What Makes This Book So Great (27 page)

In some ways this is like a very simple adventure story. In other ways, it’s like a story of humanity glimpsing the complexities of a galactic civilization. What it’s really like is the stereoisomer of both of those stories, the inverse inside-out twisted version of them. The whole twisted-chapter thing is a meditation on the stereoisomer theme. It really is very clever, and fortunately, very beautiful.

Sunflash, some splash. Darkle. Stardance. Phaeton’s solid gold cadillac crashed where there was no ear to hear, lay burning, flickered, went out. Like me. At least, when I woke again it was night and I was a wreck. Lying there, bound with rawhide straps, spread-eagle, sand and gravel for pillow as well as mattress, dust in my mouth, nose, ears and eyes, dined upon by vermin, thirsty, bruised, hungry and shaking, I reflected on the words of my onetime advisor Doctor Merimee: “You are a living example of the absurdity of things.” Needless to say his speciality was the novel, French, mid-Twentieth century.

Since this is the beginning of a chapter, you have as much context as any reader for why Fred is tied up, and he doesn’t get around to telling you for pages and pages. If this is going to drive you mad, don’t read this book. If you can bear it, then you have the pretty words and the promise of aliens and a machine with a moebius conveyer belt running through it and the taste of bourbon and fries when you’ve been reversed by the machine. Nobody but nobody else could juxtapose all the things in those five little paragraphs and make it all work. Zelazny could certainly be very odd, and this is a minor work, and not where I’d recommend starting. (That would be with his short stories, presently being reissued in gorgeous editions by NESFA.) But it’s short—I read it in about an hour and a half—and it’s got the inimitable Zelazny voice which will keep singing in my mind when all the details and the irritation have sunk back into oblivion.

There is a man. He is climbing in the dusky daysend air, climbing the high Tower of Cheslerei in a place called Ardel beside a sea with a name he cannot quite pronounce as yet. The sea is as dark as the juice of grapes, bubbling a Chianti and chirascuro fermentation of the light of distant stars and the bent rays of Canis Vibesper, its own primary, now but slightly beneath the horizon, rousing another continent, pursued by the breezes that depart the inland fields to weave their courses among the interconnected balconies, towers, walls and walkways of the city, bearing the smells of the warm land towards its older, colder, companion.

Yup, that’s definitely one of the ways science fiction can make you long to be there. Nobody ever did it better.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

68.
Waking the Dragon: George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

Re-reading these books right now is a mistake. Before I picked up
A Game of Thrones
again, I had only a calm interest in Jon Snow’s true parentage, I’d forgotten who Jeyne Poole was, and best of all, I only mildly wanted
A Dance with Dragons
. I sagely nodded when I read that George R. R. Martin is not my bitch. I have every sympathy for this position. All the same, I know that by the time I get to the end of
A Feast for Crows
I’ll be desperate, desperate, desperate, so desperate for my fix that I’ll be barely able to control myself. I will be
A Dance with Dragons
–seeky, and is it out? Is it even finished? Like heck it is. And I know I’m not entitled to it but I waaaaaaaaaant it! If I were a sensible person, I’d have waited to re-read until it was ready and I could have had a new installment to go with the old. But now it’s too late.

So what is it about these books that makes me talk about them in terms of a two-year-old snatching at sweets in a supermarket?

Firstly, they have a very high “I-want-to-read-it” quotient. This “IWantToReadItosity” is hard to explain, is utterly subjective and is entirely separate from whether a book is actually good. Who can say why Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer and Zenna Henderson have it for me and Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley don’t, despite the fact that Hesse and Huxley are major world writers? I’ll happily acknowledge that
The Glass Bead Game
is a better book than
Job: A Comedy of Justice,
but nevertheless,
Job
has that IWantToReadItosity, and if you left me in a room with both books and nothing else, it would be
Job
I’d start first.

Now, even within genre this is something that varies a lot between people. The Wheel of Time books don’t have it for me. I’ve read
The Eye of the World
and I didn’t care enough to pick up the others. Ditto Harry Potter, where I’ve read the first three. These are books that have IWantToReadItosity for millions of people, but not for me. The Song of Ice and Fire books do, though, they grab me by the throat. This isn’t to say they’re gripping in the conventional sense—though they are—because IWantToReadItosity isn’t necessarily to do with plot or characters or any of the ways we conventionally divide up literature. It’s got to do with whether and how much you want to read it. You know the question, “Would you rather read your book or go out with your friends?” Books have IWantToReadItosity if you’d rather read them. There are books I enjoy that I can still happily put down to do something else.
A Game of Thrones
is eight hundred pages long, and I’ve read it six times, but even so, every time I put the bookmark in, I put it in reluctantly.

These books are often described as epic fantasy, but they’re cleverer than that. Most epic fantasies are quests. This is a different kind of variation on a theme from Tolkien. In those terms, it’s as if when Sauron started to rise again in Middle Earth, Gondor was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses. They’re about human-scale dynastic squabbles on the edge of something wider and darker and inhumanly dangerous. The world is wonderful, with a convincing history leading to the present situation. It has good names (Winterfell, Greyjoy, Tyrion, Eddard), great characters who are very different from each other and are never cliches—and Martin isn’t afraid to kill them, nobody is safe in this world because of being the author’s darling. There are mysteries that you can trust will be resolved, everything fits together, everything feels real and solid and full of detail.

But the thing that really lifts them above the ordinary is the constant balance at the edge of the abyss, the army marching off south to win a kingdom when the real (supernatural) danger is north. There are human problems on a human scale, tragedy, betrayal, honour, injustice, and always the creeping reminder underneath of something … colder.

If you like history, and if you like fantasy, and if you like books where one page leads you on to the next and you can’t believe it’s that time already, you should definitely read these. Also, if you haven’t read them you’re lucky, because you have four eight-hundred-page volumes to go before you’re reduced to a slavering hunk of waaaaaaaant.

OCTOBER 14, 2009

69.
Who reads cosy catastrophes?

Cosy catastrophes are science fiction novels in which some bizarre calamity occurs that wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and even thrive in the new world that follows. They are related to but distinct from the disaster novel where some relatively realistic disaster wipes out a large percentage of the population and the protagonists also have a horrible time. The name was coined by Brian Aldiss in
Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction
(and used by John Clute in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
) by analogy to the cosy mystery, in which people die violently but there’s always tea and crumpets.

In 2001, I wrote a paper for a conference celebrating British science fiction in 2001. It was called “Who Survives the Cosy Catastrophe?” and it was later published in
Foundation
. In this paper I argued that the cosy catastrophe was overwhelmingly written by middle-class British people who had lived through the upheavals and new settlement during and after World War II, and who found the radical idea that the working classes were people hard to deal with, and wished they would all just go away. I also suggested that the ludicrous catastrophes that destroyed civilization—bees, in Keith Roberts’s
The Furies
(1966), a desire to stay home in Susan Cooper’s
Mandrake
(1964), a comet in John Christopher’s
The Year of the Comet
(1955)—were obvious stand-ins for fear of the new atomic bomb that really could destroy civilization.

In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn’t take long and isn’t lingered over, and the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt. The survivors wander around an empty city, usually London, regretting the lost world of restaurants and symphony orchestras. There’s an elegaic tone, so much that was so good has passed away. Nobody ever regrets football matches or carnivals. Then they begin to rebuild civilization along better, more scientific lines. Cosy catastrophes are very formulaic—unlike the vast majority of science fiction. You could quite easily write a program for generating one.

It’s not surprising that science fiction readers like them. We tend to like weird things happening and people coping with odd situations, and we tend to be ready to buy into whatever axioms writers think are necessary to set up a scenario. The really unexpected thing is that these books were mainstream bestsellers in Britain in the fifties and early sixties. They sold like hotcakes. People couldn’t get enough of them—and not just to people who wanted science fiction, they were bestsellers among people who wouldn’t be seen dead with science fiction. (The Penguin editions of Wyndham from the sixties say “he decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily called ‘science fiction.’”) They despised the idea of science fiction but they loved Wyndham and John Christopher and the other imitators. It wasn’t just
The Day of the Triffids
(1951), which in many ways set the template for the cosy catastrophe, they all sold like that. And this was the early fifties. These people definitely weren’t reading them as a variety of science fiction. Then, although they continued to exist, and to be written, they became a specialty taste. I think a lot of the appeal for them now is for teenagers—I certainly loved them when I was a teenager, and some of them have been reprinted as YA. Teenagers do want all the grown-ups to go away—this literally happens in John Christopher’s
Empty World
(1977).

I think that original huge popularity was because there were a lot of intelligent middle-class people in Britain, the kind of people who bought books, who had seen a decline in their standard of living as a result of the new settlement. It was much fairer for everyone, but they had been better off before. Nevil Shute complains in
Slide Rule
(1954) that his mother couldn’t go to the South of France in the winters, even though it was good for her chest, and you’ve probably read things yourself where the characters are complaining they can’t get the servants anymore. Asimov had a lovely answer to that one: If we’d lived in the days when it was easy to get servants, we would have
been
the servants. Shute’s mother couldn’t afford France but she and the people who waited on her in shops all had access to free health care and good free education to university level and beyond, and enough to live on if they lost their jobs. The social contract had been rewritten, and the richer really did suffer a little. I want to say “poor dears,” but I really do feel for them. Britain used to be a country with sharp class differences—how you spoke and your parents’ jobs affected your healthcare, your education, your employment opportunities. It had an empire it exploited to support its own standard of living. The situation of the thirties was horribly unfair and couldn’t have been allowed to go on, and democracy defeated it, but it wasn’t the fault of individuals. Britain was becoming a fairer society, with equal opportunities for everyone, and some people did suffer for it. They couldn’t have their foreign holidays and servants and way of life, because their way of life exploited other people. They had never given the working classes the respect due to human beings, and now they had to, and it really was hard for them. You can’t really blame them for wishing all those inconvenient people would … all be swallowed up by a volcano, or stung to death by triffids.

The people who went through this didn’t just write, and read, cosy catastrophes. There were a host of science-fictional reactions to this social upheaval, from people who had lived through the end of their world. I’m going to be looking at some more of them soon.

OCTOBER 20, 2009

70.
Stalinism vs Champagne at the opera: Constantine Fitzgibbon’s
When the Kissing Had to Stop

When the Kissing Had to Stop
was published in 1960, and republished in 1980, which is when I first read it. It’s a book set in the near future of 1960, clearly intended as a warning “if this goes on” type of story, about a Britain taken over by a Soviet plot aided by a few troops and some gullible British people, much as Norway was taken over by Hitler in 1941 and Tibet by China in 1959. (Russia never in fact used that kind of tactics.) It’s written in a particularly omniscient form of bestseller omni, it has a large but consistent cast of characters, and many of the chapters consist of such things as saying what they were all doing on Christmas Eve. The characters are very well done, there are Aldermaston marches (cynically funded by Russia for their own ends), there’s a coup, and by the end all the characters except one are dead or in gulags. I think I’ve always read it through in one sitting, sometimes until very late at night, it’s not a book where it’s possible for me to sleep in the middle.

Re-reading this now, I’ve just realised that this was a very influential book. I’m not sure if it was influential on anyone else, indeed, though my copy quotes glowing reviews from the British mainstream press, I’m not sure if anyone else ever read it at all. But it was very influential on
me,
and particularly in the way I wrote about people going on with their ordinary lives while awful things happen in the Small Change books. Fitzgibbon does that brilliantly here, they’re worrying about who loves who and whether to get a divorce and all the time the Russians are coming. He also keeps doing the contrasts between upper-class luxury and horror—from carol singing in a country house to carol singing in the gulag, from the Kremlin plotting to champagne at the opera.