association-list

That’s the title of a new David Levine story in April’s F&SF. I thought that his Hugo winner Tk’Tk’Tk was OK, but not mind blow­ing, but this one is really quite good. A an episodic story, told going back­wards in time, wound around a string of just so sto­ries about a spacer called Tita­nium Mike. I’ve just fin­ished read­ing it, so I’m still not really sure why, but it really res­onated with me. I think that I’m start­ing to under­stand what all the fuss is about.

When I was in high school, the Chap­lain, who was a lib­eral sort, invited a group of Bud­dhist monks to come and visit. They came and talked, answered ques­tions, skinny asian men, some young, some old, with shaven heads and saf­fron and orange robes, wear­ing sneak­ers or Birken­stocks over socks. Few of these things made any impres­sion on me, though. I was in high school, after all, and knew most things better than they did. I’m still not a fan of reli­gious orders, although I think that I could have a more fruit­ful con­ver­sa­tion with one of them. The thing that really stuck with me, though, was the sand man­dala that they com­pleted while they were there.

I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, but they’re quite intri­cate, fine, clear lines of col­ored sand, shaken out of a paper funnel with del­i­cate taps. The idea that they were simply going to com­plete it, let it sit for a few days, and then just tip it into the trash or per­haps use some other, more sacred method of dis­posal were abhor­rent to me. I spent the couple of days that they took to com­plete it think­ing up ways to pre­serve it. My favorite, the one I ended up sug­gest­ing to the Chap­lain, was to have them build it on steel, or some other heat resis­tant sur­face, then bake it in the kiln we had in the art build­ing, seal­ing the pat­tern in glass. He explained it all to me then, but I didn’t buy it then, and am not one hun­dred per cent sold on the idea of enshrin­ing the tran­si­tory nature of things in expen­sive ritual.

Still, there are lessons to the things beyond the obvi­ous, or at least there were for me. The value of art­work as symbol, rather that just being the thing itself. Up until then, art was just some­thing that you did because it was beau­ti­ful, or because it felt good, rather than because it meant any­thing. Some­times, of course, an art­work is just a thing done for its beauty, or the sat­is­fac­tion of cre­at­ing it, and often that’s enough, or even better than had it come gravid with symbol, but for all of my teach­ers nat­ter­ing on about what this or that art­work sym­bol­ized, I’d never known what they meant before then, never had the real­ize that in a par­tic­u­lar con­text a visual art­work could be trans­formed into a tool for saying, lent nar­ra­tive weight beyond its imme­di­ate presentation.

I had intended to say some­thing here about my dis­taste for the internet’s ten­dency towards the pack­rat­ting of ephemera, but on fur­ther con­tem­pla­tion, it’s early days yet. Record­ing every­thing and then using var­i­ous fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms (pri­mar­ily the eyes of the bored, at this point) to ferret out the things among them that aren’t triv­ial or ephemeral isn’t some­thing that we’ve had the tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­ity to do, up to now. As a strat­egy for find­ing the things worth pre­serv­ing, it cer­tainly has its merits. In all like­li­hood, most of the hes­i­tancy we see, the trep­i­da­tion toward being seen as triv­ial or insignif­i­cant, has to do with the human per­cep­tual bias towards the supe­ri­or­ity of the past. We should prob­a­bly give it a little time before we bother to pass judge­ment, or even before we worry about the problem.

Not quite an exhaus­tive list­ing of the fic­tion that I’ve been read­ing recently, but for the most part it’s been re-​​reads lately, in addi­tion to a lot of writ­ing. Coming up on the first draft of the book and knocked out a good third of a new story yes­ter­day. Near term sched­ule for writ­ing, for the truly bored amongst you:

• Finish the first draft before my brother’s wed­ding in late June. This is ambi­tious, but I think that I can get it done, and I’d like to have noth­ing hang­ing over my head for that.
• Let the book sit for a month before revis­ing. In that time period, I’m going to work more on the sup­port­ing sto­ries and start pol­ish­ing them for pub­li­ca­tion and then send­ing them out. I plan on start­ing to send these out in July.
• One all of the sup­port­ing sto­ries are ready for market and making the rounds, revi­sion starts on the novel. Hoping to have this hit­ting agent’s desks around late Sep­tem­ber, but we’ll see how long it takes. I’ve never been an expert at revi­sion, nor have I ever revised some­thing this long before. We’ll see how long it takes.
• Once it’s pol­ished and ready to go, more sup­port­ing sto­ries and a start on the next book, which I’m sure that I’ll talk about more when the writ­ing starts.

Now, to the books.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald.

Every time I read some­thing by McDon­ald, I’m kind of shocked that he isn’t better known. That said, River of Gods was a huge, dense book, and that might have scared a lot of people off. Brasyl, how­ever, is not nearly so long, and every bit as good, if not better. Not being Brazil­ian, I can’t tell you how close he’s gotten to the feel­ing of the place, but as a reader I now feel like I’ve been there. The sense of atmos­phere is incred­i­ble and the pacing and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion in the book are spot on.

Now, I rarely say things like this, being a fan of brevity, but I really felt that the book would have ben­e­fit­ted from being just a bit longer. This is only par­tially because the rest of it is so good that I didn’t want it to end. We’re well set up for a sequel of some sort, but another ten thou­sand words could easily have dis­pensed with the need for one, I think. McDon­ald is a writer who’s heav­ily influ­enced by music, I think, and one thing that he’s taken home from that influ­ence is the con­cept of dynam­ics. He’s more than capa­ble, I feel, of stuff­ing every page with pyrotech­nics, but he refrains, making parts of the novel quiet, other parts loud, some fast, some slow, and he does this quite inten­tion­ally and to won­der­ful effect.

Although I’ve been some­what under­whelmed by Pyr’s efforts so far, they’ve at least earned by admi­ra­tion by bring­ing McDon­ald back to the U.S., and I think that this is pos­si­bly the best book that they’ve put out so far. I’ll be look­ing to see this one on the award bal­lots next year, and I’ll be very dis­ap­pointed if it isn’t there, but with the way that they’ve been going lately, it’s almost hard to take them seriously.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi.

The last book in his series con­cern­ing John ‘Com­pe­tent’ Perry, The Last Colony fol­lows up rea­son­ably quickly after the con­clu­sion of the other two, but not so closely that I’ll be incom­pre­hen­si­ble to some­one who hasn’t read either of the others. Like his hero, Scalzi is com­pe­tent, charm­ing, and funny. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s about all there is to the book. As much as I applaud his con­cept of ‘gate­way SF’, I can’t help but think that this isn’t quite it, or at least isn’t the gate­way that isn’t orig­i­nally meant. Instead of bring­ing new read­ers to the table, I think that these books are more likely to serve as a entree to those read­ers who haven’t read any­thing pub­lished by an author who wasn’t writ­ing prior to the New Wave.

I’m not sure what I think about that, really. I’m not sure more backwards-​​looking SF is really what we need from some­one new. We have enough extant genre man­darins doing that already, and I’d be nice to see people trying to take things in a new direc­tion. Espe­cially Amer­i­can authors. It isn’t for noth­ing that three of the books on this list are from the UK. What I would really like to see is some­thing from Scalzi that is for­ward look­ing but retains his energy, opti­mism, and humor. Scalzi is well on his way to making a name for him­self, and I’d like to see him stretch a little, rather than con­tin­u­ing to address the estab­lished base. To write some true gate­way SF.

The Exe­cu­tion Chan­nel by Ken MacLeod.

I only fin­ished this a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to think about it. For the most part it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing read, full of MacLeod’s usual assur­ance and poise, and then at the end it yanks the rug out from under the char­ac­ters and the reader so vio­lently that no one is quite sure what hap­pened. And then it ends. I have to admit that I felt a little bit like I’d been mugged after I turned the final page. I might have to revisit this one, after some time to think it over and re-​​read it. Fas­ci­nat­ing work, but I’m still not sure what the point was, and if the author was telling us the right story.

Bone Song by John Meaney.

I have to admit that I’m still a bit con­fused by John Meaney. The books that he writes are inter­est­ing, some­times even com­pelling, but all too often are crip­pled by his reliance on stale genre tropes and otaku-​​style inter­est in cer­tain topics. If he writes one more scene about his char­ac­ters going run­ning, I think that I’m going to scream. At least in this one he mostly abstains from the dull mar­tial arts stuff and ori­en­tophilia. What we get in it’s place is a more or less stan­dard hard-​​boiled sci­ence fic­tion novel that’s been search and replaced into a some­what more ornate and dark fan­tasy novel.

There are some good spots, some effec­tively writ­ten scenes of fan­tasy and horror, but ulti­mately the novel is ham­strung by two glar­ing flaws, in addi­tion to a host of irri­tants that oth­er­wise could be glossed over. The first is the entirely unbe­liev­able romance at the core of the story. It hon­estly has no legs and adds absolutely noth­ing to the story other than a hook with which the author can, quite unsuc­cess­fully, tug at our heart­strings at the very end of the book. It should have been cut, full stop. It’s fine to have those char­ac­ters sleep with one another and then deal with the weird fall­out of that.

The other is the irri­tat­ing assump­tion that all poli­ties, every­where, are going to be too cor­rupt for Good Cops On The Side of Right and Good to do their jobs with­out taking the law into their own hands. I’m gen­er­ally annoyed by tough-​​guy char­ac­ters like the pro­tag­o­nist of this book, but to use them in this day and age with scarcely a nod to the long and unglam­orous his­tory of them in genre lit­er­a­ture is a mis­take. To his credit, Meaney makes most of the things that they do in this vein mis­takes, but it still detracts from the sup­pos­edly moral center of the novel.

This looks to be the start of a series. I’m not sure that I’ll read the next one, unless the premise is more intrigu­ing than that of this novel. I was hoping that the shift in genre might jar some­thing inter­est­ing loose, but it’s more or less like the old stuff with a dif­fer­ently col­ored coat of paint.