What Makes This Book So Great (50 page)

As for creatures who have no sin … what’s so hard about accepting the existence of such creatures? Aren’t angels supposed to be exactly that?

Jo again: So, if Brother Guy had been on Lithia, we’d be in contact with cool aliens and finding out as much as we could about them.

Meanwhile
A Case of Conscience
remains a readable and thought-provoking book.

DECEMBER 31, 2010

128.
Swiftly goes the swordplay: Poul Anderson’s
The Broken Sword

The Broken Sword
was first published in 1954, the same year as the original publication of
The Fellowship of the Ring,
so it’s a pre-Tolkien fantasy, and certainly a pre-fantasy-boom fantasy. Lin Carter, who is one of the people who created fantasy as a marketing genre, feels the need to go on about this at great length in the introduction to the 1971 revised edition, because Anderson used the same list of dwarves in the Eddas that Tolkien did and has a Durin—this would be more convincing if Durin hadn’t been mentioned in
The Hobbit
(1938) but it really doesn’t matter.
The Broken Sword
is indeed entirely uninfluenced by Tolkien, or indeed anything else. It has been influential, but the most interesting thing about it is how unique it still is.

First, this book is grim. No, it’s grimmer than that. Grim for Norse levels of grim. The truly unique thing Tolkien came up with was the eucatastrophe—where the forces of evil are all lined up to win and then the heroes pull off a last-minute wonder and everything is all right. He took the looming inevitability of Ragnarok and gave it a Catholic redemptive spin. Anderson stuck with Ragnarok. There hasn’t been anything this grim in heroic fantasy since. There’s kinslaughter and incest and rape and torture and betrayal … and yet it isn’t depressing or gloomy. It’s also very fast moving, not to mention short. My 1973 Sphere edition, which I’ve had since 1973, is barely over 200 pages long.

No actual plot spoilers anywhere!

The second deeply unusual thing is that it takes place on a whole planet.

The story is set in Britain, with excursions to other bits of Northern Europe, at the end of the tenth century. It’s also set in Alfheim and other parts of faerie that lie contingent to our geography. So far so normal for fantasy set in our history, oh look, Europe. But unlike pretty much everything else I’ve ever read that does this, Anderson makes it all real. Faerie has countries too, and while the elves and trolls are at war here, there’s a country over there with Chinese demons who can move only in straight lines, and one with djinni, and there’s a faun homesick for Greece. I am always deeply uncomfortable with fantasy that takes European mythology and treats it as true and universal. What Anderson does is have mentions of other parts of the real world and other parts of the faerie world. He knows it’s a planet, or a planet with a shadow-planet, and he makes that work as part of the deep background and the way things work. He’s constantly alluding to the wider context. Similarly, all the gods are real, and while what we get is a lot of Odin meddling, Mananan also appears and Jesus is quite explicitly real and increasingly powerful. I loved this book when I was eleven, and I still love it, and it’s hard to disentangle my old love from the actual text in front of me to have mature judgment. This was a deeply influential book on me—I don’t mean my writing so much as me as a person. The Northern Thing is not my thing, but this struck really deep. I probably read it once a year for twenty years, and the only reason I don’t read it often now is that when I do that, I start to memorise the words and I can’t read it anymore. I can certainly recite all the poetry in it without hesitation.

The story is about a changeling—both halves. Imric the elf takes Scafloc, the son of Orm, and leaves in his place Valgard. Scafloc is a human who grows up with the elves, and Valgard is half-elf and half-troll, and he grows up with Scafloc’s human family. Doom follows, and tragedy, especially when they cross paths. The book is about what happens to both of them. The elves and trolls are at war, though some suspect the Aesir and the Jotuns are behind it. There’s a broken sword that must be reforged, there’s doomed love, there’s Odin being tricksy. There’s a witch. There are great big battles. There’s skin changing and betrayal and magic. Even the worst people are just a tiny bit sympathetic, and even the best people have flaws. This isn’t good against evil, it’s fighting for what seems to be the lighter shade of grey, and people trying to snatch what they can while huge complicated forces are doing things they can’t understand.

Fantasy often simplifies politics to caricature. Anderson not only understood history and the way people were, but he made up the politics of faerie and of the gods and got them as complex as real history too. I read this now and it’s all spare prose and saga style and he does so much in the little hints and I think, “Damn, he was good! What an incredible writer he was!”

If you haven’t read it, you should pick it up now while there’s such a pretty edition available. If you have read it, it’s well worth reading again.

FEBRUARY 25, 2011

129.
The work of disenchantment never ends: Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Icehenge

Icehenge
(1984) is my favourite Kim Stanley Robinson novel, at least when I’ve just finished reading it. I first read it in 1985 as soon as it was published in Britain, picking it up because I’d been blown away by some of his short stories.
Icehenge
is incredibly ambitious and it really works, but its ambitions are very unlike what we usually see done in science fiction.

It’s set on Mars and Pluto between 2248 and 2610. It’s written in three sections, and all three are autobiographies—autobiography has become a popular genre in this future because with modern medicine everybody confidently expects to live about a thousand years. Unfortunately, memory is finite, so people only really remember about eighty years, with just occasional flashes of the time before that. Writing diaries and autobiographies for your future self saves them looking things up in the public records, and there might be things you want yourself to know about yourself that you don’t want to get into those records.

It’s not possible to discuss the weird cool things
Icehenge
does without some odd spoilers—to be specific, I can’t talk about the second and third parts of the book without spoiling the first part, and there’s also a spoiler for some odd things it’s doing.

The first section is the diary/memoir of Emma Weil. She’s a lovely person to spend time with, direct, conflicted, an engineer. Her speciality is hydroponics and life-support. She’s aboard a mining spaceship in the asteroids when a mutiny breaks out—the mutineers are part of a planned revolution and their spaceship is part of a planned jury-rigged starship. They want her to go with them to the stars. She chooses instead to return to Mars and get involved with the revolution there.

Reading this section is such a joy that it doesn’t matter at all if you know what happens in it. This is also the most conventionally science-fictional section—Emma’s an engineer, there’s a starship and a revolution, there are technical details about closed systems and they all have long life, you think you know what kind of book you’re getting into. You couldn’t be more wrong.

The second section is set in 2547 and is the memoir of Hjalmar Nederland, who is a Martian archaeologist literally digging up the remnants of his own life. (He knows he lived in the dome he is excavating, though he doesn’t remember it.) He finds Emma’s diary and it vindicates his theories. This whole section is both structured around and atmospherically charged by T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
. Robinson directly references it from time to time: “We fragment these ruins against our shore,” the unreal city of Alexandria, the vision of Emma as another climber. More than that, the spirit of the poem is the spirit of Nederland. He reads Cavafy, but he breathes Eliot. This is very hard to do, and even harder to do subtly, but Robinson manages it. It’s a strange dance of despair. Nederland knows that we can’t really know what happened in history, that we constantly revise and reimagine it, even our own history, even when we do remember it.

In this section we see Mars much more terraformed, but still caught in the strange political limbo. The Cold War is still going on on Earth, and Mars has the worst of both systems, the corporations squeezing and the five-year plans. It’s interesting that they don’t have an Internet and the Cold War has resolved itself in such a different way, when they have colonised the solar system and do have computers. I find this odder than older science fiction in some ways. This doesn’t make me ask where is my Martian terraforming project and thousand-year lifespan. Perhaps because I first read it when it was shiny and new it still feels like the future, just one that’s subtly skewed.

When a huge circle of standing liths is found on the north pole of Pluto, Nederland realises that a hint in Emma’s journal explains that this amazing monument was left by the expedition she didn’t join.

At about this point in my re-read, I realised that it is my love for
Icehenge
that prevents me from warming to Robinson’s
Red Mars
. I like this version of long life and forgetting and this version of slow-changing Mars so much better than his later reimagining of them that I felt put off and then bored. Maybe I should give them another chance.

The third section, set in 2610, involves a debunking of Nederland’s theory by Nederland’s great-grandson, though Nederland is still alive on Mars and defending himself. And this is where Robinson provides the greatest meta-reading experience I’ve ever had. The whole thrust of this section makes me, the reader, want to defend the first part of the book from the charge of being a forgery. I love Emma Weil, I want her words to be real, I can’t believe they’re forged, that they’re not real—but of course, at the same time, I totally know they’re not real, Robinson wrote them, didn’t he? I know they’re not real and yet I passionately want to defend their reality within the frame of the story. I can’t think of a comparable whiplash aesthetic experience. And it happens to me every single time. Emma’s narrative must be authentically written by Emma and true—except that I already know it isn’t, so I know nothing and I feel … strange. It’s a fugue in text.

This is a book that asks questions and provides poetic experiences rather than a book that answers questions. It has a Gene Wolfe quote on the cover, and I’m not at all surprised that Gene Wolfe likes this. (I just wish T. S. Eliot could have lived to read it.) It’s odd but it’s also wonderful.

130.
Literary criticism vs talking about books

I always resist when people call me a critic. I resist because my degree is in Classics and Ancient History, not in English. I never studied this stuff. I’m not qualified to be a critic. Literary criticism is a conversation, and it’s a conversation I’ve never been part of—critics are in dialogue with the text but also in dialogue with each other. I’m talking about books as part of a different conversation, one with its roots much more in fanzines and Usenet than in periodicals. Beyond that, I resist the term because critics are supposed to be impersonal and detached, they’re not supposed to burble about how much they love books and how they cried on the train. Most of all I resist because I hate the way that necessary detachment and objectivity seem to suck the life and the joy of reading out of the books critics talk about.

As I was editing these posts into this volume, I kept noticing my spoiler warnings and wondering whether I should take them out. Critics don’t use spoiler warnings. Spoiler warnings are fannish and embarrassing. But the
reason
real critics don’t use spoiler warnings is because nobody reading real criticism is supposed to mind having the books spoiled, even though “spoilers” are well named—it does spoil a book to know what happens. Re-reading is forever, but you can only have the experience of reading a book for the first time once.

In the Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
North and South,
there’s a footnote a third of the way through that gives away the ending. The enterprise of reading for pleasure was so far from the mind of Patricia Ingham, when writing the critical apparatus for that book, that she couldn’t imagine that anybody on page 110 might prefer to read the next two hundred pages without knowing that X and Y will end up together. She clearly thinks that the only purpose for which anyone might pick up the book is to study it.

I don’t want to be like her. I want to talk about books and turn people on to them, I don’t want to spoil them. Many people don’t mind spoilers, and that’s just fine, they can read on past the warning. There are things you can’t say about books without discussing the plot and the characters.

I’m talking about books I re-read, but the reason I am re-reading them is for the sheer joy of it. I want to share that, and that includes the joy of discovery. I left my spoiler warnings in so you could decide for yourself whether to keep reading. You know yourself and how you read. I gave you the warnings and trusted you to make an informed decision.

You may also have noticed a lack of critical detachment. I am talking about books because I love books. I’m not standing on a mountain peak holding them at arm’s length and issuing Olympian pronouncements about them. I’m reading them in the bath and shouting with excitement because I have noticed something that is really
really
cool.

There’s another odd thing, to do with what it’s possible to take seriously. For a long time all of SF was, to use Delany’s term, “paraliterature” and none of it was taken seriously. But for decades now there have been SF authors who are treated respectfully, who are studied, who have books written about them by academics. But aside from that, within SF, some writers are given serious consideration and others aren’t. There’s canon formation. Le Guin is someone who can be taken seriously. So is Delany. But nobody takes Bujold seriously, or Brust, though they’re both popular. C. J. Cherryh and William Gibson arrived in SF at much the same time in the 1980s. (Cherryh won her first Hugo in 1982, and Gibson in 1984.) Almost immediately Gibson became somebody to be respected, while people smile patronizingly when Cherryh is mentioned. There’s a divide within SF between literary and popular and I think it’s a line drawn in a very strange way, a line that doesn’t have much to do with either the importance of the concerns or the literary quality of the work. Nor does it have to do with commercial potential—Gibson sells very well. But why is it only possible to write fannishly about Bujold, and seriously about Delany? It frustrates me equally that I’m not supposed to have fun with Gaskell and I am
only
allowed to have fun with Bujold. I want to consider them all together and look at them all from the same angle.