What Makes This Book So Great Page 19
The land around Gallanach is thick with ancient monuments; burial sites, henges, and strangely carved rocks. You can hardly put a foot down without stepping on something that had religious significance to somebody sometime. Verity had heard of all this ancient stoneware but she’d never really seen it properly, her visits to Gallanach in the past had been busy with other things, and about the only thing she had seen was Dunadd, because it was an easy walk from the castle. And of course, because we’d lived here all our lives, none of the rest of us had bothered to visit half the places either.
It isn’t in any way a genre novel, but it’s great fun and so very good.
JUNE 23, 2009
63. More dimensions than you’d expect: Samuel Delany’s Babel-17
Babel-17 was published in 1966, the year in which I learned to talk. I didn’t read it until I was a teenager, and it’s been in my regular rotation ever since. It’s set against a background of galactic conflict, huge wars between sections of humanity and their various alien allies. “Babel 17” is a code, or an alien language, that the military can’t break. They call in a retired codebreaker-turned-poet called Rydra Wong, who goes off with a ship of misfits to adventure near the front lines, be captured, find allies in unexpected places, and discover the truth about Babel-17.
The thing about the description in the paragraph above is that it’s all true and yet it’s really not that kind of book. All those things happen, but they’re not what the book is about. It is about the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the (now disproved, but cutting-edge linguistic theory at the time the book was written) idea that language shapes perception to such an extent that thinking in a different language gives you a different perception. It isn’t true, but it’s a lovely speculation for science fiction, and in Babel-17 you have people whose brains are literally reprogrammed by language, and moments where changing language to think about it shows you the weak points in a structure. It might not be the case that speaking a language without the word “I” gives you no concept of self, but how very interesting to play with a character like that.
But it isn’t the kind of science fiction that’s all about the ideas either. There are exciting adventures and wonderful characters and fascinating worldbuilding and testing scientific ideas to destruction, which as a set of things is pretty much a definition of science fiction. But it’s a very unusual book.
There are a lot of common tropes of SF in Babel-17 that are treated in a way that’s not just unusual for 1966 but that remain unusual now.
I mentioned there’s a war. Later in the book there’s combat and even action scenes. But the first mention of the war we have, the first image of it, is of the blockade of planets and the consequent starvation and cannibalism. Everyone in the book has lived through that. It’s part of all their histories, whether they’re talking about it or not, it’s always informing their actions and motivations. This is so like real war and so little like the conventions of writing military SF that I can’t think of anything else like it. And this is part of the background, not the focus of the book.
Rydra is telepathic, which is a fairly common attribute for a science fiction heroine. But it’s a weird form of telepathy that makes her unhappy and which she denies for as long as she can. She’s also a plausible great poet—Delany uses some of Marilyn Hacker’s poetry as examples, which helps. (Generally with a character who’s presented a great poet, it’s better not to show their work unless you have some great poetry at hand.) Delany makes the choice to show us Rydra from the outside and from several different points of view before we get into her head, which works astonishingly well at giving us a picture of her complexity. She’s a surprisingly three-dimensional character. Also, and I almost didn’t say this, she’s a woman. She’s the protagonist, she’s a space captain and poet, she’s competent and active, she makes her own choices and rescues herself and saves the world, and she’s a woman, and it was 1966.
There are interesting family structures. Triples—marriage, close work, and living arrangements among three people—are common. Rydra is a surviving member of one, other members of her crew are in one. This is never anything but an accepted piece of background. There’s also a scene where a very straight man has a sexual encounter with a (technological rather than supernatural) ghost. There’s a clearly implicit background of a complex set of sexualities and relationship shapes that fit within the future culture.
The background is unusually dense, as always with Delany, with layers and implied further layers and texture. There are multiple cultures, even within the one side of the conflict we see, there are people of all colours, shapes and sizes and social classes. There are castes and classes, there’s also the sense that working people actually work, with a notion of things they actually do. There is also body modification for fashion and lifestyle reasons (solid roses growing from your shoulder, like a tattoo) that have social significance as class and status markers. It’s projecting the sixties, but not at all as you’d expect, and it falls into its own shapes and makes a unique future.
If Babel-17 were published now as a new book, I think it would strike us as great work that was doing wonderful things and expanding the boundaries of science fiction. I think we’d nominate it for awards and talk a lot about it. It’s almost as old as I am, and I really think it would still be an exciting significant book if it were new now.
JULY 7, 2009
64. Bad, but good: David Feintuch’s Midshipman’s Hope
Midshipman’s Hope is unashamedly reminiscent of both Forester’s Hornblower books and Heinlein’s Starman Jones. A lot of the worldbuilding is there explicitly to load the deck to get the result Feintuch wants—a Napoleonic space navy where adolescents go into space with ridiculous amounts of responsibility and angst about it. It could be an Oliver Optic novel! The majority of the book is about how Nicholas Seafort, a seventeen-year-old midshipman on Hibernia, a ship headed on a three-year interstellar cruise, is forced by circumstances and his own honour into situations where he has to make awful choices which always turn out to be right. The book is written in first person, so we spend it nose to nose with Seafort, his angst, his nightmares, his funk, his utter inability to forgive himself or unbend for an instant. And that’s what’s good about it. It’s ludicrous really—later in the series he eventually gets to a point where the only way for him to get more responsibility to angst over and a higher position he isn’t qualified for would be if he was suddenly forced to be God—but it’s compelling nevertheless.
I read it in the first place because the late Mr. Feintuch used to post on rec.arts.sf.written, and he made it sound like something I’d like. And it is something I like. I’ve read the whole series. Indeed, everyone in our house read it, to the point where we affectionately refer to the series as Midshipman’s Mope. But if it’s so awful, why did I keep it, and why am I reading it again? Isn’t that an interesting question?
At a Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, the question was raised as to why people read bad books. Sharyn November, the editor of Penguin’s YA Firebird line, replied that everyone wants Cheetos sometimes. The problem with that answer is that it doesn’t really model what I do—and I’m generalising from one person here, but then, as Steven Brust says, everyone does that. If it was a case of “everyone eats Cheetos sometimes,” the requirement for something undemanding, then almost anything undemanding would do. Now I do from time to time want things that are undemanding for their undemandingness, but I always want specific things. It’s not a case of “anything undemanding would do.” I want things that scratch particular itches.
When I think of my comfort re-reads they all tend to be things where everything comes out all right in the end—children’s books, romances, and military stories. The characters in these sorts of books tend to be justified in what they do. There’s a certain black and white nature to everything. They tend to be series, so I can really soak myself in them, or if not series then at least a lot of books to the same formula. If I’m comfort re
ading I don’t read one Noel Streatfeild or Georgette Heyer or W. E. B. Griffin, I read typically five or six. The other thing they have in common is that while the prose might be clunky, the characters might have only two dimensions and the plots when examined may be ridiculous, they’re really good on the storytelling level. They may look contrived when you step away from them, but while you’re immersed, you can care. Indeed, you’re allowed to care, encouraged to care. They’re manipulative in some ways, but you feel that the author is buying what they’re selling, they’re button-pushing, but they’re honest. They’re the author’s buttons too. Heyer may be laughing just a little at her heroine, and inviting you to laugh with her, but the text is also deeply invested in the reality of social anxiety and true love. And they’re not interchangeable. If I want military training and male camaraderie, then giving me waltzing at Almacks doesn’t cut it, and vice versa.
Now this probably doesn’t help with why other people read bad books at all, as lots of people don’t re-read much if at all. But it might be why they keep on reading new volumes in a bad series. They know what they’re getting, it’s honest, you’re invited to care about the characters, who will be justified in their main actions, and the storytelling is good.
Midshipman’s Hope definitely fits all this. I picked it up this time because I was trying to think about why I read bad books, so I wasn’t pining for a rigid navy in space, or for aliens and planets, which are definitely elements that make me forgive a lot of flaws. By about a third of the way in, though, the book had entirely grabbed me. I didn’t want to put it down, even though I knew what happened, I wanted to go through that dance again with poor old unforgiving Seafort as he does everything wrong and hates himself and it all turns out to have been right. I didn’t go on to re-read the rest of the series. But if I’d been at home and they’d been there, I might well have, even knowing everything I already know about them.
(The future slang in the later books irritates me, and the fact Seafort comes from Cardiff, which is mildly irritating in Midshipman’s Hope, because he’s so totally American, becomes actively annoying later where Feintuch demonstrates he knows nothing about the geography and culture. I’m writing this post in Cardiff. It’s a city that has changed a lot in my lifetime. I’m sure it’ll change a lot more by 2194, but I think it would take a lot longer than that to change into the U.S. Midwest. I wonder if there are people in the Philippines who grump like this about Juan Rico?)
However and notwithstanding, if you’re looking for a book about a boy with an uncompromising sense of honour who gets piled with too much responsibility, and that has spaceships and aliens and strong narrative drive and undeniable sincerity, and if you can put up with a handful of ludicrous coincidences pushing the plot along, then Midshipman’s Hope is definitely the book for you.
JULY 30, 2009
65. Subtly twisted history: John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting
It’s so easy to talk about how clever The Dragon Waiting (1983) is that it’s easy to lose sight of what good fun it is, so I wanted to start with this. It’s a brilliantly written, absorbing book with great characters; it’s hard to put down once it gets going; and it’s laugh-aloud funny in places. This is John M. Ford’s World Fantasy Award–winning masterpiece, and it really is notably brilliant. It’s a historical fantasy that plays games with history. I suppose lots of historical fantasies and alternate histories play games with history, but most of them are playing tic-tac-toe while The Dragon Waiting is playing three-dimensional Go.
It’s a Richard III book, though it takes a while to figure that out. Indeed, it takes a while to figure it out at all, because the first part that introduces the three main characters seems like the beginning of three different books, set in three different worlds. The wizard Hywel Peredur lives in a post-Roman Wales, the boy Dimitrios Ducas lives in a Gaul reconquered by Byzantium, and the doctor Cynthia Ricci lives at the Renaissance court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Yet this is all one world and the three of them meet up with Gregory von Bayern, a vampire gun-maker, at an inn in an Alpine mountain pass, and go on together to work against Byzantium’s designs for reconquering Britain, and suddenly we are into the reality of the Wars of the Roses, the plotting nobles, the princes in the tower, vampires, wizards, Henry Tudor with Byzantine backing, exploding guns, dragons, witches, ciphers, poisons, and intrigue.
The world is an alternate history where Julian the Apostate lived to ensure no one faith had priority over any other, and everyone is largely pagan. I don’t think anyone else has written a feudal world without Christianity that I’m convinced by, never mind medieval Europe, so this in itself is a major achievement. Justinian and Theodora became vampires, and held on to and consolidated Belisarius’s reconquest of half of Italy, going on to divide up France between themselves and the English crown. Now they’re mopping up the rest of Italy.
Real-world Byzantium fell in 1453. It’s hard to feel all that sorry the alternate world counterpart is trying to swallow up all of Europe fifty years after that, which makes them an interesting choice of bad guys. We never see them all that clearly, what we mostly see are the individuals manipulated by them, not Byzantium itself. Still, it makes a convincing menace.
I normally hate alternate histories where the turning point was hundreds of years before and yet there are characters with the same names and characters, but it doesn’t bother me at all here. I think I don’t mind it because Ford does it so perfectly, and not only that but he knows the history and geography so well that he never puts a foot wrong. There are very few books written by Americans and set in Britain (and only this one in Wales) where the geography works and the scale of the landscape feels right. (Similarly, I’d never dare set anything in the US.) Ford knows the real history well enough that it sits up and does tricks for him.
Similarly, if there’s one thing that puts me off a book it’s vampires. Yet The Dragon Waiting has a major vampire character and a plot and backstory that rely on vampires. It helps that they’re not sexy, or attractive, it helps that they’re much more like heroin addicts and that Gregory is using animal blood as methadone. Most of all, it helps that it doesn’t have vampires because vampires are cool, but because vampires are necessary. At least it doesn’t have any pirates. (But perhaps Ford could have made me like pirates, too. He made me almost like a Star Trek novel, after all.)
The characters are wonderful, all the way through. The book gives you time to get to know them and then uses them in precise ways, so you feel they’re doing exactly what they would do. This is true even of minor characters. It also uses Arthurian motifs to underscore the story, without ever getting tangled up in them. Part of the satisfaction of re-reading a complex book like this is seeing the mechanism, knowing what’s going to happen and seeing the inevitability of each action. It’s surprisingly hard to do that with this—it’s hard to hold on to. It’s as if in twisting the tail of history Ford could somehow manage to twist his own tale and make it come out differently.
What a good book this is, what an enjoyable read, and how incredibly clever. I love it.
It’s not likely to have a U.S. reprint soon, so I’d grab this attractive Gollancz “Ultimate Fantasies” edition while it’s available.
AUGUST 18, 2009
66. A very long poem: Alan Garner’s Red Shift
Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973) is a book I have practically memorised, which makes re-reading it weird—it’s more like reading poetry than prose, because my brain keeps filling in the whole line from the first word. The reason I know it so well is because I like it a great deal, and also because it’s a very difficult book (again like poetry) and one that I first read as a teenager and kept coming back to and back to in an attempt to understand it. Garner’s previous books—The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), The Owl Service (1967), Elidor (1965)—were children’s books deeply rooted in place and mythology. Red Shift is all that, but it definitely isn’t a children’s book. It’s much too cha
llenging and elliptical. Almost the whole book is dialogue, there’s practically no description and very little attribution of dialogue. It’s set in the same places in three distinct time periods—Tom and Jan in the contempory 1973, Thomas and Madge in the Civil War, and Macey and the remnants of the Ninth Legion at the borders of Roman Britain. They’re linked by location and by a paleolithic axe and by a vision they all share of something that is blue and silver and very bad. You don’t find out what the blue and silver thing is until the end of the book.
The story can be seen as a version of Tam Lin. It’s also a naturalistic story about a romance between young people with no money, and a story about some Roman soldiers trying to live on a hilltop, and a story about the kinds of betrayals you get in civil wars. It’s a story about the history of Cheshire, and about the way history has deep roots and happens right where you are. It’s about sex and love and longing and how hard it can be to hold on to connections between people. It’s full of beautiful imagery and language. It jumps between times that are linked thematically. It really is a lot more like poetry than prose, it makes more sense if you read it with the protocols of poetry.
“I’m not sure about the mean galactic velocity. We’re with M31, M32 and M33 and a couple of dozen other galaxies. They’re the nearest. What did you say?”
“I love you.”
“Yes.” He stopped walking. “That’s all we can be sure of. We are, at this moment, somewhere between the M6 going to Birmingham and M33 going nowhere. Don’t leave me.”