What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  The Eternals live outside Time, though time passes for them the same way it does for everyone. Paradoxes and the issue of meeting yourself can happen only within Time. The Eternals are incredibly smug and self-satisfied and busy making “Minimum Necessary Change” to keep everything nice. They change the one and only reality to promote lowest common denominator happiness. They take the technology they want and then change reality so that it doesn’t exist in Time because it would be too disruptive.

  Andrew Harlan is a Technician who identifies and makes those changes. His hobby is “Primitive” history, the history of the period before the invention of time travel, history that always stays the same. He thinks of himself as a monk in the service of Eternity. Then he falls in love with a young lady from the 575th century, gets caught up with a loop in continuity his bosses are arranging—and then everything goes wrong. The book is called The End of Eternity, so you may think you don’t need a spoiler warning, but actually you do. Spoilers follow.

  This is the ultimate book about the futility of time travel. Brunner suggests that time travel that changes reality will tend to wipe itself out by changing reality so it isn’t invented. Asimov specifically says that it’s a terrible idea because with the power to change things, however benevolent you are, you’ll change things in a cautious way, to make things safer. Space flight dies out every time because of the changes they make.

  In swapping Eternity for Infinity, time travel is expressly rejected in favour of space travel. One change is made—and not one that would be made today to bring about a brighter future! They give the people of the primitive era of 1932 a hint about atomics, which of course will lead to mankind going to the stars at the earliest possible opportunity. It’s hardly possible to read this in 2010 with the same optimism as readers did in 1955, or even as I did in 1975, even given the recent discovery of lots more extra-solar planets.

  The End of Eternity, with its all-male fraternity of paternalistic meddlers, seems almost painfully sexist, and Noys, the beautiful love interest from the decadent 575th century, seems like a bit of plot mechanism more than a character. However, when all is revealed—on what is practically the last page—it turns out that Noys is from the far future and has been manipulating everything else to get what she wanted, a future of humanity in the stars. I don’t know if this is enough to redeem her as a character or the whole setup to that point. Asimov could write good female characters when he wanted to (Arkady from Second Foundation) so let’s be generous and give him the benefit of the doubt here.

  The one detail from the book that had stuck in my mind was the time traveler stranded in 1932 putting an ad in a magazine he knew would survive saying “All the Talk Of the Market” in front of a drawing of a mushroom cloud, to attract the attention of his friends in the future who were trying to rescue him. ATOM and the cloud would mean nothing in 1932 and everything in Eternity, or even in 1955. I don’t know why this kind of thing has stayed with me forever when I had forgotten all the other details of the plot.

  My other thought was what a Cold War book it is, without being one of those that has Soviets in the twenty-sixth century or anything like that. The controlled planned centuries of Eternity are explicitly contrasted with the free chaotic future expanding among the stars in a way that seems shaped by the rhetoric of Free World vs. Communist world. And I don’t think there’s much more to be said on useless time travel after this, where Harlan and Noys choose for humanity to give up hundreds of thousands of years of safe future on Earth for the possibility of freedom among the stars.

  JULY 12, 2010

  116. Texan Ghost Fantasy: Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle

  Perfect Circle (2004) (U.K. title Firecracker) is one of Sean Stewart’s best books. It’s about Will, an ordinary working-class man living in Houston. He comes from a large and complex family and he sees ghosts. He sees them in black and white. They’re often, but not always, people he knows. They can see him too, and sometimes communicate with him. He can’t exorcise them or anything like that, he can just see them, and at night he can’t tell them from living people, which is why he doesn’t drive. Not driving can be a problem in Houston. He’s a normal American everyman, which means he’s a divorced father trying to have a relationship with his daughter, who is just becoming a teenager with distinct opinions about him and the whole ghost thing. She wants to go to Six Flags. He doesn’t have any money. Then he gets a call from a cousin with a ghost problem, and then things get complicated.

  Stewart has been writing excellent fantasy for years, but it doesn’t fall into marketing-category-shaped boxes, so though he is a terrific writer he never seems to make it big. I don’t understand it—you’d think he’d be a bestseller. Maybe he always gets the wrong covers—he certainly does seem to have been very unfortunate there. And Perfect Circle lost out on a World Fantasy Award to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; most years I expect it would have won. The book was published by Small Beer, a small press run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, themselves fantasy writers. Small Beer are definitely my favourite small press, and one to watch. They’ve done some terrific short story collections by some of the best writers in the field (Theodora Goss, Holly Black, Joan Aiken, Link herself) and they also publish a lot of wonderful but slightly quirky novels that might not quite meet mainstream tastes at the big publishers. They recently published Greer Gilman’s Tiptree Award–winning Cloud and Ashes, for instance.

  Perfect Circle is one of those books that’s hard to talk about. The voice, Will’s voice, is first person, confidential, and desperate. The whole situation feels completely real, including the thing with the ghosts. There’s an uncle who was vapourised in a refinery accident, all but his boots, and Will sees him wandering around in black and white and barefoot. The ghost of a cousin (Will has a lot of cousins) helps her family get compensation for an industrial accident. There’s a family reunion, there’s a scene in a shooting range where Will admits that the problem with being kind of left wing is that you don’t get to exercise your usual American constitutional right to make guns go boom, there’s a vengeful ghost, and after all of that there’s even a hopeful ending. I like it a lot. It’s a book I don’t start reading late at night, but it doesn’t go over into being too scary for me.

  If you like books set in the US in the present day, and if you like a little supernatural in among your natural, you should on no account miss this one.

  JULY 23, 2010

  117. The language of stones: Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife

  Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife (1996) is a rural fantasy, rather than an urban one. It’s the story of a forty-year-old woman rediscovering herself as a person and a poet when she comes to the mountains outside Tucson and encounters the local inhabitants, human and otherwise, and begins to unravel their secrets. There’s a romance in it, but it doesn’t fit with the kind of thing usually considered as paranormal romance either.

  It is a great book though, one of my favourite American fantasies. It doesn’t make it all up like Terry Bisson’s Talking Man, it walks the more difficult balance of using both European mythology and the mythology of the people who were there when the settlers came. Windling makes it work, and in the process writes an engrossing novel that I can’t put down even when I know what’s going to happen. This is one of those books that hits a sweet spot for me where I just love everything it’s doing—it’s the sort of book I’m almost afraid to re-read in case it’s changed. The good news is, it hasn’t.

  I called it an American fantasy, but what I mean is that it’s a regional American fantasy. I think the reason there isn’t one “American fantasy” is because America is so big. So there are regional fantasies like this and like Perfect Circle, and there are road trip fantasies like Talking Man and American Gods, and they have the sense of specific places in America but not the whole country because the whole country isn’t mythologically one thing. I might be wrong—it isn’t my country. But that’s how it feels.

  In any case, The
Wood Wife is doing one place and time, and the sense of the Rincon hills and Tucson and Arizona comes through strongly. Maggie Black has been a wanderer, growing up in Kentucky, educated in England, living in New York and California and Amsterdam. She’s forty years old when she comes to the mountains of Arizona as an outsider who has inherited a house and a mystery from a dead poet. It’s so refreshing to have a middle-aged woman heroine, one who’s already successful in her career when the book starts, who is done with one marriage and ready to move on, one with experience, one with a talented female best friend. Coming-of-age stories are common, but mid-life stories about women are surprisingly rare.

  All the characters are great. They also belong very specifically to their place and time. The humans are mostly the kind of people who live on the artistic fringes, some of them more successfully than others—I know a lot of people like them. One of the central things this book is doing is showing a variety of relationships between romantic partners who have their own artistic work, and different ways of supporting that within a relationship. There’s art and life and the balance between them, and then there’s magic getting into it—we have magical creatures as literal muses, and the story explored what becomes of that.

  Windling is best known as the editor of some of the best fantasy and fantasy anthologies of the last few decades. She’s one of the most influential editors in the genre—and still I wish she’d find more time for her own writing because this book is just marvellous.

  As well as a precise place, time and social context it’s also set in a localised mythological context. It’s the book I always point to as doing this thing right, of showing a mythological context in which there were people and their magical neighbours living in the region and then there were Europeans and their magic coming in to that. Too many fantasies set in the New World use European mythology as if the European settlers brought it into a continent that was empty of any magical context beforehand. Windling doesn’t do that. Nor does she deal with the mythology of the Native Americans as if it were a familiar European mythology. This story feels as if it came out of the bones of the land.

  Best of all Windling goes at all this directly, aware of what she’s doing. The story is about two generations of painters and poets who come from elsewhere to the Rincons, and cope with living in and artistically rendering the land in their own way. First there’s the English poet Davis Cooper and his partner the Mexican painter Anna Naverra, who we see in memory and in letters that run through the text, grounding it in twentieth-century art and literary history. Then there’s Maggie, also a poet, and the painter Juan del Rio. This is Maggie:

  “I’ve studied Davis Cooper as an English poet. Born and raised in the West Country. So when I read his poems I see English woods, I see the moor, and hedgerows, and walls of stone. And then I drive up here,” she waved her hand at the dry land around them, “and I realise that these are the woods he’s been talking about all along. These hills. This sky. Now I’m reading a whole different set of poems when I look at Cooper’s work.”

  And Davis, whose life and letters run through the book:

  I need a land where sun and wind will strip a man down to the soul and bleach his dying bones. I want to speak the language of stones.

  Anna and Davis and Maggie and Juan all interact with the spirits of the land directly, and are changed in their different ways. There are people who can transform into trees or coyotes, there’s the fascinating mystery of the spiral path, and the whole thing ties together beautifully. It feels real.

  And it’s in print, for once, so absolutely nothing stops you from buying it this moment and reading it for yourself.

  JULY 29, 2010

  118. A great castle made of sea: Why hasn’t Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell been more influential?

  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was published in 2004. When I first read it in February 2005 I wrote a review on my LiveJournal which I shall quote because it is still my substantive reaction:

  It’s set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an England that is the same but distorted by the operation of magic on history, and it concerns the bringing back of practical English magic. What it’s about is the tension between the numinous and the known. The helical plot, which ascends slowly upwards, constantly circles a space in which the numinous and the known balance and shift and elements move between them. It’s a truly astonishing feat and I’ve never seen anything like it.

  I’ve just read it again, and I could pretty much write that post again. In summary—this is terrific, it reads like something written in an alternate history in which Lud in the Mist was the significant book of twentieth-century fantasy, and it goes directly at the movement between magical and the mundane.

  I wasn’t the only person to think this book was brilliant. It won the World Fantasy Award, it won the Hugo and the Mythopoeic Awards, it was Time’s number one book of the year, a New York Times notable book, it was in the top ten of almost every publication in Britain and the US and it was a huge international mega-bestseller. It did about as well as any book can do.

  But five years later, it doesn’t seem to have had any impact. I said it was as if the rest of us had been building sand castles on the beach and she had raised up a great castle made of sea, but five years on, sand castle fantasy is being published all around as if Clarke had never put finger to keyboard. I wonder why that is?

  It may be that it’s just too soon. Publishing is astonishingly slow. Books being published now were written several years ago. Influence does take time to permeate through. But wouldn’t you think that in five years you’d start to see some influence? But even without publishing speed, it could take longer than that for Clarke’s influence to be assimilated and reacted to. I shouldn’t be so impatient. Ten years might be a better measure. If I’d looked for things influenced by Tolkien after five years I’d have assumed he’d had no effect.

  Maybe it will take a generation, maybe the people who read Clarke when they were teenagers will grow up to write fantasy influenced by her, but it’s not going to happen with people already grown up and publishing and set in their ways?

  Perhaps it’s just sui generis, so wonderful and unique that it can’t really be an influence except as a spur to excellence?

  Or maybe, in the same way it doesn’t appear to have much in the way of immediate ancestors, it can’t produce descendants? It’s wonderful, but it’s not what fantasy is, it isn’t in dialogue with fantasy and it’s hard for fantasy to engage with it?

  After all, what do I mean by influence? There’s plenty of fantasy set in Regency England—there’s Novik’s Temeraire for a start. I don’t think we should have a sudden rash of books about Napoleonic magic or books with charming footnotes containing short stories. I don’t even want more books directly using faerie magic. (We have had some of those too.)

  What I would have thought I’d have seen by now is stories that acknowledge the shadow Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell cast across the possibilities, things that attempt to engage with the numinous in the way it does. Fantasy is all about ways of approaching the numinous—and everything I read is still using the traditional approaches. That’s what I keep hoping for and not seeing.

  Perhaps it will happen, given time.

  Meanwhile, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is there, it’s incredible, and one can always read it again.

  AUGUST 19, 2010

  119. Gulp or sip: How do you read?

  I was chatting to a friend about Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and she mentioned that because it was so long she’d had trouble setting aside enough time to read it. It is long, but I hadn’t had that problem, because I don’t think of reading as something I have to stop to do. I read in the interstices of my day. I feel I have to clear time to write—I need free time that’s also psychologically free time to write, if I have to go to the bank later that hangs over me and gets in the way. But I don’t feel like that about reading at all. I read all the time I’m not act
ively doing anything else—and even sometimes when I am.

  Actually, I read all the time. I carry my book around with me and read on the bus, on the metro, or if I’m waiting for someone. If I’m going out, I check that I have enough to read to last me. I generally read one book at a time, but occasionally I’ll read a big heavy hardback at home and take a little light paperback out with me. If I’m really enjoying the hardback I’ll lug it along—I’ll always remember reading Anathem while going round IKEA with my mother-in-law. I always read if I’m eating alone. I have in fact perfected the art of eating with either a fork or chopsticks in my right hand with my book open in my left hand. I can turn pages one handed with no problem. This is one of the reasons I prefer paperbacks.

  I read in cafes and tea houses. I don’t think of this as going there especially to read, any more than I think of going there to breathe. I will be reading and breathing while I am there drinking tea, that goes without saying. I won’t read if I’m there with somebody else, or if I’m having a meal with somebody else. But if it’s just me, or if you’re meeting me, you’ll find me inside the book—and if I’m there with you, I’ll get my book out for the two minutes while you’re in the bathroom.

  I read in the bath—and this is why I vastly prefer baths to showers. I haven’t figured out a way to read in the shower yet. I used to read only in-print paperbacks and current SF magazines in the bath, but since I moved here where I have a huge old bath and very hot summers, I have given in and now even read hardbacks, as long as they belong to me. (I have never dropped a book in the bath, though I know the story about the person who dropped in The Fires of Heaven and schlurp suddenly found the book had sucked up all the water and they were high and dry.)