On Charm

It took a short story collection from 1908 to finally crystalize an aesthetic principle that had been sloshing about in my brain. Reading The Sword of Welleran and Others by Lord Dunsany (the incomparably named Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) was a revelation. In reading it I was transported in a way that is much too rare. In approaching this review then, I had to try to elaborate what exactly about it I loved so much. The too-obvious answer was that it reminded me very much of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories (unsurprisingly, as Gaiman will sing Dunsany’s praises every time he’s asked about influences). Digging deeper, I had to ask: What is it I love so much about Gaiman? That required meditation.

During that time of reflection, duty called and I continued reading slush pile stories for Strange Horizons. Here’s what they don’t tell you about the slush pile before you start: it’s really not that bad. Very few of the stories are submitted by illiterate mouth-breathers. Most of them are at the very least competent. The vast majority (unsurprisingly) fall into the RUMIR category. Yet we still reject at least 98% of them (see Jed Hartman for exact statistics). A number of the stories cover subject matter very similar to Gaiman and Dunsany: the gothic, the epic, the mythical. Yet so few of them achieve the heights that those two authors reach reliably. What’s the difference? For the most part, the slush story lacks a certain spark. It’s probably indefinable, but my meditations have finally yielded a name for this mysterious quality: I’ll call it charm.

The charm of Gaiman and Dunsany stories (and others spring to mind, not just in fantasy: I believe Connie Willis’ charm has propelled her to her vast number of Hugo statuettes) comes from their ability to hold the big and the small in mind all at once. While the stories are often epic, mythic, and touching, they are also aware that things don’t always go smoothly. Not in a “The Dark Lord is thwarting me” way or even an “All my choices have come to ill” way, but in more of a “herding cats” sort of way. These stories have the confidence to be playful. The dream-speaker runs afoul of the overly literal mind; the heavenly song is interrupted by the soulless being who talks during the theatre (see Rev. Book’s ‘special hell’); “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” is laid low—who knew?—by none other than Sacnoth; Lines such as: “And the long ride was a hard and weary one for Soorenard and Akanax, for they both had mortal wounds; but the long ride was easy for Rollary, for he was dead.”

What makes for a charming story? At the very least, it can’t take itself 100% seriously. There must be some perspective, some awareness that humor is what keeps our worlds from crashing in on us even when they are literally crashing in on us. The stories should have at least some people that act like people: not everyone is a hero or a villain; most of them just try to get by on their own ground (see the Discworld novels and the “pile of money the size of St. Paul’s” it has charmed out of its legions of readers). It helps when the prose sings on the sentence level as well. I hasten to add that this is not because of any Hemingway/Asimovian journalistic “transparency,” but because the words are a joy and you want to keep going from one to the next. Dunsany’s is an odd brand of poetry; you’d think too many of his sentences begin with “And…” for it to work (“And Iraine was the last of the captains, and rode away alone”), but from those humble, biblical roots he spins unforgettable imagery. And while this doesn’t directly relate to Dunsany so much, I’d also like to make a pitch for that brand of charming dialog that manages to sound natural while being funnier, more rhythmic, and more charming than any of us can ever manage in real time (see Mssrs Shakespeare, Whedon, and Scalzi for various examples of that craft).

So many of the very deep, very serious gothic investigations of grief, philosophical deconstruction of fae, and musings upon the fates of gods that come through the slush pile could use a dash of charm: an awareness that gods come and go but that someone out there will always be trying to herd cats with only the most marginal success. Does every story need to be charming? Not at all, it would be antithetical to the purpose of certain kinds of fantasy and science fiction—the kinds that focus on the grand ideas of things, and less on the human scale. I can’t see what this sort of aesthetic would really add to Greg Egan’s work, and he’s one of my all-time favorites. But even some of those grand and serious works could do with a little more confidence—the confidence to bring up the silly to further enhance the sublime (see also Neal Stephenson, he manages it even in Anathem).

So what of The Sword of Welleran and Others? I’ll leave you with this: GO READ IT. Not every story in it is a flat-out winner, but the first three entries count amongst the finest fantasy I have ever read. If that wasn’t clear enough: EVERY PERSON WHO ENJOYS THE WORK OF NEIL GAIMAN MUST GO READ DUNSANY. Go forth, all the legions! (And as it’s available on Project Gutenberg, there is no excuse for avoiding it.)

Amazing African Speculative/Satirical Fiction

The Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for when I started casting my sf/f net wider into international waters. The author is Kenyan, exiled from his homeland after having spent too much time in jail. The book tells of a fictional African Ruritania, named Aburĩria, which shares the same problems seen throughout Africa: a power- and money-hungry dictator who rules through fear and cronyism. The main characters are everyday sorts of people, the sort of people who would be middle class if there were a middle class to speak of in this country. This book is both funny and sharply satiric. It opens your eyes to problems elsewhere seen from a native point of view, not from an imposed Western one. It is fantastic, i.e., there are magical elements in it, but they spring from a totally different tradition than what we're used to.

While the plot is unsummarizable, let me at least give you a flavor. The two main characters are the eponymous Wizard and his friend/companion/lover Nyawĩra. However, the Wizard isn't actually a Wizard; at least, he didn't start out that way. His name is Kamĩtĩ, and he's a college educated man. He earned a degree in India and returned to his homeland to seek work in the big city, Eldares. However, no work can be found and one employer even actively goes out of his way to mock him. As we are introduced to Kamĩtĩ, he has descended to alcoholism. Through various coincidences, he ends up running from the police with Nyawĩra, and to shake the cop off their trail, he poses as this Wizard of the Crow. The policeman completely buys the ruse, and in fact comes back the next day to ask for magical career assistance.

Thus begins Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra's journey. Although he's not out for money, Kamĩtĩ ends up being very good at what he does, using his knowledge of psychology and traditional herbalism to genuinely help people. He's so good, in fact, that he becomes a minor threat to the Ruler, the absolute dictator of the land. On the other hand, the Ruler also wants to try to harness the Wizard's power. Nyawĩra is a modern woman, and involved in the socialist opposition party that has made various public protests against the government. She is both savvy about harnessing people power and also at great risk of being arrested and disappeared. She sees the potential in the Wizard’s precarious position.

Through it all appears a wide and diverse cast of characters: government ministers competing for the Ruler's favor and carrying out their petty power politics, industrialists hoping to make huge amounts of money in bribes through international aid projects, religious figures, wives, police, people on their way up and people on their way down. Most of the governmental plots are driven by the proposal to build a sort of Tower of Babylon in order to honor the Ruler. The project is called Marching to Heaven, and the idea is to build a tower in Aburĩria so high that it reaches outer space. They hope to secure World Bank funding for this as an employment project. Just the hint that jobs may be in the offing cause queues of job seekers to form spontaneously throughout the country, and the fluctuating government attitudes towards the queues (They're a positive symbol of the people's love for their ruler and should be encouraged! They're a negative symbol of the unemployment problem in the country and must be banned!) exemplify the incoherence of rule by corrupt dictators.

The study of the Ruler and his policies reminds one of the corruption seen in the court of Caligula as depicted in Robert Grave's I, Claudius. The Ruler himself is of course corrupt, also venal and completely unrestrained. However his corruption, and the fact that he encourages his ministers to fight each other, means that everyone lives in constant fear, out only for themselves, with no thought to benefit the country as a whole. It's a very instructive picture of modern corruption and the problems faced by some African countries. In fact, Ngũgĩ traces the entire history of the problem for us in various snippets, never resorting to info-dumping, but rather to story-telling: from the withdrawal of the colonial powers, the first rebel strongmen, then the second generation that succeeded them (mostly by being servile survivalists until finally seizing power for themselves; this is the stage in which we are introduced to Aburĩria), the Cold War dollars that flooded into the countries from America and Russia, then the withdrawal of Cold War dollars and the new ideas about promoting "democracy." While America tends to be the 800 lb gorilla of the story—much of the plot revolves around getting American dollars and respect—this comes from an African perspective and not an American one—very refreshing. One instructive passage has the Ruler reflecting on what an American ambassador tells him:

In the days of the cold war, they used to shower him with praises for dispatching thousands of his own people to eternal silence. And now, even after he had assured them that he was ready to repeat what he had done for them, they were lecturing him about restraint and the new global order! He now stood on injured dignity. He had to show his ministers that he was not afraid of the special envoy, even if he was an emissary of the West.

Ngũgĩ takes it even farther: although Kamĩtĩ and Nyawĩra are somewhat successful—in harnessing the power of the Aburĩrian people, using their brand of 'magic' to make their lives a bit better, and surviving themselves—the ending is not pie-in-the-sky happy. Changes of power do occur, but once a country gets so mired in corruption and dictatorship, it is not possible to easily transform it into a functioning democracy, even if there are educated people who desperately want to make that happen. This gives a sobering view of the potential for American involvement in the world--not a rebuke of any specific American policies, but simply a more nuanced and realistic view of the way the non-American world works.

Now, a lot of the magical/speculative elements of the story support the satirical elements. One minister gets his ears enlarged to sycophantically show the Ruler that he will be the "Ears" that hear everything in the country, another gets his mouth enlarged so he'll be the Ruler's mouthpiece. The Ruler begins physically expanding like a balloon at one point, also losing his voice, which the Wizard is called in to deal with. There are out of body experiences and religious experiences and various magical coincidences. Sometimes the Africans are shown to be rather stupidly superstitious, especially some of the low-level government buffoons, but (again with the nuance) it is also shown how authentic African ways of thinking can be harnessed to encourage people to act, to organize, and to live better lives.

Wow, all this and I didn't even touch on how he depicts the challenge of supporting women's rights in a country where a man's power to beat his wife is considered a fundamental aspect of his masculinity.

This is a very long, very dense book, but it’s never boring and it's often funny. Ngũgĩ has a sharp wit and incredible depth of knowledge. There's something interesting happening in every scene. I learned more from this book that I would have from hundreds of newspaper articles, and I feel that it has an authenticity that those articles might have lacked. I hope that this book will be widely read, and I hope that it will get some play in the genre community. We're completely familiar with using Western spec-fic to comment on Western sociopolitical issues; I hope readers will take this opportunity to read African spec-fic being used to comment on African issues.

The Issue at Hand, William Atheling, Jr.

"William Atheling, Jr.,” was the pseudonym under which James Blish wrote criticism. The Issue at Hand collects the columns he wrote in that guise in 1952, '53 and '54, then in '62 and '63, finishing with a speech from 1960. There is an additional collection, More Issues at Hand which I can assure you I will be purchasing in the near future. His criticism is ruthless and insightful and still fascinating to read. It also gave me some insight into debates that have been raging for decades and still do today. This book is valuable for writers (to avoid the mistakes of the past), readers who want a glimpse into the past of the field, and any reviewer or critic.

Let's start off with something I found quite gratifying: Atheling was writing for fanzines. He started off in Redd Boggs' Skyhook, then continued in Richard Bergeron's Warhoon and Dick and Pat Lupoff's Xero. Given the esteem with which this criticism continues to be mentioned today, I had assumed that it appeared in the regular (and regularly edited) fiction magazines—Astounding, F&SF, or perhaps Galaxy. After all, older critics are always telling us bloggers that only properly edited reviews/criticism/essays are worth reading; if it's not edited by professionals, don’t bother. So to find out that this amazing criticism that has stood the test of time was published in fanzines, which, let's face it, were the blogs of their time, tickled me to no end. It is also quite encouraging to think that our bloggy blatherings really do have the potential to produce great criticism (and on some occasions have already done so).

Generally Atheling's reviews get deep into the craft of writing, both when it's well done and more often when it isn't. In his first column, after laying out the goals of his criticism and its justifications, he takes apart a story from the Sept. 1952 Startling Stories, "Night Talk" by Charles E. Fritch. Atheling starts out:

One would think, for instance, that no writer should need to be told that a story cannot get along without at least one believable person in it; and that no editor would buy a story that lacked such a person. If you think both these points self-evident, please turn to.... The basic point is that there is nobody in the story. The man from whose point of view the story is told has no name; he is referred to only as "the traveller." Also, he has no appearance; the sole clue we are given to help us visualize him is that he is wearing boots...and, on the second page of the piece, "clothing." The illustrator has given him fur cuffs, collar and hat, but this is a completely creative gesture on the illustrator's part, and gives the author more aid in reaching his readers than he has earned.... This may seem to be heavy artillery to bring to bear upon a story which can be little over a thousand words long, but I can't see why a story should be excused for being bad because it is short.

Atheling gets specific in his criticism, which brings us to another point: audience. Atheling had a luxury that we don't today. Writing for fanzines in the '50s and '60s, he could expect that most of his readers owned the magazines, and either had read or would read the stories he covered. He didn't need to worry about spoilers, he didn't have to give the context, and he certainly doesn't do plot summary. The essays read perfectly well without having the text to hand, although several times I wished I did so I could see exactly what Atheling meant and get more context. Today we can't assume that people reading our reviews have, or are ever going to, read the stories and novels we talk about. It's a shame, but really only in that we have to spend time writing plot summaries. It's boring, but necessary.

Atheling defends his detailed critiques from all comers. For one, he points out that he is performing a service for writers (one which he strongly indicates editors should be doing but aren't). He points out that writers rarely get any feedback at all on their stories, and if you rule out the "plot summary + I liked it" sort of review, often none at all. Once most of the magazines shut down their letter columns (which situation has not improved; only Analog today continues to have a regular letters column) the writers and the editors both became blind in an important way. It is inevitable that when they know letters won't get published the fans don't write them (I can only imagine how many more letters Stan Schmidt receives than Gordon van Gelder does), and then both the editors and the authors lose a valuable source of feedback. Authors need to know when something doesn't work so they can get better, and Atheling sees himself as providing this service, to a limited extent.

Also, Atheling had to contend with criticism of his own work. (Critics critiquing critics also isn’t new!) For instance:

Some time back, Damon Knight wrote me a letter about this column in which he said, among other things, "...I think it's a waste of time to bring up your big guns against short-shorts by Charles E. Fritch. You ought to aim at the top, where the cliches are being perpetuated, not down among the black-beetles."

Perhaps so...I have several times torn newcomers to shreds, and will be at it again in just a moment. I think Damon has a different conception of what constitutes aiming "at the top" than I do, at least for the purposes of this column. I am not particularly interested in criticizing authors, known or unknown, in a vacuum. If there is to be any point in analyzing what is printed in the professional magazines, the analyses should also be read by editors, who are usually at least as guilty as writers when a nuisance is committed....

To aim at the top then, let's examine such a case of editorial collapse on the part of a great editor: John W. Campbell, Jr. The story under consideration is "Final Exam," by a new writer (if that's the word I'm groping for) named Arthur Zirul.

His awareness of the larger industry that goes into making genre literature gives him more insight and a better aim than average, definitely something for the lowly reviewer to keep in mind.

Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the writer that James Blish was, so it is difficult for me to criticize a work down at the nitty-gritty level of word-craft (although after Geoff Ryman's tutelage at the SF Masterclass, I'm more aware of that level than I have ever been). However, towards the end Atheling speaks of higher aims that I also found gratifying. He is discussing non-genre authors playing in our sandbox (turns out the McCarthy/Atwood-style controversy has a provenance going back generations!) and why they are so often successful:

In short, all these books are about something. I submit to you that very few science-fiction stories, even the best of them, are about anything... For all their ingenuities of detail and their smoothness as exercises, they show no signs of thinking—and by that I mean thinking about problems that mean something to everyone, not just about whether a match will stay lit in free fall...

I am trying to discuss the kind of book from which the reader emerges with the feeling, "I never thought about it that way before"; the kind of book with which the author has not only parted the reader from his cash and an hour of his time, but also has in some small fraction enlarged his thinking and thereby changed his life. For this kind of operation an exploding star is not a proper tool; at best, it is only a backdrop.

This is so much like what I wrote in my "Reviewing Philosophy" post, that I'm just grateful that I demonstrably read the book after composing the essay; otherwise I would think myself a horrible plagiarist.

In general, Blish as Atheling is arguing for holding genre fiction to high standards, not giving in to excuses such as "it's just entertainment" or worse, "it's educational." He argues (as did Gary Wolfe at the Masterclass, which proves that this battle must be continually waged) that genre literature is LITERATURE, and should be read and written as such. The authors won't spontaneously get better if their mediocre efforts get published; and if the editors won't knock them into shape it's up to the critics.

I'm not sure that Atheling’s style of criticism is right for me—the word-by-word analysis of the craft of a story. I might experiment with it, but I doubt it will make up the core of what I do. However, it is immensely valuable to read the arguments for it, and to see it done brilliantly. His clarion call to not cut sf any slack just because we like it—that encourages me more and more, and will certainly influence me as a move forward with my reviewing experiments.

Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

So, now that I've outlined what I want from my speculative fiction, I need some examples. Is there anything out there that can meet my newly-high standards? Will I become some sort of cranky critic killjoy, categorically condemning everything as crap? Breathes there a book that exemplifies the principles of multiculturalism, new ideas, new ways of looking at the world, engaging plot, and artistic prose? Oh look, I have one right here. (How handy!) In fact it's a Hugo nominee this year. While I have my suspicions that Brasyl, by Ian McDonald, won't end up taking home the rocket, it should.

The story is told in three parts: past, present and future. In 1732, Father Quinn is a Jesuit priest who has come to Brazil to help deal with a rogue priest in the interior. In 2006, Marcelina is a reality TV producer who thinks she's come up with a sure-fire ratings hit. She'll find Barbosa, the goalie who didn't block the gaming-ending goal in a World Cup soccer match from the '50s, put him on TV mock-trial and see if Brazilians are willing to forgive him. As she tries to track him down some very odd things begin happening to her, as if a doppleganger is interfering with her life. Finally, in 2032, Edson is an entrepreneur working his way up out of the favela, the ghetto. When his brother steals a purse with a quantum-encrypted RFID system, he meets up with a quantumeira, an attractive rogue physicist hiring out her quantum computers for illicit purposes.

When all these threads intersect, and we finally find out what the ultimate conflict is, it is enlightening. It illuminates a much more fundamental question than simply "is all this real?" It picks an answer to that question, and then delves deeper into the implications. This is what really good sf should do.

It's interesting to compare Brasyl to its fellow Hugo nominee, Halting State by Charles Stross (about which more in a near-future post). Superficially, their near-future scenarios are similar. People have access to real-time heads-up computing in the form of web-connected glasses, and computing advances have led to quantum computing and largely ubiquitous surveillance that the characters must escape. Stross uses his story to make political points about personal and political struggles in such a world. McDonald gets deep into the structure of the universe and how we should move forward in a multiverse that may be just as strange as we can imagine. That difference in ambition is one of the many reasons why Brasyl is the superior work of the two (although as I'll make clear, I enjoyed Halting State perfectly well).

Another strength is that McDonald's characters are all interesting and completely different. Father Quinn is a powerful man who turned to the church because of his guilt over committing a murder. Marcelina has not signed up for an action-heroine life, but she will use all her resources to survive, even when the doppleganger ruins her already tenuous relationships with her mother and sisters. Edson is a man of many identities, refusing to be tied down to any one. Entrepreneur, young gay lover to an older man (who is also a physicist, helping with infodumping as needed), Efrim the empowered transvestite, Edson going after the beautiful lady physicist, DJ Pettycash the ruling DJ of the baile (street party - there's a very handy glossary in the back of the book), and many others. All of the main characters wrestle with multiple identities at different times, which reinforces the multiverse investigations of the plot and setting.

Each character/time line has a completely different tone and prose style. 2006 is written in the relatively straight-forward style that you find from most sf. The 18th century passages are written in a slower, more formal and poetic style. Edson's sections are exuberantly flamboyant. Consider this passage from the street dance:

Straight up Petty Cash catches PJ Suleiman's hip-swaying samba paulistano, hauls a mangue bass out of his sample array, and brings in a beat that has the bass drivers bowing and booming in their cabs. The crowd reels back all at once, whoa! Then in midbeat everyone is up in the air, coming down on the counterpoint, and the bloco is bouncing. Suleiman tries something clever clever with a classic black metal guitar solo and an old drum bass rinse, and it's itchy and scratchy but you can't dance to that. Petty Cash takes the guitar solo, rips off the bass section and bolts on funk in industrial quantities: an old gringo bass line from another century and a so-fresh-they-haven't-taken-the-plastic-off pan-rhythm. Efrim can see the track lines on Petty Cash's I-shades as his eyeballs sample and mix in real time. The audience are living it loving it slapping it sucking it: no question who wins this face-off.

Throughout that whole scene I found myself nodding my head to the beat of the invisible music - that kind of response, pulling the reader in so completely, is the work of a master.

I enjoyed this work so much that I almost hate to point out any flaws, but all books have them. This one has fewer than most. Quinn's traveling companion is a (presumably) fictional French scientist, Robert Falcon. In this time line he's invented a primitive computer for weaving patterns via punch-cards. In our universe this was invented by Jacquard in 1804. Perhaps this feat of prodigy would explain why Falcon is already bandying about the concept of Turing's universal computer 300 years early, but it rang a false note for me. Just because a concept is obvious to us now does not mean that it would be obvious to someone working with its antecedents. Another minor quibble is that Edson falls in love with one version of his quantumeira, then meets another one. For the ending to work one has to assume that his affections have transferred to the new woman (who isn't as cool as the 'original,' and McDonald doesn't quite sell the transition.

These points are really by-the-by. I haven't even started on the martial arts, the exotic cults, the honestly earned resonance with Heart of Darkness, the feeling that the people in the past and future really do think differently than we do, etc. It all comes together beautifully in a masterfully crafted package. I hope that via its Hugo nomination it gains a wide audience, many admirers and many imitators.