What Makes This Book So Great (35 page)

So, why don’t I like this book? Too much torture, too much angst, too much helplessness, and a very complicated plot that relies on everyone being idiotic—very much the way that people are idiotic, but even so. I also can’t help feeling that it doesn’t entirely make sense—the whole thing with Vlad mentioning the Merss family being taken as a threat and then the way they’re all killed doesn’t entirely fit with the explanations at the end. I don’t say “ah-ha!” I say “huh?” which no doubt means I’m missing something, but I missed it this time, too. On the subject of missing something, the book has two layers of extra-narrative quotation. One layer, about the natural history of the jhegaala, fits perfectly and makes sense—it illuminates the stages the animal goes through and these have some metaphorical relationship to what Vlad’s going through, no problem. The other, the quotations from the play, baffle me. They’re mostly funny little bits of dialogue, but there’s not enough there to deduce the whole play from the fragments, it seems to concern a Jhegaala but we don’t know who, and they serve generally to cast shadows instead of illumination. As this is a book about shadows, I suppose that makes sense.

DECEMBER 18, 2009

90.
Quiet iorich won’t forget: Steven Brust’s
Iorich

Iorich
will be published in January, which probably means “any minute now.” It’s the latest Vlad book, the eighteenth Dragaera book (I miscounted before) and it’s set in the ongoing continuity, a few years after
Dzur
.

I have an ARC. It’s surprisingly odd to go from re-reading a long series of books—seventeen distinct volumes—to starting a new one. It’s not that re-reading isn’t pleasurable, but there’s no sense of urgency to it. Even if I’ve forgotten the details, the general flow of the shape of the story will be in my mind, so that things will come back to me before I get to them, and I’ll at least half-remember what’s going on. Going on to a new one is entirely different. Suddenly, it is urgent. What is going on? Will characters I care about survive? Why is this happening? It’s like, and yet unlike, the difference between reminiscence and experience. What it’s actually like is when you’re on a long familiar trip, and you’re looking out of the window from time to time but mostly reading your book, and then the train takes a detour and you’re suddenly way up in the mountains and you drop your book because you’re suddenly riveted to the view out of the window. Only, you know, the other way around.

What can I say about
Iorich
without spoilers? Well, nothing at all, except that I enjoyed it a great deal. I happen to know that four people reading this have also read it, and I’m actually longing to have a spoiler-filled discussion about Devera and other matters, but I shall restrain myself until more of you have had a chance to have the book unroll itself before your eyes in the proper fashion.

House Iorich are concerned with justice and law, and so Vlad spends the book caught up in concerns of justice and law. There’s an advocate of House Iorich who is the representative Iorich of the book. The animal iorich seem to be a kind of rhino dinosaur, judging from the silhouette on the representation of the Cycle. We don’t see any, except in carvings, which is probably just as well. The book is mostly set in Adrilankha, and features all the characters you’d expect to see in Adrilankha four years after
Dzur
. They have some great interactions. There’s also strong indication that there’ll be another book between Dzur and this, because quite a lot seems to have happened to Vlad. Kragar mentions that he’s looking older, which really struck me—I know Dragaerans don’t age at the same rate, but having an Easterner friend must be really hard for them.

For some reason it suddenly struck me as I was thinking about the plot of
Iorich
that the Vlad books are remarkably self-contained. We were talking in the
Dzur
thread about who he’s telling them to and why and when, and how he doesn’t know if the reader knows about events of the other books. Vlad’s life is continuous, but he’s narrating episodes as stories, and either the episodes have the shape of stories or he’s giving them that shape. The occasional comment about “skip it” or “that’s another story” is part of that shaping, I think.

Most of the books cover about a week, as near as I can figure—
Jhegaala
’s longer, and so is
Dragon,
but generally they’re intense minute-by-minute descriptions of about a week in Vlad’s life, with gaps in between where his life doesn’t fit story shape. Now they are all very self-contained. The volumes of this series definitely stand alone—I’ve been suggesting better or worse places to start, but really you could read any one of these books and want to read the others. They work in any order. Yet they’re not episodic. I mean they are, but there’s always a very strong feeling that each episode is part of an arc, part of a greater whole, that they are going somewhere. I think these break my definition of series and are a different kind.

Anyway,
Iorich
. You want it, you’ll like it. But you knew that anyway.

DECEMBER 26, 2009

91.
Quakers in Space: Molly Gloss’s
The Dazzle of Day

The Dazzle of Day
(1997) is an astonishing short novel about a generation starship.

There have been plenty of books set on generation starships by everyone from Heinlein to Wolfe, but the thing that makes this stand out is how astonishingly real the characters are, and how well fitted to their world. Gloss has an immense gift for getting inside people’s heads. This story is about people both like and unlike us—they are culturally Quakers and they’ve been living on the ship for generations, which makes them very different, and yet they’re unmistakably people. They’re my favourite kind of characters, people I can understand and get inside their heads, and yet very different from the standard kinds of people you get in books. They’re very much individuals, not types, and they’re very much shaped by their culture and experiences.

The book opens with a piece of a memoir from a woman on Earth who’s considering going on the ship, then the middle section consists of the rotating points of view of an extended family a hundred and seventy-five years later as the ship is approaching a planet, then it ends with a piece of memoir from a woman living on the new planet a hundred years after that. The way they live, the expectations they have of family and work and decision making are all very unusual, but they take them for granted and so I absorb them naturally as I’m reading. The characters, whose ancestors came from Japan, Costa Rica, and Norway, speak Esperanto, and Esperanto is used in the text for a few words for things we don’t have, which gives it an unusual flavour. This is only the second time I’ve read this, as I completely missed it when it was published. I think of a second reading of a book as completing my read, a first reading is preliminary and reactions to a first reading are suspect. I loved this book just as much the second time. It’s very well written and very absorbing. It isn’t a cheerful story though—thematically it’s about worlds and boundaries, and it’s about those things very much on a human scale. This very much isn’t a fantasy of political agency, one of the things it faces is the knowledge that change can be frightening, that responsibility can, but that the answer to that is not refusing to change or refusing to accept responsibility.

I sometimes read something and think “I’d have loved this when I was eleven.” I’d have hated
The Dazzle of Day
when I was eleven, it’s all about grown-ups, it has a lot of older women as significant characters, and while being on the generation starship is essential to everything, everything that’s important is internal. But I love it now for those very things. If there’s an opposite of a YA book, this is it.

JANUARY 6, 2010

92.
Locked in our separate skulls: Raphael Carter’s
The Fortunate Fall

The Fortunate Fall
(1996) is about the possibility of changing human nature. You wouldn’t think that would be rare in science fiction, but it is, vanishingly rare. It’s hard to address. What Carter does here is to give us a viewpoint from about a hundred years in the future, a viewpoint with an awareness of a quite detailed future history and personal history, of which we see only as much as we need, but which gives us the illusion of much more. Maya is a camera, with new-style implants in her head plugged in to converters for her old-style ones. She broadcasts telepresence direct to the Net, her thoughts, memories, sensations, imaginings, and gets feedback from her audience. At the start of the novel she’s in Kazakhstan doing a series on a holocaust that took place fifty years before and has been almost forgotten, and she’s nervous because she has to work with a last-minute screener who for all she knows could forget to filter out the fact that Maya needs a bathroom break. And thus we’re painlessly introduced to everything that’s going to be important: the world, the Net, the history that lies between them and us, Maya, and her new screener Keishi.

When I first read
The Fortunate Fall,
I felt that it justified cyberpunk, it was worth having had cyberpunk if we could come out the other side and have this book. Re-reading it now for what is probably only the fourth time in fourteen years, with quite a different perspective, it seems that this was, as well as a completion to cyberpunk, also the first science fiction novel of the twenty-first century. It has dated remarkably little. Parts of it, like the Guardian regime where the Americans ran the world and ran the Square Mile camps as franchises (McGenocide, the text jokes), seem regrettably more plausible now than they did when I first read it. By and large with near-future Earths, they fit precisely into pre- and post-9/11—by that classification
The Fortunate Fall
seems definitely post. It’s also one of the first post-Vingean books to deal with the Singularity and find interesting answers to it. In 1996 I didn’t know this was going to be an irritation much worse than cyberpunk, but if the curse of Singularities is the price I have to pay for
The Fortunate Fall,
I’ll take that too.

This is an important book, certainly one of the most important books of the last twenty years. It’s a book I tend to assume everyone interested in science fiction’s potential will have read. And it’s also about as good as books get. Nevertheless I know a lot of people haven’t read it, so I’m going to discuss it as far as possible without spoilers.

It’s a very intense book both emotionally and intellectually—in that way I’d compare it to
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
and
Cyteen
. Like those books it is about what it means to love, and what it means to have your life path readjusted and hack your brain with technological mediation. They’d make a wonderful thematic trilogy of, “Look, this is what SF can do and the kind of questions it can ask!”
Cyteen
(1988) doesn’t have a Net but the other two do, and how interestingly different they are! Carter’s Net has the cameras transmitting what they see and feel, and everyone else consuming that, it’s had a neuro-viral plague that transformed everyone who caught it to an Army that ended the Guardian regime, and it has no clear distinction between what’s in the Net and what’s in the brain, when one can be hacked by the other. It has Postcops, people who wake up running software named after Emily Post who go around doing law enforcement for the day before, resuming their normal lives the next day. It has Greyspace, where feral AIs have their own ecologies. It has Weavers, who are doing slow complicated fixes for things they don’t want to see, like homosexuality and Christianity—a “nun” chip in your head for the first that stops you feeling any desire. They’re working on subtler fixes, where people just lose their faith or desire. And this is just in the primitive Fusion cultures, because there is also Africa, where technology is incomprehensibly higher. It is part of the human condition to be imprisoned in separate skulls, but for Maya it is something to long for. Technology has made everything fundamentally different. If there’s a small
s
“singularity,” they are on the other side of one, they are forced both closer to each other and further away by the technology that links their brains, takes over their brains, edits their brains. Yet Carter writes about them as people we can know and care about. Their Net has changed not only what love means, but what it can mean, yet I have had conversations about Maya’s dilemma at the end of the novel that are all about love—in passing through Carter’s changed world, we come to re-examine our own axioms. (I think what Maya decides is just right. I will acknowledge that this is not the only valid point of view.)

It’s also worth saying that Carter’s prose is always astonishing, whether it’s hilarious:

I menued the chip’s colour to a grey that matched the fabric. I stepped back and checked the effect in the mirror. The transformation was amazing. Ten minutes ago I’d looked like a typically encrusted old-time Netcaster. Now I looked like a dangerous lunatic with no fashion sense. Stop me before I accessorize again.

Or philosophical:

“We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we’re a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God’s creation left right and center. Well, Maya Tatyanichna? You know what we have wrought. What is your judgement? Which is better? A tiger, or a poem about a tiger?”

The first paragraph of the book has been so extensively quoted I won’t type it in again, even though I always turn back and read it again at the end.

The book is so mind-blowingly much itself that it isn’t really like anything. But it was reading Thomas Disch’s
Camp Concentration
that made me think of reading this now, because there are thematic similarities. The comparison Carter explicitly invites and the one I think is the most ultimately satisfying is with
Moby Dick
.