Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But there does remain one thing that fantasy needs to be rescued from in terms of content; the simplistic moral dualism that seems to reside at the core of most of it, that which is most often and most loudly proclaimed on book packages and in the PR—the time-honored “battle of Good Against Evil."

  The Battle of Good Against Evil is a bore. It is unreal. It is uninteresting. And in human terms, it is a lie.

  There is a wonderful moment in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, itself a wonderful genre-bender that combines hard science fiction and “high fantasy.” The hero, champion of the cause of Order against the Chaos of Faerie in which he has long lingered, looks back on Elf Hill wistfully. I am on the side of Order, he finally decides.

  I think...? he then asks himself before he rides on into his destiny.

  I have said and written often enough that the interesting stories, are never about the Battle Between Good and Evil but about the conflict between different concepts of good, whether in the world, or within the same human heart.

  China Miéville doesn't, to my knowledge, pay significant attention to this in theory, but it is certainly there in his fiction. Vance, Hughes, and others realize this on a fairly ironic and good-natured level, but in Miéville's novels it is deeply formative and central, and in contemporary fantasy, certainly in what is published as genre fantasy, that is newer and far more significant than any amount of “weirdness."

  As I said in my review of Iron Council, the third book in his “New Crobuzon” (or “Bas-Lag") series, I had read and reviewed the first one, Perdido Street Station, but not the second. Now I have read The Scar, and to me, and from this peculiar perspective, the progression in this regard is interesting and somewhat peculiar.

  Perdido Street was set mostly in New Crobuzon, and although the main characters were not simplistically portrayed as “good” heroes versus “bad” villains, it was essentially a story about a conflict with those between whom the reader could sympathize and identify with and “evil” forces.

  But by the time Miéville got to Iron Council, we have a passionately political advocacy novel about a revolution against a thoroughly evil system, and while the characters have admirable and slightly ambiguous psychological depth, it most certainly is a story about the battle between good and evil, and you know who you are rooting for as surely as if the protagonists and more or less faceless collective antagonists were wearing team jerseys.

  Iron Council has a thematic and plotwise closure with which one might argue on emotionally esthetic terms, but which works on a structural level. Perdido Street Station did not; the characters and their personal stories were left hanging in mid-air, and it seemed like a transparent set-up for an inevitable sequel, which is what I assumed The Scar would be.

  But it is not. Nor is Iron Council a sequel to The Scar any more than The Scar is a sequel to Perdido Street Station. This is a most peculiar trilogy, if that is what it is, though I am beginning to think that “Bas-Lag” is an open-ended series format, the continuity of which resides entirely in the imaginary world. There are no continuing characters. Major characters from Perdido Street Station do not appear either in The Scar or Iron Council, and their stories do not resolve. Bellis Coldwine is the main viewpoint protagonist in The Scar, and she does not appear in Iron Council either.

  Bellis flees some vague political hot water in New Crobuzon via river and ocean ship toward a far distant colony of the city. But her ship is attacked by pirates and she and others aboard are taken to Armada, a vast floating and mobile pirate city continually cobbled together through the centuries out of captured vessels, and told they are never going to be able to leave.

  The Armadans have also hijacked a kind of New Crobuzon drilling platform, not to bring up oil, but rather rockmilk, a magical substance with which to fuel an apparatus to control an avanc, a huge creature from another dimension or something, which they plan to capture and use as a mighty underwater tug to allow their pelagic city to move at will and at great speed over the great Empty Ocean.

  The powerful navy of New Crobuzon has long been out to get the pirate city for obvious reasons, and the theft of their drilling platform exacerbates their ireful determination. There is a secret New Crobuzon agent aboard Armada, and he enlists Bellis in a plot to get a message to the city government by dangling the possibility of rescue before her. Later he reveals that he has discovered a plan by the grindylow, a race of mysterious, magically powerful, hideous, voracious aquatic monsters to invade New Crobuzon by sea, river, and waterway, and that he knows their invasion plan and if he does not transmit it back to the city, it and its inhabitants are surely doomed.

  Most of the pirates aboard Armada believe or just assume that the Lovers, leaders of the dominant faction, want to harness the avanc simply to increase the speed and mobility of the pirate city, the better and safer to pursue the business of piracy as usual.

  But it turns out that the Lovers are pursuing a mystical quest to have the avanc drag Armada to the Scar of the title, a kind of magical dimensional rent far away in the Empty Ocean and therefore otherwise unreachable, where they will gain some apotheosis and/or super-puissant powers never really defined, something like Ahab harnessing Moby Dick, rather than slaying him, to haul the Pequod to the mystical ultima thule of his dark vision quest.

  Well, it would be giving away too much to go a lot further. For present purposes, the point is that while the outlaw floating multi-species pirate city mirrors and foreshadows the revolutionary mobile multispecies railroad city of Iron Council, here none of the main characters, Bellis included, are without their central moral flaws, paradoxes, and ambiguities.

  In the end, Bellis opts to try to save the city that she has fled and both loves and hates, betraying Armada, which she has begun by detesting and comes to identify with. The grindylow turn out to be something other than what they are painted as by the spy. The Lovers betray Armada, not for evil purposes, but in the pursuit of a mad mystical good.

  And Armada is both an egalitarian utopia, at least in terms of the rest of Bas-Lag, and, after all, a society of piratical thieves ready, able, and more than willing to kill the innocent in the process of pursuing its own predatory self-interest.

  The real stories are not about the conflict between Good and Evil but about conflicting concepts of good, or at least self-interests, enlightened or deluded. In The Scar, Miéville admirably demonstrates that he knows this and has freed his fantasy from that genre convention. In the light of this retrospective discovery, consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, I must confess that, for me at least, The Scar casts the ardent revolutionary dialectic of Iron Council in a different light, particularly since its protagonists are hardly simple exemplars of good in their personal lives. Okay, sometimes a story of the conflict between Good and Evil is a valid one, particularly when the distinctions are specifically and analytically and passionately political, and the characters are not Pure Knights or slaves of Sauron.

  But is this not simply good writing, whether “science fiction,” “fantasy,” or “mainstream"? What, you may ask, does this have to do with “weirdness"?

  Yes it is, and not very much.

  Miéville has indeed liberated fantasy from its set of political, moral, and social medievalist conventions, but “weirdness” has nothing to do with it. Miéville has a genius for beautifully rendering truly bizarre fictional fantasy realities with total literary verisimilitude. But, as I hope I have adequately demonstrated earlier, anyone doing this is already standing on the shoulders of giants, and “weirdness” in terms of content and worldbuilding, going as far back at least as Homer as it does, is something that can never be “new."

  However, in purely literary terms, in terms of technique and the deepest root concept of fiction itself, or at least speculative fiction, something “new” does seem to be aborning. As I said before, what Rudy Rucker called “Free Form” really isn't, but what Miéville calls the “New Weird” is approaching this. And what it is a
pproaching can perhaps be further clarified by looking at a novel like The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston, who, at least according to the blurbs, and the easily enough discernable influences, is party to this new “Movement."

  Here we also have a fantasy world seemingly entirely dissociated from our own space-time continuum, unless some sequel or sequels to come will end up proving otherwise. It's called the Four Lands, and it's a rather small pocket universe floating in what seems like purely literary space-time, where god, with a deliberately small “g” and “it” for a pronoun, has supposedly departed, leaving the set-up in the care of the “Eszai,” a small circle of immortals, led by an immortal emperor with the power to make “Zascai,” ordinary humans, immortal, or bust immortal Eszai back to mortal at will or whim.

  The political situation is a lot more complex than that, for the lands are ruled by mortal kings or queens who gain their thrones more by skullduggery than lineal descent, and while the Emperor and the Eszai are not supposed to “rule,” they don't exactly take the Prime Directive any more seriously than George W. Bush does.

  Nor are the Zascai exactly humans. There are several subspecies, including winged but flightless humans, and all are engaged in a Forever War against the Insects, never-ending swarms of, well, voracious and apparently mindless giant bugs. The story, as the title implies, is that of the war against the Insects, period, with, however, many interesting Machiavellian subplots among the Eszai and the Zascai.

  Thus far Swainston would seem to have carried what Miéville has done to a further level of purity that illumines and clarifies exactly what is most new about the misnamed “New Weird” on a purely literary level. This is not science fiction, because this literary universe has absolutely no connection with our own, and there is quite a bit here that violates its laws of mass and energy, conspicuously the square-cube law that makes giant bugs a physical impossibility within them. Nor is it fantasy by the usual definition, for while various Eszai may have supernormal powers, “magic” is never invoked. Nor is it “alternate history” or “uchronie” as the French have it, for, there being no point of tangency with our real world, there can be no point of departure from it.

  Jant Comet—the “Messenger,” for all immortal Eszai inhabit such functional avatars—is the viewpoint character. He is a rare hybrid of flightless winged human and another lightweight subspecies, and therefore the only person in the entire literary construct who can fly.

  He is also a junkie, and called exactly that by other characters, addicted to a drug called “cat.” More often than not this merely fucks him up severely and leaves him with withdrawal symptoms when he comes down, leading of course to the next shot, and he does shoot it—with a spike. But sometimes it transports him to another reality or dimension or something called “the Shift,” inhabited by humans and by a panoply of bizarre and often horrific sentient creatures that put the denizens of “Bas-Lag” to shame.

  So what we have here, however tentatively, however imperfectly, is an even purer example of what Miéville has done, and what I would contend is the true revolutionary core and import of what Miéville has misnamed the New Weird.

  This is not science fiction or fantasy or uchronie or historical fiction or contemporary fiction, or anything that tries to follow or invoke any consistent set of mimetic laws or parameters, be they that of science, pseudo-science, or magic.

  One might call it a subspecies of speculative fiction, mainly because it is being published as such, and for want of any other taxonomic genus to put it into. This, tentatively and imperfectly, is something quite new—fiction that exists on a literary level only, as a purely literary construct.

  This is a very difficult concept for me to even attempt to describe. Small wonder then that what may be these early attempts at actually writing such stuff are somewhat tentative and imperfect.

  But to give it the old college try....

  Prior to the development of photography, painting, at least in the west, evolved, and strove to develop, more and better techniques to achieve “realism” or “mimesis.” Perspective, chiaroscuro, even the use of the camera obscura; the ultima thule, arguably finally best attained by the Dutch realists, being to be able to use paint on a flat surface to create the most perfect illusion possible in the eye of the beholder that he or she is seeing a frozen slice of actual reality in three dimensions.

  Photography does this much better and instantly, and we have long been conditioned to see photographs as doing this perfectly. Early on, there were those who moaned that photography would kill painting, but that is not what happened.

  Instead, photography liberated western painting from the goal of producing, well, photo realism, revealed its true nature as in fact pigments applied to a flat surface, nothing more than that, but nothing less either, unbound, free to explore anything and everything that might be produced by paint on canvas—impressionism, cubism, expressionism, abstraction, abstract expressionism, pop art, whatever.

  Whether this has been a good thing or a bad thing or both is a good argument, but one that is irrelevant for the present purpose, which is to use it as an analogy for the essential true nature of writing as words on paper, period.

  It's easy enough to see this when it comes to poetry, especially “modern” poetry, or so-called “free verse,” which can exist without rhyme or meter or in extreme cases even coherent imagery, purely as esthetically pleasing (or not) ink patterns on paper.

  Fiction, though, must at minimum at least convey a meaningful series of events, must tell some kind of story, or it isn't fiction. Attempts to write so-called “fiction” that does not do this results in, not to put a fine line on it, gibberish and crap.

  Speculative fiction, in its incarnations as both science fiction and fantasy, is free from the stricture to deliver a series of such events, to tell a story, in a setting, world, or context that mirrors existing reality, but thus far it has been confined to a kind of mimesis in terms of “world building,” setting its stories in fictional constructs that recreate, if not mimic, our coherent phenomenological reality by constructing literary universes that at least are internally consistent—that cohere, like our own, around a coherent set of physical or magical laws or a combination of both, however different, however outré, however “weird."

  Miéville's Bas-Lag trilogy, with its cavalier use of magicks that are conveniently pulled out of the magician's rabbit's hat at any plot turn, goes a long way to freeing itself from that constraint—whether by entirely conscious intent or not it is thus far difficult to tell—to become a purely literary construct, words on paper with no external referents, and no internal restraints either save purely literary esthetics.

  In The Year of Our War, Swainston is doing much the same thing but carrying it even further, unless she is just being sloppy. Perhaps she is doing both, for unlike Miéville's Bas-Lag trilogy, this novel is full of words, minor artifacts, locutions, even a dating system, that seem straight out of our own contemporary culture, even pop culture, and therefore are quite jarring.

  Whether this is just sloppy prose in need of more careful editing or whether it is deliberate, I cannot tell, and maybe, once it is pointed out, it doesn't matter. If it is deliberate, it would seem to be Swainston reminding the reader that this is, after all, not only a purely literary construct, but one that knows it's a purely literary construct, and wants the reader to realize it too.

  And if it is the accidental result of sloppy prose, well, the effect is no different, and once having been pointed out, can become self-consciously applied by anyone who wants to.

  And this, I would contend, is the most basic aspect of the New Weird and the most revolutionary: speculative fiction that exists as a self-consciously pure literary construct, words on paper that knows they are words on paper, as modern painting knows that it is paint on canvas.

  But there is a problem with such stuff, which has to some extent been written outside of speculative fiction as so-called “post-modern” fiction, lar
gely under the baleful influence of deconstructionism, and what is usually lost in the deconstruction is story. A good deal of the fiction in the old New Worlds suffered from this, too, much of it more interesting to writers as lab experiments than to readers as satisfying and entertaining fiction.

  Moorcock, in his introduction doesn't quite acknowledge this, but he is adamant that lack of storytelling is the major flaw of much “serious literary fiction,” which is why it needs a healthy dose of same from so-called “popular fiction” if it is to be meaningful to the general reader. Which may also be why such fiction that knows and proclaims that it is a pure literary construct can most likely, and indeed perhaps only, succeed as speculative fiction. Speculative fiction at least forces attention to theme and content and, to a lesser extent, setting, without which it cannot be speculative fiction.

  Swainston succeeds in this regard up to a point, because the main story is that of a war, which forces an action-based plot if nothing else. She also does well with the character-based subplots. Miéville likewise succeeds in all three books of the Bas-Lag trilogy, more or less in like manner. But all four books suffer from a lack of satisfying closure, and for the same reason.

  Iron Council at least brings the story to a thematic closure, but does so by arbitrarily pulling the necessary rabbit out of Einstein's hat at the conclusion. The Year of Our War does something similar. Perdido Street Station concludes the action plot well enough, but leaves the characters hanging in mid-air without resolution either in that novel or in The Scar, and The Scar's conclusion is a great sequence for a silly movie.