And if you liked the New Weird…
I just reviewed Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s The New Weird anthology, and if you’re interested in varying offshoots and antecedents, you might want to check out my reviews of:
Should be enough homework for today.
Short FictionReview #15: The New Weird edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer
It might seem weird that people once got worked up about this stuff (and, maybe they still do and I’m just not paying that much attention anymore), but about five years or so ago (that’s 35 in dog years and paleolithic ancient history in Internet reckoning), people were getting worked up about “The New Weird,” whether it was a bona fide genre subcategory and/or movement, who its practitioners were, and who the hell cared. At least it was better than arguing about whether cyberpunk was dead and whether slipstream was literary science fiction, or literary fiction that stole from science fiction.
Now, along come the Vandermeers — both of whom have dogs in this hunt, Ann as editor of the presumably now defunct Silver Web magazine and currently at the helm of Weird Tales and Jeff as the author of City of Saints and Madmen, among other works, associated with The New Weird milieu and, if recollection serves, one of those who at the time thought the whole discussion about the classification kind of pointless — with The New Weird anthology. Theirs is an interesting approach. This is more than a compendium of stories that tend to share a theme; rather, it is a kind of snapshot of a fixed era (with one exception) of excitement — possibly mixed with some confusion — of authors breaking ground from traditional fantasy and horror and mixing it up in very intriguing, though sometimes incomprehensible ways, whose time, the editors seem to suggest, has past. “New Weird is dead. Long Live the Next Weird.”
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Anathem update
Well, I’m now about halfway through Neal Stepehenson’s Anathem and, while I’m enjoying it, the going is slow. When I was in graduate school, my 18th century British Lit class had as required reading a 1500 page epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson called Clarissa which recounts the seduction, rape and subsequent suffering of said title character. Correctly suspecting that perhaps not everyone would read it thoroughly, the professor assigned the students sections that we would each summarize and present to the class as we worked through the reading. My section was some 500 pages into the story, and I remember starting my presentation by saying, “I was fortunate to be assigned the part of the book where something actually starts to happen.” Which is sort of how I feel about Anathem about now.
I’m not overly obsessive, let alone concerned, about world-building. I don’t look at the maps, or the etymology of a sword’s name, or get overly concerned about any of that stuff. I don’t get upset if there’s some inconsistency in the imagined world; hell, the real world is inconsistent enough for my taste. I’m more interested in metaphor, or even just whether it’s a good read. In Antathem, Stephenson is poking fun at the world-building fetish (I think) but, at the same time, is a practicing adherent. A dangerous thing for an author known to never hesitate to let the reader just how much he knows.
Certain sections of the book begin with definitions of the Earth-like society’s terms, sociological classifications, and historical events. Here’s Stephenson reading these definitions. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll love the book for this alone.
Festival of the Book
One of the advantages of living near a college town is The Virginia Festival of the Book. The two things that persuaded me to move to Charlottesville were the extensive music scene — the hometown of Dave Matthews with venues for just about any major artist from Dylan and Springsteen to Bill Frissel and Jane Siberry to locals such as Devon Sproule ( just this past week I saw Joan Baez and Ani DiFranco); and the home of WTJU, one of the last remaining noncommercial free form terrestrial radio stations where they even let someone like me spin discs on a Saturday night — and the fact that in the downtown there are literally a half dozen used and independent book stores all within strolling distance. This year’s book festival has Mary Doria Russell, though she’s assigned to historical fiction which has been her genre of choice lately, but it also has some comics, fantasy, SF discussions that I’ll probably attend, though I’m not overly familiar with most of these authors. The danger, of course, is the likelihood of adding even more books to the already overweighted “to be read” shelves.
Check it out, if you’re in the neighborhood.
Short Fiction Review #14: Interzone #220/February 2009
Back in June, Interzone published an edition dedicated to “Mundane SF,” which essentially means the story’s future speculative setting must be based on plausible science. So, no FTL, which virtually eliminates space opera, or telepaths or pointy eared aliens who speak English and act more or less like human beings except that they have pointy ears even though they live on planets light years away from Earth. I guess. It all sounds to me like Hard SF in a girdle, and I don’t quite get it. You could, for example, group fiction that takes place only in New York City, or must involve farm implements, or that is first person narration by a transsexual. I mean, it might be interesting to read a collection of stories that take place in New York City, if only to say, “Oh, I recognize that restaurant where the characters are eating, I go there all the time,” but, beyond that, I’m not really sure how the categorization serves to help the reader to appreciate the author’s technique or critical perspective. Geoff Ryman’s introduction seems to say that one purpose of mundanity is to provide hope (and, indeed, his own contribution, “Talk is Cheap,” seeks to show how hope springs eternal in even direst circumstances). But, I’m not so sure why that should be the case. After all, On the Beach takes the mundane approach to the possibility of nuclear holocaust that is plausible, but certainly not hopeful.
I was thinking about this in reading the latest Interzone, which, with one exception, could be a mundane issue. Not only in the sense of plausible scientific extrapolation, but also in the sense of, well, being mundane in trodding familiar ground. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; the better stories here manage to unearth some disturbing ideas that are certainly relevant to our mundane existences.
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Comical
You may have heard that a fairly good copy of the iconic first issue of Action Comics that introduced the character of Superman — the first superhero — is on the auction block. Recession be damned, some estimate a winning bid could be as high as $400,000. For a comic book.
Like any other red-blooded American boy in the Cold War era, I was a comic book collector. But, as my childhood chum and fellow collector once remarked, “The trouble was we actually read these things, so pages would be torn and folded. So, even if we didn’t end up throwing them out, they probably wouldn’t be worth much today as collectibles to people who are more interesting in owning the things as an object, rather than what they were originally intended for – something to make being a kid more bearable.”
I think I started collecting comics at around third or fourth grade, but by the time I got to junior high school it was, to use a Biblical phrase that has come into use of late in the political realm, time to put childish things away. I had graduated to the tales of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and real books without pictures. I wasn’t (or at least didn’t want to be treated like) a kid, anymore. Consequently, I emptied my drawers of comics and sent them, I don’t really remember where.
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Anathem
I just started the latest from Neal Stephenson, which I notice has already hit the remainder tables after coming out in late 2008. It’s a little slow going, in large part because Stephenson really wants you to understand what he’s making up. Opening at a random page, here’s a random paragraph:
The praxis had done it with water power. Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract — therefore, at an altitude well above our heads — they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south towards the Mynster, bypassing the cataract , the bridge and the bend. After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers. The water in the pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from a pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate. A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, passing between those two fountains.
Geez, I would have just been happy to know there were two fountains in front of the gate that flanked the town’s central square!
Bad Monkeys
I just finished Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, which, as anyone familiar with his work might expect, is thought provokingly funny. The main character, Jane Charlotte (and,yes, as fans of Ruff also know, he’s never met a literary allusion he doesn’t like) is in a detention center, has evidently killed someone, and also seems crazy. A psychiatrist seems to be trying to determine the underlying cause of her psychosis, which forms the novel’s narrative in which Jane recounts her fantastic adventures in a secret organization dedicated to the elimination of murderers, child molesters and other purely evil people. Of course, we’ve been down this road before — is she crazy or is there really some sort of alternate universe where good does triumph over evil. All through the book you’re trying to figure out how Ruff is going to turn the tables and come up with an ending that is something more than an average Twilight Zone denouement. And he manages to pull it off.
Fun stuff, though his previous book, Set This House in Order, is his best and the one I’d recommend first if you haven’t read him before. His other two novels are Sewer, Gas & Electric and the cult-classic Fool on the Hill, which was one of the first reviews I did for Black Gate publisher John O’Neil when he was helping to start the whole on-line reviewing thing at SF Site.
Library Thing
It’s been almost four years since I’ve moved, and half of my library is still in boxes, mainly because the bookshelves I’ve been wanting to install haven’t been. Instead, there are some rather rickety temporary structures that weren’t really designed to hold books (more to display things) which are sagging under the weight of the volumes I’ve so far unpacked. As it happens, I hope this weekend to get started working on the library, not so much the bookshelves as reorganizing what I already started, and soon realized I’d planned wrong, doing some painting and generally getting ready to install real bookshelves at some point. I’m actually looking forward to delving into my collection and dusting off some stuff I’ve forgotten about (and/or haven’t gotten around to read). In fact, the only thing I liked about moving was the chance to start reorganizing my books/records/CD collections, though, as the date of the move got closer, there was too much last minute stuffing into boxes hat I’m not entirely certain if all my “L” authors really are in the boxes with the “L” on them. Could mean “late additions.” We shall see…
Which brings me to this thing, an online way for you to catalog your stuff and get recommendations from people who like the same stuff you do. At this point, the last thing I need is more suggestions on what else I should be reading in addition to what I already haven’t caught up with, and I really don’t need a database, but I have started to add titles to the list as I finish them. I really don’t know why I’m doing this, other than that I can. Eventually, I hope to have everything shelved in a real library so that if I need something, I can physically see and retreive it. That, to me, is part of the enjoyment of books as objects after you’ve read them. But, seeing as how we are all moving, like it or not, to a virtual life in which we download pdfs and mp3s, it seems like a good place as place as any to start building these other shelves. At least they don’t cost nearly as much…
What it all means
As a recovering English major, I sometimes just like to read for the hell of it, enjoy the story and not worry too much about literary merit or what any of the stuff might symbolize. Moby Dick, after all, is a great yarn about high seas adventures. But, then again, you’re missing something if you don’t also ponder what it is has to to say about God and the existence of evil (which is nothing particularly uplifting; Melville will never make the Oprah book club).
When I write reviews, I have to wear my English major hat, and frequently I realize that I missed something that I might not otherwise have considered if I were just reading for amusement and didn’t have to think about it in an attempt to say something semi-interesting that might actually be helpful to someone who may not have read the work in question, or read it the same way I did.
I actually like reading some literary criticism, but what I can’t stand are critics who suffer from “what I’m saying is more important than what the text is actually saying” syndrome. And, sometimes, I just don’t feel like working that hard. Case in point is this post at the blog for Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I think I understand Niall Harrison’s responses more than I understand the points taken from Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory though, not having read the book (nor do I intend to) that’s probably my shortcoming, not his.