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I’ve been away without ordered leave from the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks – the joys of end-of-semester committee crunch and grading. But two things that I’ve wanted to link to:
Greg Bloom has another series of posts on the ways in which the Fund for Public Interest Research has resisted unionization efforts. The way in which many purportedly lefty organizations refuse to let their workers bargain for decent conditions is pretty shameful.
Alexander Mueller, fresh from porting over Susanna Clarke has translated the China Mieville seminar into German too. Great stuff.
Finally, I’ve been meaning for a while to link to this Nir Rosen piece, which is the best and most detailed on the ground discussion that I’ve seen of Iraq’s descent into civil war. I see via TPM Muckraker that Rosen is venturing into the blogosphere.
A piece that I’ve written on China Mieville’s New Crobuzon novels and the politics of fantasy is available at N+1 magazine’s website (link leads to their homepage; I’ll update with a permalink when it’s archived: UPDATE – permanent link added). Anyone who wants to comment, disagree or otherwise respond is welcome to do so here.
China Miéville has just won the Arthur C. Clarke award for Iron Council, which we ran a seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the current issue of The Believer. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.
When I first wrote about China Mieville’s Iron Council, I wrote, toward the conclusion:
Mieville has stated in interviews that he does not want to create stories with simple “good vs. evil” morality, but that is generally what he does. The government of New Crobuzon is populated entirely with people who operate with as much love and compassion as a Dark Lord . Mieville’s main characters are often conflicted, impulsive, selfish, and wonderfully complex, but they end up fighting against forces that are entirely loathsome, which is a cop-out.
This is an idea that deserves attention and discussion, and I think my original language made the issue seem more cut-and-dried than I know it to be.
I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access – John H mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days – for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.
As usual, my list of the Hugo eligible books for this year (as well as short story collections), meant less as a form of canvassing (especially given that nominations are about to close) than of solving the commitment problem of getting me off my arse to talk about books that I liked and didn’t like. Necessary qualification – the very best novel that I read last year isn’t available yet – Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning – a book that has the potential to remake the genre. It’ll be out in a couple of months, at which point I’ll have more to say.
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As previously foretold here. The participants:
Miriam Burstein is an associate professor at Brockport. She previously participated in our seminar on China Mieville’s Iron Council. She blogs at The Little Professor.
Henry Farrell blogs here.
Maria Farrell blogs here.
John Holbo blogs here.
“Lizardbreath” is a pseudonymous lawyer, who likes writing about cake. She blogs at Unfogged.
Abigail Nussbaum is a programmer in Tel Aviv and the senior review editor for Strange Horizons. She blogs at Asking the Wrong Questions.
Francis Spufford is the author of several books, including Red Plenty, which was the subject of a previous CT seminar.
It being the season, some recommendations for entertaining fiction – feel free to castigate my narrow tastes in comments, to make your own recommendations, or both, as suits you best.
Charles Stross – The Apocalypse Codex (Powells, Amazon ). The new Laundry book, and the best one imo since the first. Without giving anything major away, things are really beginning to move …
China Mieville – Railsea (Powells, Amazon). Again, China does his best to lose me, this time writing a novel which could easily be mistaken in a dim light for young-adult steampunk. Again, he fails completely. Enormous fun – you’ll never think about naked mole rats in the same way again.
Josh Bazell – Wild Thing (Powells, Amazon). Only very good, in contrast to its prequel, Beat the Reaper, which was an excellently funny macho asshole thriller, but still entertaining. The footnotes are good value too (how many popular thrillers have footnotes with short discussions of spandrels?), up to, and only up to the point where the author starts expounding his views on Middle East politics (he’s an Alan Dershowitz fan – enough said).
Paul McAuley – In the Mouth of the Whale (not officially available in US; though if you have a Kindle you can gimmick your address). A sequel to his Quiet War duet. I need to write something on the way that these books use evolutionary theory to drive their argument.
Paul McAuley – Cowboy Angels (Powells, Amazon). A very different novel – hard sf meets the paranoid Cold War thriller. Imagine an America (not ours) which discovers how to build gates to recently branched alternative realities, and starts to play out the game of empire-building and neo-liberalism, not with other countries, but with different versions of itself.
Tim Powers – Hide Me Among the Graves (Powells, Amazon). Vampirism, Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelites. Among Powers’ best – not as good as Declare or The Anubis Gates (but then: what is?), but just as good Last Call, and better than the rest (which is to say – very damn good indeed).
Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene – The Damned Highway (Powells, Amazon) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – the H.P. Lovecraft mix. I’ve speculated before that there is no subgenre of fiction that cannot be spatchcocked with Lovecraft, but Hunter S. Thompson blends particularly well, and amidst the comedy, there is one moment of genuine loathing and horror (tentacle porn and Richard Nixon, aloof). The graphic design person who thought of Steadmanizing the Ian Miller illustration for At The Mountains of Madness and using it as the cover art, deserves an award.
Harry Connolly – Child of Fire (Powells, Amazon). Lovecraftian urban fantasy. Fun, fast-paced braincandy, found via Charles Stross (the first of a series, which unfortunately appears to be in hiatus).
Felix Gilman – The Rise of Ransom City (Powells, Amazon). But you’ll have to wait until the fall/autumn for that one (more in due course …).
Francis Spufford’s earlier semi-autobiographical book on childhood and reading, The Child that Books Built, talks about fairytales. It tells us about Propp, Bettelheim and the others, relates fairy tales to Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood (the ur source of all stories) and to his own childhood, and finishes by arguing that fairytales pose a challenge. They transport us to a dark wood; alien; removed from the comfortable assumptions of home and family and ask: now: what do you do? Red Plenty is explicitly written as a fairytale in which the hero is “the idea of red plenty as it came hopefully along the high road.” The high road dwindles into a path, then a track, and ends in a tangle of brambles and thorns. The idea not only does not know where to go; it does not know if there’s anywhere left that it could go, or even whether there was somewhere that it could have gone had it only taken the right road at the beginning. By entering the world, it’s become hopelessly ensnared in it.
Chris’s post below reminds me that I’ve been meaning to disagree with this claim by Nick Carr.
Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It’s easy to understand why: There’s a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it’s pretty dull.
But there’s another reason why portrayals of utopia don’t work. We’ve all experienced the “uncanny valley” that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy – or at least it looks creepy. That’s probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world.
I liked Embassytown a lot (which will come as no surprise to long time CT readers). It wasn’t perfect. There is a longish section (between the two-thirds and four-fifths mark) which dragged – it had neither the intellectual pyrotechnics nor the pacing of the rest of the book. But where it is good, it soars, and better reconciles literary ambition and sense-of-wonder headkicks than anything else he’s written. It’s hard to compare with any other book – perhaps the closest is Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand in its mixture of space opera and linguistic speculation – but the comparison isn’t very close. The writing is more tamped down and Delany’s perverse romanticism is nearly entirely absent. Perhaps the best way to think of the book is as a kind of hard science-fiction, where the ‘hard’ theory that is being played with is linguistic theory rather than speculative physics (now that I think of it, Mieville’s suggestion that his imagined universe is a ‘parole,’ of the ‘langue’ that is the under-lying meta-universe is an obvious hint in this direction). Mieville is not trying himself to contribute to literary theory – but then, when Alastair Reynolds uses weird bits of information theory to come up with a justification for a cloaking device, he is presumably not doing this for the purposes of peer reviewed science. He’s having fun – and so too is Mieville. Some of the concepts – people literally being incorporated into Language as similes by aliens who need concrete referents to think and to speak – are quite wonderful.
I’m not going to write a review of the book (I don’t think it would be possible to top Sam Thompson’s excellent piece for the LRB) – but I do want to point to one interesting resonance between the book and Iron Council (which of course we did a seminar on a few years back. Since there are spoilers, the rest is below the fold.
A piece I wrote on China Miéville’s The City and the City. has come out in the Boston Review. The nub of my argument:
Miéville brings these quotidian practices into stark perspective. He uses slips of perception and movement back and forth between cities to highlight the contingency of many of the social aspects of the real world. The City & the City draws no hard distinction between the world of fantasy and our own. Instead, Miéville seems to suggest, the real world is composed of consensual fantasies of varying degrees of power. The slippage isn’t between the real world and the fantastic, but between different, equally valid, versions of the real. As the title makes explicit, neither city has ontological priority over the other—Besźel is not a simple reflection of Ul Qoma, or vice versa.
I mentioned Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy in the piece, but I wasn’t able to make clear how great a debt I owe to it (since Farah is an occasional CT reader, I hope this post can serve as both thanks and public acknowledgment). Rhetorics of Fantasy allowed me to figure out what I thought about the book (some have suggested that it’s indeed one of the texts behind TCATC. Its argument – brutally simplified – is that the different modes in which fantasy authors represent the relationship between the world they have created and the real world has important rhetorical consequences. Thinking about fantasy in this way highlights just what is most interesting about TCTATC - that it is a fantasy of superimposed worlds, none of which is entirely fantastic (the genuinely fantastic elements of the book are extremely limited, and are a kind of macguffin), and each of which is just as rooted (or unrooted) in reality as the other. This allows Miéville to make the familiar strange – to treat something (or somethings) that closely resembles real life as if it was fantastical in the same way that your imagined-world-of-choice is fantastical. It is a very interesting shift in perception, and one which I do not think I would have been able to decode, at least to my own satisfaction, had I not read Farah’s book.
They close tomorrow. I’m not eligible to vote, but if I was, I’d be nominating the following.
- Felix Gilman – The Half-Made World. See here for my thoughts, and here for Cosma Shalizi’s.
- Ian McDonald – The Dervish House. Very good and interesting near-future book on Turkey – blending together historical conspiracy, complexity theory, theories of religious experience and politics. It somehow works. “True wisdom leaks from the joins between disciplines.”
- China Mieville – Kraken. Not his most intellectually challenging book, and a little bit baggy, but enormous fun.
I’d also recommend Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty (which has surely already won the Hugo in the alternate reality that spun off when Gravity’s Rainbow won the award in 1973 (ok – it was the Nebula – but Artistic Licence!)), but I would prefer to wait on that recommendation until its US publication (sometime this year, I think). I also enjoyed Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (which also gets published in the US this year), but not as much as many others – the intellectual pyrotechnics are dazzling, but it’s still a fairly straightforward caper novel underneath it all. Feel free to add others, agree/disagree etc in comments.
He’s been subbing over at Ta-Nehisi Coates for the last few days. Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post reviews of both Gentlemen of the Road (aka: Jews with Swords!) and his lovely Maps and Legends for at least two years.
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I got an iPad for X-Mas so – finally! – I can get in on this e-book thing. I bought Quiggin’s Zombie Economics
But I’m thinking about quoting our John in something I’m writing (yes, on Zizek). But I can’t footnote a Kindle edition. No pages. What will the world come to? Bibliography has gotten a bit old and odd in the head in the age of the internet, but the existence of pages themselves is kind of a watershed. On the one hand, there’s really no reason why a text that can be poured into a virtual vessel as easily as it can be inspirited into the corpse of a tree should have to have ‘pages’. Still, it’s traditional. Harumph. I suppose I’m going to have to use Amazon’s ‘search inside’ or Google Books and pretend I read the paper version, as a proper scholar would. Or just email John Q. and ask.