Category Archives: Speculative Fiction

Science fiction and/or fantasy.

Two 2001s

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My favorite science fiction movies are the ones that don’t spend two and a half hours yelling and throwing things at my face. This is why I recently watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again. It’s quiet and slow and never boring.

(I assume anyone reading this knows the story: a monolith forcibly evolves a prehuman; millions of years later, the discovery of another monolith prompts a mission to Jupiter; the ship’s computer goes crazy and kills most of the crew; yet another monolith turns the survivor into a magic space baby. Level up!)

The Movie

Movie poster

2001 looks strikingly different from current Hollywood science fiction. At the moment the coolest future Hollywood can imagine is one drained of all colors but dirty gray, dim gunmetal blue, and body-fluid orange. Apparently sometime in the 21st century the visible spectrum will contract Seasonal Affective Disorder. But then, nearly every Hollywood future is either an apocalypse to struggle through or a dystopia for a self-absorbed hero to topple explodily, so I understand why the color graders are depressed. 2001 has its share of beige and sterile white, but, y’know, it’s a cheerful sterile white. And it’s joined by the computer core where David Bowman lobotomizes Hal, lit with the dark red of an internal organ; and Bowman’s mysterious minty-fresh hotel room; and a rack of spacesuits that might have been sponsored by Skittles bite-size candy. 2001’s future might be worth looking forward to–new worlds to explore, new life forms to discover, magic space babies to evolve into. It feels that way partly because the future is pretty. Listen to the score: the spaceships don’t dock, they waltz.

Studios tend to pigeonhole SF as an action genre, and tend to assume too little of action movie audiences. I often bail on these movies for being too loud, too fast, and too dumb. It’s interesting how little 2001 explains, and how little it needs to. 2001 gives just enough information to suggest what’s happening, and trusts the audience to make connections. The movie doesn’t tell us why Hal kills Discovery’s crew. Hal proudly tells an interviewer that the Hal 9000 computer has never made an error. Hal reads Bowman’s and Poole’s lips as they debate shutting him down for repairs following his mistaken damage report. We can work it out for ourselves.1 I’m mildly jarred when, later, Hal explains to Bowman about the lip reading–Bowman didn’t know about it, so it’s not like this dialogue doesn’t make sense, but the audience knows from the way the movie cut between shots of the crew and Hal’s eye. Watching 2001 I get used to not listening to needless explanations. Over half the movie has no dialogue at all.2 It’s the most effective demonstration in sci-fi film of the principle of “show, don’t tell.”

2001 spends a surprising amount of time watching people run through commonplace routines, the kind of action most movies gloss over. The “Dawn of Man” sequence shows how the prehumans live before the monolith shows up because we need to see how they began to understand how they’ve changed. But you might wonder why 2001 shows every detail of Heywood Floyd’s trip to the moon–sleeping on the shuttle, eating astronaut food, going through the lunar equivalent of customs, and calling his daughter on a videophone. When the film moves to the Discovery the plot doesn’t start rolling again until we know David Bowman’s routine, too.

In 1968, science fiction was in the thick of the New Wave, a label given to the younger SF writers writing with more attention to good prose, rounded characters, and just generally the kinds of ordinary literary qualities that make fiction readable. These were never entirely absent from science fiction, but the “golden age” of the genre was dominated by a functional, didactic style exemplified by the work of Isaac Asimov. Some fans call science fiction the “literature of ideas.”3 In golden age SF, the ideas were king and everything else existed only to serve them. The characters were mouthpieces for the ideas. The prose was kept utilitarian–“transparent” was the usual term–to transmit the ideas with minimal friction. Writers used less of the implicit worldbuilding that dominates modern SF, relying on straightforward exposition to describe the world and particularly the scientific gimmicks they’d built their stories around. Stories often described in intricate detail actions that, to the characters, were routine.

Translate these expository passages to film and you have the scenes of Heywood Floyd taking a shuttle to the moon. This is not inherently bad. I’d argue that it takes more talent and effort to write a good book in this grain than it does to write traditional fiction, but a witty or eloquent writer can do as he or she pleases.4 So can filmmakers as proficient as Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Trumbull, 2001’s effects supervisor. I can see why some viewers lose patience with 2001, but I personally am not bored.

The Book

Book cover

Of course, 2001 does exist in prose. 2001 was a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke; while Kubrick wrote the script, Clarke wrote the novel. The movie was so far ahead of its time that, even with its 1968-era design work, it still looks fresh. So when I followed up this viewing of the movie with Clarke’s novel, which I hadn’t read in so long that I’d forgotten it completely, I was surprised it was so old-fashioned. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been: 2001 the movie’s virtuoso style is built from an old-fashioned plan. I just hadn’t noticed until I reread the novel, which seems unaware the New Wave ever happened. Clarke’s prose lacks the style of Kubrick’s direction, and without actors to give them life the characters are revealed as perfunctory sketches, functions rather than subjects. They demonstrate aspects of the universe, and witness its wonders, but the universe itself is what matters.

It’s striking how much space Clarke devotes not to telling us what someone is doing now, but what they would do, could do, were doing, or had been doing. Sometimes 2001 reads like the kind of nonfiction book you’d give to children to teach them how grown-up jobs work. (“At midday, he would retire to the galley and leave the ship to Hal while he prepared his lunch. Even here he was still fully in touch with events, for the tiny lounge-cum-dining room contained a duplicate of the Situation Display Panel, and Hal could call him at a moment’s notice.”) Clarke’s purpose is not only, and maybe not even primarily, to tell a story. He wants to make the audience understand Heywood Floyd and Dave Bowman’s entire universe. Clarke’s 2001 is the opposite of Kubrick’s. The movie is gnomic, open to multiple interpretations. The book wants to tell us something, and it’s going to make it absolutely clear.

Unfortunately Clarke, while not really bad, doesn’t quite have the writing chops to deliver compelling exposition–or at least he wasn’t exercising them here. Still, the book occasionally improves on the movie, mostly by expanding on it. 2001 is over two hours long, but the book has more space.5 The movie’s “Dawn of Man” segment keeps its distance from its subjects. We don’t get to know any of the prehumans. We can’t really even tell them apart. The novel can get inside the mind of the prehuman Moon-Watcher. After Hal, he’s the most vivid character in the book. (On the other hand, it says something about 2001 that the most vivid characters are an ape-man and a paranoid computer.)

In both film and book, the climax of the “Dawn of Man” comes when Moon-Watcher intuits the concept that makes him, in Clarke’s words, “master of the world”: the tool. Specifically, a weapon–Moon-Watcher needs to hunt and to defend himself from leopards and rival bands of prehumans.

The movie then makes its famous jump cut from bone to satellite. The book tells us something the movie doesn’t: the satellite is part of an orbital nuclear arsenal. If the unease running under the surface of the novel’s middle section seems muted now, it’s because it needed no emphasis in 1968: it went without saying that humanity might soon bomb itself into extinction.

When Bowman returns to Earth as the Starchild, his first act is to destroy the nuclear satellites–and then the book repeats the “master of the world” line. If humanity made its first evolutionary leap when it picked up weapons, says 2001, its next great leap won’t come until it learns to put them down again. Apparently this theme appeared in an earlier draft of the movie’s script but didn’t make it into the final film. It doesn’t feel like the movie is missing anything–it is, after all, already pretty full–but the novel is better for the symmetry.

Evolviness

A monolith.

The theme shared by both novel and movie is evolution–and here we come to the original reason I started this essay: evolution in science fiction is weird. Several crazy evolutionary oddities crop up over and over in SF, and 2001 makes room for them all.

People who don’t know much biology often think evolution tries to build every species into its Platonically perfect ideal form. In this view, humans aren’t just more complex or more self-aware than the first tetrapod to crawl out of the ocean: we’re more “evolved.” This is as pernicious as it is foolish–in the early 20th century, true believers in evolutionary “progress” used the idea to justify eugenics and “scientific” racism.

Despite that, in many science fiction stories evolution has a direction. This direction is usually entirely unlike the direction the eugenicists were thinking of. Not usually enough, mind you–a few of these “perfect” humanoids look disturbingly blonde–but science fiction people mostly evolve into David McCallum in the Outer Limits episode “The Sixth Finger”–people with big throbbing brains and, more importantly, godlike powers. (Also, at least on TV, they tend to glow.) Depending on the story, this might be a metaphor for either social and technological progress (if the more highly evolved beings are wise and authoritative, like Star Trek’s Organians), or absolute power corrupting absolutely (if they’re assholes like Star Trek’s Gary Mitchell). The crew of the Enterprise met guys like this in every other episode of Star Trek–Gene Roddenberry’s universe has more alien gods than H. P. Lovecraft’s. In media SF huge heads are optional; powers aren’t. Especially in comic book sci-fi–think of the X-Men, the spiritual descendants of A. E. van Vogt’s Slan. Sometimes people evolve into “energy” or “pure thought”–or, in modern stories, minds uploaded as software. In Clarke’s own Childhood’s End the human race joins a noncorporeal telepathic hive-mind. In 2001, the Starchild destroys the Earth’s orbiting nukes with a thought. In science fiction, sufficiently evolved biology is indistinguishable from magic.

The suddenness of David Bowman’s transformation brings up another point: in science fiction, evolution happens very fast, not in gradual steps but in leaps. It works like the most extreme form of punctuated equilibrium you’ve ever seen–a species coasts for a few million years in placid stability, until bam: a superbaby is born! With three eyes and an extra liver and telepathy! In biology, this is known as saltation, or more colloquially as the “Hopeful Monsters” hypothesis. Nobody takes it seriously… except in science fiction, where you actually can make an evolutionary leap in a single generation. This is the premise of Childhood’s End, and The Uncanny X-Men, and Slan. Theodore Sturgeon used it in More Than Human. Sometimes this is a metaphor for the way an older generation struggles to understand its children. More often it’s simply artistic license. Evolution takes millions of years, but fiction, unless it’s as untraditionally structured as Last and First Men, deals with individual human lives. To talk about evolution, SF writers collapse its time scale to match the scale they have to work with.

Some SF, particularly in TV and film, twists saltation even further away from standard evolutionary theory: evolutionary leaps don’t just happen between generations. People can evolve–or devolve–in midlife, as David Bowman is evolved by the monolith. In the world of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, for instance, you can go in for “evolutionary therapy” and come out with a Big Head. In my plot summary I used the words “level up” ironically, but it really is like these writers are powering up their Dungeons and Dragons characters–suddenly, the hero knows more spells. Written SF usually tells these stories with some kind of not-exactly-evolutionary equivalent–in Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave all life on Earth becomes more intelligent when the solar system drifts out of an energy-dampening field; the protagonists of Anderson’s “Call Me Joe” and Clifford Simak’s “Desertion” trade their human bodies for “better” bodies built to survive on alien worlds. TV shows just go ahead and let their characters “mutate.” Countless episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who are built around this premise, the most awe-inspiring being Star Trek: Voyager’s legendarily awful “Threshold”, in which flying a shuttle too fast causes Paris and Janeway to evolve into mudskippers.6 This is, again, artistic license: stories focus on individuals, not species. The easiest way to write a story about biological change is through metaphor, by putting an individual character through an impossible evolutionary leap.

Most of the leaps I’ve cited in the last three paragraphs have something in common: they don’t involve natural selection. In science fiction, evolutionary leaps are triggered by outside forces. Sometimes an evolutionary leap is catalyzed by a natural phenomenon, like the “galactic barrier” encountered by Gary Mitchell on Star Trek. The latest trend in evolutionary catalysts is technological. Vernor Vinge has proposed that humanity is heading for a “Singularity”, when exponentially accelerating technological breakthroughs lead to superintelligence, mind uploads, immortality, and just generally a future our puny meatspace brains cannot predict or comprehend. The Singularity is the hard SF equivalent of ascension to Being of Pure Thoughtdom, leading to the less kind term “the Rapture of the nerds.” Plausible or not,7 the occasional singularitized civilization is de rigeur in modern space opera (not always under that name; for instance, lurking in the background of Iain Banks’s Culture universe are civilizations who’ve “sublimed”). Short of the Singularity, a good chunk of contemporary far-future SF involves transhumans or posthumans, people who’ve enhanced their bodies and minds technologically, A pioneering novel in this vein was Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus, about a man whose body is rebuilt to survive on Mars.

Singularities and transhumanism put humans in charge of our own evolution. 2001 puts human evolution in the hands of aliens, as do many other stories, including Childhood’s End. Octavia Butler’s Dawn and its sequels deal with humanity’s assimilation into a species of gene-trading, colonialist aliens. Both books are about humanity’s future evolution, but just as often the aliens have guided us from the beginning of human history, as in 2001–the idea even took hold outside of fiction, in Erich von Däniken’s crackpot tome Chariots of the Gods?. Star Trek explained the similarity of its mostly-humanoid species with an ancient race of aliens who interfered with evolution on many planets, including Earth. Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit is a cynical take on the same concept.

So. Having (at tedious length) established that science fiction tends to get evolution (usually deliberately) wrong, what does it mean? Specifically, what does it mean for the ostensible subject of this essay, 2001?

Tales of weird evolution rarely depict change as evil.8 More often they’re about human potential. Evolution is more often a metaphor for progress and growth, personal or social: the Organians are “more evolved” than us not because they can turn into talking lightbulbs but because they possess more knowledge and wisdom. Stories of evolutionary leaps are about the hope that we can become more than we are, the growing pains we suffer in transition, and occasionally the fear that we might not be able to handle our new knowledge and abilities.

It gives me pause, though, that in science fiction growth is so often represented by a kind of evolution that doesn’t exist. As I’ve mentioned, there are narrative reasons for these oddities. An epiphany is more dramatic, and more suited to a story taking place in a limited time-frame, than a geologically slow ongoing process of becoming. And an epiphany can’t come out of nowhere–it needs a specific cause, one more narratively satisfying than the laws of biology. But what we end up with are stories of personal and social progress in which we don’t grow ourselves–we’re grown by outside forces. Our growth as human beings is an emergent property of accelerating technological change, or it’s granted to us by gods and monoliths. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Moon-Watcher doesn’t discover tools himself–the monolith implants the concept in his mind. The human race has to prove it’s worthy of the next step in evolution by traveling to the moon and then to Jupiter, but when David Bowman arrives the secrets of the universe are given to him.

The evolution metaphor in 2001–and in science fiction in general–is a weird, confused, disquieting tangle of optimism, hope, and cynicism. Humanity has the potential to be more than we are, but not by our own effort and not through any process we can control or understand. It’s like science fiction thinks we can’t get from here to wisdom without a miracle in between.

  1. The book explicitly explains Hal’s behavior and its explanation is different from the one we’re led to believe in the movie. ↩

  2. The trivia section of 2001’s IMDB page gives the dialogue-free time as 88 minutes out of 141. ↩

  3. I am not one of them. The description is uselessly vague. What book isn’t about ideas? ↩

  4. This is why I bought Mark Twain’s Autobiography, on the face of it a thousand pages of random Grandpa Simpsonesque rambling: Mark Twain’s grocery lists are worth reading. ↩

  5. Sorry. ↩

  6. As a capper, they proceed to have baby mudskippers together. ↩

  7. I’m on the “not” side, myself. ↩

  8. When they are, they’re usually horror stories. Often they focus on a mad scientist who’s devolving people, or evolving animals, e.g. The Island of Dr. Moreau. ↩

Links to Things

Books, Movies, Speculative Fiction, ,

I plan to revive this blog for 2012. I’m still writing slowly, but two or three potential posts are now gradually accreting on my hard drive. In the meantime, here’s a links post:

  • Here’s Roger Ebert’s list of the best films of 2011. I’m linking to this mostly in order to quote this observation:

    …I believe the more specific a film is about human experience, the more universal it is. On the other hand, movies “for everybody” seem to be for nobody in particular.

    I think this is just as true of books, and music, and just art in general.

  • At The Rumpus, a conversation about the movie The Most Dangerous Game (imdb) that turns into a discussion of the difference between trivia and knowledge.

  • Gareth Rees on deciding what standards to use when talking about art, with a focus on Greg Egan. Rees’s argument doesn’t convince me–the first half of the post compares completely different art forms with completely different functions, but the second half compares books to other books, which is, I’d argue, completely different:

    The science fiction writer Greg Egan is another pertinent case. Judged by the standards of the literary novel, Egan’s works fall far short: his prose is dry and impersonal; his characters carry out their function in the story but no more; his plots are often episodic and lack dramatic conflict or resolution; he has a tin ear when it comes to satire. But all of that can be forgiven because he brings to his work a unique interest in the character of physical law.

    That may be true, but it’s hard not to wonder why a novel can’t provide interest in the character of physical law and have lifelike characters, beautiful prose, and well-crafted plots. I’ve always wanted to like Egan’s work, but the weird affectlessness of his stories has always proved an insurmountable barrier.

    That said, I think Rees’s post is worth reading. (Via)

  • American Scientist on the problem with Freakonomics and simple-minded statistical-cherry-picking contrarianism.

Unfortunately, having left these URLs lying around for so long, I no longer recall how I found some of them. I’ll have to do better with this so that I can include “via” links.

More Links to Things

Books, Comics, News and Politics, Speculative Fiction, ,

There’s probably going to be another gap of at least a week before my next substantial post, but I have a few more interesting links:

  • Comix Cube on comics, sound effects, and typography, with a focus on the work of Jordan Crane:

    That being said, there’s something especially exciting about what Crane is doing here. The graphic forms he’s using are typographic, but by and large they’re just beyond identifying as anything in our alphabet.

  • SF writer Karl Schroeder makes the case for aspirational science fiction:

    The fact is that if I’ve learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it’s that the one thing that’s sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design it. It’s a funny thing: nobody ever questions your credentials if you predict doom and destruction. But provide a rosy picture of the future, and people demand that you justify yourself. Increasingly, though, I believe that while warning people of dire possibilities is responsible, providing them with something to aspire to is even more important.

    Right now, this is the kind of thing I want to read.

  • This article, about a local-food restaurant operating in a small Virginia town, contains the most comedically oblivious sentence I’ve seen in any news story this week:

    The biggest challenge has been winning over townspeople. It’s not hard to find residents who say that a meal at the Harvest Table is more than they can afford, though none who said so in interviews had actually eaten there.

    Gee, I wonder why.

  • Every so often, you hear politicians and talking heads claim that half of Americans–the bottom half–pay no taxes. This is, of course, not the case; these people are using rhetorical sleight of hand, using the single word “taxes” when they mean “federal income taxes.” Kevin Drum explains the real situation, and then clarifies exactly who doesn’t owe federal income tax, and why.

Links to Things

Art, Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

Here are a few things I’ve been reading lately:

Reviewing Worlds of Exile and Illusion 3

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I started this third post on Worlds of Exile and Illusion a month ago, but it’s been half-finished a while–I’m only just starting to feel focused enough during my free time to write again. (Here are parts one and two, posted some time ago. It feels kind of odd to have taken so long on this review; it makes it seem as though I found this book more significant than I actually did. In fact, it’s just the thing I happened to be reviewing at the moment I acquired a case of blogger’s block.) Critically speaking, my verdict on City of Illusions was similar to my feelings on Rocannon’s World: Better than most SF adventure novels, not as good as Le Guin’s later work.

What it’s About

A thousand or so years after being conquered by aliens called the Shing, Earth is sparsely populated, its small, isolated human communities separated by miles of wilderness. An amnesiac offworlder named Falk sets off from the east coast of North America to find the Shing’s colony, a city called Es Toch.

Comments

Cover art

City of Illusions is twice the length of the other two books–it was published on its own–and is maybe a bit overlong. After Planet of Exile, it feels like a step backwards. Planet read like Le Guin finding her voice. City, like Rocannon’s World, reads like Le Guin is still searching for it, experimenting with common SF tropes. Both are pretty standard quest narratives, Rocannon in a fantasy kingdom and City in a post-apocalypse. The part that seemed most characteristic of Le Guin was the middle of the novel, in which Falk travels through a series of distinct little cultures. (It’s also notable that Falk carries a copy of the Tao Te Ching, a major influence on Le Guin’s work.)

What’s less characteristic of Le Guin is the Shing. They’re evil alien tyrants, basically. We’re told they broke the League of Worlds, conquered the Earth, and destroyed or suppressed most of humanity’s knowledge, technology, and culture. Which is pretty much what you’d expect from aliens in this kind of story. They’re Evil! The hero must stop them!

The Shing, when Falk finally meets them, tell a different story: there never was an enemy. The League self-destructed from its own paranoia. Earth is stagnant not because the human race is being kept down, but because, through fear and fragmentation, it’s keeping itself down. The Shing themselves are just another community of humans. All of which is entirely possible, because in the last two books we didn’t actually see much of the big war. It’s never clear to Rocannon who attacked him, and Planet of Exile isn’t about the war so much as something that happened centuries later because of the war. I had sort of expected that City of Illusions would have a twist ending, and that this would be it–at least superficially, the idea that humanity itself, and not an external alien threat, is its own worst enemy would have been in keeping with the worldview of Le Guin’s Ekumen books.

The real twist is that there is no twist: the Shing are exactly the conquerors they’re said to be, and the book ends with Falk, his memory restored, heading back to Werel to spread the news of the threat. Which I guess is a surprise, more so than the twist would have been. But it’s surprising because it feels wrong.

Way, waaaaay back in part one of this review, I mentioned Le Guin’s decision to give all the people of her universe a common ancestry, and the thematic consequences:

Everybody in this universe is some kind of human–some, like the Gethenians or Athsheans, are very different kinds, but they’re still relatives, if distant relatives. This is, as much as anything, a metaphor: the Hainish universe is no place for the kind of unbridgeable mutual incomprehension you get in, say, Starship Troopers.

I also mentioned the resulting out-of-placeness of the incident in Rocannon’s World where Rocannon and company are accosted by carnivorous bug-eyed monsters. And the Shing, again, are out of place in a way that sort of warps the story. You can see the warpage in the treatment of “mindspeech,” the Ekumen universe’s word for telepathy. This is the thing Rocannon is looking to learn in Rocannon’s World, and as a weapon it’s a little crappy. Yeah, the ability to read minds sounds like the ultimate intelligence source, but it’s hard to make war on people when you feel everything that happens to them. Also, it turns out that in mindspeech it’s impossible to lie. The Shing change the rules: they learn to “mindlie,” and suddenly telepathy is a weapon again. They seem to have punched their way in from a slightly less complex universe and turned everything around them to cardboard. Of the later Ekumen novels, only The Word for World is Forest has a more simplistic moral landscape, and at least there we were encouraged to side not with the Earthmen but the Other.

The end of City of Illusions reads like a cliffhanger, but Le Guin never returned to this storyline–her next Ekumen book was The Left Hand of Darkness, which mentions the war period as something that happened a long time ago, and isn’t it nice that it’s over? And because the vestiges of traditional Doc Smith space opera were a dead weight dragging Le Guin’s early trilogy away from the direction it needed to go, I have to agree: I’m very glad Le Guin ditched this plot.

And I’m glad there was no internet at the time, because if there were I’m sure someone would have been very aggrieved about it on LiveJournal. The idea of continuity probably looms larger in fan consciousness today, in an SF media landscape dominated by serial fiction, shared worlds, and transmedia storytelling, than it did in the sixties. By media-fan standards, the continuity in the Ekumen series isn’t the strongest. It doesn’t need to be: these books are in no way chapters in one big story. What I found surprising was the discontinuity in tone. Fictional universes have conceptual, philosophical underpinnings the way the real world has laws of physics. If these early novels of Le Guin’s feel to me like they exist in a slightly different universe from The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s less because of any forgotten wars than the simple fact that they’re borrowing more from the stock conventions of mid-twentieth-century space opera.

Reviewing Worlds of Exile and Illusion 2 (Now With Fifty Percent Less Relevant Content)

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(This is part two of my bloviations about the early Ursula Le Guin novels collected in Worlds of Exile and Illusion. I’ve been letting this sit for a while, but I’m determined to finish it before moving on to something else. Part one is here.)

Planet of Exile

Cover art

Planet of Exile is the best of these three novels, and it’s no coincidence that it pushes the war plot furthest into the background. Instead it’s built around a premise that plays to Le Guin’s strengths: two cultures rubbing up against each other. The war has left a colony from the League of Worlds stranded and isolated on the barely medieval planet Werel. In this shared space, two separate cultural identities are maintained by pressure from both sides: the Leaguers seem foreign because the locals define them as foreign, and because they define themselves as foreign, and the definitions reinforce each other in a vicious circle. The tension reads not only as the fear of one culture being absorbed into another–the balance of power between the locals and the colonists seems about equal, so either culture could end up dominant–but also the fear of being the culture doing the absorbing. The anxieties that inspire colonialists, like the British in India or Viking colonists in Greenland, to rigidly separate themselves from the “natives” are the same as the anxieties that, back home, inspire prejudice against immigrants.

I felt distanced from Rocannon’s World. As fit a mock heroic fantasy, the characters seemed just a bit bigger than life, and proportionately shallow; and the prose tended towards a slightly elevated tone. Rocannon’s World is the kind of book where guys swoop into battle on flying cats. That can be cool, especially coming from someone like Le Guin who can actually write, but it’s not necessarily what I’m in the mood for when I pick up one of her books. Planet of Exile is more grounded. The characters act like people, not myths. The local king isn’t a dashing warrior–he’s a crotchety old man staving off dementia. A siege of the colony perpetrated by the local equivalent of Genghis Kahn and his horde isn’t a swashbuckling adventure–it’s chaos, struggle, short rations, and too-easy death.

Planet of Exile is not quite as deep as Le Guin’s best work–it’s a brisk adventure novel, basically. But it’s still very good. Better, in fact, than some better-remembered SF from the period, or even many recent novels and stories that SF fans have received with enthusiasm. Which is why I’m going to wander off on a tangent again.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, Metaphor, and Allegory

Planet of Exile is about emigration, expatriation, and holding on to cultural identity. The colony’s main challenge is that, after many generations on Werel, with the original colonists long dead and the League of Worlds distant and half-recalled history, neither the colonists nor the Werelians see the colonists as natives of Werel.

Someone whose mental image of science fiction was formed by the worst episodes of Star Trek might ask “So what’s Le Guin really writing about? Immigration?” Because, in popular media, that’s how science fiction and fantasy too often work. You have a guy whose face is black on one side and white on the other, and another guy with the same skin tones but on the opposite sides, and they hate each other. And that stands for Racism! You have a planet with guys called “Yangs” and “Khoms” trying to conquer each other. And that stands for the Cold War! Hack scriptwriters love this stuff. So does a fair chunk of the audience, sometimes. Another sizable chunk of the audience doesn’t, because… well, you shouldn’t be able to solve a story, y’know?

You don’t often see this kind of thing in realistic fiction. Well, okay, you do, but everyone immediately realizes it’s crap. Bring on the fantastika, though, and suddenly a lot of crap detectors get a lot less sensitive. A TV detective series featuring flat characters, stupid O. Henry plot twists, ten-ton-anvil morals, and slap-you-in-the-face messages would make it through maybe six episodes of plummeting ratings before getting cancelled. Make it a fantasy series, call it The Twilight Zone, and you’ll be hailed as a television genius.

I’m focusing on media SF because media SF gives lame allegory its biggest audience and greatest cultural influence, but you get low standards in written SF, too. Even people who love SF, even people who write SF, are not immune. Look at what just won a Nebula.

It might be easier to see how most fiction works–as a broad, much simplified generalization–by looking at something set in the real world. I’ll use Anna Karenina as an example so that I can segue into a Tolstoy quotation. A novel has two levels. (I did say “much simplified.” We’re talking grade-school level here. But that’s all I need for the purposes of this blog post.) Level One is the literal level, the specific story about a specific character, Anna. Level Two is the metaphorical level, the level of meaning, and it’s not specific. It’s a jumble of thoughts, issues, images, metaphors, and, well, stuff. It relates to the readers’ lives in any number of ways, and says many things, and can support any number of interpretations, some of them contradictory. Some interpretations may make more sense than others, some may be either particularly insightful or way off base, but none of them will be the One True Answer. As Tolstoy wrote, “If I wanted to express in words all that I meant to express by the novel, then I should have to write the same novel as I have written all over again.”

I’d argue that a book is great to the extent that it provides the reader with stuff. Not that Level One, the story-level, isn’t important–but it’s important because the story the framework that supports the book’s meaning, and if the story isn’t well crafted the meaning is likely to be distorted or dishonest. The problem with Twilight Zone-type stories is that Level One is a thin, unsatisfying veneer and Level Two is simple to the point of tedium. Once you’ve decoded the allegory, matched message (A) to plot (B), there’s nothing else to it.

This is, of course, how our least inspired high school English courses teach students to read novels: as a riddle, with a correct answer. (Write a two-page paper on Lord of the Flies. What is the Theme? List the Symbols.) As a culture, we tend to be a little suspicious of anything with no immediate and obvious utility, literature included. Start a conversation on school curricula, and someone at some point is bound to echo the old students’ refrain: “When are they going to use this stuff?” The great thing about the riddle theory of literature is that it offers an answer: fiction is useful for sending coded messages.

Some people grow up believing this is actually how fiction works. Some of those people even become writers. Mediocre media SF is particularly prone to feature on-the-nose allegories. Is it because the connection between the literal Level One story and the real world is less obvious? Because caring what happens to a fictional character is one thing, but caring about a fictional character in an imaginary world takes an extra mental leap? Maybe allegory is a comfortable mode for writers who just want to know what all this crazy fantasy stuff is for. But fantastic fiction ought to work like any other kind, for all that SF and fantasy stories don’t deal with the real world on their literal levels.

Planet of Exile’s colonists aren’t immigrants. It’s a little closer to the mark to call them refugees, but that’s not really accurate, either–the power relationships between the locals and the colonists are all wrong. They aren’t colonialists or imperialists because they aren’t trying to dominate Werel–they’ve even discarded much of their technology to keep the locals on an even footing. Planet of Exile isn’t definitely about any of those things, but… let’s say it relates to any of them. Reading it might inspire thoughts about any of them, or all of them, or completely unrelated subjects. (Or nothing in particular–if some readers just care about Level One, I won’t argue with them.) It’s all good. Novels aren’t about sending Messages, but generating multiple readings, unique and personal to particular readers.

I love science fiction, I love fantasy, but part of loving a genre is wanting to see it at its best. Look at Le Guin’s early, minor, most conventionally adventure-style novels and it’s obvious how much even the least ambitious end of these genres could raise their games.

Reviewing Worlds of Exile and Illusion (Part One)

Books, Speculative Fiction, , , , ,

Worlds of Exile and Illusion collects Ursula K. Le Guin’s first three novels. By current standards, they’re short books–the first two were published as Ace Doubles, backed with books by Avram Davidson and Thomas M. Disch. They’re minor Le Guin, but minor Le Guin is still better than much of the science fiction being published at any given time.1

These books have also been collected under the title Three Hainish Novels. The Hainish universe is where most of Le Guin’s science fiction novels take place. Here’s the backstory: all known intelligent life forms, us included,2 are the descendants of colonists from the planet Hain. Everybody in this universe is some kind of human–some, like the Gethenians or Athsheans, are very different kinds, but they’re still relatives, if distant relatives. This is, as much as anything, a metaphor: the Hainish universe is no place for the kind of unbridgeable mutual incomprehension you get in, say, Starship Troopers.

Ages later, the human races (or Hainish races, if you want to get technical) are discovering space flight and rediscovering each other. Devices called ansibles allow instant communication between any two points in the universe. The Ekumen, or League of Worlds, coordinates cultural contact and exchanges of information between worlds. This happens mostly via ansible because information can travel faster than light, but living beings can’t. Near light speed time dilation applies. A journey of a dozen light years will take a few hours for the passengers, but more than a dozen years from the point of view of the outside universe. Representing the Ekumen as an envoy to a new world means taking a one-way trip: by the time you get home, if you ever do, everything you know will be gone.

Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions take place on the fringes of a war between the League of Worlds and a mysterious, hostile culture called the Shing, who by the third novel have conquered the Earth. Le Guin’s starting point for these books was the unthoughtful pulp space opera favored by Doc Smith and Edmund Hamilton, which doesn’t sit comfortably with her later work. These novels work best when Le Guin pulls away from the space war narrative.

Rocannon’s World

Cover art

Before fantasy took off as a marketing category, one way to sell a fantasy novel was to laminate it with a thin veneer of science fiction. That fantasy world? Another planet. Those fabulous creatures? Aliens. Magic? Invoke Clarke’s Third Law,3 or “psionics,” which in the science fiction genre are pretty much magic with laboratory cred.

That’s the kind of book Rocannon’s World is: a hundred-page condensed epic fantasy quest. In a couple of ways it’s uncharacteristic of Le Guin’s work. First, one important element of Le Guin’s work is the theme of different cultures making contact and coming to an understanding. It’s the primary plot of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Telling, both novels about Ekumen envoys on recently contacted worlds, and a major part of The Disposessed and The Other Wind. And this is exactly the part of the story that Rocannon’s World skips! Rocannon decides to visit Fomalhaut II in “Semley’s Necklace”; by the first chapter he’s been there for months and is already close friends with the local lord. Second, in one sequence where Rocannon and his allies are captured, taken to a deserted city, and nearly eaten by a band of uncommunicative winged humanoids. It reads like Le Guin’s take on The Thing From Another World, and it’s bizarrely out of place in a universe otherwise free of bug-eyed monsters.

I may come back to those points later when I write about City of Illusions (in a second post, since this one is getting large and as usual I’m writing at a snail’s pace). For now, the point is that Rocannon’s World, as a whole, is not the most remarkable or characteristic thing in Le Guin’s bibliography. Which is why I’m about to spend the bulk of this review talking about the prologue.

Rocannon’s World grew from Le Guin’s short story “Semley’s Necklace,” which became its prologue.4 “Semley’s Necklace” is a story about a woman who enters fairyland for a night to retrieve a family treasure stolen by dwarves, only to find on her return that a generation has passed, her husband is dead, and her daughter is a stranger. It’s a classic fairy tale plot, with the small differences that Semley is from Fomalhaut II, the dwarves are aliens, and traveling to fairyland means flying a spaceship to a museum on another planet.

What makes “Semley’s Necklace” different from a straightforward “yes, but my telepathic dragons are aliens” story is that Le Guin switches styles when she switches planets. The Fomahaut sections are lyrical, and just slightly flavored with the rhythms of oral storytelling. For the museum scenes Le Guin switches to the prosaic, straightforward third person favored by pre-new-wave SF. The implied narrator of Semley’s story is a high fantasy writer, or maybe a folklorist with literary aspirations. Rocannon’s narrator is writing for Astounding Science Fiction.

A vocal minority of hard SF fans are snobs about fantasy. They grumble when a fantasy novel wins a Hugo award. They complain when bookstores file the fantasy and SF together. There was a time when I myself thought I hated fantasy. My excuse is that I was twelve. Even then, though, the “Oh sweet Jeebus there’s chocolate in my peanut butter” attitude didn’t make much sense to me. Where was the hard and fast line between these genres? Don’t they sort of blend into each other? Science fiction stories present themselves as extrapolations of reality, but in practice total impossibilities–telepathy, faster-than-light travel–are acceptable as long as they behave like real-life physical phenomena, working according to definite, predictable rules. Many fantasy worlds are built on similar rigorously worked-out rules (the Lord Darcy stories), or include nothing supernatural at all (the Gormenghast books). Any hard-and-fast definition of either science fiction or fantasy will leave out some edge cases.

It’s clear from “Semley’s Necklace” that whether a story is SF or fantasy partly depends on point of view: how much the narrator, the characters, and by extension the readers understand about the world of the story. Take time dilation. According to the laws of relativity, as an Ekumen ship approaches light speed, time slows down for anyone on board. From Semley’s perspective, she travels for a few hours, stops briefly to pick up her necklace, turns right around and returns home the next morning to find that sixteen years have passed in one night.

Which is also what happens to people who visit other worlds in fairy tales. The difference is that for the hapless denizens of fairyland, as for Semley, this time shift is frightening and inexplicable. For Rocannon, “time slows as you approach light speed” is a fact as unremarkable as “running out of gas makes the car stop working” or “food gets hot in the microwave.” From his point of view the interesting and mysterious thing isn’t that Semley has skipped sixteen years, but that she’s travelled eight light years just to retrieve a necklace. So maybe whether we read a story as science fiction or fantasy depends partly on what the protagonists find wondrous, mysterious, and strange–on the story’s own attitude towards its fantastic elements. The more the non-realist material is treated as a normal, well-understood part of the world, the more the story feels like science fiction.

  1. Their companion novels are pretty much the same deal–Avram Davidson and Thomas Disch were major writers, but these particular books (The Kar-Chee Reign and Mankind Under the Leash) are so obscure I’d never heard of them until I researched this review. ↩

  2. You might object that this doesn’t jibe with the fossil record, but SF writers are allowed that kind of thing when setting up their premises. No one objects to FTL travel, and that’s also technically absurd. ↩

  3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ↩

  4. “Semley’s Necklace” is also collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. It reads a bit oddly when divorced from its novel: the first paragraph claims it’s a story about Rocannon, but on its own it’s clearly about Semley. ↩

Lavinia

Books, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia

Lavinia

I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin this year. In a crazy time, her work feels very calm and sane.

Lavinia is one of her most recent books, and one of her best. I read some reviews after I finished it, and more than one reached a point where the reviewers, in their enthusiasm, were reduced to waving their arms vaguely and saying “this is just a really good book.” As Adam Roberts wrote in his Strange Horizons review, “We might ask, in what ways is this book so very good? But the temptation would be to reply: in all the ways.”

I’m not smarter than Adam Roberts, and I don’t have the Critic Mojo to attempt a close reading of Lavinia or reveal the technical secrets of its success. I’m just saying if you have any interest in the premise at all, you should read this book, and then moving on to some random thoughts (which will be a bit spoilery).

The Premise

Sometime around the third decade BCE, the poet Virgil wrote some pretty good Iliad fanfic. In the Aeneid, a Trojan named Aeneas travels to Italy and founds Rome by marrying the daughter of King Latinus, Lavinia, who has no dialogue and almost isn’t even in the poem.

Lavinia is Lavinia’s life story, told in first person.

Random Thoughts

This is an alternate take on the Aeneid narrated by someone Virgil treats as a plot token instead of a character. In this situation, you might expect a subversion of the original work, with a total bastard Aeneas and Lavinia justly angry with Virgil for ignoring her. That would be a worthwhile approach, but Le Guin is doing something else which to me seems less obvious.

Lavinia works with instead of against the Aeneid, expands it without contradicting it much.1 Lavinia’s role is the same, but she’s not something to be traded. She has some power and chooses her path. She actively works with her father to arrange the marriage to Aeneas, partly because she’s decided she likes the guy, but also because she’s politically savvy. She knows the alliance will be a good thing for Latium’s future because the author has already given away the plot.

Early in the novel Lavinia makes cross-time telepathic contact with Virgil, who’s dying on board a ship to Italy. They hit it off. Virgil is chagrined that he didn’t give Lavinia a bigger role (too late for rewrites), and gives her a heads up on what’s coming. From that point onward, Lavinia isn’t sure whether she’s a real person or a character in a myth. Being a practical sort, she doesn’t worry very much–her life feels the same either way. It’s implied that this is part of why she accepts and eagerly pursues the plot laid out for her: she sees herself as part of a story, and this is her role.2

Aeneas is the upstanding hero Virgil wanted us to see him as. It would be easy to do a subversive take on the guy: Virgil didn’t actually finish the Aeneid before he died, so it ends very suddenly with Aeneas killing his enemy Turnus as Turnus begs for mercy. This is not the most flattering image to go out on. It’s been a few years since I read the Aeneid, but I recall not being very impressed with the hero.3 But he’s easily rehabilitated, for the same reason he looks bad. All Le Guin has to do is carry the story on past the end of the poem. Aeneas, as it turns out, is disgusted with himself, and is a thoughtful ruler for the three years he has left.

Aeneas dies offstage, anticlimactically. The novel carries on past that, too. Where Lavinia parts company with the Aeneid, and the conventions of myths and heroic tales, is in its deliberate lack of climax. Usually the kind of story starring an Aeneas–whether it’s a myth, an epic poem, or a modern fantasy adventure–climaxes in a big damn fight. Lavinia is the story of Lavinia’s life, and like life it doesn’t have a neat climax; it goes on for a while, then gently winds down. Lavinia’s great triumph isn’t victory in battle, but guiding events to ensure that Rome will not be ruled by Aeneas’s incompetent heir Ascanius.

Ascanius grew up with war and believes he can only prove his manhood in battle. This is the kind of thing we associate with “primitive” societies like ancient Greece and Rome, but a lot of people–mostly men–still think this way. Not in the sense that they’re itching to sack Troy, of course, but a lot of men are less interested in being seen as wise, or good, than tough. Watch any amount of television, and pay attention to the ads; there’s a lot of money to be made in convincing men your product will prove they’re not wimps.

More to the point, we sometimes seem to want our leaders to be tough more than we want them to be capable administrators. In the absence of a real war, we metaphorically militarize some mundane problem, declaring war on drugs, on crime, or on poverty, as though we might make people less poor by stabbing something.

One of the best passages in Lavinia is Aeneas and Lavinia’s patient, subtle, not entirely successful attempt to calm Ascanius down. Their point is that if Ascanius thinks he can only prove his virtue by fighting, he’ll be more interested in fighting than anything. And how can a ruler preoccupied with glory be trusted to attend to economics, agriculture, legislation–the dull everyday details that are the real work of governing?

Leadership isn’t about glory and isn’t about winning. It’s mostly about responsibility, and thinking about others before yourself, and the boring daily grind of administration. Lavinia, working in the background of Aeneas’s epic poem, invisibly stage-managing the founding of Rome, might be in a better position to appreciate that than anyone.

  1. Lavinia’s hair is a different color. That’s pretty much it. ↩

  2. It’s tempting to relate this to Le Guin’s interest in Taoism; the Wikipedia page for Tao quotes The Way and its Power by Arthur Waley: “[Dao] means a road, path, way; and hence, the way in which one does something; method, doctrine, principle.” Is her role in the Aeneid her way, her path? Honestly, though, I know so little about Taoism that I’m probably way off base here. ↩

  3. Although Aeneas is nowhere near as big a bastard as Odysseus. Or Achilles, although in his case we were supposed to think he was a prick. ↩

My Best of 2010, Part Three

Books, Horror, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms

When I review books I tend to write about theme a lot. (I hope I’m less simpleminded and reductive about it than your average high school English teacher.) N. K. Jemisin’s books have plenty of interpretive possibilities–among others, there are ideas here about power, and how it interacts with religion, and how cultures use their gods even as they think of themselves as following or living under those gods–but I must confess that when I read these what I most appreciated was their narrative drive.

I read these books at times when I was frustrated with stories padded with meaningless action, narrative cul-de-sacs, and excess exposition. (Too many recent books, and way too many movies, seem to think that unless they overemphasize and overexplain everything their audiences won’t Get It.) Attention spans are shrinking, but so many novels and films feel weirdly long, harder to sit through than many genuinely longer older works. So it’s a relief to come across novels like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms which earn their length. These books plunge straight into their plots, deliver worldbuilding and backstory as they go, and waste no time.

These are both “outsider caught in a world of complicated schemes and political maneuvers” books, and both sidestep one of the usual problems with this plot type: it often discourages active protagonists. It’s easy for this kind of book to resemble a stereotypical mediocre hard-boiled detective story whose narrator bounces from thug to thug, gets exposited at, and ends every scene by falling unconscious from a blow to the head. I was glad these books–The Broken Kingdoms in particular–starred narrators who had goals and were constantly making plans.

I also loved that these were two more entries in an my favorite fantasy-genre trend: series whose individual volumes are complete novels, not chunks of a 3000-page epic narrative. (In my cynical moods I suspect the epic-writers have no faith that their audience will come back unless they’re left hanging. In my case, they’re the ones I’m most likely to drop, partly because by the time I’ve picked up volume two I’ve usually forgotten the plot of volume one.)

Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Red Tree

I started writing a couple of paragraphs about this, then realized the paragraphs were threatening to turn into a short essay, as much about the horror genre as about this book. I hope to finish that essay and post it; in the meantime, I’ll just say I liked the book.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future

I wrote about this around the time I read it.

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

This is another book I’ve already written about.

China Miéville, Kraken

As with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, I liked Kraken for the force of its story. It’s probably not China Miéville’s best novel, but he seems to have had fun writing it. The prose reads like it’s running, like it’s tripping over itself to get the ideas out–and there are a lot of ideas here: the book starts with the impossible theft of a giant squid and from there sprawls out in all directions. The pages ooze enthusiasm and some of that enthusiasm transferred to me at a moment when I was having a hard time feeling enthusiastic about anything at all.

Kraken is Miéville’s stab at the “hidden magical subculture existing in the margins of a modern city” genre. (I’m trying hard not to call it “urban fantasy,” because these days that term means at least two different things.) What distinguishes Kraken, besides Miéville’s abundant imagination, is its attitude towards magic. Sometimes these “the real world, but with magic!” stories set up a magic-vs.-science rivalry, in which “science” (or “technology”) is a mysterious force opposed to magic. Which annoys me. First, because it misrepresents what science actually is–it’s a process, not a hegemonic culture, philosophy of life, or force of nature. Second, because these stories always push us to root for magic–which is, wow, so creative and dreamy–and against science, which is cramped and closed-minded and inhuman, apparently. Anyone whose sense of wonder has ever been tripped by witty, enthusiastic science writing knows this is not an honest argument. Fantasy isn’t real, but it’s about reality, and when a story touches something real and isn’t honest about it, in a poetic or metaphorical sense, it grates.

So it’s wonderful that Kraken doesn’t prescribe any particular attitude towards magic. Maybe you’re awestruck, but it’s just as okay to think, as Kraken’s protagonist Billy does while pondering the Law of Sympathy, it’s “trite” that “a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else.” Billy works in a natural history museum. He’s a tour guide, not a scientist, but he sees the world with a scientist’s eyes. Kraken,unusually for an urban fantasy, suggests that the rational, curious, investigative approach of a scientist might be as valid a way to understand a fantasy universe as it is to understand the real world.

My Best of 2010, Part One

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As I too often note on this blog, I haven’t written much lately. I could claim I haven’t been writing because haven’t had much to say, but the truth is that I haven’t had much to say because I haven’t been writing. Sometimes I don’t consciously realize what it is I have to say until I try putting it into words.

The sticking point is that to write something I have to put in some serious thought–serious for me, anyway–and I cut down on sustained pondering over the last couple of months. I’ve spent the year anxious about a number of things, the biggest of which are the economy and the direction in which the country is headed. It feels like everything we’ve built in the last century is being torn down and hollowed out. Lately, if I’m not careful, contemplation can metamorphose into perpetual low-grade panic.

So I haven’t engaged enough with the books I’ve read. I’ve let the texts wash over me, let the authors’ thoughts drown out my worries, escaped from a world where, for the moment, I don’t want to spend very much time. I managed this without focusing on any particular kind of book. Some people disdain “escapist” literature, but, truth be told, you can escape into Dostoevsky as easily as Doctor Who.

This is, of course, not good for me. So I’m going to try to post more often. I’m starting slowly with a review of 2010–just a paragraph or three on the books that made the biggest impression on me, for good or ill. I’ll split it into multiple posts, because in a few cases I’m coming up with encouragingly long paragraphs. I may eventually try to come up with longer essays on a few. (If nothing else I’m a little chagrined that, of the books I did manage to write about, the only ones by female authors were the among the books I didn’t like.)

The books will be listed in alphabetical order by author, because I hate trying to rank things. (Anyway, it’s not fair pitting contemporary writers against the aforementioned Dostoevsky.)

The Best (Part One)

Kage Baker, The Bird of the River

This is, sadly, Kage Baker’s last novel. It’s one of her better ones, another book in the fantasy series that began with The Anvil of the World, set in a secondary world which draws as much from America as most Extruded Fantasy Product does from Europe. Like Anvil, it’s very much a working class fantasy: it focuses on the kind of people who stay in the background of most secondary world fantasy, and it spends a lot of pages just watching them do their jobs while the plot casually emerges from the background. The Bird of the River is about a riverboat and some of its day-to-day operations would have looked familiar to Mark Twain. I came away thinking I should really read Life on the Mississippi again. Maybe in 2011…

Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

This is one of the books I reviewed. In the absence of new insights, I’ll simply direct you to that post.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

I avoided The Last Unicorn for years because of the word “unicorn,” which for me conjures up black velvet paintings sold out of a trailer. Peter S. Beagle is a genius, though, so inevitably I was going to get around to reading this, and when I finally did it blew away any thought of kitsch.

The Last Unicorn is set in a world balanced halfway between fairy tale and history, tipping towards mundanity. It’s a world aware of itself passing into legend, a place where wannabe Robin Hoods hope a folklorist will come along and transcribe ballads about them. This may sound very twee and self-referential, but it’s not. It never feels like the characters are playing parts, or that the things that happen to them don’t matter.

Beagle remembers that, in legend, wonders cost something. As one character says, “Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.” The novel is tinged as much with loss and disappointment as hope. It’s not about heroes, but failures: people who’ve reached the middle of their lives and found they haven’t wound up in anything resembling a fairy-tale ending, or even a fairy-tale mid-plot. There’s a unicorn in The Last Unicorn, but the book is mostly about the human characters coming to terms with lives that aren’t the stories they’d wished for.