What Makes This Book So Great (23 page)

The character I’m ridiculously fond of is Estraven. I’ve loved him since I was a teenager. He’s not a man or a woman, he’s in exile always and everywhere, and he always sees the big picture and tries to do what he can. He tries to be as good a person as he can, in difficult circumstances. He’s one of my favourite characters in all of fiction, and when people play that “who would you invite to dinner” game, I almost always choose him, immediately throwing all hope of gender balance out of the window. I cry when he dies, and at the end of the book, every time. I don’t know if I’d react so strongly to Estraven if I read the book for the first time now. His backstory, which is revealed so beautifully slowly, is one of the beauties of the book. His name reflects the levels of culture we have in Karhide, friends and hearth-brothers call him Therem, acquaintances call him Harth, and Estraven is his landname, which would be used where we use a title—yet when he learns mindspeech, up on the glacier, it is as Therem that he manages to hear it, and he hears it in his dead brother’s voice—the dead brother with whom he had a child. Poor Estraven, so tragic, so clear-sighted, so perfectly and essentially of his world and culture!

It’s a commonplace of SF for planets to have only one country and culture. Le Guin should be commended for mentioning four or five on Gethen and showing us two. However, there’s a Cold War legacy in the way Karhide and Orgereyn are opposed, and Orgereyn is totalitarian, with its units and digits and work camps. I feel Orgereyn only really exists to give Genly and Estraven something to escape from, but I love their escape so much that I don’t care. I think it’s done pretty well, certainly Genly’s subjective experience of it, but I don’t think Orgereyn is as developed or as well thought through as Karhide.

The “tamed hunch” of the fastnesses, and the “mindspeech” of the Ekumen are both dealt with science fictionally rather than fantastically, but are “psi powers” of a kind rather unfashionable these days. Le Guin writes about them believably and interestingly, and I think they enhance the book by being there and providing more strangeness.

The heart of the book is the journey across the glacier, two people, from different worlds, manhauling a sledge across vast distances. There are echoes of Scott’s Antarctic expeditions—for me, echoes the other way around, because I read
The Left Hand of Darkness
first. She took these quintessentially useless and particularly masculine endeavours and made them over into something else entirely. She was clearly fascinated with polar exploration—she has a short story in
The Compass Rose
about women from South America getting to the South Pole first and not marking it or telling anyone. Here there’s a reason for the winter journey. So that’s another gender subversion.

The Gethenians have a concept they call “shifgrethor,” which is like pride. You waive shifgrethor for someone to tell you something directly, otherwise you sidle around to avoid offending them. This is notably different from Earth notions of offending pride only in how conscious they are of it, of what is sayable and unsayable, of having a mechanism for waiving it. I think it’s one of the more interesting gender things—much more interesting than that they don’t fight wars—that they have this set of shifting privileges and offendable pride and that they’re aware of it. They’re touchy in a very alien way, and I think that’s really effective.

Le Guin has written essays since about the assumptions she made in writing the book. She also wrote the story “The Winter King” where she uses “she” as the pronoun for all Gethenians, rather than “he” as she does in the book, and the later story “Coming of Age in Karhide.” Both of these explicitly feminise the Gethenians. They’re interesting, as are her writings about the book, but they’re afterthoughts from a different world.

It is light that is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the left hand of light, as in the yin-yang symbol, in which dualities are united.
The Left Hand of Darkness
is a book about making whole. It’s also a book about what it means to be a good person and where gender is significant in that. But mostly it’s about the joy of pulling a sledge over a glacier between two worlds.

JUNE 10, 2009

58.
Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings: The short stories of Lord Dunsany

The first time I ever heard of Lord Dunsany was when my friend Jez Green read his story “Idle Days on the Yann” at one of my story parties. Although I’d never read it before, hearing it was like hearing something I’d read as a child, or before I was born, and the process of discovery was like a process of rediscovery. I’ve never felt that with any other writer—they were always new when they were new, but not Dunsany. And when I do re-read him, it’s recursive. In Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle” he talks about going into distances that continue to hold their charm as distance and never become mere surroundings, and that’s the best description of reading Dunsany I can think of.

Dunsany wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. When I tried to find more Dunsany in the early nineties he was about as out of print as it is possible for anything to be. His short stories had been reissued in Ballantine editions by Lin Carter in the seventies, and I eventually managed to get hold of these secondhand in one of those little bookshops that you just know wouldn’t be there if you ever went back to it. Fortunately, this situation has improved, and right now tons of Dunsany is available.
Time and the Gods
is an excellent big collection from Gollancz, and
Wonder Tales
and
In the Land of Time
are also in print. Besides these, there are a number of e-editions, and lots of his early stories are available free on Project Gutenberg. So right now it’s easy to get hold of Dunsany. But why would you want to?

Lord Dunsany wasn’t writing fantasy, because what he was writing was defining the space in which fantasy could later happen. He was influential on Lovecraft and Tolkien. There’s a whole strand of fantasy—the Leiber/Moorcock/Gaiman strand—that’s a direct descendant of his. But though he has always had a small enthusiastic fan base, it was possible for me to miss him entirely until the early nineties, and for lots of other people to miss him for even longer. I think this may be because he didn’t write many novels, and the novels he did write aren’t his best work. His acknowledged masterpiece novel,
The King of Elfland’s Daughter,
is probably best described as good but odd. He isn’t at his best writing characters, which gets peculiar at novel length. What he could do, what he did better than anyone, was to take poetic images and airy tissues of imagination and weight them down at the corners with perfect details to craft a net to catch dreams in. It’s not surprising he couldn’t make this work for whole novels, when as far as I know, nobody else has ever quite made it work in prose. If it is prose. It’s some of the most poetic prose ever written, quite enough to get anyone drunk on words.

Take this for example:

He opened a little, old, dark door in the wall through which I went, and he wheezed and shut the door. The back of the shop was of incredible age. I saw in antique characters upon a mouldering board, “Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings.” The sun was setting now and shone on little golden spires that gleamed along the roof which had long ago been thatched and with a wonderful straw. I saw that the whole of Go-by Street had the same strange appearance when looked at from behind. The pavement was the same as the pavement of which I was weary and of which so many thousand miles lay the other side of those houses, but the street was of most pure untrampled grass with such marvellous flowers in it that they lured downward from great heights the flocks of butterflies as they traveled by, going I know not whence. The other side of the street there was pavement again but no houses of any kind, and what there was in place of them I did not stop to see, for I turned to my right and walked along the back of Go-by Street till I came to the open fields and the gardens of the cottages that I sought. Huge flowers went up out of these gardens like slow rockets and burst into purple blooms and stood there huge and radiant on six-foot stalks and softly sang strange songs. Others came up beside them and bloomed and began singing too. A very old witch came out of her cottage by the back door and into the garden in which I stood. (from “The Shop in Go-By Street”)

It’s the weasels and the jade earrings that make it real and fantastical at once. It’s whimsy, but it isn’t ever empty whimsy. Or here again:

In a wood older than record, a foster brother of the hills, stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees came right up to the houses, which, with their great beams and wooden framework and thatched roofs, green with moss, seemed almost to be a part of the forest. (from “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”)

Sacnoth is a magic sword. It’s the moss on the roofs and the tribes of the beasts that anchor this, and all of it looks forward to the actual fantasy it prefigures. And here:

The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again. (from “The Sword of Welleran”)

It’s the “well-known” and the prosaic different cellars—I think you have to read a whole story to fully appreciate what he was doing, but these paragraphs are enough to give you a taste of the style and the form.

He really isn’t like anyone else at all—the closest in my opinion is Cordwainer Smith, who was writing SF, but who did the same sort of thing with assumptions and details and a long perspective.

Dunsany was a contemporary of Wells’s, but when we read Wells now we can see what he was writing was actual science fiction, like the science fiction we write now. You can’t do that with Dunsany and fantasy, but in a way that makes him even more interesting. He isn’t a father of fantasy but a grandfather or a fairy godfather. I tend to read, or even re-read, one Dunsany story at a time, but the images in them stick with me forever, which is how I know I didn’t really read them as a child, because I couldn’t have possibly forgotten them.

Give him a try, you’ll be glad you did.

JUNE 11, 2009

59.
The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge’s
A Fire Upon the Deep

Any one of the ideas in
A Fire Upon the Deep
(1992) would have kept an ordinary writer going for years. For me it’s the book that does everything right, the type example of what science fiction does when it works.

There’s a universe where not only technology but also the very ability to think increases with distance from the galactic core, and the universe is divided into “zones of thought.” In the “Slow Zone” you can’t have true AI or FTL. In the “Beyond” you can have those things, but nothing that takes more than human-level intelligence. In the “Transcend” you have singularities and godlike beings, and above that, who knows? There’s an ancient godlike evil known as the Blight lurking at the edge of the Transcend, the level where it’s possible to become a Power. Humans poking around wake it up and trigger a catastrophe. Their escaping ship, which might contain the seeds of the Blight’s destruction, rushes to the bottom of the Beyond, where it lands on a planet where the inhabitants, the Tines, are pack minds, at a medieval tech level. Meanwhile, Ravna, a human librarian at Relay, and Pham, a human rescued from the Slowness and patched together by a Power, start a rescue mission.

You could have lots of great stories set in the Beyond, with its solar systems full of uneasily co-existing alien civilizations. You could have stories set in the Slowness—Vinge later outdid himself with one,
A Deepness in the Sky
. You could have long series of books set on the Tines world, especially about first contact with them when humans get there. The interstellar newsgroups could themselves have sustained trilogies. What Vinge gives us of his universe is like what Tolkien says of Middle Earth, “an account … of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told.”
A Fire Upon the Deep
is the story of an absolutely fascinating universe and of how it came to an end.

The book alternates between the big events happening in space and the small events happening on Tines World. It never fails to leave one story at a point where you want more of it, and never fails to be enthralling with the other story. There are two stories on the planet—Jefri and Johanna are separated and dealing with two entirely opposed groups of aliens. Tines World has nations and climates and history and philosophies, as well as fascinatingly bizarre aliens. And for those aliens, the human language, Samnorsk, and human history and technology as revealed by the child’s toy dataset they have from the human children, is new and universe changing, while we know that humans are trivially unimportant in the larger scale of things and that Samnorsk is a minor unimportant language. There’s a good cognitive dissonance with that.

Vinge does really well at making the wider universe seem real, even though we don’t see all that much of it. We have what Ravna takes for granted, and what she has to explain to Pham. We see the newsgroups and get to know some of the posters—like the Aphranti Hegemony (“Death to Vermin”) and Sandor at the Zoo. We see a little of Relay and a little of Harmonious Repose, but it’s surprising how much detail is evoked with so little. The Beyond feels solid, with its layers of translation and weird aliens—ones that walk on tusks, and ones like potted plants, and Twirlip of the Mists, who sounds demented but is always right.