What Makes This Book So Great (21 page)

This is, like all Bisson’s work, a very American book. It’s not just the history, it’s also the wonderful sense of place. I found myself thinking of it when I went on the Capitol Limited train down through Harper’s Ferry last summer, the geography of the novel informed the geography out of the train window. At one point I realised I’d just crossed the bridge that is destroyed in the book—but that wasn’t in real life. That was the turning point of history—in Bisson’s novel, Tubman was with Brown and they burned the bridge, and everything was different afterwards. In Bisson’s 1959, the South, Nova Africa, with its N’African inhabitants, black and white, and the North, the United Socialist States of America, are at peace, the border seems a lot like the way the border between the US and Canada used to be. (Speaking of Canada, Quebec is mentioned separately from Canada and must have gained independence somehow, or maybe Confederation happened differently. Unsurprisingly, Bisson doesn’t go into detail.)

I like the characters, all of them, the 1859 and the 1959 ones. The minor characters are done very expressively with just a little description going a long way:

Harriet was at the Center, Pearl said, working on Sunday, was that what socialism was all about, come on in? Not that Harriet would ever consider going to church, she was like her Daddy that way, God Rest His Soul, sit down. This was the week for the Mars landing, and Pearl found it hard to listen to on the radio until they had their feet on the ground, if ground was what they called it there, even though she wished them well and prayed for them every night. God didn’t care what planet you were on, have some iced tea? Or even if you weren’t on one at all. Sugar? So Pearl hoped Yasmin didn’t mind if the radio was off.

and the book’s style moves seamlessly from that kind of thing to:

Dear Emily, I am writing to tell you that my plans changed, I went to Bethel Church last night and saw the great Frederick Douglass. Instead of a funeral, I attended a Birth. Instead of a rain of tears, the Thunder of Righteousness.

I like the way the history seems to fit together without all being explained. I like the shoes from space that learn your feet, and the way they are thematic all the way through. I like the way the people in 1959 have their own lives and don’t think about the historical past any more than people really do, despite what Abraham thought when he wrote for his great-grandson, not guessing it might be a great-granddaughter. I like the buffalo having right of way across highways and causing occasional delays. I like the coinage N’African, and I like that almost all the characters in the book are black but nobody makes any fuss about it. (They didn’t put any of them on the cover, though.) There’s one heavy-handed moment, when a white supremacist (the descendant of the white abolitionist doctor) gives Yasmin a copy of a 1920s alternate history
John Brown’s Body,
a book describing our world. They don’t think much of it, and you can understand why. Their world is socialist, green, more technologically advanced—it’s 1959 and they have space manufacturing and a Mars mission, as well as airships (of course!) and green cars—and still has herds of buffalo and nations of First Nations people. Texas and California rejoined Mexico. Ireland won independence in 1885. It’s been a struggle, and it feels complicated, like history, but not many people would prefer the racism, class problems and injustice of our world. Yet it isn’t preachy, except for that one moment.

I’ve heard it said that the U.S. obsession with their Civil War, and the large number of alternate histories featuring it as a turning point, arise out of a desire to have slavery back. I think even the South Triumphant novels are more often Awful Warnings than slaver panegyrics, and
Fire on the Mountain
puts the whole thing in a different light. People want to do the Civil War again and get it right this time. The book may be a little utopian, a little naive, but it’s a beautifully written story about a nicer world, where, in the background, people are landing on Mars. In 1959.

APRIL 27, 2009

53.
Susan Palwick’s
Shelter

There’s a certain kind of book that’s almost a subgenre: the important book. The sort of book that everyone is talking about even if they hate it, the sort of book that gets reviewed everywhere and appears on award lists and gets discussed and is influential on the genre and other writers.
Anathem
is one of last year’s and so is
Little Brother
(2008). If you’re reading this, then it’s quite likely that you’ve read them and even more likely that you’ve heard people talking about them and you plan to read them, or you very strongly plan not to read them because what you’ve heard has put you off. Sometimes, though, there will be a book that seems to me like it ought to be an important book and then for some inexplicable reason practically nobody agrees with me. It comes out, it does OK, but it doesn’t get the attention I feel it deserves. Some people like it, but it never becomes something everyone is talking about. I’ve talked about a couple of these here,
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
and
Lady of Mazes
. Susan Palwick’s
Shelter
is another. It came out in 2007 and I read it instantly, because I love Palwick, and I wrote about it on my LiveJournal and then—nothing. Nobody else was excited about it, it didn’t get nominated for anything, though I nominated it for a Hugo.
Shelter
is very well worth your attention.

It’s set in a near-future San Francisco, it covers twenty years of history, and it deals with a world in which a whole pile of current trends and new technology intersect in complex and fascinating ways with people’s lives. As you’d expect if you’ve read Palwick’s fantasy novels
Flying in Place
(1992) and
The Necessary Beggar
(2005), it has solidly drawn characters and the world feels very real. What you might not expect is how well she does the science-fictional extrapolation.

There’s a major plague known as CV, “caravan virus,” that mutates fast and has many strains. It kills lots of people, and the ones who survive have to cope in isolation with robot (“bot”) nursing and people interacting with them only in whole-body protective suits. Two little girls survive the virus: Meredith, rich and white, and Roberta, poor and black. They also represent the two extremes of selfishness and altruism—and this is a world where altruism has been medicalised and Roberta spends a lot of time in therapy and in fear of mindwipe because of her “problem.” Their lives are intertwined from that childhood illness through their connection to Meredith’s father, the uploaded Preston, and to Meredith’s troubled adopted son. When mental problems are routinely treated with mindwiping, what do you do if you discover someone you love is beginning to develop them? How can you ask for help when you know what sort of help you’re likely to get?

The book opens with the third narrator, House, an AI convinced it isn’t an AI. AIs are illegal in the US because they’re defined as legally persons, and therefore owning them is slavery. There’s also the AI terrorism problem.… House’s point of view is done beautifully. It feels entirely real, entirely immersive, and you can really believe the way it reasons its way through decisions. The book begins in the “present” of the story, during a very severe storm (global warming has deteriorated), and goes back to the earlier events that led to the world and the relationships we’re given at the beginning. Palwick directs our sympathies as a conductor directs a symphony. The twenty years of history and events we’re shown, from different points of view, build up a picture of a future that has clearly grown from our present. Every detail has second-order implications—you have bots doing the cleaning, so you have people afraid of bots, and people who think doing your own cleaning is a religious act, and you have sponge bots trying to stem a flood as a metaphor for people unable to cope.

This is also the kind of SF you can put up against
Middlemarch
as character study; it’s really a story about people. But the people are in situations they can be in only given the science-fictional premises of the story—damaged by the isolation, worried about mindwipe, trying to fake not being altruistic, coming up with new kinds of art, trying to cope with an uploaded, ubiquitous, but not necessarily benign father.

I also liked it that Roberta was a lesbian and this was an undramatic fact—well, breaking up with her girlfriend was dramatic, but the fact of her orientation was no more significant than Meredith’s heterosexuality. It’s refreshing to have major characters with non-heteronormative sexuality without the book being about that.

One thing I found weird and unconvincing was that Gaianism had become the mainstream religion of the US, displacing Christianity which still exists as a minority thing. I don’t see Christmas celebrations being replaced by Solstice ones anytime as soon as
Shelter,
and while I understand the purpose of the Gaian temple and how much better that worked for the story than a church would have, I didn’t see anything that would have made Christianity be all but forgotten. I kept worrying at this detail because the general level of worldbuilding and world-holding-together is so good that this niggled.

This was actually my third reading of
Shelter,
because I read it straight through again as soon as I’d finished it. The harrowing parts of it, and the ethical dilemma that lies at the heart of it, don’t get any easier to read. But it remains a wonderful book, a shining example of what science fiction can be when it tries.

MAY 31, 2009

54.
Scintillations of a sensory syrynx: Samuel Delany’s
Nova

I’ve talked before about how my least favourite books by an author can end up becoming my favourites because they stay fresh while I read the others to death. I can’t imagine how it is that I ever didn’t like
Nova
. It was published when I was four years old, in 1968 (and it’s in print!), and I read it when I was fifteen, and twenty, and twenty-five (I read everything on the shelves in alphabetical order when I was twenty-five) and I don’t think I’ve picked it up again until now. I was clearly too young for it those earlier times. Maybe this is a book you have to be forty-four and a half to appreciate. (Though Delany would have been twenty-four, twenty-five when he wrote it.) Reading it now I have vivid impressions from those earlier reads, images from it that have stuck with me for twenty (twenty-five, thirty) years but I’d also forgotten it enough that it was like reading an exciting new book, a new science fiction Delany! People have been saying often enough over the last twenty-five years when I’ve talked about Delany, “And
Nova
!” and I’ve always had half a mental hesitation in agreeing, because I knew I hadn’t enjoyed it. I was an idiot! This is one of the best of Delany’s early works. And yet, reading it now, and thoroughly enjoying it, I kept trying to find the book I knew I hadn’t liked in this new book that I did.

It’s a thousand years in the future, and humanity is scattered over the universe, with many colonized planets. There are three main political units: Draco (including Earth), the Pleiades Federation, and the Outer Planets. The transuranic element Illyrion is what powers the incredibly fast FTL spaceships, and keeps the balance of power among the three groups. Lorq Von Ray of the Pleiades has a feud with Prince and Ruby Red, of Draco, and is decided to get seven tons of Illyrion from the heart of a nova. But although all this is true, it isn’t quite that kind of book—it’s about the dignity of labour and a post-scarcity (except of Illyrion) post-cleanliness society, but it’s mainly about a gypsy boy called Mouse and his sensory syrynx, and tall Katan who comes from the moon and likes moons better than planets, and the twins Idas and Lyncaos, one black and one albino. It’s a grail quest story, and a grudge story, and it’s a story where the shape of the darkness between what’s said makes a pattern to match the visible pattern of the story—and maybe that’s what I didn’t like about it? Maybe I couldn’t see it in enough dimensions the last time I read it?

As always with Delany he has thought a lot about the implications of his future, the technology and the economics are all worked out and then mentioned only as they are relevant. It has aged pretty well, it doesn’t feel more than forty years old except sometimes when it talks about humanity living spread out on a number of worlds by the end of the twentieth century (I wish!) and when it talks about Pluto as the solar system’s outer edge and Triton as her most distant moon. We’re all still stuck on Earth, but we have found a lot more moons since 1967, not to mention the Oort cloud. I never thought the local geography of the solar system I learned as an SF-reading teen would seem so quaintly obsolete.

There are a lot of science fiction futures with faster-than-light drives, but I wonder if
Nova
has the fastest one of anything? They zip about between stars as Americans go between cities, for parties. It takes five hours to go from Alkane in Draco to the Dim Dead Sister in the Pleiades. There are no slow transits of systems, no time lost in hyperspace, no relativisitic problems, no gravitational problems, just whizzing along jacked in (1968 … anticipating some of cyberpunk) and landing directly on the planet when you get there. There’s a whole apparatus and paraphernalia of SF furniture missing. (Maybe that was my problem?) It’s weird though, it’s as if SF as a whole has decided on the speed of space travel not because of physics but because of the way other SF has done it, and Delany ignored that. In place of it there’s this very fast moving universe where worlds are big places and there are lots and lots of them and the characters zip between them excessively fast but without the reader losing the sense of places and distance.

There’s also a mythical dimension. This was one of the things that bothered me before. I felt I wasn’t getting it, and that it unbalanced the actual story. It’s stated overtly to be a grail quest, which makes Prince with his missing arm the Fisher King … or does it? Is Mouse with his one bare foot Jason—but so many of them have one bare foot. The mythical resonances are there, but they tangle. Is Lorq Prometheus, stealing fire to give to mankind? Is blind Dan falling in the chasm the Tarot Fool? One of the things I always remembered about
Nova
is that Mouse’s gypsy lack of belief in the tarot is seen as old-fashioned superstition—and they’re on a starship. The characters are clearly huge figures of mythical significance, but what figures, and in what system? I’ve never been sure. This read, it didn’t matter, their significance wasn’t more than appropriate, that they were themselves enough to carry it. The allegory may have been there but it never broke through the surface enough to disturb me.