Asimov's SF, September 2010
Page 3
And, back in the eighteenth century, French was the diplomatic language in most European courts, and French-style meals the epitome of refinement.
The common point between those situations is that the countries exporting their cultures were all economically or politically strong at the time. Associated with this is an aura subtler than a military invasion: that of cultural influence. Not only is the dominant culture exported, but people in the non-dominant countries will strive to imitate it with various degrees of success, sometimes denigrating their own culture in the process. For most of the twentieth century (which coincides with most of the history of speculative fiction), the US has been the dominant world power, and therefore US—and by extension Western Anglophone—speculative fiction is the one that determines the market; the one that is talked about, the one that is emulated, the one that is translated and exported.
A frequent side effect of cultural domination is isolationism, especially after the period of growth is over: the paradigm is not voiced in so many words, but the implication is that if a culture can be so widely adopted, it is because it is somehow superior. Therefore, the dominant culture tends to make far fewer efforts to import anything from abroad (late Imperial China is pretty much a textbook example of this).
To a large extent, this means that what we consider international SF today, what we think of as good stories, as unforgettable narratives, are in fact shaped by Western Anglophone culture—and above all by US culture, just as our movie-making is permeated by Hollywood, and our television is strongly influenced by American programs.
Does this make SF in other countries derivative? We might argue at first sight that it does. Many of the tropes of science fiction are Western or even American: the biggest one, arguably, is the scientific approach itself, which as we have seen originates from the West, and has often been imported wholesale (countries such as Japan are an amazing exception). But there are others, like the exploration of space and stories of first contact, which in classic SF are a thinly-disguised retread of either the colonization process or the American conquest of the West.
But the effect is more pernicious yet: the grammar of storytelling itself, the SF novel, whether it be adventure or literary stories, is very much a product of its time and place. The novel, and especially the commercial novel as we understand it today, is a Western construct. To take only one example, even late Chinese prose literature is radically different from what was developing in the Western world in the same time period. The great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasty (fourteenth century to twentieth century) are not plot or character-centered, and do not have a neat, tidy resolution or a climax. Rather, they aim to present a variety of images, themes, and personalities, what sinologist Richard J. Smith[13] calls “infinite overlapping and alternation,” a feeling of endlessness that is not rooted in some underlying meaning of the world. This is a very different aesthetic from Western novels, where a crescendo of plot has to climax and lead into an emotionally charged denouement.
Therefore, to ask of other countries that they write SF novels might seem like a retread of colonialist ethos, forcing alien values onto them.
And yet . . . and yet, all literature is a dialogue. A dialogue in the sense that the writers are listening to those who have come before; that no SF writer exists in a vacuum, but rather draws inspiration from their predecessors. But it is also a dialogue because any writer will speak in their own voice—a voice that is influenced by their upbringing, the society they live in, the values they hold dear. Even if those other countries had read no other SF but that imported from America—which, as I have shown above, is not true—they would still create a form of science fiction that would be uniquely their own. Japanese SF, as Nick Mamatas points out on the Haikasoru blog[14], harkens back to Van Vogt and Fredric Brown just as much as it draws from other Japanese writers, religious concepts, manga, science....
Because just as if one gives two writers the same plot and ask them to write, one will end up with two very different stories, no two people will read the same book in the same way, and no two people will craft an answer to the same book or author in the same voice. That is even more true when there is a great distance between those two writers. What I, as a Frenchwoman living in France, get out of reading Charles Stross is no doubt very different from what a black Kenyan woman would get out of it. And what I will write is different from what an Asian or an African writer will write.
To take just one example: there is a greater emphasis on the community in Asian countries than there is in the West. As a result, many Asians coming-of-age stories are about learning to fit in and be accepted, rather than forging one's independence. A story in which a character walks away from his community and his family would be seen as a tragedy, rather than the triumph of turning over a brand new leaf and making a life for oneself—as it might be in the West. Likewise, Asians tend to have a more elastic concept of reality than Westerners. (the idea that science can explain everything is a typically Western one.) pieces such as Liu Cixin's “From Ball Lightning"[15] or Han Song's “The Wheel of Samsara"[16] have a peculiar, very fluid concept of reality and memory.
SF, then, is shaped by influences and dialogue, and the voice of SF in different countries is necessarily going to be different. When you throw into the mix the writers of those countries—the Brazilian writers of Brazil, the Chinese writers of China—then you will have voices that are very different from those that come from America or indeed from the western world, and markets that will continue to develop and thrive, and make their own ways with their own voices.
Copyright © 2010 Aliette de Bodard
With thanks to Lauren Beukes, Keyan Bowes, Dario Ciriello, Fabio Fernandes, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Rick Novy, and Juliette Wade.
* * * *
References
1 “Japanese History: Meiji Restoration,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 2001 & 2006.
2 C.P. Fitzgerald, A Concise History of East Asia, Penguin Books, 1966.
3 worldsf.wordpress.com
4 www.concatenations.org
5 Jenny Bai and Cecilia Qin, www.concatenation.org/articles/sciencefictionchina.html
6 Sherry Yao, www.concatenation.org/articles/sciencefictionworld2010.html
7 M. Elizabeth Ginway, Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood In The Land Of The Future, Bucknell University Press, 2004.
8 Nnedi Okarafor, www.sfwa.org/2010/03/can-you-define-african-science-fiction
9 Nick Wood, worldsf.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/monday-original-content-sf-in-south-africa-by-nick-wood
10 Nick Wood, “Science Fiction in South Africa,” series of articles from 2005 to 2009 (nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/index2.htm?sfsa.htm)
11 Centre National du Livre, Le Secteur Du Livre: Chiffres-clés 2008-2009, 2010
12 Natalie Levisalles, “The US market for translations,” Publishing Research Quarterly, June 2004.
13 Richard J. Smith, China's Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, Westview Press, 1994.
14 Nick Mamatas, www.haikasoru.com/science-fiction/world-sf-worth-reading-before-developing-an-opinion
15 Novel excerpt published in World Without Borders, wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-ball-lightning
16 Short story collected in The Apex Book of World SF, ed. Lavie Tidhar, Apex Publications, 2009.
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Novelette: BACKLASH by Nancy Fulda
Nancy Fulda has earned a Masters’ Degree in Computer Science, won a trophy in competitive ballroom dance, and sold a number of stories and articles. She lives in northern Germany with her husband and three children. You can find out more about her at www.nancyfulda.com. Nancy's taut thriller about terrorism and time travel is her first tale for Asimov's.
A quiet Chinese girl collected our plates after the meal. She placed a hand-wrapped fortune cookie at each setting, gave me a searching look, and vanished into the crowded restaurant.
Clarise nibbled the end off her cookie
and withdrew the fortune with the same flamboyant grace she had shown as a child. “ ‘Time is a fickle ally',” she read. “Confucius must know I turn twenty-three tomorrow.” She feigned indignation, but it couldn't mask her natural poise. She was resplendent in a tailored business suit, her hair twining free of the twist she wore at the office.
I take Clarise out every year for Valentine's Day. It started as a consolation prize, a sort of Daddy-daughter date to soothe the pain of her breakup with Billy Sanders. Clarise was thirteen at the time; bookish, awkward, painfully insecure. She had grown into her potential since then. The annual Valentine's dinner had become the highlight of my year; a chance to snatch back fragments of a happier past, to banter with an exquisite woman as I once bantered with her mother.
Which made the interloper to her left all the less welcome.
Sean, his name was. Hair too long, shirt too baggy. Decent posture, dreadful table manners. He reminded me of high school punks with big mouths and no sense of humor. But he was the first in a long string of short relationships who actually seemed to make my daughter happy. For that, I supposed, he deserved some respect.
Clarise leaned into her guest's shoulder as he opened his fortune cookie. “Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts,” he read, and the two of them smiled as if at some private joke. Clarise glanced up and saw me watching them.
"What does yours say, Daddy?” she asked. I snapped my cookie in half and glanced at the paper.
It was covered with spidery lines that somehow seemed random and precisely geometric at the same time. A clear space in the middle hosted crisp black text: Eugene Gutierrez. Activation code: pupae.
My hand was shaking.
"Very funny,” I said, crumpling the message in my fist. “Clarise, if this low-brow prankster is the best you can do for a boyfriend, I suggest you stay single.” I threw the paper onto my plate and stalked away from the table, slapping two fifties on the cashier's desk as I left. Through the glass fronting of the restaurant, I saw Clarise stretch across the tablecloth to retrieve my fortune.
I was halfway down the block when Sean caught up with me.
"Mr. Gutierrez? Mr. Gutierrez, I didn't, I wouldn't—I mean, Clarise told me you worked in special ops, but she also told me about the nightmares, and I would never—"
"Go home, boy,” I said. Clarise had been telling him quite a bit, it seemed.
Sean's mouth set in a hard line. I knew what he wanted to say: “You're a paranoid old man, and an egotist, just like everyone says. Clarise is the only one who can't see it.” But he just looked at me until the line of his mouth relaxed and his muscles unknotted. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?” he asked. “It's lousy weather for a walk."
"No,” I said as Clarise trotted up to join us, shoes clicking on the wet pavement. “I need the exercise."
Clarise gave me that look, the one that meant she knew I was going to walk five kilometers in the rain, then go home and lie dripping on my bed for the rest of the night. Come dawn I'd be at the gym, beating out the last of the adrenaline.
"Go on,” I said, holding my voice steady. “The night's young. Go have fun."
"Only if you promise to behave,” Clarise said, twisting around a phrase I'd used in her childhood. Her smile was coy.
"Get outta here,” I said. I waited until their backs were turned before letting the tension return to my jaw. Methodically, I flicked the last soggy crumbs of the fortune cookie from my sleeves.
It was not the first joke, the first game. Local kids used to snap twigs outside the window at night, hoping to goad me into a panic. I'd find myself pressed against the rough floorboards, fingers raw with splinters, cringing against shrapnel that I knew wasn't there. Or I'd feel the cold edges of a pipe wrench in my hands and hear myself spewing curses and blustering at the sky.
Ten years was plenty of time to practice discipline: the outward signs were gone now. But a noisily swerving car, the scent of sulfur—or an ill-conceived message in a fortune cookie—could still unleash that gasping feeling as the world spun out of control. It's what I hate most about flashbacks: you can't fight them, can't run from them. Someone pops a firecracker and you're back in South Africa, battered, shackled, praying to a God you don't believe in that they don't know where your family is.
I'd left my coat at the restaurant. I went back to get it, uncertain whether or not to trace the fortune cookie to its origins. If it was just a random prankster, some kid taunting the wacko for old times’ sake, it probably didn't matter. But if it was Sean—and who else besides Clarise had known that we'd be eating here tonight?—If it was Sean, then my daughter was dating both a fool and a liar. I wasn't willing to permit that.
The girl who'd brought the cookies watched me from behind a large bamboo plant as I entered. She looked fourteen, give or take two years, with dark eyes and an oval face. She was oddly still for a girl her age; no fidgeting, no slumping. My route to the coat rack took me within three feet of her, but I kept my eyes focused forward, unwilling to confront her just yet.
"Eugene,” she said.
I paused. I had not given my name at the restaurant. The table was reserved under “Gutierrez” and I had paid for our meal in cash. The girl fell into step beside me, and I noted that her movements were like her voice; controlled, efficient, yet still broadcasting urgency.
"We've got a problem,” she said softly. “Jo-jo says there was a leak downstream and—"
Click.
It was the sound of the internal lock on an M&P .40.
I almost moved too late. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, that it was just the clank of some woman's purse zipper, but then I heard the same weapon cock. I grabbed the girl and shoved us both to the floor.
A shot whizzed past my head. Someone screamed. I tightened my grip on the girl and rolled us both behind the cashier's desk. Half the restaurant panicked—standing dumbfounded at their tables, running in hopelessly stupid directions—as the second shot fired. A corner of the cashier's desk exploded; a chunk of wood hit my face. I dragged the girl into the kitchen.
It was a relief, almost, to be running from a tangible threat. My heart thudded as I pulled the dark-eyed teenager—stunned, shaky, but thankfully not hysterical—into a crevice between two shrimp vats and looked for a weapon. The knives were too far, the frying pans too unwieldy. I was rifling through a box of chopsticks when police sirens sounded outside the building, followed by the shatter of breaking glass and a general drop in tension throughout the restaurant. A few moments later the drawling prattle of the police officers confirmed that the gunman had fled.
The girl beside me looked relieved and placed a hand on my chest with disturbing familiarity. “Thank you,” she said. “I'm not trained for stuff like that. If you hadn't been there I'd—"
She broke off mid-sentence when she felt the chopsticks pressing against her throat. I could kill her with just my body weight, and the look in my eyes must have warned her that I might really do it. She paled.
"Eugene,” she said. “What is this?"
"That's what I'd like to know. That's what you're going to tell me. Why would a bogus note show up in an old vet's fortune cookie, followed by a very non-bogus try on his life? Who are you, and how do you know my name? Talk."
A complicated wash of emotions passed through her eyes. I couldn't peg most of them—they fled too quickly—but I was certain the shock was real.
"You didn't activate,” she said, aghast. She sounded like someone discovering that her best friend had just killed himself.
"No, I didn't ‘activate.’ I don't even know what you're talking about.” What was this? Hypnosis? Suppressed memories? I'd seen enough to know mental twiddling was possible, and I wouldn't put tricks like that past any of the agencies I'd worked for. But why me? Why now?
The chopsticks were digging into the girl's throat, but she didn't seem to notice. “The fortune cookie,” she said. “You got a note with patterned lines?"
"Yes, damn it!"
"Yes, I read it!” I said. The restaurant's kitchen workers were slowly recovering from the shootout; standing up, gathering in clumps, talking. Soon someone would spot us huddled in our corner. “Now tell me what it was supposed to do. Besides trigger a flashback.” Which was threatening to manifest, now that the adrenaline of the past few minutes had worn off. My hands were shaking too badly to hold the chopsticks, so I dropped them. I was likely to pass out on the floor soon, but I didn't know how to communicate that to my . . . captive? Partner? The roles were starting to blur.
"The flashbacks,” the girl breathed. “We didn't compensate for the flashbacks. Degenerative psychological condition, powerful neurological triggers . . .” She stood and pulled me to my feet with impressive force. “Come on, we can't stay here."
That last part, at least, made sense. I let her tug me toward the back kitchen doorway, but our exit was blocked by a beefy Chinese man in a white apron. “Chen-chi,” he said. “Your shift's not up yet. Who's this?"
"A friend,” Chen-chi said. “I have to leave early today. I'll make up the time tomorrow."
"That's what you said yesterday."
Chen-chi shrugged and tried to push past him, but he stood his ground and spat something in Chinese. Chen-chi answered in the same language, and the exchange grew heated. Then Chen-chi punched him in the stomach.
It was the sorriest excuse for a hook I'd ever seen; no hip rotation, poor shoulder placement, lousy contact angle. But she made up in enthusiasm for what she lacked in technique, and her boss staggered back in surprise. She grabbed my arm and pulled me past him, away from the restaurant, into the gathering darkness.
We ran through rain, splashing past alleys and skidding at street corners. The past pressed like black smoke against my vision, threatening to overpower me. I held the memories back until we slipped through an unlocked basement window, down into a dusty room.