association-list

Sev­eral years ago, I wrote a story set in a post-​​singularity world, which bore a bit of a family resem­blance to ‘Elegy …’. Mine was pretty bad. There’s a posthu­man guy and another posthu­man about to tran­scend, and a bunch of people trying to stop her from doing it. I never did revise it fully, because I could never con­vince myself that the set­ting wasn’t pre­cisely iso­mor­phic to the same sit­u­a­tion reworked as a fan­tasy, or a super­hero story. Also it con­tained enough Ellisian verbal tics that I wor­ried that Warren would file suit. And also there are the ugly chunks of auto­bi­og­ra­phy and per­sonal opin­ion dropped in there. But those things are fix­able. There might even be a story worth telling in there, but I never could get over the foun­da­tional prob­lem that basi­cally that the set­ting didn’t say any­thing unique, and didn’t reflect inter­est­ingly on the story that I had to tell.

I sup­pose that that fail­ure was the begin­ning of the end of my flir­ta­tion with sin­gu­latar­ian fic­tion. I still enjoy a finely-​​wrought peice of it, but I never could make it work for me, and I was less impressed with work in the sub-​​genre there­after, having strug­gled with the set­ting issues up close and rarely seeing anyone solve them in a sat­is­fy­ing way.

I strug­gle too much, a lot of the time, with the under­ly­ing mean­ings of sto­ries, both the ones I try to write and the ones I read. I don’t think that SFF is required to be alle­gory at all times, or even most of the time. I don’t sub­scribe to Gibson’s theory that all SFF is built around a re-​​framing of some con­tem­po­rary issue or the cur­rent zeit­geist. But I sup­pose I at least expect an argu­ment, a lesson, a pos­si­ble issue, or some­thing to think about.

This story was good. It was coher­ent, it man­aged not to over-​​explain, it was about real-​​feeling people and real­is­tic rela­tion­ships. Rajaniemi has the storyteller’s spark. It was a bit baggy, like it was told at the gran­u­lar­ity of a novel, rather than a short story. It’s sat­is­fy­ingly low on expo­si­tion. There are many moments where the writ­ing is quite nice.

There are two takes on the ending, I think. Either the sky-​​people planned the entire affair to go off the way it did, or they didn’t. I like the former theory better. A bit of the­ater, allow­ing Koso­nen to move on and his son and the quan­tum girl to finally go free in a way that makes them less dan­ger­ous to the people around them (pre­sum­ably they’re reduced some­what by trans­la­tion into poet­i­cal form). The set­ting here then is a neat bit of work, but doesn’t really get behind the story and push. It’s stronger if you’ve read “Deus Ex Homine”, I think.

If the latter is the case, then the story is unfin­ished, the ending makes very little sense, the setup is stupid, and Rajaniemi is betrayed by the allure of his set­ting, much like I was.

There’s a longer dis­cus­sion to be had, now that the sin­gu­lar­ity thing is just about wound down, but I am not sure that this story is the right tee for kick­ing it off.

Story here, for dis­cus­sion here.

As opposed to the first two sto­ries here, I slot­ted this one into my ‘inter­est­ing fail­ures’ cat­e­gory. I did this mostly because I think that it’s a tol­er­a­ble story and a great exam­ple of a major error in genre fiction.

The story here moves along quickly, with deftly sketched char­ac­ters straight out of steam­punk cen­tral cast­ing. We’ve a valet with a secret, an expe­di­tion into an inter­dicted coun­try, vaunt­ing over­con­fi­dence, and even­tu­ally an awak­en­ing to a grave danger. Every­thing flows smoothly and is topped off by a fine action sequence.

And yet… The story is some­how weight­less, taking each ele­ment of the sub­genre that is uses out of the box and plac­ing it just so. Noting new is orig­i­nated and noth­ing is actu­ally said (I sup­pose that one could argue that the state­ment is that aggres­sive hege­mo­niz­ing swarms are bad, or that indi­vid­u­al­ity is impor­tant, or that loy­alty is more impor­tant than kind, but all these seem to go with­out saying). We are told a story. It is fluent, com­plete, and hollow, con­cerned pri­mar­ily with manip­u­la­tion of scenery and fur­ni­ture. No ele­ment of the stan­dard build­ing blocks is ques­tioned, or goes unused (it’s even hinted that some­where out there are magi­cians, although we never seem to see any).

It could be, as some­times seems the case with BCS, that we’re read­ing an open­ing chap­ter or pro­logue, refit­ted into a stand­alone piece while the larger work lan­guishes in draft, but if so, this one needs the coun­ter­weight of the main body to give it weight.

I started this post out as a giant rant against steam­punk, but by the time I’d gotten half-​​way through it, I real­ized that my rhetoric was get­ting pretty famil­iar. The gist:

The free­dom allowed you by work­ing in a well-​​defined genre or set­ting is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time build­ing the world. You can short­cut and infer to your heart’s con­tent, and there is little chance that your reader, if she is suf­fi­ciently famil­iar with the sub­genre within which you’re work­ing, won’t ever get con­fused. You can spend all of your time fill­ing out your char­ac­ters, elab­o­rat­ing your plot, and lay­er­ing mean­ing through­out to enforce your finely honed point. The prob­lem with this this that too many late­com­ers to the steam­punk party are too busy play­ing with the dec­o­ra­tions and “swag­ger­ing sub­myth types made of the finest gold-​​plated card­board” to ever bother with any of this. We get thin, shop­worn char­ac­ters in a generic set­ting (automata, air­ships, and gears, oh my!), walk­ing through mispaced plots whose pri­mary func­tion is to exhibit the clev­er­ness of the writer in coming up with ever more baroque elab­o­ra­tions on the stan­dard genre furniture.

There was more. You should thank me for delet­ing it. But this depic­tion of steam­punk is basi­cally dull. This is not steam­punk at its worst, but all genre writ­ing at its worst. The same point could have been made of the post-​​Tolkein fan­tasy boom from the late 70s to the early 90s (the hang­over of which is still with us today), or the end­less dreary cyber­punk follow-​​ons that have taken up most of the intel­lec­tual air­space in between now and then, or the mini-​​booms in epic fan­tasy, dark fan­tasy, the new space opera, etc., etc., etc.. Para­nor­mal romance and steam­punk are just the latest iter­a­tions and there’s fairly little that’s inter­est­ing to be said about them specif­i­cally. These are basi­cally the pub­lish­ing equiv­a­lent of momen­tum trad­ing. Some­thing equiv­a­lent will always be with us.

There is little to be done while the market is still hungry. But it’s worth the time, I think, to try and ignore the noise, and do our best to amplify the signal, all the while know­ing that it’s impos­si­ble to win.