Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (13 page)

The surface of the lake rippled again; more flashes of light, brighter, to the point of pain, hot needles driving into his head…

And then he
was
out, floating away more weightless than weightless, consisting of less than the empty space between his dreams, as if everything that was himself had been distilled down to one pure thought.

An industrial espionage hack inadvertently uncovers much too much, leading to a rogue AI merging with a human upload, flinging these corporate honchos and zoned-out artists into uproar with law and the technological abyss. Yes, it is storytelling in the then-newish cyberpunk mode, but also the media corporate hysterics of Norman Spinrad’s
Bug Jack Barron
(1969), two decades street-smarter. (Cadigan’s famous in-your-face line is “If you can’t fuck it, and it doesn’t dance, eat it,
be
it, or throw it away.”) A couple more decades on, it retains plenty of bite and propulsion, a nervy vision of a future that didn’t quite happen, but might yet.

21

Karen Joy Fowler

There they meet Dr. Carr, alienist, and his patient B.J.. A charmingly deranged young man uncertain of his own existence, B.J. is prey to perceptual distortions (again, like everyone else in the novel, though only he is labeled as mad). He sets the pair free and escapes with them in a picaresque, episodic, haphazard and entirely gratifying mission, leading to Sarah Canary’s final transformation and disappearance.

Ugly, incommunicado, at home with birds but scarcely noticing the mostly devious humans she encounters, Sarah Canary is a projective screen upon which the hopes, lusts and terrors of everyone else are written. Is she literally an alien, in the science fictional sense—a being from another world, and therefore another species entirely? Certain scenes imply so, and as it happens Fowler herself considers this to be the case. Still, in postmodern mode, she warns us that interpretations of this sort must always remain, in the end, for each reader.

Her Wizard of Oz crew, in their madcap wanderings, gather in the ebullient Burke, a naturalist, and his associate Harold, who has purchased from Burke a dead mermaid, hideously ugly, which proves to be something else entirely. Finally they collect Miss Adelaide Dixon, suffragist and magnetic doctress, whose public addresses in support of free love and women’s right to orgasm create just the kinds of ructions one anticipates in this brutal male environment at the edge of civilization.

Miss Dixon sees in Sarah Canary (both names are always given; she is never Sarah nor Miss Canary) the escaped murderess Lydia Palmer, whom she wishes to save. Harold, a man driven to a desperate belief in his own immortality by the horrors of the Civil War, pursues Sarah Canary under a sort of taxidermist impulse. She is one of science fiction’s “women that men don’t see,” but women don’t see her, either, probably because she is not a women but a creature from an entirely different realm than the familiar bisymmetry of the sexes.

Broken symmetries mark Sarah Canary and her oddly triumphant procession. The puzzle or koan is posed: Of what use is one wing to a bird? To a duck feigning injury, a great deal of use, faking-out any carnivores hungry for her chicks. What use is a single chopstick? Harold learns to his disadvantage, when he essays what 19th century sexist primness referred to as “female frailty,” i.e. rape. (Such delicacy does not attend the dominant racism that asserts “Find a crime, hang a Chinaman,” a dictum Chin must warily consider whenever he deals with the white demons and demonesses.) Chin sees the world as circles and straight lines, and the plot traces just such patterns, as if all these characters are acting out parts in a circus act. Indeed, from start to end the novel itches with fleas, not least in reports of a flea circus, its diminutive captives dressed as people. Is the human world just a flea circus to Sarah Canary and her own people? It is not impossible.

One recurrent note in this unsentimental book is sounded by Burke: “Let us have no lies between us…. No dissembling. No cunning. No deceit.” Yet the story is built of little but cunning or clumsy deceit. It is the contrary of what Chin’s ancient culture, for all its own sexism, deems the essence of civilization:
ren,
“the tolerance or benevolence a man felt toward others… the most fundamentally human quality. The ideogram was the same as the ideogram for
man.
”

All of this zany, challenging tale is told in a voice beautifully suited to its many Emily Dickinson epigraphs. Adelaide Dixon, secluded with her alien charge above a hostelry of drunken, riotous men, observes that “the wind blew water across the window with a sound like a handful of pebbles thrown by a secret lover.” B.J., too, finds semaphores in every random snap of a blanket in the wind. The world is written upon by messages that nobody else can decipher. “The moon came out again and the water on the window pearled against a background of black branches and black sky. Adelaide began to make black marks on the paper before her, marks that flew across the page like birds.” Like, perhaps, Sarah Canary hatched like a pupa from her dress that heals itself, flown naked into a sky where nobody can see her. Except us, lucky readers, in imagination.

22

Gwyneth Jones

So this is not your average love story, not even for science fiction which has been familiar with sexual oddities since at least Philip José Farmer’s
The Lovers
in 1952, where a man falls for a mimetic insect. The reverse mirroring of Carroll’s
White Queen
is everywhere at work in this first volume of what would become the Aleutian Trilogy, where the second book,
North Wind
(1994) takes place a century or so after the first, and the third,
Phoenix Café
(1998), 300 years after the aliens made themselves known and eventually, effortlessly, colonized the disrupted nations and cultures of the world, before packing up and leaving, using a faster than light system devised by a human woman scientist.
[1]
It is not surprising, then, that
White Queen
shared the inaugural James Tiptree, Jr. award for sf and fantasy expanding or exploring the understanding of gender.

The threads of the story are many and hypercomplexly knitted, and for a long time it is almost impossible to unravel who is who, or why. Most of the characters are confused about each other—not just their motives, which is always rather mysterious in any serious novel, but their very nature. That’s because Jones is undermining identity, nature and nurture from the outset. The trilogy is not just a headlong postmodern work of art; it’s a
poststructural
construct. But don’t let that put you off.

Since the 1940s, science fiction has worked the same way you best learn language and customs—by being immersed in a culture, as a child learns. Faux-sf, by contrast, operates the way school children used to learn French or Latin, arduously memorizing tables of vocabulary and grammar. Gwyneth Jones uses almost pure immersion, a method pioneered in Fred Pohl’s and Cyril Kornbluth’s
Wolfbane
(1959, revised 1986) and Frank Herbert’s
Whipping Star
(1970) and
The Dosadi Experiment
(1977). You sink or swim. This is either baffling and frustrating or exhilarating, especially in the first half of
White Queen
where there is very little hand-holding. Oddly, in the two sequels Jones is far more forgiving, perhaps because she is obliged to use traditional infodumps to bring forgetful or new readers up to speed quickly. Usefully, she has published a remarkably detailed and fascinating account of how she developed the background to the trilogy, and if readers start drifting or getting seasick they might consider turning to this essay, “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension.” Perhaps the key to these novels of identities and affiliations turned on their heads and then sideways is Jones’s critical
postulate
:

I wanted my aliens to represent an alternative. I wanted them to say to my readers it ain’t necessarily so. History is not inevitable, and neither is sexual gender as we know it an inevitable part of being human.... I planned to give my alien conquerors the characteristics, all the supposed deficiencies, that Europeans came to see in their subject races in darkest Africa and the mystic East—“animal” nature, irrationality, intuition; mechanical incompetence, indifference to time, helpless aversion to theory and measurement: and I planned to have them win the territorial battle this time. It was no coincidence, for my purposes, that the same list of qualities or deficiencies—a nature closer to the animal, intuitive communication skills and all the rest of it—were and still are routinely awarded to women… the human world over.
[2]