reading Russ: "Nor Custom Stale" (1959)

reading Russ table of contents

     It was the night after Harry's retirement party that something first went wrong. They had all been talking about something scientific that Freda did not understand, with Wilberforce from Harry's job insisting that life meant risk and Harry insisting no, and then Harry saying that the life-lengthening properties of Houses were due to the fact that they never changed.
     "Why," he was saying, "change a person's life and right away they have to change. They have to make decisions. They have to age. Thing to do is not change, not a particle, not a molecule." And Wilberforce (whom Freda had always thought far too rugged) had gotten angry and shouted that Monotony is Death and Harry had shouted Monotony is Life, so the end of it was they got very angry and Wilberforce said he hoped Harry would have a real dose of Monotony soon to make him see how fast he'd age. The guests had been getting into their cars at the extra Car Port in the basement, when Freda noticed what was wrong and came over to her husband, down the basement stairs.
     "Harold," she said, "there's something wrong with the House." But Harold was busy telling Wilberforce that Change was Death and the highest human wisdom was to find the perfect moment and live it over and over.

Faced with a passage such as this one, which comes early on in Russ's first "professional" science fiction story (Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1959), most readers, trying quickly to assimilate the story to what they know about writing, would probably reach either for the category "satire" or for the category "metaphor," or for both. Certainly most science fiction critics would. The story, they'd tell themselves (and then they'd tell us), satirizes, and/or is a metaphor for, midcentury middle-cass suburban life, with its middlebrow intellectualism, its monotony (or Monotony), its trivialization and imprisonment of women. The metaphorical reading can be quickly dismissed by pointing out that the story, like most sf of its era (and that of any era up until the past decade or two), simply is not metaphorical; it presents us not with a metaphor for suburban life but with suburban life itself, albeit displaced quite a large number of centuries. All right, then, satire. This would seem to be a safer bet; after all, much of the story is clearly humorous, and clearly targeted at something its writer had A Problem with. Having categorized the story, we can finish reading it, laughing and nodding if and when we agree that Russ's targets deserve targeting and that she has aimed well, shaking our heads and muttering if and when we disagree, and move on. That's taken care of.

Except I don't think so. Kingsley Amis's drivel notwithstanding, I think satire, much like metaphor, is seldom a fruitful way to read sf, and that sf is often poor sf to the extent that it can be reduced to mere satire (or, again, mere metaphor). Which is not to say that sf never satirizes; clearly the story at hand does. But isn't there anything more that can be said about it? Is the experience that is "Nor Custom Stale" dispatched so easily?

In The American Shore, Delany asserts — repeatedly — that science fiction "can only give us apotheosis, not history." Let me say right off that I'm not entirely sure I understand what he means. Delany is steeped in modes of thought (critical theory, structuralism and everything that has come in its wake, etc) that I'm simply not well versed in (and am often somewhat suspicious of); in any formal sense I'm a theory nincompoop. There are probably shades of meaning behind his use of "apotheosis" and "history" (and, hell, all of his other words, as well) that go zooming right over my head. Even beyond that, Delany's criticism always fills me with a multitude of conflicting feelings; at times I'll find it revelatory, at times gratifying confirmation of what I'd suspected, at times incomprehensible, at times nonsense, at times desperately wrong. The American Shore is his most complex, sustained work of criticism. I've only read it once. I don't even begin to know how to feel about it, let alone what it "means."

But to whatever extent I could be said to understand what Delany means, I find the assertion suggestive, and I wonder if it might be a better lens through which to look at "Nor Custom Stale," indeed at much of sf. Rather than metaphorically "standing for," rather than (or in addition to) satirizing the banal monotony of suburban life, Russ, it might be possible to say, is presenting us with its apotheosis. Now a lot of the elements of the story that had to be ignored in order to sustain a satirical reading can come back into play. The "immortality for Houses," which strikes me as at best irrelevant to satire (and which another common model for reading sf, that of extrapolation or prediction, would force one to dismiss as "inaccurate" — failing as it does to foresee planned obsolescence), now makes much more sense. More specifically, a satirical reading of "Nor Custom Stale" would have to work very hard not to notice that, in the passage I quoted above, Wilberforce is in fact wrong, Harry in fact right — and indeed this same reading would not, could not realize that the millions of years that Freda and Harry live their monotonous, repetitive, day-in-day-out lives, are literal millions of years.

Most importantly, the story's awe-inspiring ending, with its startling motion that I can only begin to describe by calling it the inverse of bathos (though this is terribly incomplete, because even this anti-bathos contains its own...batheticization?...within itself), is revealed in its full science-fictionality, in its necessity. Without an understanding of science fiction in its specificity — this mode of writing that is so tied to the literal, to the prosaic (more on that link and how I'm willfully misusing it hopefully to come, soonish) while simultaneously reaching for the mystical and the transcendent — one might misread this ending as merely ironic, a sort of reductio of the motionlessness of suburbia into the heat death.*

*In this case not quite literally.

It is this. But it is more: because at the same time as the reductio is reducing, the apotheosis is...apotheosizing. To read the ending of this story as science fiction — sf that is commentary, to be sure — rather than as commentary that "uses" the "tropes" of science fiction is to feel what sf readers and critics once felt less embarrassed referring to as "the sense of wonder," a feeling that has come in for a great deal of (at times justified) criticism in recent decades — it is juvenile, it is simplistic, it is irresponsible — but which I think is widely misunderstood (including by many of its proponents) and long overdue for a re-evaluation. In the sense of wonder as I understand it, one is in a state of profound awareness of conflict, of the irreconcilable and the irreducible: the universality of transcendence and the specificity of that which is — of life and the body — try, and fail, to coexist.

Russ, here, is not merely satirizing a mode of life. She is exploring it as a mode of life: criticizing it, yes, of course, and urgently so (Russ was always a propagandist, always a skilled one, almost always using her skills for The Forces Of Good), but criticizing it not as if it were an object that simply exists, a thing you can pick up and look at from all sides and then put down again, but as life, as part of the world, part of the universe. Suburban life, and everything that goes with it and everything else Russ so ably targets, is banal, does reduce those who live through it to triviality, but it is also a part of something larger, simply because everything is. On the page I quoted him from before, Delany continues: "The reason," he says, that sf gives us apotheosis in place of history, "is that apotheosis is, indeed, the case. What science fiction can do, however, is analyze the workings of that case with an extreme precision." To a large extent I don't understand what he's talking about. But to the extent that I do, this is what Russ has done. And as she does so, her story — like all good science fiction stories — invents science fiction anew.

     The window cleared. Freda began to tremble.
     She found herself looking at a wall of snow. Perpendicular, straight as steel, it towered above the house and way above it, way past the very top of the window, were stars in a nighttime sky. The sky was so very black and the stars so very bright that they lanced through Freda's eyes and made her lower her gaze to the wall of snow again.
     Even without the light from the House she could have seen the snow, for the light of the stars seemed as intense as moonlight, and it spilled down the sides of the wall of snow. The wall was some twenty feet from the side of the House; it stood impenetrable, terrifyingly solid, but there at the edge of the wall where the heat from the House had cleared a space around it, a very strange thing was happening. The snow melted but it did not melt; it exhaled, it breathed white vapor, it boiled, it whirled and writhed upward in a hundred fantastic shapes, hurrying swiftly into the black night sky above. On the top of the wall (barely seen from the House) were shining, sparkling pools of liquid, pools that moved sluggishly this way and that.
     Behind Freda the House spread its usual rosy warmth, noon in the kitchen, afternoon in the living room, twilight in the dining room, but here spring, summer, fall and even winter had died. For this immortal cold was a sun away from winter. ...
     Harry came out of the bedroom, yawning as he always did at the time he always came out every morning, and as he looked and saw, Freda turned. The Panel near the window glowed with its five ruby eyes. Five? No, six. Twelve. Twenty. Then more and more until the whole panel glowed red as a cluster of cherries. In case of failure of Air, she thought, throw open the door and admit Natural Air into the House. "Oh Harry, what shall we do?" she said, but there was no particular need to answer; the cherries dimmed, darkened, and then became green, green as beech leaves, green as the young green on hedges.
     Freda had time only to say, "Oh, Harry!" and he, "Freda, what—" when the house gave a little tentative shake and then another and then shivered into a hundred — no a million — no many, many more atoms, atoms that threw the airy snow up in a great billowing rise. ... But not into the air, rather into the space above the air, and then it settled down on the frozen air, on to the sluggishly living pools of liquid hydrogen, bounced a little, billowed a little, and finally lay quietly, invisibly, over a radius of some hundred miles.

Books read 2014

Welcome to the second annual silly round-up post of all the books I've read in the past year. First the list; afterwards, some statistics and comments.

Links are to posts where I wrote about or after, or posted an excerpt from, the book or writer in question.

1. Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (re-read)
2. Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (re-read)
3. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (trans. Philip Boehm)
4. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
5. Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary (eds. Justin Landon and Jared Shurin)
6. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa)
7. Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
8. Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (re-read)
9. Arnold Schoenberg, Letters (ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser)
10. H.P. Lovecraft, To Quebec and the Stars (ed. L. Sprague de Camp)
11. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story
12. Dorothy M. Richardson, The Trap (Pilgrimage 8)
13. The Cascadia Subduction Zone vol. 3 no. 4 (October 2013)
14. Clifford D. Simak, Strangers in the Universe
15. Vandana Singh, Distances
16. Stanisław Lem, The Chain of Chance (trans. Louis Iribarne)
17. Doris Piserchia, Star Rider
18. Asimov's Science Fiction (February 2014)
19. Clifford D. Simak, Worlds Without End
20. Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
21. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet issue 29
22. Lackington's Magazine issue 1 (Winter 2014)
23. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from margin to center
24. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
25. Asimov's Science Fiction (March 2014)
26. Dorothy M. Richardson, Oberland (Pilgrimage 9)
27. Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration
28. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
29. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
30. Dorothy M. Richardson, Dawn's Left Hand (Pilgrimage 10)
31. Peter Handke, Across (trans. Ralph Manheim) (re-read)
32. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen
33. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (trans. Meredith Weatherby)
34. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems (selected & trans. Norman MacAfee with Luciano Martinengo)
35. The Black Woman: An Anthology (ed. Toni Cade Bambara)
36. Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire (re-read)
37. Dory Previn, Bog-Trotter: An Autobiography with Lyrics
38. Dorothy M. Richardson, Clear Horizon (Pilgrimage 11)
39. A.E. van Vogt, The Book of van Vogt
40. Asimov's Science Fiction (April/May 2014)
41. Denise Levertov, The Jacob's Ladder
42. The Cascadia Subduction Zone vol. 4 no. 1 (January 2014)
43. A.E. van Vogt, The Voyage of the Space Beagle (re-read)
44. Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection
45. Jacob Bacharach, The Bend of the World
46. Isaac Asimov Presents the Great Science Fiction Stories: Volume 1, 1939 (eds. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg)
47. Agota Kristof, The Notebook (trans. Alan Sheridan)
48. Asimov's Science Fiction (June 2014)
49. Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
50. Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem
51. Lackington's Magazine issue 2 (Spring 2014)
52. Sarah Tolmie, The Stone Boatmen
53. Gabriel Josipovici, Hotel Andromeda
54. Asimov's Science Fiction (July 2014)
55. Rachel Pollack, Alqua Dreams
56. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era
57. Fantasy & Science Fiction (July/August 2014)
58. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. Ann Smock)
59. Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver)
60. Agota Kristof, The Proof (trans. David Watson)
61. James Tiptree, Jr., Warm Worlds and Otherwise
62. John Hawkes, The Lime Twig
63. Asimov's Science Fiction (August 2014)
64. Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Finished
65. Angela Davis, An Autobiography
66. Samuel R. Delany, Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (re-read)
67. The Cascadia Subduction Zone vol. 4 no. 2 (April 2014)
68. Women of Wonder (ed. Pamela Sargent)
69. June Jordan, Civil Wars
70. Joanna Russ, The Two of Them
71. Jeff VanderMeer, Authority
72. Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein's Nephew (trans. David McLintock)
73. Nina Allan, The Race
74. Asimov's Science Fiction (September 2014)
75. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
76. Kathy Acker, Kathy Goes to Haiti
77. Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
78. Vonda N. McIntyre, Superluminal
79. Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water (trans. Itäranta)
80. Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
81. Ghalib Islam, Fire in the Unnameable Country
82. Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (re-read)
83. The Cascadia Subduction Zone vol. 4 no. 3 (July 2014)
84. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
85. Asimov's Science Fiction (October/November 2014)
86. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
87. L. Timmel Duchamp, The Grand Conversation: Essays (re-read)
88. Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories
89. Agota Kristof, The Third Lie (trans. Marc Romano)
90. Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance
91. Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright)
92. Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire (re-read)
93. Samuel R. Delany, Nova
94. Asimov's Science Fiction (December 2014)
95. Sarah Tolmie, NoFood
96. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet issue 30
97. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
98. Dorothy M. Richardson, Dimple Hill (Pilgrimage 12)
99. Asimov's Science Fiction (January 2015)
100. Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays
101. Samuel R. Delany, The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—"Angouleme"
102. Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wild Years 1946-1955, ed. Martin H. Greenberg
103. Bessie Head, A Question of Power
104. Pier Paolo Pasolini, St Paul: A Screenplay (trans. Elizabeth A. Castelli)
105. Dorothy M. Richardson, March Moonlight (Pilgrimage 13)
106. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
107. Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass

General statistics

Number of different writers represented: 59
Most represented writer: Dorothy M. Richardson (6 books)
Most represented writers all of whose books I read were not part of the same long multi-volume novel: Samuel R. Delany (5 books)
Number of books written by men: 41
Number of books written by women: 44
Number of books written by (people known to me to be) (people who in the U.S. would be considered) people of color: 22
Number of books written by people not from the U.S. (with some tendentiously subjective decisions as to who "counts"): 41
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 27
Number of books in translation: 16
Number of "books" that are actually magazines: 19
Number of re-reads (not including books I both read for the first time and re-read in 2014): 10

Fiction

Number of books I consider fiction: 72 (including 15 magazines and 3 anthologies not counted in some authorship statistics)
Number of writers represented: 37
Most represented writer: Dorothy M. Richardson (6 books)
Most represented writer all of whose books I read were not part of the same long multi-volume novel: Samuel R. Delany (3 books) along with trilogies by Agota Kristof and Jeff VanderMeer
Number of books by women: 29 (including one all-female anthology)
Number of women writers: 18
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 9
Number of writers of color: 6
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. (with same disclaimer as before): 29
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 19
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 16
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 9
Number of books in translation: 13 (including Itäranta)
Number of writers of books in translation: 10
Number of foreign languages represented: 6 (Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Japanese)
Most represented foreign language: French (3 writers, 6 books)
Number of re-reads: 5

Science Fiction

Number of books that seem like they could conceivably be called science fiction by any stretch of the imagination whether I would call them that or not: 53
Number of books I think it makes sense to consider science fiction: 48 (removing Bacharach, Brontë, Carter, Head, and Pasolini)
Number of books that seem uncontroversially science fiction: 42 (removing further Fowler, Islam, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Pollack's Unquenchable Fire, and Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen)
(From here on figures are based on the 48 books I consider sf, minus the 15 mixed-gender magazines — 33 books total.)
Number of writers represented: 21 (not counting contributors to the 3 anthologies)
Number of books by women: 15
Number of women writers: 11 (not counting contributors to Women of Wonder)
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 7
Number of writers of color: 4
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 8
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 6
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 6
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 4
Number of books in translation: 2
Number of writers of books in translation: 2
Number of foreign languages represented: 2 (Finnish, Polish)
Most represented foreign language: Finnish and Polish (1 book each)
Most represented writer: Samuel R. Delany and Jeff VanderMeer (3 books each)
Number of re-reads: 5

Non-Fiction

Number of books I consider non-fiction: 30
Number of writers represented: 21
Most represented writer: Samuel R. Delany and Gabriel Josipovici (2 books each)
Number of books by women: 11
Number of women writers: 9
Number of books by people of color (with same disclaimers as before): 12
Number of writers of color: 11
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 7
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 6
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 5
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 4
Number of books in translation: 2
Number of writers of books in translation: 2
Number of foreign languages represented: 2 (French and German)
Most represented foreign language: French and German (1 book each)
Number of re-reads: 4
Number of books of or about literary criticism*: 16
Number of books about science fiction*: 9
Number of books of or about philosophy*: 6
Number of books about science*: 2
Number of books about music*: 3
Number of books about film*: 3
Number of books of or about history*: 11
Number of books of or about feminism*: 10
Number of books about racism and/or POC experience*: 12
Number of books about sexual minorities*: 6
Number of books of or about specifically leftist theory*: 10
Number of books of or about theology and/or religion*: 3
Number of biographies*: 2
Number of memoirs, autobiographies, etc.*: 9

*broadly speaking, making snap judgments, and with a lot of overlap

Poetry

Number of books I consider poetry: 5
Number of writers represented: 4
Number of books by women: 4
Number of women writers: 3
Number of books by people of color: 1
Number of writers of color: 1
Number of books by writers not from the U.S.: 3
Number of writers not from the U.S.: 2
Number of books by writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of writers not from the U.S. writing in English: 2
Number of books in translation: 1
Number of writers of books in translation: 1
Number of foreign languages represented: 1 (Italian)
Most represented foreign language: Italian (1)
Most represented writer: Denise Levertov (2 books)
Number of re-reads: 1

Inadequate yet overly detailed comments

I read neither as much nor as well in 2014 as I did the year before, though not dramatically so in either case. My ever-present problem of reading just to get through, to get to the next book — rather than reading simply to read, simply to exist with the work at hand — was I think stronger than it had been, which led to a frustration with the knowledge that I was reading slower, which led to a stronger urge to get through, which...a feedback loop. I don't wish to overstate this — it wasn't as dramatic as all that — but it is a problem, one I wish I could overcome.

Another thing I was uncomfortable with in my reading is that it seemed to me very scattershot — seldom did the books I was reading seem to speak fruitfully to one another. In part this is just chance, that the books I came to through all the myriad processes that select this rather than that as "the next book" didn't happen to produce as much dialogue as I'd like, but in part it seems like both poor planning and poor brain function. But because of this, where last year I was able to usefully talk about things in more general terms, here it's hard to think in anything other than specifics — hence the overabundance of detail.

In 2013 I began making a conscious effort to make sure I was reading at least as many women as men, to counter misogynist society's (and my unconsciously internalized) bias; as I said at the end of that year this quickly becomes much easier and by the time 2014 had started it was neither an effort nor conscious, requiring no list-making, quotas, etc. My reading remains skewed male in some fields, but overall there is approximate parity. 2014's quote-unquote "social justice" reading goal was to read more works by people of color, particularly black people, particularly black women; this was only moderately successful. I need to make a more concerted effort, especially considering that reading such amazing writers as June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Angela Y. Davis, Bessie Head, and so on and so on, is, of course, its own reward, as is overcoming at least some part of the immense stupidity that has been programmed into me as a white person.

The biggest "event" in my fiction reading was no doubt my finishing — just this past week as I write — Dorothy M. Richardson's massive thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage. As yet I'm left mostly speechless in the face of this remarkable work — which perhaps is appropriate, considering Richardson's frequent questioning of the value of responding to the world with writing. And yet she also wrote, a great deal; and I hope to be able to muster something soon. Another major event was Agota Kristof's great trilogy (for all my complaining about science fiction series, funny that two of the most important non-sf works I read were multi-volume), which, though I have written about it, filled me with a sense I find it difficult to describe; I keep being tempted to say that they made me feel like I was in the presence of something greater than I would ever be capable of knowing or being, but that accuses the books of seeking a grandeur, superiority, and self-satisfaction that they categorically refuse to have anything to do with.

Other general fiction that deserves singling out: Gabriel Josipovici's latest, Hotel Andromeda, about a woman trying to figure out how to write about the artist Joseph Cornell and why she feels a need to (especially in the face of the horrors of the world, why such art and writing on it should matter at all), may be my favorite of the handful of his novels I've yet read (though I think I think that every time I read one). Nothing, perhaps, can be said about Sade, but The 120 Days of Sodom was...peculiarly important to me. Bessie Head's A Question of Power blew me away, though I doubt I "understood" it in any sense of the word. A peculiar, unexpected thing: I read it immediately after reading Blanchot's essay on Sade (in Lautréamont and Sade, whose other essay I plan to read soon), and periodically I found myself forgetting what I was reading, thinking I was still reading Blanchot! Which maybe should not have been surprising, given how interested both works are in the nature of power, and how very deep both of their explorations go.

Three writers I had expected to read more of were Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Bernhard. I really thought I was going to have finished À la recherche (or at least finished a first approach to it) by year's end, but an accidental break of nine months between Sodom and Gomorrah and The Captive put the kibosh on that plan. Both volumes fascinated; The Captive in particular was interesting to me in the ways it was manifestly "unfinished"; in a work so much about the process of coming to be able to create the work, it is almost appropriate that some of it should remain unfinished, so that we can catch a glimpse of what the process of its coming-to-be might have been like. I read no fiction by Woolf (though at least one of the "essays" in The Moment, "Sterne's Ghost", is at least as much a story), spending most of the year reading an essay collection, one piece every few weeks, some of them fantastic, many largely unnecessary at this point. And for Bernhard, I read only one, the wonderful Wittgenstein's Nephew, surprisingly less bitter and more directly "autobiographical" than my previous two, Old Masters and The Loser, had led me to expect. I will surely continue to read these writers, with any luck more so, in the coming year.

As for science fiction — which I read more of than I felt like I was doing — it was the usual mixed bag. I subscribed to two magazines: Asimov's, which with its average of maybe one or two good-to-excellent stories each month is the best contemporary sf magazine I've yet read, online or off; and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, which I find frankly abysmal, bordering on unethical in its overwhelming focus on anything-goes, foundationless (and yet peculiarly homogeneous) "fabulism" — though the bizarrely hilarious and clearly self-questioning poems of A.B. Robinson in issue 30 were an exception. Other contemporary sf included Lackington's, whose first two issues I read entire and thereafter sampled — I appreciate its mission (and it has published some excellent work), though I have reservations about some aspects of its approach and find its success so far mixed (as is probably to be expected); I also read intermittently in the other online magazines, out of which Margaret Ronald's brilliant, bottomless "The Innocence of a Place" in Strange Horizons was by far the best (and I don't just say that because SH has recently, unaccountably, decided to start periodically publishing my silly words). I continue to object to most of what is published in short sf these days.

Five new-in-2014 sf works enthralled me. One was Nina Allan's The Race: I have reservations about its language, and about some of what seem to be its philosophical underpinnings, but its willingness to occupy exciting territory that essentially no current (and little past) sf is willing to occupy (and those aspects of its language and philosophy about which I have no reservations) more than outweigh those concerns. I hope to re-read it soon(ish), and with any luck I will be able to write about what I mean then. Another was Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, first volume of his Southern Reach trilogy; I liked the trilogy overall but found on balance that the second and third volumes worked primarily to contain what was so elusive and powerful about the first. Read on its own, or even to a lesser degree under the restraining influence of the trilogy as a whole, though, the power of Annihilation is undeniable. A third (less unarguably "science fiction") was Ghalib Islam's Fire in the Unnameable Country, which I read for the Strange Horizons book club and so have already talked about way too much.

And then there was Sarah Tolmie. Sarah Tolmie! The fact that, apart from my (long but oh so inadequately partial) review of The Stone Boatmen, Maureen Kincaid Speller's in Strange Horizons, another by Thomas Foster in The Cascadia Subduction Zone, and some brief talk on twitter (much of it laboriously spurred on by me), I've seen very little of the sheer excitement her two sf books should have generated is, frankly, an indictment of the field as it stands. The Stone Boatmen alone, as far as I'm concerned, should have made the science fiction field come to a screeching halt in its need to respond, and that's without even mentioning NoFood, so different, so similar, just as thrilling. The original animating impulse behind this blog — indeed behind essentially all of my writing — is the notion that sf, particularly the tradition growing out of the American sf magazines, has been uniquely able to respond to the conditions of modernity (in the longue durée sense), in a particular (not necessarily superior, but particular) way that is not available to any other art form. When I returned to contemporary sf after over a decade mostly away from it, I was astonished to find how completely disinterested in this the field had become, in its paradoxical but simultaneous attempts to repeat the so-called "tropes" of the past and to be ignorant of that past in its rush to become indistinguishable from corporate genre LitFic. Tolmie takes the concern with modernity that had once been implicit in all science fiction — that had in my opinion become increasingly and frighteningly mystified (or I should say mystified in a newly dangerous way; or I should stop disclaiming and just remind the reader that this is a drastically shortened and simplified version of what I mean) beginning in the 1980s, then totally abandoned by the turn of the millennium — and brings it, consciously, undeniably, to the fore. This is what science fiction should be doing. (Now, if she'd just write a book about space, I could die happy.)

Other contemporary-but-not-as-brand-new sf: Karen Joy Fowler's latest, which I could not be nearly as enthusiastic about as many; Vandana Singh, who I love deeply, though I sometimes fear she's too much under the sway of the assumptions of "literature" for all her talk of revolt from it; and Thomas Ligotti, who for me oscillates crazily between "I wish I had written this" and "this is just stupid" (part of this may be due to my reservations about "horror" and "the" so-called "weird").

Then pre-millennial sf, which in general tends to be a safer bet for me. Of greatest importance: some short fiction of Clifford D. Simak, possibly my single favorite sf writer; Doris Piserchia, whose Star Rider is both exactly what you want when you want "some sf paperback" and so much more (as, to be fair, so many of them are); Thomas M. Disch, whose Camp Concentration lived up to the Disch-hype, which for me 334 had not; A.E. van Vogt, my hero, about whom I'm increasingly certain I'll one day write a novel; Samuel R. Delany, whose fiction I continue to explore roughly chronologically (The Einstein Intersection and even more so Nova are a superb culmination of his early explosion of increasingly strange novels; the short fiction collected in Driftglass is mostly meh); Rachel Pollack, another "my hero", whose writing is so miraculous that every time I'm away from it for any period of time I begin to doubt it, only to be joyously reconverted every time I return; and Vonda N. McIntyre, whose Superluminal is one of the greatest of all sf novels, a slap in the face to anyone who doubts the liveliness of the field in the 70s.

As for non-fiction, I have to say immediately that June Jordan's essay collection Civil Wars should be required reading for at least all Americans. Every word is of the utmost importance. Of equal importance is W.E.B. DuBois's behemoth Black Reconstruction in America, which is foundational to any meaningful understanding of American history, and indeed the USA's present, including its dominating presence in the world. Maybe even better combined with Immanuel Wallerstein's very convincing introduction to world-systems analysis. Over the past year I've become convinced that an understanding of the role of American slavery, and its afterlife continuing until today, with a focus on both the particular and the world-spanning (which is precisely what Jordan and DuBois, along with Davis, and others, are so good at in their different ways; for a related mirror-image perspective, Ngũgĩ is also key) is absolutely vital for anyone who wants to try to understand...well, how the world works, and why.

For more "close-range" writing, Gertrude Stein's Wars I Have Seen and Dory Previn's Bog-Trotter are both the kind of book I wish I could convince everyone to read. Both are funny and terrifying as they live in the process of falling apart. Stein probably has her audience, but with Previn I wish even those who had no interest in (or awareness of) her music would read her; hers is one of the great lost minds of the 20th century. What might seem to be just another memoir of nervous breakdown, or just another book of celebrity gossip from someone who lived adjacent to some of the big names of 1950s and 60s Hollywood, becomes a fascinating exploration of philosophy, mysticism, and politics from no already-familiar, already-staked-out standpoint (and with no rigid separations), and all the more provocative for it.

Speaking of great minds of the 20th century, in 2014 I "discovered" Pier Paolo Pasolini — another of the major events of my literary year. Though he seems to be having a sort of low-level renaissance in the culture right now, for me it happened essentially by accident — I went quite literally at random to one of the DVD racks at the library, happened upon his Decameron, and remembered that his was a name I'd been meaning to investigate (I did see Salò years ago, but to the extent that one can ever be ready for it, I was not ready for it then — in the sense that I was then quick to paper over any discomfort with jokey dismissal). Things spiraled outward from there, mostly in terms of his film (though its availability in the U.S. is appallingly uneven), but I did read what was until a month ago the most comprehensive selection of his wonderful poetry available in English (the McAfee and Martinengo translation), and the newly-published translation of his bizarre unrealized screenplay for a movie about St Paul. I will soon be reading more (an essay collection and the new poetry collection are on their way to me as we speak), and I've been laboriously reacquainting myself with the Italian I learned in high school and continuing my education in the language in the hopes of being able someday to read what is not available in English (his English language bibliography is if anything in even a sorrier state than his filmography). I don't know how to speak to what he means to me, but much of it has to do with his dual inward and outward movement, his commitments to both literature and radical politics without succumbing to the poisonous "literature is journalism" syndrome. A large part, too, of my obsessive dive into Pasolini came in the form of Barth David Schwartz's massive biography, Pasolini Requiem, which I cannot recommend too highly. For obvious and typically unavoidable reasons it is rare for a biography of a brilliant artist and thinker to live up to its subject, but this is an exception: not just in its mustering of mere fact (a remarkable achievement in itself considering the enormous range of the material, from Pasolini's life and from Italian and European literary, philosophical, and political history, among other things) but in every aspect of its language and structure it is the biography Pasolini deserves. (Pasolini also directed some of my other reading, most notably with Sade.)

In a similar world is Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature, which continues to work its changes on my mind five months after I put it down; beyond what I've already said in other posts I'm not sure I want to say anything more now. And always there is Josipovici's criticism.

As for sf criticism, my re-read of L. Timmel Duchamp's The Grand Conversation was useful insofar as it reacquainted me with her arguments, but did not do much to deepen my understanding of them (this is on me, not on the book). The Cascadia Subduction Zone has more of a focus on should-you-buy-it-or-not style reviewing than I am interested in, which is not to say I'm not glad it exists, because I am. Speculative Fiction 2012 was largely trivial, to be honest. And I'm not remotely ready to formulate a response to Delany's American Shore, which, as with most of his criticism, I find alternately brilliant and troubling (in the sense that I find many of its premises misguided), in ways that are very difficult to articulate; then too with this book in particular there is just so much to respond to. Even a single short essay by Delany can send my mind reeling in directions that would require dozens of essays of my own (seldom if ever actually written, of course) to explore; and this book is to a short essay as quantum physics is to an inclined plane.

I read very little poetry this year. Apart from Pasolini, there were two books of Denise Levertov, who I still admire but with whom I think I am less enraptured than I originally was, Shange's famous "choreo-poem", which is marvelous but which I suspect has a greater impact seen performed than when read; and Anne Carson, who I continue to enjoy so unreservedly that I almost begin to have reservations. There was also poetry in every issue of LCRW (which apart from the Robinson I had the same objections to as I do to the magazine in general), Asimov's (which is without exception aggressively trivial), and The Cascadia Subduction Zone (which is not particularly my kind of thing).

For next year? There are a few specific directions I'd like to take my reading. I want to read a lot of the "western canon" type books that I have not yet read (anything from Plato to Dante to Cervantes to Kierkegaard, and on). I want to read too non-western canonical works, though for obvious (and stupid) reasons I have less of an idea where to begin on that vague task (though the Ramayana comes to mind, and I'd be interested to explore Arabic-language philosophers, not that I know any). I'd like to begin seriously reading the Bible. Modern and contemporary poetry. Afrofuturism and other black science fiction. More work, sf and not, in translation. And science writing — for someone who writes science fiction and sf criticism, I don't much keep up with science itself.

And I want to return more emphatically to the writing that, ultimately, keeps me going, makes me want to do this (what is this? — writing criticism, writing fiction? living?) in the first place: the tradition of 20th century science fiction that centered on, and grew out of, the American sf magazines of, especially, the 1930s-70s. For all I've written on this blog, all the busy-ness, I haven't touched on even a fraction of what the best of this writing means to me.

2014 Off Vesta

To repeat the speech from last year: it feels weird to me to do a big self-linking post like this, but I've found it very helpful when others have done it (and people seemed to appreciate it when I did it last year), so here it goes. Not so much a "best of" as a summary and index of what I see as my more "important" (or whatever) writing here over the past year.

Simak's "Answers"
In praise of possibly my single favorite science fiction writer, reveling in the ways one of his stories lives in the conflict between certainty and uncertainty, in melancholy beauty and in the concreteness peculiar to sf.

On Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
On what I see as conflicting and irreconcilable impulses in Fowler's work. This should maybe be read alongside this excellent post (not by me) about how the...socio-political? function of institutions like the Booker (for which Fowler's novel was nominated) guarantees their literary triviality; the world I feel Fowler wants to have it both ways about is the one described in that post.

My first draft woke up like this: a ramble and Too close, too much
A single pair of passages, one from Samuel R. Delany and one from Gabriel Josipovici, inspired both of these posts. The one with the nonsensical Beyoncé reference in the title is about the social and material conditions that might give rise to the very different self-descriptions of commercial sf writers and those I, following Josipovici, tend to call modernists. The other is also about a similarity-in-difference between sf and modernism: how sf's signature gesture of having "too much" going on to see all at once and modernism's of forcing us to come "too close" to see everything may have much in common despite their enormous fundamental differences; it's also the closest I've yet come to being able to write about the marvelous Doris Piserchia.

On transgressing genre boundaries and all that
In which I argue for, not the purity, but the difference of science fiction, against the supposedly radical effort to demolish that difference in the name of "artistic freedom." The pull quote: "From where I stand, blurred genre lines are nothing short of hegemonic." Totally unexpectedly this was my most popular post of the year, thanks in large part to a link in this vital post (which I urge you to read) by Nina Allan.

Finally, he lifted his ship and went away
I guess technically now I'm supposed to pretend this never happened, but it did and it was important to me, so: I had a remarkable experience of renewal while reading a Marion Zimmer Bradley story and I wrote about it, with help from Peter Handke.

Toward the eternity
A quick look at a sentence from my hero, A.E. van Vogt, that exists strangely both outside and inside of narrative. (Also check out the comments for links to two interviews with van Vogt that I've been obsessing over ever since.)

Lost time
Again Josipovici is the jump-off point. His discussion of the Jewish and Christian liturgical traditions through Proust's notion of voluntary and involuntary memory led me to think about how sf (here, works by Simak, Octavia E. Butler, Cordwainer Smith, and Gene Wolfe) often explores similar concepts, in its very different way. Flaws in the post — misses, incompletenesses, pointlessnesses — pop out at me now, but as a beginning I think it's worth holding on to.

Shuffling tropes
On Charlie Jane Anders' "Palm Strike's Last Case", in which I mutter about capitalist propaganda on the way to an exploration of the harm caused by thinking and writing in terms of "tropes."

Atavism, degeneration: one reason (among many) to read Lovecraft
A series of observations about Lovecraft's enterprise: the tendency of his stories to begin and end with uncertainty, horror, and dissolution, mirroring his notion of the universe; his equal abhorrence of the ancient and the modern, the past and the present/future; and how this is tied intimately to his racism; followed by a brief exploration of what this enterprise, in toto, might have to say to white people if we can stop falling all over ourselves to distance ourselves from his racism — one of many ways in which his fans domesticate his work.

The fictional writer, the fictional reader and an addendum
Two posts about how any work of science fiction, by its nature, regardless of how it is written or what it is about or whether it is any good, insists that its writer and its reader are fictional, and a plea for writers and critics to be mindful of what this might mean. (I later posted a passage from Delany talking about similar things; and all this is is probably related to my challenge to take sf as seriously as those who distrust it.)

Confusion and understanding: one post about The Stone Boatmen
Looking at this wonderful novel through Chaucer and Langland's experience of the shift to modernity (with a lot of help, as usual, from Josipovici) helps to reveal how such a shift is and is not what the book is up to, and to see what it has to say to us, in its non-propagandistic way, about truth. I hope to return to this novel, whose publication should be recognized as a major event in the field. This post hardly begins to scratch its surface.

The turtle could not become a starship
A quick post on how one "unassuming paragraph from early on in Vonda N. McIntyre's Superluminal comes very close, for me, to containing all of science fiction" (though wish I had not used the word "containing" — maybe more "opening up on"). One of my very favorite posts.

Agota Kristof and the Southern Reach
Another quick post, another personal favorite. Having read Agota Kristof's twin trilogy and Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy concurrently, I look (with help from Kierkegaard and Heidegger) at what happens when each trilogy departs the "notebook" format of its first volume.

And then I had three post-series. I haven't yet gotten far on my Joanna Russ or Adventures in Time and Space read-throughs, but I did manage (just barely) to write about all ten stories shortlisted for last year's Sturgeon Award.

With Joanna Russ I've so far dealt only with what she published (mostly in college journals) while a student at Cornell: the early poetry, a witty and surprising first science fiction story, and two less-interesting non-sf stories.

As for Adventures in Time and Space, the short introductory post explaining why I want to write about the stories in that for-better-or-worse classic anthology of "golden age" science fiction gives a nicely concise, if vague, statement of the importance I attach to that era (which, as I say there, has a uniqueness that "remains largely unappreciated by its detractors and partisans alike." So far I've written about Heinlein's "Requiem", which I took as an opportunity to to puzzle out why his work is so distasteful to me, and John W. Campbell's wonderful "Forgetfulness" (written as Don A. Stuart), which I looked at as a sort of contrapuntal structure of paradox and contradiction spiraling outward and inward until it tears itself apart and collapses into silence.

And finally, Sturgeonblogging was grueling and horrible but surprisingly rewarding; as I wrote in my wrap-up, the project "helped me to articulate much of what I needed to articulate" about the current state of the field, "or at least pointed in that direction." The stories covered:

1. Gregory Norman Bossert's "Bloom": good, with reservations about its overly workshopped feel.
2. Vylar Kaftan's "The Weight of the Sunrise": revolting in its contemporary-white-liberal centered ventriloquism of quote-unquote "the other," along with other problems.
3. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass": fascinating, though I had some doubts about its "lovely" language. The comments section, oddly, exploded with multiple conversations in different directions, at times cranky, usually interesting, seldom having much to do directly with the story itself.
4. Will McIntosh's "Over There": a wretched piece of garbage.
5. Alan DeNiro's "The Wildfires of Antarctica": which I wanted to like but did not, or maybe vice versa; I may need to reevaluate it, especially in light of L. Timmel Duchamp's interesting review of the collection it appears in.
6. Val Nolan's "The Irish Astronaut": totally by-the-numbers, not science fiction in any sense, morally reprehensible.
7. Sarah Pinsker's "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind": so deliberately and skillfully what I don't want sf to be that it threw me into despair.
8. Robert Reed's "Mystic Falls": an intriguing misfire by an interesting writer.
9. Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer": a marvelous piece using misdirection to explore the nature and ethics of representation.
10. E. Lily Yu's "The Urashima Effect": a perfectly serviceable story I found I had so little to say about that I ended up using the post as a wrap-up as well.

Agota Kristof and the Southern Reach

Among so-called negative thinkers, there are some who after having had a glimpse of the negative have relapsed into positiveness, and now go out into the world like town criers, to advertise, prescribe and offer for sale their beatific negative wisdom — and of course, a result can quite well be announced through the town crier, just like herring from Holstein... But the genuine subjective existing thinker... is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he constantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm is sometimes the condition for a cure.

—Søren Kierkegaard as quoted in Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Interest, interesse, means to be among and in the midst of things, or to be at the center of a thing and to stay with it. But today’s interest accepts as valid only what is interesting. And interesting is the sort of thing that can freely be regarded as indifferent the next moment, and be displaced by something else, which then concerns us just as little as what went before. Many people today take the view that they are doing great honor to something by finding it interesting. The truth is that such a judgment has already relegated the interesting thing to the ranks of what is indifferent and soon boring.

—Martin Heidegger, "What Calls for Thinking?"

I've just read Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy in tandem with Agota Kristof's twin trilogy. I didn't plan it that way. I didn't even realize it until, after finishing Kristof's The Third Lie, I noticed that the next book I'd planned to read was also the conclusion of a trilogy. Immediately my mind started to compare them. As it turns out, they are well worth comparing. Annihilation and The Notebook, the marvelous opening volumes respectively of VanderMeer's and Kristof's trilogies, both present themselves as the writings in a notebook; more important (though related), these first volumes are both open wounds. But though both trilogies depart from their notebooks for a kind of "broader view" once the first volume is done with, they do so in dramatically different ways; and where in the remainder of her trilogy Kristof insists on keeping the wound open (not least by bringing out the implications of the verb "present" in my previous sentence), VanderMeer seems almost frantic in his rush to patch the wound up — without regard for what "the condition for a cure" might be. No wonder his three books had to be issued in such rapid succession: neither he nor his publisher, it seems, could imagine leaving Annihilation out there, alone, needing to be dealt with.

Authority and especially Acceptance, overabundant embarrassing similes aside, are eminently readable and entertaining. This is not nothing, and I don't want to minimize it. They contain much that is intriguing, even wondrous in the fullest sfnal sense. But the intrigue here is mere intrigue; they are, they work at being "interesting novels" where Annihilation was something entirely different, a tear in the world, making a demand on us. Or at least Annihilation is this if one can consider it as its own entity; unlike with Kristof's work, which creates in the reader a great deal of justified faith, with VanderMeer's the mere knowledge that there is to be a "rest of the trilogy" (coming soon! so very soon!) feels like it is working, is calculated to foreclose already even before one reads on.

Kristof's books are, simultaneously, "the negativity of the infinite in existence" and the process of finding ways to live with it; as such The Proof and The Third Lie are glorious unfoldings of the premises and promises of The Notebook. (Walter Benjamin, in an essay on Kafka, reminds us that the word unfolding has a double meaning: "A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper.") But Authority and Acceptance, even at their considerable best, even as they strive (or pretend) to be "about" what Annihilation raised, are ultimately a betrayal: not unfoldings but results: the town crier announcing that the negative has been glimpsed, in the process reducing it to the status of a good for sale.

The turtle could not become a starship

This unassuming paragraph from early on in Vonda N. McIntyre's Superluminal comes very close, for me, to containing all of science fiction.

A rank of electric cars waited at the corner, tethered like horses in an old movie. She slid her credit key into a lock to release one painted like a turtle, an apt analogy. She got in and drove it toward the waterfront. The little beast rolled along, its motor humming quietly on the flat, straining in low gear on the steep downgrades. Laenea relaxed and wished she were back in space, but her imagination could not stretch that far. The turtle could not become a starship; and the city, while pleasant, was of unrelieved ordinariness compared to the alien places she had seen. She could not, of course, imagine transit, for it was beyond imagination. Language or mind was insufficient. Transit had never been described.

There were no electric cars when McIntyre wrote, at least not readily available for use at, essentially, a vending machine. Movies with horses in them are not "old" here because transportation by horse is outdated (after all lines of tethered horses continue to appear in movies in our age of cars), but because movies themselves are old. An infodump disguises itself, transparently, as incluing (any writer to whom the action in "She slid her credit key into a lock to release one" was routine would not, almost could not describe it so thoroughly; more likely the actual action, and its economic consequences, would disappear into a phrase like "She released one"). A metaphor ("The turtle...") tries to become literal at the precise moment ("...could not become a starship") that metaphor becomes impossible. The city at which the reader has marveled in previous passages must suddenly be reinterpreted, retroactively, as quotidian. Rationality, language, imagination and the mind fail in the face of what their furthest explorations have opened up to experience. And the words on the page leap the gap from the unremarkable to the unimaginable, more than once, in more than one direction, in the space of nine short sentences.

Confusion and understanding: one post about The Stone Boatmen

[For those who care, fair warning: this post contains what probably amount to spoilers.]

Though I try always to extend sympathy at least, it is difficult for me to approach any new work of sf with anything other than suspicion. But very early on in my first reading of Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen — I am no longer able to say when or where, exactly — I decided to trust: to have faith in the work, and in Tolmie's ability and above all responsibility in pursuit of it. Or — can this really be characterized as a decision? Perhaps better to say that I found myself trusting her, that something palpable but not quite locatable in or between her words made such trust not only possible but natural, even unavoidable. Tolmie does not betray this trust.

The Stone Boatmen sets itself in, and in the ocean between, three coastal cities, none of which have names, none of which have been in communication with the others for a millennium prior to the events of the novel. Each has staked its being on one semi-mystical, semi-rational organizing principle, each carrying with it its own contradictions. There is the city of ceremonies, in which not only do elaborate rituals mark certain days and certain events in life, but smaller rituals attend almost every quotidian moment of every day; these ceremonies give the people of this city a physical (and therefore mental) connection with tradition, with the knowledge and power of "the ancestors" (on whom more to come), and yet the people often find the constant adherence to ceremony stifling. Then there is the city of poetry, in which the power of the word is almost — but not exactly — worshiped; this city understands the ability of art, specifically literary art, to create a world, but it lives perhaps too much in the world of mere art, has perhaps too much of a misleading, superstitious (even frantic) belief in the identity of the word with the thing. And finally there is the city of the golden birds, where priests study the behavior of a peculiar breed of bird in order to govern and advise the people according to what they divine therefrom; the actions of these birds are, explicitly, only a pretext, an arbitrarily ordered set of otherwise formless information focusing on which allows the bird-priest's mind to explore and to conclude; and yet these birds are no ordinary birds, and they do in fact possess authority — of some kind.

Each city, in short, has its own particular way of ordering and understanding the world, all of which have many appealing, crucial facets which it would be disastrous to lose but which nonetheless work also to conceal the world, to prevent the people from, as it is described later on, hearing what the world has always been saying to them. The relationship between these systems, once they encounter one another, is no simple, easily graspable thing. They are not complementary in the sense that some facile combination of them would result in enlightenment. There is a kind of trajectory to the order in which we encounter them: ritual, with its mystique and secretiveness, conceals words; words conceal what the birds, perhaps, reveal; and what the birds reveal conceals...well, whatever it conceals — "reality"? "being"? ..."truth"? — is what the book could, in a way, be said to be "about." But it would be a terrible mistake to take this trajectory as indicating a hierarchy, some kind of progressive step-by-step sense in which words are "better" than ritual, bird-divination "better" than words. Indeed it could be thought of as a circle (or as a closed chain consisting of three interconnected links, the form the cities choose to symbolize their new relationship), as the connection to ancestral ways of being and knowing that the people of the first city experience through their ceremonies is intimately tied to this world-speech to which the characters, and the book itself, seek to be attentive.

On a first reading it is tempting to think The Stone Boatmen is about — or perhaps better it is tempting to try to make it be about — a society becoming modern, much as, in our world, Europe did in the period centered around 500 years ago (proceeding as it did to steamroll that modernity catastrophically over the entire world). And indeed at first it seems to be so; the book opens with Prince Nerel alternately embracing ceremony and chafing against its restrictions; it then moves on to Mahar, a man of the next generation, who, as Maureen Kincaid Speller puts it, is "bored by the emphasis on ceremony and ritual in his own city. He is also acutely aware that he does not belong fully either to the city or the palace and his determination to be a sailor and boat-builder is a deliberately calculated expression of that uncertain status" — impatience with tradition, questing for novelty, and struggling for self-definition in the face of the confusions of uncertain status being of course some of the major characteristics of modern life.

But, as Speller notes in her insightful review, Tolmie's book "seems constantly to fold itself into new shapes in the reader’s mind." Even before the opening section — before Nerel's story — there is a prologue, bearing the title "The Ancestor's Tale" (the Chaucerian resonances are entirely appropriate, as we shall see in a moment), which haunts any attempt to make such simple meaning out of the narrative that follows. These two pages sketch in the planned death and mystical transformation of "the senior technician," Harel, who occupies a position of some power in a high-technological society (these are the people who will come to be known as "the ancestors") and, seeing disaster (of the type we ourselves are about to face?) approaching, decides to take action. It is not clear exactly what this action is, but it is obviously this that leads (singlehandedly? immediately? it is, deliberately, forever, unclear) to the relatively static, mostly "low"-technological societies we encounter in the novel proper, a millennium later. In light of this any attempt to view the three cities as we encounter them in the novel as "pre-modern" is necessarily a distortion of what the novel gives us — indeed, it would be more accurate to call the societies "post-modern," were the term not already taken by something to which it is much less suited.

The events of the prologue have complex ramifications on everything that is to follow, in the shape both of the cities and of the events that occur within and between them (to the extent that these two things are separable elements of the novel). Even in the first two sections, dealing with what could be misread as Nerel's "pre-modernity" giving way to Mahar's modernity, things are not so simple; and as we then progress first to the section dealing with the poet Rose and then of her daughter, the seer Fjorel, the novel "performs the remarkable feat of maintaining a permanent tension between tradition...and modernity or modernization" (as Thomas Foster puts it in his review in The Cascadia Subduction Zone). This is a work that recognizes the value and the problems with both, admitting it all into itself, refusing propaganda, resolute in its determination not to place one over the other.

A digression may make clearer what I mean, and clearer too how Tolmie manages to perform her remarkable feat. Tolmie says (in fact it is quite apparent that she wants the reader to know) that William Langland's poem Piers Plowman was heavily on her mind as she wrote The Stone Boatmen. Not yet having read that poem, I turned for assistance to Gabriel Josipovici's The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction and its discussion of Langland alongside Dante. Josipovici’s subject in this book is what it means to become modern, which means he will be useful in exploring the ways in which modernity and non-modernity interpenetrate in The Stone Boatmen. He writes that both Piers Plowman and the Commedia

open with the hero-narrator’s sudden awareness of being lost and his asking a figure of authority (Virgil, Holy Church) who appears before him what it is he needs to do to find salvation. Both poems then provide an answer to this question not in terms of logic or metaphysical argument, though there is plenty of both in the poems, but in terms of experience. The hero undergoes a number of experiences which lead him eventually to see that the universe and his own life make sense. … In Langland too the public and the private, his own history and that of the world, come together when he wakes up on Easter Sunday to hear the bells ringing for ‘God’s resurrection’. Here, for the first time in the entire poem, the dream vision and the waking reality coincide, significantly enough in the one event which stands outside human time and yet gives meaning to all human history: the Passion and the Resurrection, eternally re-enacted in the sacrament.
        It is as if both journeys had been undertaken to cleanse man of the stiff and stubborn man-locked set, the private vision of the foolish natural man* which led only to the dark wood of chaos and confusion, and to give him back himself by revealing to him the reality of the world and the meaning of God's plan. But this is not simply a matter of listening to what people have to say to you. Virgil and Beatrice and St Bernard have much to say to Dante, but they are important to him primarily for what they are and for where they lead him, rather than for what they teach. Similarly, in passus XII of Piers Plowman Imagination warns the dreamer that 'learning and intelligence are both worthy of praise', for 'without the use of learning, bread could not be changed into the Body of Christ' ... and without intelligence, which 'springs from men's observations of many things — of birds and beasts, and of experiments both true and false', man could not come to the Truth. ... For the world is a book and all the parts fit and yield forth God's meaning. Dante and Langland thus both construct their poems so as to elicit from the hero (and hence from the reader) the exclamation: 'Now I see how it is!'

* "Stiff and stubborn man-locked set" is a reference to a previously-discussed Wallace Stevens poem, and "foolish natural man" to a passage from the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor, also previously-discussed; this type of man is contrasted against "he who is spiritual and can judge all things," aware of the way God works through the world.

If we make allowances for large differences in theological orientation from work to work, Josipovici could almost be describing The Stone Boatmen here. Just as Dante and Langland present a journey from confusion to understanding, so too does Tolmie*, though here the confusion and understanding, and the experience that leads from one to the other, are those of a whole society over multiple generations rather than one individual within one lifetime (this difference is, as I have discussed, typical of sf). The characters speak rarely if ever of a God or gods, and never of salvation per se, but nearly all of the action of the novel is driven by the attempt to regain the ability of the revered ancestors to listen to the speech of the world, to understand the nature and plan of these ancestors, and to discover what place the lives of individuals and of communities have in the context of that plan. And to read the book is to experience this attempt, to try along with the characters to listen to what the world is saying.

*With a lot of "logic and metaphysical argument" as well, to the point that it almost obscures the necessity of experience. I will not have the space here to explore this seeming contradiction — which is in fact the very soul of sf — but I hope to do so in a follow-up.

But this book is neither written nor read by people with medieval understandings of the world; though in it modernity and tradition always coexist, it is itself a product of the modern world, and so things are not so simple as the above might lead one to believe. But neither are they in Josipovici, who is discussing Dante and Langland in order to lead into an examination of the radically different worldview one finds in Chaucer, for whom the crises that would lead to what we think of as modernity were already well underway:

Instead of making experience reinforce what old books say Chaucer seems to be at pains to pull the two apart. The perpetual concern with dreams is just another aspect of this problem, since the question whether dreams are prophetic or not is really the question of how far God impinges on this world and how far we can tell what kinds of relation exist between this world and God’s providence. In Dante and Langland, we saw, there was an answer to these questions, and an answer that had to be sought for, but which was connected with the public facts of the Incarnation and the sacraments of the Church. But Chaucer’s poems make no mention of this. Instead they merely raise the question and leave us more puzzled than before.

Once again Josipovici could almost be describing The Stone Boatmen, and reading this passage with this book in mind it can be tempting to say that Tolmie is more "Chaucerian" than "Langlandian." This is particularly so in the early parts of the novel’s final section, the one dealing with Fjorel and her dream-visions. These dreams come from Maleki, the current temple bird* — who is also, Fjorel comes to realize, the current incarnation of Harel, the senior technician whose transference into a bird we witnessed in the prologue, known to the people of the cities as the last king of the ancestors. In a sense, then, it is possible to take Maleki/Harel as a stand-in for God (or rather for His role in the Josipovici passage) and say that there is no doubt as to "how far God impinges on this world" — there is no question as to whether Fjorel’s dreams are true visions — which would seem at first to set Tolmie’s enterprise against Chaucer’s. But as ever it is not so simple. For one thing, Harel was not God, or a god, or even supernatural in any way; he was merely a man, different from others only in the extent of his technical know-how, possessing no transcendent authority. Then too Harel’s mind, inhabiting the body (which emphatically includes the brain) of a succession of birds over the course of a millennium, is no longer that of a human. Though it retains much of the same factual information it possessed when he was a living human, along with the urgency that led him to abandon the technical way of life while also ensuring that a record of it would exist**, its perspective on this knowledge, its interpretation of this urgency, and its ability to communicate any of it, are now that of a bird, not a human — and as such Fjorel’s dreams cannot be a transparent window onto the truth of things. "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him," goes the line from Wittgenstein that serves as one of the novel’s two epigraphs, and the same is true of this bird — indeed, the problem of comprehension is more pronounced, as Maleki cannot even speak, has no language. Fjorel spends most of her time in the novel being confused, frustrated, even resentful at what is happening to her; she knows that her visions have meaning, but she can find no way to grasp this meaning.

*Low-budget bookblogging problems: I had to return the book to the library, have not yet been able to buy my own copy, and my notes as always have frustrating lacunae — so I’m not quite getting the terminology right here. In the city of birds all birds are "sacred" (or some near equivalent), but there is always one mated pair which occupies a central place, physically and otherwise; Maleki is the male of this pair at the time the novel takes place.
**In multiple ways — the books of the ancestors still exist, the rituals of the city of ceremonies descend from the ancestors, and Harel himself seems to have been waiting all this time for a mind, Fjorel’s, that is in some mysterious way "ready" to receive his messages.

Later on, Josipovici looks at Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and finds it emblematic of the modern worldview that rose up to deny the (Chaucerian) uncertainty and anxiety that had followed in the wake of the collapse of the (Dantean and Langlandian) medieval worldview.* Where the "I" in the medieval poems is "moving slowly towards understanding (and leading the reader with him)," in Bunyan it is more as though "he passively records a film which passes before his eyes." In the medieval poems meaning is something that must be searched for; "in Bunyan the meaning is there from the start." Rather than learning "how to make sense of the world," Bunyan’s Christian "learns how to flee from it ... his task is to escape the World, the Flesh and the Devil" where in Dante and Langland what must be escaped is not the world but "a false and subjective view of the world; what they discover is not a new set of facts, but a new understanding of the nature of that false view." Bunyan’s work is a presentation of a set worldview and morality "which we either accept or reject, depending on our prior allegiances and our own fear of damnation," rather than a process in which the reader as well as the writer and the "I" all take part. And rather than there being a tension between the real event, the real being, and what it allegorically "stands for," Bunyan’s "story is meaningful in so far as it is reducible." But what is on the surface for the Calvinist Bunyan but is increasingly obfuscated as modernity progresses is that "this is true of the story because it is true," for the person with a modern perspective, "of the world as well." Looking ahead to later forms, we can put this another way: that no matter how much secular modernity insists it has no need to see the world as "meaningful," the shape of what is by now traditional narrative puts the lie to this insistence, indeed subtly but powerfully propagandizes for a particular interpretation of what the world "means."

*As discussions of these issues are always open to accusations of oversimplification and nostalgia, I would like to stress here that I am summarizing very roughly in the interest of keeping this post to some reasonable length. Josipovici is very aware (as am I) that "the medieval era" was neither a monolith nor some golden age of perfect harmony; but in Europe during these centuries a shift did occur in the prevailing ways of relating to the world, and this shift, especially as "Europe" metastasized across the face of the planet, does continue to govern our own prevailing ways of doing so. Any discussion of such phenomena must engage in generalization to some degree, which by no means must entail losing sight of the fact that generalization is what is going on.

I bring this up to emphasize once again the degree to which Tolmie avoids such propaganda. If Bunyan's "story is meaningful in so far as it is reducible," Tolmie's is meaningful in so far as it is not. The Stone Boatmen is practically overflowing with elements that seem to mean, to carry some set allegorical meaning (the recurrence of twins and doubles, for instance, or the encounter between Rose and the fox that eats her pears), but Tolmie, much like Kafka though reading her otherwise feels nothing like reading him, takes great pains to undercut the allegory, to insist that what is presented to us is itself, not some reduction of itself.

And as we saw before, The Stone Boatmen incorporates the Langlandian (or at least what I am interpreting through Josipovici as Langlandian) insistence on process, on coming, through experience, to the truth, with the Chaucerian emphasis on the absence of a knowable truth. The Chaucerian anxiety in the face of this absence (which, lest the point be lost, is very close to the anxiety that runs through those works called "modernist," at least when the term means more than some simplistic periodization) is present, in its way, again most especially in Fjorel’s story. In a conversation between her and the bird-priest Herodias, Fjorel’s mentor, the talk turns from the confusion of her visions to the mysterious event that not only started the novel proper but set in motion all of the events that follow the prologue: the discovery that among the commoners there is a man who, despite being unrelated to him, looks exactly like Prince Nerel, and who therefore also looks exactly like the ancient stone boatmen in the city’s harbor, the Prince’s resemblance to whom has long been a source of amazement in the court. Herodias says,

"It must mean something. Two men born in one generation, exactly alike but not twins, both looking just like those statues more than a thousand years old. All have wondered about it since. Who knows? Maybe the birds will tell you why and solve a long mystery." Fjorel looked anxious.

Fjorel’s anxiety, as a character in the novel, is not quite that of Chaucer-the-writer. One feels that she would have been fine going through life simply experiencing, feeling no need for the world to have meaning (this perhaps is how one can read "the stillness," the state of semi-meditative hyper-awareness in which she, for the most part comfortably, spends much of her life); but suddenly she finds the demand to find meaning thrust upon her. It is this responsibility, and her lack of faith in her own ability to live up to it (perhaps because of personal failing, perhaps because to fulfill this responsibility is by its nature impossible) that makes her anxious. The position of the book itself, I think, to the extent that it can be said so simply to have one, is to be found in Herodias’s response to Fjorel’s anxious look:

Fjorel looked anxious. "But if they don't it doesn't matter. We do not need to know everything," he added hastily, apologetically.

The eager curiosity to know, to find out, paired (humorously, in this case) with the understanding and acceptance that the mastery of knowledge has limits. The tendency occasionally to forget the one in the acknowledgment or pursuit of the other. The mingling of aspects of both modernity and "pre-modernity" in multiplicitous and, unlike the modernity we actually live in, non-prescriptive, variable form. The book is after — and it is possible to interpret this, as Foster does, as "utopian," though I would call it more properly, specifically sfnal — a reconciliation between these, in reality, unreconciled (and perhaps unreconcilable) ways of being in the world. In Tolmie as in Dante and Langland, the world is an interpretable set of information, like a book (though the novel thoroughly questions that breezy "like"); but as in Chaucer there’s no guarantee that this information "means," indeed when it most seems to mean is when it can be most deceptive. In light of all this, and in light of its own nature as a (resistant) product of modernity, the journey from confusion to understanding that The Stone Boatmen otherwise shares with Piers Plowman and the Commedia necessarily occurs between somewhat different poles.

Wittgenstein, recall, provided one of the two epigraphs: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." But before this is one from Langland: "Whan all tresores arn tried, treuthe is the beste". The movement of the novel can perhaps be understood in part as a movement from a "confused" melding of these two lines (or rather of aspects of them) to an "understanding" one. As things stand at the beginning, Prince Nerel, or rather the society he (metonymically, politically, problematically) represents, has long staked itself on the understanding that there exists truth, that it is the beste of all tresores, but there is a growing discomfort with the distance at which it seems to reside. The ceremonies continue as always, at times even leading to moments of startling clarity, but increasingly the silence, the absence of the ancestors with whom the ceremonies are supposed to be a link weighs on them; and even in those moments of clarity there is the sense that something is missing. Truth exists, perhaps, but the splendor of the ancestors is so foreign to the people of the present that it seems only a fundamentally different kind of being could ever grasp it and even then could never communicate it; Wittgenstein's aphorism is readable as expressing ultimate unknowability, the absence of truth from a world that promises to possess it.

The crisis escalates in the figure of Mahar, but then a peculiar thing happens: in his confusion, his being deeply unsettled, he acts — and through his action, the three cities, unaware of each other for a thousand years, are linked. What each possesses throws into relief what another lacks. As I said before, they do not complement, let alone "complete" one another, but the shift from mere learning to experience that their intercourse allows for allows also for the life of Rose, transplanted by choice from one city to another (and unwittingly bringing the best of her city with her), and then her daughter Fjorel, who would never have been born without the contribution of all three cities. In a sense the crisis is embodied in Fjorel to a greater extent even than in Mahar; from what I have already discussed about her role in the novel it is probably apparent that Langland's Treuthe and Wittgenstein's incomprehensibility pervade every aspect of her being.

But through her own life, her own experience — both in submission to and in reaction against the role of seer that has been thrust upon her — Fjorel is able to come to a new synthesis of these seemingly opposed elements. Not for her Chaucer's puzzlement (though she passes through it), nor Bunyan's and modernity's obfuscation (though she sometimes wishes for it), nor the anxiety and melancholy of those who struggle against modernity, whom I find it useful to call modernists (though, again, she is no stranger to anxiety or melancholy). Neither does she succumb to the glib triumphalism of much of what is called postmodernism, which, refusing to look at the problem, noisily declares that there is no problem.

When Fjorel attempts to explain the understanding she has come to, she begins by disclaiming that what she has to say is perhaps "not spectacular," not, at any rate, as exciting as people might hope the solution to ancient mysteries would be. In a sense she is right; this is no "all will be revealed" TV series finale. What she provides are not so much answers as (and someone — her father? augh, if only I hadn't had to return the book — points this out) the understanding that different questions need to be asked. The question is not: what is the ancestors' plan? for there is no plan, or at least not one that matters any longer. The question is not: how can we be more like the ancestors? how can we know what they knew, do what they did? — it is not, that is to say: how do we break through the barrier of incomprehensibility to seize the truth? Rather, the question Fjorel enables her people to begin asking (and here I want to emphasize Speller's observation that this novel has no truck with overnight transformations, that it "is less bothered about these moments of epiphany, more concerned about the responsibilities such rediscovery brings with it") is closer to: how can we be ourselves?

By the end of the novel, we, having read it, are able to hold Langland's and Wittgenstein's words simultaneously in mind in a new way. They are not opposed; they are aspects of the same thing. Truth exists, for we are all linked, with one another and with everything else in the world. But truth is truth precisely because of who we are, because of our experience. A lion, or a bird, or an ancestor, given the ability to speak to us, could not make itself understood. But this does not mean there is no truth, only that truth, consisting of everything that is, is larger than any one vision of it — and that our responsibility, knowing this, is to seek it always.

Noted: Delany on sf's "fictivity" and "double futurity"

As I begin slowly to make my way through Samuel R. Delany's recently reissued The American Shore, I am gratified to see him approaching — from his very different directions, for his very different reasons — many of the same issues I discussed recently in my two posts on what I called the fictional writer and the fictional reader. (I'm also glad that I wrote those posts before I read this passage, because if I hadn't they probably would have turned into still more thoughts-on-passages-from-Delany lingering in my drafts and notes, along with countless others; and too I might have lost some of those aspects of my thought not directly relevant to Delany's here.)

From the commentary on lexia 2:

With the reader located firmly at the only real present, and the object and the speaker organized out from that present, we see that the fictivity of the science fiction story is structured differently from the fictivity of the mundane fiction story. In a third-person, past tense tale of mundane fiction, the incidents are "false" but the telling is "true." The incidents take place "before" the telling; the telling takes place "before" the reading. In a third-person, past tense mundane fiction, therefore, a simple temporal path leads away from the (present) reading back through the telling into a past that becomes more and more fictive (i.e., "false") the further back it goes. In a third-person, past tense science fiction tale, however, this path is looped into a bizarre knot in which we find the first tensions of that special charge unique to the s-f genre; we find it with the occurrence of the first verb. The incidents, which are false, occur in the future. But as the narrative voice places them in its past, the telling must (fictively) occur farther in the future than the incidents. Therefore, the ordinary fictive voice of science fiction is even more fictional than the incidents; the telling is less true than the incidents recounted. The narrative voice of science fiction (unlike the narrative voice of mundane fiction) is more fictional than the incidents it recounts. (A number of s-f writers have conscientiously exploited this: the "telling" of Asimov's Foundation series takes place specifically several thousand years after the incidents — the series posits itself as an historical reconstruction. Several of Cordwainer Smith's tales launch from a distance at least a generation beyond the major fictive occurrences.) The futurity of science fiction is not single, therefore: it is essentially doubled, supporting itself, interwoven with itself, creating a dense fiction by the same process with which it severs itself from the substance of the mundane. In one sense science fiction is a discursive image of futurity speaking of its own exhaustion. In another, it is a luminous interim, where projections from the past may dazzle us in transformation, hung between a real and a virtual limen, a reading and a telling, displaced about a proairetic axis. (The temporal fictive framing of other modes — first-person mundane fiction, for instance, where the telling is fictive, and so forth — is all suggested here: but we must progress.)

[At the word proairetic, Delany provides this footnote explaining the term as he's using it: "Proairesis (Greek, προαίρεσις pre-choice), largely through Barthes's S/Z, has become the term for the acts of fictive characters, e.g., going to the park, plotting, taking pills, dancing, etc.)"]