association-list

It’s hard for me to tease out what I don’t like here about this story from what I don’t like about its embed­ded assump­tions about human­ity, Amer­ica, and people.

Like some­one said a couple of sto­ries ago, I am dog-​​tired of first-​​person nar­ra­tives. I am tired of a lot of things, and this story man­ages to hit on a lot of them. So if you strip away the science-​​fiction aspects of the story, you have a slightly sexist and racist reac­tionary stick-​​figure of a pro­tag­o­nist wor­ship­ing his golden idol of a father because his father loves him less than his dogs. I’d have con­sid­ered the father-​​son rela­tion­ship here a cheap, sen­ti­men­tal trick in a better story. Here, the main char­ac­ter is so warped by this unlikely rela­tion­ship that he’s effec­tively emas­cu­lated, despite the fact that he has worlds more power than his father in every con­ceiv­able way. The only way to make the device more crass would be to move it into 1970s Amer­i­can Male Author daddy-​​issue ter­ri­tory by having the kid lust after Mona more and have a painful scene in which the kid dis­cov­ers that his daddy have been ‘com­fort­ing’ her in her grief, after her hus­band died. Suf­fice it to say that I find the char­ac­ters unbe­liev­able, schematic, and uninvolving.

The embed­ded assump­tions are maybe going to be less appar­ent or obnox­ious to the non-​​American people; it might even be West Coast spe­cific. Capitalist/​libertarian-​​oriented, dully US-​​centric, assum­ing that each tech boom will be fol­lowed by another, the coun­try is better than the city, manual work better than intel­lec­tual work, gov­ern­ment is evil when not incom­pe­tent, etc., etc., so on and so forth. It cir­cum­scribes the world declar­ing that while it might be dif­fer­ent, it can never really be better. I am against the golden age, as a human con­cept. The fact that we all feel it says some­thing about us, rather than some­thing about the world. If the story had been a dis­sec­tion of this feel­ing through its blink­ered and backwards-​​looking main char­ac­ter, it might have been some­thing inter­est­ing, but it doesn’t even remain unex­am­ined; it seems to be the explicit posi­tion of the story.

It could be that I am riding my own hobby horses into some­one else’s nar­ra­tive, and taking these things too seri­ously, but the fact remains that improve­ments in the state of the world do have real con­se­quences. To write a story in which the bet­ter­ment of the lives of bil­lions of people is side­lined by the quo­tid­ian drama of the decline of the aged is, in some ways, to entirely miss the point of using a science-​​fictional set­ting. No doubt there are issues of taste at the heart of it. Also there’s an elec­tion coming up, and that always gets my polit­i­cal juices flow­ing and my ide­o­log­i­cal anten­nae quivering.

Even putting aside the ide­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings of the story, the fail­ures of char­ac­ter would be enough to damn it, all on their own. Prose-​​wise, it feels under-​​baked, larded with a few too many stock phrasings.

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 see a few ways in here, craft-​​wise.

1: Mis­di­rec­tion

One way swings around that delib­er­ately provoca­tive ending line. We’re asked to fully reimag­ine the movie from the per­spec­tive of the all-​​invading alien mon­ster, pro­tean, agres­sively hege­monz­ing. A mon­ster for whom the very rape cannot have any mean­ing. In the com­ments, Watts says,

Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you sug­gest: a metaor­gan­ism with­out sex wouldn’t know what rape was. Which is why I intro­duced the “rapist” dialog with Childs’ search­light a couple of scenes ear­lier, during which the mis­sion­ary admits to levels it cannot under­stand in that word. But it does learn con­no­ta­tion of “forced pen­e­tra­tion of flesh”.

Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.

The typ­i­cal con­ven­tion to signal that a word being used is for­eign is to put it in ital­ics. Watts, or Clarkesworld, hasn’t done so here, but I think that it might have been useful to do so, just to empha­size that the crea­ture doing the talk­ing doesn’t actu­ally under­stand the con­cept, but I figure it isn’t strictly nec­es­sary. There’s an argu­ment to be had there, as the con­ven­tion is cer­tainly used earlier:

Later I hid within the bipeds them­selves, and what­ever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or ass­holes. It said that MacReady was some­times called Mac. It said that this col­lec­tion of struc­tures was a camp.

The final line sig­nals that we’re not being told the story that we expect we’re being told. We spend the entire story metic­u­lously repick­ing each piv­otal moment of the film, explain­ing why the mis­sion­ary isn’t at fault, how the harm it caused all springs from incom­pre­hen­sion. But at the last we see the rever­sal: the mis­sion­ary does mean to have us all, to release use from death and our tiny, brutish suffering.

The last line is there to tell us that we’re explor­ing ‘evil’ from the inside and that while we’re seeing the other side of the story, the inte­rior inter­pere­ta­tion is entirely con­so­nant with the exterior.

It’s a neat trick.

2: Pacing

Another way to look at it is how to tell a story that most of the read­ers already know in a way that’s com­pelling. Reimag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise (imag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise), but find­ing a moti­va­tion for the crea­ture, work­ing a back­story that fits the facts on the ground and enriches, rather than usurps the polt. Whe shuf­fle back and forth between two strains. Missionary-​​as-​​Childs, walk­ing into the long night and think­ing through its expe­ri­ences; and a retelling of the events in the movie, rein­ter­pereted through the newly invented backstory.

Left alone, nei­ther of these threads would work. A simple recount­ing of the story of the movie would leave us bored. What does it matter if the crea­ture is there, sor­row­ing at the hos­til­ity that it encoun­ters? By the same token, its reflec­tions on the dif­fer­ences between its nature and that of the world that it finds itself in are hollow with­out the con­text of the fram­ing story. Com­pellingly writ­ten, sure, but noth­ing but a deci­sion and a small, quiet death happen. It takes a dif­fer­ent kind of artistry to raise this sort of intro­spec­tion out of the level of the dull. It’s unclear whether or not Watts can manage it, but here, hung of the scaf­fold­ing of the other thread, it becomes a sail, rather than a baggy pile of canvas.

3: Crit­ter gonna get ya

Some­thing of the ever­green pop­u­lar­ity of this genre of story is that it makes for almost auto­mat­i­cally com­pelling cinema. Hon­estly, it’s pretty hard to fuck it up too bad. Your char­ac­ters can be paper thin or gilt card­board and no one is going to care. Faults are excused and ratio­nal­ized away by the stark moral dilemma of need­ing to get rid of the mon­ster that is killing every­one one by one. No one really cares that MacReady is a swag­ger­ing jack­ass with silly hair, he’s as close as we’re going to get to a hero, so we’ll root for him as long as he lasts.

One of the things that makes The Thing so sticky in the memory is that the crit­ter might already have got you, but you haven’t real­ized it yet. It’s a break from the stan­dard con­ven­tion. Later betray­als might not be telegraphed, as is a core of the form, because the char­ac­ters are never sure which side they’ll shortly be on.

To some extent, to offer the critter’s per­spec­tive is to defuse the ten­sion some­what. Part of the fear comes from the fact that you never know where the threat is going to come from. I think that Watts does the best thing here. He doesn’t try. He knows that most of the read­ers will know how it comes out, that even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ll know the form, know the stan­dards. He allows the move­ment and ten­sion of the story to come from a course of rev­e­la­tion walked in a void in the exist­ing story. Who will the crea­ture get next stops being impor­tant. At the time of the telling, every­thing is already over, or almost. Who it will get next stops being the ques­tion, and it starts being, ‘What will it decide, and what will that mean?’.

4: Con­clu­sions

This story more than most is ensnared in nets within nets of mean­ing, right from the workd go. “I am going to rewrite The Thing from the alien’s per­spec­tive”, is a simple enough state­ment. But since the source text for this remix exists in the way it does, you already have threads about cancer and para­noia and our unre­li­able biol­ogy and the feel­ing that death is hunt­ing us all down one by one anyway, all before you write a single word. The colo­nial­ist stinger in the tail adds another layer of dif­fi­culty. I guess what I mean here is that I can’t get past the excel­lence of form and all of the accreted mean­ing to what Watts is trying to actu­ally say. Which may be noth­ing, hon­estly, other than that it’s a fun thing to try and rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective.

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-​​La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the con­fi­dence of the nar­ra­tive voice. The story fol­lows an unnamed pro­tag­o­nist from a quite close third-​​person per­spec­tive through a future war in South-​​East Asia, con­cern­ing a par­tic­u­lar MacGuf­fin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-​​La of the title), virally trans­miss­able fellow-​​feeling that stops hos­til­i­ties in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before every­thing is blown to atoms by the unseen back­ers of our name­less view­point char­ac­ter. The story’s prime emo­tional con­flict is his strug­gle between destroy­ing the peace plague and let­ting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This strug­gle would have more res­o­nance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another view­point on whether or not the plague nul­li­fies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t per­fect, of course. There are only token female char­ac­ters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Con­se­quence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in war­zones far away from the home front, with­out any real engage­ment with the con­se­quences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the clev­er­ness of its syn­the­sis of these ele­ments, and I think that it suc­ceeds very well (that said, I tend towards syn­the­sis ( see update below ) in my tastes, per­haps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swan­wick being favorites of mine).

Since read­ing it, I’ve gone on some­thing of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as qual­ity stuff, some of it better, I think, than this par­tic­u­lar piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opin­ion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought Hebrew­Punk and ordered The Book­man, so I may be in the throes of an irra­tional enthu­si­asm. Look­ing for­ward to what he pro­duces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the ter­mi­nol­ogy that I’m using above.

“Tiny Feast” by Chris Adrian.

I missed the first week and some spir­ited dis­cus­sion of a fairly weak story, so it may be that this story, weak in another way, might spur some sim­i­larly inter­est­ing discussion.

I thought that this one was well writ­ten, but oth­er­wise failed on most other levels. I have to admit some bias, in that I have essen­tially no inter­est in fan­tasy specif­i­cally fea­tur­ing fairies. It’s a trope at this point that has been so bru­tally overused that it’s hard to imag­ine it having any sort of res­o­nance with anyone at this point. I real­ize that my point of view clearly isn’t shared, so I’ll try to put it aside. The story imag­ines one of the changelings taken by the fairy court, Oberon and Tita­nia and the whole lot, get­ting leukemia and going into treat­ment. In terms of play­ing the con­flict in a humor­ously dead­pan way and depict­ing the process in an accu­rate way, the author gets high marks, but as a story it never really gets any­where, or says any­thing, or really has any char­ac­ters. Any one of those could be fine, of course, but at some point the story just falls down, when you decline to pro­vide your read­ers with any reason to care.

If we’re to read this straight, Oberon and Tita­nia are fairies and so at least some­what alien and dis­tanced from human con­cerns. It’s never clear why either of them should care about this par­tic­u­lar changeling over any other, other than he’s sick. The author never both­ers to make them human char­ac­ters, nor does he manage to make them con­vinc­ingly alien. They speak on one hand from a desire for the story to move for­ward, and on the other from a desire by the author to make the story humorous.

Over the course of the sto­ries, inter­ac­tions are detailed, scenes are set, jokes are con­structed and deliv­ered. The boy sick­ens, recov­ers, sick­ens more, and dies. Noth­ing else actu­ally hap­pens. No point is deliv­ered, nor is one pos­si­ble to infer, given the half-​​assed inhu­man­ity of the characters.

It strikes me that the author had a neat idea for a story, then didn’t real­ize that his con­ceit didn’t have legs enough to stand alone at such length. Maybe he had some inkling, hence the jok­i­ness, the places where it’s over­writ­ten. Halfway to Rem­brandt Comic Book ter­ri­tory, more or less. Still, in the end, it stacks up to more or less noth­ing inter­est­ing, and the author, while clever and skilled, simply isn’t writ­ing at the level where you’ll stick around to listen to him talk­ing about any­thing, just because the prose is so good.

And so we reach the end with­out me having said much inter­est­ing or clever, but I feel that the con­ceit here doesn’t stand up to crit­i­cism any better than it stands up to read­ing; that it is, in fact, a con­ceit and only pro­vides the critic with his thinnest gruel, styl­is­tic analy­sis. I am hoping that I’m miss­ing some­thing, and that some of the other com­menters will pro­vide a view of the story that illu­mi­nates a more inter­est­ing angle from which to view the story.