What Makes This Book So Great (6 page)

In utter silence, the ship drew away from the tower. It was strange, Rorden thought, that for the second time in his life he had said goodbye to Alvin. The little closed world of Diaspar knew only one farewell, and that was for eternity.

The ship was now only a dark stain against the sky, and of a sudden Rorden lost it altogether. He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds that Man had ever made—the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel drilled suddenly across the sky.

Even when the last echoes had died away into the desert, Rorden never moved. He was thinking of the boy who had gone, wondering, as he had so often done, if he would ever understand that aloof and baffling mind. Alvin would never grow up, to him the whole universe was a plaything, a puzzle to be unravelled for his own amusement. In his play he had now found the ultimate, deadly toy which might wreck what was left of human civilization—but whatever the outcome, to him it would still be a game.

The sun was now low on the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing from the desert. But still Rorden waited, conquering his fears, and presently for the first time in his life he saw the stars.

The plot is quite simple. Diaspar is beautiful but entirely inward turned. Alvin looks out and discovers that there is more in the universe than his one city. He recovers the truth about human history, and rather than wrecking what is left of human civilization, revitalises it. By the end of the novel, Man, Diaspar, and Earth have begun to turn outward again. That’s all well and good. What has always stayed with me is the in-turned Diaspar and the sense of deep time. That’s what’s memorable, and cool, and influential. Clarke recognized though that there isn’t, and can’t be, any story there, beyond that amazing image. It’s a short book even so, 159 pages and not a wasted word.

They don’t make them like that anymore.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

13.
Clarke reimagined in hot pink: Tanith Lee’s
Biting the Sun

After reading
Against the Fall of Night,
I felt like reading something else set at the end of time, but this time with some girls in it. Tanith Lee’s
Biting the Sun
was the obvious and immediate selection. Re-reading it with that in mind, I wonder if this may have been Lee’s intention in writing it.

My friend Hergal had killed himself again. This was the fortieth time he had crashed his bird-plane on to the Zeefahr Monument and had to have a new body made. And when I went to visit him at Limbo, I was wandering around for ages before the robot found him for me. He was dark this time, about a foot taller with very long hair and a moustache all glittery gold fibres, and these silly wings growing out of his shoulders and ankles.

It’s the far future. Humanity is confined to three very similar domed cities (the interestingly named Four Bee, Boo, and Baa) and the rest of the Earth is desert. Robots do everything. People are essentially immortal, and decadent. We have an adolescent protagonist. So far, so very similar to Clarke. After that point, everything is different. Lee’s work is first person, up front, immersive, immediate, individual, and anything but distant. Her version of humanity has not been genetically engineered into contemplative asexuality and aeons of quiet dreaming—anything but. Lee gives us a slangy rebellious girl with a taste for sex and drugs and changing gender. This is the subversive feminist version of the desert city with robots at the end of time.

The normal life cycle in Lee’s world is for the life-spark (or soul) to begin as a child, with at least one involved parent, or maker. The child goes to hypno-school and is educated. After this, the child becomes “Jang,” adolescent, and is expected to stay at this stage for a century or two. Beyond that they become “Older People” and live a different lifestyle for some centuries until they’re sufficiently bored with life to wipe their memory and return to childhood, this time with a robot parent.

Robots do everything. There’s nothing significant for people to do. At one point we’re shown people “working” where they have to press buttons—and if they don’t press them, they pop up anyway in half a minute. This really is makework and futility. Even art is entirely computer-mediated—and when the protagonist tries to make a sculpture without that mediation, it falls to bits. There’s no work, there’s no art, robots have it all. This is an early take on the problem of post-scarcity leisure, and as such it also makes an interesting comparison with John Barnes’s
A Million Open Doors
or Karl Schroeder’s
Ventus
. If you can do anything you want and have anything you want, but none of it matters, what do you want to do or have? There’s nothing in this world for humans to do except eat, shop, take drugs, dream designer dreams, follow fashion, and have sex, for which they get married for periods varying between one afternoon and forty days. Jang are supposed to sabotage things from time to time, and even that isn’t any fun, and doesn’t really achieve anything. Life’s a cycle of romance, drugs and sex, no wonder people are killing themselves in droves. There’s no scarcity of anything, and you pay for things with groveling thanks. If you think of some work you could do, you have to apply for permission, and you’ll find the robots have already got it covered.

Clarke’s robots are wise, ageless, inscrutable and have the good of humanity at heart. Lee’s are petulant, have personalities, and are not beyond cheating on their programming. They’re sure they know best, after all. Clarke’s are wise servants, Lee’s are stifling over-controlling parents. This may not be as good for the characters, but it does make for more conflict.

Life for humans is, on the surface, glittering and fascinating. There are about six words of new slang, giving a brave illusion of a new dialect. Almost everyone lives in a palace. Fashion is constantly changing. You can have a completely new body designed, and wake up in it right away. You should do this no more than every thirty days, but you can short-circuit the process by committing suicide if you’re impatient. Killing yourself creatively and designing interesting bodies are almost the only real art forms. You can change gender as easily as you can change height, weight, hair and skin colour. Most people have a gender preference, but it tends to be fairly mild. One character describes himself as “eighty percent male” and appears as female only once in the novel; others switch gender as often as clothing. This is done brilliantly, because it’s accepted so casually. It bears comparison with the best of Varley’s Eight Worlds stories.

The book has an interesting title history. It was originally published in the US as
Don’t Bite the Sun
(1976) and
Drinking Sapphire Wine
(1977). I own a 1979 UK (Hamlyn) edition of both volumes bound in one cover as
Drinking Sapphire Wine
. More recent editions include both books but use the name
Biting the Sun
. I think of it as
Drinking Sapphire Wine,
as that’s what it’s said on my copy every time I’ve read it for almost thirty years, but they’re both great titles.
Biting the Sun
refers to a shard found in an archaeological site our protagonist spends time at in her quest for relevance. The shard bears the message, “Do not bite the sun! It will burn your mouth,” which she interprets as not fighting the system—which she nevertheless continues to fight throughout the book. The sapphire wine is the water of Lethe which will let you forget who you are and begin again at childhood.

Unlike
Against the Fall of Night,
I’ve re-read this at reasonably frequent intervals. I think it’s fair to say that I like it a lot more—but then I am a sucker for characters and events in a book, and Clarke’s is pretty much pure atmosphere. I adore Lee’s first-person unnamed protagonist. I re-read it to visit with her and her world for a while. She’s predominantly female and has been Jang for about twenty-five years and is sick of it. She has a circle of friends and a life that doesn’t contain anything real. At the beginning of the book she steals a pet, a desert animal. The first volume is about her search for meaning in her life, and the difference her pet makes; the second volume is largely about her living alone and making the desert bloom. You can see that as growing up, in a very limited way, I suppose.

I don’t know quite what it says about gender expectations that while Clarke’s protagonist looks outside the city and causes a renaissance, Lee’s settles for a garden.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

14.
Something rich and strange: Candas Jane Dorsey’s
Black Wine

This was only my second read of Candas Jane Dorsey’s
Black Wine,
and I don’t have all that much coherent to say about it except “Wow,” and “You want to read it!”

The child imagined the wind slipping and sliding down the dunes at Avanue. She imagined the dunes as some kind of geometrical slope, at thirty-five degrees, like this one, but the mother kept talking and the mind picture changed with each sentence, like the shape of the wind.

“It’s an amazing landscape there. It’s all billowy and soft, like a puffy quilt. Or maybe like the body of some great voluptuous fat person turning over in bed, the covers falling off, the mounds of flesh shifting gently and sensually. You know, you can memorize the patterns and then a big wind-storm comes and when you go out the next day everything is different. The skyline is different. The shoreline is different. The sand has turned over in its sleep. While you slept.”

Let’s try that again: Wow! You want to read it!

(“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” Harriet Vane asks Lord Peter Wimsey in Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
. I have to reply with him: “So easily that, to tell the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”)

Soberly, however,
Black Wine
was published in 1997. It won the Crawford Award for best first fantasy novel, the Tiptree Award for best book that makes you think about gender, the Aurora Award for best book in English by a Canadian, and was third in the Locus Poll for best first novel. From which you’d gather that it’s a first fantasy novel, it’s good, and it makes you think about gender, all of which is correct so far as it goes, but doesn’t get you much further.

This is another book like
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
that I’d expect to be a classic that everyone has read, and yet which seems to have been read only by a small group of passionate enthusiasts. I don’t even own a copy myself, and have read it (twice!) because of the kindness of my next-door neighbour Rene Walling.

It’s fantasy, but it might just as well be science fiction. There are some small insignificant magic gifts. There are some prophetic cards that seem to work. It’s another planet, anyway, a whole planet with as many cultures and climate zones as you’d expect, and a moon that rotates. There’s some technology, airships, medical imaging, but it’s unevenly distributed. There doesn’t seem to have been an industrial revolution, most of what you see is handmade. They know about genes, but children are as often conceived between two same-sex partners as two opposite-sex ones. Against this world we have a story of travel towards and away from, of mothers and daughters, quest and escape, horizons and enclosures.

This is a difficult book to focus on, unexpectedly hard-edged where fantasy is often fuzzy, disconcertingly fuzzy in places where you expect it to be solid.

There’s an immense richness of world and character, and of story arising out of the intersection of the two. We see four very different cultures close up, the culture of the Remarkable Mountains, of the Dark Islands, of Avanue and of the Trader Town. They’re all at different stages technologically and socially, the way things are in the real world. They do things differently. They have different languages and different patterns of behaviour. Nobody could confuse them. Names especially are edgy things, and central. Every culture has their own naming custom, from the names the slaves give each other in their silent language of touch and gesture to the people of Avanue who are all called Minh.

The novel is built from the intertwined stories of a mother and daughter who come from different places. It’s not told sequentially. You have to fit it together as you read. There were things I didn’t understand the first time I read it, and the odds are there are still things I don’t understand. I can see re-reading it fifty times and still be finding new things in it. It’s a book that happens almost as much in your head as on the page, which is rare and wonderful. This is a story where trying my trick of figuring out what would happen in the second half and where the beats would fall would have got me nowhere. I couldn’t even have guessed the plot.

It’s beautifully written at all levels. The language is precise yet lapidary—literally. The words are like stones, sometimes sharp and sometimes jewel-bright, and all of them essentially placed in the structure of the novel. The words are sometimes frank and shocking, but that’s right, so is what they’re saying:

Near them two students in green tunics were struggling with a fallen bicycle, trying to straighten the handlebars. Essa saw that they needed it because one student was wounded in the leg and could not walk. She averted her eyes as if from an intimate act. Essa pulled the hand of the trader, whose palm was slimy with hot sweat. If the smell of death, something she thought was a cliche which is not, had not been filling the square his and her fear would have been palpable. Essa could only feel grateful for the camouflage as they started to run.

She heard a ragged officious shout behind them. They turned, still running but ready to dodge, thinking they were the target. The two young soldiers were beating the two students. The boy who had given Essa directions raised the club he had unhooked from his belt and brought it down on the skull of the wounded student. Her long hair seemed to shatter into a spray of black and glittering red.

It’s demotic language, but not demotic in the way Monette’s Melusine books are; indeed it’s not really like anything else at all. If I had to compare it to anything it would be to Silverberg’s
Lord Valentine’s Castle,
but with much more depth.