Locus, February 2013
Page 21
Because so much of the novel is devoted to the characters visiting various communities, the narrative inevitably feels a little fragmented, especially in the final quarter, when a series of events send it off on a tangent into time travel and alternative realities. Yet this is offset by the novel’s very real emotional intelligence. Although her moments of self-criticism are never terribly convincing, Grace’s keen eye and amused, slightly cynical voice allows the novel real agility and perceptiveness in its handling of character. But for all the warmth and dexterity of its observation, the book sometimes feels somehow too warm, too gentle. Indeed, despite the starkly imagined first chapter, in which Dllenahkh’s sojourn in a monastic retreat is interrupted by the news that his home world has been destroyed, there are surprisingly few places where one feels the overwhelming grief such a tragedy must give rise to.
At one level that’s not surprising: such consuming loss would be likely to overbalance any book, especially one as deliberately generous of spirit as The Best of All Possible Worlds. But it’s of a piece with the novel’s larger tendency to shy away from the implications of many of its elements: despite the deeply unsettling revelation that Grace’s sister and her children have been systematically manipulated and abused by her psionically gifted brother-in-law, that plot line seems to simply vanish once the authorities become involved, as does the suggestion that Grace’s favourite nephew, Rafi, might have the potential to follow in his father’s footsteps. Likewise, the discovery late in the novel that Dllenahkh committed a terrible act of violence before the destruction of Sadira is quickly (and unconvincingly) absorbed and set aside.
It’s a tendency that blunts the novel’s larger desire to explore the ways in which new worlds transform both societies and individuals. Yet in a way that doesn’t matter: while The Best of All Possible Worlds may lack the allegorical power it initially gestures toward, it is nonetheless a novel deeply aware, not just of the ways in which love transforms us all, but of the importance of accepting this world in all its imperfection and possibility.
–James Bradley
JOHN CLUTE
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed. (Library of America, 2 vols., 978-1-59853-158-9/978-1-59853-159-9, $70.00, 803+835pp, hc) October 2012. Covers by Richard M. Powers and Ralph Brillart.
Canons are, of course, stages, which do never sit still. Each snapshot iteration of the spinal cord of any art dramatizes a constantly changing self-portrayal – ever since the Classic canon lost its hold a few centuries ago – that we hope beseems us as inheritors and bearers of the culture of the Western World. But canons have to be seen to be believed, or they become illegible in the morphing of the world. Shakespeare is canonical because he is, literally, staged; Ben Jonson is Tintern Abbey, which we eat picnics on but do not get. And as with theatre, so with stories that are meant to be read: we do best with something we read when it has been framed for belief. But the literatures of the English speaking world have not, until recently, been very well staged. (The current digital revolution(s) in protocols of belief, and the confounding of canon-perception in an age of matrices sans frontières, are issues beyond the remit of this review, which is about hinged books.)
The main exception to this long failure to dramatize canon is almost certainly the Library of America, which was founded in 1979 partly on the model of the French Pléiades series, which began about 80 years ago: sharing with it uniform bindings whose size and hand-easy dimensions beg the reader to hold and open any title; sharing with it a focus on central authors within the theatre chosen, which for the Pléiades has turned out to be European literature as a whole, and for the Library of America remains strictly confined to American writers; but not sharing the assumption clearly held by the Pléiades editors: that an intelligent audience will be able to cope with visible scholarship, for their editions are amply and critically annotated. The Library of America follows on this score the profoundly American example of the Great Books of the Western World, where a cod Enlightenment principle – that because all knowledge is ultimately harmonious, an intelligent participant in a culture will be able to understand any iteration of that culture without notes – has for decades justified the production of well-edited texts without a word of evaluative comment. This has been multiply convenient. It generates, given the production values of the LoA, highly readable, ‘‘clean’’ artifacts. It costs less. It flatters its constituency that they are part of the long conversation by virtue of entitlement. It dodges any arguments about the nature of canons in general, or about any particular choice in authors whose inclusion in the LoA very quickly became, for most of us, a sign of canonization. It generates a sense that its choices of author and text need no word to the wise, because those choices are unquestionable.
This all worked pretty well in the early years, when individual volumes racked up to twice the length of current releases, giving off a visceral heft of authority, and in the process, as intended, encompassing entire oeuvres; and when there was a wide choice of authors who could be taken up by the LoA without spooking the gatekeepers. More recently, however, as the array of obvious candidates diminished, it’s all gotten a bit adventurous. Those of us who have long felt that the great American authors of fantastika were inherently part of any genuinely representative canon will have of course been aware that some LoA authors selected during the easy years before 2000 – like Charles Brocken Brown or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe – were uneasy fits into any taming canon of realistic fiction. The demarcation between real and genre was always a presumption of demarcation (and was always pernicious). But clearly the election of H.P. Lovecraft in 2005 and of Philip K. Dick (three volumes 2007-2009) does mark a change. An unspoken array of assumptions may have justified the inclusion of the really very terrible Theodore Dreiser, but the election of Lovecraft is inconsistent with any unspoken consensus about the central spine of American literature; it is an argument.
But that argument – it is one almost any reader of this review in this venue in this year would affirm – is not made. Lovecraft’s unnamably flavoursome prose slides – unsullied by the intoxicating stink of Weird Tales – straight into the immaculate, hyponotically readable LoA format, without a word spoken. As though by magic, the Good Ship Canon skids onto thin ice. And we are glad. (There is no room here to say exactly why we are glad: though we know, we know why.) But now we come to the books on review, and ice floes are in the offing. For the LoA, Gary K. Wolfe has edited, excellently, two anthologies, each separately published but also purchasable together: American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956 and American Science Fiction: Five Classic Novels 1956-1958. His choices of text are intelligent and arguable, though of course no argument is permitted in the LoA format. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1954) is missing, but because it was not available; there is nothing by Isaac Asimov, not even The Naked Sun (1957); there is no Philip K. Dick for obvious reasons; Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1954) is excluded because Clarke was English; there is no A.E. van Vogt (if a suitable title could have been found) but he was Canadian. I would have liked to have seen Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1954 fait accompli), but have not read the book in almost 60 years and may misremember its appeal. So how does this double volume consort with the LoA house-styling of canon? Lovecraft is in line with old practice: to devote a volume to a single author establishes an enfolding context, and on publication any argument is done with. But an anthology is argument; Wolfe’s choices are, as it were, what his anthologies are about. Which brings us, for the last time, back to canon. If Wolfe is not consciously challenging old ex cathedra presumptions about what is central to American literature, presumptions embedded into the LoA’s clubbable silence about its role, then what is he doing? I suspect the editors of the LoA don’t exactly know. Wolfe may have assembled two genuinely fine anthologies; he may have to be content with that.
The LoA has in fact provided something new: an online site –
The first volume contains four novels. C.M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants is uncannily and comically prescient about the corporatizing of the modern world, and the transfiguration of all that’s born into fungibles for consumption. Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, though psychological theories are treated as accurately predictive, movingly infuses the green shoot of love (or its betrayal) into every act engaged upon by the tale’s numerous characters as they assemble themselves into a posthuman gestalt, and enter into the maturity of the race in the stars. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett is astonishingly competent in its love/hate depiction of a rural Ruined Earth whose citizens are hamstrung by religion but, thanks to the tale’s scapegoated but ultimately manumitted adolescent hero protagonist, may escape into a free world; that the new world is a technocracy betrays the time of writing, but it is stirring all the same to watch the world prepare to begin to fix itself better. Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man – as Peter Straub says in his introduction – is an astonishingly accomplished expansion of a short-story idea into a novel, with not a wasted word.
The second volume contains five novels. Robert A. Heinlein’s Double Star so compellingly narrates his actor protagonist’s successful doubling of a famed (but fatally ill) statesmen, at a turning point in the expansion of Homo sapiens beyond the home planets, that the subversiveness of the tale can easily be missed: that a mime can become a working facsimile of a statesman without our learning at the end that he was really the love child of the previous monarch: and can guide us to the stars. Alfred Bester’s utterly silly, superbly incandescent Tiger! Tiger! (here properly reprinted in the better version published a year later as The Stars My Destination) still reads like the time bomb that (as I remember from reading it in Galaxy in 1956) was gonna blow old SF to smithereens: and did so: and out popped Dick and Delany and Zelazny and the New Space Opera Gang. A Case of Conscience by James Blish is a combination of hard SF thought experiment and theological debate; no one had ever quite pulled off a clangour of discourses like this, and Blish never quite managed the trick again. The doomed Lithians at the heart of the conflict of worldviews seem, all these decades later, even more exquisite. Algis Budrys’s Who? is a Cold War tale of conflicted identities that seems enormously more cogent (and compact) than its nonfantastic competitors, perhaps because by the 1950s SF writers had learned to apply their toolkit to the world itself. And Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time edges much closer to the kind of highly erotized theatrics that he was born a few decades too early to be able to stage properly; of all ten authors here assembled, he is the one most conspicuously locked into the wrong era.
That 1950s SF was readable has long been a critical truism; what is borne in on one, after all these decades, is how unrelentingly competent these writers were (or, in the case of Pohl and Matheson, are). The occasional cheap shot or shortcut, an inability to refrain from self-betraying snipes at women, the upliftwards gaze of tale-ending climax after climax, all pale away in the cleansing fire of skill. And what we learn, in the light of this fire, is that each of these books is about something. Each of them looks out. It may be gauche to assert this: but even knowing all we know about how we understand and misunderstand everything under the sun, we are left with a sense that the nine novels here so excellently presented are windows we can look through: that through these tales we regain some of the joy of looking at the world.
–John Clute
KAREN BURNHAM
Diverse Energies, Tobias S. Buckell & Joe Monti, eds. (Tu 978-1-60060-887-2, $19.95, 320pp, hc) November 2012.
The mission statement of Diverse Energies is to present science fiction featuring the sort of multicultural world that we live in today, where people from all backgrounds mix and mingle and have adventures. In this it admirably succeeds, with stories featuring Japanese, Chinese, American Indian, African American, Norse, Indian, gay, straight, etc., characters. On the other hand, the stories here fall into a sort of pattern that saps some of the diversity and some of the energy billed on the cover. The prevalence of near-future, shabby, have vs. have not settings is completely understandable in a selection of stories written in the shadow of the Great Recession. Science fiction always wrestles with the present as much as the future, and right now the present seems mighty shabby, So many of the stories fit the dystopian mold that it becomes a little wearing towards the end.
Ellen Oh’s story starts the anthology on a tragic note. In a war-torn Asian country where children as young as 14 are being drafted, a young boy has turned to theft to feed his family. The initial part of the story is somewhat clichéd and the dialog is quite stilted. All that falls away in the aftermath of a Hiroshima-style bombing of the civilian population, after which our POV character is clearly dying from radiation poisoning as his best friend tries to save him. It is an incredibly heartrending portrait of suffering. The next story, Daniel H. Wilson’s ‘‘Freshee’s Frogurt’’ (an excerpt from his Robopocalypse novel that does not particularly tempt me to read it) makes a rather unfortunate contrast, being an oddly slight story about the (graphically) violent beginning of a robot uprising. Ken Liu’s ‘‘Pattern Recognition’’ is a solid story covering some of the same territory as his Clarkesworld story ‘‘Tying Knots’’, with the exploitation of the intellectual abilities of the powerless, here children raised in an isolated compound and used to solve pattern recognition problems. ‘‘What Arms to Hold Us’’ by Rajan Khanna also features young children being exploited, this time as teleoperators for off-world mining. The young hero is being manipulated by an individual, but eventually he works out the rough shape of the overall system that is oppressing him.
In ‘‘Gods of the Dimming Light’’ Greg van Eekhout gives us another starving youth attempting to feed his family, and this one gets scooped up into a plot revolving around Ragnarok in San Diego. The ‘‘Good Girl’’ in Malinda Lo’s excellent story is trying to rescue her brother instead of feed her family in a tale of a government oppression dystopia. The developing lesbian romance at the heart of the story is wonderfully done. Paolo Bacigalupi gives us a street urchin who gets tangled in intrigue centered on the Dalai Lama in ‘‘A Pocketful of Dharma’’. In Rahul Kanakia’s ‘‘Next Door’’ the have/have not dynamic is dramatized by showing the wealthy, with their augmented vision glasses, barely aware of the poor living literally right next to them. The young gay protagonist here is another one trying to provide for his family, getting involved with a plot focused on Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. Cindy Pon also dramatizes the have/have not divide in ‘‘Blue Skies’’, where a young man kidnaps a rich young girl and shows her the outside world. It’s a good story, but one where the characters don’t quite come to life.
K. Tempest Bradford’s story might handle this best. In ‘‘Uncertainty Principle’’, Iliana is a young woman of mixed heritage who has found herself shifting between similar-but-different universes ever since she can remember. Her parents are scientists who invented time travel, and her whole life she has been buffeted by people messing with timelines. Tellingly, each time her universe shifts, things get slightly worse and slightly shabbier. Eventually she finds herself being raised by different people, and that motivates her to get a handle on what’s going on. She makes contact with time travelers and eventually gets things back on the ‘‘right’’ track. It’s a fun, empowering story.
The
concluding story, ‘‘Solitude’’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, is a reprint (as is the Bacigalupi story) and it feels almost unfair to the rest of the stories to include it here. In Le Guin’s Hainish universe, the woman who narrates the story is the daughter of an ethnologist. They encounter a post-technological world where the adult researchers have very little luck talking to the adult members of the society. The mother decides to raise her son and daughter in that culture so that they can learn it as children learn things. As they grow towards young adulthood, the mother wants them both to return to the ship and to civilization. The narrator, however, feels much more at home in her adopted culture and refuses to leave. After she wins the battle to return to her home, we follow her as she raises a child of her own, and returns to tell her story to her mother’s culture. It beautifully encapsulates the richness and challenge of being multicultural.
–Karen Burnham
GWENDA BOND
Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 978-0316133975, $18.99, 528pp, hc) November 2012.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone, the opening installment of Laini Taylor’s YA trilogy of the same name, was a marvel of a novel, given power through a hybrid of smart construction and riveting emotion. It introduced us to blue-haired Karou, a young art student living in Prague, secretly raised by monsters known as chimaera. Karou traveled the globe collecting human teeth for her fearsome, beloved father figure Brimstone. For what purpose, she did not know. But as that novel unfolded, winged beings were spotted around the world – burning doors with black handprints, doors that Karou had formerly used as portals. A warning: abandon this review here, all who don’t want to be irretrievably spoiled for that novel or the newest. When Karou encounters Akiva, a seraph with fiery eyes who is closing the doors, she is strongly drawn to him, and finally discovers the long-hidden secrets of her past. Brimstone’s use for the teeth she has collected is to resurrect soldiers for a war between the seraph and the chimaera, raging in the world of Eretz. He makes new bodies through magic, using teeth, and in fact he harvested Karou’s soul long ago, when she was Madrigal, a chimaera slain for falling in love with the enemy: Akiva. As Daughter of Smoke and Bone ends, Karou’s family is dead, her people a victim of all-but-genocide at Akiva’s angry hand on his master and father Joram’s behalf.