by Laura Miller
What happened to Thom and Toto? It seems only the “Man with the Compound Eyes” knows, a persona the reader only learns about through a reported conversation between Thom and the man himself as the former lies dying at the base of a cliff. The Man with the Compound Eyes can be understood as a symbol of individual points of view contained within a collective perspective. Like an insect’s, the man’s eyes are composed of ommatidia forming a kind of video mosaic, and creating a transcendent image of nature. The Man with the Compound Eyes exists to encourage the reader to step outside him or herself and see the world through nonhuman eyes.
We later discover that Toto died of a snakebite four years before the trash tsunami, and the story about the climbing and bug-collecting expedition was concocted by Alice to work through the trauma of the loss of her only son. She tells Atile’i that she is writing a novel called The Man with the Compound Eyes and, in so doing, reveals herself to the reader as the one who has woven all the narrative strands of the novel together into a metafictional parable about the power of the imagination to reflect and refract worlds within worlds, projecting what is and might be.
ANN LECKIE
THE IMPERIAL RADCH TRILOGY (2013–15)
Starting with a remarkable debut novel that won every major science-fiction award in its first year of publication, the Imperial Radch trilogy takes a powerful approach to gender and sexuality.
Ann Leckie (b.1966) grew up reading science fiction and fantasy throughout her childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, but it wasn’t until the birth of her children in 1996 and 2000 that she found the motivation to begin work on her conceptually ambitious Imperial Radch trilogy, which tells the story of an AI trapped in a human body in a genderless galactic empire on the brink of civil war. The trilogy combines the operatic scope of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels with the intimate explorations of humans as social animals found in Ursula K. Le Guin’s most-loved books. Leckie’s writing has drawn comparisons to both, but it is the power of her storytelling that makes her approach to gender and sexuality much more than a gimmick.
Throughout, gender is conspicuous—chiefly by its absence. It is a literary decision, underlined on every page by the use of “she” as a neutral, universal pronoun. In English, “she” is almost never a neutral pronoun. “He,” by contrast, is still used synonymously with “men and, as an afterthought, women.” “She” is specific; “he” is universal. We’re so used to assuming the masculine default in culture that if every character in the trilogy were referred to as “he,” it would be easy to assume that they were all men and boys—which would hardly distinguish the trilogy from a great deal of pulpier science fiction.
The narrative arc of the series, however, is not about gender. It breaks new ground in storytelling precisely because it is not about the gender binary. For Breq, the protagonist and viewpoint character, gender is not a concern for the quite simple reason that Breq is a fragment of the consciousness of a two-thousand-year-old warship, built by an imperial civilization which happens not to draw clear distinctions between “people with and without penises.” Readers experience a great deal of experimental science fiction through the eyes of outsiders, but Breq is part of the machine of the Radch (the conquering empire)—quite literally.
Leckie drops us into the middle of a struggle between the warring factions of a tyrant, Mianaii, who is able to clone herself and divide her consciousness between multiple bodies that have now turned on one another. The books manage, masterfully, to concern themselves with intimate questions of identity while at the same time they illuminate empire, colonization, and conquest on a galactic scale. The world’s very strangeness, from the customs of Radch citizens—who are obsessed with crockery and never show their naked hands in public—to the in-depth exploration of postgender, posthuman love relationships, is thrown into sharp relief by its relentless familiarity. It’s still about who conquers, who is conquered, who is sleeping with whom, who respects social norms, who disobeys her parents, and what the neighbors will think of it all.
For Breq, the trauma and the drama are an embodiment itself. Breq is the last surviving human ancillary of the destroyed warship, and the strangeness of being confined to one fragile human body leaves her little time to concern herself with the genital specifics of that body, or of anyone else’s. Without the familiar signifiers, Breq and her crewmates still manage to wage war, fall in love, betray and rescue one another, and wrestle with the complexities of conquest and social justice. That is the real wonder at the core of the Imperial Radch series: It demonstrates that gender itself is not essential to a good story.
More than anything, Leckie’s trilogy is fun—a classic, rollicking space opera. Breq could, in many ways, be the heroic soldier-protagonist familiar in science fiction: brave, deeply moral, conflicted, forced to confront the barbarity of the system of which she is a part as she meets alien ambassadors, kicks down doors and launches missiles at enemy spaceships. She manages to be all this and more without being limited or defined by gender—which is precisely what makes the Radch series a story for our times.
NNEDI OKORAFOR
LAGOON (2014)
Okorafor’s portrayal of Lagos before, during, and after an alien invasion is both a biting commentary on current Nigeria as well as a fast-paced futuristic adventure.
Science fiction has long been assumed to be a purely Western genre. As noted by Nnedi Okorafor (b.1974) herself, there is a sense in which the perception of African reading audiences as being more interested in reality-based stories than ones dominated by technology has become needlessly pervasive. This makes writers and publishers reluctant to produce work of this kind, and audiences hostile to them. As she said first in a Nebula Award blog post:
… I think getting African audiences to open up to science fiction will take some finesse. True African science fiction, which is different from what Western audiences are used to consuming, needs to be written/filmed and made available first.… [O]ne will have to deliberately combine the concept of ‘art as a tool for social commentary and change’ and entertainment. The root of the technology, cultural shifts, sentiments, concerns, characters, way of speaking, needs that drive the story must first and foremost be endemically African. Along with the unfamiliar, must come the familiar… a gradual ascent. A whisper to a shout. A ghostly woman in the night to a full blown alien invasion in the middle of Imo State that only a frustrated plantain chip seller named Chukwudi can stop.
This background is necessary to understand the novel, which was written after that interview, half as an intervention and half in protest against a denigrating portrayal of Nigeria and Nigerians in Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 South African sci-fi/alien-invasion thriller, District 9. How do we change the negative perception of Africa to one of an exciting, dynamic place, important enough to warrant something as phenomenal as an alien invasion? How do we make audiences receptive to it?
Lagoon’s main plot begins when a hip-hop artist from Ghana on a post-performance stroll (Anthony), a Nigerian soldier with a bloody nose (Agu), and a marine biologist with domestic violence issues (Adaora) chance upon each other at Bar Beach at the exact moment when an alien invasion of Lagos begins. Their abduction and eventual excretion by the body of water set the mood for a rollercoaster plot of events that upend not just their individual lives but those of the whole nation and the sub-region, adding a more creative disorder to a place already defined by chaos.
But why Lagos? The author insists we ask “why not?” The city is the most populated in Nigeria and one of the largest in the world: a cosmopolitan sprawl of humans, concrete, and tar, and, for a while, the capital city of Nigeria. Bar Beach, where much of the plot takes place, is the country’s most famous outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, foregrounding a skyline of private high-rise buildings for upper- and middle-class Nigerians. As well, it accommodates the dregs of that society within it: prostitutes, informants, religious scam artists, miscreants, and security officials, among others. In the 1970s and 1980s, the beach ho
sted a number of public executions of robbers sentenced to death by the military government. This combination of a grotesque history and a social backdrop that the beachfront provides keeps the story exciting from start to finish, along with the activities, intentions, and behaviors of the visiting, shape-shifting aliens.
But far from being a merely didactic intervention and protest, Lagoon weaves itself beautifully into a fast-paced suspenseful narrative, absorbing in its realistic characterization, language (with which many non-Nigerian readers might inevitably struggle: Pidgin English is a creole formed organically from the many years of interaction of Portuguese and English with Nigeria’s many languages), diverse range of voices and perspectives, brilliant writing, and the powerful imagination of the writer, to whom Nigeria is as much a fertile fantasyland as it is a real, conscious entity, and a home.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS (2015)
Malevolent jinn leave the realm of Peristan to interfere in human affairs in Salman Rushdie’s half-fanciful, half-journalistic treatment of contemporary global chaos.
It is rare for contemporary works of literary fiction to take on magical worlds beyond our own; in this recent novel, Salman Rushdie (b.1947) brings the reader to Peristan, or Fairyland, the realm of the jinn. This somewhat chaotic tale also takes on the dismal state of current world affairs, attributing it to the malign influence of these supernatural beings who have transgressed the barrier between our two worlds.
The novel begins in medieval Spain, during the time of the so-called Convivencia, when people of monotheistic faiths lived together in more-or-less harmony under Muslim rule. The great rationalist Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (usually known in English as Averroes) is working on his rebuttal to the anti-philosophical screed of his predecessor Al-Ghazali, at a moment when religious fanaticism is ascendant and Ibn Rushd’s promulgation of Aristotelian philosophy is viewed with skepticism. One day, a jinnia—a genie princess called Dunia, among other names—arrives at his door. Dunia slips into the world of men and women from Peristan, and then into Ibn Rushd’s bed. Together they originate a race called the Duniazat—human beings without earlobes and with slightly magical propensities.
Along with his rambunctious, irreverent style, Rushdie is best-known for his public disputes with certain bastions of conservative Islam. While this novel, like all of Rushdie’s novels, despises fundamentalism, it makes loving use of the rich Islamic cultural tradition. Jinn are mentioned in the Koran and appear throughout doctrine, folk Islam, and works of art and literature. They are made of smoke and fire, but can assume corporeal form; they inhabit a kind of parallel world, slipping in and out of human affairs, usually to make mischief. They range in representation and, in this novel, from fearsome to feckless: “They live in the moment, have no grand designs, and are easily distracted.” Peristan, the home of the jinn, manifests their obsession with “the patterning of things which only civilization provides; it was a place of formal gardens, elegantly terraced, with cascading streams of water.” Despite these idylls, jinn cannot seem to stop themselves from interfering in human affairs.
We meet the present-day descendants of Ibn Rushd and Dunia’s brood at a moment when environmental chaos, corruption, and fanaticism have cast the human world into a period of darkness. As we learn, the upheavals, or “strangenesses” of the modern day are the result of jinn interloping in the human realm—sinister jinn who are power-mad and obsessed with mayhem. Seeking revenge for the death of her father at the hands of these bad jinn, Dunia reenters the human world and enlists her descendants to fight them: Geronimo the kindly gardener, the hapless graphic novelist Jimmy Kapoor, and a harridan named Teresa Saca, are three among others in a large cast of characters, some of whom appear briefly and pass quickly out of the book. The heroes are up against “jinn parasites,” who are unleashed among the populace to commit horrors taken straight from the headlines; these parasites are “eating people’s faces in Miami,” or “stoning women to death in desert places,” or “shooting passenger aircraft out of the sky.” The human realm turns out to be particularly susceptible to the jinn brand of chaos: “the craziness unleashed upon our ancestors by the jinn,” the narrator writes, “was the craziness that also waited inside every human heart.”
The novel ends on an optimistic note; the narrator reveals that he or she is writing from some thousand years in the future, after “men and women returned to their senses, order and civility were everywhere restored, economies began to function, crops to be harvested, factory wheels to turn.” No one is “gulled” any longer by “those antique, defunct belief systems.” Most importantly, Dunia has sealed the cracks between Peristan and the human realm, risking no chance of further conflagration. But, even in this enlightened age, the novel concludes, human beings sometimes yearn for the troublesome magic that once enlivened a thousand and one nights.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
LAURA MILLER–GENERAL EDITOR
New York–based journalist and critic. Miller was a cofounder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for twenty years, and is now a books and culture columnist at Slate. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column for two years. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).
Page 178
JES BATTIS
Coeditor of Mastering the Game of Thrones (2015) and author of the Occult Special Investigator series and Parallel Parks series (as Bailey Cunningham). He teaches in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver. His research focuses on the medieval period and eighteenth century, with interests in pop culture and LGBTQ history.
Page 264
LAWRENCE BATTERSBY
Scottish freelance writer who has lived in Paris for the past twenty years. Battersby writes in different forms including short stories and poetry, and has recently completed a historical novel set in nineteenth-century Spain.
Page 60
MATTHEW CHENEY
Author of Blood: Stories (2016) and academic work on Samuel R. Delany among others. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of New Hampshire.
Pages 196 & 220
NOEL CHEVALIER
Associate professor of English at Luther College, University of Regina, Saskatchewan. His teaching and research interests include literary responses to the Bible and literary representations of eighteenth-century pirates.
Page 70
JOHN CLUTE
Canadian writer of science fiction and fantasy criticism, currently based in the UK. Clute’s novel Appleseed was a New York Times “Notable Book” in 2002. He is currently working on the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Page 214
GARY DALKIN
UK-based writer and editor. Former judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and founder of the International New Media Writing Prize, Dalkin is a contributor to Writing Magazine, Amazing Stories, and Shoreline of Infinity. Recent projects include Andrew David Barker’s Dead Leaves and the anthology Improbable Botany.
Pages 124, 184, 216, & 258
RICHARD ERLICH
Emeritus professor in English at Miami University, Ohio, since his retirement in 2006, Erlich is best known for his scholarship on the works of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Pages 28 & 174.
PETER FITTING
Emeritus professor of French and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Fitting is author of numerous articles on science fiction, fantasy, and utopia. He is also author of the anthology Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology (2004).
Page 78
ANDREW R. GEORGE
George teaches Akkadian and Sumerian language and literature at SOAS, University of London, where he is professor of Babylonian. He is author of The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Crit
ical Edition, and Cuneiform Texts (2003), and a prize-winning translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (2000).
Page 16
LEV GROSSMAN
Journalist, novelist, and book critic for Time Magazine. The New York Times describes Grossman as “among this country’s smartest and most reliable critics.” His novels include Warp, Codex, The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land.
Page 268
MARY HAMILTON
Game designer and executive editor for audience at The Guardian. Hamilton describes herself as a storyteller, a writer, and a news junkie.
Page 282
