But that combat does come, and is unsparingly conveyed. Here’s the aftermath of Kat killing another girl by exposing her to mutant wasps.
The girl, so breathtakingly beautiful in her golden dress the night of the interviews, is unrecognizable. Her features eradicated, her limbs three times their normal size. The stinger lumps have begun to explode, spewing putrid green liquid around her.
Needing the dead girl’s bow and arrows, Kat has to manhandle this human wreckage to get them.
After surviving the Games with her village-mate Peeta, Kat finds, in Catching Fire, that the deadliest days have just begun. The suicidal act of defiance that won her and Peeta an unprecedented shared victory, telecast to the nation, has brought long-quashed rebellion to a simmer.
Back in District 12, and touring the country, Kat finds herself—under the symbol of the mockingjay pin she famously wears—reluctantly at the heart of the turmoil, while concerned simultaneously with keeping her loved ones alive, and with burgeoning parallel romances with Peeta and old hunter friend Gale. But then comes an unexpected return to the savage arena, and with it another literary influence rears its head. The clock-shaped technological booby-trap, where Kat and crew rumble, summons up nothing so much as the gloriously insane, over-planned traps the Joker used to engineer for the Silver Age Batman. But on a weightier level, clever allusions to the Mitteleuropean revolts of 1989 and even prescient temblors from the Arab Spring vibrate through this portion of the saga as well.
Collins’s charming first-person voice for Kat continues unerringly, pulling the reader deep into the action, and the increasingly mature and realpolitik-savvy girl of this installment is a realistic expansion of the young woman who entered the Games all naïve.
Collins unrelentingly ratchets up the stakes and tensions in the concluding volume, Mockingjay, which shifts to the venue of District 13, the legendary rebel redoubt that proves, distressingly, to be literally underground, a militarized autocracy on the lines of George Lucas’s THX 1138 or Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth. Kat is forced into the Joan of Arc role of Mockingjay, and also acquires a bit of a superhero patina, what with her intelligent weapons and armor. Romantic concerns serve as welcome interstitial moments, with Gale by her side, yet emotionally distant, and Peeta a tortured captive in the Capitol. The savagery of the arena, naturally missing, is replaced by the brutality of combat, culminating in Katniss’s squad-level, then solo, assault on the Capitol, in the manner of a John Scalzi or David Drake military novel. The ultimate ending: Orwellian victory, betrayals, sacrifice, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a harsh grace.
The success of Rowling and Collins, as well as Stephanie Meyer and a host of second-tier YA authors, among both their intended adolescent audience and a huge number of adult readers, raises the provocative question of whether “mature” science fiction has reached a point of self-referential, inward-looking decadence that has contributed to the dwindling of its readership. (A similar instance in the field of comics draws parallels with the senescent output of DC and Marvel, and a charming yet callow rogue like Scott Pilgrim.) Certainly, The Hunger Games provides more immediate surface pleasures and points of newbie access than The Quantum Thief (Entry 101). But sacrificing the accumulated thick intertextual continuity of a century’s worth of adult science fiction might not be strictly necessary for the genre’s survival, if we can interbreed the best YA sf with the best adult sf, selecting for the virtues that appeal to the eternal thirteen-year-old, sense-of-wonder addict in us all.
94
Cory Doctorow
Little Brother (2008)
WHILE THE MAJORITY of his science-fictional peers forsake the genre’s historical commitment to near-term speculations and politically conscious fiction, fleeing for the bland safety of Middle Earth or Wizard School or Interstellar Empires, Cory Doctorow plunges headlong into the venerable tradition of admonitory, near-future prophecy. He’s a smart and talented and inventive writer, still as youthful and energetic and optimistic, despite approaching age forty, as he was upon his precocious debut in 1998. His ability to function on the bleeding edge of technology and culture is daily exhibited by his partnered curatorship of one of the web’s most popular and influential blogs, Boing Boing. All of these qualities are evident from page one of Little Brother, latest in a long line of anti-authoritarian books.
Ever since Anthony “Buck” Rogers sought to overthrow America’s evil Han overlords in the pages of his 1928 Amazing Stories debut, “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” science fiction has concerned itself with prophecies of doom for the United States and its unique and transcendental form of democracy. (This hortatory mode actually began in England, all the way back in 1871, with George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, a work that sparked scores of other John-Bull-endangered scenarios.) Almost immediately thereafter, writers as diverse and as diversely talented as John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber and Jerry Sohl took up the gauntlet, depicting Old Glory besmirched under the thumb of forces inimical to our revered core values. By 1962, the format had reached some kind of mad apotheosis and larger cultural significance and awareness with the release of the fictionalized documentary Red Nightmare, in which narrator Jack Webb was our Virgil on a journey across a hellish USA overrun with Commies.
At the same time, a second literary strain foresaw the possibility of decay and dictatorship from within: homegrown worms burrowing within our own subverted institutions. Sinclair Lewis conjured up a nativist presidential dictator in It Can’t Happen Here. And of course Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four implicitly limned a dystopia that had sprouted stepwise over time on domestic soil, rather than being imposed from without by foreigners. This sense of a democracy betrayed by factions within that had lost sight of its seminal values naturally received a huge boost in the 1960s, reflecting the prevalent mistrust of government. A late-period instance of this formulation is the graphic novel by Alan Moore, V for Vendetta (1982-88, and filmed in 2006).
Both types of science fiction—and their hybrid offspring—lend themselves to certain shared plot devices, a stew of motifs from the American Revolution, the French Resistance, and other historical rebellions. A simmering revolt against seemingly impossible odds, led by a charismatic hero of the underground and his loyal posse, including one or more babelicious fellow female freedom fighters. Treachery, sacrifice, atrocities, temporary defeats and ultimate victories. Noble speeches, cruel dictates, torture and resistance. Often, the rebels will enlist or invent new technology to aid their cause, explicitly endorsing America’s Edisonian virtues and privileging the small, idealistic and flexible forces over the ossified, cynical, superior powers.
Such stories are among the most stirring and topical and edifying sf novels ever written. As has been famously argued, Orwell’s book alone probably forestalled the very future it so convincingly painted as inevitable. But of course, such a potent toolbox works perfectly well for any ideology, no matter how dangerous and despicable. William Luther Pierce’s reprehensibly racist The Turner Diaries is the black sheep of this genre, but no less powerful for that.Doctorow’s Little Brother is a book which fits as perfectly into this tradition as if organically grown from the seeds of its predecessors. Luckily, Doctorow and his novel are on the side of the angels, i.e., America’s Founding Fathers and a contemporary citizenry that’s proud, thoughtful, and knows the true meaning of patriotism.
Little Brother is the first-person tale of Marcus Yallow, a seventeen-year-old student in San Francisco on the day after tomorrow. (The ineluctable presence of a teen narrator and the publisher’s marketing have cast this book as a Young Adult title, and in fact it debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List, Children’s Chapter-book Division, at the number 9 slot. But all those who have enjoyed Doctorow’s past “adult” novels will find this an equally strong and mature and polished link in that chain.)
Marcus is a Good Boy and a Nice Kid from a fine middle-class liberal home, despite exhibiting the familiar adolescent impulses to mess around and goof of
f in harmless fashion. He also happens to be a cyberwhiz. One day he and some pals are bunking school. Unfortunately, this is the moment when al-Qaeda chooses to blow up the Bay Area Bridge and the underwater BART tunnels. In the chaos, Marcus and his pals are hauled off the streets in a military sweep and remanded to extra-legal inquisitors. After some harrowing physical and mental harassment based on his rebellious attitude and past misdemeanors, Marcus is eventually deemed a non-threat and turned loose.
But he discovers upon his return home that in the face of this terrorist assault America is well on its way to becoming an anti-privacy police state, with the Department of Homeland Security monitoring the travel, purchases and thinking of innocent citizens. Angry both at his own treatment and the general shrinking of freedoms, Marcus begins to lead a teenaged resistance movement.
Cobbling together an alternate, privacy-friendly internet out of simple video-game consoles, Marcus—masquerading as the mysterious and anonymous M1k3y—foments small but cumulatively stinging acts of culture-jamming, becoming a glamorous icon of rage against the machine. He is aided by his pals, including newcomer Ange Carvelli, who becomes his first love. Dodging the authorities, Marcus gets a nerve-racking crash course in the dangers, thrills and responsibilities of dissent, before the whole situation ramps up to a climactic battle of small and righteous versus big and mean-spirited.
Doctorow’s major literary accomplishment, from which all else flows, is certainly his faithful and naturalistic inhabiting of the consciousness of Marcus. In every respect, Doctorow’s portrayal of the lad is utterly believable, from his scared reactions at his initial confinement to his puppy love affair to his fiery resentment at the abuses of authority. This verisimilitude echoes the proverbial Golden Age of Sf (and the Golden Age of an sf author’s intoxication with the form) being thirteen. This is a novel where satirist P. J. O’Rourke’s formulation of “Age and guile beating youth and innocence every time” is given the hearty and convincing boot. Which is not to say that Marcus has a cakewalk to victory. Doctorow is careful to insert realistic setbacks and roadblocks and partial victories into his tale, just as he fairly offers the arguments of the authorities.
Doctorow is of course in love with technology and romanticizes it no end. His paean to computer programming at the close of Chapter 7 is practically a love song, and some of his—or Marcus’s—infodumps approach MEGO conditions. Coding up boring Cobol routines for the insurance industry, say, can instill doubts about the wonderfulness of all programming. But then again, the core ethos of sf revolves around technology, and Marcus’s ingenious hacking makes for some clever reading.
Doctorow’s goals with this novel are twofold: first, of course, to entertain with scintillating speculations and an exciting adventure; second, to propagandize on behalf of freedom, political accountability, communal action and taking control of one’s life. The book reflects this bipartite mandate neatly, in its alternation between action and theorizing, with each half of the equation balancing and justifying the other.
In the end, Doctorow totally fulfills his dream of updating Orwell for the iPod generation.
95
Ekaterina Sedia
The Alchemy of Stone (2008)
BORN IN RUSSIA in 1970, expatriated author Ekaterina Sedia still rates as a comparative youngster in the field. Her initial publication credits date to early 2005, with her second and well-received novel, The Secret History of Moscow, appearing as recently as 2007. So she’s an author whose career has blossomed wholly in the crepuscular light of the New Weird, that startlingly revealed louche neighborhood of Fantastika City initially mapped by M. John Harrison, Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville. Given the hype, allure and trendy prominence of New Weird, it’s only natural that any beginning author with a bent for off-kilter scientific romances would come to play in this mode. Perhaps inspired by such predecessors as Kathe Koja, Sedia shows herself to be a solid citizen of this venue, bringing to the exotic milieu a solid helping of steampunk-style science.
Her third novel, The Alchemy of Stone, is pure New Weird, much along the lines of China Miéville’s gold-standard trend-setter, Perdido Street Station (see Entry 62). But unlike Miéville’s maximalist, burly tome, Sedia’s book is something of a miniaturist’s triumph, showing a decidedly female touch, if such a gender distinction bears any weight at all. The tale focuses on a limited cast and a few central tropes or motifs, yet in the end renders a city and a world and its inhabitants nearly as deeply as Miéville’s more hulking construction.
Sedia’s compact and charmingly tragic book takes place in the City of Gargoyles, an arcane conglomeration built partially by primal non-human stone-working creatures (now in danger of extinction), and partially by the subsequent human settlers. Mattie is a sentient “female” automaton created by a Mechanic named Loharri. Given her partial freedom (Loharri still retains the literal key to her windup heart), Mattie has switched to the rival political/philosophical camp of the Alchemists. Her pursuit of a cure for what’s killing the gargoyles will lead her through politics, warfare and romantic heartbreak, as power struggles intersect with more personal affairs.
Mattie’s meticulous lab work to perfect “the alchemy of stone” recipes that will halt the petrification of the gargoyles show Sedia’s keen and clear understanding of the basic tenets and practices of science, and her desire to put such knowledge at the heart of her fiction. Her novel’s title proves well-chosen when we recall that our own historical alchemists were not primarily supernatural occultists, but sedulous experimenters intent on producing duplicable results and transmissible formulas.
But enfolding this science-fictional nugget at the heart of the book lies the overarching depiction of Mattie, and the burden of meaning engendered by her sheer being. What we have here is the latest extension of the grand old theme of “robot becoming human.” Like Lester del Rey’s Helen O’Loy, Mattie is a robot who learns to love, despite abuse at the hands of her creator and her second-class status in the city’s hierarchy. “She came from Loharri’s laboratory, born of metal and coils and spare parts and boredom; this is where she would find herself in the end, likely enough.” And Sedia’s conceit of a physical key to Mattie’s heartsprings expertly illustrates one of the things sf does so well: concretization of metaphor.
Along with its echoes of Miéville, Sedia’s sweetly melancholy novel—continuously captivating, even though less densely tricked out with backstory and verisimilitudinous details—carries with it a delicious flavor of a tributary stream to sf: European puppet fairy tales, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Carlo Collodi. In the end, though, its major guiding star might be a writer who does not figure often enough into New Weird hagiography, despite a strong and continuing track record: Tanith Lee. Lee’s particular blend of dark fantasy, romance, weird science and obsessive quests seems to have found a worthy protégé in Sedia.
Finally, as an extra-literary codicil, we should mention that Sedia’s career happens to illustrate another important development that occurred during the period of our survey: the rebirth of the small or independent sf presses. Once, on the nearer borders of the Golden Age, before large publishing houses became interested in science fiction, the core publishers of distinction were all small, fan-based operations such as Arkham House, Gnome and Shasta. Today, as big firms chop their backlists, avoid anything but potential bestsellers, and become leery of transgressive subject matter, indie firms such as Night Shade Books and Tachyon Press, aided by POD and digital technologies, carry the banner of innovative sf high. Nearly Sedia’s entire output has reached readers thanks only to Sean Wallace’s bold Prime Books.
96
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Windup Girl (2009)
AWARDS IN THE SF field are an exceedingly problematical metric of literary value. Anyone attempting to justify the World Fantasy prize taken by Martin Scott’s Thraxas against contention from books by James Blaylock and Peter Beagle, among other superior nominees in 2000, knows that much. But every now and t
hen, usually once a generation, a book will justifiably sweep the slate of awards in a year, betokening something special and of lasting value. The “triple crown” of Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards given to William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer was for a long while unequalled.
Then came Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl—like Gibson’s book, a debut novel following some acclaimed short stories—to pick up a Nebula, a Hugo, a Locus, a John Campbell and a Compton Crook award. Plainly, both fans and professionals alike recognized a book of rare merits, one that perhaps even signified a generational shift of talent within the field, given Bacigalupi’s relative youth. (He was aged 36 in the year of The Windup Girl’s publication, and as John Scalzi has convincingly demonstrated in his essay “Why New Novelists Are Kinda Old, or, Hey, Publishing is Slow,” this is precisely the average age of past breakout writers.)
What virtues rendered Bacigalupi’s novel so popular and meritorious? Topicality, speculative prowess, and fine writing (that last virtue in reality standing for a whole suite of narrative excellencies in such essential areas as plot, characterization, setting and language). Like Ian McDonald (Entry 75), Bacigalupi has achieved a rare fusion of mimetic and science fictional power that fulfills all the long-harbored expectations of a certain camp of science fiction, most recently codified in Geoff Ryman’s “Mundane SF” manifesto. Hewing rigorously to contemporary realities and science, focusing on near-term futures, this kind of science fiction eschews the glories of space opera and time travel and other extravagances for meticulous blueprints of our probable paths through rough decades ahead.
And rough indeed is Bacigalupi’s vision for the planet.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 33
