What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Lady of Mazes is rigorous hard SF, but the questions it raises are philosophical rather than technical. The problem with writing about post-humanity and people whose experience is very far from ours is the difficuty of identification. This can sometimes be a problem for me with Egan and Stross. Schroeder avoids the potential pitfalls, in any case for readers who are prepared to pay close attention even at the beginning when everything is unfamiliar. Lady of Mazes has a very high new-cool-stuff-per-page density, but without ever losing sight of the perceptions of its point-of-view characters. It has worldbuilding and ideas casually mentioned that most writers would mine for a trilogy, and it has one of the best descriptions of suffering chagrin I have ever read.

  Set in the same universe as Schroeder’s earlier Ventus, Lady of Mazes also explores some of the same themes. Schroeder seems generally interested in what gives life purpose and agency in post-scarcity societies. Schroeder, like John Barnes, seems to think that many people would retreat into unreality. Schroeder appreciates that people tend to become very baroque when given the opportunity. In Lady of Mazes we see new art forms, new ways of living, angst over relationships and other hallmarks of humanity. The illusions they embrace are the illusions of meaning and significance. They are happy and fulfilled within their ultimately meaningless experience. Schroeder doesn’t have any answers, but he’s great on fascinating questions. Does it matter if what you do matters as long as you think it matters? What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural? And if a Chinese Room started to attack your home, how would you fight against it?

  On this re-read I am more impressed than ever with Schroeder’s breadth of vision and clever construction. I also had a great time hanging out again with Livia and her world. The shadow of the post-humans and half-understood technology may hang over them, they may live in very odd worlds, but these characters are recognisably people, and people one can care about.

  AUGUST 20, 2008

  11. The Weirdest Book in the World

  For a long time I thought the weirdest book in the world was Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap, in which a retiring college professor does a holiday mind swap with a colleague on Mars, only to find when he gets there that the colleague doesn’t exist and his own body back on Earth has disappeared. Things get weirder from there on, and don’t stop being weird by the end of the book. Then I discovered R. A. Lafferty and thought nobody could ever be weirder.

  In 1995, Lafferty lost his title. Robert Reed wrote An Exaltation of Larks, which really did seem to be the weirdest book in the world, making Sheckley and Lafferty seem positively normal in comparison. Robert Reed is an absolutely brilliant writer. I think he may well be the greatest living writer of short SF, edging out Ted Chiang by a nose. Stories like “A Plague of Life” and “Veritas” are why I buy SF magazines. Gardner Dozois has said he could publish a Best Robert Reed of the Year collection every year. He’s phenomenally wonderful, up to about 10,000 words. After that it’s as if you can hear him thinking, “Oh. Better throw in something else now. Something new.” Sometimes this works really well, as in Sister Alice and Marrow, where the recomplications just make the books better. Other times, as in Down the Bright Way, you find yourself thinking at the recomplications, “You know, this might have been enough for any normal person?” Then there’s An Exaltation of Larks, which is brilliantly written, fascinating, and essentially becomes a new genre every 10,000 words. It starts off on a college campus with weird things happening, and whenever you think you have some idea what’s going on, you just don’t. There’s a section where the characters are alien turtles floating in space. It has been, for more than a decade, the indisputable weirdest book in the house.

  But I may have just read something that beats it for sheer unadulterated oddity.

  Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) was an American “women’s writer” of the early twentieth century. Her novels are odd romances set in an era after divorce but before divorce was acceptable, after automobiles but before air-conditioning and penicillin. To someone used to Victorian novels and modern ones, they have a fascinating level of morality—in one of them, someone lusts in his heart and is falsely accused of murder and, eventually exculpated, he dies of TB caught in prison. Rich people have interesting trouble passing through eyes of needles. Adultery is a perpetual problem. Love is not enough, and neither is money.

  I read half a dozen of Norris’s books from the library, just for fun. (I do this sometimes.) The last one I randomly picked off the shelf was Through a Glass Darkly, which is science fiction and, you guessed it, my new contender for the weirdest book in the world.

  There’s a utopian world which is an alternate America that didn’t fight the Spanish–American war and which has always made peace ever since. It’s socialist to the point of having free food for everyone, and in a way that clearly grows out of Norris’s experience of having lived through the Depression writing cheerful books about rich people’s love troubles. This alternate world also happens to be Heaven, or one of the Heavens—there are at least seven, as everyone knows. People are born and die there, but people also arrive there from our world when they have died here in a particularly good way. Our hero, a young trainee doctor, turns up there after having died heroically in the battle of Midway. He is shown around in a typical mainstream-writer-writes-utopia visitor way, having how everything works explained to him.

  He then sets out to practice as a doctor, his training being miraculously complete. (Don’t ask.) He falls in love with a married woman and angsts about this at great length. Then he falls in love with and gets engaged to her daughter. The daughter finds out about the mother and allows herself to be swept away in a flood (where she’s rescuing some kids) and drowns, and is reborn in our world. There she grows up in New York and becomes a nurse, is seduced and marries someone else to give her baby a name. In the end she realises she loves the someone else after all.

  That’s it. Two-thirds of the book takes place in the ideal otherworld, and one third in our world. There’s no frame closure.

  If you have contenders for books weirder than this, do let me know.

  SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

  12. The Poetry of Deep Time: Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night

  I’ve been meaning to re-read some Clarke in a memorial kind of way ever since he died earlier this year. What I picked up immediately was the short story collection Of Time and Stars, the first thing of his I ever read, which holds up wonderfully. Looking along the shelf this afternoon I found myself wanting new vintage Clarke, and failing that, which I’m not going to get, one that wasn’t utterly familiar. There comes a time with authors one really likes and re-reads a whole lot when the books that were the least favourites become the favourites, because they’re the ones you can still actually read.

  Against the Fall of Night (1953) was the first far-future SF I ever read. My memories of it were hazy—I remembered the far-future city Diaspar, the only city on the desert Earth, and the way it had stood for countless millions of years looking only inward. I couldn’t have told you a thing about the plot and characters, and on re-reading it, yeah, they’re there, I suppose, but they’re not what’s important.

  There isn’t much lyrical SF, and it’s something more often associated with Zelazny than Clarke. In the story about SF, Clarke was the nuts-and-bolts engineer with a vision. Yet here we don’t see any nuts and bolts, we’re into Clarke’s-law sufficiently advanced technology. What makes the book memorable and notable is the beauty of the words and the imagery that clothes the ideas.

  Man has been beaten back from the universe and confined himself to Earth. Not everybody was writing in those terms even in 1953—this is where Heinlein looks like an enlightened feminist. But never mind. I didn’t notice it when I was twelve. There is one female character, but it might as well
be all “he” for all that it matters. For the purposes of this story the spirit of humanity, the only important character, is called Man, and he, and is to be considered male. The actual notable characters are two asexual teenage boys and a middle-aged asexual male librarian. Forget it. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. It’s probably part of the genetic engineering they’ve done so they don’t want to leave the city. Gender barely exists, sex isn’t an issue, passion isn’t an issue. Cope. Billions of years have passed, the oceans have dried up, nobody leaves Diaspar and Alvin is the first child to be born in the city for seven thousand years.

  It’s an amazing span of time, between now and then, and Clarke really makes you feel it. You feel how old Diaspar is, with its forgotten connections to lost cities and its buried robotic levels. Nobody knows how the computers work, or the moving walkways. They’re decadent, in a mild passionless way. Then you learn of the dried-up oceans, the fallen moon, the endless desert, the great span of history out among the stars before the city existed. This really does feel like the end of time, not only to the people who live there but to the reader as well.

  In utter silence, the ship drew away from the tower. It was strange, Rorden thought, that for the second time in his life he had said goodbye to Alvin. The little closed world of Diaspar knew only one farewell, and that was for eternity.

  The ship was now only a dark stain against the sky, and of a sudden Rorden lost it altogether. He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds that Man had ever made—the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel drilled suddenly across the sky.

  Even when the last echoes had died away into the desert, Rorden never moved. He was thinking of the boy who had gone, wondering, as he had so often done, if he would ever understand that aloof and baffling mind. Alvin would never grow up, to him the whole universe was a plaything, a puzzle to be unravelled for his own amusement. In his play he had now found the ultimate, deadly toy which might wreck what was left of human civilization—but whatever the outcome, to him it would still be a game.

  The sun was now low on the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing from the desert. But still Rorden waited, conquering his fears, and presently for the first time in his life he saw the stars.

  The plot is quite simple. Diaspar is beautiful but entirely inward turned. Alvin looks out and discovers that there is more in the universe than his one city. He recovers the truth about human history, and rather than wrecking what is left of human civilization, revitalises it. By the end of the novel, Man, Diaspar, and Earth have begun to turn outward again. That’s all well and good. What has always stayed with me is the in-turned Diaspar and the sense of deep time. That’s what’s memorable, and cool, and influential. Clarke recognized though that there isn’t, and can’t be, any story there, beyond that amazing image. It’s a short book even so, 159 pages and not a wasted word.

  They don’t make them like that anymore.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

  13. Clarke reimagined in hot pink: Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun

  After reading Against the Fall of Night, I felt like reading something else set at the end of time, but this time with some girls in it. Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun was the obvious and immediate selection. Re-reading it with that in mind, I wonder if this may have been Lee’s intention in writing it.

  My friend Hergal had killed himself again. This was the fortieth time he had crashed his bird-plane on to the Zeefahr Monument and had to have a new body made. And when I went to visit him at Limbo, I was wandering around for ages before the robot found him for me. He was dark this time, about a foot taller with very long hair and a moustache all glittery gold fibres, and these silly wings growing out of his shoulders and ankles.

  It’s the far future. Humanity is confined to three very similar domed cities (the interestingly named Four Bee, Boo, and Baa) and the rest of the Earth is desert. Robots do everything. People are essentially immortal, and decadent. We have an adolescent protagonist. So far, so very similar to Clarke. After that point, everything is different. Lee’s work is first person, up front, immersive, immediate, individual, and anything but distant. Her version of humanity has not been genetically engineered into contemplative asexuality and aeons of quiet dreaming—anything but. Lee gives us a slangy rebellious girl with a taste for sex and drugs and changing gender. This is the subversive feminist version of the desert city with robots at the end of time.

  The normal life cycle in Lee’s world is for the life-spark (or soul) to begin as a child, with at least one involved parent, or maker. The child goes to hypno-school and is educated. After this, the child becomes “Jang,” adolescent, and is expected to stay at this stage for a century or two. Beyond that they become “Older People” and live a different lifestyle for some centuries until they’re sufficiently bored with life to wipe their memory and return to childhood, this time with a robot parent.

  Robots do everything. There’s nothing significant for people to do. At one point we’re shown people “working” where they have to press buttons—and if they don’t press them, they pop up anyway in half a minute. This really is makework and futility. Even art is entirely computer-mediated—and when the protagonist tries to make a sculpture without that mediation, it falls to bits. There’s no work, there’s no art, robots have it all. This is an early take on the problem of post-scarcity leisure, and as such it also makes an interesting comparison with John Barnes’s A Million Open Doors or Karl Schroeder’s Ventus. If you can do anything you want and have anything you want, but none of it matters, what do you want to do or have? There’s nothing in this world for humans to do except eat, shop, take drugs, dream designer dreams, follow fashion, and have sex, for which they get married for periods varying between one afternoon and forty days. Jang are supposed to sabotage things from time to time, and even that isn’t any fun, and doesn’t really achieve anything. Life’s a cycle of romance, drugs and sex, no wonder people are killing themselves in droves. There’s no scarcity of anything, and you pay for things with groveling thanks. If you think of some work you could do, you have to apply for permission, and you’ll find the robots have already got it covered.

  Clarke’s robots are wise, ageless, inscrutable and have the good of humanity at heart. Lee’s are petulant, have personalities, and are not beyond cheating on their programming. They’re sure they know best, after all. Clarke’s are wise servants, Lee’s are stifling over-controlling parents. This may not be as good for the characters, but it does make for more conflict.

  Life for humans is, on the surface, glittering and fascinating. There are about six words of new slang, giving a brave illusion of a new dialect. Almost everyone lives in a palace. Fashion is constantly changing. You can have a completely new body designed, and wake up in it right away. You should do this no more than every thirty days, but you can short-circuit the process by committing suicide if you’re impatient. Killing yourself creatively and designing interesting bodies are almost the only real art forms. You can change gender as easily as you can change height, weight, hair and skin colour. Most people have a gender preference, but it tends to be fairly mild. One character describes himself as “eighty percent male” and appears as female only once in the novel; others switch gender as often as clothing. This is done brilliantly, because it’s accepted so casually. It bears comparison with the best of Varley’s Eight Worlds stories.

  The book has an interesting title history. It was originally published in the US as Don’t Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977). I own a 1979 UK (Hamlyn) edition of both volumes bound in one cover as Drinking Sapphire Wine. More recent editions include both books but use the name Biting the Sun. I think of it as Drinking Sapphire Wine, as that’s what it’s said on my copy every time I’ve read it for almost thirty years, but they’re both great titles. Biting the Sun refers to a shard found in an archaeological site our protagonist spends time at in her quest for relevance. T
he shard bears the message, “Do not bite the sun! It will burn your mouth,” which she interprets as not fighting the system—which she nevertheless continues to fight throughout the book. The sapphire wine is the water of Lethe which will let you forget who you are and begin again at childhood.

  Unlike Against the Fall of Night, I’ve re-read this at reasonably frequent intervals. I think it’s fair to say that I like it a lot more—but then I am a sucker for characters and events in a book, and Clarke’s is pretty much pure atmosphere. I adore Lee’s first-person unnamed protagonist. I re-read it to visit with her and her world for a while. She’s predominantly female and has been Jang for about twenty-five years and is sick of it. She has a circle of friends and a life that doesn’t contain anything real. At the beginning of the book she steals a pet, a desert animal. The first volume is about her search for meaning in her life, and the difference her pet makes; the second volume is largely about her living alone and making the desert bloom. You can see that as growing up, in a very limited way, I suppose.

  I don’t know quite what it says about gender expectations that while Clarke’s protagonist looks outside the city and causes a renaissance, Lee’s settles for a garden.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

  14. Something rich and strange: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine

  This was only my second read of Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine, and I don’t have all that much coherent to say about it except “Wow,” and “You want to read it!”

  The child imagined the wind slipping and sliding down the dunes at Avanue. She imagined the dunes as some kind of geometrical slope, at thirty-five degrees, like this one, but the mother kept talking and the mind picture changed with each sentence, like the shape of the wind.