Catching Up on Links

As it happens, I've got a review in the fourth issue of Fruitless Recursion. This one covers Starboard Wine by Samuel Delany, and I'm very proud of the way the review turned out.

While I'm at it, I think I neglected to mention my last review in Strange Horizons. In that one I'm paired with Richard Larson to offer two views on Xiaolu Guo's UFO in Her Eyes.

Dracula: Classic Lit AND Fun to Read

[Posted on the 112th anniversary of its publication.]

It's always fun coming to these 'classic' tales; you never know quite what you're going to get. Is it going to appeal, or will it be one of those books that's important, but not fun? Something like Dracula could easily fall into the latter category. Certainly not every book that has spawned so many imitators and innovators is itself a gem. Yet I was happily surprised by Bram Stoker's original. Any book that has you yelling at the characters 'When will you people learn to pay attention to the color text!' (if you'll pardon my inner RPG-er showing) is an involving book that is well worth the read.

Another fact about reading classics is that you're never coming to them fresh. Does anyone picking up Frankenstein these days find themselves shocked --shocked!-- that it involves creating a living being out of dead people? Probably not. So I knew that Dracula is a vampire, a very old and powerful one. I knew that the Harkers would be involved, as well as Van Helsing. I knew some of the rules of vampirism as they've come to be popularized. I didn't know much else, so I was still surprise-able. For instance, I largely assumed that any character whose name I didn't recognize, such as Lucy Westenra or Dr. Seward, was going to be toast by the end of the book. For all I knew, it was possible that Mina Harker and Dr. Van Helsing would be the only survivors, hence their appearances in subsequent movies/books/comics/etc. Not true, as it turns out.

The book itself is a bit unconventional (coming as it did before the conventions). It is purely epistolary, being told solely through diary entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. It is also charmingly unrestrained by genre conventions. It takes turns as pure horror (Jonathan Harker’s hair-raising experiences in Count Dracula’s homeland), domestic drama (Lucy Westenra writes to Mina soon-to-be-Harker about deciding which of her suitors to marry), medical drama (her suitors, joined by Dr. Van Helsing, band together to try to figure out why she is wasting away), mystery (as the band of adventurers track Dracula down to his London hide outs) and ticking-time-bomb thriller (as they race to prevent him from returning to his base of power).

Stoker does some great things here. For one, the more we find out about Dracula's powers, the less we see him on stage. By the end we know of him only by his movements and his psychic link with Mina. He's only onstage as a real character during Jonathan's stay at the castle, where we don't yet know the full range of his powers. This makes him both mysterious and more sinister. On the other hand, after all the build-up, the actual victory over the Evil is pretty anti-climactic. It's a very tactical endeavour to get to the right place at the right time in order to not have to face Dracula at his full strength. And only one of the menfolk die in the doing, although I'll leave the gentleman's identity safe from spoilage. It’s rather different from Dracula's end in various movies.

I think the book is strongest when it partakes most of the horror genre. The tale of Jonathan’s trip to Castle Dracula is truly harrowing, and I think that the tale of the ship that brings Dracula to England (of which we learn via the Captain’s log and later newspaper reporting) would make an incredible film all of its own. Certainly it is in these scenes that Stoker’s imagery is most vivid. Lucy’s romantic dilemmas drag on a bit in comparison. I also admire the way Stoker uses the epistolary form to really punch up his occasional (and occasionally literal) cliff-hangers. Although if you really want to make yourself giggle, try picturing Hugh Jackman delivering various of the elderly Dutch Dr. Van Helsing’s lectures. I dare you. But in the final analysis, Dracula is a good and fun read, not just an influential one.

Preaching Against Preachiness

Do you remember that Bob Dylan song that came out a few years ago? The chorus ended with the line: “I used to care… but things have changed.” If you can hum that tune, you’re probably not the target audience for Little Brother. Reading it feels a bit like being preached to by a very earnest friend. Perhaps they just found God. Perhaps they just found politics. Perhaps you even agree with them. But being shaken by the lapels while they try to convince you Just! How! Important! This! Is! does grate. I began to really grok that Dylan song when, a couple of years after graduating from college, I stopped reading The Nation. I mostly agreed with what they said, mostly it wasn’t news to me, and I mostly grew weary of their vaguely accusatory proselytizing.

The topic of Doctorow’s story is privacy, government intrusions thereon, and ways to use tech to preserve your rights. It makes the point (with which I completely agree) that government security, especially the kind of theatre associated with taking off our shoes in airports, doesn't make us any safer. Nor does locking up suspicious persons in secret jails far away from the normal justice system.

Which is what happens to our hero, Marcus. He's a pretty harmless hacker kid, ditching school to play games with his friends. Unfortunately, he's out and about when a terrorist attack takes out the Oakland Bay Bridge. He and his friends get rounded up by Homeland Security. They're interrogated, and eventually freed (after their parents have spent days thinking they may have been killed). All except for Marcus' best friend Daryl. He was wounded when he was taken into custody, and never released. Marcus has no idea if he's alive or dead.

We get excellent depictions of the physical and psychological approaches that interrogators use to break down subjects, and we see them being used on innocent American citizens. We also see how this sort of unilateral power is an invitation to abuse: because Marcus holds out a little too long demanding a lawyer and his rights as an American, he's detained and messed with just a little bit longer. He also gets an extra label as someone to be observed and tracked after release, and he's instructed never to tell anyone what happened.

All this turns Marcus into a full-fledged radical. He mobilizes all his hardware, software and internet savvy to start messing with the security state. We get lectures on RFID tracking, seminars on encryption, explication of routing routines, and master classes in other software and social hacks used to get around security. The point is made, repeatedly, that security systems are a joke that don't make anyone safer but do allow the government to abuse its citizens. To which I say Amen! However, an additional message seems to be that if you aren't running ParanoidLinux on a box that you built yourself, flicking through all your neighbors' wi-fi connections to disguise where your packets are coming from and using PGP on all your exterior communications, you're a sheeple who deserves what's coming to you.

This a book for teenagers, and understandably adults don't come off very well. There are only four who are at all sympathetic: Marcus' Mom who is British and thinks all this is terribly uncivilized, one particular social studies teacher who actually teaches civil liberties and allows free classroom discussion and eventually is fired and investigated, a Turkish coffee shop owner who starts allowing only cash transactions so that the government can't track them (he's had enough of government abuse in his homeland) and the crusading investigative reporter who is crucial in the success of Marcus' campaign. All the other adults are either abusive figures of government power or sheeple like Marcus' Dad who spouts off all the pro-government straw-man arguments.

As I am now pushing 30, and have only once built a computer from scratch and that with lots of help from a friend, this book is not aimed at me. I probably would have appreciated it more between the ages of 17 and 22 when I too CARED passionately about all this stuff, subscribed to the Nation, went to Green Party meetings, and got into gleeful arguments with people who didn't agree with me. So for all the kids out there going through that phase now, this will be both a great read and a great resource.

So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, it's a bit mixed. Marcus' rise to power as leader of a local hacker collective seemed a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, the teenage character portrayals seemed spot on. I was especially fond of the geek-girl girlfriend who acquires Marcus; she reminded me quite a bit of myself at that age. A quibble: while the cast of characters is as admirably racially mixed as you would expect of a half-way realistic book set in San Francisco, everyone here is middle class or above. There's certainly nothing here to empower poor folks. In fact, the actual resolution only comes about because the investigative reporter was a college friend of Marcus' mother--not the sort of contact working class people tend to have. One of Marcus' friends may come from a poor family, but he's such a computer genius that he's been working for a software design house since he was twelve--also not a typical option for the poor.

Overall, there's a lot to like here, but I was continually put off by the heavy-handedness of it all. On the one hand I felt like Doctorow was preaching to the choir, as I agree with his political stances and vote accordingly. But on the other hand I felt like I was being repeatedly castigated for being non-133t. So while I suspect that this book will go over very well with its intended audience, at 29 that audience no longer includes me.

Full disclosure (both as an experiment and as a result of the discussion at Torque Control): I met Cory once at a Strange Horizons party at WorldCon in 2004 (before I was really a reviewer). He was quite nice and we chatted briefly about Disneyland. He signed my copy of Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, which I enjoyed. I also strongly agree with his stances on Creative Commons, copyright law, and DRM. However, I don’t read Boing Boing, and I didn’t enjoy Eastern Standard Tribe as much as I’d hoped I would. Thus while I own his book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, his work hadn’t floated back up to the top of my to-read pile until this Hugo nomination.

Fen of Color United!

Why? Because diversity of experience and diversity of thought make for a more interesting future for everyone.

And because all these authors are awesome (just a sampling!), and wrote things that I would never have thought of otherwise.

There's a big live journal celebration going on today, go take a look!

New Review Up

Just a quick note to mention that I've reviewed Ken Scholes' debut novel: Lamentation over at SFSignal. Quick version: this is a good fantasy novel and very readable, but he hits some cliches pretty hard. Still, I'm interested to see if he's setting those cliches up to be undermined in later books in the series, so I think I'll be sticking around for this one.

...And, Just for Completeness' Sake

The other half of Paul McAuley's "Essential Books" meme, this one dealing with Fantasy & Horror. Same rules as before. Again, thanks to SFSignal for the link.

1. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
2. Tales of Mystery and Imagination EDGAR ALLAN POE 1838
3. A Christmas Carol CHARLES DICKENS 1843
4. Jane Eyre CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1847
5. The Hunting of the Snark LEWIS CARROLL 1876
6. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON 1886
7. The Well At The World's End WILLIAM MORRIS 1896
8. Dracula BRAM STOKER 1897
9. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary MR JAMES 1904
10. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things LAFCADIO HEARN 1904
11. The Wind in the Willows KENNETH GRAHAME 1908
12. Jurgen JAMES BRANCH CABELL 1919
13. A Voyage to Arcturus DAVID LINDSAY 1920
14. The King of Elfland's Daughter LORD DUNSANY 1924
15. The Trial FRANZ KAFKA 1925
16. Lud-in-the-Mist HOPE MIRRLEES 1926
17. Orlando VIRGINIA WOOLF 1928
18. The Big Sleep RAYMOND CHANDLER 1939
19. The Outsider and Others HP LOVECRAFT 1939
20. Gormenghast MERVYN PEAKE 1946
21. Night's Black Agents FRITZ LEIBER JR 1947
22. The Sword of Rhiannon LEIGH BRACKETT 1953
23. Conan the Barbarian ROBERT E HOWARD collected 1954
24. The Lord of the Rings JRR TOLKEIN 1954-5
25. The Once and Future King TH WHITE 1958
26. The Haunting of Hill House SHIRLEY JACKSON 1959
27. The Wierdstone of Brinsingamen ALAN GARNER 1960
28. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase JOAN AIKEN 1962
29. Something Wicked This Way Comes RAY BRADBURY 1963
30. The Book of Imaginary Beings JORGE LUIS BORGES 1967
31. Ice ANA CAVAN 1967
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 1967
33. Earthsea URSULA LE GUIN 1968-1972
34. Jirel of Joiry CL MOORE collected 1969
35. Grendel JOHN GARDNER 1971
36. The Pastel City M JOHN HARRISON 1971
37. Carrie STEPHEN KING 1974
38. Peace GENE WOLFE 1975
39. Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1978
40. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ANGELA CARTER 1979
41. Little, Big JOHN CROWLEY 1981
42. The Anubis Gates TIM POWERS 1983
43. The Colour of Magic TERRY PRATCHETT 1983
44. Mythago Wood ROBERT HOLDSTOCK 1984

And here we see the *problem* with focusing on classics for the last couple of years: 7 books from before WWII, and only 4 books from after? Whoops. Well, time and a chronological reading plan will eventually solve that problem.

I'm Obviously a Sucker for a List Meme

Via SFSignal and Andrew Wheeler, (bold means I've read it, italic means it's on my to-read list, etc.):

Paul McAuley's List of Essential SF Titles

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Journey to the Centre of the Earth JULES VERNE 1863
After London RICHARD JEFFRIES 1885
The Time Machine HG WELLS 1895
The House on the Borderland WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON 1912
We YEVGENY ZAMIATIN 1924
Brave New World ALDOUS HUXLEY 1932
Star Maker OLAF STAPLEDON 1937
1984 GEORGE ORWELL 1949
I, Robot, ISAAC ASIMOV 1950
The Martian Chronicles RAY BRADBURY 1950
The Dying Earth JACK VANCE 1950
Childhood's End ARTHUR C CLARKE 1953
The Space Merchants CM KORNBLUTH & FREDERIK POHL 1953
Tiger! Tiger! ALFRED BESTER 1956
The Death of Grass JOHN CHRISTOPHER 1956
The Seedling Stars JAMES BLISH 1957
The Midwich Cuckoos JOHN WYNDHAM 1957
Starship Troopers ROBERT A HEINLEIN 1959
A Canticle for Liebowitz WALTER M MILLER JR 1959
Solaris STANSLAW LEM 1961
Hothouse BRIAN ALDISS 1962
A Clockwork Orange ANTONY BURGESS 1962
Cat's Cradle KURT VONNEGUT JR 1963
Martian Time-Slip PHILIP K DICK 1964
Dune FRANK HERBERT 1965
The Crystal World JG BALLARD 1966
Flowers For Algernon DANIEL KEYES 1966
Lord of Light ROGER ZELAZNY 1967
Nova SAMUEL R DELANY 1968
Pavane KEITH ROBERTS 1968
The Left Hand of Darkness URSULA K LE GUIN 1969
Roadside Picnic ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKI 1969
334 THOMAS M DISCH 1972
Dying Inside ROBERT SILVERBERG 1972
The Fifth Head of Cerberus GENE WOLFE 1972
Ten Thousand Light Years From Home JAMES TIPTREE JR 1973
The Forever War JOE HALDEMAN 1974
Inverted World CHRISTOPHER PRIEST 1974
The Female Man JOANNA RUSS 1975
Arslan MJ ENGH 1976
The Ophiuchi Hotline JOHN VARLEY 1977
The Final Programme MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1968
Kindred OCTAVIA BUTLER 1979
Engine Summer JOHN CROWLEY 1979
Timescape GREGORY BENFORD 1980
Neuromancer WILLIAM GIBSON 1984
Divine Endurance GWYNETH JONES 1984

Pretty good list. I might have made some substitutions (perhaps Helliconia instead of Hothouse for Aldiss?), and I'm not sure there's *nothing* essential after 1984. But certainly the quality of works and authors is very high. I'm also happy to see that my program of reading the classics means I can fill in more of the first half of this list than I could've before.

Less a Review, and More a Thank You

In my quest to read more classics, I came up to Rudyard Kipling's classic YA tale, Kim. I especially wanted to read this because I realized that it influenced quite a bit of espionage fiction that came after--most notably in my mind, Tim Power's excellent Declare.

As I began reading it, I was fairly pleased with the way Kipling treated race. It's obviously a central concern of the novel--the second paragraph makes it clear that Kim is White, and this is emphasized many more times.

There was some justification for Kim - he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the trunnions - since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white - a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, and Irish regiment... His estate at death consisted of three papers - one he called his 'ne varietur' because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate'. The third was Kim's birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic - such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher - the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge.

While Kipling makes it clear that the poorest white is superior to the richest Indian, he also respects many of the native characters in the story. One of the reasons Kim is so successful is that he can move amongst and communicate with the native population. One of his best mentors is a Muslim horse trader from what I assume would today be Pakistan. Probably the most impressive figure in the book as a whole is a Tibetan lama--who holds up well as a pretty impressive character. I had a mental picture in my mind of the racism present in society at the time Kipling was writing (1900), and decided that Kim was probably pretty darned enlightened by the standards of its time. I felt the same way about King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885) -- sure it's racist, but it seemed to accord a measure of respect to the African population that I thought would have been uncommon at the time. Certainly by the time Haggard wrote She, he'd abandoned any sort of enlightened attitude at all. So I'd heard at times about people taking issue with Kim, but I'd never investigated the matter at any depth, and didn't quite see what the problem was.

I was in the middle of reading Kim when Racefail09 entered my consciousness. I came to the discussion very late, but I tried to follow some links, especially to the early material. And I read I Didn't Dream of Dragons. That made a huge impression on me--all of the sudden, I was reading Kim and understanding why it is persistently hurtful. Sure, read by a white audience of its time, it may have been slightly progressive. Read by a white audience today it's antiquatedly Colonialist, but still can be charming. However, read by an Indian audience either then or now, it must be incredibly painful. The casual assumptions, the dismissiveness. As Deepa D. put it:

Do not tell me, or the people like me who have grown up hearing Arabic around them, or singing in Swahili, or dreaming in Bengali—but reading only (or even mostly) in English (or French, or Dutch)—that this colonial rape of our language has not infected our ability to narrate, has not crippled our imagination. When I was in class 7, our English teacher gave us the rare creative writing assignment, and three of my classmates wrote adventure stories about characters named Julian and Peggy and Tom. Do not tell me that this cultural fracture does not affect the odds required to produce enough healthy imaginations that can chrysalis into writers. When we call ourselves Oreos or Coconuts or Bananas (Black/Brown/Yellow on the outside, White on the inside)—understand the ruptures and bafflement that accompanies our consumption of your media while we resent and critique it.

I started to read Kim differently. It didn't seem so charming anymore. Sure, the Tibetan lama is awesome, and the real bad guys are Russian and French. However, the assumption of English colonial benevolence didn't sit quite so well. The assertion of innate racial difference no longer seemed quaintly antiquarian. I began to read it from another viewpoint, one that saw the insulting depictions--especially of one Bengali spy who is very clever but suffers from an amazing inferiority complex re: the English, also the sherpa-type laborers and other native populations--and saw how hurtful they are.

I'm not on Livejournal, and I haven't made any really public statements about Racefail. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank so many people who have written. You have helped me understand why even casual, non-KKK-crazy, every-day racist assumptions HURT. Why attempts at tokenism don't help (River and Simon Tam in Firefly have an Asian surname, and as xkcd pointed out, that future is supposed to be half Chinese dominated. But they're played by white actors. WTF?) From your anecdotes, from your long and thoughtful posts, from your repeated assertions in the face of commenters who were telling you that it's not that bad, that you should just shake it off, I learned why that's just not possible or right. I read differently now because of what you've written. I'm thinking here specifically of Tempest Bradford (Angry Black Woman), coffee & ink, Mary Ann Moharanj and Deepad--they've written the main posts that I read. But there were a whole ton of folks leaving comments with names I didn't catch, and I want to thank them too. I'm sorry that so much of the sf/f community decided to be complete assholes about this--you shouldn't have to suffer more for trying to get folks to understand an important truth. When it comes to dickish behavior from so many quarters, all I can do is point to Torque Control's post on the subject and say I whole-heartedly agree.

I'll continue to try and read differently, to read with an awareness of race that I had previously been privileged enough to ignore. I'll try to support small presses like the start-up Verb Noire, PoC authors both established (e.g. the incredible Nalo Hopkinson) and new (Craig Laurence Gidney) and blogs like World SF news. The more viewpoints that feel welcome in sf/f, as I have previously maintained, the better off we'll all be. The future will be incredibly diverse, and more diversity in writing about the future will help everyone think about it in more interesting ways. So while I haven’t become some enlightened being overnight, at least I know to be aware of things I wasn’t before, and hopefully I’ll be able to seek out more authors who will enlighten me further.

PS - this isn't as much a review of Kim as it is a description of an evolution in my thought process. However, Kim is over 100 years old now. You can find out lots about it if you want to. It certainly was quite influential for a significant swath of genre fiction, and worth reading on that account. Also, it is a rather fine illustration of colonialism in action, if you want to see what that looked like at the time. And it's a fun read, although the language hasn't dated terribly well. I'm not in any way saying that people shouldn't read it--just that folks should be aware of its glaring flaws and less willing to give it a pass just because it's old, like I was going to do.

A Very Short Fiction Collection

This is a slim volume of short stories, perfect for airline or beach reading. In The Flattered Planet, A. R. Yngve proves himself to be an author of idea-a-minute inventiveness, but not much maturity. Especially with the politically oriented stories; they have all the subtlety of a brick to the head. (On a more general note, with the election of Barack Obama, stories that assume that the default 'President’ is like Bush Jr. aren’t aging well.) Of course, subtle is hard to do in stories with a maximum length of about 20 pages (small pages with large font and significant margins) and a minimum length of 6 words. (Of the flash-fic my favorite is: “He killed for the elixir of eternal youth. He got life.”) And some of the ideas are good: there's beautiful imagery in a story of underground women whose habitat is threatened by oil drilling (although inasmuch as they are portrayed as a threat, they contribute to a rather myopic treatment of women throughout). There’s also a good one about quantum observers and how even mundane things may effect the universe.

On the other hand, some of the stories devolve into outright silliness: in the opening story, one of the longest, increasingly powerful NASA telescopes discover an Earth-like planet. Following an unrealistically accelerated timeline, they see more and more detail, realizing that it's not just Earth-like, it's *exactly like* Earth. Eventually we send a probe, and they realize they're being watched. They paint their Moon in such a way that we can see it, claiming that we are poor copies of them. The viewpoint astronomer believes that they're a poor copy of us, and conceives a plan to send up a message flipping them off. In another, a thinly disguised Cory Doctorow is repeatedly revived after death, and forced to perform for the amusement of tormentors, since the ‘copyright’ on his life and experiences has expired and people can do what they want with him.

That's really where these stories fall down; even when the ideas are intriguing, Yngve tends to take the low road to silliness instead of examining them with any thematic depth. Still, it's much easier to forgive stories when they are <4000 words long; at least you haven't invested that much. So if you want a light read that throws around ideas like they're confetti, you could do worse than this. However, even with all the ideas in the air here, due to execution none of them completely rise to the level of thought-provoking.

Edited to Add: A. R. Yngve's Response

International SF Blog

Many, many thanks to Lavie Tidhar for the World SF News Blog. This is a website that, as soon as I heard of it, I realize that I desperately wanted something like it to exist. And now it does! I see things there already about South African SF, Danish SF, Polish SF, and an soon-to-be-released anthology: The Apex Book of World SF, which I shall be pre-ordering as soon as I'm done here.

Go and click (and buy, if you can)! This is exactly the sort of thing that we need to support in order to make science fiction the most awesome and awesomely diverse field that it can be.

[Thanks to SFSignal for the link!]