Monday, May 2, 2016

yet we are dogs nevertheless

Kafka did not write science fiction. He did not write speculative fiction. He did not write fantastic fiction, nor did he write fantasy, certainly not in the sense that people tend to mean these days. He did not write weird fiction, what he wrote is not The Weird. People — terrible, bad people — sometimes try to lump Kafka in with science fiction or speculative fiction or fantastic fiction or fantasy or weird fiction or The Weird. This is of course because terrible, bad people are often terribly, badly wrong.

It is in "Investigations of a Dog", I think, that Kafka, though he did not write science fiction, comes closest to writing science fiction. A-ha, you say, it's because here he writes about dogs who think and talk like humans do — an sfnal concept — and so surely by that logic a story about a man who wakes up one day transformed into an insect, or a story about a castle that does not exist in reality, or a story about a horse who becomes a lawyer: all of these are also sf! But no — I suggest that "Investigations of a Dog" is the closest Kafka — who did not write sf — comes to writing sf not because of the dogs in the story, but because of the dogs out of it. Kafka, who did not write science fiction, makes his closest approach to something recognizable as science fiction in five words in this story, five words that appear in the middle of a sentence in the middle of one of his famously long paragraphs. He writes:

They appeared from somewhere, I inwardly greeted them as dogs, and although I was profoundly confused by the sounds that accompanied them, yet they were dogs nevertheless, dogs like you and me...
(Or at least, this is how the Muirs translate him.)

Dogs like you and me — this invocation and fictionalization of the reader — accusing the reader of being something they are not, something they cannot be, something closer to the work than is possible, in more ways than one — but at the same time it's true, it's correct, it is neither a lie nor, for the moment at least, a metaphor. If Kafka has anything in common with sf — which is not to say that he is sf — it's not that he calls the narrator a dog, it's that he calls the reader a dog.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

This / narrow sign between walls

I don't have any German, but I do have a bilingual edition of Paul Celan's selected poetry checked out from the library, and just now when I read, in "Anabasis", the lines that Michael Hamburger renders as
re-
leased, re-
deemed, ours.
my curious eye traveled across to the facing page and read, in whatever sense one can read a language one knows roughly how to pronounce but not how to decipher, the corresponding lines
aus-
gelöst, ein-
gelöst, unser.
and while I'm not saying anything new by saying that translation is a very peculiar thing, it's just a very peculiar thing that the way Hamburger renders the lines has the effect of making me feel the reness of these words, and of making me think about why it is that to re-lease means to release, why to re-deem means to redeem, where Celan's lines — presumably — would have the effect of making one feel the gelöstness of the words (neither of which (google suggests) possesses any reness)... which, intriguingly, I suspect also would make one feel the changing prefixes with a similar kind of newness and focus as Hamburger's version lends to the unchanging prefixes. (I would bet the German emphasizes the past tense of these verbs more as well, but I feel on even shakier ground there.)

These are, then, of course, as we all know already, different poems. The one in English strikes me as very fine, though (and as) it largely escapes me; I can't speak for the one in German.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

precisely in the way it manages such rivalry

As I write this I've just started reading Claudia Rankine's very popular Citizen: An American Lyric, a few days after re-reading her Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, powerful poetry about death and its effects on life, that earlier one. I'm on page 9 of Citizen: An American Lyric (though by the time I post this, if I post this, I will have read to the end), and already I love it (if that's a word for it), already I've typed up two passages to hold on to, already I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of what it's doing (among other things, treating the mental correlation that causes "you" to understand that these things (mainly white) people say and do are instances of everyday casual racism — that they are A Type Of Thing — that they are directly connected to both the grinding and the more spectacular and devastating violences of white supremacist racism — treating this correlation as being in itself poetic), already I'm thinking about passages like
An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn't bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with "yes, and" rather than "yes, but." You and your friend decided that "yes, and" attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it's another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.
(where just a page or two earlier "you smell good" was part of a recollection (narration?) from childhood of something casually racist a schoolmate had said) and
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it's raining. Each moment is like this -- before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.
which take up two adjacent pages, in part via this note Anne Carson appends to her translation of Sappho's fragment 96, which I conveniently happen to have read and typed up yesterday:
"rosyfingered": an adjective used habitually by Homer to designate the red look of Dawn. I think Sappho means to be startling, but I don't know how startling, when she moves the epithet to a nocturnal sky. Also startling is the fecundity of sea, field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and fill the nightworld of the poem -- swung from a thread of "as sometimes" in verse 7. Homer too liked to extend a simile this way, creating a parallel surface of such tangibility it rivals the main story for a minute. Homer is more concerned than Sappho to keep the borders of the two surfaces intact; epic arguably differs from lyric precisely in the way it manages such rivalry.
which is not any kind of analysis (and certainly the remaining pages may make a fool of me), just a record of these early thoughts and this coincidence, the type of thing that maybe doesn't get recorded very often.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

One Way Out

Two hours on the bus took Hodos to work, where as usual he would remain for ten hours, nine and three-quarters of them paid. He depressed many keys that day, an untallied number but one no doubt approximately equaling that of any other day. We cannot know what was in his thoughts, but let us speculate: that he was aware, with that awareness which had been acute when he had first started the job but had dimmed progressively with each day he worked, that every key he depressed affected in some small way the movement of objects scattered throughout the world, throughout the solar system, and in some rare cases even elsewhere, further still. During his training, as he learned about the relevance of the speed of light to the keys he must depress, he had tried to engage his supervisor in a kind of low-level philosophical talk about other implications of that universal constant, but the supervisor had been uninterested or uncomprehending — at any rate had not responded in kind. Before long, it appears, Hodos himself grew similarly uninterested. Certain types of substances moved away from the Earth; certain others moved toward the Earth; both types, and others, moved between other locations without reference to the Earth, with the financially significant exception that their movement was governed, to some extent, by the Earth-bound keys Hodos and his coworkers depressed. Perhaps he wondered, less and less each day, what would happen if he refused to depress the keys, or even just one of them. But surely he knew even from the beginning that it would make little difference except, perhaps, to him, and this only negatively, as most likely he would simply be fired and replaced. We feel that we can report these thoughts with some degree of certainty, as there is nothing at all out of the ordinary about them. We must however recall that this report is sure to be incomplete, not least because of the change in his behavior that would be seen the following day, after the preparations of this evening. We begin with this day and not the evening, during which the first out-of-the-ordinary actions took place, in order to establish, however quickly and roughly, the norm from which the subsequent action departs.

Though there are many things we may feel are lacking in our lives, chief among the things we truly lack is necessity. The various having-tos with which we are meant to be satisfied in its place are, of course, simply not the same thing. Hodos took his lunch break and ate. After lunch he resumed depressing keys until it was time to leave; he then caught the bus. His lover was not to be at home that night or for the next several. We feel there is nothing to suggest that this had any psychological impact on what was to follow, and put forward instead the hypothesis that the forthcoming actions' coinciding with the temporary absence is nothing more than a matter of opportunity; after all it is easier to lay the ground for one's own death in solitude than in company, if at any rate that death is self-selected. On the way home Hodos got off the bus at a different stop than usual, as one result of which the bus missed a momentary clearing in the traffic. All the other passengers would have to wait; whether they were resigned to the fact was something only each one of them, individually, could know. Hodos, for his part, took advantage of the vehicles' paralysis to run across the street to his goal, a BigBox. Sliding doors open at mere presence, independent and certainly unaware of intention to enter, but it is their opening that makes entrance possible. After pacing the aisles for half an hour in what a perspicacious eyewitness might have described as a frustrated agitation caused perhaps by an inability to find what he was looking for mingled with an unwillingness or indeed an inability to ask for assistance, Hodos located and purchased two items that under ordinary circumstances would have been, considering his income, unimaginable extravagances. We shall see later on that an unusual freedom from the restraint imposed by limited resources will recur: a characteristic aspect of Hodos's final actions. On leaving the store he removed one of his purchases, an automatic, from its package and strapped the other, a robot still in its package, to it. This accomplished, he stepped into the automatic and programmed it with his home address; and as it must it lifted and carried him through the streets, weaving between the cars when possible, stopping and waiting when not. In summer the last of the day's sunlight is never so harsh and intrusive as it is in winter. Hodos did not exit the automatic until it stopped just outside of his home, whereupon he stepped out of it, opened the front door to the house, and allowed the automatic to float inside ahead of him. Inside, he unstrapped the robot, removed it from its packaging, and began depressing the keys that would accomplish the elaborate reprogramming required. He did not at any point consult the manual, which suggests that his preparations began some time before we have been able to establish: for there is nothing known in his history that would account for an expertise in unorthodox robot programming. No doubt some of the keys he had depressed during previous work days had called relevant information onto his screen, but the records of this, if they exist, have not been made available to us. All told the task took many hours, most of this time spent running simulations: it had, of course, to be right; and far into the night, finally it was. He had consequently little time for sleep. He ate a small breakfast and wrote a long note which we of course have not read — for some things should remain private; and he allowed the automatic to carry him back to work, the robot left behind, plugged in, charging. During the paid hours of his last day at work he depressed many keys, keys that, this time, mattered. His awareness, which would normally have been diffuse, of the consequences of these keys' depression, today was surely focused. One presumes that he found himself thinking of time, and of work. Though he might never have articulated it, perhaps his attitude toward the work day had always been that it may be a lot of time, but that it is only time — that all time passes and all things, even the work day, end. That, although the well-known phenomena associated with subjective experience might have caused the time at work to seem always to pass more slowly than time spent, for example, in solitude, or with his lover inside of him, nevertheless the time at work was less real, mattered less. This less-real time, however, would seem also more obviously spatial, physical; we propose that he felt himself always to be stepping through it, or perhaps up it, not climbing exactly, and not struggling precisely, but ascending as though on a flight of stairs, the resistance of gravity an unremarked obstacle, tiring but ordinary. Though little of this would have risen to the level of consciousness, at some points during that day he may have become aware that the passage of time felt no different than it did on any other day; if so, he must have wondered why this was. From time to time someone he worked with made a comment; he smiled or nodded or made a comment in return as appropriate. He ate on his lunch break and depressed more keys afterwards, keys determined now not by the needs of the company or the whim of his supervisor but by his own needs. These keys, when depressed in these particular combinations, communicated with relays in far-off places, places far-off enough that the communications, though composed of a frequency of light and traveling therefore at light's usual speed, nevertheless took humanly significant amounts of time to reach them, a result also of the multiple relays through which he had sent them bouncing. And though the messages never stopped moving at their enormous velocity we can without too much inaccuracy picture them as frozen, or trapped, awaiting the preordained moment at which they would be released to do their work. His preparations complete shortly before the ten hours were up, Hodos passed the remainder depressing keys that would from his employer's perspective seem more appropriate; then, at the usual time, he left.

The automatic, obeying the exigencies of its programming, flew, Hodos inside, only one moment of decision remaining to him, the rest belonging to languages more determinant than Sapir or Whorf ever dreamed and after that to nothing but natural law. The windows of automatics are set to opacity by default, and this Hodos never changed, though whether this was according to preference or indifference we cannot know. We do propose that he felt neither fear nor (conversely) happiness as he made the last of his decisions and opened the door to his house. In the end he had not trusted himself to do it and so the robot, following its programming, killed him as he stepped inside. We need not divert ourselves with macabre description of methods. It will suffice for our purposes to say that, once it confirmed that Hodos was indeed dead beyond the reach of any hypothetical medical attention, the robot lifted the body, the weight of which was well within its tolerances, and placed it back inside the automatic. The robot then climbed inside as well and depressed a number of keys, in response to which the automatic lifted and began to fly, maneuvering down the roads connecting the house with the main road, at which it stopped and waited for traffic to pass. The wait was not too long, as by now a fair amount of time had passed (how much we need not divert ourselves calculating) and the worst of the traffic had subsided. Individual trees exhibit a remarkable ability to grow seemingly healthy in the inclement environment provided by mere breaks in the pavement of cities, though no doubt the epoch in which such apparent health is possible is coming swiftly to an end. The automatic, true to its name, needed no further guidance, and the robot entered sleep mode, awaiting the moment when the irrevocable instructions it carried within would goad it back into wakefulness. By plotting its course against a zoning map we can determine that the automatic passed by buildings intended for both commercial and residential purposes, including many which had been constructed for the one purpose and later converted to the other. The motion described in the present paragraph continued for several hours, during which time the frequency with which the automatic encountered other vehicles decreased markedly. When the buildings grew sparse enough that the automatic's algorithms determined that to leave the road and approach its destination in a straight line, with some deviations, would not be inappropriate and would indeed be preferable in terms of the efficient uses of time and energy (the latter of which, though it had not any longer concerned Hodos, was a default consideration in the automatic's programming which he had had no reason to alter), the automatic left the road and flew its cargo through the abandoned wreck of the countryside, heading toward an airport serving not the city in which Hodos had lived and worked, but rather a different, neighboring city.

By now the light from the origin city had dimmed enough, and that of the destination city had not yet increased enough, that the sun's reflected light began to filter down from space to such an extent that the moon could have been observed by any system possessing both a visual apparatus roughly equivalent to the human average and an interest in making such observations. Were such a system present (and we cannot be certain that one was not, though neither the body, nor the robot, nor the automatic, were one such at that time, and while once animals capable of observing the moon had lived in that area, it is fruitless to speculate what they might have thought of it, for by this time they had all been dead many long years), it would have detected what Hodos, for example, would no doubt have called a full moon. Had the robot been active and recording impressions, it would have been more precise: for there exists, overlaid over the older everyday meaning of the phrase, an exact, scientific sense in which the moon is full only for that fraction of a second during which its waxing has completely ceased and its waning has yet to begin (indeed some would insist, with perhaps even greater exactitude, that one should not speak of the moon's phases at all, the concept being an essentially meaningless byproduct of the limited viewpoint from which humanity has historically observed the moon). There are many such relatively recent scientific senses of older, traditionally less precisely deployed words and phrases, and the overlaying of these meanings, sometimes to the point of their total replacement, is ever an ongoing process — one of many by which languages change over time. In such fashion did the "foot," once a rough but usually sufficient unit of measure varying from person to person, come to coexist and eventually be superseded by the "foot," whose dogmatic definition of "just this long and never any longer or shorter" was enforced by systematic structures to which adherence was not elective; that more recent invention, the meter, is generally thought of as meaning "the length of a meter stick" though a specialist will insist that its more accurate and therefore truer meaning is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second, and though we may scoff at the apparent arbitrariness of this figure surely we have no right to do so at the authority of the specialist. The opposite trajectory, from more to less precise, also occurs, as exemplified by the many meanings of the word "aspiration," trace evidences of a time in which the metaphorical association of breathing with hoping was clearer — and consequently less metaphorical — to the ordinary user of language than it is to us today, an association which in turn once brought explicitly to light the connections, now all but inaccessible to us, between breath, life, the present moment, and that elusive conceptual construct called "the future." Research suggests that, although at that moment the moon would have been visible had anyone capable been looking for it, the stars by and large would not, which was of course a normative situation. Hodos, in fact, never saw the stars during his life. Once, long ago, the stars were the only objects seen regularly which exhibited repetitive circular motion, the cyclical paths they drew across the sky contrasting markedly with, for example, the generally linear, haphazard, and/or pumping movements of animal life. In the span of human existence this has changed drastically, first with the celebrated invention of the wheel, whose first spinnings must have wreaked inconceivable changes upon the minds of its earliest witnesses, who would surely have connected this motion with the slower and more inexorable spinning of the heavens above them; then much later with the aforementioned light pollution, which ultimately severed the experiential link between the two rotations. It was only after the inability regularly to see the stars became a quotidian, if not yet all-pervasive, aspect of human life that humanity began to launch objects, and sometimes itself, into space, in which all motion is parabolic or elliptical — conic sections aspiring to the cyclical. From this the notion suggests itself that the source of humanity's relatively new urge to travel to the stars may be not, as is often assumed, the merely practical fact of the technological ability to do so, but rather this severing of the visual link connecting humans to the experience of this sort of motion, and perhaps too the absence of the simple daily fact of the stars themselves. Such speculation, however, is irresponsible. The automatic that Hodos had purchased when still living obeyed his programming and conveyed his body, already beginning to be overtaken by the fungal and bacterial populations which once had lived mostly in harmony with those cells we are more comfortable thinking of as his, through the night air. Of this much we can be certain. The automatic encountered no other mechanical devices and no living creatures during this part of its voyage. This is not surprising; indeed, as it was traveling through that region still referred to as "the countryside," though the associations called up by the term have changed radically in recent decades, it would have been more surprising had the automatic encountered any activity whatsoever. To attempt to draw some picture-in-words of the silent progress of the automatic through the moon-lit ruin that had once been an ecosystem, a way of life for countless members of countless species, is tempting; but such would be pathos. The reader who so desires is welcome to it, but we, on whom the facts press, shall note only that what had been Hodos, though we are accustomed to think of it as dead flesh, was itself more thriving an ecosystem than the dead countryside through which it was carried. To conceive this as irony is to remain locked to the anthropocentric perspective; to avoid such conceptions, we shall carry on. The conveyance flew on; and though we too must carry on there is scarcely a thing to do now that is not some form of looking away. Were Hodos still alive, we could perhaps occupy ourselves with reconstructions of his thoughts and feelings; but he was not alive; even had we had some fantastical access to his consciousness when he was alive, he was no longer, and so if we are to busy ourselves with anyone's thoughts, they can only be our own. But we have had too much of them already. We ourselves are not experiencing this flight; as such we have the luxury to say "several hours later..." should we give in to such temptation. Feeling, however, that this is an irresponsible distortion, we have tried thus far to stay with the automatic through the duration of its flight. Such a thing is of course impossible, as evidenced by our many divergences into equally irresponsible speculation and pontification: these, too, a looking away. There is no way for anyone who was not there, ourselves included and consequently our readers as well, to know truly what this journey was. Indeed even for someone who was there — had anyone been there — such direct knowledge would only be available at the moment itself, and even then only in limited form. At any experiential spacetime coordinate off of the journey itself, knowledge of the journey is indirect at best. And who can say, too, what experience, what knowledge is, to an automatic?

The automatic, with its cargo of robot and body, flew on through a land in which nothing of any consequence could live. Struggling enclaves of plant life began to crop up, one here, one there, painstakingly maintained, through robotic intervention, by scientists whose methods, it is safe to say, will have only temporary success. The automatic came upon a road, the use of which its algorithms judged desirable. The road soon became a canyon passing between buildings: first shallow and spaced out, then taller and closer, then taller still: the automatic had entered the next city. Other vehicles began to be present on the roadways. The buildings, like those in the previous city, crowded in so close that there was no horizon to speak of; it would therefore be inappropriate to refer to sunrise, but the ambient light, scattered by molecule after molecule, began to increase and change in quality in ways not attributable solely to the artificial lighting of the city (more than capable of drowning out any other star, but not our own). It was still too early for the first major rush hour and so the other vehicles, though numerous, were at first only minor obstacles in the automatic's course; equally it was only a minor obstacle in the other vehicles' various courses, which we have not had occasion to research. The average height of the buildings peaked, plateaued, and began to decline again, as the airport, like most such, was located not in the heart of the city but some distance outside of it. In the course of a single sentence, perhaps, the automatic traversed this distance. It approached one of the commercial gates to the airport, presented its credentials to the sensor, and, once the latter raised the barrier, entered the airport grounds. It took its place at the rear — soon to become the middle — of a queue of various automatic conveyances awaiting a spot on the next ascending car. The robot within, in accordance with its programming, resumed functioning. The line, being wholly automated, moved at a rate describable for our purposes as quick, and soon the automatic arrived at the elevator door. The robot took the body into its grasp. The doors to the automatic and to the elevator both opened and the robot exited the former, traversed the distance between, and entered the latter. The now-cargoless automatic departed, to be found somewhere else entirely, much later, quite by accident.

Meanwhile the elevator car began its long ascent, and here we really must apologize, for at this point both the time and the space traversed by our narrative begin to expand exponentially, to a degree which we simply cannot recreate in the form of our story. The problem, as we shall see, will quickly become wholly insurmountable. The time spanned by the just over thirty-five hundred words which precede those which, we presume, you are now reading, is approximately fifty hours; the space, perhaps five hundred kilometers. The elevator car in which the robot and the body now rose would continue rising, first in a greatly inclined manner taking it also roughly southward and then, when the tributary cable joined the so-called Quito Ascender (more accurately the ascender operated under the jurisdiction of the Quito Elevator Authority), very nearly straight up, for over a hundred times that distance before reaching its apex; the time, too, must be scaled upward in similar proportion. But as you will notice if you skip to the end of this narrative (as perhaps you have already), much less remains than has passed. Would the story be told, there seems no way around this distortion; by calling the reader's attention to it, we hope in some small way to correct for the fault. And indeed in this paragraph we have already given most of the significant events of this portion of the journey: the robot was once more deactivated; the body continued to decay, though slowly (for the elevator car, as Hodos had planned when alive, was refrigerated); and meanwhile up and over landmass, water, landmass, water they rose until, some perhaps ten days later, they paused momentarily high above Ecuador Territory, the elevator car awaiting its turn to attach itself to the cable tethered to Chimborazo's flattened peak so as to continue the ascent to the artificial satellite in geostationary orbit, nearly 37,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. An opening in the ascent schedules allowed the car to hook itself onto the ascender and, detaching itself from the tributary, it began the final, much longer leg of its climb into orbit. The air around it was distinctly thinner than it had been at the beginning of the journey, and colder — altogether inhospitable to human life, which surely could not have lasted long if exposed at that elevation. This is however irrelevant, for no living human was so exposed, and the only death we shall encounter within this narrative has already occurred. In fact, our even mentioning the possibility is a clear symptom of the sickness diagnosed earlier in this paragraph. For what remains to say of this portion of the journey? The car ascended. The body's decay, though greatly arrested and not effecting during this period any changes detectable by any but the most sensitive of instruments, continued nevertheless. The robot remained deactivated. Time and space passed, the former lending some of its irrevocability to the latter. Eventually (a word indicating not, as its construction might suggest and as it in fact did at an earlier point in its history, an action occurring in the manner of an event — a redundant, yet somehow curiously suggestive notion — but rather a failure, on the part of whoever may have resort to it, to face the reality of time as it passes) the car reached its destination: the anchor satellite, referred to by the serial number 983AEQ 55197-39. The car hooked itself to this 983AEQ 55197-39 and unhooked itself from the cable, then stowed itself in one of the satellite's bays, awaiting processing. Almost a day passed. The Earth indulged in nearly a full rotation on its axis; people lived and died; species continued along their paths to extinction; and the body, decay still slowed, and the robot, still deactivated, awaited, with neither patience nor impatience, their turn. Many sentences would have to fill this space, were we to be faithful to the event.

But we are very close now; and perhaps we are right after all to leave behind us the strictures of time as humans merely experience it — for what is human time to a celestial body? And so we shall attempt to convey in one final paragraph what happened to the matter that had been Hodos, and what, we suggest, Hodos himself had been up to in ensuring that it would in fact happen to him although — in some senses precisely because — he was no longer he. Divergences now are a luxury we cannot afford; and time: time has slipped, finally, out of our control. The vessel Hodos's final labors had conjured forth arrived and parked itself within the satellite, in the same bay in which the car awaited it; and the robot, as programmed, awoke. It took the body into its manipulators, approached the doors of the car, and opened them, revealing the vessel simultaneously opening its own doors. The moment the robot was fully out of the car the latter withdrew from the bay and joined a swiftly-moving queue with other cars waiting to be filled with various cargoes and begin the descent back to Earth; though what cargo and destination this particular car took on, we may never know, as record-keeping in this decadent age is unreliable at best. The robot conveyed the body to the vessel, a small one with just enough room for one human-sized body and a great deal of compressed fuel, then withdrew and deposited itself in one of 983AEQ 55197-39's waste-processing facilities, from which only a small portion of its data log would, some time later, be retrieved. In the meantime, the vessel positioned itself on one of the pads on the exterior of the satellite. What is still sometimes called the "vacuum" of space, we now know, is a frothing effervescence of subatomic particles continually passing from potentiality to actuality and back again. When the time came, the vessel released its docking clamps, fired maneuvering thrusters until it was far enough from the satellite to engage its primary engine, and then, at precisely the moment Hodos had calculated, added its full burn to the momentum its orbit around the Earth already imparted. The course and speed of most interplanetary voyages is plotted according to a complex cost/benefit analysis factoring in the locations and movements of the various bodies in the solar system, the cost of fuel, and the cost of time, among other considerations; but as we have already noted, the uniquely final nature of Hodos's journey allowed him to escape many of these merely practical concerns; and he had planned things so that this early, vulgar stage of the journey would be over as quickly as possible; in a word, he had ordained that the vessel burn all its considerable fuel resources immediately, at the highest possible rate, propelling itself and its cargo at what would not have interested him to learn was a record-breaking rate of acceleration. The vessel escaped the Earth's gravity well and continued adding energy to its own orbit so as to break from the path the Earth traces around the sun and enter into a new parabolic course. By the time it exhausted its fuel it was irrevocably set upon a new trajectory; and here we have reached what we believe to have been Hodos's goal. The vessel crossed the orbit of Mars, which was at that moment quite elsewhere; it passed through the asteroid belt, coming near no object of consequence. By now, what had been Hodos was under the sway of no influence other than that of gravity. In its vessel, it traveled in an unfathomably long curve across the orbit of Jupiter, which planet was in fact rather nearby, close enough that the curve along which the vessel traveled bent considerably, as had been Hodos's plan. The eternal storm bands slid across the visible surface of that vast globe, engaged in no one knows what business; there is no reason to suspect that whatever lives under the icy crust of its startlingly hospitable moon Europa was in any sense aware of the vessel's passage, or, if these inhabitants are capable of such observation, that they regarded it with any particular feeling. We have, with the assistance of several experts, projected the course the vessel will be traversing; barring any unforeseen encounter with some object not on our charts — which, extensive as they may be, can never be complete — it appears that Jupiter and its moons were the last objects it will come close to in any foreseeable amount of time or distance. And though the body that had been Hodos and the vessel that carries it are still, these years later, quite firmly within our solar system — the experts assure us that they have not yet crossed the orbit of Saturn, which planet they will miss by a large margin — it is nevertheless appropriate to call it an interstellar object, one subject no longer to the everyday requirements of life, business, personal whim, but only to the higher order of gravity and the pure necessity it enforces. For as the vessel travels through the universe, it will do so not in some Earthly straight line, nor in some distracted zig-zagging from point to point, but rather in a great parabola, most noble of figures, wending its way according to the dictates only of that force which has given structure to the universe itself, bending here under the influence of a distant star, there under that of some globular cluster, elsewhere, far later still, should it make it so far (and we believe that it will), perhaps answering, in its magisterial way, only to the call of distant galaxies. Considered thus, we find, contrary to prevailing opinion, that there is no mystery to Hodos's final actions; and we feel that even now, were he still able to regret, he surely would regret only that in order truly to submit to the call of necessity, to eliminate the arbitrary, his death was required so soon; that were he still able, he would regret only that he could not have delayed the time of this death even just a little, that he could not have allowed himself to experience this wonder, if only for an hour, a day, a month, a year!

—North Providence
December 2013 - March 2014

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

a year of reading short science fiction

So, I spent 2015 reading all of the short science fiction. Well, "reading all" — I looked at all the stories published in all of the free magazines I was aware of (though I ended up cutting some magazines when it became apparent that there was no chance of anything decent appearing in them, and I didn't look at, e.g., Beneath Ceaseless Skies or Nightmare because it's extremely rare for the things categorized as "fantasy" and "horror" to be of any interest to me), as well as in the subscription-only magazines I subscribed to (Interzone for most of the year, F&SF for some of it, Asimov's for all of it [except that for some reason I never got the December issue, which I'm sure was no great loss]). I didn't actually finish reading the vast majority of them; indeed, I ended up writing about almost every story I managed to get to the end of, because my goal was to write at least something about every story I liked even a little bit.

Why did I do this? God only knows. Because of some sickness I care about science fiction, though the state of the contemporary field works very hard at finding a cure.

What did I find? The field is garbage, almost exclusively. It is also enormous, exhausting, pointless. With some extremely rare exceptions, every word, every paragraph break, every thought, is routine and formulaic. With some extremely rare exceptions, there are no politics other than liberalism and fascism — to the extent that the two can be distinguished. With some extremely rare exceptions, what is unique to science fiction is wholly absent, and what is potentially good about other literatures is as well. With some extremely rare exceptions, the field is white, white, white, white, white; black writers, specifically, are almost wholly absent — and with some extremely rare exceptions, no one non-black seems to notice or care.

I was just on twitter for a regrettable half-second, and — despite my aggressive pruning of my TL to keep it relatively free of sf nonsense — even in that brief time I saw reactions to the recently-released, entirely uninspiring Nebula nominations that suggested it was fundamentally illegitimate to react to the list with a "meh" (admittedly the utterer of the specific "meh" in question was someone already much-loathed, for intermittently reasonable reasons), and that it is — I quote — "weird" to object to bad literature being nominated for a literary award if the writer of the bad literature is from a marginalized population. OK. (Meanwhile the liberals will swear up and down that the "puppies" — because when fascists give themselves a diminishing name, good liberals go along with it — are wrong when they say the liberals only care about identity, not quality. A field in which the literal actual for real fascists are even slightly closer to honest and correct than the closest thing to a "left" alternative is not a healthy field.)

When I started this project, I think I had the vague thought that maybe by highlighting every story I thought had anything decent going on in it, and explaining what I found that decency to be and why while also saying what reservations I had, that maybe people would start to think about what this writing is and does, and what it could be and do. (The liberals, for some reason I haven't been able to figure out, love to call the field — and whatever else they feel like annexing and sticking their imperial flag into — by Heinlein's preferred and frankly terrible term, "speculative fiction", but beyond their ineffectual and damagingly-formulated calls for "diversity" they seem entirely unwilling to speculate on what the field could be other than what it already is.) Whether this thought would be along my own suggested lines or not, I hoped to be able to at least contribute something. Turns out, though, that (with, again, some extremely rare exceptions) there is no interest in thought, only a "praise/attack" binary (and that belovedly meaningless middle ground, "I don't agree with everything but it's interesting," with no follow-on discussion). (Of course, anyone who did start to write with some thought would then have to somehow sneak that work by the horrible editors in this godforsaken wasteland...)

So for the most part, I regret spending a year of my damn life doing this. Yes, I read some things I'm glad to have read, and a few things that will stick with me as important, but looking over what I wrote about....well, many of them are merely "ok" against a background of terrible; many, I regret calling even some little attention to.

But anyway. Here's the tag; as far as I know everything in it between the January/February recommendations post and the post about M. Téllez's (legitimately excellent and not-coincidentally self-published) "About a Kid and a Woman" was originally published in 2015, with two exceptions: Sofia Samatar's "A Brief History of Non-Duality Studies", originally published a few years back in Expanded Horizons, and Ras Mashramani's "A Young Thug Confronts His Own Future", originally published in a Metropolarity zine in, I think, 2014. If you care about the Hugo Awards and haven't submitted your ballot (or whatever it's called) yet, consider that tag (with those exceptions) my recommendations post. (It's a shame about the exceptions, because those two stories are easily among the handful of actually-important stories I read all year.) And if I may be forgiven some link-lists, both in alphabetical order by writer's name:

My favorite stories of 2015, with links to my posts:

And my favorite of my posts about the stories (excluding the ones linked above):

Monday, February 15, 2016

"About a Kid and a Woman" by M. Téllez (bka Eighteen)

There are any number of particularities I could, even desperately want to, discuss. The ongoing tension and balance between so-called "standard" and "non-standard" Englishes (Chrome wants to tell me that "Englishes" is not a word), not simply reveling in alternate ways to say the same thing but insisting on the fact that these different ways say different things, an unstated insistence that how they do it where they from matters. The portrayal of people who have been changed by the coming and sort-of going of civilization: these people aren't just living in the woods, they're living in woods that very recently were a city; their home is not only a home but bears living resonances and traces of what it used to be, a church; and their lives cannot be a "return to nature" any more than, as Stanisław Lem points out, a robot's could be ("Why, it would mean turning into deposits of iron ore!" Lem writes, in one of his criticism's very rare good moments). The emotional honesty of the love story, and its intricate interweaving with the situation the characters are in, culminating in that astonishing final paragraph. Much more.

But though this all plays in to the wonder that is this story, to talk about it all in the ways I as yet know how to risks too much suggesting that what is to be praised is the writer's mastery over their material, their artful arrangement of the elements into an attractively moving whole. And although the mastery on display is considerable, what really amazes me here is not mastery-over but vulnerability-to: much like its narrator every element in this story is in a precarious state, close to collapse or self-contradiction or suppression in the face of hegemonic certainties, always in danger of becoming disastrously unbalanced, always under threats both internal and external, intellectual and physical. But it does what it must: it remains aware, it balances, it finds strength — eventually — not in aggression and certainty but in openness (albeit an openness that knows it cannot be open to everything, that some things must be rejected, that it will often be difficult to figure out which things these are). And when it collapses — and collapse it does, collapse it must — it does so with a trust that does not cancel but coexists with, or incorporates, mistrust.

As must be apparent, I am not equal to the task of describing what it does: which is to be profoundly political while at the same time allowing itself merely to be: which is to be not the juxtaposition or the integration of opposites but the refusal of this kind of binary categorization in the first place, while at the same time presenting the struggle, the difficult and dangerous work, that this turn to a new kind of openness demands of those already damaged, already in pain, led by boundless knowledge to hopeful fear, fearful hope.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

"Pillow-Talk of the Late Oneirocalypse" by Vajra Chandrasekera

To begin a story with "—not how it started nor how it ended," and then to go on from there, is perhaps to acknowledge that by beginning to write one begins to carve the world into pieces, the ones that will be written and the ones that will not — an acknowledgment without which writing is much more likely to work to make us forget that such carving has taken place. The last Chandrasekera story I wrote about, the superb "Stick a Pin in Me", also concerned itself greatly with what will and will not be spoken, and who wants it that way and why; also like that other story "Pillow-Talk" takes the form of a rambling monologue — or, rather, a dialogue of which we only see one part, the interlocutor's contributions having been carved away. There is a joy to seeing a writer find a form perfectly suited to what they need to say, and watching these two remarkably different stories unfold is one such. (Which is not, of course, to say that Chandrasekera should only ever write carved-out monologues!)

A major difference here is that where the narrator of "Pin" was desperate, dying, to hold on, the narrator here is much more willing to let go of what they themself call "basal reality" — ambivalent, but willing. If the narrator is to be trusted, it is only one subjective year (it's different for everyone) after they reluctantly, or accidentally, followed most (or all?) of humanity through "the door in [their] dreams". If they are to be trusted, they feel pain at having been separated from their loved ones, from their context. If they are to be trusted, they are just as disoriented by the rapidly receding memory of a basal reality "which is actually quite an unfashionable thing to believe in now" as anyone else is. (I think, perhaps, we should trust them every bit as much as we should not; every word they say contradicts another, but all, somehow, are true to the same degree. This might mean that I believe the narrator is both what they say they are and the "evolved oneiric life-form" they describe as being a hypothetical other.) But despite, or at any rate in addition to, or maybe instead of, this inexperience, pain, and disorientation, they have reached an accommodation with mortdieu, the death of the "gods of order"; with an Earth that "moves so easily now, people are always breaking worlds in their enthusiasm"; with a self even less stable than our theoretically waking selves. It may be the only kind of accommodation possible — or, and, or, to make it seem so may be nothing more than brutal self-justification.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

"I Am Winter" by Robin Wyatt Dunn

I don't know if they have this effect on everyone, but I have a great deal of difficulty resolving Dunn's stories into a sense of what-happened, of who-did-what-why. I don't say this to complain; some of the writing that's mattered most to me — And Chaos Died, say, or The Passion Artist — presents me with similar difficulty. Which is not to say that I think Dunn is on the level of a Russ or a Hawkes, but it might be to say that I only think he's not yet. I very much hope to see him keep writing.

In this particular story my difficulty has a great deal to do with the reticence of the narrator, who is perfectly willing to share intimate details of his life if they cross his fictional mind but who stays almost wholly silent about his reasons, or justifications, for the decisions he makes during the story. The same goes, in fact, on what I'd call a metatextual level if the word weren't so laden with obnoxious usage, for Dunn: take for example the narrator's self-chosen name, which is Zarathustra ("but you can call me Zee; if you will call me anything") — signaling, no doubt, any number of references that go over my head (I haven't read Nietzsche, though, unlike many grown adults on "the left" [or whatever], I'd like to) — "but it is only a word I picked out of an old book, because I liked the sound." Especially in combination with the earlier reference to "what little reading I've done" (you've only done a little reading and one of the books you read was Thus Spake Zarathustra?) I'm choosing to interpret this as a joke of sorts, though whether on Zee's part or only on Dunn's I can't say.

In the absence of explanation even antecedents become difficult to trace ("I remember the last time I tried this," Zee says, and I'm not completely sure what "this" is, even though I am witness to what he is doing). The clarity and simple motivations that a typically plot-based reading would ask us to look for — primarily: when, how, why, and to what extent do Zee's intentions toward the young thief he's hunting change (for that matter, what were they to begin with, exactly) — aren't here, to my reading (in writing this I keep having the nervous feeling that maybe the story is completely obvious and I'm just being dense), and in their absence the reader is free, not to come up with their own (though there is evidence that could be mustered, and I do have my own favored ideas) but to recognize that the whole literary construct of "motivation" is just that, a construct, seldom bearing much relation to the lives we live.

And it all takes place against a half-glimpsed context, the conquest (by unclear methods) of earth by alien "Benefactors" who have (for unclear reasons) removed the planet from its orbit, sending it on a journey (to unclear destinations, if any) during which it grows ever colder as the sun grows more distant, its atmosphere bleeding away, its population dwindling (though some "grow new 'lungs'" and make other adaptations — by what means and to whose ends is left ambiguous). The elucidation of all this could easily have been "the story" but it is not; and when the story ends, suddenly, with an almost van Vogtian shift in scale, it manages somehow to be both vertiginously irresolvable and cathartic in the least complacent sense of the term.

Friday, January 8, 2016

Books read 2015

The third annual look at what I read in the past year. First a list — with links if I've written about the book, whether here, on my tumblr (if I wrote at least a little more than just "good!" or "terrible!"), or as part of the Strange Horizons book club — and afterward some commentary.

1. Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire (re-read)
2. Rachel Pollack, Temporary Agency (re-read)
3. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alanya to Alanya (Marq'ssan cycle 1)
4. Anne Carson, Red Doc>
5. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, issue 31
6. Clare Winger Harris, Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science
7. Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
8. Interzone 255 (November-December 2014)
9. Asimov's Science Fiction (February 2015)
10. Galaxy Science Fiction (October 1950)
11. Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
12. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays
13. Jennifer Marie Brissett, Elysium Or, The World After
14. Stanisław Lem, Microworlds (ed. Franz Rottensteiner, trans. various)
15. The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane
16. Ellen Cushman, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People's Perseverance
17. Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks (trans. Christina MacSweeney)
18. Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster
19. Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution
20. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
21. Alan Garner, Red Shift
22. Alan Garner, The Owl Service
23. Nisi Shawl, Filter House
24. Asimov's Science Fiction (March 2015)
25. Interzone 256 (January-February 2015)
26. Marcel Proust, Time Regained (trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
27. Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation (re-read)
28. Nina Allan, Spin
29. Nina Allan, The Race (re-read)
30. Soviet Science Fiction (ed. uncredited, trans. Violet L. Dutt)
31. Hilton Als, White Girls
32. Plato, Parmenides (trans. Benjamin Jowett)
33. Galaxy Science Fiction (November 1950)
34. Doris Vallejo, The Boy Who Saved the Stars (illustrated by Boris Vallejo)
35. R.K. Narayan's rendering of The Ramayana
36. Dung Kai-cheung, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (trans. Dung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall)
37. Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (re-read)
38. Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee, Rama II
39. Genesis (KJV)
40. Interzone 257 (March-April 2015)
41. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
42. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. - A Documentary History, ed. Jonathan Ned Katz
43. Rachel Pollack and David Vine, Tyrant Oidipous: A New Translation of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus
44. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History
45. Asimov's Science Fiction (April/May 2015)
46. Kuzhali Manickavel, Things We Found During the Autopsy
47. Frederik Pohl, The Case Against Tomorrow
48. Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
49. Asimov's Science Fiction (June 2015)
50. Craig Strete, The Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories
51. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
52. Andrea Hairston, Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, a Speech, and Eight Essays
53. Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or The Birth of Art (trans. Austryn Wainhouse)
54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett)
55. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
56. Asimov's Science Fiction (July 2015)
57. Interzone 258 (May-June 2015)
58. Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
59. Octavia E. Butler, Mind of My Mind
60. Fantasy & Science Fiction (July-August 2015)
61. Exodus (KJV)
62. Asimov's Science Fiction (August 2015)
63. Miguel de Beistegui, Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor (trans. Dorothée Bonnigal Katz, with Simon Sparks and Beistegui)
64. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (trans. Patrick Bowles and Beckett)
65. Samuel R. Delany, Equinox
66. Asimov's Science Fiction (September 2015)
67. Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1950)
68. Henry Dumas, Ark of Bones and Other Stories
69. Kiini Ibura Salaam, Ancient, Ancient (re-read)
70. Nancy Jane Moore, The Weave
71. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn) (re-read)
72. Leviticus (KJV)
73. Interzone 259 (July-August 2015)
74. Fantasy & Science Fiction (September-October 2015)
75. Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (trans. Beckett)
76. Gabriel Josipovici, Hotel Andromeda (re-read)
77. Octavia E. Butler, Survivor
78. Fantasy & Science Fiction (November-December 2015)
79. Asimov's Science Fiction (October-November 2015)

And commentary.

From the perspective of today at least, I want to say it felt like a scattered, vague, often routine year of reading. I suspect this has a lot to do with the massive quantities of new short science fiction I was reading, only a fraction of which shows up on this list because I arbitrarily and somewhat old-fashionedly only included the paper magazines I read as "books" here. (On the other hand it's not like I'm going to call an issue of, say, GigaNotoSaurus — i.e., one story, most of the time not one I read all the way through — "a book.") I plan to say more about My Year Of At Least Trying To Read All The Damn Stories in a forthcoming post (after I manage to write about the one 2015 story I have left to write about, which is beautiful and wonderful and hard to write about), but for now I'll just say that by the end of the year it was exhausting and felt obligatory and mechanical and awful, the occasional good (and much rarer great) story notwithstanding. In fact by the end of the year I was kind of feeling like reading itself was obligatory and mechanical, just something I did because what else was I going to do and at the same time something I had to force myself to do rather than the much more appealing options of sitting vacantly in front of the television or the computer. All those damn stories — and even just looking at this list, my god I read so many magazines — took their toll, I guess. Part of the end of the year too was taken up with reading for pre-arranged critical projects, one in particular (tba) deeply unpleasant; I don't want to stop participating in criticism beyond the self-directed, typically serendipitous rather than planned, bounds of this blog, but I think I need to reorient my approach to it.

Despite all that this list is full of books that moved and changed me. I finished Proust's great novel, delighted among other things to find that its final volume is full of pre-emptive demolitions of superficial takes on Proust, then later read Miguel de Beistegui's extraordinary (albeit poorly translated) book about it — though calling it "a book about Proust" is misleading, especially in a climate which tends to think of literary criticism as secondary to the "real" work. Beistegui's book is a thrilling work of philosophy in its own right: it is both, as Steve Mitchelmore once put it, "a stunning study of what fiction might be other than representational" and an attack-from-within on Western concepts of rationality and linear time that have reigned supreme since at least Kant. Reading it was one of those wonderful experiences where you recognize, intimately, what you've felt all along without being able to articulate (or sometimes just plain without knowing it) while simultaneously being forced to reconsider everything you thought you knew, everything you thought you thought. A year that had Proust and Beistegui in it and nothing else would be a great year.

And Beckett! My god!

And Helen DeWitt!

I've begun reading the Bible, slooooowly, in the King James Version; I will admit I sometimes (often) find myself glazing over, but at other times it's a remarkable experience — the sort of expanding narrative of the books of the Torah, or the Pentateuch if you prefer (I have neither a traditional allegiance nor a firm knowledge) — the way it practically gallops through these grand events, slowly beginning to look more and more closely until we reach what strikes me as the central event, the giving of the law (which is still narrative: it is not merely a list of laws, it is the narration of the event that is God giving the law to Moses and through him the people), which takes up as much or more space than everything that has come before it combined — it's like nothing else I've read, though at times I find myself thinking of Beckett, or Bernhard ("And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, The LORD bless thee, and keep thee," he said, I thought).

As with Beistegui, it was a post of Steve's that brought me, unexpected, to Georges Bataille's "highbrow coffee table book" on the paintings at Lascaux, which, shaped though it often is by his more, uh, questionable tendencies, is nonetheless beautiful and provocative, with a great deal to say about art, time, and wonder (and the photographs are why words like "exquisite" exist). Valeria Luiselli and Hilton Als, vastly different as they are, both demonstrate, in their affinity with and vast distance from the typical New Yorker-style, MFA-taught, read-aloud-on-NPR kind of "personal writing," what such writing could be if freed from these institutional requirements (and, admittedly, if written by people as brilliant as Als and Luiselli). As for Marilynne Robinson, after having read Gilead with a deep sense of gratitude, Absence of Mind was fascinating and troubling for the way its subtle and often necessary attack on scientism and related sins was yoked to, again, the politically and artistically compromised MFA world that she is, after all, as an instructor at Iowa, at the heart of; her horrifying two-part interview with Obama (the second part of which I managed to restrain myself from reading) was almost like the punchline to the joke that was my strange relationship with her work last year. For all that, though, I'm still glad of Gilead more than not, and am undecided whether I wish to explore further.

Politics! If I thought my departure from and disgust with liberalism was complete and total before I read Losurdo's book on the subject, well, it's damn well complete and total now. Speaking of that monstrous ideology, I read a pair of important books on its close relative (Losurdo calls it a "twin birth"), slavery: Eric Williams' study of Capitalism and Slavery, whose often dry (though just as often cutting) take on the subject is nonetheless vital in showing how slavery shaped just about every aspect of the world that we live in to this very day — which is also a focus of Edward E. Baptist's much more....intimate? (sometimes in my opinion irresponsibly so) book, intertwining as it does a visceral accounting of the experience of slavery (so often missing from our received histories — one hears so often of things like "slave auctions" in contexts which encourage us not to think about what this might entail) with an in-depth economic analysis of just how it all worked, how it developed (and how very modern and dynamic it was, putting the lie to the "antiquated institution on its way out anyway" notion), and how it created, well, the modern world.

In science fiction (aside from all the new stories) I started but never returned to L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle, which I would like to get back to soon if I can; I began Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series, which so far I have vaguely mixed feelings about but am excited to continue; Jennifer Marie Brissett enraptured me with her richly disjunctive book; I renewed my love affair with Rachel Pollack; Nina Allan impressed me with her elusive, fragmentary glimpses of not-quite-future, not-quite-alternate worlds; I returned with joy and gratitude to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, perhaps the single most important novel in my life, lurking behind everything I ever write in any capacity (and discussing it with a group of brilliant people at Strange Horizons was sheer pleasure); and in their extremely different ways Clare Winger Harris, Craig Strete, Nisi Shawl, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and the wonderful old 1950's issues of Galaxy available at the Internet Archive all reminded me of why I'd wanted to be reading short science fiction in the first place.

Hopes for the year to come? As ever I'd like to read more poetry (Rankine, Rilke, and Ashbery come to mind as people I'm interested in exploring, and I've recently picked up the new Pasolini collection). I want to continue with Beckett. I'm tempted to re-read Proust already. More perversely, I'm also tempted to try to reacquire my Italian (never fluent to begin with, and never faced with dense intellectual work) with Losurdo's as yet untranslated (into English, that is) book on Stalin. More non-fiction: criticism, philosophy, politics, science, history, maybe even "theory". I'd like to give less of a shit about science fiction, though that's probably a vain hope, dammit. If I must keep up with "new" writing I want to read the books that don't get corporate attention; Jamie Berrout, for one, looks exciting, and I have some Metropolarity books to finish and begin. Older works — I've heard a rumor that people have been writing for millennia — and more in translation. Fewer books, proportionally, by damned white people (by the most generous possible accounting a little less than a third of the books I read in 2015 that can be so counted were by writers of color, which when you factor back in the unbearable whiteness of contemporary short science fiction makes for an even sorrier state of affairs). And only, only things I fucking care about.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

"The City of Your Soul" by Robert Reed

The usual Robert Reed questions apply. Is the writing style provocative or precious? (Answer: yes.) Is this misogyny or just heterosexuality? (Answer: yes.) Has something occurred or has one posture merely followed another? (Answer: ...yes?) A city disappears, but then the disappearance disappears. Like the fake fakes that obsessed Philip K. Dick when he wasn't too busy being a shithead (he talked about sneaking in to Disneyland at night and swapping out the mechanical birds for real ones), a disappearing disappearance is a negation, a self-canceling-out, but at the same time not: it's a presence, a persistence, of a kind with no more than an infrathin separation from that of any other thing-that-exists. Questions of truth and mattering (as in, what matters? what does not?) take on more and more importance as they become more and more unanswerable, unless they're not important at all. People discuss it fruitlessly on the internet.