science fiction – Page 90

Jeffty is five

Published on July 24, 2007

(I wrote this last year and had always intended to come back to it, but I never did, until Nicholas reviewed Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories and reminded me of this again.)

It was Kip’s post on Harlan Ellison and his trademarked name that reminded me of Ellison’s celebrated short story “Jeffty is Five”, which I had also just reread it again, so it was fresh in memory anyway.

I must’ve read “Jeffty is Five” about a dozen times by now; it’s a well anthologised story, winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo award. The first time I read it, some twenty years ago or so, I quite liked it, but over time I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with it.

As the Wikipedia summary puts it, “Jeffty is Five” “tells the story of a boy who never grows past the age of five physically or mentally. The narrator, Jeffty’s friend from the age of five well into adulthood, discovers that Jeffty’s radio plays serial programs no longer produced on radio stations that no longer exist. They are contemporary, all-new shows, however; not re-runs. He can buy comics such as The Shadow and Doc Savage that are, again, all-new although they are no longer being produced. The narrator is privy to this world because of Jeffty’s trust, while the rest of the world (the world that grew as Jeffty did not) is not.”

In the story, trust and nostalgia are inseperatable. The narrator gains access to Jeffty’s golden childhood world because he has Jeffty’s trust and looses it in the climax of the story by inadvertently betraying this trust. At the start of the story the narrator is out in the cold, untrusting world of seventies America, at the end he’s there again, but made even worse by knowing what he has lost.

As a story, it is a powerful dose of nostalgia, a paean to Ellison’s own lost childhood and the wonders it held, even for people who never experienced this time themselves. There’s always been a stubborn streak of nostalgia in science fiction, an awareness of history to which this story appealed; as its long list of awards shows. It also fits well with the general trend for nostalgia of the late seventies —happy Days, anyone?

Now in general, nostalgia is a reactionary emotion, not just a hankering for an idealised past and a denial of the present, but also a denial of possible future improvement. In small doses this is harmless, but when it controls a discourse, it can be a prelude to authoritarianism. Which is why I’m skeptical of nostalgia these days, especially as seductive as it is presented here. Ellison is quite convincing in his genuine love for nineteenforties pop culture, but unfortunately, this love is stuck in the middle of a quite amoral tale. Let me explain what I mean by that.

First, there’s the treatment of Jeffty’s parents, who are depicted without any sympathy for their plight, as dour, soulles, crushed people with no notion what their son can do, or appreciation of him. Both physically and mentally they’re repulsive. They have to be repulsive and unsympathetic for the story to work, to make the real world that much more dismal, but also because if the narrator felt any real sympathy for them, his joy in sharing Jeffty’s world with him could not be so innocent.

Then there’s Jeffty himself, whose condition is treated as not just positive, but as a wonder, something to envy. Again, this needs to be done to make the story work, but if you think about it, would you want him to stay five forever, or would you want him to grow up?

Finally, there’s the narrator’s treatment of Jeffty, which is nothing short of exploitative. In the heart of the story, when he recounts his time with Jeffty, “the happiest time of my life”, it’s all about him listening to new installments of his old favourite radio shows, seeing his favourite movie stars making new movies of his favourite novels, reading his favourite comics and pulps; you get the picture. It’s all about his pleasure in material things, justified through the lens of sickly nostalgia. (His hatred for contemporary America is also rooted in material matters: rock music, cheap candy bars, junkfood.)

This is why, though I loved this story when I first read it years ago, I’ve found it less and less charming everytime I’ve reread it. It’s well written, but it’s wrong.

Something Rotten – Jasper Fforde

Published on July 17, 2007

Cover of Something Rotten

Something Rotten
Jasper Fforde
393 pages
published in 2004

Something Rotten is the fourth novel in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which concludes the story and ties up all the remaining plot points from the previous three books. There may be some spoilers here if you haven’t read the previous novels,The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots. Like the previous books this was entertaining, funny in places but slight. Nevertheless, this was an improvement on the previous book, which I thought to be the weakest in the series.

In Something Rotten Thursday Next comes out from her hiding place in the realm of unfinished stories back into the real world, to take on her old enemy the Goliath Corporation and force them to uneradicate her husband, Landen Park-Laine. This may turn out to be more easier than she though, as the corporation has seemingly turned over a new leaf and is in the process of setting right all of their previous misdeeds in return for their victims forgiveness. Landen may therefore be much more easily restored to her than Thursday thought possible.

Women write science fiction??!

Published on July 17, 2007

Not a new discovery one should say, what with some women sf writers even winning Hugo Awards these days, but apparantly shocking enough for online sf magazine Helix, run by professional not very loveable curmudgeon William Sanders to bring out an entire issue full of wimmin writers and then complain bitterly when the rest of the world shrugs its shoulders:

There’s been a lot of talk in the SF community – some of it rather intemperate, as always happens in such cases – about “gender bias” in the genre or in certain magazines, about the largely estrogen-challenged Hugo list, etc. You’d think that there would be a favorable reaction when a magazine comes out with an all-women’s issue. Realistically, I don’t expect it’s going to happen, to any great extent – that’s how it goes, people yell and scream about something and then when somebody does something about it they don’t have a word to say – but somebody ought to say SOMETHING.

And somebody damn well ought to be reaching for that Paypal button. If they’re serious about their feminism, well, here’s a chance to put their money where their phosphors are. I’m going to be pretty damn disgusted if the donations don’t go up this quarter.

Now I’ve only followed Sander’s editorial career from a distance, but I cannot remember him striking any great blows for feminism or gender equality before, more the opposite. This is just a cheap stunt which won’t strike a great blow against gender bias and has nothing to do with feminism. Female science fiction writers are neither rare nor obscure, haven’t been for fifty years, so any sf magazine worth its salt doesn’t need to do “special” issues, but has a mix of male and female writers as a matter of course. So don’t break an arm patting yourself on the back, Sanders.

Thanks James!

Piers Anthony and the fungus

Published on April 27, 2007

Way, way back in his career Piers Anthony was still capable of writing mildy interesting books, before he discovered just writing the same story –of adventures in a magical fairyland in which every male character is like their creator obsessed by the colour of panties– over and over again would make him much more money. Back then he wrote the only novel of his I’ve read all the way through and not regretted it afterwards, Omnivore. It had the interesting idea of having an alien planet full of fungi based lifeforms, including huge fungilike “plants”. Turns out that idea is not as crazy as it sounds at first, because it turns out a prehistoric plant species called Prototaxites was really a fungus capable of growing twenty feet high:

The enigma known as Prototaxites, which stood in branchless, tree-like trunks up to more than 20 feet tall and a yard wide, lived worldwide from roughly 420 million to 350 million years ago. The giant was the largest-known organism of its day, living in a time when wingless insects, millipedes, worms and other creepy-crawlies dominated, as backboned animals had not yet evolved out of the oceans.

“That world was a very strange place,” said researcher C. Kevin Boyce, a University of Chicago paleobotanist.

Prototaxites has generated controversy for more than a century. Originally classified as a conifer like a pine tree, scientists later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae or a fungus .

“No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense,” Boyce said. “A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil.”

Every day you can learn a little tidbit like that that makes you realise the world you live in isn’t just sttranger and more wonderful than you imagined, but it’s stranger and more wonderful than you can imagine. But not if you read any Piers Anthony novels.

Sharp on Philip K. Dick

Published on April 10, 2007

Ellis Sharp describes the appeal of Philip K. Dick:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

But Dick is also very good on ideology and social control. The world he describes in his fiction continues to resonate today. Official reality is a vast simulacrum, is it not? Wars for freedom and democracy. Celebrity gossip. Grinning royals and loyal, flag-waving subjects. Important writers and journalists.

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

It’s easy to dismiss Dick as either a talented science fiction writer, interesting but ultimately limited by his subject matter or as a kind of half-crazed creator of hallucinary nightmares, interesting for their novelty but irrelevant to anything else, but that would be missing the true strength of his writing. Dick’s ultimate concern is the nature of reality, whether there can be such a thing as a fundamental realiy underlying our lives or whether it’s all a construct, no matter how natural it may look. Being a
science fiction writer Dick went slightly farther in this than just making the usual banal observations of the artificiality of American life, by reveling in unreality and constructed realities, yet almost always with their roots in that banal artificiality of white American suburban life.

His early short fiction, collected a few years ago in five large volumes, is illuminating in this regard, in the sheer number of stories that take place in suburban surroundings where everyday features of life have taken on a nightmarish aspect. They show how his fantasies were always grounded in the concerns of the “real world”, the paranoia, insecurity, powerlessnness and claustrophobia of day to day life, no matter how absurd or grotesk they seem at first sight.

(Speaking of science fiction, I do wonder what Ellis made of last Saturday’s Dr Who episode, featuring a certain Elizabethan playwright he’s blogged about occasionally…)