What Makes This Book So Great (10 page)

Do not say “Where can I buy your books?” The answer is “The bookstore!” (Or “The dealers’ room!” or “Your usual online bookstore!”) Asking this question makes the writer feel as if you think they’re self-published and sell their books out of the back of their car. (My husband’s boss asks me this every time she sees me.) Ellen Kushner is irate about it in her journal. I think people ask this because they want to demonstrate good intentions, but again, don’t ask. If you want one just go and buy one quietly where you normally buy books.

If you have read their books and you adore them, do say so if you’d like to. You can’t go wrong with “I really like your books!” or “I really like
Specific Title
.” The worst thing that can possibly happen is that the writer will say “Thank you,” and you’ll stand there tongue-tied by being in their presence. This still happens to me occasionally when I meet writers I really admire. The last time I met Samuel Delany I managed an actual sentence with words in it, rather than just awestruck gurgling. Most writers can cope even with the gurgling if they have to.

If you have read their books and you hate them, don’t say, “I have to say, I really hate your work.” You don’t have to say it at all. Again, it leaves the writer with no possible honest and polite reply. If you’re having an actual conversation with the writer about something and it’s actually relevant to say that you hate all alternate history including theirs, or their treatment of dragons, then it can be OK. But marching up to them and saying you have to say it—and it’s something people always feel they have to preface that way—is just a waste of time.

Pick your time to approach. If a writer is eating or busily engaged with other people, don’t interrupt them just to gurgle at them. There’ll probably be another moment.

Oh, and finally, if you meet a writer and they turn out to be four feet tall, or immensely fat, or terribly ugly, or old, don’t say, “I thought you’d be taller/thinner/prettier/younger.” As I was saying, writers are people and can have their feelings hurt by this kind of thing just like anyone else.

JANUARY 29, 2009

26.
“Give me back the Berlin Wall”: Ken MacLeod’s
The Sky Road

Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books consist of
The Star Fraction
(1995),
The Stone Canal
(1996),
The Cassini Division
(1997) and
The Sky Road
(1999). That’s the order they were published in originally in the UK, in the US they were published in the order
The Cassini Division, The Stone Canal, The Star Fraction
and
The Sky Road
. Tor have republished
The Star Fraction
and
The Stone Canal
in one trade paperback called
Fractions,
and I bet (without any inside information, just because it makes sense) that they’re fairly shortly going to do the other two in one volume called
Divisions
.
*

I really like these books. They’re a fully imagined future where the capitalist criticism of communism is entirely true, and so is the communist criticism of capitalism. They’re kind of libertarian (several of them won the Prometheus Award) and they’re grown up about politics in a way that most SF doesn’t even try. These aren’t fantasies of political agency, not at all. But they contain revolutions, political, technological and social, and they have an awareness of history that makes them stand out. MacLeod has written more accomplished books since, but not more passionate ones. Anyway, because of the publication order differences, it’s always possible, when two or three Ken MacLeod fans are gathered together, to get up an argument about reading order. The books are chronologically sequential in the original publication order. But it doesn’t really matter. You can make a pretty good argument for any order—except that everyone always agrees that you should read
The Sky Road
last. So, out of sheer perversity, I decided to re-read it alone, and to consider whether it works as a standalone novel.

Surprise: it does. You can start with
The Sky Road
. And it’s even a good idea.

The Sky Road
and
The Cassini Division
are alternate futures to the stories in
Fractions
. And if you read
The Sky Road
in sequence, that’s a lot of what you’re going to be thinking about. Most of the conversations I’ve had about the book have been about that. But it’s a cracking good story in its own right. It has two storylines, alternating chapters throughout the book. One is the first-person point of view of Clovis colha Gree, a student of history in a distant future, and the other is the third-person point of view of Myra, a disillusioned and life-extended communist about a century from now. They are connected by revelation, and because Clovis is trying to write a biography of Myra—The Deliverer. You want to know how things got from A to B, and slowly, over the course of the book, you find out.

The thing I never really appreciated, reading it as the culmination of the series, is the way in which Clovis’s story is shaped like fantasy. The woman comes to him through the fair, she is beautiful and perilous, she is something more than she seems, and they fall in love and she takes him into a world of enchantment. Myra’s story is all end-game cynicism, while Clovis’s is, in complete contrast, almost idyllic. There’s also time, history, technology, boilerplate spaceships, computers that are half organic and half babbage engine, the background terraforming of Mars, and all the tortured compromises Myra has made along the way from the ideals she held in 1970s Glasgow. For this book, I really don’t think it matters who appeared in the earlier books. The story more than stands alone. The background of the earlier books just gives it more depth, more history. If you have that context, it hooks on for you, if not, I really don’t think it would matter. The alternate-ness certainly doesn’t matter, except in the way that missed opportunities are always cause for wistfulness. And I’m not sure I don’t like Clovis’s world better than Ellen May’s anyway.

MacLeod always plays fair with his ideologies. The text doesn’t take a position. He doesn’t extrapolate to meet his own prejudices—well, not more than people do just by being human. In the Clovis parts of
The Sky Road,
the greens and barbarians have won, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Clovis follows the religion of Reason:

In the beginning, God made the Big Bang, and there was light. After the first four minutes, there was matter. After billions of years there were stars and planets and the Earth was formed. The water brought forth all manner of creeping things. Over millions of years they were shaped by God’s invisible hand, Natural Selection, into great monsters of land and sea.

The conclusion of someone who has lived from Myra’s time until Clovis’s is that the people of his day are more able to withstand the problems and temptations that destroyed the world once.

I think
The Sky Road
is my favourite of the quartet because I find both characters sympathetic.

I’m tempted now to re-read them all in reverse order and see how it goes, but I think I’ll restrain myself. And if you haven’t read them, you should by all means be sensible and start with
Fractions,
which is even in print.

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

27.
What a pity she couldn’t have single-handedly invented science fiction! George Eliot’s
Middlemarch

It’s too much to ask, of course. Nobody could, a quarter century before
The War of the Worlds,
and when Verne was only just beginning to be translated into English. But it’s such a pity, because she would have been so very good at it.

I started to read George Eliot only a few years ago. She suffered in my mind from a geographical, or rather alphabetical, contagion with Dickens and Hardy. (I have no idea how it is that my grandmother didn’t own any Mrs. Gaskell, when Mrs. Gaskell would have been so very much to her taste. It makes me a little sad every time I read
Cranford,
to know she never did.) In any case, whatever you may think, George Eliot isn’t tedious or depressing or shallow. What I loathe about Dickens is the shallowness of his caricatures, the way he pushes them around his ludicrous plots not even like puppets (because I could admire a well-done puppet show) but like children’s toys that might topple over at any moment and get a grinning “Aw shucks” from the mawkish and badly played omniscient narrator. Hardy, on the other hand, was a good writer. I loathe him for the morbidity of his imagination and the sheer misery of his stories. Even his “lighter” works are blighted, and his best and most serious ones are barely endurable. But would I have liked
Middlemarch
any better when I was ten? Maybe it is a book you shouldn’t read until you’re forty.

But she should have been a science fiction writer! And she could have been because she saw the world in an essentially science-fictional way. She saw how technology changes society—she understood that thoroughly. In a way, she was someone who had lived through a singularity—she had seen the railroad coming and had seen how it entirely transformed the world she grew up in, with second-order effects nobody could have predicted. Her books constantly come back to technology and the changes it brings. Her whole angle of looking at the world is much closer to Wells than to Dickens. She didn’t often speculate, but when she did, you have lines like: “Posterity may be shot, like a bullet from a tube, from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes.” (From
Felix Holt, the Radical
.)

And she understood the progress of science, the way it isn’t all huge and immediate:

He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the meantime have the pleasure of making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But he did not simply aim at a more general kind of practice than was common. He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of discovery. (
Middlemarch
)

The trouble with mimetic fiction isn’t that you can tell what’s going to happen (I defy anyone to guess what’s going to happen in
Middlemarch,
even from halfway through) but that you can tell what’s not going to happen. There isn’t going to be an evil wizard. The world isn’t going to be destroyed in Cultural Fugue and leave the protagonist as the only survivor. There aren’t going to be any people who happen to have one mind shared between five bodies. There are unlikely to be shape-changers. In science fiction you can have any kind of story—a romance or a mystery or a reflection of human nature, or anything at all. But as well as that, you have infinite possibility. You can tell different stories about human nature when you can compare it to android nature, or alien nature. You can examine it in different ways when you can write about people living for two hundred years, or being relativistically separated, or under a curse. You have more colours for your palette, more lights to illuminate your scene.

Now, the problem with genre fiction is often that writers take those extra lights and colours and splash them around as if the fact that the result is shiny is sufficient, which it unfortunately isn’t. So the most common failing of genre fiction is that you get shallow stories with feeble characters redeemed only by the machinations of evil wizards or the fascinating spaceship economy or whatever. What I want is stories as well written and characterised as
Middlemarch,
but with more options for what can happen. That’s what I always hope for, and that’s what I get from the best of SF.

If Eliot could have taken her SFnal sensibility and used it to write SF, she could have swung the whole course of literature into a different channel. She could have changed the world. All the great writers who followed her would have had all the options of SF, instead of the circumscribed limitations of the mimetic world. We wouldn’t see books, like Piercy’s
He, She and It,
that are well written in character terms but incredibly clunky in SF ones because they don’t have the first idea how to embed SF tropes in a narrative.

Meanwhile,
Middlemarch
remains an extremely good book, and I enjoyed it as much on a second reading as I did on the first. You’d think from the bare bones that it would be as depressing as Hardy: it’s the story of two people who passionately want to succeed but who fail. Dorothea wants to help a great man in a great endeavour, and finds herself utterly miserable in marriage to a man jealous of her, and engaged on writing footnotes on footnotes. Lydgate wishes to make medical discoveries, and finds himself miserably married to a social climbing woman who weighs him down in debt, everyday cares and the shallows of life. Eliot shows us exactly why they make the decisions that seem like a good idea at the time and how they lead inexorably to disaster. It isn’t a miserable book though, not at all. It doesn’t grind you down. It’s very funny in parts, it has a huge cast of minor characters, some of them seen in great detail (she knows how to use omni deftly) and Dorothea’s story at least ends happily, if unconventionally. That is, unconventionally for a Victorian novel. She doesn’t get to be the ambassador to Jupiter, more’s the pity. She always wants to rush off and do good. “Let us find out the truth, and clear him!” she declares, when she hears base rumours about Lydgate. I’d like her to be in a universe where everyone’s response to that wasn’t to tell her to be sensible and calm down.

Middlemarch
is a panorama, and a terrific novel of life in provincial England just before the Reform Act. It’s the kind of book where you want to gossip to your friends about the characters and what can become of them. I love it, and I heartily recommend it. But I wish she’d invented science fiction instead, because she could have, and it would have been so amazing if she had.