INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (16 page)

SMILER’S FAIR

Rebecca Levene

Hodder & Stoughton hb, 416pp, £14.99

Stephen Theaker

“They say the fair holds one example of all that there is in the world – every food, every spice, every pleasure and every vice,” says nobleman Lahiru, who, though married with three children, will be “hunting the finest boy flesh to be had for many miles” during his visit. Smiler’s Fair is a travelling city, drawn by mammoths from place to place, because no one stays still for too long in this world. Do so and the worm men will get you! The fair, home to scoundrels, scum and psychopaths, takes a daily census of its inhabitants and visitors, and when the first death comes the fair moves on. For our cast, all roads pass through this exciting, squalid, movable feast.

Krish’s birth father, King Nayan, wanted him dead to undo a prophecy. Cut from his mother’s belly and stolen away, Krish knows nothing of that, and lives as a shepherd until a brush with the king’s flying squad sets him on the run. Lady Nethmi has been sent by her uncle to marry old Lord Thilak, but he already has a good woman to share his bed.

Eric is a teenage sellcock, growing too old for the sleazy customers of his owner, Madam Aeronwen. He decides to follow his favourite client home from the fair. Dae Hyo, perhaps the last of his tribe, would avenge the murder of his people and reclaim his homeland; trouble is, he’s also a recovering alcoholic chased out of town after he fell asleep on the job and got a team of miners killed by the worm men.

Smiler’s Fair
is very much the first part of a series, and doesn’t work brilliantly as a standalone novel. The protagonists move around the board, but few of their stories progress very far. It feels like threads were added till there were enough to fill the pages, rather than because they were truly needed. There’s a common theme to some of them, of scorned and mistreated wives: the woman who adopted Krish, beaten by the husband she always wanted to leave; Nethmi, an unwilling wife with an uncaring husband; Babi, wife of gay lord Lahiru, humiliated by the lover brought into their home. But with no common catalyst, it feels oddly coincidental that these life-changing adventures all begin at once.

The prose style feels uncomplicated and perhaps even deliberately simplified: in one five-page section I looked at, ninety-five per cent of the text was made up of one and two-syllable words, with only two of eighteen hundred words reaching five syllables. It feels like the language is pitched at someone with the reading age of eleven or twelve, though the content is far too salty for that age group. This makes it an easy and accessible book to read, but once you notice it’s hard not to feel like the book is talking down to you.

Levene’s editorial work on the excellent Doctor Who line from Virgin Books was very well regarded, and this feels rather like a book written by a canny editor who has surveyed the market, thought about what will be marketable (it will appeal to fans of
Game of Thrones
), and produced a book designed to fit the bill. Some parts are a bit corny – one man becomes the captive of a society of women, who of course require impregnation! – but it’s a solid adventure and I enjoyed reading it. I’m sure it will find fans, though I probably won’t read any sequels: I’m not worried about the characters, nor really intrigued by the trundly setting.

The worm men are frightening at first, but the premise of the book, that they can’t dig up into your home if it’s on the move (because the sun poisons the land against them), was unconvincing, and felt like an arbitrary way to set this world in motion. For me that world is in some ways too similar to our own: there are mammoths, but also snakes, cows, horses, goats, rats, etc. Maybe it is our world, or maybe it’s just parallel evolution, but the inclusion of Earth Prime animals in a fantasy novel always feels to me like a wasted opportunity. It’s ironic that fantasy is often less adventurous than science fiction when it comes to these things.

Promisingly, events later in the book suggest that the Hollow Gods of the series title might play a bigger role in future volumes. More weirdness and magic would certainly have made this book more appealing, and it might prove easier to take an interest in the lives of these mostly unpleasant characters if they were set in opposition to gods who are even worse.

GREEN PLANETS

edited by Gerry Canavan & Kim Stanley Robinson

Wesleyan University Press hb, 307pp, $85

Lawrence Osborn

Green Planets
is a collection of papers jointly edited by a professor of English literature, Gerry Canavan, and Kim Stanley Robinson. It explores “the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism” and “considers how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis”. Canavan introduces the volume with a historical overview of environmentally conscious SF. He offers some explanation of terms that will be used and sets the scene for the structure of book, which is built around opposing understandings of utopia and dystopia in language appropriated by Samuel Delany from W.H. Auden.

Part 1 is entitled ‘Arcadias and New Jerusalems’ and contains four chapters exploring the long-standing opposition between pastoral and urban utopias. Christina Alt’s opening chapter offers a depressing comparison of two of H.G. Wells’s stories – depressing because Wells first presents a pessimistic vision of the future of humanity in
The War of the Worlds
and then offers an eco-fascist vision of an earth cultivated to serve human interests in
Men Like Gods
. Michael Page illustrates the perennial struggle between evolutionary optimism and apocalyptic pessimism with the aid of Simak’s
City
and Stewart’s
Earth Abides
. Gib Prettyman explores the Taoist dimension in Ursula Le Guin’s utopian fiction. Rob Latham concludes Part 1 with an examination of New Wave critiques of eco-imperialism in hard SF.

The second part, ‘Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies’, consists of five chapters focused on the dystopias corresponding to the utopias of Part 1. It begins with Sabine Höhler’s study of Garrett Hardin’s
Exploring New Ethics for Survival
, which is perhaps slightly off-topic as Hardin was an ethicist rather than a SF writer and this book was really an apologia for his right-wing ethical stance. This is followed by Andrew Milner looking at an Australian example of climatic apocalypse, Adeline Johns-Putra analysing Maggie Gee’s
The Ice People
, and Elzette Steenkamp exploring ecological concerns in South African speculative fiction. Of these three chapters, I found Johns-Putra’s the most thought-provoking in that it uses SF to challenge gendered understandings of caring in environmentalism. Part 2 concludes with Christopher Palmer looking at the effect of the ubiquity of apocalypse in recent literature.

Part 3, ‘Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon’, is an attempt to explore the interstices between the utopias of Part 1 and their corresponding dystopias. Eric Otto looks at Paolo Bacigalupi’s strategic use of dystopias to commend their opposite. Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman offer a study of what they call science faction – recent speculative extrapolations from current science to earthly life after the (near) extinction of the human race. Although such material is only tenuously connected with SF, I found this chapter the most thought-provoking in the book. Bellamy and Szeman demonstrate the inherent conservatism of these extrapolations: by highlighting the supposed ease with which with the environment would recover after the end of the human race, the books they analyse present ecocatastrophe as a mere misstep, something that might be avoided by the appropriate technological fix. In Chapter 12, Timothy Morton uses
Avatar
as a peg on which to hang some rarefied thoughts on ecology and post-Enlightenment philosophy. To conclude the section, Melody Jue links Lem’s
Solaris
and Greg Egan’s ‘Oceanic’ to bring an ecological dimension to the surface/depth dichotomy in SF.

In addition to the essays that make up the bulk of the volume, there is an afterword in the form of a dialogue between Canavan and Robinson, which concludes on an upbeat note rejecting the charge of pessimism that is sometimes levelled at ecological SF. Last, but not least, Canavan has compiled a fairly comprehensive annotated reading list for anyone who wants to pursue ideas raised by the volume.

Given the multi-author nature of the work, it was inevitable that the quality of contributions would vary. There are some dull and uninteresting contributions. Indeed, one or two are little more than extended book reports. But those are more than compensated for by the chapters that throw up ideas you will want to develop in entirely different directions from those taken by the authors. In conclusion, the book certainly fills a gap in the market and offers an invaluable starting point upon which, hopefully, other scholars will build.

CALL AND RESPONSE

Paul Kincaid

Beccon Press pb, 391pp, £16

Paul Graham Raven

While introducing a section devoted to Christopher Priest (who else?), Paul Kincaid makes a claim which is a reliable marker that one is reading a critic rather than a reviewer: that writing a positive review is a far greater challenge than a negative one.

Kincaid is referring to his closeness to both Priest-the-man and Priest-the-author, to a familiarity with, and instinct for, the totality of an oeuvre which, counterintuitively, makes communicating one’s conceptions of the work under consideration that much harder. In my own case, the challenge is not born of an excessive closeness to Kincaid’s oeuvre (he’s too damned prolific for me to keep up with, as the TOC of
Call and Response
amply demonstrates) so much as a more reflexive concern: how to praise the work of a fellow critic without it looking like said praise is rooted primarily in the similarity of our critical positions?

Kincaid and I appear to have both a text-level aesthetic and a generic ontology in common: we tend to like the same books for similar reasons, and our conceptualisations of the ways in which genres are (self-)constructed have a considerable overlap (even though I mutter about modality where he fulminates on fuzziness; he’ll come round eventually, I’m sure). But while it’s very pleasant to find oneself in concord with a critic one admires and respects, there is a sense in which this is precisely the least valuable sort of criticism one can read. If there is a point to criticism beyond the simple commercial recommendation (or otherwise) of the review then it lies not in having one’s
a priori
prejudices and preferences affirmed. On the contrary: the best criticism, the criticism that sticks with you, is the criticism that challenges your preconceptions, changes your thinking. As such, and perhaps paradoxically, Kincaid’s is the wrong criticism for me to be reading; we attend the same church, you might say, and sometimes even harmonise from the same hymn-sheet.

So why, then, is
Call and Response
a valuable book, as well as a pleasurable one? It is this case to be made, the case for a less subjective sort of praise, that problematises the positive review: how to separate the ends from the means, the conclusions from the discussion. Or, to put it another way: how should one make the case for the value of the work to a hypothetical addressee who may not agree with its conclusions?

Fortunately for your not-so-humble interlocutor, Kincaid makes this easy, as it’s a question he wrestles with constantly and earnestly, whether in the abstract (as in his introduction) or in the concrete (as in the reviews and essays which follow it); there is a dutiful current of reflexivity in Kincaid’s writings, manifest in both the foregrounding of his personal and subjective relationships with particular books, oeuvres and authors, and his unshowy considerations of his own positionalities. Shorn of anthropological verbiage, what this means is that we don’t just see Kincaid’s opinions, but the criteria upon which they were based; we get to observe and share in the process of their interrogation. We see how the sausage gets made, in other words.

What might seem surprising, at least at first, is that this transparency and rigour is the hallmark of a critic who has concluded that the purpose of criticism, “as both a reader and a critic, is to help me explore the books I read.” Doesn’t that sound solipsistic and selfish? Doesn’t it sound like exactly the sort of ivory-tower attitude that “reviewers” so deplore in those with the lofty temerity to call themselves “critics”?

Of course it does – because it’s a conclusion taken out of context. And that, to me, is the reviewer/critic dichotomy in a nutshell: the reviewer attempts, consciously or not, to isolate a text in a sort of literary laboratory where its qualities can be examined with a false sense of objectivity; while the critic knows, instinctively or otherwise, that literature is neither created, consumed or discussed in a cultural vacuum, and that the text without context is mostly a mirror in which we glimpse our own face and mistake it for the author’s. Kincaid is an anthropologist of SF; he understands that all accounts are partial, all positions subjective, and that all authors – himself included! – walk the world with Barthes’s bullet lodged in their chests. He thus achieves the nearest possible thing to objectivity, by merit of operating on the assumption that objectivity is unachievable.

The value of the work, then, lies in the exposure of the process. We read Kincaid not to be told what to think, but to be shown how we might decide for ourselves.