Fantastika – Page 64 – Wis[s]e Words

Valor’s Choice — Tanya Huff

Published on February 13, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Valor's Choice

Valor’s Choice
Tanya Huff
409 pages
published in 2000

Tanya Huff is one of those science fiction writers I vaguely knew about but never had read anything from, nor to be honest, had heard much about. One of those authors that steadily plods along, has a decent following and career but never quite had a breakthrough novel. I never really had a reason to take a closer look at her work, until I found myself in the English Bookstore last Friday looking for something light to read and Valor’s Choice caught my eye. I’m always on the lookout for good, enjoyable military science fiction and continuously disappointed by what I find on the shelves, when even a cursory glance is enough to show me that yet again my expectations are set too high.

And yet my standards for mil-sf are set so low already; all any story has to be to get me to read it, is to beat the Weber minimum. If the politics are less annoying and rightwing than David Weber‘s, the writing can be just as awkward, as long as there’s something interesting the writer is doing with their story. Literary qualities be damned, just as long as you tell a good story. Tanya Huff, from what I saw in the bookstore seemed capable of delivering at least that much, so I took a gamble on her. You may guess from the fact that I’m reviewing this already that she more than succeeded: I started reading this on the way home from the bookstore and had finished it on Saturday evening.

City of the Chasch — Jack Vance

Published on February 11, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of City of the Chasch

City of the Chasch
Jack Vance
172 pages
published in 1968

When I first started to discover science fiction (longer ago than I care to recall) Jack Vance was one of the more popular writers to be translated into Dutch and the local library therefore had a shitload of his books. I therefore read quite a lot of his work, including the whole Planet of Adventure/Tschai, the Mad Planet (as it was called in Dutch) tetralogy, in one of those big omnibuses Meulenhof specialised in. There’s little I remember off it, to be honest, other than that it was a typical Vancean planetary romance.

Jack Vance is of course the master of this subgenre, effortlessly creating new worlds and societies for his stories, always exotic and strange yet believable and with their own logic. Sometimes the stories he sets in these worlds disappoint, as was the case for me when I reread Big Planet two years ago. For City of the Chasch I had less expectations, just because I remembered less about it, but I was still a bit disappointed with it. Like Big Planet, the worldbuilding here is more sketched in than fleshed out, not as rich and interesting as I had hoped it would be. I had planned to read the next books in the series immediately (I’m still missing the fourth) after I’d finished this one, but now I’ll think I’ll pass.

John Christopher 1922-2012

Published on February 6, 20121 Comment

A bad start to my day this morning, as I read the news that John Christopher had died. Of course, at age 89 it’s hardly a surprise, but still. As Damien Walker explains, for my generation of readers he was oftenan important first introduction to science fiction:

Readers of my 30-something generation are most likely to remember John Christopher for his young adult novels The Tripods and its adaptation for the small screen in the 1980s. The Tripods describes a future Britain where humanity has been enslaved to a race of alien invaders who travel in giant, three-legged walking machines. Fragments of The Tripods are lodged very deeply in my imagination, in particular the horrifying sense of immense and all-powerful authorities looming over life, beyond our control and understanding.

The Tripods Trilogy were not quite the first science fiction books I read in English rather than Dutch (having discovered that the local library was much more lenient in lending out English rather than Dutch adult books), but they were close. Appropriately I discovered them in the high school’s tiny little lending library, where they were some of the few books that appealed to me when I discovered it in my first year there. Having part of the first year of students who’d gotten English in their last year at primary school, I could just about read them, though they were supposedly a few grades about my reading level. They were the perfect sort of book for young teenagers, fitting that classic template of the young boy on the verge of initiation into adulthood rebelling against the strictures of his people, who runs away from home and finds the secret truths of his world, then fights and wins to restore the true order of things, and Christopher told it brilliantly. I must’ve reread them half a dozen times or more.

There was also The Guardians, about a young boy in a future dystopian England growing up to discover the true nature of his country and setting out to right ancient wrongs, which I also read half a dozen times or so. He was a consumate storyteller and could get you so wrapped up in a book you’d barely notice the time, as Jo Walton also experienced:

It was his 1977 novel Empty World that caused me to realise that adolescents were the natural continuing readers of cosy catastrophes. In Empty World all the adults and little children die of flu and the world is left to a handful of teenagers — this is so viscerally adolescent wish fulfillment that reading it (at twenty-two) I failed to get off the train and was carried on to Liverpool.

What greater compliment can any writer wish for?

Damien G. Walter works hard to annoy me

Published on January 30, 2012Leave a comment

Damien G. Walter’s post about 7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels you must read annoyed me from the start, with its misspelling of science fiction as “sci-fi” and its demand I must read these books; no I don’t. I hate that sort of hucksterism. Good books you don’t have to read, good books you want to read.

Those are just minor irritations though, the real problems start with the introduction:

At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irrate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have plucked some bluebells in the forest. (Unless you happen to own an entire forest. Do you? Well OK then.) SF and Fantasy are common ground that any writer can build their house upon, but pretending to own them just makes you look silly.

I’m sure there are fantasy and sf fans who are annoyed just by the ide of socalled literary writers poaching on their terrain, but they are in the minority. Reasonable fans have no problem with non-genre science fiction or fantasy, what they have a problem with is with:

— Mainstream writers who deny they’re writing science fiction when they clearly are writing science ficion, aka the Atwood syndrome.
— Mainstream writers who write science fiction that’s outdated, turgid and using well established sf tropes genre writers have long mined out, in a way that makes it clear said writers have never read any science fiction themselves and are unaware they’ve reinvented the wheel yet who still get lauded for their cleverness in doing so — Ishiguro disease.

The latter is something that’s luckily gotten rarer as science fiction itself became more mainstream, but the first still happens more often than it should. Neither is a concern you can wave away with an analogy about plucking bluebells. It’s not fannish defensiveness to be annoyed by this. Writers like Atwood who deny writing science fiction help reinforce the idea that science fiction is something you need to be ashamed off, something dirty, while writers who just regurgitate stale old ideas do science fiction no good either.

Walter goes on:

And it’s doubly silly if you’re an aspiring writer of the fantastic, because you may be hurling away the best chance to learn you will ever get. If as a writer you are only as good as what you read, then how good can you expect to be if your book diet is filled with derivative works of pulp fiction? A fast food diet may please the taste buds, but you wouldn’t expect to dine out on Big Macs every day and become an olympic athlete. So why expect to write even a good book without reading them first?

If I see one more pulp fiction/junk food metaphor I’ll scream and scream until I get sick. I can you know. Why equate fantasy and science fiction with “derivative works of pulp fiction”? Is Walter really saying there are no science fiction books, no fantasy writers that can equal literary novels, mainstream writers? Delany, Russ, Aldiss, Lem, LeGuin, Dunsany, Wolfe, Moorcock, Harrison, Jones, McHugh, Gentle, all these and many more cannot hold themselves with the best literary novelists, these are no writers you have to work for to get their writing, that offer as much intellectual stimulation? If you truly think that, you’re not likely to convince me your opinion on the “7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels I must read” is going to be worth much; if not, why say it?

What make’s these novels distinctly ‘literary’ as opposed to the genre novels they resemble? Put simply, they are better. More ambitious, deeper in meaning, both intellectual and poetic. They might be harder work for readers trained to the easily digested conventions of commercial fiction. But if you make the effort to read these books on their own terms, there are incredible feats of imagination to discover in their pages. They feature many of the tropes of genre SF & Fantasy, but in the hands of writers who understand what those fantastic metaphors are really all about. But most of all these are books which reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world. If genre novels create fantasy worlds to escape in to, these books show the fantastic reality of the world we all live in.

Again, there are no science fiction or fantasy writers who do that for you? You can only think of these genres as escapism, pulp fiction, not something that can ever “reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world”? Why bother reading it then?

Now the actual list is …not bad, to be honest, if a bit dated, with The Road (2006) being the most modern work on it, but the introduction just ruffles all my feathers. It seems needlessly dismissive of science fiction and fantasy, approaching its readers as junk food devouring slobs who have to be insulted into reading the right books. Had Walter just stuck to listing these books and not gone for the hard sell, this would’ve been an interesting post. Now it’s just annoying and snobbish. At a time when there are quite a few literary writers who dabble in science fiction without being traumatised if somebody calls their works that and sf writers crossing over with few problems, even if they have to lose an initial here or there, it seems particularly silly to revoke this supposed division under the guise of getting these sf slobs to read some proper books.

Fantasy: inherently conservative?

Published on January 28, 2012Leave a comment

For a change, why don’t we take a post that I mostly agree with and take a side issue to nitpick? Here’s a short extract from Gareth Rees’ excellent credo for critics

This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”

Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.

I think that is wrong, or at least not the whole truth. Sure, on the one hand there are fantasy authors, with the most obvious example being Tolkien himself, who do believe in the idea of a rightful king and all the baggage that implies, while on the other hand there are legions of lesser writers following the footsteps of a Tolkien, unthinkingly taking the same bagage with them, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy set in a medievaloid setting with kings and queens has this bagage, or that fantasy authors explicitely have to reject these ideas not to have it. There needs to be room for writers who want to use a medieval like setting to tell stories that aren’t political in the sense Gareth is talking about, who take the political and sociological implications of such a setting as a given, rather than something to be endorsed or condemned.