Extra Star Drives for Empty Space

As I mentioned when it was published, my review of M. John Harrison's Empty Space for Strange Horizons was a more polished version of a rather ragged, untamed essay.

For the terminally curious, here are the parts that I cut. Most of the cuts were done for reasons of focus; a few I made simply because the sense of the sentences seemed, on reflection, too hermetic (or just wrong).

To indicate context and provide some form, I've included connecting material at the beginning and end.

Empty Space by M. John Harrison

My review of M. John Harrison's extraordinary novel Empty Space has been posted at Strange Horizons.

My original version of this review was a long, crazy, rambling essay. Editor Abigail Nussbaum did heroic work helping me cut it down into something for a general audience. I like both versions — this one is much more a review, the longer version is ... brain spewings. Abigail kindly suggested that I post the cut pieces here on the blog, and I will do that later this week. I think the Strange Horizons version is perfectly good for 90+% of readers, but a few folks might enjoy seeing what zany lands this great book, and its predecessors, sent me to.

Update: And here are the deleted passages.

Worldbuilding

From three of the most interesting things I've read recently and, thus, started thinking about together...

M. John Harrison:

A world can be built in a sentence, but epic fantasy doesn’t want that. At the same time, it isn’t really baggy or capacious, like Pynchon or Gunter Grass. It has no V. It has no Dog Years. It has no David Foster Wallace. It isn’t a generous genre. The same few stolen cultures & bits of history, the same few biomes, the same few ideas about things. It’s a big bag but there isn’t much in it. With deftness, economy of line, good design, compression & use of modern materials, you could ram it full of stuff. You could really build a world. But for all the talk, that’s not what that kind of fantasy wants. It wants to get away from a world. This one.

Ian Sales on Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey:

There are some 150 million people living in the Asteroid Belt. The greatest concentration is six million in the tunnels inside the dwarf planet Ceres. There is no diversity. There is passing mention of nationalities other than the authors’ own – and a bar the characters frequent plays banghra music – but the viewpoint cast are American in outlook and presentation. Ceres itself is like some inner city no-go zone, with organised crime, drug-dealing, prostitution, under-age prostitution, endemic violence against women, subsistence-level employment… Why? It’s simply not plausible. Why would a space-based settlement resemble the worst excesses of some bad US TV crime show? The Asteroid Belt is not the Wild West, criminals and undesirables can’t simply wander in of their own accord and set up shop. Any living space must be built and maintained and carefully controlled, and everything in it must in some way contribute. A space station is much like an oil rig in the North Sea – and you don’t get brothels on oil rigs.

Further, what does all this say about gender relations in the authors’ vision of the twenty-second century? That women still are second-class citizens. One major character’s boss is a woman, and another’s executive officer is also female. But that female boss plays only a small role, and everything the XO does she does because she has the male character’s permission to do so (and it’s not even a military spaceship).

Paul Di Filippo on Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders by Samuel R. Delany:

Given that the book achieves liftoff into SF territory halfway through, you need to know that Delany does not stint on his speculative conceits. His hand is as sure as of old. The future history he creates is genuinely insightful and innovative. But it’s always background, half-seen. Because our heroes are living in a semi-rural backwater and are self-professed “Luddites,” their mode of life is more archaic than the lifestyles of others. But the shifting world keeps bumping up against them, rather in the manner of Haldeman’s The Forever War. Eric and Shit move ahead almost in a series of discontinuous jumps, waking up at random moments like Haldeman’s returning soldiers to find the world growing stranger and less comprehensible and less welcoming around them. It’s as if they are riding a time machine whose intervals of travel are ever-increasing. By the end of the book, the two ancient lovers are relics, fossils, and the mutant children who, in a sense their actions helped birth, are golden-eyed and alien.

Delany’s focus on such humble men—both Eric and Shit proclaim their lives to have been full and happy and joyous, but ultimately inconsequential, and no other character beside Robert Kyle is a Bigtime Player, and he’s mostly offstage—is the ultimate enactment of the goals discussed in Ursula Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”. No wars, no heists, no inventions, no high drama, no bigger-than-life supermen propel this story. To pervert the title of Aaron Copland’s famous work, it’s a “Fanfare for the Common Horndog.” And yet by this very limitation, by the intensity with which Delany inhabits the simple lives of his heroes, the book assumes that majesty which all eternal and humble things acquire, when seen a-right. 

Security, Causality

We make fiction for the same reason as we make buildings: security. Rigid notions of causality in fiction have developed as shelter from a fear of the unstructuredness of actual events. Few societies have been more afraid than ours of losing a status quo that was illusory in the first place.

--M. John Harrison

In Which I Exhort You to Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody.  It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story. 

I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world.  I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face.  Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again for my desire for fantasy!"), but the effect of Who Fears Death is very different, despite the many horrific events experienced or observed by the characters, because its view of fantasy is more generous -- the world is, it seems to say, made up of stories.  They're how we understand things.  So be careful in the stories you tell and the stories you listen to, but don't give up on myth and legend and fantasy.  (In that, it's more Barry Lopez than M. John Harrison, really.)

Though the review I just sent off is 1,500 words, I felt like I could have gone on at twice that length, and I fear what I wrote is too general.  I didn't even find a way to write about the epigraph from Patrice Lumumba that opens the book ("Dear friends, are you afraid of death?") -- one of the fascinating things about the novel is how it uses fantasy in a kind of dialogic approach to reality, thus illuminating both.  For instance, part of the story uses a quest structure with echoes of Lord of the Rings (including a giant eye of evil) to critique both the good/evil dichotomy of so much epic fantasy and the good/evil thinking that fuels massacres and genocide in our own world.  The stories we tell ourselves are not innocent -- they affect how we behave toward each other, and Who Fears Death shows that vividly.  It's also about other types of fantasy -- for instance, the common one that the Harry Potter books so effectively exploited wherein nerdy or awkward folks become the saviors of the universe.  Typically, once they've saved the universe, those characters go on to have great lives in the epilogues of their books.  It doesn't really give too much away to say that Who Fears Death is smarter than that about what heroism and fate can demand, while also recognizing that stories, to be useful, may need to answer some of the ambiguities more common to life than fiction.  Just because there are lots of lies in legends and myths doesn't mean we don't need them or that they don't tell truths about life; we just need to be careful in how and why we choose to keep telling them.

The method of the novel's telling will probably not obsess ordinary readers the way it did me, because I'm always obsessed with the Barthian question, "Who speaks?"   There are a variety of levels of narration in the book, and it seemed to me to be a kind of fictionalized fiction: Onyesonwu, the protagonist, may be the narrator for most of the novel, but her narration is not "realistic", but rather novelistic -- not only is it full of dialogue in a way it probably would not be were it the transcription it is presented as, but both the dialogue and narration are shaped and intentional in a way off-the-cuff storytelling is not.  Everything exists for expository purposes, and there's none of the noise we get in even a very stylized novel like JR, nor the delight in the rhythm and stagi-ness of scripted dialogue that is David Mamet's calling card -- instead, we get fluent, deliberate, written conversation that moves the story along ... just like most novels that aren't posited as told tales give us.  I don't know if this was intentional on Okorafor's part or not, but it doesn't matter, because the effect is marvelous, suggesting multiple levels of distance from the actual (in a diegetic sense) telling of the tale.  What we are reading, then, is a novelized legend that wants to pass itself off as a transcribed autobiography, and this conceit fits wonderfully with so much of what else is in the book.  And then the final chapters add complexity to it all.

Anyway, the novel is wonderful in all sorts of different ways, and I'll be writing more about it, I expect, probably in my next Strange Horizons column, because I happened to read it while I was also reading Timmi Duchamp's fascinating anthology of essays Narrative Power and David Shields's provocative Reality Hunger, and the three books really had an awful lot to say to each other, at least in my mind.  More on all that later, though...

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison

a review by Dustin Kurtz

Nova Swing's conceit is essentially the same as the conceit of M. John Harrison’s previous book, Light. Somewhere out in the hinterlands of human-inhabited space there is a stretch of bad physics, a mean glowing strip of strange, light years long, known as the Kefahuchi Tract. In Light the Tract is a wild plaything for entradistas -- thrill-seeking celebrity pilots whose exploits seem to make up the substance of much of that galactic arm’s rumor. In an example of the casual but powerful analogy at which Harrison excels, the galactic neighborhood near the Tract is often called the Beach. The Tract is also puzzlingly related to an invisible, though hungry, earthly horror and his serial killer scion. And, just to spice things up, the Tract is somehow involved with ancient alien relics, the appropriation of which forms the goal of much of that book’s plot. If you haven’t read Light and are confused, don’t worry. I have read it, and those muddled sentences above are about the best I can do for a summary.

Nova Swing is set on a world that somehow intercepts that same Kefahuchi Tract on one discrete area of its surface. Or rather a sliver of the Tract, the alien K-code incarnate, has fallen to the ground near the depressed city of Saudade. The previous book spends much time in space, aboard a stolen military-grade K-ship. Here, though there are moments in which space travel comes into play, the action is almost entirely terrestrial.

With Nova Swing Harrison has written, or perhaps hopes to have written, a beautiful bastardization of far-flung science fiction and a gritty noir crime story. Gene-mods are sold like the latest fashions. Prostitutes with peppermint-scented hair, tusk-mouthed professional fighters and enormous horse-thighed rickshaw drivers all take their place among Harrison’s characters. His gun-kiddies, deadly packs of mercenary seven-year-olds sporting pastel raincoats and heavy weaponry, are some of his most memorable touches. Many of these characters are familiar from Light, though they are much more fleshed out here. The ostensible protagonists of the book are Vic Seratonin, a "travel agent" into the dangerous wastelands of fallen Tract, and Lens Aschemann, a grandfatherly detective who drives (or rather, is driven) around in a vintage convertible and looks like Einstein. Vic is this novel’s nihilist version of Ed Chianese. He is a terrestrial entradista. His predecessors entered the bewildering "event site" for adventure and glory. Vic, however, is terrified of the deadly chaos he encounters there. It makes him bitter and ashamed. The plot here is spare. Of course there is a bit of cat and mouse between Vic and Aschemann, particularly when Vic brings a piece of living code out of the site with some nasty side effects. There are some curious scenes in the event site itself, a bit of virtuoso accordion playing, and even one very gratifying firefight, but really this book, unlike either of the genres Harrison is drawing from, is not about the plot. It is about characters and atmosphere.

In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, Harrison has said that this book was meant to explore some of his favorite people from Light in greater detail, and that intention certainly shows. His ensemble is endearing, in a pathetic fallen-world kind of way. They are all of them weary, nostalgic or deluded, bitter and strung out and wonderful. Each character, from his cancer-ridden old Emil to his ingratiating Fat Antoyne captures you and makes you want to read more. The problem is that Harrison himself is as much in love with his creations as any reader. He cannot, it seems, bring himself to let them go when the time comes. The main plot of the book is much shorter than the book itself, the excess being filled with the lives of his sallow flock.

Of the two genres, his noir elements are arguably the more successful. In fact, he is better in this regard than most crime fiction authors being published today. Take this scene in a shoreline bar:

"I’ve seen you here," Aschemann said.

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back, so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminum frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal. He’d seen that dress in the nanocam pictures of Vic Seratonin. More importantly, perhaps, he'd seen it fourteen days ago when she’d stumbled out of the toilet at the Caf矇 Surf disoriented by the neon-light and music as if she were new in the world. She still had an unformed labile air. Her smile was cautious, but the dress was ready to promise anything.

"I’m here a lot,” she said. “I like the band. Do you like them?"

He took a moment to light his pipe. He swallowed a little.

"They’re as guilty as ever," he said.

The science fiction elements are pervasive and, again, very well written, but somehow end up feeling less than necessary. Yes there is interstellar travel and virtual reality, the nanocams mentioned above, even an alien race or two. But all these elements are bent under the weight of Harrison’s forlorn setting. Thus the aliens are VR addicts and the gene-mod kits are used by desperate girls forced into prostitution by desperate circumstances. His characters are outsiders, one and all.

In fact, the entire world of Nova Swing is defined, indeed posited by, its outsider status. Paradoxically, the landscape we are shown in the book, possibly including the planet, even the entire galactic branch, are characterized as being apart from some unseen centrality. The center of this landscape, from which all affluence, power, and even hope might come, is only hinted at in personal histories, glimpsed in the actinic glare of ship engine flares. It is just over the horizon, just across that fence, three star systems down the line. But the force of action in nearly all narrative, particularly in the two genres from which Harrison is ostensibly borrowing here, is driven by the division between a center and its lesser valent. One of the classic character tropes of cyberpunk is the outsider pitting his skills and moral superiority against a mainstream system or structure.

With no focus, no centrality, Harrison’s downtrodden characters are trapped. They have no drive to action. Indeed, they often seem puzzled by their idleness. And though they are excellently written, they display little of the change, the development, that we associate with successful characterization. In this, I would argue, they resemble an older conception of character, an early romantic model of static character, tempered here by invasive third-person narration.

In the absence of a center to this othered landscape all character motivation must come from a different source. The Kefahuchi Tract, or rather its planetside sliver, fills that void. Harrison has mentioned the Tract as a location for alien physics inscribed on the substrate of the universe. In practice, however, the event site comes across as a dream locale, full of portent. Cats come streaming out at dawn and running back in at night. Their coats are white or black, but never mixed. Landscapes are uncertain in the site, and distances have no meaning. There tend to be a lot of stray shoes. The site, here, is an impetus to action. Vic is driven to explore it in search of an unruly client, and also to satisfy a local tough’s hunger for valuable artifacts. Lens is driven into the site by his own past, his curiosity, and to track down Vic Seratonin. The event site is a medieval wilderness to these characters. It is the source of all signs, a mirror of the meaningless void surrounding their small world. It is a hyper-semic realm, mirror to the empty a-semic reaches of space from which it came. Everything has significance in the site, even if this sign is only one of alienation and difference, not meant to be communicated. "In every corner there’s a broken telephone nailed to the wall," Vic says early in the novel. "They’re all labeled Speak but there’s no line out. They ring but no one’s ever there." Just as Harrison’s characters have in them shadows of the pre-romantic, unchanging except perhaps in form, but with no significance attached to such transformation, here we see the mythical dark forest through which all quests must lead. Vic Seratonin is a Percival with a drinking habit. He is an outsider even among this lot, drawn into the event site despite his reluctance and bald-faced fear. Just as in tales of knights-errant, the landscape demands the action and the knights merely fulfill it. Unlike most romantic heroes, Vic is explicit about it. "You want to know what it’s like in there? The fact is, you spend all your time trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

If, then, the book does share more with early Romantic tales than either of its apparent source genres, it is so excellent a book that it serves only as a surprising confirmation to me that I must love tales of romance and questing. It takes a great writer to defy the larger trends of genre, even literary history, from within. Harrison, with this book, shows himself to be one of the best writers in the field, whatever that field might happen to be.

The Cowboy Angel Rides

The best writing advice I've read in at least a week comes from M. John Harrison's blog. Read the whole post. Here's a paragraph in case you don't trust me:

When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality. I don’t want to read a story misrepresented from some other culture’s folklore, or a story in which mainstream ideology of the last fifty years is presented as myth. Go read Clive Barker. Go read Kenneth Patchen, who was reportedly an unlikeable man but who could write you a fantasy in a couple of lines. Or put “The Gates of Eden” on repeat.