Fantastika

The Zero Stone — Andre Norton

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Cover of The Zero Stone


The Zero Stone
Andre Norton
221 pages
published in 1968

You can’t accuse Andre Norton from starting her stories slowly. When The Zero Stone opens, its protagonist, Murdoc Jern is fleeing through a primitive town on an alien planet, barely one step ahead of a mob of religious fanatics wanting to kill him. They already killed his boss when the priests of a local cult indicated the both of them for their next ritual victims, but Murdoc managed to escape. He finally manages to reach the dubious safety of a free trader ship, where his only friend is the ship’s cat, but when it falls pregnant after ingesting a strange stone on the traders’ first stopover and he himself falls ill of a strange plague once the cat gives birth, he learns not only that the trader’s crew plan to abandon him on an airless moon, but also that they had been hired to kidnap him. Luckily for him, the cat’s mutant offspring turns out to be a mysterious and powerful alien intelligence who calls himself Eet and who sets out to save Murdoc from his predicament.

The reason for Murdoc’s continuing bad luck turns out to be the old memento that was the only thing he’d taken from his adopted father’s home, who had been not just a gem trader but also a retired crime Guild boss. This memento is a ring too large to be worn and containing a dull, lifeless stone; it was found on a corpse drifting in space but Murdoc’s father could never find out anything more about it, which is why he called it the zero stone. As you’d expect in a story like this, his son has more success in finding out at least some of the story behind the stone, if only by being dragged behind it in a series of increasingly desparate escapes from danger, aided and abetted by his alien companion.

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Diversity doesn’t mean Tobias Buckell should write magic realism

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Tobias Buckell talks about being light but not white, diversity and how it can become mired in cliche:

But even as that happens, I also get annoyed with narratives that try to require me to fit into a certain ‘type’ of diversity. It seems the white power structures like immigrant narratives and magical realism from brown-identifying folk. Man, is that ever true, and even allies can fit into this. There’s been a heavy pressure on me to drop doing the action and to write about magical immigrants. I’ve been offered book deals and better money, and it’s funny, I’ve had three editors in the last ten years point blank sketch out the outline of the same novel: immigrant from the Caribbean arrives in the US and does something magically realist.

The reasoning here seems to be: Buckell is from the Caribbean, that’s almost Latin America and Latin American writers write magic realism, not technothrillers or space opera. It’s a Small World diversity, with your cultural background reduced to a series of cliches and no clue that you might want something else instead. It’s the dominant culture looking for the exotic, the thrill of the novel but only within rigidly defined borders.

In science fiction, as in much else, the dominant culture is American and American assumptions about race, gender and culture drive much of the debate about diversity. Somebody like Tobias Buckell who can (ugh) “pass as white” can fall through the cracks. Not exotic enough that he can be easily pigeonholed, but not “assimilated” either. A novel like Hurricane Fever is driven by assumptions and a worldview an American writer wouldn’t share, even if at first glance it’s just a technothriller.

As readers we should always be wary of cliches, of the conscious and unconscious ways we ourselves think about various cultures. It’s not just that we expect writers to adhere to certain cultural cliches, it’s also that we may see them where they aren’t. We’ve seen that with dialect and the use of “non-standard” English in science fiction, not just dismissed as a literary trick by some, but also seen as racist when writers use e.g. African-American vernacular English.

I’m not innocent of these things myself; I’ve tried several times to get into Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring but keep getting stuck on the first few pages, by the way one of the characters talks. Similarly, with several of Aliette de Bodard’s science fiction stories which draw on Vietnamese history and culture, I’ve felt they came uncomfortably close to cliche images of despotic and authoritarian, hivebound Asia, but is this her fault or am I guilty of seeing a much more complex setting through orientalist lenses?

Get the complete Bold as Love series for under 12 pounds

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Moving on from yesterday’s post, the bad news is that Gwyneth Jones had to self publish The Grasshopper’s Child, the sixth novel in her Bold as Love series as an ebook. The good news is that her entire series is available as ebooks on Amazon.co.uk for less than 2 pounds per book. That’s a little under 12 pounds, way less than a normal priced hardback for what is one of the most important, if much less well known than it should be, British sf series.

(My review of Bold As Love.)

Whither the British SF boom?

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Around the turn of the Millennium and for a couple of years into the Bush era, it seemed that British science fiction was were most of the interesting writers were coming from, so much so that people were seriously speaking of a British sf boom, overshadowing their pale and inward looking American cousins. A decade later and people are writing gloomy articles about the British sf bust and how much of the earlier promise of British science fiction seems to have been lost. Now I remember being excited for and convinced that this boom was happening at the time, but looking back on it I wonder. Was there ever a true British SF Boom or was it all smoke and mirrors conjured from China Miéville’s instinct for self promotion and J. K Rowling’s runaway and unexpected success with Harry Potter?

The latter is of course the most important, getting millions of children, young and not so young adults to read fantasy, inspiring a legion of now twentysomething readers to read and write fantasy and science fiction themselves. Rowling’s impact on the existing sf and fantasy scene in the UK seems more limited though: published by Bloomsbury, as far removed from a genre publisher as you can get. The same goes, to a lesser extent to writers like Philip Pullmann and Jasper Fforde, new, popular, but with limited (direct) impact on the science fiction genre.

Instead the dominant figure of Turn of the Millennium UK science fiction was China Miéville: young, politically engaged, erudite, sexy. He became the voice of a new, Guardian acceptable form of science fiction, a generation of writers that also included e.g. Justina Robson, Adam Roberts, Liz Williams and Alastair Reynolds, who all had their debut novels around 2000. In that regard you could say that there was a boom of new, interesting writers, one that for once had recognition in mainstream media.

Similarly, the case Andrew M. Butler made for the boom back in 2003, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom, which took a longer term view, has some merit. But the weak point in it remains that it counts several generations of British writers as part of the boom, everybody from M. John Harrison to Gwyneth Jones and Charlie Stross, many of which were writers who’d been writing for years or decades like Harrison and Jones or, who’d like Stross, might have been British but were clearly focused on the American market.

Looking back then, in my opinion the boom was largely the result of a benificial media climate, open to the appeal of fantasy and science fiction due to the success of Rowling, Pullmann, Fforde and Jeff Noon with mainstream readers, as exploited by media friendly writers like Miéville. This exaggerated what was a normal cyclical upturn in new published writers. The good news is, if there wasn’t really a boom, there can’t be a bust either, just the absence of media attention and buzz…

And yet the participants in the latest Coode Street Podcast do seem somewhat pessimistic about the current state of British SF and I have to agree with them somewhat. There are a lot of interesting things happening in science fiction, but it seems to come from outside the UK at the moment. What’s really galling to me is the lack of attention to female sf writers in the UK as opposed to elsewhere. N. K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley, Ann Leckie, Karen lord, Aliette de Bodard: all non-UK writers broken through in the last few years, joining others like Nalo Hopkinson or Elizabeth Bear. Meanwhile British authors like Gwyneth Jones, who is easily as important a sf writer as any of the Baxter-McAuley-Banks generation and who started publishing at roughly the same time a decade or so earlier [1], has to self publish the latest novel in her best known series.

Justina Robson, Liz Williams, Tricia Sullivan, Pat Cadigan, Mary Gentle, to a certain extent, all British female authors who should’ve had the same success as writers like Ken MacLeod, Charlie Stross, Adam Roberts, John Meaney etc, but never quite seem to have gotten the same support of their publishers. It’s this lack that I’m more and more convinced is why British SF is going through a bust, because only the male writers are left in the Serious Science Fiction ghetto and they’re not enough to sustain the hights of the boom.

[1]: Thanks Ian!