Black Gate

My reading’s defined, largely, by sheer chance. I stumble across something at a used-book sale, buy it along with a box of other books, put it on my shelf and forget about it, then finally years later take it down and read it and, often, realise I should have started in on it long before. Which is a long way around to explaining how I just now came to read Chris Moriarty’s debut novel Spin State, which was published in 2003. And why I’m only now writing about the best work of 21st-century science fiction I personally have read.

The first book of a trilogy (the second, Spin Control, came out in 2007; the third, Ghost Spin, was published earlier this year), Spin State was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Spectrum Award. A frenzied yet controlled mixture of hard sf, cyberpunk, space opera, political saga, hard-boiled noir, war story, and any number of other genres, Spin State captures the mind-shredding sense of wonder of science fiction as well as any book I’ve ever read. It’s densely written, intricately and dextrously plotted, and boasts dialogue both fiercely dramatic and bluntly true. It also always seems to aim at character, using its twists to generate powerful scene after powerful scene.

It ought to be a mess. It’s a long book, but covers much ground; it seems that every scene, every line, is doing three different things — touching off fuses to detonate later. But it never falls apart, never distintegrates into noise. It challenges you: I had to read the opening pages twice before I caught the rhythm of it. Set hundreds of years in the future, AIs possess wired human bodies, genetic constructs build interstellar Syndicates, and quantum technologies make distance something different than what we understand: you can physically be located on a space station in a far solar system but sit down to a full meal in an elegant restaurant on the Moon in the light of the environmentally ruined Earth. Technologies and politics are complex, and in fact the history of this future is complex all along the line: there’s a kind of take-no-prisoners ferocity to the unrelenting beat of new and wild ideas the book throws at you. Which is to say it’s in the best tradition of science fiction.

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Earlier this week Mark Rigney put up an interesting post on the (narrative) uses of ghosts, and suggested a number of plot and thematic functions a ghost can serve in a story. The post resonated for me with the book I was reading at the time: Ali Smith’s Hotel World. And when I say ‘resonate’ I mean it seemed to echo some of the questions I had about the book, and to suggest some ways of looking at the novel that might help unriddle some of its more curious aspects. So here’s a look at the novel, bearing in mind the question: what’s that ghost doing there?

Hotel World is Smith’s second novel. Published in 2001, it followed 1997’s Like and two volumes of short stories, Free Love and Other Stories (1995, winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award) and 1999’s Other Stories and Other Stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. It’s a short novel, made up of five longish interconnected stories and an epilogue. Each of the five main stories follows a woman in a city on the north of the UK; each woman is connected in some way with a certain hotel, a part of the worldwide Global Hotels chain.

The first story is the first-person recollections of one Sara Wilby, ghost. She was a maid in the hotel, who for a joke tried to fit herself into a dumbwaiter on the top floor of the hotel only to have the old dumbwaiter fall and kill her. Her story follows her attempt to understand her death, what happened, and what it means; she succeeds, through a final reconciliation with her former body. The second story follows Else, or Elspeth, a homeless woman who panhandles outside the elegant Global Hotel. She’s given a room for the night by Lise, the night clerk at the hotel, who is the subject of the third story. The fourth story follows a guest, Penny Warner, a newspaper writer working on a puff-piece about Global Hotels. The last of the five stories follows Clare Wilby, Sara’s sister, who, like Sara, is trying to understand Sara’s death. The last section pulls back to give us a wide-angle view of the world and all its connections and ghosts.

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One of the distinct pleasures of used-book sales is finding an old book about which you know nothing, and making a cheap gamble: a literary bet that the story will prove worth the coin. You hope it pays off with unsuspected greatness, but for me as a reader the bet’s covered if I find something memorably strange. Not necessarily greatly strange, but eccentric, interesting, and outside the received narratives of literary histories (and genre histories past). Which brings me to Helen Simpson’s 1933 novel The Woman on the Beast: Seen From Three Angles.

According to the online Australian Dictionary of Biography, Simpson was born in Australia in 1897, went to England in 1914 to study, published some short plays, and returned to Australia in 1921, where she began publishing poetry, plays, and novels. She divided her life between Australia and England, and in 1939 was selected to be the Liberal candidate for Parliament for the Isle of Wight. Unfortunately she soon fell ill, and ultimately died of cancer in 1940. Among her prolific output were 1932’s Boomerang, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and two books filmed by Alfred Hitchock: 1937’s Under Capricorn, and 1929’s Enter Sir John (written with Clemence Dane), which reached screens under the title Murder! (Her 1935 novel Saraband For Dead Lovers was also made into a movie, Saraband, in 1948.)

And then there’s The Woman on the Beast, which is strangeness of a different order: science fiction mixed with Christian fantasy. A preface lays out the theme — “that the most hateful actions are, as often as not, performed for the best of reasons” — and states that the book’s three stories have only that idea in common. After a prologue set in the dark ages, the three stories in question follow, set in India in the sixteenth century, in France during the Revolution, and in Australia in 1999. Then there’s a brief epilogue, depicting, as you might expect from the title, the Apocalypse. But which also makes clear that the three stories have more than theme in common.

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Last week I noted that Tor’s promising that they’ll be publishing an English translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy, a highly successful work of Chinese science fiction. Tor says that this will be the first publication of a science fiction novel from mainland China. But, as the statement implies, it won’t be the first Chinese-language sf novel translated into English. You can take a look in the comments of the linked article at Tor for examples; as it happens, I’ve got one of those exceptions to hand, Chang Hsi-Kuo’s City Trilogy, translated by John Balcom and published in one volume in 2003. (Chang, a Taiwanese, has had his name romanised in a number of different ways; I’m using here the name given him on my copy of the English translation of his book.)

According to Balcom’s introduction, the first book of the series, Five Jade Disks, was published in Taiwan in 1984. The next, Defenders of the Dragon City, came in 1986. Tale of a Feather completed the series in 1991. But before the novels, Chang had written a short story called “City of the Bronze Statue,” published in 1980; written in the style of a history or guidebook, it told the story of a bronze statue built at the centre of a colony city on an alien world, and how the statue was broken down and reforged as different rulers took control of the city and systems of government rose and fell. The story’s now the prologue to the trilogy, which itself tells of desperate wars in and around the same city, Sunlon City.

The short story and the trilogy both grapple with history, though in different ways. You can see elements of China’s and Taiwan’s past in the background of the trilogy’s alien setting, in the cycle of dynasties and factions. What comes through clearly, even to someone like me whose understanding of Chinese history is basic at best, is a sense of fatalism. This is science fiction that deals with the big questions, with the sweep of time and the nature of destiny. It’s sometimes a struggle to work through, due to the way that it presents these themes, but I think in the end it’s a convincing success.

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I observed the other day that the end of October’s a good time for reading classic weird fiction. This morning, as young ghosts and goblins of all sorts are preparing their evening’s depredations, I’m writing about a subject I’ve wanted to deal with for a while: the novels of Charles Williams. Williams was born in 1886, and died in 1945; a scholar, poet, editor, and theologian as well as a novelist, he’s probably the third-best-known of the informal group of Oxford Christians called the Inklings, behind C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. A Christian fascinated with the occult, his novels are tales of the supernatural and the numinous at play in the ‘real’ world. He wrote of ghosts, magi, and the Holy Grail, among other things, and his stories, laboured and profound, are some of the strangest fantasies I know.

I’ll start with some biographical detail (much of which I found in Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings). Williams was hired by the Oxford University Press in 1908, and soon rose to become an editor. His first book of poems was published in 1912. In 1917 Williams was married, and in the same year was initiated into the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a successor organisation to the faction-ridden occult group called the Order of the Golden Dawn. He continued to write poetry through the 1920s, and in 1927 wrote two masques, a kind of ceremonial drama. He’d begun lecturing at local institutes, and soon after the masques wrote his first novel, Shadows of Ecstasy. He couldn’t find a publisher for it at first, but his second book, War in Heaven, made it to print in 1930. Three more novels followed: Many Dimensions in 1931, then The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps in 1932. Shadows of Ecstasy was finally published in 1933.

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October draws to a close and so it’s time to turn to horror and the supernatural, to the weird tale and the things that cannot be known. Today, I want to look at one of the founding classics of the weird, Robert W. Chambers’s collection of linked short stories, The King in Yellow. Published in 1895, it was celebrated by H.P. Lovecraft, who used some of the book’s ideas in his Cthulhu mythos; in fact, the book’s inspired a mythos of its own, complete with a wiki site, as well as any amount of further fiction, music, and games. You can find it for yourself online.

The book’s made up of ten short stories, plus a poem supposedly extracted from a play called The King in Yellow. The first five tales mention the play to varying extents, and all have other fantastic elements, as well as a horrific or weird tone. The sixth story is a set of brief prose poems, while the final four stories are basically mimetic and seem to have nothing to do on a plot level with the first five — though they have certain motifs and themes in common. The play which links the first five stories, the group I’ll call here the ‘mythos stories,’ is said to drive mad anyone who reads it; it’s not clear if it has ever been performed. The first tale’s clearly set in the ‘future’ of 1920, so by extension the following four must be as well (a sculptor mentioned in the first story turns up in the second). The second story features an odd fluid that can turn anything immersed in it to stone. The third and fourth seem to have characters from the play crossing into the real world, while the fifth deals with a timeslip — a blurring of past and present — and also has a character who seems at least tangentially related to the play.

But the primary interest in these stories is the play itself, and the strange things it contains. We never get a plot summary, or character list, or even a description of its themes. Only hints and names. Hastur. The Yellow Sign. The Pallid Mask. “Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali.” The sinister King in Yellow himself. What does it all add up to?

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