44-52)

4. Chris Roberson, "Wonder House" (pg. 53-59)

5. Robert Reed, "The Good Hand" (pg. 60-75)

6. Carol Emshwiller, "Wilds" (pg. 76-82)

7. Allen M. Steele, "The Jekyll Island Horror" (pg. 84-100)

On Story and Avatar

2010-01-08T02:12:00.007-05:00

• Thoughts on Avatar
• Further Thoughts on Avatar

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

Back to Avatar again, this time to offer some thoughts on its story and its script, particularly because I keep seeing the same comment(s) about the film with unfortunate regularity.

For an example, I quote Ken of Neth Space:

The story is terribly cliché, predictable, heavy-handed, and quite hypocritical coming from Hollywood. And it's a great movie. ... The presentation is spectacular ....

This passage effectively sums up the general response to Avatar across much of the SF&F blogosphere, and from people with whom I've discussed the film. At this point, the response itself is becoming clichéd and predictable. I see two consequences: first, the perpetuation of a misconception about Avatar's story; second, an unwillingness to engage with that story on its own terms and to consider why Cameron made specific choices.

   To see a review that does engage with the story and consider Cameron's choices, I recommend Roz Kaveney's piece at Strange Horizons. It is the most thorough and astute commentary on the film I have read yet.

   I want to suggest something about Avatar's story that might initially seem a bit addled to some: namely, that its supposed clichés and predictability in fact constitute its great strength and the source of its emotional power -- and that Cameron did this on purpose.

   The basic plot of Avatar's story is not original; the basic roles fulfilled by many of the central characters are nothing new. I do not dispute such claims. Yet the key is how we choose to frame the significance of such familiarity: i.e., we can dismiss it as mere cliché and predictability, or we can credit Cameron for consciously employing known archetypes and mythical structures for a reason.

   Avatar's unabashed reliance upon the nearly universal cycle of the hero's journey in myths and epics makes not just for effective storytelling, giving us characters and situations with which we can immediately identify and in which we can become invested, but also for a film with broad and adaptable appeal. The seeming straightforwardness of Avatar's narrative creates opportunities for a wide range of audiences to find a way into the film, whether that way is Jake himself or the romance between Jake and Neytiri or the conflict between Good (Na'vi) and Evil (humanity) or the discovery of Pandora.

   In this respect, as much as Avatar is most directly impressive for its visual beauty, it is actually all about the story. When watched (and read) closely, the film reveals how expertly it is plotted, how carefully it is shot and edited. Consider, for instance, that the first and last shots of Jake are close-ups of him opening his eyes, waking up to a new life -- first during his arrival to Pandora as a fresh recruit to the avatar program, then finally reborn as a Na'vi. Consider, too, how waking up is not just a repeated visual motif throughout the film, but how it also appears several times in the dialogue between characters (such as a scene between Augustine, Selfridge, and Quaritch) and supports the centrality of seeing and perceiving differently to Jake's development. Consider that Jake's exuberance for physically experiencing Pandora is established early, as he gets ready to enter his creche for the first time and pokes his finger into the soft gel of the bed, smiling with open wonder. Consider that everything Jake learns from Neytiri in order to become and to see as a Na'vi returns in the narrative, such as using vines and massive leaves to slow a fall from a great height or knowing how to make "saheylu" (the bond) with various Pandoran creatures. Consider, finally, the repetitions of Neytiri defending Jake and/or saving his life, each time the context slightly different and the stakes higher.

   The broad appeal and seeming straightforwardness of Avatar's story are also, I want to suggest, at the heart of the variety of reactions to and debates about the film. Here is where matters get truly intriguing, for I think Cameron has anticipated many of the criticisms against Avatar and made a film that reveals more about the assumptions and ideological investments of its critics and viewers than they do about its shortcomings or supposed hypocrisies. Many, for instance, seem to elide how subversive the film is by making the clearly American corporation and its mercenaries the bad guys, encouraging the audience to desire their defeat and applaud their expulsion from Pandora. (Pushing this reading a bit further, the deep irony of Avatar is that Cameron has delivered a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a successful violent response to the hypercapitalist imperialism of his own Western culture, and done so from the inside with the means and through the institutions of that culture. In this vein, we might attend to how some non-Western, Third World, and currently or formerly colonised peoples are responding to Avatar.) Whatever the criticism, positive or negative, Avatar is at least generating discussion, which is more than we can say for most films these days.

   In the end, the common claim that Avatar's story is "terribly cliché [and] predictable" proves most unfortunate because it in fact condemns Cameron for doing exactly what he should be doing as a storyteller: generating conflict that arises naturally from the events and from the actions and motivations of the characters, then bringing everything to a resolution and inducing catharsis for the audience. Originality takes many forms and means different things in different sociocultural contexts. Thus, perhaps Avatar's accessibility, familiarity, and (potential) universality represent its true achievement, clothed in the now very mainstream tropes and conventions of SF and aiming for that "sense of wonder" so fundamental to traditional SF.

   Perhaps this is precisely what Cameron intended.

Book Reviewing and Blogging

2010-01-03T01:34:00.001-05:00

Recently, a fair amount of discussion (and debate) on book reviewing and blogging made its way across the SF&F blogosphere. I found this discussion intriguing and informative, and so wanted to collect and organize the various comments here.

Author Mark Charan Newton cast the first stone with his blog post, What Makes a Good Book Blogger? (From a Writer's Point of View).

Some book bloggers/reviewers responded (reading the comments for these posts expands the discussion significantly):

• King of the Nerds

• Fantasy Book News & Reviews

• Neth Space

• The World in the Satin Bag

The discussion also led to blog posts on the issue of reviewing from 2008:

• OF Blog of the Fallen: 1 March 2008 and 10 December 2008

• Jeff VanderMeer (29 March 2008)

• Hal Duncan (8 June 2008)

Finally, James at Speculative Horizons posted his excellent and helpful tips on blogging and reviewing: Things I've learned about blogging.

2009 Books Read and Films Seen

2010-01-01T10:58:00.001-05:00

Now that it's a new year, I need to clear the slate for my reading and film lists, but I wanted to ensure that both lists did not just dissolve away into cyberspace never to be seen again (by me, at least).

My "best of" lists for 2009 readings and films are here.

2009 Reading List (Out of 4 Stars)
• Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan, 2002) ** 1/2
• Anathem (Neal Stephenson, 2008) ****
• Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009) ***
• Blindsight (Peter Watts, 2006) ****
• Calculating God (Robert J. Sawyer, 2000) * 1/2
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1959) ****
• Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds, 2001) ***
• Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks, 1987) ** 1/2
• Darwin's Radio (Greg Bear, 1999) ***
• Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1994) ****
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams, 1979) ***
• Hominids (Robert J. Sawyer, 2003) * 1/2
• The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle, 1968) *** 1/2
• Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1993) ****
• Revelation Space (Alastair Reynolds, 2000) *** 1/2
• River of Gods (Ian McDonald, 2006) ****
• The Upside of Down (Thomas Homer-Dixon, 2008) *** 1/2
• Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986) *****
• What is America? (Ronald Wright, 2008) ** 1/2
• Year's Best SF 14 (Hartwell and Cramer, eds., 2009) ***

Films Seen in 2009 (Out of 4 Stars)
• 2012 (2009) * 1/2
• Avatar (2009) *****
• Away We Go (2009) *** 1/2
• Bright Star (2009) ****
• The Brothers Bloom (2008) ** 1/2
• The Class / Entre Les Murs (2009) ****
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) ***
• District 9 (2009) *** 1/2
• Donnie Darko (2001) ***
• Doubt (2008) ****
• Frost/Nixon (2008) ***
• The Hangover (2009) ***
• Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) ****
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) ***
• The Informant! (2009) *** 1/2
• I Love You, Man (2009) ***
• Inglourious Basterds (2009) ****
• Julie & Julia (2009) ***
• Knowing (2009) **
• The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) ***
• Milk (2008) ****
• Nine (2009) ***
• Ponyo (2009) ****
• Quantum of Solace (2008) ***
• Rachel Getting Married (2008) ****
• The Reader (2008) *** 1/2
• Revolutionary Road (2008) ****
• The Road (2009) *** 1/2
• Star Trek (2009) *** 1/2
• State of Play (2009) ***
• Synecdoche, New York (2008) ****
• Up (2009) ****
• Valkyrie (2008) ** 1/2
• Waltz with Bashir (2009) *** 1/2
• W. (2008) ***
• Watchmen (2009) ****
• Where the Wild Things Are (2009) *** 1/2
• The Wrestler (2008) *** 1/2

Favourites of 2009

2009-12-27T01:52:00.031-05:00

Inspired by SF Signal's recent Mind Meld posts on the "best genre-related books/films/shows consumed in 2009," I thought I might give my Top 10 lists for SF&F novels and short stories read this year (for the first time) -- seeing as most of what I read was originally published before 2009. Then, I'll throw in a list for films.

Favourite SF&F Novels Read in 2009 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986) *****
2. Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992) ****
3. Blindsight (Peter Watts, 2006) ****
4. Anathem (Neal Stephenson, 2008) ****
5. Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1994) ****
6. River of Gods (Ian McDonald, 2004) ****
7. Revelation Space (Alastair Reynolds, 2000) *** 1/2
8. The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle, 1968) *** 1/2
9. Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds, 2001) ***
10. Darwin's Radio (Greg Bear, 1999) ***

Most Disappointing: Calculating God (Robert J. Sawyer, 2000); Hominids (Robert J. Sawyer, 2003); Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks, 1987).

Favourite SF&F Short Fiction Read in 2009 (Out of 4 Stars)
1. "Exhalation," Ted Chiang (2008) ****
2. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," James Tiptree, Jr. (1973) ****
3. "Story of Your Life," Ted Chiang (1998) ****
4. "Tideline," Elizabeth Bear (2007) ****
5. "Pump Six," Paolo Bacigalupi (2008) ****
6. "Verthandi's Ring," Ian McDonald (2007) ****
7. "The Sledgemaker's Daughter," Alastair Reynolds (2007) ****
8. "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," Ursula K. Le Guin (1971) ****
9. "Minla's Flowers," Alastair Reynolds (2007) *** 1/2
10. "Boojum," Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette (2008) *** 1/2

Honourable Mentions: "The Spires of Denon," Kristine Kathryn Rusch (2009); "Memory Dog," Kathleen Ann Goonan (2008); "Mitigation," Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell (2008); "End Game," Nancy Kress (2007); "Splinters of Glass," Mary Rosenblum (2007); "Sanjeev and Robotwallah," Ian McDonald (2007).

Favourite 2009 Films (Out of 4 Stars)
1. Avatar  *****
2. Watchmen  ****
3. Inglourious Basterds  ****
4. Bright Star  ****
5. Up  ****
6. Ponyo  ****
7. The Class  ****
8. District 9  *** 1/2
9. The Informant!  *** 1/2
10. Where The Wild Things Are  *** 1/2

Worst Film Seen in 2009: 2012  * 1/2

Top 5 Non-2009 Films Seen in 2009: (1) Synecdoche, New York; (2) Rachel Getting Married; (3) Happy-Go-Lucky; (4) Revolutionary Road; (5) Doubt.

Here are links to some other end-of-year, best-of lists from the SF&F blogosphere (to be updated as more lists become available):
• Adventures in Reading
• Antick Musings
• Bookgasm
• A Dribble of Ink
• Fantasy Book Critic (Liviu)

• Fantasy Book Critic (Mihir)
• Fantasy Book Critic (Robert)
• Fantasy Cafe
• Fantasy & SciFi Lovin' News & Reviews

• Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
• OF Blog of the Fallen
• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
• SF Signal (John DeNardo)
• Speculative Horizons

• Stomping on Yeti
• Strange Horizons (multiple reviewers)
• Suvudu

• Visions of Paradise
• Walker of Worlds
• The Wertzone
• The World in the Satin Bag

Further Thoughts on Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009)

2009-12-25T10:37:00.008-05:00

Some further reviews and commentaries on Avatar:
• Nick Mamatas (a silly rant, interesting for the level and bile of its silliness)
• 'Avatar' and the War of Genres (Gerry Canavan)
• When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? (Annalee Newitz @ io9)
• The Blue Future of Video Games (Stephen Totilo @ Kotaku)
• Intentions be damned, Avatar is racist (SEK @ Acephalous)
• John Scalzi on the most memorable SF films of 2009
• The Wertzone
• SF Signal (Scott Shaffer)
• Locus (Gary Westfahl)
• Speculative Horizons

   I wrote in my other post on Avatar that Art functions to challenge and potentially change how we see our world and ourselves, relating this idea to what I think constitutes the central theme of the film: to see differently, to perceive in a new way.

   One clear sign that a work of Art has succeeded in this function can be found in the multiplicity of readings, arguments, critiques, reactions, and emotions generated by the film. With Avatar, the variety and even vehemence of readings of the film are proving most important in this respect. If anything, the film is at least inspiring discussion and debate -- not just about whether it's awesome or sucks, but for its politics and sociocultural meanings.

   More specifically, I suggest that a significant part of the film's success resides in its openness to multiple, various interpretations . . . as well as in the way it exposes, or reflects back, the reductiveness or overdetermination or oversimplification of some of those interpretations. Put in a slightly different way, Avatar, I think, is quickly becoming an excellent example of how people will see in a work of Art what they want, need, desire to see, thereby closing themselves off from, blinding themselves to, or outright distrusting the wider, more universal meanings at play in the film. In other words, Avatar appears to be generating both insightful commentary and misprisions (i.e., willfull misreadings).

   A common critique of Avatar claims that the story is clichéd, conventional, too simple, unoriginal, boring, vapid, and so on. The standard question goes, "With all the investment in technology and making the film look great, why couldn't Cameron develop a better, more intelligent story?" By extension, the critique of the story involves charges that the script is poor, the dialogue being awkward and overly obvious and "cringe worthy."

   On one hand, such a critique assumes (and discounts) that Cameron did not make careful, purposeful choices regarding the plot, characters, setting, and key incidents; on the other hand, such a critique also reveals an inattentiveness to the role of the dialogue in the film, which is to establish and forward plot, character, setting, and incident.

   Regarding the story, which is the part of Avatar drawing the most discussion and debate in terms of the film's themes and meanings, I wrote before that I see Cameron as clearly aiming for the mythical and archetypal with this film. So, yes, in its foundations, Avatar's story is one that we have seen before, one that we know: it is not "new." However, the mythical and archetypal remain relevant precisely because they are open and flexible enough to be reapplied and refashioned -- to be renewed -- continuously and with reference to the contemporary historical and sociocultural context.

   Thus, Avatar is not merely "Dances With Wolves (or Pocahontas) in space" and so yet another entry in the tradition of stories that assuage "white man's guilt" about colonialism and race by having a privileged white man "go native" and become the leader/saviour of the oppressed, racial Other (such as Native Americans or Africans). This is the sort of reading given by Annalee Newitz. Moreover, Avatar, as supposedly such a story of "white man's guilt," is not materially, straightforwardly "racist," as argued by SEK.

   I do not deny that Avatar in many ways invites and permits such interpretations. Yet I also think the film is more nuanced.

   In particular, a crucial fact of the film's narrative structure is that Jake Sully (re)tells his story at some point after the events we see in the film have occurred. The time of the telling is quite separate from the time of the action. Avatar's narrative functions as a remembering, as a recollection, as a narrativizing of a specific series of experiences, from Jake's perspective -- a perspective that is effectively a Na'vi perspective, a hybrid Na'vi/human perspective, when considering that Jake gives up his human body for his Na'vi "avatar," but also his human culture for the Na'vi culture, his human homeworld for Pandora, his human way of seeing for the Na'vi way of seeing. Jake does not merely "go native" to understand the Other: he becomes the Other, completely.

   The film's script very carefully establishes the conditions for this transformation. Selfridge and Quaritch comprise the economic and military marriage of current First World corporate, free-market capitalism, exemplified by America and George W. Bush's 8-year presidency. As Thomas Homer-Dixon explains in The Upside Down (2008), the driving ideology of corporate, free-market capitalism is growth: i.e., growth is necessary; growth will and can continue ad infinitum; growth means that we perpetually desire and must have more (of everything). The damage and outdatedness of this ideology are apparent today, for instance, in the ever-widening gap between rich and poor or the increasingly volatile state of the environment, interrelated developments that influenced events such as 9/11 and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. In Avatar, Selfridge and Quaritch can see only what will forward their need for growth: acceptable "quarterly statements," and "more or less" humane measures to appropriate (by sheer force) the materials that will generate the wealth so pleasing to creditors and investors. They embody, therefore, colonialism in its modern form; they constitute Cameron's argument that corporate, free-market capitalism's hunger for growth will continue to define humanity in the future, repeating the same mistakes as now . . . just on a vastly larger scale (reinforced by the immensity of the bulldozers and dump trucks used on Pandora, which Jake experiences immediately upon arriving).

   If anything, Avatar puts the viewer (say, Western generally and American specifically) in the uncomfortable position of applauding the defeat, death, and dismissal of Selfridge and Quaritch -- of the cultural, social, economic ideology that defines, creates, and underpins the viewer's way of life, which is itself based upon the need for growth at the expense of all else. To humans (and so us, the viewers), the Na'vi are not only Other as aliens; they are Other for their sociocultural (even economic) ideology, or perspective, which is based upon the interconnectedness of all life on Pandora, an interconnectedness reinforced by the physical, biological, electrochemical, and psychical means by which the Na'vi interact with and "see" their world. Theirs is an ideology utterly opposite to ours, and so uncomfortably exposes the hubris, violence, and lack of compassion endemic to how we (as Selfridge-and-Quaritch) maintain growth.

   Jake's complete transformation into a Na'vi, then, encompasses much more than an unthinking repetition of "white man's guilt." He goes from a distinctly unprivileged white male (ex-Marine, mercenary, disabled, lacking the economic and political means to get the operation that would let him walk again) to a Na'vi who resists and subverts the exploitative, hypercapitalist, anti-environmentalist machine(s) of human colonialism and growth. This is about humanity's guilt, for what it does to Others and to itself. Avatar explicitly rejects humanity; hope, it suggests, rests only in the sort of radical, fundamental change that Jake undergoes.

   So, to charge Avatar with being "racist" is a severely reductive reading of the film. Partly, such a charge suggests a certain level of intention in the film: i.e., whether in making a white male the hero or in modelling the Na'vi on various indigenous human cultures (say, Native Americans most obviously), Avatar is "racist" by reinforcing dominant/subordinate racial hierarchies and dichotomies of essential difference(s), by constructing the Other through the default and inherent "white" gaze.

   For instance, as SEK writes on Acephalous (linked above):

[Avatar's] fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). . . . The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different. They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence. The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi. (Think literal assimilation.)

The assumptions in this claim are intriguing for how they misprision the film, revealing the investments of the critique as much as they do anything concretely wrong about Avatar. One could counter, for instance, that the film's "fundamental narrative logic" is anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and environmentalist, in that this is the story's clear political platform. One could also propose that the Na'vi do not stand strictly and only for animistic Native Americans, but represent all indigenous peoples with lifestyles, cultures, beliefs in contrast to and conflict with hyperindustrialized, colonialist peoples. One could further observe that far from assuaging "white guilt," Avatar seeks to problematize this very concept by reminding viewers that humans are the "aliens" on Pandora; that the ideology of Selfridge-and-Quaritch is exposed as bankrupt of empathy and no different in the future than in the past or the present; that Jake fails and stumbles as much as he succeeds, requiring Neytiri to save and rescue him repeatedly. Moreover, claiming that the Na'vi are racist because they see humans only as different willfully misreads the evidence in the film, which puts the unwillingness for cultural exchange and mutual understanding quite firmly on the shoulders of Selfridge-and-Quaritch, while the Na'vi have the wisdom to try once more to teach a human their ways as a path to fruitful diplomacy.

   The result? Jake's final, full transformation into a Na'vi undermines even the categories necessary to a reading of Avatar as racist, for he physically, biologically, culturally becomes the Other. He rejects the human reliance upon (racial) binary opposites that justify colonial exploitation -- the precise binary opposites that inform and make possible SEK's critique. (Jake's transformation thus echoes that of Ogden in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," though Avatar goes a step further in the "surrender" to the Other by making it biologically permanent.)

   Avatar's story, therefore, invites viewers to (mis)read it in reductive, overdetermined ways that reflect their own investments and needs because of its seemingly clichéd, unoriginal surface. This apparent conventionality may constitute the film's most subversive aspect: if all we see is a clichéd, unoriginal surface, we close ourselves off from engaging with the purpose and intelligence of the story's mythical/archetypal register as, ultimately, the most effective means by which to address a broad range of audiences about the consequences of contemporary corporate, colonialist, free-market capitalism for the environment specifically. Our way into caring about those consequences moves through characters that fulfill unambiguous roles (i.e., heroes vs. villains; victims vs. oppressors), that by their actions and relationships connect us to the individual, local, and emotional stakes of the film's central conflict.

   The vehemence with which many are rejecting such emotional stakes by attacking the story belies, I think, a kind of cynicism about the power of the mythical/archetypal to represent our current historical and sociocultural context. I am seeing a jadedness about the force of the film's stunning, intense, bursting, exhilarating beauty, which is the key to the viewer's investment in the story. (The two are not really separate or mutually exclusive, as is often made the case in commentaries.) I am sensing a distrust of the wonder that beauty induces, a need to resist it by dismantling the story and discounting the complexity of the characters. I am witnessing far too often an outright dismissal of the film based on incomplete evidence and/or the negative opinions of others.*

   Yet all of that returns me to a suggestion I made at the beginning of this post: Avatar is generating discussion, positive and negative, which Art that is culturally relevant on a wide (or mass) scale should do. In this respect, it demonstrates science fiction's ability to take old, familiar forms and give them new life.

   Adam Roberts writes in The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), "SF is better defined as 'technology fiction' provided we take 'technology' not as a synonym for 'gadgetry' but . . . as a mode of 'enframing' the world, a manifestation of a fundamentally philosophical outlook" (18). SF thus gives new life to old, familiar forms by "'enframing'" (i.e., seeing, perceiving, giving meaning to) them in the technoscientific terms of the modern world.

   With Avatar, this technoscientific enframing operates on several levels at once: film as a distinctly modern Art created by and reliant upon technology, here especially with the development of the 3D and CGI technology needed to make the film that Cameron envisioned; Selfridge-and-Quaritch asserting dominance over Pandora and the Na'vi by means of the superior technology of their machines, machines (from computers to guns to spaceships to breather masks, and so forth) without which they could not secure and perpetuate their hyperindustrialist, hypercapitalist ideology; Jake's experience of Pandora and the Na'vi relies upon and is mediated by the technoscience that makes "avatars" possible, to the point where he eventually starts to question what constitutes his true reality -- his life in his human body or his life in his Na'vi body/avatar.

   From here, we might ask what role technoscience has played and currently plays in supporting colonialism, capitalism, and anti-environmentalism. We might ask to what extent our beliefs in the rightness or necessity of our need for growth are mediated by, enframed by, our attachments to technoscience as proving our fitness to dominate Others (culturally, socially, economically, politically). These questions then lead potentially to a third: might Avatar, as a massive blockbuster costing some $300 million to make and taking full advantage of the technologies of film, be also a subversive commentary from the inside (so to speak) on our attachments to technoscience as the means by which we establish "progress" -- at the expense of our moral and spiritual (and environmental/ecological) health?

   Am I asking too much of the film with such questions? I do not think so. They do show, I hope, that Avatar can bear steadily more layered approaches and critiques, particularly because it is open and flexible enough to accommodate a variety of readings (positive, ambivalent, and negative). Moreover, I hope they show that any reading of the film should push past just its surface and into the underlying implications of the medium, the story, the characters, the setting, and so forth.**

   Those characters and that setting represent the audience's most tangible ways into both the wonder and possible meanings of Avatar. Here is where Jake Sully as the stranger in a strange land proves key: his total lack of experience of Pandora and the Na'vi is also ours; his introduction to, understanding of, and love for Pandora and the Na'vi is also ours; his constant enthusiasm for and will to explore Pandora leads us from surprise to surprise, breathtaking spectacle to breathtaking spectacle, and into a new and alien perspective. Sam Worthington, I think, manages the two sides of Jake expertly: Jake-as-human is quiet, calm, determined, uncomplicated; Jake-as-Na'vi is exuberant, passionate, committed, willfull (consider the scene when Jake is "driving" his Na'vi avatar for the first time and catches and then bites gleefully into a Pandoran fruit: wide-eyed excitement; juice covering his mouth and chin; the laughter of freedom). Here is where Neytiri as Jake's and the audience's teacher about Pandora provides the alien's point of view, asking Jake and us to "see" Pandora as the Na'vi do, to touch and smell and taste and move through Pandora like the Na'vi. Zoë Saldana, I think, gives the film's best performance in this role: by turns strong and athletic, tender and vulnerable, angry and compassionate, curious and knowing, dangerous and loving; wholly invested in Pandora as Neytiri's world and the Na'vi as Neytiri's people; utterly convincing and believable.

   Worthington and Saldana; Cameron's construction and presentation of Pandora: they are pitch-perfect, and need to be in order to encourage the audience to become invested in the archetypal story and the film's visual beauty. The nature of that investment ultimately reveals much about the viewer, in terms of what meanings are seen (or not seen) in the film. This is not to say that everyone must or should like Avatar; certainly, such an expectation would be unreasonable and unrealizable. Yet one trend in some reactions to Avatar so far demonstrates how criticism can make claims based on incomplete evidence or inaccuracies or surface readings, thereby influencing the judgements of others who have not seen the film but feel capable of pronouncing upon its quality, story, or politics. To close, see these two examples:

(1) Nick Mamatas's review and especially its comments section, to which I was directed by Antick Musings (look there for "Nick Mamatas Sums Up Avatar," and the summary judgement that Avatar is a "lousy" movie);

(2) stuff white people do (where the blogger decides not to see the film because of Annalee Newitz's io9 article, linked at the top of this post).

* NOTE: I wonder if the source of such jadedness and distrust might be a modern discomfort with allegory. Avatar definitely suggests we approach it as allegory: from "unobtainium" to a scientist named "Grace" to the main character "Jake Sully" to the clear opposition of Selfridge-and-Quaritch vs. Pandora/the Na'vi. Allegory has traditionally functioned as a metaphorical mode of sociocultural critique (i.e., Spenser's Faerie Queene or Orwell's Animal Farm), and in this respect Avatar's world and the two sides of the conflict can easily fulfill a variety of corresponding referents. While on one hand Avatar prompts viewers to immerse themselves in the sense-of-wonder that is Pandora, on the other hand it asks viewers to relate its story and Pandora to their current historical and sociocultural context.

** NOTE: For an excellent, insightful critique of the film, see Gerry Canavan's post, 'Avatar' and the War of Genres. His conclusion that Avatar plays out the opposition between SF and fantasy, between disaster and hope, leaving us with the former as we exit the theatre into "Colonel Quaritch's world," is the sort of critically astute analysis that the film can bear.

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009), Part V

2009-12-20T14:59:00.004-05:00

[Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV]

7. Mike Resnick, "The Bride of Frankenstein" (pg. 80-87) ***
Read 20 Dec. 2009. I think of this kind of story as a stunt. Not an experiment, but a stunt: like trying to see if you can jump through a burning ring of fire on a motorcycle while, maybe, juggling chainsaws. Mind you, the story is not that absurd, but it's a stunt nonetheless -- one that I enjoyed a great deal, particularly for its cheeky re-imagining of Mary Shelley's characters in a mostly-tidy domestic arrangement, with the creature as a dedicated pacifist who devours tragic romances such as Anna Karenina and Romeo and Juliet. The wife is our narrator, through entries in her journal, and we learn about her daily frustration with the loneliness and strangeness of her domestic life, not to mention her open distaste for Igor, the hunchbacked servant, and her manifest discomfort with the creature. One key is Resnick's revision of the creature: "'I don't kill things. . . . I have been dead, Baroness . . .. It is not an experience I would wish upon anyone or anything else'" (83); "'Therefore, we must be here for a higher purpose -- and what higher purpose can there be than love?'" (86). The other key is the tone of the narrative, which remains steadfastly light, in the sort of knowing, wink-wink, self-conscious lightness that understands the story is playing around with very familiar expectations while ending up basically at the same place as the original, yet shifting the register of the original (i.e., the creature's demand that Victor make him a mate) from tragedy to romance. I like Resnick's inventiveness, perhaps especially because I am so familiar with Mary Shelley's novel: (re)telling the story from the Baroness' point of view nicely resets our impressions of the dynamics between the characters. Yet I can't shake the feeling that the story's a stunt, that it might have done more with a "what if?" revision of that novel's story.

8. Brian Stableford, "Some Like It Hot" (pg. 88-106) ***
Read 20 Dec. 2009. In the subgenre of post-apocalyptic, environmental dystopias, this story presents a potentially controversial ideological response to the threat and consequences of global warming: instead of trying either to maintain Earth as it is or to return it to some ideal ecological state, why not help the world keep warming up, because who really likes the cold and what of all the new economic opportunities that might result? Stableford metes out this perspective carefully as we learn and see more of Gerda Rosenhane's life, decisions, beliefs, motivations, and actions -- such that she disturbingly makes sense, to a point. Her foil is her childhood best friend and infatuation, Kelemen Kiss, who becomes the political head of what is known as the Gaia movement, working to contain and perhaps reverse the effects of the "Carbon Crisis" (89), which has resulted in an ecologically unstable and rapidly changing Earth. As Kelemen, or Kay, builds a life in politics, Gerda builds a life in science as a biologist and genetic engineer, carefully managing Kay's investment in new biotechnology such that, in the end, he helps forward her agenda. Stableford imagines a very plausible world post-environmental collapse, politically and ecologically and economically and culturally. The ideologies of Kay and Gerda form the central conflict, and Stableford smartly makes Gerda the story's focalizer. Her ideas would be radical even today, I suspect, and so identifying and sympathizing with her becomes a somewhat uncomfortable exercise (particularly because Kay not just fails to see her romantically, but proves unable to see anyone but himself as right and in charge). For example, she says to Kay at one point, "'The point, beloved, . . . is not to worship Gaia more devoutly, but to cast her idol down. She has held the world in icy thrall too long. Now that spring is here, the task at hand for humankind is . . . to make proper preparations for glorious summer. And whether you win or not, and however large your majority might be, you're backing the wrong horse'" (93). Gerda proves right, in the very long run, but such sentiments are difficult and discomfiting to hear. This story does what good SF is capable of doing: examining problematic possibilities, ideas, evolutions, opinions. Perhaps it is cynical, in the end -- a tragedy of the supposedly wrong side "winning"; it definitely is not satire or irony. Yet the narrative loses steam in a few spots, specifically stretches of exposition that seem too satisfied detailing Gerda's scientific rationale(s) for her anti-Gaia position. The narrative also loses the crispness and intrigue of the opening several paragraphs, which are recaptured only in spurts as the story progresses: a drawback in a story that offers few moments of concrete action.

Final Thoughts
• Overall, I would say that the Dec. 2009 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction rates as a fairly good collection of short fiction, but lacking at least one story of real, surprising brilliance and execution. The best story is Crowell's; the weakest story is Genge's.

• Surprisingly for me, as posted on SF Signal earlier this week, two upcoming Best of 2009 anthologies include Genge's story: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Vol., 4, edited by Jonathan Strahan; and, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. (Go here and here, for the tables of contents.) I wonder why?

• Where the lesser stories come up short and the better stories succeed lies with tone and voice primarily. When inconsistent, they produce awkward hiccups in the style and the mood; when consistent, they hold the reader's interest, they reinforce the plausibility and (for lack of a better word) validity of the story's world, characters, and incidents. Crowell and Wolven do this best, making their pieces good models to follow.

• I'm not sure yet if I have a full and clear idea of what gets a story accepted at Asimov's. There must be a whole range of reasons. From the evidence of the Dec. 2009 stories, I would say inventive ideas are certainly important, for each story does at a minimum offer and explore an intriguing premise. Also, none of the stories is bad or awful, but some are definitely executed better as a whole than others, which suggests that in a top market such as Asimov's we can really see what separates simply good stories from truly excellent stories.

Thoughts on Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009)

2009-12-19T18:11:00.017-05:00

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

– John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,

What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind ....
– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

One of the basic functions of Art is to challenge us to see our world and ourselves in new ways, to perceive and look at Life differently.

To see in new ways, to perceive differently: this, we might say, is the raison d'être of science fiction, a genre/mode/tradition that relies upon the estranging and unfamiliar as a means by which to comment upon now, upon today.

Of all modern art forms, film most powerfully and concretely has the ability to change how we see our world and ourselves, to put before us the estranging and unfamiliar, thereby introducing us to new worlds whether they be of the past or the present or the future, another country or culture, other lives outside of or unknown to us.

Avatar does all of this, as a work of Art, of science fiction, of film -- on an epic, sublime, and breathtaking scale.

It seeks nothing less than to remind us of the stunning, heartbreaking beauty of Earth, a beauty that we must value as more than a mere commodity. It aims unabashedly to alter how we see Earth by giving us Pandora, a world so magnificently surprising and colourful and alive that it asks us to be swept away by and utterly immersed in the beauty of its newness . . . asks us to care for it and protect it from ourselves.

Seeing forms the centre of Avatar: in its story and characters; in the very 3D technology Cameron developed simply to make the film that matched his vision and needs.

As injured former Marine Jake Sully arrives on Pandora and gets introduced to the scientists who will help him learn to use and control his Na'vi avatar, such that he can make contact and establish a (diplomatic) relationship with Pandora's indigenous people, he must also begin learning the Na'vi language. In Na'vi, to say "I see you," one of the scientists informs Jake, means something more like, "I see into you" -- thus, a statement of acknowledgement, acceptance, understanding, sympathy, even love and affection.

This alien way of seeing (into) another person is mirrored in Cameron's use of 3D for Avatar. The 3D serves, I think, a specific, crucial function in the film: supporting and embodying Avatar's central theme and metaphor. As we are taken to an alien world, we must -- like Jake Sully -- struggle to see, perceive, and look at it on its own terms. Initially, the 3D takes some getting used to, such as near the film's beginning when Jake is released from his cryogenic bed and floats to his locker: the long shaft in the spaceship where Jake is located with other awakening crew members is almost too much visual information to process, yet fascinating to watch at the same time. As Jake (and so the audience) gradually experiences more and more of Pandora, the 3D becomes almost natural, almost inherent to the way in which one looks at and inhabits this world. Specifically, the 3D becomes intimately intertwined with the very wonder that is Pandora.

For instance, when Jake and Neytiri (his Na'vi contact, sponsor, teacher, love interest) first meet, she grudgingly decides to bring him to her people. At one point, they stop on a large tree branch that serves as a path, a bridge. While they are talking, we see something that looks like a cross between a miniature floating jellyfish and a fuzzy dandelion seed captured by a breeze. Neytiri informs Jake that it is a seed of Eywu, the Na'vi's name for their Mother Nature, which is also in fact a physical tree, their holy of holies. This seed of Eywu flits around Jake and comes to land on him; soon he is covered by several of these white, glowing seeds. All the while, the scene is in 3D, which generates the magic of the event for the audience and so reflects the surprise of the experience for Jake.

Moments such as this one consistently remind us of Pandora's newness, even as we also become accustomed to experiencing that newness through a 3D perspective. In effect, through that 3D perspective we "see into" Pandora and the Na'vi, caring deeply for both. Thus, the "truth" of Avatar is found in its "beauty."

With regard to the story, then, many are commenting on its unoriginality, its mere conventionality. Cameron got this part of the film wrong, some say. The story is just Dances With Wolves in space, some say. It is just Pocahantas with blue aliens, others say. It is trite, still others say.

These sorts of comments reveal, I think, a kind of jadedness in viewers and critics. The plot is certainly not original: the outsider arrives in The New World, intent upon exploiting it for his personal (economic, political, cultural) gain; he meets and develops a relationship with the local, indigenous people; as he learns their ways and falls in love with the King's daughter, he changes his perspective and instead wants to defend them from his own people/nation/corporation. Cameron, clearly, does not aim for an original plot in Avatar. Rather, he aims for a story that rests on the foundation of mythological/archetypal themes and characters and situations. In other words, he goes for the universal and the timeless.

The originality of Avatar, then, resides in how Cameron tells the story, not necessarily what he tells in the story. "True Wit," as Alexander Pope observes in An Essay on Criticism, "is Nature to Advantage drest": originality is a familiar story made fresh again by the way an artist dresses it in new clothing, in the fashion of the day. That freshness in Avatar comes from the tropes of science fiction and how Cameron translates them into the medium of film and with the 3D technology.

Avatar paints its heroes and villains with broad brush strokes, true. Yet I believe that is the point: good and evil are unambiguous; we are asked to root wholeheartedly for Jake and the Na'vi, and we are asked to resist and detest the greed and hubris of the humans who desire Pandora solely for its economic value. In doing so, we are asked as well to rejoice in the joy of hope . . . perhaps a fading possibility for many today.

Moreover, through the tropes and conventions of science fiction in particular, Avatar challenges its audience to reflect upon the assumptions we may carry regarding the alien, the other. (This notion is certainly key to the Pocahontas story, to Dances With Wolves, and so forth.) Near the film's end, when Jake narrates that the "aliens" (i.e., humans) left Pandora for good, his transformation and altered perspective are complete: humanity is now the other; Pandora and the Na'vi are now the norm. The potential consequence, the film hopes, is that we are transformed, too. When we not only sympathize and identify with the Other, but see as the Other, we can enact true change in ourselves and in our world.*

For these reasons, Cameron gets the story right. He utilizes the plot structure and archetypes that most boldly and distinctly communicate his meanings. We need not ask much more of him, I think.

I admire and feel humbled by the force of will and determination, by the dedication and belief and vision, of James Cameron. Bringing this film to fruition represents a phenomenal achievement. Avatar's beauty left me in speechless awe too many times to count (Neytiri and then Jake flying Pandora's skies on ikran; Jake being accepted as one of The People, the camera pulling up to an overhead shot looking down upon the Na'vi all joined in a circle and connected to Jake by laying a hand on each others' shoulders; plants and creatures that light up when touched; the floating mountains). I reveled in the characters and the story, only too willing to let myself be swept away by the action, the romance, the humour, and the catharsis of the good guys winning -- really winning -- in the end.

Avatar is a film that can be seen only in the theatre to experience the full impact of all that it attempts to do. It is science fiction as pure "sense of wonder." It is Art as Truth, Beauty, and Wit.

Here are links to some reviews of and discussions about Avatar (to be updated as I find more sources):
• Metacritic.com Avatar page
• Roger Ebert's review
• Roger Ebert's blog entry
• The Globe & Mail's review
• The Globe & Mail's interview with Cameron
• The Toronto Star's review
• Big Hollywood's review (for a negative reaction)
• SF Signal discussion
• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
• Bookspot Central review

*NOTE: A fair amount of discussion about Avatar focusses on the film's politics, which are environmentalist/ecological and anti-Bush Era free-market capitalism/pre-emptive war. Cameron himself admits to such an agenda with Avatar. I just want to clarify a couple of misconceptions that inform some of the negative responses to the film on this count.

First, the military in the film are not nationally/internationally sanctioned troops: they are mercenaries (many of them ex-Marines) hired by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) to provide security for his mining operations on Pandora. Even Jake Sully is no longer a Marine, but has come to Pandora because it is a job and a chance to do something, as the VA will not cover the operation that would fix his spinal injury and give him his legs back. If the film is "anti-war" or "anti-America" in any way (and the mercenaries are obviously presented as Americans), it does so as a critique of the colonialist, corporate, free-market capitalism that, for example, produces the private security forces at work in Iraq today. In this respect, yes, the Americans are the bad guys, and have been for centuries (I recommend perusing Ronald Wright's What is America? on this topic).

Second, Avatar's environmentalist/ecological message is very much front and centre, yet Cameron is not, I suspect, arguing for a "green politics" that would have government(s) too invasively "regulate" our lives. Sometimes, the only way to get a message across is to use a Big Stick. Is the Earth in peril (primarily because of colonialist, corporate, free-market capitalism's greed)? Yes. Should we be reminded of Earth's precious, inspiring beauty and of how all of Nature is profoundly interconnected? Yes. Does the film leave the choice of what we do about Earth's current condition in the hands of the individual? Yes.

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009), Part IV

2009-12-19T01:27:00.001-05:00

[Part I; Part II; Part III]

6. Benjamin Crowell, "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime" (pg. 66-79) *** 1/2

Read 17 Dec. 2009. Smart, humourous, witty, focussed, sly. Hints of homage to Douglas Adams. A climax and an ending that neatly balance the expected and the slightly ambiguous. This is a fine, fine story, starting with the title and not slowing down until the last word; I wonder if it will appear in some "Best of 2009" collections next year. One thing that Crowell does especially well is maintain what I'll call a consistency of tone, of voice: the writing has energy, confidence, purpose, intelligence, keeping the narration neatly poised between Horatian satire and a kind of honest, wry appraisal of why humanity has all the necessary skills to forge a unity among various alien peoples in spite of itself. Sidibé's simple desire to help a fellow diplomat on board the "GalCiv" spaceship leads her, innocently, to form an intricate network of trading goods and favours, which leads to the importance of the bucket -- not to mention some of the aliens in her "cohort" aboard the spaceship suspecting that she's ultimately after "Complete galactic domination" (74). In the end, this is what she achieves, just not quite in the way we (or she) would expect, for in just going about the daily business of the trade network and wishing for a 15-minute nap between appointments, she cultivates co-operation among all her fellow GalCiv diplomats. "'I was only -- you can't -- I don't really know what I'm doing. They didn't vote for me or anything'" (79): her reward? Why, the godlike mastery of spacetime, of course, bestowed by, well ... perhaps by God himself/herself/itself. In the end, the story is positive, optimistic: humanity as the connector of the Milky Way's races and nations, despite its intentions to the contrary. Sly, indeed.

7. Mike Resnick, "The Bride of Frankenstein"

8. Brian Stableford, "Some Like it Hot"

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009), Part III

2009-12-16T21:19:00.007-05:00

[Part I; Part II.]

4. Nick Wolven, "Angie's Errand" (pg. 44-54) ***

Read 16 Dec. 2009. A very strong story, from the craft of the words to the strength and complexity of the main character Angie to the plotting and resolution. This is the sort of quality writing I expect to find in a top market such as Asimov's. Wolven presents a distinct voice in the narrator and demonstrates an attentive ear for sound and rhythm: "The sheer waste of it made her stomach knot, but afterward her blonde hair fell in feathery masses that softened the severity of her starved cheeks" (45); "Vestiges of glass in the frames of townhouse windows glistened in the afternoon light like unshed tears" (50). There's crispness in the language, and poetry. Angie encourages the reader's sympathy: the older sister turned single mother to her sisters and brother after the "Crisis" (a deliberately vague recent apocalyptic event); she is at a point of crisis herself, believing she needs a man for help and support; she faces a nearly predictable danger because of this belief, and comes through changed with an inner conviction, "patience," and "confidence" (54) -- a change that develops plausibly, naturally from the story's incidents. Those incidents are measured carefully, generating and never quite fully releasing a tension that infuses everything in the story (characters, setting, events, words). On the cusp of giving in to the cliché consequences of a lone, vulnerable woman in a threatening world of lawless men, Wolven throws a couple of twists at the reader that bring relief but also pathos. This story treats gender roles and stereotypes in a more neutral, thoughtful way than Genge, as people revert to old, primal needs yet also find new sources of strength because of the "Crisis." A few moments of awkwardness set the story back a tad, though ("At the word spoil a sob rose in her throat. She swallowed it hastily, releasing Emily's collar" [44]).

5. Jim Aikin, "Leaving the Station" (pg. 56-65) ** 1/2

Read 16 Dec. 2009. A change of pace here, with a supernatural fantasy, in which Joan, now forty, assumes ownership of her uncle's antique shop and rediscovers that she can see ghosts. Perhaps predictably, she starts noticing odd changes in the store: some items get moved, some items appear in spots where they were not before, and the like. Formerly a train station, the antique store makes for a credible site to have and attract ghosts from the past -- a place of transition, of moving from and between one place to another. And Joan is at a point of transition in her life, divorced and laid off and needing to redefine herself. Perhaps predictably, she meets a new man and wants to sell the store; the latter doesn't happen for various reasons, until she decides to keep the store after the unpredictable climax. The key to the story is how Aikin handles the climax and dénouement, for Joan's character shifts into being more rounded and surprising than the reader has so far seen: "Out there, just beyond the doors, was an ocean of joy so deep she had never imagined such joy could exist, and she had tasted it, it had filled her, and now it was gone and the doors were sealed shut again" (64). There is catharsis here, for Joan and the reader; there is comfort, and an opening up of a yearning. Death as the "joy" of a journey on train to a new destination? I like this idea. It is tempting; it makes a kind of sense, if you have dealt with death.

6. Benjamin Crowell, "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime"

7. Mike Resnick, "The Bride of Frankenstein"

8. Brian Stableford, "Some Like it Hot"

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009), Part II

2009-12-15T00:44:00.007-05:00

[Part I.]

2. Sara Genge, "As Women Fight" (pg. 24-33) **

Read 13 Dec. 2009. This story has an inventive idea, and metaphor, at its centre: a somewhat evolved human culture, apparently owing to the influence of long-ago visitors from outer space, is built around the potentially annual exchange of bodies between husbands and wives -- rather, exchange of personalities, or selves -- depending on who wins a "Fight" (actual, ritualized physical combat). Yet the story is too heavy-handed with its biases regarding the implications of this idea/metaphor. People switch bodies in order to inhabit, experience, and understand the minds and desires and proscribed roles of both genders; the women, however, are made to be the more desirable choice (faster, heightened senses, etc.) overall, while the men fit into clichéd behaviours and types, despite the story's admirable attempts to blur and challenge gender constructions/constrictions. The main character, Merthe, is an effective focalizer: ambiguous; confused; at a point of personal and cultural conflict, and so willing to do things differently and accept the consequences; chivalrous, heroic. I wonder, though, if switching bodies and a transferrable consciousness/self/personality aren't becoming overly conventional in SF now? Also, Genge seems to be reaching for the substance of Russ or Tiptree, Jr., but the . . . artistry feels not quite up to the task.

3. John Shirley, "Animus Rights" (pg. 34-43) ** 1/2

Read 14 Dec. 2009. I like the premise: two aliens named Adversary and Animus, whose true form is a "lightbody," have been fighting and defeating each other on Earth for centuries, inhabiting a succession of human bodies and participating in major military conflicts such as the French Revolution or World War I. Able to live up to 500,000 years, they see humans as "primates," of interest for the brutal intensity of their wars. Yet they are taking too direct a role in pushing humanity toward its destruction, and so are told to back off by their homeworld's Committee. I like the premise, for it gives Shirley ample opportunity to comment on our penchant for violence in the past, today, and in the future; it creates room for Shirley to suggest a slightly new twist on the "art" of war. However, there is a predictability in the story, and the writing is frequently awkward, especially when the perspective and dialogue are that strictly of the "emerged" Adversary and Animus (e.g., "'Seven years of peaceful marriage, and suddenly you're a man of blood,' Wilamina said suddenly ..." [34]; "Then Adversary looked up at Animus -- at the lightbody that had departed the shattered primate body. ..." [36]). The parts don't quite make for a wholly unified, skillfull whole.

4. Nick Wolven, "Angie's Errand"

5. Jim Aikin, "Leaving the Station"

6. Benjamin Crowell, "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime"

7. Mike Resnick, "The Bride of Frankenstein"

8. Brian Stableford, "Some Like it Hot"

Reading Asimov's Science Fiction (Dec. 2009)

2009-12-11T23:55:00.012-05:00

Certainly, if planning to write stories and get them published, reading and knowing the best markets is a good thing. Hence, I will make an effort to read issues of Asimov's consistently for a few months and try to gauge the kind of story that gets sold to and finds its way into this leading market.

I will give each story a rating (out of four stars) and offer my thoughts on what did and/or did not work.

1. Jeff Carlson, "A Lovely Little Christmas Fire" (pg. 10-22) ** 1/2
Read 12 Dec. 2009. This is a good, serviceable story with a dash of humour and a sprinkle of hardboiled-detective attitude. The point of view of the main character, Julie Beauchain, feels a bit artificial at times: the narrative is too pointed in ensuring that the reader knows she's black and a woman and hot for her man/partner Highsong. Yet the bringing together of current corporate capitalist greed and US defense/military R&D initiatives in genetically engineered and augmented termites allowed to run amok makes for an intriguingly plausible dystopian America. Tightly paced and plotted; entertaining; engaging main character. For me, though, it ultimately lacks a multilayered substance in its meaning(s), and the writing at times is awkward or a little forced (e.g., "If she was worth her weight, she would've jumped Highsong or at least smooched a bit ..." [p. 18]).

2. Sarah Genge, "As Women Fight"

3. John Shirley, "Animus Rights"

4. Nick Wolven, "Angie's Errand"

5. Jim Aikin, "Leaving the Station"

6. Benjamin Crowell, "A Large Bucket, and Accidental Godlike Mastery of Spacetime"

7. Mike Resnick, "The Bride of Frankenstein"

8. Brian Stableford, "Some Like it Hot"

Reading Year's Best SF 14 (Hartwell and Cramer)

2009-08-16T20:44:00.018-04:00

I am gradually making my way through Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 14 (EOS, 2009) and thought I would rate the stories out of four stars as I go, perhaps with some occasional commentary.

1. Carolyn Ives Gilman, "Arkfall" ***

2. Neil Gaiman, "Orange" ** 1/2

3. Kathleen Ann Goonan, "Memory Dog" *** 1/2

4. Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pump Six" ****

5. Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, "Boojum" *** 1/2

6. Ted Chiang, "Exhalation" ****

7. M. Rickert, "Traitor" ** 1/2

8. Cory Doctorow, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" **

9. Vandana Singh, "Oblivion: A Journey" **

10. Robert Reed, "The House Left Empty" ** 1/2

11. Michael Swanwick, "The Scarecrow's Boy" ** 1/2

12. Ted Kosmatka, "N-Words" ***

13. Alastair Reynolds, "Fury" ** 1/2

14. Ann Halam, "Cheats" ** 1/2

15. Jason Sanford, "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain" ** 1/2

16. Mary Rosenblum, "The Egg Man" ***

17. Daryl Gregory, "Glass" ***

18. Jeff VanderMeer, "Fixing Hanover" ***

19. Rudy Rucker, "Message Found in a Gravity Wave" *** 1/2

20. Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell, "Mitigation" *** 1/2

21. Sue Burke, "Spiders" ***