Book Review: Aurorarama by Jean-Cristophe Valtat

This is the kind of book where a character will say to another, “So, you are the one who ransacked my room,” leading to a three or four page expositional monologue wherein “mysteries” that the reader had already forgotten about are explained in excruciating detail by the ransacking character. Then a new civilization will appear and every detail about it, from its economic system to its racial tensions, will have to be encyclopedically cataloged, again, by expositional characters expositing. Then another character will appear and say, “No, I’M the one who ransacked your room,” and so on.

In other words, it’s a literary novelist’s idea of what a contemporary SF novel must be like. It doesn’t reek of parody or condescension. It reeks of missing-the-point-but-earnestly-trying-to-cash-in-anyway, which is a word. Now.

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Freedom of Speech. Let’s Understand It!

Tags

boycott, ender's game, gay, NOM, orson scott card

Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, means that the government itself is not allowed to impair your ability to say whatever it is you want to say — within certain boundaries laid down by various Supreme Courts over the years. The government can prosecute you for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater (um, maybe), for example, or for uttering ‘fighting words,’ whatever those are.

Ender’s Game

Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want to say without consequence. It just protects you from legal consequence. Non-governmental consequences often follow controversial or inappropriate statements. For example, if you smart off to your cranky old grandmother, she might slap you in the face. If you submit a plagiarized story to your editor, you might get fired from your job as a reporter. If you make up stuff in your memoir, you might make Oprah angry. In none of these cases will you go to jail.

More to the point: if you are a prominent and raging anti-gay activist, I’m not going to pay money to see your movie, even if the movie has nothing to do with your anti-gay activism or your rage. The government isn’t involved in this decision of mine. The First Amendment doesn’t apply. I’m also going to be encouraging everybody I know to Skip Ender’s Game, which is my own exercise of my own free speech rights! Ta da! See how it works!

Speech has consequences, because speech matters. It would be a terrible world to live in if the things we say were completely irrelevant all the time, because they were “just words” or “just opinions” or “just” whatever. There’s no “just” about it. Words and opinions are powerful; they matter, and like anything that matters, they have consequences. There would be no reason to speak at all, otherwise. A world where anything can be said because nobody cares is a world where nothing is really said — and that’s the opposite of a world with free speech.

I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept for Orson Scott Card or his whiny-ass fans to understand.

The Nebulas and Me

Tags

2012, nebula awards, science fiction and fantasy, sfwa

Participating in a fandom isn’t just about liking what you like. It’s also about knowing what others in the fandom like, too, and why they like the things they like. This holds true whether the fandom is a narrow one, based on an individual creator (I am a fan of MW Kaluta and I am also a fan of The Avett Brothers) or a broad one (I am a fan of literary fiction). When you read (or watch, or listen to, or consume in whatever manner) a specific text within the context of a fandom, you are not just taking in that one work — you are adding it to your knowledge of the object of your fandom as a whole.

Or at least I am. That’s what I do. For me, part of the pleasure in reading (or watching, etc.) the things that I read (etc.) is in connecting what I’ve read (etc.) with other things I’ve read (etc.), and with other things that other people are reading (etc.), especially other people who like the kinds of things that I like. This is the difference between a person who is truly a fan, and one who is simply a reader (viewer, listener, etc). If you spend all your reading time with Dickens and Austen and Tolstoy, for example, you are certainly a literary reader, but the true literary fan doesn’t want to just read good books. The fan wants to read what’s new, what’s hot, wants to anticipate what’s on the horizon, wants to argue with other fans about which writer is underappreciated, which is overrated, which is Goldilocks-perfect. “This book fits into its place in its genre because of these reasons, and it makes an interesting pattern when viewed against these four other recent books.” That kind of thinking. Fandom can be a sort of non-rigorous comparative lit.

Fans follow books (or movies or television shows, etc.) in exactly the same way that fashionistas follow clothing trends — not because they mean anything, but because they are the trends. Red is in this year for men’s pants because red is in this year for men’s pants. There is no reason or objective calculation. It just is what it is, this year, probably because somebody “who matters” said so. Same with the reputations of Eugenides, Englander, and Strout in literary fandom: they’re hot because they’re hot, even though most readers (readers of Dickens and Austen and Tolstoy on the one end, readers of Dan Brown and Stephen King on the other end) have never heard of them, and likely never will.

I used literary fiction in my examples above because I am currently a card-carrying member of that fandom, so it was easier to make my case. I used to be a big science fiction/fantasy fan, too, in my high school and college days, very up on the field. In my middle-age, though, I’ve turned into a dabbler. I maybe read five or six f/sf books in a year, but not with any intentionality or agenda. When I look at a screen of science fiction titles on Amazon, I have no idea which books are considered must-reads and which are also-rans. Reviews and blurbs don’t help, because I don’t know which reviewers “matter” anymore (most science fiction/fantasy magazines review books by summarizing them, anyway), and blurbs are always positive. I can pick out old favorites, easily, most of whom are still in print in some form, some of whom are more famous than ever (Dick, Malzberg, LeGuin, Zelazny, Delaney, Ballard). But that’s like only listening to the rock and roll of one’s youth: enjoyable, and even necessary occasionally, but dead-ended. My choices are not made within the context of the trends, is what I’m saying, and, I’m sorry, I think I need for them to be, at least partially, in order to be who I think I am, and who I want to be — a fan.

The fastest way to get to an understanding of what’s “in” is to see what the insiders think. What they like is what’s hot, by definition. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll like what they like, I hasten to add — but this exercise isn’t about taking pleasure in any individual book. It’s easy enough for me to pick books I know I’ll like (oh, hey, here’s a Delaney I never read). It’s about taking pleasure in the genre as a whole, and in my growing understanding of that genre — where it is now, and where it’s going tomorrow. So I decided to read all of this year’s Nebula Award-nominated novels, to start my re-education.

The Nebulas have been awarded every year since 1966 by the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization that demands of its members proof of gainful employment in the field. These are the ultimate science fiction (and fantasy) insiders. They have a decent track record of picking great books, too: Dune by Frank Herbert was the very first winner, for example, and the subsequent winners and nominees include classics as various as The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin, Forever War by Joe Haldeman, a brace of Philip K. Dick books, several Delaneys and Zelaznys and Silverbergs and Asimovs, etc. They even throw in a William S. Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut into the mix every once in awhile for some literary spice.

But history is history. I have finished the six books in this year’s nomination pool, and I was disappointed. Maybe it was a bad year, or maybe my criteria and the typical SFWA member’s criteria for what’s great and what’s good and what’s bad are different, which would not make me less of a fan, by the way, just an argumentative one (the best kind).

Here are my own micro-reviews of the nominees:

“Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed

A nicely-polished sword & sorcery tale, set in the Islamic caliphate, but not really, in the same way that most fantasy novels are set in a fake version of medieval Europe. Despite the setting, the overall vibe was very conventional: a curse, an evil king, a sacred text, a swivelling throne that hides a powerful artifact — good pulpy fun, basically, with no ambition to break new ground. This could have been an Indiana Jones movie or a Fritz Lieber story. I don’t expect or demand a blown mind every time I read a fantasy novel, but I do kind of demand a blown mind of Nebula award nominees. It’s a higher standard they have to meet. This one? Supposed to be at least as good as Dune? At least as good as Slaughterhouse Five? Nah. Kind of run of the mill.

I didn’t hate it, though. I want to be clear on that. I just didn’t love it.

“Ironskin” by Tina Connolly

In the first few pages, we see our heroine arrive at the site of her new job — a mysterious castle on a foggy moor! She’s to be a governess there! She has a dark secret! She is instantly attracted to and repelled by her employer, a man who apparently has a dark secret! The child she’s to govern has a dark secret! Need I say more? The synopsis reads like a parody but the book itself is dead earnest, with the leaden prose and impossible-to-believe-outside-of-gothic-genre-convention characterizations to prove it. I read the whole thing. I didn’t want to. It’s not that I disliked this book because of the high standard of the Nebula Awards. This one, I’m surprised it even got published.

“The Killing Moon” by N. K. Jemisen

As with most of these books, the world-building here was primo, though in this one, the (non-heteronormative!) characters and their fates actually mattered to me. The elevator pitch: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman crossed with Assassin’s Creed. The prose was unobtrusively well-done, which came as a huge relief after the clunkiness of “Ironskin.”  I can’t give this the most hearty of recommendations, but I can give it a recommendation. I am not awaiting the next volume of Jemisin’s “Dreamblood” series with bated breath — but I might pick it up if I happen to see it. I could see an interesting long-term franchise spinning out of this world, which is something we fans enjoy. Right? Or is it “us fans?”

“The Drowning Girl” by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Of all these, this one strikes me as the most literary. I don’t say that to signify quality, only to signify genre. The plot runs along an axis defined by characters and relationships, rather than actions and adventures. Every fantastical thing that happens could (or could not) be due to the narrator’s mental condition — something she acknowledges. The language is dense, allusive, self-reflexive, and chatty all at the same time. Reminds me more of Jeanette Winterson, especially “Written on the Body,” than any science fiction or fantasy book I’ve ever read. I liked it a lot, but not in the way I expect to like genre books, which kind of threw me off. Okay, I can hear the complaints now: if a book is “too genre,” like “Ironskin,” predictable and formulaic, Joey bitches, but if it’s “too literary,” he also bitches.

I maintain that there’s a balance!

I also maintain that this could have been published by Knopf or Little, Brown rather than Roc, and it would have satisfied me more. Context is a big factor in our enjoyment of a book. Or at least it is in mine. (That’s what this whole post is about). Reading this book in the context of the fantasy genre was like sitting down expecting a dinner of ham and macaroni and cheese, and being served opera and Fauvism instead.

“Glamour in Glass” by Mary Robinette Kowal

I was afraid of this one, since the description made it sound like Jane Austen fan-fiction with magic. Which it is. But it’s not so bad, even so: light, harmless fun. It was not remarkable enough to make me want to read more in the series. When it comes to the surprisingly burgeoning Regency-Period-With-Fantasy-Elements genre, nothing I’ve read so far compares to the great “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. In “Glamour in Glass,” Kowal gets nothing exactly wrong, but Clarke’s novel gets everything exactly right, and that constitutes the difference between an entertainment and a mind blowing. Probably an unfair comparison, since Kowal’s ambitions don’t seem to be as large as Clarke’s in the first place, but I am just operating as a fan these days, not a critic, so I can be unobjective. That’s part of the fun!

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This one — the actual winner of the Nebula for Best Novel (the winners were announced while I was still reading through the nominees) — definitely had a lot going for it: strong prose, great characters, interesting world-building. The overall plot remained confusing to me at the end. I don’t understand why the antagonists were doing all of the things they did (I do understand a couple of the things they did). That may be because I only skimmed a lot of the jargony science/exposition stuff while waiting for the next character bit.

Out of five stars, I’d give most of these a “three” and only one (“The Drowning Girl”) a “four.” I’ve actually had better luck finding books I love by picking random science fiction books off of Amazon’s genre page (I found “Perdido Street Station” that way) than I did by reading these, the supposed cream of the crop. That happens. I’m not here to complain about that, or at least I’m not here to complain about that very bitterly. Just a little.

I’m also not here to accuse the people who make the nominations of being evil, which is what a lot of readers and fans do when their tastes are not validated by industry awards. I think most people put in the position to judge the work of their peers approach the task with the best intentions and earnest effort, and yet it almost always goes wonky anyway, for whatever reason.

Maybe the mind-blowing works cause such heated passions for and against, half the jury in one column, the other half in the other, forcing the judges to find middle-of-the-road, inoffensive three-starrers to praise unanimously.

Maybe there’s a little bit of log-rolling and back-patting (how could there not be, people being people)? Maybe. Probably.

More than any of that, though, I believe that there’s some way of looking at these books and seeing the best in the field — using some set of criteria that I am not using. My best guess? World-building is the primary thing these books seem to do best. Even “Ironskin” did a good job in that regard, with its world where the early twentieth century’s Great War was between humans and faerie kingdoms, and where bits and pieces of fey magic still stuck around the edges of a rapidly-industrializing England. World-building is important in any genre — yes, even literary (Hemingway’s world is not William S. Burroughs’ world) — but in science fiction and fantasy, it seems, world-building, and only that, is enough, according to the trendsetters and taste-makers of the day.

Despite not being bowled away by any of these books, though, I’m still glad I did this. I might even do it again, next year. Or maybe I’ll look at the Clarke Awards instead. What do you think?

Re-Reading (and Re-Re-Re-Re-Reading) Starstruck

Tags

books, graphic novel, IDW, kaluta, starstruck

I remember reading in TCJ, a long time ago, that a good comics page was just as dense as a good page of prose, and that if you didn’t spend enough time on a page — if you just “skimmed for story,” you would miss out on most of what the comic was telling you. I believe Gary Groth may have written this (that’s how long ago it was!), or maybe Kim Thompson.

So I set to staring at my comics pages after the first “skim.” It didn’t help me any. I just felt stupid, staring.

When I was a kid, I used to read my comics over and over and over and over again, each re-read in rapid succession (as in: finish the comic, start over reading the comic). I was reading some pretty sophisticated — for a second-grader — comics back then, like Bob Haney’s Brave & the Bold. I believe that the re-reading was what allowed me to comprehend these comics.

Copyright (c) MW Kaluta and Elaine Lee, all rights reserved. Used for illustrative purposes in the context of a commentary/review.

I’m doing the same thing now with Starstruck by Elaine Lee and MW Kaluta (which, by the way, I read in the 80s for the first time, but had mostly forgotten): re-reading each chapter six or seven times before moving on. It’s a dense, dense book, one that actually could justify Groth’s statement that a comics page can contain as much information as a prose page, and should be read as slowly as one. Staring doesn’t help, though. Re-reading is the key. Each time I re-read a chapter, I definitely catch something I didn’t catch before, and these aren’t just little detail-schmetails, these are big story elements that I totally glossed over in my usual quick-read-the-word-balloons-and-glance-at-the-artwork manner. For example, I didn’t realize, the first few times I read the page above, that the dude who shot the android’s head off was the boy’s father, even though I had already met the father, a very distinct and memorable character, just a few pages before. A stupid thing to not realize, but there you go. There was a lot going on in addition to this plot thread, and I got distracted. Anyway.

Do you like dense, “difficult” comics that are also beautiful to look at? If so, you will like Starstruck. If not, you won’t. There’s an easy way to find out: you can give Starstruck a try for free. Creators Elaine Lee and MW Kaluta have been posting the pages of the original book online in low-rez webcomic form at starstruckcomics.com. Despite my past heralding of the webcomic form, though, I have to say that Starstruck, of all the graphic novels I’ve ever read, really suffers from web-based presentation. It really needs to be consumed in book form. Fortunately, IDW has put out a gorgeous collected edition for you to read, and re-read, and re-re-read, etc.

Elsewhere on the Web

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Lee and Kaluta recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a new Starstruck graphic novel. Yay!

The contemporary TCJ writer John Hilgart does a great job of close reading Starstruck:

As important, there are no explanatory boxes of narrative copy to be found in Starstruck, urging you along, making everything obvious. Anything that’s not dialogue in a speech bubble is either raw data (time, place) or a quotation from a notable figure or book from within the Starstruck universe, casting a provocative or oblique light on events. Together, Lee and Kaluta have engineered a comic book storytelling mode that approaches documentary. No one is in a rush here. As a reader, it’s easy to be a spectator, to step inside and linger.

Books: “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Trawling Gutenberg)

Tags

barsoom, books, John carter, princess of mars, review

I probably should have read A Princess of Mars when I was twelve. Everything I liked back then was obviously, now that I look back, shaped by it — from Harlan Ellison and Robert A. Heinlein and Superman and Star Trek and Roy Thomas and Steve Gerber, to Land of the Lost and Star Wars and beyond.

I don’t think I would have seen or made the connections back then, though. I also wouldn’t have realized how well-written it is, as a piece of prose. Except for the silly science, and the imperalistic underthinking, this could have been written by a professional science fiction writer today. And our own contemporary silly science in our own contemporary science fiction novels will surely appear just as silly in a hundred years, so blah. More on the imperalistic underthinking in a moment.

When I talk about “the writing” I am specifically talking about the clarity and sharpness of the prose. Most early 20th century pulp writing (including the work of the still-popular Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft) strikes me as overblown and kitschy — because it is overblown and kitschy — but Burroughs nearly holds his own with the best prose stylists of his day.

Case in point: I recently finished reading Edith Wharton’s travelogue In Morocco, and the prose here reminded me very specifically of hers — a high compliment coming from me. I hate Wharton, but I love her prose. It’s complicated. Now, I very emphatically do not mean to imply that the characters and their relationships are as deeply-rendered or as finely crafted as those in Wharton’s masterpieces like The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome. They are not. These characters, and these relationships, are short-handed and sketchy, in the time-worn “boy’s adventure” style, comparable to the relationships and characters in a contemporary blockbuster movie. But they are also comparable to the almost non-existent relationships and characters in Wharton’s travelogue. The prose, though, in both cases, flows.

The travelogue comparison is particularly interesting, I think. By coincidence, I’ve read a couple of turn-of-the-century travelogues just recently (Wharton’s, and Twain’s The Innocents Abroad), and the similarities are just too striking to be an accident. In addition to everything else that it happens to be, A Princess of Mars is a travelogue, albeit a fictional one, describing a fictional place. That means the author is allowed more leeway, and can get his characters into more adventure and romance, than if he is obliged to conform to anything like reality.

Of course, Wharton’s travelogue doesn’t resemble our contemporary understanding of reality, either, in some ways.

Compare this, from Wharton:

It was swarming with hill-people the day we were there, and strange was the contrast between the crowd inside the circle of picketed horses and the white-robed cockneys from Rabat who fill the market-place of Salé. Here at last we were in touch with un-Arab Morocco, with Berbers of the bled and the hills, whose women know no veils and no seclusion, and who, under a thin surface of Mahometanism, preserve their old stone and animal worship, and all the gross fetichistic beliefs from which Mahomet dreamed of freeing Africa. […] The men were lean and weather-bitten, some with negroid lips, others with beaked noses and gaunt cheek-bones, all muscular and fierce-looking. Some were wrapped in the black cloaks worn by the Blue Men of the Sahara, with a great orange sun embroidered on the back, some tunicked like the Egyptian fellah, under a rough striped outer garment trimmed with bright tufts and tassels of wool. The men of the Rif had a braided lock on the shoulder, those of the Atlas a ringlet over each ear, and brown woollen scarfs wound round their temples, leaving the shaven crown bare.

To this, from Burroughs:

There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young. […] The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.

In both cases, we’re looking at the inhabitants of an exotic landscape from behind a dehumanizing, imperialistic, paternalistic gaze (Wharton’s “Blue Men of the Sahara” nicely echoing Burroughs’ “Green Men of Mars”). In Burroughs, that imperalistic point of view will, of course, result in the white man being better at everything than the natives, eventually making him their ruler (see also: Burroughs’ Tarzan, Cameron’s Avatar and etc.) In Wharton’s case, the rulership of the white man has already occurred, is a matter of historical record (in her day, Morocco had recently been taken by the French, from the Spanish who had it before, and so on and so on). Wharton’s admiration for the French, who, in her view, were saving the Moroccans from themselves, is the John Carter myth writ real.

That Burroughs’ characters aren’t technically human makes his description of the Tharks slightly more palatable to us than Wharton’s casual racism, but both writers — the pulp “hack” and the sophisticated literary genius — are speaking from the exact same place, and telling exactly the same story, in the above paragraphs: “look at these weird and inferior tribal freaks. Let’s rule them, shall we?”

The palatability of encoded racism and imperalism in science fictional narratives makes those narratives (and those encoded beliefs) endure long after we know they are useless and vile. Very few of us would get behind the notion that France, Belgium, England and Portugal, etc., should be ruling large swaths of Africa anymore. But it’s easy to root for John Carter as he shepherds the hopelessly savage Green Men of Mars toward civilization. And I did root for him. And I did enjoy it. And I knew better, too.

I said that the imperalistic underthinking was a sign that the book wasn’t written recently, but, come to think of it, never mind that. Much contemporary science fiction (including the aforementioned Avatar by James Cameron) carries these notions hidden within it, probably not because the authors believe such things, but because such a fundamental genre trope, once ingrained, is almost impossible to extract. Genre, at its most basic, reproduces itself with only slight variations from generation to generation. Contemporary science fiction writers who create imperalistic narratives aren’t doing so because they are secretly imperalists. They’re doing so because they are secretly imitative hacks.

There are, like, eleven or twelve or thirty more of these Barsoom books (“Barsoom” is what the natives call their home planet of Mars). I don’t think I’ll read the rest of them. This one was fun to read, though, especially in light of the recent fairly watchable movie based on it. And the fact that, like every other ebook on Gutenberg.org, it was and is legally and openly free.