I don’t think in genre terms. I consider “literary” a genre with its own conventions just like SFF, crime, romance etc. I see writing as a thought-delivery device. Each iteration of writing is a tool which should serve us (readers, writers) in the most effective way. I include aesthetics in my use of the word ‘effective’ in contradistinction to efficient. I will personally write anything, no matter what genre my ideas lead me into. I don’t want to be a slave to my choices or to the classifications of others.
Pretentious malarkey aside, I have read pretty much everything that has any kind of storytelling at its heart since I was very young. I am a big fan of comics, and ‘The Last Pantheon’ (the collaboration you mentioned) is a homage to the comics of my youth. It is meant to be a comic in prose form, hence the imagery.
I was fortunate to have a father who did not believe in age-rated fiction. We had a library and he let us loose in it. One of the best ways to get a child to have a broad literary appetite is to say “read whatever you want in here”. So I read pulp detective magazines, Amazing Stories, various encyclopaediae, books on witchcraft, Le Carre, Fleming, Milton, Shakespeare, Herbert (Frank and James), Stephen King, Greer, Cicero, chess, comics, religious texts, Anne Sexton, and so on. Everything, really.
I enjoy fantastical fiction because it affords a lot of freedom to the writer, which is why it is a shame that so many actors in SFF seem hidebound, deploying various literary and visual clichés. “You can be weird, but only in these ways.”
I have no control over how my writing is received: death of the author, and all that. I am not a big fan of District 9, although there are two different reasons for this. I simply detest the handling of Nigerians in that film, along with the disrespect towards the Head-of-State by naming cannibals after him. Not something I can accept, I’m afraid. The second thing is that the film fails artistically. The first half of the film is great, but it descends into silliness in the second part. If people see any similarities, that’s fine. They bought the book, and that entitles them to an opinion, just like paying to see District 9 gives me the right to my critique.
I notice in a recent interview, referencing Rosewater, you talk about being “more interested in the humans and their interaction with the science fictional elements of the story. […] My stories are about people, with incidental science”. Do you think it’s time that science fiction writing moved on from the over-attention to scientific detail?
No. I think that science fiction is a broad canvas. Different creators work to the tastes of different people. It’s a spectrum, and there is room for all wavelengths, although not all devices are sensitive to all bands. What I’m saying in my clunky way is that the hyper-scientific is as welcome as the barely-scientific. There are fans for all, and I don’t think science fiction should move on as much as expand. Editors in particular, as gatekeepers, need to have a broad vision that encompasses every possibility. Sure, you know what your readers want based on previous sales, but you don’t know what they don’t want. The two are not the same.
And pushing that a little more, I seem to remember at the Masterclass that you weren’t very enthusiastic about the notion of different cultures represented in stories as having “different science”, and wondered if that is connected?
In anthropology circles even the notion of “culture” is being challenged, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion. My opinion of “cultured science” in fiction is that it’s othering. It is not without historical origins (for example, the idea of zero was mind-blowing for Europeans. The Greeks literally freaked out at a time when Egyptians and Babylonians had been using it for centuries). I think that if done with subtlety and research, it’s okay. I just don’t like ham-fisted representations of other cultures. Sometimes “different science” is code for “magical”, which has its own sociocultural uses of making the other seem primitive.
Rosewater seems to have a little of everything – aliens, skills that some might choose to interpret as evidence of the paranormal, mysterious government organisations that might or might not be corrupt – but all set in a world that feels plausibly…I want to say quotidian; it’s full of people just trying to manage in the circumstances. Yet, for many of your readers the circumstances of daily life in Lagos might seem more difficult to comprehend than the fact of an alien city coming into being on its outskirts. Are you inclined to leave the reader to get on with figuring it out, hoping they won’t think that you’re speaking for all Lagos, all Nigerians, and so on, or do you feel concern that they’ll take your presentation as the definitive word?
I trust the reader. This is an entertainment, a fiction. I speak for nobody but myself, and the Nigeria I present here is a version, a dimension created from distorted memories. It is a truth, but if anyone wants to know a city or a country, they need to visit the country, or read the travel guides and other “non-fiction” accounts.
I will say, though, that lots of events and circumstances that are staples of post-apocalyptic fiction are commonplace in many non-Western countries. Nigeria is a difficult country to comprehend, but then so is the Republic of Ireland, USA, Russia, Iraq, the UK, and pretty much every single country that exists. Put it this way, nobody asks Zadie Smith if she speaks for all Londoners.
I trust the reader, and as I said, I can’t control how my work is received.
Making Wolf was a very harsh encounter with ideas of “home” for Weston Kogi, as well as being a meditation on the nature of “identity”, and a tough read generally. You seem to be, in part, suggesting that the immigrant never can truly go home, because they bring so much back with them…? But I’m struck too by the way that you lay a great deal of emphasis on the complexity of life as it twists around what we imagine are the certainties of genre fiction. So, are you deliberately trying to subvert the expectations of genre readers or just telling it like it is?
Both.
The moment you leave “home” for another country, you change. You are never going to be the person that left. Identity is negotiated daily and in different contexts both as an emigre and immigrant. The idea of returning in glory is a fantasy of all immigrants, regardless of the (usually romanticised) country of origin or destination. There is no “home”. There is only this hybrid creature who will never feel fully welcome in either country.
I am also telling it like it is. People love simplified versions of unfamiliar cultures, which is bullshit. People love statements that are right out of obsolete Eurocentric and elitist anthropology texts, making categorical pronouncements about a people you don’t fucking know except for what they show you. I spent one year in Western Samoa and let me tell you, I find Margaret Mead’s writings absolutely hilarious and marinated in mendacity. Humans are complex, and human groupings are infinitely complex. Genre needs to move away from simplistic depictions, and writers in particular need to do better.
***
WICKED WEEDS
Pedro Cabiya
Translated by Jessica Powell
Mandel Vilar Press pb, 256pp, $16.95
Stephen Theaker
This book begins with a warning: there are two ways of reading it, and both are a bad idea. The diligent reader who consumes each page in its usual order is on a road to chaos, which isn’t very appealing, so this reviewer took the second option: following the directions of the contents page. That takes us first to all the police interviews, then the personal journal of the unnamed, self-professed and supposed zombie at its centre, then the scientific explanations for his condition, and finally a series of field notes. This adds a degree of choose-your-own-adventure interactivity to the book, letting the reader shuffle through its pages like an investigator or a judge looking for evidence.
We learn that our zombie woke from his grave some years ago and availed himself of the washtub, clothes and money left at his grave in readiness. His parents were wealthy, and left him all of their assets, the only stipulation being that to enjoy them he must pretend to be alive. Other zombies can recognis
e him, which is not always welcome, but he finds it quite easy to fool humans, as long as they are kept at a certain distance, something he finds increasingly hard to do during the episodes described in the book.
He is the executive vice president of a company’s research and development division, in charge of twenty-eight chemists who work in five laboratories. Dissatisfied with working from an office on the executive floor, he chooses to work instead in Laboratory 5. He doesn’t know precisely why he chose that one – the glass windows? the free space? – but readers may come to their own conclusions as he writes about its other occupants and their physical attributes.
The hem of Mathilde Álvarez’s shirt rides up to reveal “steely abdominals and a pristine, flat belly button”. Patricia Julia Càceres wears a short skirt, revealing her leg, “a perfectly smooth, sculpted column”. Doctor Isadore Bellamy’s lab coat falls open, showing a floral-print dress that only just manages to contain “the flawless bulk of her jet-black breasts”, while “the muscles of her slender thighs stood out against her black skin each time she shifted her weight”.
The reader can tell from his descriptions that these three scientists must be attractive, and from subsequent events we understand that the three of them are attracted to the vice president. On some level his actions must be influenced by this; what’s missing is any understanding on his part of the connections between all this, the weight of anything. As a zombie he lacks what a fellow sufferer, the oldest zombie around, describes as qualia, “the living being’s capacity to establish a connection between his experience of the world and the self”.
This idea is both the book’s weakness and its strength. On one hand, it gives us a central character who behaves like an android, and the scenes where sexy scientists try to seduce him feel cheesy, a bit Tasha Yar and Data. On the other hand, the idea is explored in more interesting and political ways elsewhere: the poor, deliberately infected to become easily biddable, exploitable and shippable workers; or the rich, going on murderous rampages once their conscience is gone. It all asks the question: is our emotional connection to the world all that makes our lives meaningful?
Our central character is trying to fix what is broken in himself, to come up with a cure: that’s why he has taken degrees in pharmacology and chemistry, why he is in this career. The extent of his success is demonstrated by a lengthy appreciation of the sensations invoked by moving his hand up Patricia Julia’s leg in a nightclub, which takes a couple of pages. There is some humour in that level of detail, and also in that, after she puts her tongue in his ear, he crosses his fingers, hoping that a centipede won’t slide into her mouth.
The translator, Jessica Ernst Powell, has previously worked on Borges, among others, and seems to have done a fine job here with a text that mixes mysticism, science, zombies and social commentary in a way that must have been challenging to translate. It’s not a book for every reader, and some may find themselves admiring it more as it moves away, if read in contents page order, from the comical zombie scientist and his saucy pals to the darker histories of the field journal, to children going to the wrong side of the river at night, and to Papa Vincent in the jail of the Tontons Macoutes.
***
ISRA ISLE
Nava Semel
Translated by Jessica Cohen
Mandel Vilar Press pb, 256pp, $16.95
Lawrence Osborn
This is a novel in three parts: part detective story, part speculation about a peculiar footnote in American and Jewish history, part alternate history based on that speculation. As the story progresses it constructs a fictional alternate homeland for the Jews in upstate New York.
Part 1, ‘Grand Island’, is the story of a manhunt set in New York state in early September 2001. Simon Teibele Lenox (aka White Raven), an experienced New York cop, is assigned to a Secret Service unit based in the Twin Towers. His task is to find an Israeli, Liam Emanuel, who has come to the USA in search of an alternative promised land. The finality of his abandonment of Israel is symbolised by the fact that he left his shoes behind at Ben Gurion Airport (metaphorically shaking the dust of Israel off his feet). But the Israeli authorities want him found and quietly returned. Of course they do, ‘Emanuel’ means ‘God-with-us’, and the Zionist vision of Israel is meaningless if God has abandoned it.
In the course of his investigation, Lenox begins a relationship with a Jewish colleague, Jackie Winona Brendel, which forms an obsessive subtheme in his thoughts as his search for Emanuel takes him to Grand Island, NY. The author’s play with NY place names as Emanuel and Lenox head for Grand Island makes this a something of a second exodus. This is where the historical footnote comes in. Grand Island was bought in 1825 by Mordecai Manuel Noah who intended to found a Jewish refuge there, to be called Ararat. In Semel’s version, Emanuel is Noah’s descendant and he has the title deeds to prove his ownership.
Having tracked down Emanuel on Grand Island and failed to persuade him to return, Lenox returns to New York on the morning of 11th September and goes to his office to write his report and resign… And the story ends with Jackie pinning up missing person fliers.
Part 2 takes us back to 1825. Noah has come to Buffalo to claim the island he has purchased. This is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an Indian serving woman, Little Dove, in the household of Noah’s host, Lenox. She persuades Noah to visit the island, which in reality he never set foot on. While they are together on the island, they make love. Noah leaves; Little Dove remains, carrying his child – a fusion of Jew and Indian. And so the scene is set for the alternate history of Part 3.
Semel returns us to September 2001. Ararat rather than Israel has become the Jewish homeland. But the religion of Ararat is a strange fusion of Judaism and Native American traditions. A colour-blind gay black Indian photographer, Simon, is in a relationship with Jake Brendel (aka DJ Teibele), a Jew who has exiled himself from Ararat. Simon is commissioned by newspaper magnate Lenox to follow the story of Ararat’s governor, Emanuella Winona Noah, as she makes her bid for the White House. Initially on the lookout for a scandal, Simon eventually meets the governor and is won over by her. Again there is a subtheme of Simon obsessing about his relationship with Jake. Part 3, and the novel as a whole, concludes with Simon returning by plane to New York. He is looking at the Twin Towers and for the first time in his life he sees a flash of red when, it is implied, the plane crashes. Then we segue to Greater Damascus (Israel in our universe) where Jake has gone to scatter Simon’s ashes.
That summary seems to be full of spoilers, but the storylines seem less important than the symbolism and the careful weaving together of names and ideas across the three parts of the novel. There is the recurring fusion of Jewish elements with elements representing other victim groups (specifically native Americans, blacks, and gays). And this is achieved by presenting us with characters of mixed heritage, describing sexual relationships that bring together the different victim groups, and by mixing and matching Jewish and American Indian names.
A recurring theme throughout is the quest of oppressed people/exiles for a place they can call home. But they do not find what they are looking for. In the real world, the Zions they try to create fail to live up to their promise.
Did I enjoy the novel? No. Does that matter? Perhaps not. I am left with a sense that I have only scratched the surface of the novel’s meaning(s). If you are looking for a gripping yarn to while away a few hours, this is not the book for you. But if you want an intellectual challenge that will make you want to read and re-read until you have begun to make sense of its complexities, you could do far worse than tackle Isra Isle.
***
THE KRAKEN SEA
E. Catherine Tobler
Apex pb, 128pp, $11.95/ebook $3.99
Jonathan McCalmont
Before they are written, stories exist as pure artistic potential. The act of creation is also an act of destruction as the process of making a potential story into an actual story involves cutting a
way the excess potential until you are left with nothing but the actual. When moving from potential to actual, a writer must decide which elements of their potential story to make real: Do they emphasise the characters, the plot, or the themes? Do they service the plot by keeping things light and easy to parse or do they service the characters by delving into the thoughts and feelings of their characters? For every story that has ever been written there are hundreds of phantom potentials, forms that could have been actualised but were not. According to this view, the job of the creator is not just to come up with a series of good ideas but also to ensure that those ideas are actualised in the most pleasing manner imaginable. E. Catherine Tobler’s novella The Kraken Sea is an example of an actualised story that comes very close to embodying its full artistic potential.
Set in early 20th Century America, the story revolves around a teenaged orphan named Jackson. The novella’s opening act follows Jackson as he leaves his orphanage and tries to find a place for himself in the world. Tobler writes in short, unadorned sentences with minimal dialogue or emotional introspection meaning that Jackson’s early encounters with the outside world feel like an overwhelming rush from paucity to richness. At first, Jackson seems to struggle with his new world as he articulates everything he doesn’t understand (either about himself or the world) in terms of its resemblance to fantastical creatures. Finding himself stripped bare by an encounter with a young girl and a series of fairground stalls, Jackson demands to know why he is different to other boys.
Interzone #267 - November-December 2016 Page 13
