What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  This is a world dominated by China. At some time in the past, the US has had a proletarian revolution, and at some time only about fifteen years ago had the Cleansing Winds Campaign, an overwhelming event like the Cultural Revolution in China. Global warming has made much of the interior of the US uninhabitable. Mars is being settled. Everything is socialist, but there are cracks. Stories often take place in the cracks, and this one is no exception.

  This is a book about ordinary people getting by and coping with their everyday problems in a world that’s both weirdly different and weirdly similar to our own. It’s a very political book in the sense people normally mean. It’s showing us a world after a proletarian revolution in the US, for goodness’ sake. And yet it certainly isn’t a fantasy of political agency. None of the characters in the novel have any political agency at all. They’re all helpless against the system, and getting by as best they can in the cracks.

  Zhang is an ordinary working-class working guy getting by without thinking about things too much. He’s an engineering tech who, during the course of the book, becomes an engineer. He uses futuristic cyberpunk equipment to do his job, but he takes it all for granted. He jacks in to his tools with a sigh. There is no glamour, even when he’s using computer systems to design houses organically. He’s also gay, in a much more unromantic and realistic way than I’m used to seeing with gay characters written by women. He has casual sex. He has a terrible time when he’s forced to live on Baffin Island where there’s no possibility of meeting anyone. He’s forced into an embarrassing situation taking the daughter of his boss on a date.

  We also have the points of view of Martine, a twenty-year veteran who’s now lonely among her goats on Mars; Angel, who races a kite (a huge powered hang glider) through the skies of New York City; Alexi, another Martian settler, who wants to get better at engineering; and San Xiang, an ugly girl who gets a new face and finds out it isn’t really what she wanted.

  It’s surprising how unusual it is to have a book where the characters really work. Maybe I’ve just read too many quest novels and too many stories about interstellar traders. But it seems that in most fiction while characters may have a job, the story takes them away from it. We don’t see much in the way of actual work being done. Zhang’s work is futuristic and half-cyberpunk, but he has to do it, and keep doing it. The economic relationship between work and living is more realistic in this novel than in any other SF future I can think of. In the end, you’re left with a mosaic picture of a man in his world. Zhang’s world has clearly descended from our world. It’s better in some ways and worse in some ways. If not a plausible future, it’s not a future that has dated itself out of existence in the fifteen years since the book was written. If not a hopeful vision, it’s not a disastrous one either. It has texture and ambiguity. I value that, and I’d like to see more of it.

  NOVEMBER 17, 2008

  19. Anathem: What does it gain from not being our world?

  Tom Shippey, who isn’t an idiot, called Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008) “high fantasy” in The Times. So in my second reading of Anathem in the two months since it came out, I was trying to figure out what he meant when he used that term about a book that includes spaceships and the scientific method.

  Shippey defines high fantasy as “a story set entirely in a secondary world, the creation of which is a major part of the author’s appeal and intention.” Certainly, the world of Anathem is deeply appealing. It’s not just that geeks live in giant clock-monasteries, cool as that is. It’s not the way different parts of those monasteries are enclosed for different amounts of time. It’s the angle on time that encourages. Our narrator, Erasmas, is only nineteen, yet it’s second nature to him to say: “When there’s an economy extramuros, we can sell the honey outside the Day Gate and use the money to buy things it’s difficult to make in the concent. When conditions are post-apocalyptic, we can eat it.” Or “For three thousand years it had been the concent’s policy to accept any or all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw any away.… We had folding chairs made of aluminum, bamboo, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, handcarved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal and plaited grass.” This is a large part of why I love it, and why I missed it after I finished it and wanted to read it again soon. However, this isn’t a fantasy thing. SF has worlds with funny words and customs and interestingly anthropological ways of looking at things.

  Shippey also says that Stephenson intended the book to proselytise for the ideas, for potential fraas and suurs, which, if it were the case, would hardly have led him to end it the way he does.

  I started thinking about why Stephenson had chosen to set the story in a different world, rather than set it four thousand years or so in our own future. There’s a good plot reason, of course, which is having people from our world show up later. But he could just as well have set it four thousand years in the future and had aliens, rather than people from our world and other cosmoses. Since the first time I read Anathem I’ve been assured by people I trust who know about science (Marissa Lingen and Chad Orzel) that essentially the many-worlds alternate physics stuff is all wrong. While the French is cute and all that, it could have been aliens and been fine. The bit I like least about Anathem is the bit in space, the probabilistic Millenarian ex Machina stuff. So he could have lost that and not annoyed Mris and other physics people and still kept everything I adore about the book. My general feeling is that SF is better if it’s connected to our world. I have an emotional preference for futures we could get to from here.

  Nevertheless, I think it’s better for Anathem to be in its own world. There’s a way of writing fantasy where you use history but put it into a subcreated world so that you can talk about the essence of the history and not the details. Guy Gavriel Kay does this a lot, and I have done it myself.

  Anathem is doing that same thing only with the history of science and natural philosophy.

  That rocks.

  NOVEMBER 30, 2008

  20. A happy ending depends on when you stop: Heavy Time, Hellburner and C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe

  Cherryh has been writing the Union-Alliance books since Downbelow Station in 1981. They’re a series of standalone novels within a shared universe. The major characters from one book may be seen briefly in another book, but you don’t generally need to have read any specific book to understand any other book in the series. Cherryh delights in turning the reader’s brain inside out anyway, so there are books from all kinds of points of view, and one book may make you sympathise with characters and positions that other books made you detest. I regard this as a major achievement and part of what makes Cherryh a great writer.

  In internal chronological order, the series begins with the duo Heavy Time (1991) and Hellburner (1993) (published in one volume as Devil to the Belt, 2000), and that’s where I’m beginning my re-read. I’m not sure I’d recommend this as a place to start, not because you need series knowledge to follow them (you definitely don’t) but because Heavy Time is so relentlessly grim. Cherryh is seldom a barrel of laughs, but Heavy Time is grim even for her. Most of her books are a lot more fun than this. Yet if you did read them first, they might not seem so grim, because a lot of what makes them grim is the inevitability of what’s coming, which you know only from the other books. After all, there’s a definition of tragedy as a story where you know the end.

  Unlike most Union-Alliance books, these are a pair, concerning the same characters, and should be read in order. Also unlike the others, they are set in the solar system. We don’t see much of Earth, but this is as close to it as we ever get in these books.

  The asteroid belt crawls with miners all hoping for a big strike that’s going to make them rich, but the Company grinds them down worse each year. In Heavy Time a couple of prospectors pick up a ship that’s sending a distress signal and complications ensue. Ben and Bird just want to get a bit ahead an
d Dekker just wants to fly, the Company just want to screw everyone over, and the Fleet just want recruits with the kind of reflexes you can get from being an asteroid miner. In Hellburner our protagonists (those who survived Heavy Time) are in the Fleet and hoping to get along, until they get involved with trials of a prototype rider-ship.

  If Cherryh were a weaker writer, if she didn’t make the characters and the places of her novels so real, it wouldn’t matter that these books are intensely claustrophobic, and that Dekker is on the edge of crazy for most of the time you spend in his head.

  These are great feminist novels. There are women in them who succeed on their own merits and yet are questioned because they are women. They’re not in a magically non-sexist future. They’re accused of making it by “whoring around on Helldeck,” to which one of them replies, “You a virgin, Mitch? Didn’t think so.”

  It’s also a terrific future. All the details hang together. Asteroid miners being screwed by the Company is somehow more realistic than the scenarios of asteroid miners SF usually offers. And in the background negotiations going on in Hellburner you can see the beginnings, if you know what’s coming, of the long betrayals that are up ahead. Cherryh’s future history really has the texture and grain of history, and the books feel to me very much like historical novels. Yet on a series re-read when you know what’s coming, they also have history’s inevitability.

  Both of these books have ends that approximate happy endings, and if you were to read them without knowing any more about the universe, they could be read as happy endings. At the end of Heavy Time, being drafted comes as a relief, an escape from problems in the Belt. At the end of Hellburner, the immediate problems have been solved and it looks as if everything is going to be all right.

  These are happy endings to compare with the Albert Finney film version of Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, in which the happy ending is that World War II starts. I think you’re assumed to know about the implicit happy ending of WWII. But it’s still a long way off from September of 1939. It’s even worse here, where the end of the War is a quarter of a century away, and even then it isn’t good for the Fleet. Still, Cherryh artfully stops the books at points where we can feel reasonably positive, if we lack foreknowledge, and that’s really very clever of her.

  DECEMBER 1, 2008

  21. Knights Who Say “Fuck”: Swearing in Genre Fiction

  A little while ago the Mighty God King posted a marvellous collection of doctored book covers, with the titles he felt the books he’d loved as a teenager should have had. The genius of this was the way he used the exact right fonts every time, so that Mercedes Lackey’s My Little Pony Goes to War had just the font you were expecting to see on that cover. One of them that made me laugh out loud was his cover for George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. (I love those books.) His new title was Knights Who Say “Fuck,” which amused me not only because of the clever Python reference but also because it’s true, they do, and that’s one of the things that makes it different from traditional high fantasy. He’s not the only person whose knights are saying “fuck” these days—Sarah Monette’s charmingly foul-mouthed Mildmay leaps to mind—but it is something you never used to see. It didn’t fit the register of fantasy. The register has broadened. Interesting.

  I’m reading Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, which was published in 1981. I started it immediately after finishing Hellburner, which is set earlier but was published in 1992. I noticed immediately that in Downbelow Station the troopers “breathe an obscenity into com,” “swore quietly,” “swore at length,” “adding an obscenity.” In Hellburner in equivalent situations they’re saying “Shit, shit, shit!” and “Fuck!”

  Now I read both of these books pretty much when they came out, and I didn’t notice anything odd about the level of permitted swearing in them. Yet something definitely changed between 1981 and 1992, and it wasn’t C. J. Cherryh. The number of times someone breathes an oath, an obscenity, or swears viciously in Downbelow Station, you can tell she knows the words the troopers are saying. In fact it reminds me of the coy dashes you get in Trollope, where the fact that a husband called a wife a “____” in He Knew He Was Right is plot-rocking, and no, you never find out what the word is. (The footnotes think “harlot.” As I’m not even faintly shocked by “harlot” I’ve decided to fill in that blank, and all Trollope’s blanks, with the worst words I know.)

  So, was Cherryh being effectively censored by what you were allowed to say?

  The thing that surprises me about that is the date. I thought it was the sixties when people in books were allowed to use actual oaths, rather than just mighty ones. Did genre fiction lag behind? Certainly it was the New Wave that started talking about sex, but how careful were the words? I noticed when reading W. E. B. Griffin that you can say “shit” all you like in his books as long as you’re not talking about “human excrement” and similarly “fuck” is fine unless you’re talking about “sexual intercourse.” Obscenities are different from description, and use of the words can vary in either direction. These words are charged, and they have very specific registers, they’re significant markers.

  You used to see fake “futuristic” swearing. (Who can forget Larry Niven’s “tanj”?) When did that stop? Drinking Sapphire Wine has it, and that’s 1976.

  So, things clearly changed in the eighties. Why? Was there a specific change, a specific book or date that it changed, within genre fiction? Or was it a general cultural change of what was acceptable slowly bleeding through into genre? Did it get to SF first and seep into fantasy later? A Game of Thrones is 1996.

  And when did it stop being daring for people to swear “like a trooper” and become normal? My memory is that in South Wales when I was a child adults swore in Welsh, and what they said, translated, meant “God” or “the Devil,” and “bloody” was pretty strong swearing in English. But my memory of being a young adult in Britain in the early and mid-eighties didn’t include other young women casually saying “fuck” the way they do now. I think there has been an actual change, and it isn’t just that literature was coy about recording what people said, as that what people say has changed. I’m sure this is also a difference between Britain and North America, and maybe between different areas too.

  And in the future? Well, there are fashions in these things. Perhaps our texts with their liberal scatterings of “fuck” will eventually look as quaint as Trollope’s dashes.

  DECEMBER 3, 2008

  22. “Earth is one world”: C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station

  Downbelow Station was published in 1981 and won the Hugo in 1982. It is in many ways the central book of the Union-Alliance series. It’s about the Company Wars. Most of the books in the series are dealing with the aftermath of those wars, flotsam and jetsam left in their wake. Downbelow Station is central, it has many points of view (many of them important people), and it’s about the end of the war and the formation of the Alliance. It has a marvellous perspective on humanity in the wider universe. I have to admit, though, it’s a hard book to like.

  There’s a story that after Cherryh had written this book, someone told her every scene had to do three things (any three things), so she went through and removed all the scenes that only did one or two, without replacing them with anything. I don’t suppose for a moment that this really happened, but it’s one of those legends that’s truer than the facts. Downbelow Station is a dense, complex book written in a terse, futuristic style, from multiple points of view, some of them alien and many of them unpleasant. It feels disorienting and slightly disconnected and as if something somewhere has been left out. It’s definitely immersive, and the history is real enough to bite, but even on a re-read it isn’t a book I can sink into. I bounced off it the first time I tried to read it, and even now it’s my least favourite and the one I read only when I’m doing a full re-read of the whole series. Again, I don’t think this is a good place to start.

  All of Cherryh’s characters are ambiguous, but nowhere more th
an here, where there are so many of them. The plot is a complex maneuvering of factions and realignment of interests. There are space battles, and there are economics of space stations. There’s a compelling beginning where a warship turns up with freighters full of desperate refugees that have to be accommodated at the space station without warning. And there are all these factions and points of view.

  The Mazianni are a Company fleet that have been fighting too long. They’re exhausted, hard as nails, and can’t stop. Signy Mallory, one of their captains, is ruthless, competent, deadly … and really not very nice.

  The Konstantins are nice. They run Pell, a space station circling an alien planet and clinging to its independence at a time when Earth is giving up space to Union, seen here as unmitigatedly terrifying and appalling. They’re definitely nice, all of them—we get three Konstantin points of view, Angelo, Emelio and Damon—but their very niceness is their fatal flaw, the hamartia that causes their tragic downfall—except not quite, because the novel is a eucatastrophe, not a tragedy.

  Elene Quen is a merchanter who is married to Damon Konstantin and staying on Pell for a while when she learns that her own ship, and family, have all been killed.

  Josh Talley is a Union spy who after his brainwipe becomes something very interesting but also very ambivalent.

  Satin is a hisa, an alien from Downbelow. The alien point of view is convincingly alien, but the hisa are, regrettably, furry noble savages. Cherryh has done much better aliens absolutely everywhere else she has aliens. I find the hisa embarrassing with their pidgin English and their names “Sky sees her” and “Bigfellow” and “Sun her friend.”

  Ayres is a Company man, come from Earth to sell out the Mazianni and all of space. He starts off seeming deeply unsympathetic, but by the time Union have been horrible to him for most of the book, I feel terribly sorry for him.