I’m running a competition on the Whippleshield Books blog to give away a pair of limited edition hardbacks of Adrift on the Sea of Rains. All you have to do is answer three easy questions – and no, the answers are not in the book; you’ll have to search the Internet. So head over there and have a go. Please.
Author Archives: iansales
Alien zero
Prometheus – for a film which is not a prequel to the Alien franchise no honest well okay maybe it is – appropriately asks a ton of questions. Sadly, it either ignores them or gives dumb answers that don’t stand up to a second’s scrutiny. Having said that, as a film, it looks great. Pretty pictures, after all, trump everything.
The movie opens on a verdant planet beside a waterfall. There is a giant hairless humanoid standing on the shore, and a giant flying saucer hovering in the sky nearby. The giant opens a small container and eats its contents. It kills him. He falls into the water and his body dissolves down to its constituent DNA. This, we are supposed to believe, is an alien seeding human life on Earth.
But wait.
Did the giant humanoid mean to dissolve into primordial goop? Was it suicide? Or a really badly planned delivery method for planetary seeding, in which someone has to commit suicide? Maybe it was murder, maybe that was humankind’s original sin. But if we’re descended from them, why did we evolve to be so short and so hairy?
Cut to the Isle of Skye, later this century. Two palaeontologists have discovered 35,000-year-old cave paintings in a, er, cave. These paintings depict a giant pointing to a pattern of five circles. If it’s the same giants from the flying saucer, then they must have returned to Earth. Why? So they could prompt Upper Paleolithic humans to paint their picture? (We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that the oldest settlement so far discovered on Skye is younger than these cave paintings by about 30,000 years.)
This painting of a giant pointing the way to a pattern of five circles is apparently not unique to Skye. In fact, variations on it appear on artefacts from a wide variety of ancient civilisations, not all from the same time period – suggesting a number of visits, or a stay of a couple of millennia. This, apparently, is sufficient evidence for the two palaeontologists, Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), to persuade zillionaire Weyland to fund a mission to the “galactic configuration” represented by the five circles. “Galactic configuration”? What’s that then? A planetary system? Or a constellation of five stars? As seen from Earth? Thirty-five thousand years ago? Stars move, you know. Planets move too. Over time, their positions change – and so too does our viewpoint, as the Earth itself moves.
No matter. Movie logic says there’s something in the heavens which can lead our intrepid palaeontologists to a specific planet. Well, actually a moon of a gas giant. We’ll ignore the vast amounts of radiation the gas giant is likely producing, or its magnetosphere has trapped – this is a movie, after all. Weyland’s spaceship – called the Prometheus – lands on the moon, LV-223 (the first two Alien films took place on LV-426).
All this is handily explained in a briefing given by Shaw and Holloway to the members of the mission aboard Prometheus. However, rather than hire competent scientists for this trip, Weyland appears to have chosen to use rejects from Central Casting. It’s bad enough that the two leaders, Shaw and Holloway, believe in some von Däniken-type rubbish about gods from outer space creating humanity, but the rest of the team are no better. One tells another to fuck off when he introduces himself. Right. You’re zillions of kilometres from Earth – not “half a billion miles,” as one character later says; that would put you about twice as far from Earth as the Moon. Anyway, you’re light-years from Earth, in a spaceship with a small group of people, en route to an alien world. It is not a good time or place to act like an arsehole.
So there’s the scientific mission, the crew of Prometheus, the representative from Weyland, named Vickers, and an android, David. Vickers lives in a “lifeboat”, which is like a luxury flat stuck on the back of the spaceship. This lifeboat also contains a “medpod” – like the original Alien‘s “autodoc”, I imagine – but this one only works on human males. Er, right…
Prometheus lands on LV-223, and discovers a row of strange giant buildings. They’re like giant weathered pyramid-things, inside circular walls. Shaw and the others explore the nearest one. It contains lots of tunnels… and a room with a giant humanoid head. Also jars, lots of jars. Which start to ooze black gunk once the room is breached. Later, they determine the pyramid is a tomb.
Except most tombs don’t have spaceships buried under them. And these are the Giger boney boomerang spaceship from Alien… and the space jockey proves to be one of the giant hairless humanoids wearing a spacesuit. Which does make you wonder why they turned up to Earth in a giant flying saucer.
The boomerang spaceship also contains lots of jars, which the scientific team realise are a weapon. But a very strange weapon. It has different effects on different people. It made the giant at the beginning of the film turn into gunk, and so seeded the Earth. It makes the preserved head of a giant they find in the tomb explode. It turns one of scientific team into a super-strong diseased madman. It allows Holloway to impregnate Shaw with a tentacled monster. (She later uses the medpod to extract it – clearly it has been programmed to deal with pregnant males.)
When they find a surviving giant humanoid, and David manages to speak to him because he’s studied comparative linguistics and can somehow cobble together a working patois of the alien language from that… well, you don’t need that alien gunk to make your head explode. (Oh wait, maybe human languages are genetic too… Not.) But by this point in the film, the plot has already imploded into a black hole of illogic and nonsense and implausibility, so you only have yourself to blame. Prometheus is not a film to watch with your brain engaged. Just admire the pretty visuals. It makes for a much more entertaining 124 minutes.
Yes, Michael Fassbender pwns the film as the android David. Noomi Rapace’s character makes little sense, not least because religion has been fisted into a story it doesn’t fit. The rest of the cast might as well have worn red shirts. Vickers (Charlize Theron) tries to do a robot-or-not thing, but in the end proves she’s human the only way a woman in a movie possibly could: she fucks the captain (Idris Elba). At one point, Shaw is referred to as Holloway’s “zealot girlfriend”. Shaw and Vickers, incidentally, are the only two women in the film. So by 2093, we’ll have cool interstellar spaceships, but no gender equality. Plus ça change…
I saw Prometheus on IMAX 3D. It cost me £13. It was not worth it. I should have waited for the DVD and rented it. I also saw John Carter on IMAX 3D. That film was worth it. John Carter was a much better film. It also flopped. It’s unlikely Prometheus will flop – in fact, it’s probable the sequel implied by the ending will be made.
If you want to see a good sf film with giant spaceships and scary thrills, watch Cargo.
Fragment
So a year or two ago I had this idea for a postmodern planetary romance, a Leigh Brackett-style story as much about story as it was about the events in its strange and implausible world. But like most such projects – and I have an embarrassingly large number of them – it never got beyond some vague ideas and a couple of hundred words. I had a great title, ‘Gods of Saturn’, and what I thought was a pretty cool opening, but then other new shiny ideas captured my attention and my postmodern planetary romance got filed away in a forgotten folder. Until now. Maybe one day I’ll do something with it, actually finish it off perhaps, but for now it qualifies as one of those “stories that never were”, of which I have far more than I care to enumerate. But rather than let it go totally to waste and, in part, to perhaps prompt me into actually working on it and maybe finishing it, here’s the opening of ‘Gods of Saturn’ for you to enjoy…
Of all the winds which blow across the sand seas, an easterly is the most disagreeable. From that quarter, the town of Kumpara boasts no defence against the scouring grains of sand. The western wall of Pu Chou rises behind Kumpara’s tumbled blocks, and curves enfolding arms to north and south. But to the east: nothing.
There was, however, much which could be said about the couple who strolled along Kumpara’s long stone jetty one day in the Age of Helium, as small wisps of easterly wind whipped up dancing devils of sand.
Kumpara had seen better years, but had yet to reach the nadir of its decline; or its subsequent rise to quiet gentility. See it now, and perhaps you would find it hard to picture the narrow streets thick with blinding red dust, the sand whipped into fountains fifty feet high, and every house shuttered and doors firmly bolted. Those who lived there knew better than to risk the wind’s wrath.
A local spy – and there was one – who watched the young couple will have deduced they were strangers to Kumpara. The wind was not yet dangerous, but only the foolhardy or ignorant remained out once it began to blow. So too did their garments advertise their origins. The young lady was dressed in a fashion yet to be seen in the town. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed the split skirt which was common at that time in the capital city, Xu; the high-collar, with its arcane symbols of rank and allegiance; the long gloved sleeves. Her companion was equally well-dressed.
As they turned to stroll back along the jetty, some feeling or whim caused the young woman to look back. She halted, head turned and, as if conjured into being by her gaze, features formed on the face of Saturn. The lemon and orange and tan stripes swirled like the ingredients of some decadent cocktail. It was a vast face, a face which filled the planetary canvas on which it appeared, and it caused the spy to drop his telescope and scramble from his vantage point.
As a result, he did not see the reactions of the Xuan lady and her companion. He did not see her turn her back on the face in disdain.
If such an occurrence sounds remarkable but the couple’s reaction does not, it is because at that time the gods of Saturn would often manifest on the face of the gas giant. From their celestial vantage point, they would gaze on each of the moons and on each of its civilisations. Their impact depended very much on the moon’s distance from Saturn. Here on Janus, where Saturn occupies a significant portion of the horizon, the gods held sway more than on, say, distant Iapetus.
When a god appears, all see him or her. When a god speaks, only those to whom they direct their instructions hear.
Lady Eresu turned to Captain Quradu and took his arm. She gently pulled him about. “Ignore him, Quradu,” she said softly. “He cannot harm us.”
The captain dropped his hand from the butt of his tantalum-pistol. That looming face – its presence alone in the sky suggested great power. Quradu looked up at Lady Eresu – as befitted her rank, she was a head taller than he – and noted her lack of concern.
The Flying Saucer, Bernard Newman
The Flying Saucer, Bernard Newman
(2010 Westholme Publishing, $14.95, 250pp)
America Reads is a series of books which are “rediscovered fiction and nonfiction from key periods in American history”. The Flying Saucer by Bernard Newman is the first of three books in the series subtitled “1950s: Visions of the Future”. Strange then, that America apparently reads a novel by a British writer as a vision of its future. Further strangeness lies in the title. This novel was apparently the first to use the phrase “flying saucer” as a title, and yet no flying saucer actually appears in the story. They are, like the novel’s central conceit, smoke and mirrors. Project Blue Book is just as much a work of fiction as The Flying Saucer, but the author is not the United States Air Force.
The author is, in fact, Bernard Newman, who, as Bernard Newman the author, narrates the story of The Flying Saucer. Such postmodern narrative games sit oddly in what is essentially postwar pulp fiction – especially given the book’s overt nods towards HG Wells and prewar scientific romances. Newman, riffing off The Shape of Things to Come, looks to a scientific elite to save the world from itself, despite only five years having passed since World War Two ended with its frenetic technological progress resulting in V-2s and jet-fighters and radar. The opening chapter of The Flying Saucer recounts a conversation between Newman, eminent polymath scientist Drummond, and ex-spy and comedy Frenchman Pontivy. Together, they hatch a cunning plot, based on the canard that Earth’s nations will unite against a common foe. They chose Mars to be the home of Earth’s enemy. Drummond invents a rocket, made of some indestructible substance, and powered by mysterious means. It lands in Leicestershire, but unlike in Wells’ The War of the Worlds, contains only a message in a strange “alien” alphabet.
As the story progresses, as more rockets land in various parts of the world, the central trio recruit more scientists to their cabal. The messages, for example, were written by the world’s leading linguist. Who is subsequently asked by the UN to translate it. Newman, the author, adds to the global tension by placing stories of UFO encounters in various newspapers and magazines. A British film about aliens invading the Earth becomes a worldwide blockbuster after it is hyped by Newman’s contacts in the media. Meanwhile, Pontivy’s plan to extort more money for the plot from a French criminal backfires badly when the criminal tries to take over the self-created scientific elite. It all comes to a head when a Martian lands in Africa. It carefully manages to escape before the deception can be unmasked. By this point, the nations of the Earth have put away their atomic toys, are in thrall to Drummond’s League of Scientists, and eventually line up to vote in a world leader who proves to be Winston Churchhill in all but name.
It’s all wildly improbable and implausible. There’s no science in this science fiction, only vague handwaving by the narrating author. The central conceit is as old as Tsun Tsu, the book owes many of its ideas to the oeuvres of Verne and Wells, and Pontivy is an offensive racial stereotype. The end result is a potboiler which fails to convince on almost every level, yet remains mostly entertaining. It’s certainly not a definitive or seminal work, by any means. Likely it owes its alleged importance only to an accident of titling. Newman can’t have known a handful of years after the term “flying saucer” was coined that the term, that ufology itself, would prove so popular, or indeed that it would still be going strong sixty years later.
It is good to hear that America Reads. But it’s a shame, if The Flying Saucer is any indication, that it has such poor taste in books.
This review originally appeared in Interzone 232, January – February 2011.
The future we used to have, part 10
Since we’re supposed to be celebrating sixty years of Queen Elizabeth II on the throne, but watching a bunch of boats covered in bunting float down the Thames is dull, how about looking at some cool planes and cars and buildings from the last sixty years instead?
air
Hawker P.1121
Gloster Javelin
Mikoyan MiG-25 ‘Foxbat’
Mikoyan MiG-31 ‘Foxhound’
land
Supreme Court Building, Brasilia (Oscar Niemeyer)
Parque do Ibirapuera, São Paulo (Oscar Niemeyer & Roberto Burle Marx)
Ostankino TV Tower, Moscow (Nikolai Nikitin)
Observation deck of Ostankino TV Tower
water
NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered passenger/cargo ship
NS Savannah
Bridge of the NS Savannah
A Stateroom aboard NS Savannah
You don’t know… what you just went and looked up
There’s an excellent review of Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey on Martin McGrath’s blog here. Of Blood and Honey is an urban fantasy set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and it’s been widely praised. Martin finds much that’s troubling in the book regarding its setting – details which ring untrue to someone who grew up in the time and place in question.
And then there’s the Hugo Award-winning Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, whose claim of historical accuracy has been met with howls of derision on this side of the Atlantic. Not to mention the historical blunders perpetrated in earlier novels, such as those in Doomsday Book outlined by Adam Roberts here.
How much trouble would it have taken Stina Leicht to discover that the Royal Military Police wear red berets – and not the Parachute Regiment, who wear maroon berets? Or that the British Army has never been referred to as the “BA” by anyone? BA is an airline, of course; and it was founded in 1974, three years before the time during which Of Blood and Honey is set.
How much trouble would it have taken Connie Willis to discover that the Jubilee Line of the London Underground was opened in 1977, in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, and so wouldn’t have existed during World War 2? Or that people burned wood and not coal in their fires in 14th Century England? Or that no one has used the phrase “trunk call” in the UK since the 1970s?
True, most readers will either miss these errors, or let them slide. Providing the mistakes don’t pull them out of the story, many readers don’t much care. But there are those who will notice – and they will not only be unimpressed, they might be also be offended.
Without drifting into a discussion on cultural appropriation or First World Gaze (to coin a phrase), I believe a writer has a responsibility to their readers, and to themselves, to get the details right. Writers need to strive for verisimilitude (not authenticity). Research is vital in all areas – not just setting, but also science; technology; language… Anything which exists in the real world and which affects the story in any way, no matter how seemingly trivial.
In these days of the Internet, there’s no excuse. Readers can go and look something up online – and frequently do. Wikipedia has made expert knowledge available and convenient for everyone. Writers should not only be prepared for that, they should armour their writing against it. The old days of genre writers getting away with the most egregious bollocks because they didn’t know better, because their readers were unlikely to know better… they’re over. There is no excuse for sloppiness. Writers must fact-check. Everything.
Because they’ll look very, very foolish if they don’t.
You don’t know good
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told “good is subjective” or “best is subjective”. Every time I hear it, it makes me howl with rage. Because it is wrong.
If there is no such thing as good – because if it’s entirely subjective and personal, then it’s completely useless as a descriptive term – then how do editors choose which books to publish, how do judges choose which books to give prizes to, how do academics chose which books to study? And why don’t they all choose completely different books?
They can do all this because the quality of a book can be determined objectively. It is not an exact science, and it is subject to changes in taste and/or re-evaluation in light of changes in attitudes and sensibilities. But there are certain key indicators in fiction which can be used to determine the quality of that piece of fiction. It’s what makes one writer more talented, more skilled than another writer. It’s what makes one story worthy of study and another not worth giving away for free. It’s why we have classics of literature, andwhy some books are still in print two hundred years after they were first published.
If good is subjective, then awards are completely pointless. And studying literature, well, that’s a complete waste of time too. After all, how can you be an expert in a topic in which one individual’s value judgment is worth exactly the same another person’s? There’d be no such thing as an expert. All books would have exactly the same artistic value.
This is patently nonsense.
Perhaps it’s easier to describe what is bad – if good is subjective, then by definition bad must be too. Except, strangely, everyone seems to agree that the following do indeed indicate that a piece of fiction is bad: cardboard cutout characters, idiot plotting, clumsy prose, tin-earred dialogue, lack of rigour, graceless info-dumping, unoriginality, bad research…
So if we can determine with a reasonable degree of accuracy what constitutes a bad book, then it logically follows we can do the same for a good book. And since this is a scale of sorts, then there must be an objective element to determining a piece of fiction’s position on the scale. Which means it is not subjective.
And “best”? It means “of the highest quality”, “most excellent”. It is the superlative form of “good”. Go and look it up in a dictionary. If good is not subjective, then best cannot be either.
If you want to describe a book in entirely subjective terms, then tell people how much you enjoyed it, how much you liked it. That’s your own personal reaction to it. It appealed to you, it entertained you. That’s the book directly affecting you. Another person may or may not react the same way, the book might or might not do the same to them.
Because that’s subjective, that is.
Template, Matthew Hughes
Template, Matthew Hughes
(2008, PS Publishing, £20, 253pp)
Comparisons between Matthew Hughes and Jack Vance are inevitable, because if any writer is a template for Hughes’ fiction then it is Vance. Hughes’ Archonate novels are set on an Earth not unlike the Dying Earth, or on the worlds of a formless galactic polity called The Spray which resembles the Alastor Cluster (in fact, hussade, from Vance’s Trullion: Alastor 2262, is mentioned in Template).
Like many of Vance’s novels, Template is a bildungsroman, and one in which the protagonist is involuntarily pitched into a quest for his true identity. Said protagonist is Conn Labro, a highly-skilled and indentured duellist on the world of Thrais. Despite his abilities, Labro is a naïf and Thrais, with its culture based on contracts and transactions, has given him poor social skills. So when a regular customer is murdered, leaves him a fortune and an encrypted bearer deed to a planet, and an attempt is made on his own life, Labro has no idea how to respond. Happily, there is a young woman at hand to help him. Labro buys out his indenture and determines to discover his origin and the location of the planet he apparently now owns. The young woman, Jenore Mordene, he “hires” as a guide.
It’s in the nature of such a story’s template that the naïf’s voyage of discovery is as much literal as it is metaphorical. Labro’s bearer deed has determined his destination, Earth, and so he must travel there. En route, he learns something of The Spray – which gives Hughes opportunity to discourse on various cultural templates for societies. For example, one character posits a theory of societies each built upon one of the seven deadly sins. Thrais, with its “transactionalism”, is of course Greed. Unfortunately, Hughes makes little of this idea, using it merely as the topic of conversation.
On Earth, Labro sees all social interactions as a form of transaction. Mordene, however, is from a region of Earth which eschews money, and sees something different. This provides some interesting repartee, but does not advance the plot as such. But it certainly sets the template for their relationship.
It’s only when Labro learns what he has inherited that the villain of the piece steps in to the story. Now the template is Gothic. Not only does the villain remain masked but, as is often the case in such fictions, there is a greater enemy hiding behind him. And this greater villain must be defeated if Labro is to win and keep knowledge of his origin, his legacy, and the girl. And yes, the book’s climax does reveal Labro’s origin. It also explains the story’s title – there is indeed a very real template in the story.
At some point reading Template, everyone is sure to ask why we need Hughes when we have Vance. And the answer is: because we can never have too much Vance. And providing it’s done with invention and wit, then it’s as enjoyable as the real thing. Happily, Hughes matches the wit and invention of Vance. He also brings slightly off-kilter philosophical musings to his stories, and they provide a depth Vance sometimes lacks. Having said that, the writing in Template is a little stilted. While clearly intentional, it’s not entirely successful. Further, Labro is somewhat stiff a character, and Mordene is under-written. Neither characteristic is unexpected – at that intersection of bildungsroman and travelogue, where both protagonist and world are mapped, there’s little room for immersion.
This review originally appeared in Interzone 218, October 2008.
World fiction reading challenge #4: So Long A Letter, Mariama Bâ
The more observant among you will have noticed there’s no third installment in this year’s reading challenge. That’s because March’s book was My Name is Red by Orham Pamuk and I got stuck about halfway into it. At some point I plan to return to it, but for now I’m giving it a rest. I can’t really say why I lost interest so comprehensively in the book, especially since its topic is something that normally interests me: Islamic history (albeit Turkish rather than Arabic). After reading Magda Szabó’s The Door in February, I wrote, “Two books in and already this year’s reading challenge is shaping up to be one of the best I’ve done.” Clearly, I spoke too soon…
Anyway, April’s book, which I read late, is So Long A Letter by Mariama B â, a Sengalese writer. In fact, So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980, and was later called one of Africa’s Best 100 Books of the 20th Century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. So Long A Letter was originally published in French as Une Si Longue Lettre, and was Bâ’s first novel. It was also the only one she saw in print. She died in 1981, five years before her second novel, Scarlet Song, was published.
So Long A Letter is a short book of 95 pages. Ramatoulaye is a schoolteacher and the wife of Modou. He has just died and she is now in mourning. During this period, she writes to her closest friend, Aissatou, and recounts her life – much of which involves episodes involving Aissatou. The epistolary structure allows for greater intimacy, but the fact that Ramataoulaye is telling Aissatou of events which her friend herself directly experienced does seem to spoil the effect somewhat.
Though Ramatoulaye is an educated woman – Bâ herself had to fight her parents to be educated – I’m guessing much of her life is not atypical for a Sengalese wife and mother. Such as, for instance, her husband taking up with a younger woman and marrying her – in fact, not a “woman”, but a school friend of Ramatoulaye’s oldest daughter. Also, the declaration after the funeral by Modou’s brother that he will marry Ramatoulaye – ie, “inherit” her. She turns him down. Which is not typical. In fact, Ramatoulaye is adamant she will remain single now that she is widowed. When Daouda Dieng,a past suitor from before she married Modou, asks for her hand in marriage, she also turns him down. Neither the brother-in-law nor Daouda take their rejections well.
A lot of the novel concerns the family connections of the cast. Aissatou’s marriage was considered controversial because she came from a less affluent family than her husband. Likewise, when Ramatoulaye’s oldest daughter wants to marry an impoverished student, friends of the family try to persuade Ramatoulaye to prevent it. Ramatoulaye, however, knows that her daughter loves the man, and that’s good enough for her.
There are one or two moments of outright racism:
Right from Form One, he had been top of his class in this subject; but this year for every capital letter forgotten, for a few commas omitted, for a misspelt word, his teacher knocks off one or two marks. Because of this, Jean-Claude, a white boy who has always come second, has moved up to first position. The teacher cannot tolerate a black coming first in philosophy. (p 76)
The story is filled with details of life among the Sengalese, both as Muslims and as Sengalese. At one point, Daouda delivers a lecture on the importance of true democracy in a newly-formed nation (Senegal gained independence in 1960), and though he rues the male dominance of the Assembly and admits they need more women in government, his suit to Ramatoulaye seems to expect a much more traditional “partnership”. There is also much about polygamy and its effect on women involved; not to mention their huge families – Ramatoulaye herself has twelve children.
So Long A Letter is, unsurprisingly, a very reflective novel, and it is likely it is partly auto-biographical. Though only a slim book, it does an excellent job of painting Ramatoulaye, her life and the society in which she lives. It’s a classic for good reason. I’m not so sure the story quite leads to the final paragraph – various incidents recounted in So Long A Letter demonstrate that Ramatoulaye has both witnessed the happiness of others, actively worked towards it for yet more, and even experienced it herself during the early days of her marriage:
The word ‘happiness’ does indeed have meaning, doesn’t it? I shall go out in search of it. Too bad for me if once again I have to write you so long a letter… (p 95)
So Long A Letter was a good choice for my reading challenge. I’m glad I read it. I might even one day have a go at B â’s other novel, Scarlet Song.
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling
(2009, Del Rey, $25.00, 297pp)
In 1930, Hugo Gernsback wrote, “Not only is science fiction an idea of tremendous import, but it is to be an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life which, even today, are not appreciated by the man on the street.” And yet in the decades since then, the genre has ceased to be either didactic or predictive. A science fiction may have something to say – and most certainly do – but any such conversation will most likely be about the present.
Bruce Sterling, however, is not just a science fiction writer. He has also been a “Visionary in Residence”, at both the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. He has eleven science fiction novels to his name, and five collections of short stories. He has also written non-fiction, such as Tomorrow Now and Shaping Things. His last three novels could be described as conversations with the future: in Zeitgeist, it was the commodification of entertainment product and the feral capitalism of the ex-Soviet client states; in The Zenith Angle, it was the War on Terror and ubiquitous surveillance; and now, in The Caryatids, it is the collapse of the earth’s climate, of the global economy, and of nation-states.
The Caryatids of the book’s title are the four surviving clone sisters of a group of seven created by a female Croatian warlord (what is the female equivalent of warlord? warlady? bellatrix?). Vera is a member of a recovery team on the Adriatic island of Mljet (known to the Ancient Greeks as Melita), which has suffered toxic pollution. Radmila has married into a powerful Hollywood family and is now a media star. Sonja is a medic, living and working for the Chinese in a space city in the Gobi Desert. And then there’s Biserka, who is insane.
I suspect it’s no accident there are seven clone sisters – that’s one for each continent. It’s equally telling that only four have survived. Vera is Europe – technological, non-authoritarian, looking for new ways to live. Radmila is the US – technology-backed spectacle, a self-imposed role as the guardian of the planet, and wielding capitalism as a weapon with the clinical precision of a scalpel. Sonja is Asia – undefeatable, strong, and finding a way to live that neither Europe nor the US would ever contemplate. And poor Biserka is Africa – the dark continent, forever at war with itself.
There is also an eighth clone, a man. His name is Djordje – AKA George – and he is a Viennese businessman. He has a nice Viennese hausfrau wife and dalring children. He is successful, and makes more than enough money to keep his family safe and secure. He’s not above bending laws, or ethics, when making deals. He has just started using the latest business tools and he thinks they’re wonderful. George is perhaps the world as it used to be.
And the “mother”? She is the climate disaster which created the world of The Caryatids. Once she’s done her bit, she’s hustled off to a space station in orbit, out of the way of story and history.
Each clone has her story – and The Caryatids is a story. And shown to be a story about a story in the afterword “interview” with Radmila’s daughter, Mary Montalban. There are three sections to the novel: Vera, Radmila and Sonja. An epilogue sees all four meet for the funeral of their mother. They are burying the world’s past as much as they burying their own.
The world as it is in The Caryatids is not the world we know. The climate has crashed, billions have died, and most nation-states have failed. The world is now dominated by two supra-national societies – the Dispensation and the Acquis. The Dispensation is Californian and supremely capitalist. Its members talk like the flakiest of Hollywood “business” people. The Acquis are European.
As a writer or a visionary, Sterling has never been short of ideas, and there are plenty in The Caryatids. Most of them seem extrapolated from his arguments in Tomorrow Now and Shaping Things – ubiquitous computing, and complex devices created from simple components using unsophisticated techniques. This is a “spime”-dominated future.
Conversations can change minds. They can alter opinions. When conversing about the future, wiggle-room for such changes is built-in. The Caryatids is not going to be “educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life”, but it may well prove a catalyst for conversations which will do that. Gernsback might not recognise the 21st century version of his “scientification”, but for those of us living in the 21st Century and gazing into the abyss of the future, The Caryatids provides a thought-provoking, entertaining and perhaps important roadmap for the decades ahead.
This review originally appeared, with an interview with Bruce Sterling, in Interzone 221, March-April 2009.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 