What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  I’ve heard it said that the U.S. obsession with their Civil War, and the large number of alternate histories featuring it as a turning point, arise out of a desire to have slavery back. I think even the South Triumphant novels are more often Awful Warnings than slaver panegyrics, and Fire on the Mountain puts the whole thing in a different light. People want to do the Civil War again and get it right this time. The book may be a little utopian, a little naive, but it’s a beautifully written story about a nicer world, where, in the background, people are landing on Mars. In 1959.

  APRIL 27, 2009

  53. Susan Palwick’s Shelter

  There’s a certain kind of book that’s almost a subgenre: the important book. The sort of book that everyone is talking about even if they hate it, the sort of book that gets reviewed everywhere and appears on award lists and gets discussed and is influential on the genre and other writers. Anathem is one of last year’s and so is Little Brother (2008). If you’re reading this, then it’s quite likely that you’ve read them and even more likely that you’ve heard people talking about them and you plan to read them, or you very strongly plan not to read them because what you’ve heard has put you off. Sometimes, though, there will be a book that seems to me like it ought to be an important book and then for some inexplicable reason practically nobody agrees with me. It comes out, it does OK, but it doesn’t get the attention I feel it deserves. Some people like it, but it never becomes something everyone is talking about. I’ve talked about a couple of these here, Random Acts of Senseless Violence and Lady of Mazes. Susan Palwick’s Shelter is another. It came out in 2007 and I read it instantly, because I love Palwick, and I wrote about it on my LiveJournal and then—nothing. Nobody else was excited about it, it didn’t get nominated for anything, though I nominated it for a Hugo. Shelter is very well worth your attention.

  It’s set in a near-future San Francisco, it covers twenty years of history, and it deals with a world in which a whole pile of current trends and new technology intersect in complex and fascinating ways with people’s lives. As you’d expect if you’ve read Palwick’s fantasy novels Flying in Place (1992) and The Necessary Beggar (2005), it has solidly drawn characters and the world feels very real. What you might not expect is how well she does the science-fictional extrapolation.

  There’s a major plague known as CV, “caravan virus,” that mutates fast and has many strains. It kills lots of people, and the ones who survive have to cope in isolation with robot (“bot”) nursing and people interacting with them only in whole-body protective suits. Two little girls survive the virus: Meredith, rich and white, and Roberta, poor and black. They also represent the two extremes of selfishness and altruism—and this is a world where altruism has been medicalised and Roberta spends a lot of time in therapy and in fear of mindwipe because of her “problem.” Their lives are intertwined from that childhood illness through their connection to Meredith’s father, the uploaded Preston, and to Meredith’s troubled adopted son. When mental problems are routinely treated with mindwiping, what do you do if you discover someone you love is beginning to develop them? How can you ask for help when you know what sort of help you’re likely to get?

  The book opens with the third narrator, House, an AI convinced it isn’t an AI. AIs are illegal in the US because they’re defined as legally persons, and therefore owning them is slavery. There’s also the AI terrorism problem.… House’s point of view is done beautifully. It feels entirely real, entirely immersive, and you can really believe the way it reasons its way through decisions. The book begins in the “present” of the story, during a very severe storm (global warming has deteriorated), and goes back to the earlier events that led to the world and the relationships we’re given at the beginning. Palwick directs our sympathies as a conductor directs a symphony. The twenty years of history and events we’re shown, from different points of view, build up a picture of a future that has clearly grown from our present. Every detail has second-order implications—you have bots doing the cleaning, so you have people afraid of bots, and people who think doing your own cleaning is a religious act, and you have sponge bots trying to stem a flood as a metaphor for people unable to cope.

  This is also the kind of SF you can put up against Middlemarch as character study; it’s really a story about people. But the people are in situations they can be in only given the science-fictional premises of the story—damaged by the isolation, worried about mindwipe, trying to fake not being altruistic, coming up with new kinds of art, trying to cope with an uploaded, ubiquitous, but not necessarily benign father.

  I also liked it that Roberta was a lesbian and this was an undramatic fact—well, breaking up with her girlfriend was dramatic, but the fact of her orientation was no more significant than Meredith’s heterosexuality. It’s refreshing to have major characters with non-heteronormative sexuality without the book being about that.

  One thing I found weird and unconvincing was that Gaianism had become the mainstream religion of the US, displacing Christianity which still exists as a minority thing. I don’t see Christmas celebrations being replaced by Solstice ones anytime as soon as Shelter, and while I understand the purpose of the Gaian temple and how much better that worked for the story than a church would have, I didn’t see anything that would have made Christianity be all but forgotten. I kept worrying at this detail because the general level of worldbuilding and world-holding-together is so good that this niggled.

  This was actually my third reading of Shelter, because I read it straight through again as soon as I’d finished it. The harrowing parts of it, and the ethical dilemma that lies at the heart of it, don’t get any easier to read. But it remains a wonderful book, a shining example of what science fiction can be when it tries.

  MAY 31, 2009

  54. Scintillations of a sensory syrynx: Samuel Delany’s Nova

  I’ve talked before about how my least favourite books by an author can end up becoming my favourites because they stay fresh while I read the others to death. I can’t imagine how it is that I ever didn’t like Nova. It was published when I was four years old, in 1968 (and it’s in print!), and I read it when I was fifteen, and twenty, and twenty-five (I read everything on the shelves in alphabetical order when I was twenty-five) and I don’t think I’ve picked it up again until now. I was clearly too young for it those earlier times. Maybe this is a book you have to be forty-four and a half to appreciate. (Though Delany would have been twenty-four, twenty-five when he wrote it.) Reading it now I have vivid impressions from those earlier reads, images from it that have stuck with me for twenty (twenty-five, thirty) years but I’d also forgotten it enough that it was like reading an exciting new book, a new science fiction Delany! People have been saying often enough over the last twenty-five years when I’ve talked about Delany, “And Nova!” and I’ve always had half a mental hesitation in agreeing, because I knew I hadn’t enjoyed it. I was an idiot! This is one of the best of Delany’s early works. And yet, reading it now, and thoroughly enjoying it, I kept trying to find the book I knew I hadn’t liked in this new book that I did.

  It’s a thousand years in the future, and humanity is scattered over the universe, with many colonized planets. There are three main political units: Draco (including Earth), the Pleiades Federation, and the Outer Planets. The transuranic element Illyrion is what powers the incredibly fast FTL spaceships, and keeps the balance of power among the three groups. Lorq Von Ray of the Pleiades has a feud with Prince and Ruby Red, of Draco, and is decided to get seven tons of Illyrion from the heart of a nova. But although all this is true, it isn’t quite that kind of book—it’s about the dignity of labour and a post-scarcity (except of Illyrion) post-cleanliness society, but it’s mainly about a gypsy boy called Mouse and his sensory syrynx, and tall Katan who comes from the moon and likes moons better than planets, and the twins Idas and Lyncaos, one black and one albino. It’s a grail quest story, and a grudge story, and it’s a story where the shape of the darkness between what’
s said makes a pattern to match the visible pattern of the story—and maybe that’s what I didn’t like about it? Maybe I couldn’t see it in enough dimensions the last time I read it?

  As always with Delany he has thought a lot about the implications of his future, the technology and the economics are all worked out and then mentioned only as they are relevant. It has aged pretty well, it doesn’t feel more than forty years old except sometimes when it talks about humanity living spread out on a number of worlds by the end of the twentieth century (I wish!) and when it talks about Pluto as the solar system’s outer edge and Triton as her most distant moon. We’re all still stuck on Earth, but we have found a lot more moons since 1967, not to mention the Oort cloud. I never thought the local geography of the solar system I learned as an SF-reading teen would seem so quaintly obsolete.

  There are a lot of science fiction futures with faster-than-light drives, but I wonder if Nova has the fastest one of anything? They zip about between stars as Americans go between cities, for parties. It takes five hours to go from Alkane in Draco to the Dim Dead Sister in the Pleiades. There are no slow transits of systems, no time lost in hyperspace, no relativisitic problems, no gravitational problems, just whizzing along jacked in (1968 … anticipating some of cyberpunk) and landing directly on the planet when you get there. There’s a whole apparatus and paraphernalia of SF furniture missing. (Maybe that was my problem?) It’s weird though, it’s as if SF as a whole has decided on the speed of space travel not because of physics but because of the way other SF has done it, and Delany ignored that. In place of it there’s this very fast moving universe where worlds are big places and there are lots and lots of them and the characters zip between them excessively fast but without the reader losing the sense of places and distance.

  There’s also a mythical dimension. This was one of the things that bothered me before. I felt I wasn’t getting it, and that it unbalanced the actual story. It’s stated overtly to be a grail quest, which makes Prince with his missing arm the Fisher King … or does it? Is Mouse with his one bare foot Jason—but so many of them have one bare foot. The mythical resonances are there, but they tangle. Is Lorq Prometheus, stealing fire to give to mankind? Is blind Dan falling in the chasm the Tarot Fool? One of the things I always remembered about Nova is that Mouse’s gypsy lack of belief in the tarot is seen as old-fashioned superstition—and they’re on a starship. The characters are clearly huge figures of mythical significance, but what figures, and in what system? I’ve never been sure. This read, it didn’t matter, their significance wasn’t more than appropriate, that they were themselves enough to carry it. The allegory may have been there but it never broke through the surface enough to disturb me.

  Katin is trying to write a novel, though the art form is obsolete. He’s been making notes for years, but hasn’t written any of the novel yet. Mouse learned to play the sensory syrynx in Istanbul when he was a boy, and he can create three-dimensional scenes and beautiful music, and he does, frequently, in different styles and for different people. Katin is over-educated and Mouse under-educated, or they have educations orthogonal to each other. Katin explains things to Mouse, and through him to the reader. But it’s Mouse who knows the songs and the stories and knows how to make them real with his syrynx. These two with their different takes on creativity seem more important to me than Lorq Van Roy and his quest for Illyrion—he just wants it to defeat his enemies and protect himself and his worlds. They want to find ways of telling significant stories in the moment they find themselves in. Their story is about being alone and wanting to create, which doesn’t balance with the story of stealing fire.

  Nova is a space opera set in a far future that has a working class, that has people of all colours and lots of different cultures, that’s plausibly a future we could get to, or could have got to from 1968, with real hard science and mythic resonance—and I’m glad I didn’t like it before so that I come to it fresh now.

  I wish Samuel Delany would write more SF. I know there’s a theory that he wrote SF because he couldn’t write openly about the experience of being gay, and now he can, and I like his mimetic novels and memoirs but … science fiction is what I really like to read, and I just wish he’d write more SF anyway.

  JUNE 1, 2009

  55. You may not know it, but you want to read this: Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin

  Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003) is about the history of technology and society. I keep wanting to say it’s thought-provoking and full of nifty information, but what I really want to say is that it’s unputdownable.

  It’s about six engineering projects that have taken place in Britain since WWII. It’s very time and place specific, and very specific to its six subjects too, but nevertheless I recommend it to anyone who wants to write science fiction and most people who like to read it. This is a history book about how science and engineering are embedded in culture, arising almost organically from the cultural matrix of their time. And it’s written fluidly and amusingly, with prose that makes it a joy to read and re-read. I read it the first time because it had been recommended to me as interesting and I thought (quite correctly) that it would also be useful for worldbuilding. But I read it again because reading it is such a joy.

  The projects range from rockets through Concorde to computer games, cell phones, and the Human Genome Project, and they’re all described with good-humoured understanding and sympathy and in the complete context of their time and the people involved with them. Also, they’re full of charming anecdotes and amusing asides, and unexpected angles of seeing things.

  The first project covered is the Blue Streak/Black Knight rocket project of the forties and fifties, which succeeded in putting one satellite into orbit once. It begins with a description of a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society which was interrupted by a V2 rocket, at which the members cheered. Later there’s an amazing glimpse of some of our cultural heroes:

  It was at about this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the time in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its god-given place. […] Clarke contacted Lewis and they agreed to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second, Lewis brought J.R.R. Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. As Orwell said about something completely different, their beliefs were as impossible to compare as a sausage and a rose. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the way in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines at the very best were a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. “I’m sure you are all very wicked people,” said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, “but how dull it would be if everyone was good!”

  You couldn’t make it up.

  The strangest thing about this book is how directly relevant it is to my life. There’s a section about the computer game Elite. I played that! (Along with everyone else with a computer in the late eighties.) And a friend of mine was in the room when the designers brought the first demo of it to Acornsoft! As for the Human Genome Project stuff, my husband barely misses being namechecked. It talks about how the cell network was set up in Britain and how the cells were mapped, but it also talks about how contracts to re-sell were shared among many tiny distributors. That was one of my first jobs, when I was in university, selling cell phones part-time when they were car phones. (I still don’t own one.) It’s fascinating to think that this book touches even my unscientific untechnical life at all these points, and for practically everyone who grew up
in Britain between 1945 and 2003 I think it would touch it somewhere—because science and engineering run all through society, which is one of the book’s points.

  The “boffins” and “backroom boys” of the title are the unglamorous engineers who get things done invisibly. The men (and they are mostly men, with a few women visible as it comes closer to the present time) in this book are definitely that. Few people would be familiar with their names. But that’s the point, they don’t need that to be significant to our lives.

  This is a book about Britain, but I think it would be no less interesting to North American readers, if slightly more exotic.

  Imagine Romford. No, go on, imagine Romford; or if you can’t quite bear that, at least imagine the approach to Romford in the north-eastern corner of London where thinning city is shading over into built up Essex.

  It’s funnier if you do shudder at the thought of imagining Romford, but even if you’ve never heard of Romford, you can treat it as a voyage of discovery.

  It’s remarkably interesting and a surprisingly fun read.

  JUNE 4, 2009

  56. Faster Than Light at any speed

  When I read Nova I noted how unusually fast the faster-than-light was. The ship goes from Alkane to the Dim Dark Sister in five hours, and from the Pleiades to Earth in three days. These are cars-in-the-US velocities, the whole inhabited galaxy is about as far apart emotionally as New York and San Francisco. And they land directly on the planets too, and can be used on the planet to whizz around to the other hemisphere.