What Makes This Book So Great (4 page)

“Luckily,” he said, “you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as impossible in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “everything between herring and marmalade appears to be missing.”

It’s the timing that’s so beautiful, and the unlikeliness of the words. What brings me back to it isn’t the funny bits, though some of them remain funny long after they’ve stopped being surprising. (Dirk’s later offered a herring, and says there’s no such word in his dictionary … and all of this is buildup and foreshadowing for something that is in our world but not in theirs, yet.) What’s beautiful about it is the way the plot looks as if it’s bumbling along tossing elements into the blender and making a big messy stew, just like
Hitchhiker,
and then suddenly it gives a glorp and assembles itself into a perfect precise layer cake. In retrospect, every element of the book makes perfect glorious sense and needs to be there. It all fits together, from the way the sofa won’t go either up or down the stairs to the appalling dinner conversation about music on Radio Three. Things that look like jokes and asides are actually all setup. Every piece fits with every other piece like a perfect machine. It’s almost impossible to summarise or synopsise because of this. If you wanted to tell someone about it you’d have to say, “Well, there’s this time machine. And the person from Porlock. And ghosts. And Bach was written by aliens. And it’s SF and very funny and it all totally makes sense eventually.” I admire it to no end.

There are very few other examples of books I re-read to glory in the way they’re put together. There’s Barry Hughart’s
Bridge of Birds,
and John James’s
Not for All the Gold in Ireland
and perhaps—another time travel story—Tim Powers’s
The Anubis Gates
.

JULY 26, 2008

7.
“That’s just scenery”: What do we mean by “mainstream”?

In the “Handicapping the Hugos” thread, there’s a discussion of what “mainstream” means.

In the simplest sense, “mainstream” is everything that is not genre. It’s a marketing category like “mystery” or “SF” or “chicklit” or “literary fiction.” It’s everything that’s mimetic. That’s a fairly useless category, though, because it’s too huge. We joke about simplistic equations like, “If you loved
Dragonflight
you’ll adore
Mission of Gravity
” but categories exist to help people find books they’ll like, and “If you loved
Middlemarch
you’ll adore
The Hunt for Red October
” isn’t going to do much for anyone. Anyway, marketing categories may be useful for finding books, but they’re not interesting to think about as edges of genre.

“Mainstream” is a term from within SF culture. Mainstream writers don’t know they’re mainstream, and I believe Tor (which started off publishing mostly fantasy and SF) is the only publisher to label a portion of its list “mainstream.” Mainstream is defined in opposition to SF. Damon Knight famously said that SF is what we point at when we say SF, and mainstream is the same, it’s what we (SF readers) point at when we say mainstream.

What I find interesting is when there are books that are “obviously” SF but that some people think are mainstream.

I think what people mean when they say
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(an alternate history about a Jewish state in Alaska) is “mainstream” is that it has mainstream sensibilities, mainstream expectation, and, most of all, mainstream pacing. They may also mean that it had mainstream publication and that Michael Chabon is a writer who made his name selling mimetic fiction—which is still true even though his last three books have been genre and he’s spoken well of SF and even joined SFWA. I just made this kind of argument myself in that thread when I said that Ian McDonald was a long-standing SF writer who went to cons. The status of the author shouldn’t make any difference … except that it kind of does. If some people are detecting mainstream sensibilities in
Brasyl
(a novel about quantum alternities in a historic, present and future Brazil) then I suppose they are. I don’t know how, and I’d be interested to know how, because I just don’t see it.

Samuel R. Delany has talked about the importance of reading protocols, and reading SF as SF. I tend to read everything as SF.

When mainstream writers come to write SF, it’s normally the case that they don’t understand the idioms of SF, the things we do when we (SF readers) read SF. This is very noticeable in things like Marge Piercy’s
Body of Glass
(1991) (published as
He, She and It
in the US) where Piercy had clearly read Gibson but nothing much else, or Doris Lessing’s
Shikasta
(1979) and sequels. The mainstream writers know how to do all the basic writing stuff, stories and characters and all of that, sometimes they know how to do that really well. They really want to write SF—in Lessing’s case she clearly admires SF—but they don’t know how SF works. They explain too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things, they come up with embarrassing acronyms (SOWF, the “spirit of we feeling” from
Shikasta,
is burned onto my brain) and they don’t understand how to put things over. They don’t get the thing I call “incluing,” where you pick up things about how the world works from scattered clues within the text. I don’t feel that Chabon has this problem in the slightest, because he is an SF reader and knows how to inclue—indeed I very much admire the brilliance of his worldbuilding—but he’s very unusual.

I had a great revelation about this some time ago when I was reading A. S. Byatt’s
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
(1994). This is a mainstream story in which a female academic buys a bottle containing a djinn and gets it to give her wishes. It’s a mainstream story because she finds the bottle on something like page 150 of 175. In a genre story she’d have found the bottle on the first page. It has mainstream pacing and expectations of what’s important. The story is really about how simple answers are not fulfulling. The djinn is a metaphor in exactly the way Kelly Link’s zombies aren’t a metaphor. People talk about SF as a literature of ideas, as if you can’t find any ideas in
Middlemarch
or
The Hunt for Red October
! I don’t think it’s so much the literature of ideas as the literature of worldbuilding.

In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.

In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.

In a mainstream novel trying to be SF, this gets peculiar and can make the reading experience uneven.

In the old Zork text adventures, if you tried to pick up something that was described but not an object, you’d get the message “that’s just scenery.” The difference between a mainstream novel and an SF one is that different things are just scenery.

JULY 29, 2008

8.
Re-reading long series

I’m re-reading C. J. Cherryh’s Atevi books. There are nine of them, and another three promised, which makes them one of the longer SF series around. I was thinking, as I made my way through book two,
Invader,
that there are some things about a long series, any long series, that are quite different from an individual novel, perhaps in the same way an individual novel is different from a short story.

A novel is one story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Diane Duane’s
Door Into …
books, when people are going to tell a story they begin, where we’d start “Once upon a time,” with the formula “This is the story of /whatever/ and this is the way I tell it.” I find it quite useful myself to think of that as the unwritten first line of any novel, because knowing what story it is and how I tell it is a very useful thing. The
Iliad
starts off with “Sing Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles” and the story you get is the wrath of Achilles, not the whole saga of the Trojan War—it begins ten years into the war, with the reasons for Achilles’ wrath, and ends when he stops being angry, with Troy still unfallen. Eric Frank Russell’s
Next of Kin
is the story of how Leeming single-handedly won the war against the Lathians.
Citizen of the Galaxy
is the story of how Thorby learned to be a free man.
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
is the story of how Lola and her world went to hell together … and so on.

But when you have a long series, it isn’t like that. There are artifacts of publishing where one story gets spread over multiple volumes (Charlie Stross’s
The Family Trade
and
The Hidden Family,
or
The Lord of the Rings
for that matter) but I’m not talking about that. There are also very long series, like Kate Elliott’s
Crown of Stars
books, where you have one very long story in separate volumes that have individual narratives but aren’t really separable. I’m not talking about that either, though that’s interesting and I might talk about that some other time. And you get things like Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias where the different parts stand alone but comment on each other, which is also really nifty, but not what I want to talk about.

What I’m talking about is something like Cherryh’s Alliance-Union Universe or Atevi books, or Brust’s Vlad books, or Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, where you have individual books that each tell a story and can be read alone, but each book is part of a longer history, and the books illuminate each other and the longer story and the way that is told begin to emerge as the series progresses. It isn’t Achilles’ wrath but the whole Trojan War, but it isn’t a rambling set of anecdotes either, it’s a lot more like a whole mythology.

The length itself has something to do with it. I always feel that re-reading a series like that is like embarking on a voyage, because you have many volumes in front of you. When you set off, you know you’re committing yourself to a long time in the world, you’re launching yourself into something you know is good and absorbing and is really going to last. I love that feeling, when you step again into that universe, knowing what happens, knowing the long road you have to go along before you reach the end—or the present end. When a series is still ongoing, I usually re-read it when a new volume comes out. Then there’s a lovely sense that the new volume is waiting there at the end for me, that I can sail happily through the known waters with unknown waters ahead. I re-read the whole Vlad series in preparation for
Dzur,
and may well again for
Jhegaala
. Ooh! What a treat!

When I do this, of course, one thing I really notice is any minor inconsistencies. I used to have a problem understanding this. If I could see them, why couldn’t the author see them and reconcile them? If I could launch myself into the universe and re-read so happily, why couldn’t the author? Since then, I have written series myself, and now I am far more sympathetic. Re-reading one’s own work is unlikely to bring the same warm glow of trusting yourself to the words on the page and the world they create. And remembering one’s own work, one remembers what one meant to do and the broad sweep of intent, not every detail of what one actually put down. Oh well.

I also notice the felicities of connection that I might have missed before. This minor character will become a major character several books later! This antagonist will become a friend, and this friend a traitor. (Cherryh is particularly good at this.) Also, you can really appreciate setup. Through nine Vlad books, Brust mentions Valabar’s as a wonderful restaurant, but before
Dzur
we never see it.

It isn’t just seeing details, though. I think there’s a way that a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. Really long series can do different things. Partly the difference is just a case of having longer to build your spear to drive home your spearpoints. If the reader has lived with the characters for a long time and knows them really well, a line like “Ivan you idiot, what are you doing here?” can bring tears to their eyes. (Bujold’s
Memory
[1996]. Read the other seven books first.) The same goes for Dorothy Dunnett’s
Pawn in Frankincense
(1969), where I’ve known several people who have read only that book not be knocked over by the events at the end, whereas people who have read from the beginning of the series (it’s book four) reliably are.

Beyond all this, in a long series we have history. This can be the ability to give a historical perspective—Cherryh’s Alliance-Union books are brilliant at that, because they’re written from different angles on a long history. But even books that use the same points of view can do it—we see history change in Bujold’s Miles books and in the Atevi books. We see people go from being a glint in someone’s eye to viewpoint characters in a length of time that feels emotionally long enough for that to happen. In a really long series, there’s time for characters to really grow and change in a way that doesn’t feel rushed or forced. And in SF, as we’ve noted before, the world is a character. So there’s time and space for the world to grow and change. The world growing and changing is what history is, and seeing it happening before our eyes is a wonderful thing that provides a new and fascinating kind of perspective.

AUGUST 5, 2008

9.
The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles

Heinlein isn’t usually noted for his dystopias. Indeed, his Juveniles are usually considered upbeat cheery fare, suitable for twelve-year-olds of all ages. But as I was gazing out over the cornfields of Iowa (does anyone really need that much corn?) I found myself thinking about U.S. rural poverty, which led me naturally to reflecting on U.S. rural poverty in
Starman Jones
(1953). In
Starman Jones,
Max is a dirt-poor farmer teen who leaves home in search of adventure and opportunity when his stepmother marries again. Max has an eidetic memory and is a lightning calculator, which is enough to get him promoted to starship captain practically as soon as he gets off the planet, but on Earth isn’t enough for him to qualify as apprentice to a dustman. Earth has become dominated by Guilds, all of which demand fees and recommendations and kickbacks to allow people to join. Max cheats, lies and bribes his way off this horrible place to make good among the stars.