Speculative Fringe: God is an Iron at the Montreal Fringe
Monday, June 16, I went to see a show at the Montreal Fringe Festival. Local theatre company Black Box Productions was staging their adaptation of God is an Iron, originally a short story by Spider Robinson. The story, first published in 1979, was later expanded by Robinson into a novel called Mindkiller (which I have not read). The play, adapted by producer and Black Box chief Elizabeth Cano, sticks close to the original story, finding a solid stage-worthy drama in the sf tale. The play has two more performances — on Saturday and Sunday, full details here — and there are plans afoot for a filmed version to be available later.
In the near future, a young man, Joe, enters an apartment and finds a woman, Karen, near death. She’s plugged into a machine stimulating the pleasure centre of her brain, an addictive high common in this future, and one that often leads to death as the addict comes to prefer the ongoing pleasure to food or drink. Joe gets Karen out of the machine and tries to lead her back to health. Who is she? Why did she plug herself into pleasure, knowing it could lead to her own death? Who is he, and why does he care? The set-up gives us questions, and over the course of the story we come to find out the answers. Some are profound, and the last is almost a punch-line: like a punch-line, it collapses all the pathos of the story and the themes into a sudden and surprising realisation.
The tale’s a meditation on empathy and pleasure; more precisely, on empathy and hedonism. Living for pleasure is self-directed. So what drives us — as human beings seem to be driven — to be social animals? Is there some merit to living for others beyond pleasure? Cano’s script, a faithful adaptation of the story using much of the original text, tries to probe these questions.
One of the interesting things about going back to the beginning of any tradition is seeing how things might have gone. Seeing, that is, possibilities unexplored and roads not taken. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of what, in retrospect, is an earlier stage of evolution. Sometimes there’s a sense of a missed chance. And then sometimes you can see why things went the way they did.
In 1962, Peter S. Beagle began writing a fantasy novel he called The Last Unicorn. Published in 1968, the book was both serious and whimsical, a kind of extended fable about a unicorn who found she was the last of her kind and adventured through a medieval fantasyland, possibly Irish and possibly not, in search of the wicked king holding all other unicorns captive. The tone embraced both the comic (one of the major characters is an incompetent magician named Schmendrick) and the dreamlike (as in the terrifying Red Bull who emerges as a crucial antagonist). The book’s a tremendous accomplishment, a vivid working-out of classic fantasy themes.
A little while ago, 
In 1984, writer Jan Morris spent several months in Hav, an idiosyncratic city in the Eastern Mediterranean. She left it just ahead of a violent insurrection and collected her letters describing the city into a book, Last Letters From Hav. Twenty years later, she returned to Hav to document what had changed, in a piece called Hav of the Myrmidons. Both were collected together in one volume, called simply Hav.
Every so often, I come across a book so idiosyncratic I have to write about it just to work out what it is I’ve read. A book strange and powerful, but whose power is difficult to locate or specify. Sometimes it’s hard even to be sure whether the book can be called ‘good’ in any meaningful way. By writing about it, I can get some thoughts in order, and see where they lead. And as such, I want to take a look here at Olga Slavnikova’s 2017.
V.E. Schwab had written a number of YA novels when, in 2013, Tor published her book Vicious. Billed by some as a super-hero story, it had elements of that genre while also, to some extent, questioning its assumptions. Reading it, I found that the book seemed interested in questions of morality, heroism, and villainy, but that the super-hero aspects were so attenuated I doubt it would have occurred to me to consider it as a super-hero story without the claims of the book jacket. Its handling of ideas of heroism felt like a reiteration of themes comics (Marvel, DC, and independent) have been interrogating relentlessly (if not neurotically) for at least thirty years. In some ways, it’s best to simply ignore the ‘super-hero’ tag. If you do, you’re left with a well-paced and sharply-structured novel. And on its own terms, it’s an enjoyable tale.
Leaving the dark brick stairwells of the Lucien L’Allier métro last Sunday morning at 10, we found the rain was holding off: something not to be expected. Forecasts called for meteorological chaos in Montréal over the following days. Up to 24 degrees celsius, down to 2, thunderstorms, snow. But that was in the future. For the moment, Grace and I were looking for books to hold us through those unsettled days and more.
A little while ago, I stumbled on a book that seemed especially worth writing about here: The City, by Stella Gemmell. It’s Gemmell’s first solo novel; she also completed Troy: Fall of Kings, the last book by her late husband, David. David Gemmell was a widely-known heroic fantasy writer — those unfamiliar with his work can see 
Two years ago, veteran author Mary Gentle’s most recent novel The Black Opera was published to mixed reviews. Some liked the book’s mix of alternate-history fantasy and comic-opera theatricality — as the sub-title has it, “a novel of Opera, Volcanoes, and the Mind of God.” Others,