Adventures in Time and Space: Lester del Rey's "Nerves"

Adventures in Time and Space series table of contents

The work of art does not refer immediately back to the person who presumably made it. When we know nothing at all about the circumstances that contributed to its production, about the history of its creation — when we do not even know the name of the person who made it possible — it is then that the work comes closest to itself. This is its true direction; it is this characteristic which is expressed in that superlative phenomenon, the masterpiece. Perfection, in the sense given this word by estheticians, is not what distinguishes the masterpiece, nor is the mastery which belongs to the artist and not to the work. Valéry is right to say that mastery is what permits one never to finish what one does. Only the artisan's mastery culminates in the object he fashions. For the artist the work is always infinite, unfinished. And thus the fact that the work is, the singular event of its being absolutely, is disclosed as not belonging to the mastery we associate with achievement. It belongs to another order. ...
        But: does an object fashioned by an artisan or with a machine refer to its maker any more than the work of art does? It too is impersonal, anonymous. It does not bear any author's name.
        Yes, this is true; it does not refer to the person who presumably made it, but neither does it refer to itself. As has often been observed, it disappears altogether into its uses. It refers to all it does, to its utilitarian value. The object never announces that it is, but how it serves. It does not appear. In order that it appear, — this too has often been said — a break in the circuit of usage, a gap, an anomaly has to make it leave the world, leave its senses. And it seems then that, no longer there, it becomes its appearance, its image — what it was before being a useful thing or a significant value. This is also when it becomes, for Jean-Paul Richter and for André Breton, a veritable work of art.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. Ann Smock)

Where others were primarily storytellers, he [Hugo Gernsback] was a didacticist who framed his expositions either as mild japes on fascinating facts or as guided tours through the technologically marvelous world of the future. Although he came to reprint Verne, Wells and Burroughs, he personally did not aspire to literature; he aspired to something much more like propaganda.
        To some, it was potent propaganda. The significance of Amazing Stories is not in having been the first all-speculative-fiction newsstand magazine; it was not, Weird Tales having been founded in 1923. The primary significance lies in that it was the first such magazine to employ the new technological optimism as distinguished from older, classic foci for speculation.

—Algis Budrys, introduction to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era

[Erle Melvin Korshak, founder of Shasta Press] began reading science fiction in 1934, regularly getting issues of Astounding Stories and Wonder Stories from an older cousin after he had finished reading them. (The cousin later became an oil geologist, a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines.)

—Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder

After this, what more need be said about Lester del Rey's story "Nerves"? I am constitutionally incapable of leaving it at that, but I encourage you to stop reading now. Everything that follows is mere elaboration — perhaps dilution — of what has been said in the juxtaposition of these quotations.

There is a subclass (not a "subgenre") of sf that "disappears altogether into its uses." A strange fact is that as far as I can tell no writer specialized in this subclass, no writer was always an artisan — for all that many of them insisted that they were "only" craftsmen; indeed almost all of the major (or at any rate majorly productive) writers of the first several decades of sf regularly produced both it and the "broken" works that become something else.* I always think of Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote many works that seem intended only for use (Prelude to Space, for example) alongside many others that "announce that they are," the grand visionary works like Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End that he's loved and loathed for. The same goes for del Rey; a story like the famous "Helen O'Loy," odious as it may be, has that break in the circuit, where "Nerves" truly does disappear altogether into its uses.

*I want to make very clear here that to say that there is a difference between art and craft is not to say that a work of art is "better" in any way except that it is better at being art. In the specific case(s) I'll be talking about in this post I'll be speaking negatively of those works that "disappear into their use," but that is because of the nature of their use. I'm also aware that these kinds of distinctions have often been used in very damaging and oppressive ways, but even if they've been misidentified and misused the distinctions do exist; if we can't acknowledge that between a tool, in itself as a tool, and a painting, in itself as a painting, there is a fundamental difference of kind, then we can't talk about paintings at all.

The defining characteristic of this type of sf is that it does nothing other than to present something which does not currently exist, but which maybe could soon, as if it does in fact exist, and then proceed to examine some parts of its workings. And by "nothing else" I mean nothing else. So for example Prelude to Space has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than examining how a manned space vessel might be launched from the surface of the earth, and "Nerves" has absolutely no interest whatsoever in anything other than how a nuclear facility might deal with an accident.

(In his essay on sf, Blanchot writes: "A good work of science fiction, to the same extent that it purports to anticipate the future on the basis of genuine knowledge, has interest only in and for the present. Posterity stops here at ten years. The more authentic the creation, the more rapid its descent into the commonplace. There remain literary merits, the pleasure of reading; the book then moves on to a different shelf, having betrayed its kind by hypocritically staking a claim on eternal values." It would be easy to take him here as engaging in the old "if it's good it's not sf," but I believe he is referring instead to what I'm talking about here, what he was talking about in the passage from The Space of Literature, and is suggesting that by "betraying its kind" the work of the artisan becomes the work of art. I would use different terms to make the observation, but the observation itself is sound.)

The use that I'm claiming for this type of sf work, in case my recourse to Eshbach (whose blithe assumptions, and what they reveal about sf, I've discussed briefly here) and Budrys did not make this clear, is propaganda.

Nerves was written early in 1942, when atomic power was discussed publicly only in the science-fiction magazines. It presupposes a world where atomic power is an accepted fact, where atomic-power plants are as commonplace as automobile factories. Writing in a curiously prophetic vein, Mr. Del Rey has furnished some very plausible — albeit fictional — answers to the questions in everyone's mind. What is an atomic-power plant like? How does it operate? What would happen if things got out of control?

—blurb introducing "Nerves" in Adventures in Time and Space

It is important to remember, now and for the rest of this post — indeed for the rest of this series of posts — that every move this anthology makes is one of active canon-creation, not passive canon-reflection. To overstate: it was this anthology and not the age itself that called "the golden age" into existence.

Keeping that in mind, what fascinates about this blurb is how completely inaccurate it is, in the strictest factual sense. The story is not about atomic power plants but rather about facilities for the production of atomic byproducts for use in industry and agriculture.* In the world of the story these atomic facilities are neither accepted nor commonplace. Rather, they are deeply contested, though the contestation occurs almost entirely outside of the story, and the few facilities that exist are operated mainly by one company, in a near-monopoly. The story itself deals far more with the possibilities of near-future medicine than with "prophecies" about the practical functioning of atomic facilities. And indeed, del Rey is writing not in a "prophetic" but rather, to borrow an observation from Samuel R. Delany, in an incantatory vein: he wishes to call what does not exist into being merely by describing it.

*From here on I'll keep using "atomic" even where we'd normally say "nuclear" to help distinguish the setting of the story from what we might be familiar with now from real life.

The several ways in which the blurb is factually inaccurate are revealing, though, because in a broader sense it is entirely accurate. How does a story that looks always slightly to the side of, seldom directly at, the functioning of a facility for the production of atomic byproducts, while focusing much more directly on the brutal violence these byproducts can do to the human body, manage to be read as, far from a dire warning of the inhumanity to come, a "prophecy" of the exciting coming world of atomic power?

"There's an answer somewhere, has to be!"

—Dr. Jenkins, in "Nerves"

And indeed there is. There always is. Science and technology create a problem (an atomic accident kills and maims hundreds, and threatens to destroy a vast swathe of North America if some way of averting disaster is not found quickly), and science and technology are there to find a solution, over and over and over again as "Nerves" careens through its seventy interminably action-packed pages. Radioactive substances have infiltrated a man's nervous system, causing his limbs to jerk so spasmodically that bones break and he may literally die of exhaustion? Not to fear, science has found a way to synthesize curare in doses far more controllable than nature (and the "South American primitives" to whom it was known "for centuries") ever dreamed, and it can dull the motor function long enough to effect a cure; and the pain can be stopped safely with "neo-heroin." A man's heart has stopped due to his exposure to intense radiation and heat? Send for the new machine that can be used to get it going again, and it will be helicopter'd in within the half hour. Byproducts of the accident due to decay within hours into substances that will react and blow up most of the continent?

        "You've got sort of a river running off behind the plant; get everyone within a few miles of it out of there, and connect the blower outlets down to it. Where does it end, anyway — some kind of a swamp, or morass?"
        "About ten miles farther down, yes; we didn't bother keeping the drainage system going, since the land meant nothing to us, and the swamps made as good a dumping ground as anything else." When the plant had first used the little river as an outlet for their waste products, there'd been so much trouble that National had been forced to take over all adjacent land and quiet the owners' fears of the atomic activity in cold cash. Since then, it had gone to weeds and rabbits, mostly. "Everyone within a few miles is out, anyway, except a few fishers or tramps that don't know we use it. I'll have militia sent in to scare them out."
        "Good. Ideal, in fact, since the swamps will hold stuff in there where the current's slow longer."

—"Nerves"

For the first time the story looks directly at the heart of the problem — the atomic facility and the accident itself — and for the first time the solution is not to throw a scientific-technological fix at the scientific-technological problem, but — "the land meant nothing to us" — to throw the scientific-technological problem into the natural world. (The way it ends up working is that the dangerous byproducts mixed with the water form a colloid that keeps the individual molecules far enough apart to stop them from reacting; they can then be treated with a substance that reacts with them more safely, generating nothing but heat that the water can absorb — "It'll cook the river bed up and dry it, but that's all!") Despite this very telling change, though, the cycle of problem-solution problem-solution continues, and only extremely rarely is there any suggestion that it might even be possible — let alone desirable — to step out of the cycle.

And every time there is such a suggestion, it comes always from the stupid mob, sf's traditional enemy. We've just seen them in the passage I quoted just above, the landowners (and other users of the land) whose fears of radioactive contamination somehow remain foolish (the dismissiveness fairly oozes out of that word, "trouble", and har har, look, they were willing to take money) even in the face of a potentially world-historical catastrophe caused by precisely that radioactivity. A few pages earlier we've seen the competent scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors who are running things fretting about the fact that "the population" (always a group separate from those who matter) might resort to "lynch law" if forced to evacuate, even though the scientists and technicians and engineers and doctors know, as one of them says to the plant manager (on whom "the mob's" anger would likely focus) that "it wasn't your fault." And then of course there are several disparaging references to the delays and restrictions imposed by "Congress," a body sf writers often misunderstand as having some relation to "the people," which serves the convenient propaganda purpose of convincing budding technocrats that government can never facilitate business and technology enough, that it is always restricting and should be pressured to be more helpful.

You might be interested to know that at the party one very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures.

—Joanna Russ, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's"

But of course "Nerves" doesn't even have those, or anything equivalent. All it has is the cardboard heroes (and, after a fashion, heroines) and the values. (The jokey male camaraderie of the last page, the "ribbing," the slapping on the back and the winking...) Now, I'm not arguing that "Nerves" is bad because it wants a world I think is bad, or even because it's dishonest in its methods of trying to call that world into existence. (If that disqualified a work of art for me, I wouldn't — couldn't — be an sf reader, nor could I be a reader of much else.) Much of the analysis I've just done, of the ways in which "Nerves" is politically dangerous, is of a kind that I find — in isolation — tedious and pointless. That the sf of the first half of the 20th century hated the greater mass of the people, manufactured itself and its readers as an elite, and desired a technocratic nightmare world that it in many ways successfully effected, is, or should be, obvious. That it also did other things, things that often manage to achieve a kind of depth and truth difficult to articulate (and Russ's young woman articulates only a small portion of it), is perhaps less obvious but is nevertheless true. The difficulty here, looking at "Nerves," is trying to understand how it is that it, unlike many stories just as reprehensible, has nothing — nothing — to offer apart from its hideous incantations.

Is it a matter of setting? Most of the problems I've been talking about are difficult to imagine arising in anything but a near-future story; on the other hand, space operas and other far-future settings come with their own problems.

Is it a matter of technique? I have tended to argue that the most important defining characteristic of any given work of sf — the single thing that most sets it apart as its own work and that most drives what it is capable of doing — is the way it alternates between exposition methods, here infodumping, here incluing, here mixing the two in this way, here in that. Perhaps it is not insignificant that "Nerves" is almost 100% infodump, with incluing playing almost no role. It's not that infodumping is in itself "bad" (a foolish, meaningless thing to say) but that in the absence of any counterpoint with incluing (which even the sfnal "essays" of a writer like Lem have in abundance) the work succumbs to the kind of intellectual weakness that Delany identifies in the utopia, a form which no amount of clueless academic criticism can make identical with sf* but which this particular story comes very close to, in terms of structure at any rate.

*To say that works of sf can be utopian is to say something entirely different than to say that sf is utopia, or that utopia is sf.

Or is it a matter of outlook? The attitude toward technology I've been looking at in this post is very much the kind of mystification Russ was referring to in her "SF and Technology as Mystification," where the notion that technology is some force of nature that just "advances" on its own, without human input, is a cover for the machinations of capitalism; whether this mystification is presented by a booster, as here, or a nominal opponent, as in the academic panels Russ discusses, is essentially irrelevant: the mystification serves its purpose either way.

Of course it's all of these things — they all contribute — and none of them — many stories that live and breathe do some or all of these things and somehow manage to be more than propaganda.

We know that all ancient art was other than it seems to us to be. The white statues deceive us, but if we restore their colored coating to them, it is then that they appear false to us (and they are false, because this restoration disregards the power, the truth of time, which has erased the colors). A painting ages; one ages badly, the other becomes a masterpiece through the duration that decomposes its tones, and we are familiar with the fortuitousness of mutilations: this Victory to which only the flight of time could give wings, the heads from Bardo, of mediocre craftsmanship, that the sea has resculpted, has made fascinating. Moreover, the very means of our knowledge transform almost at will that which they help us to know: through reproduction, art objects lose their scale; the miniature becomes a painting, the painting separated from itself, fragmented, becomes another painting. Fictive arts? But art, it would seem, is this fiction.

—Blanchot, "The Museum, Art, and Time" (trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg), in Friendship

Obviously not nearly as much time separates us from "Nerves" as from the statues, but in the terms of modernity, of modern science, and of science fiction (again: "Posterity stops here at ten years," and though this has not in actual fact been the case, the observation remains true of the writing itself), 1942 was several eternities ago. The colors have worn, duration has decomposed the tones; and then, too, the story's being ensconced in an authoritative (and, in my secondhand copy, solidly built but heavily battered) hardcover from a major press, rather than in the disposable newsstand magazine it originally appeared in, makes it lose its scale, separates it from itself.

Plastic art is first in the service of religious sentiments or invisible realities around which the community perpetuates itself; art is religion, says Hegel. At this stage one finds it in churches, in tombs, under the earth, or in the sky, but inaccessible, invisible in a way: who looks at Gothic statues? We do; the others invoked them. The consequence of the disappearance of prayer was to make monuments and works of art appear, to make painting an art within reach of our eyes.

—"The Museum, Art, and Time"

To combine Blanchots, and to reassign the values attached to his observations all willy-nilly:

I tend to suspect that the difference between "Nerves" and, say, "Forgetfulness" — or indeed even "Requiem," which for all its self-serving propagandistic sentimentality, for all that I hate it, is something other than that as well — was largely invisible when these stories were first read. It is easy now to laugh at early sf readers (and tempting to compare them to contemporary ones in this regard) but what at first appears a simple lack of discernment may conceal something deeper: where we "look at" these stories, their first readers invoked them. They all disappeared into their uses, and the uses of all of them were, in a sense, propagandistic; it was these stories, after all, that made it "a logical development for a Depression teenager who started on science fiction magazines" to take his place in the oil industry — for countless like him to take their places anywhere in the emerging technocracy.

The stories, as "stories", were invisible. It is only the passage of time, the change in context, the coming to pass of what has, indeed, come to pass since they were written — and the way this changes the stories' "futurity," the way it transforms them into something that can laughably be called "prophetic," or just as laughably not — that makes them appear. It is only this that brings them within reach of our eyes. The passage of time and the change in context have transformed all of these stories, some into art, some not. However much I like to imagine that, had I been an avid sf reader in the era of Campbell's Astounding, I would have dismissed "Nerves" as garbage while recognizing "Forgetfulness" as a masterpiece, I'm not so sure. Perhaps "Forgetfulness" was always "broken" in the way it is now, and "Nerves" never was; perhaps not. Perhaps it is impossible to say.

Short fiction recommendations - January/February 2015

Now that I have entered the 21st century and have one of those newfangled gadgets everyone else has had seemingly forever, it's much more possible for me to do what I've been wanting to do for a long while now: explore the contemporary short science fiction field — most of which is online — thoroughly. So I've been reading a lot. I've read, or at least looked at,* every story published in January and February in every single free online sf magazine (and other magazines that regularly publish sf) that I'm aware of (a total of, good lord, forty-four magazines), as well as two magazines I subscribe to. If possible (a big if, as you'll see later on), I'd like to keep doing this and make a monthly thing out of recommendation posts.

*I made a pact with myself that'd I'd make it at least three dotepub pages into every single story, and...most of the time I did.

Before I get into talking about what this has been like, here's the list of magazines I've looked at. All are free online magazines except for Asimov's and Interzone. (For the sake of vertical space, I will not be putting this in bullet-list form, so apologies for the difficult-to-readness.) If there are any conspicuously missing from this list, please let me know!

[Click here to skip the boring lists]
[Click here to skip the boring general commentary and get to the recommendations]

The list: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Aphelion, Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omenana, Omni Reboot, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review.

Of these, no fiction appeared during January and February in The Book Smugglers, The Future Fire, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Omenana (does anyone know if there's gonna be an issue 2?), Scigentasy (they don't put a friggin year on anything, do they still exist?), or Three-Lobed Burning Eye.

Of the remaining, no fiction I found to be of any note (remember that I'm talking only about fiction) was published in Acidic Fiction, Aphelion (so terrible I'll probably stop looking at it), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (though admittedly fantasy has to work a LOT harder to convince me than sf does), Betwixt (more devoted to formula even than most), Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction (not so much relentlessly trivial as trivially relentless), Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, Galaxy's Edge (where every story feels exactly like the worst story in an all-original anthology from 1969), GigaNotoSaurus, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omni Reboot (and honestly their website is such a pain that I'm probably going to stop looking), Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons (sorry), Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, and Weird Fiction Review. Each of the rest had at least one story I thought was worth recommending.

Before I go on, some general comments: first of all, nearly everything I read (or looked at, if I couldn't make it through) was terrible beyond belief. Not incompetent — perhaps surprisingly, nearly everything I read, even at the smaller magazines, was competent, even accomplished — but just pointless, formulaic, tedious, unnecessary.

Second, it's become pretty clear already, only two months in, that there really isn't any such thing as a "good magazine" in this field, as far as fiction goes (there are probably all kinds of "bad magazines," but it's too soon to call for most of them). Even the magazines that had more than one good story in them, the other things they published, and in one case the editors' comments, made it clear that the editors were not recognizing what I recognized in those stories, and had decided to publish them for reasons I would find...untrustworthy, at best. Unlike Jonathan McCalmont, I don't generally want magazines to focus on a specific "type" of story. And indeed, many of the magazines (Perihelion, say, or at the other end of the spectrum Apex) clearly do have such a focus, but nevertheless seem unable to distinguish between stories that live and stories that do not. But despite this difference, and despite my many problems with his arguments, McCalmont is absolutely right that there is a desperate need for stronger editorial stances in this field.

(Incidentally, the "major aesthetic sea-change" in short sf that he identifies — and, in my opinion, mis-analyzes — in Short Fiction and The Feels, it turns out, is not as widespread in the field as it actually stands, as a whole, as I had expected. It is, however, omnipresent in the work that attracts the most attention, and it remains a problem.)

Third, related to both and more important by far, this is just a terrible way to read. It's an awful feeling to go from story to story feeling nothing but suspicion, knowing that the chances are that what you're about to read will be trivial — if you're lucky. Far from any reputation I may have gained (in the teensy circles in which I have a reputation at all) for being negative-and-loving-it, I don't want to hate things, I don't want to be closed off, to be always suspicious. I want to approach everything with sympathy and openness. But this field simply does not allow for that approach. It's true that the rare good stories are wonderful surprises in this context, but they would be that in any context. Then, too, there's simply so much of it that if you're to have any hope at all of reading any significant portion of it you simply have to move quickly, be unforgiving, give up on most stories long before they're done. This is not a good way to read, and I have serious doubts if I'll want to keep doing it.

But at least for these two months I've already done it. So what did I find that was good, or at least decent? Arbitrarily arranged by the magazine in which they appeared, those magazines arbitrarily arranged in alphabetical order, and with largely superficial comments, there was:

Abyss & Apex

Corie Ralston, "Faith Is a Nanooka"
Not the most important story ever, but I appreciated this little unassuming thing about an elderly woman spending her last day of life in search of her robot dog and an understanding of God, life, and love. I especially liked the way the sequence of encounters she has during this day doesn't particularly pretend to be "realistic."

George S. Walker, "Dreadnought Under Ice"
Though I wish Walker would allow himself a little more time in between hitting the "enter" key, this story of the encounter between two very different minds removed, in different ways, from Earth, encased, in different ways, in metal, and placed in the under-ice oceans of Europa, by capital, is very much the kind of thing that science fiction should be doing.

AE

Stephen Case, "Drying Grass Moon"
I have an irrational, indefensible, and honestly inexplicable fondness for stories about grouchy farmers stubbornly refusing to leave their farms IN SPAAAACE, and this is one of those. For me it even made up for the unsavory "heterosexual robot marriage is illegal and oppressed" storyline. I make no claim that it will do the same for anyone else.

Apex

Rhoads Brazos' "Inhale"
The language tries much too hard for a kind of warmed-over "loveliness," and the gambit at the end, as executed, is reductive, a closing off, but the conceit (time begins to run backwards, and cause-and-effect sense must be made of it), and Brazos' thoughtfulness in carrying it through, mostly makes up for the problems.

Asimov's

Eneasz Brodski, "Red Legacy"
I suspect that what I liked in this story is entirely different from what Brodski — who seems to be into a horrifying-sounding thing calling itself "rationalist fiction" — wanted me to like in it. Its investment in cycling through "tropes" and its treatment of personal tragedy are both frankly insipid, but the collision of the bizarrely, almost humorously disjointed structure with the melancholic tone is intriguing, as is its exploration of an alternate world in which strict Lysenkoism is both 100% true and useful.

Buzzy Mag

Paul Levinson, "Sam's Requests"
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, "The Obvious Solution"
Both messy nostalgia, both the kind of dumb-but-fun stories I can enjoy while rolling my eyes at them.

Clarkesworld

Tang Fei, "A Universal Elegy" (trans. John Chu)
Bewilderment on a vast scale. I'd hoped to re-read this story — which I didn't know what to make of and am not even sure I liked — before writing this post, but it wasn't to be. But it is rare enough for a contemporary sf story to call for re-reading that I feel moved to recommend it regardless. The story's transmutations live in a realm very little sf cares to inhabit anymore.

Interzone

Christien Gholson, "Tribute"
A bit schematic, like so many stories a bit too trying-for-beauty in its language, but the central action of the story, a centuries-long encounter in which both parties feel themselves to be facing an inexplicable monstrosity, is immensely striking.

The New Inquiry

Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Space"
Surprise! The New Inquiry wasn't on my list, and it isn't even an sf venue. Of course not — there is no way that Kriss's "Manifesto", which is already likely to be the best work of science fiction for all of 2015, could have been published in any of the existing sf spaces. This is why I protest. If I were fool enough to buy a Worldcon membership, I would nominate this for a Hugo in both the short story and related work categories. If you only read one item on this list, if you only read one thing ever again in your life, make it this. And then work, please work, to make sf a field in which this piece, both in its perspective and in its form, could have a place.

Perihelion

First of all, let me just say: Perihelion publishes a lot of fiction, and most of it is not only bad but reprehensible. Most of the stories seem to have all of the weaknesses of quote-unquote "golden age" sf, with none of the strengths. Before I came across the first of the stories from them I liked, I started to wonder if their submissions guidelines said, "When describing women, objectifying language is a must." Just for example. Go to almost any of their stories and search in the page for variations on the word "curves" if you don't believe me. (Their sub guidelines, by the way, do not say that, but they are gross in other, intimately related, ways.) In amongst all the dreck, though, I did find two pretty good stories, of a kind I doubt I'd find anywhere else. Dammit.

Karl Dandenell, "Human Faces"
Structurally reminiscent of Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah," but with a sentimentality that put me in mind, not unpleasantly, of Clifford D. Simak's lesser works, and a well-done feeling of dislocation throughout.

A.L. Sirois, "Halieis Anthropon"
The Biblical reference in the title is a bit of an unnecessary distraction in this case (he said, as he prepared to send a story with a Biblical reference in the title to yet another magazine). Melancholy and the remembrance of things lost. The quailing of the mind in the encounter with the inexplicable. I may sound like a broken record sometimes with these things, but it's not repetition, it's necessity. This story is, though not without flaws, necessary.

Shimmer

Malon Edwards, "The Half-Dark Promise"
If you'd asked me what I was looking for when I started out reading these stories, "YA steampunk" would not have been any part of my answer, but — if that's what this is — here we are. Not My Kind Of Thing, maybe, but it's real.

SQ Mag

Michelle Ann King, "The Visitors"
As with many (or most) good contemporary sf stories, I could wish that King had let this story stay longer in her mind before writing it, or before finishing it (or at least I presume that is the problem; it is unfinished, not in the sense of being unpolished or too short or not detailed enough or lacking an ending, but in the sense of not being fully thought, fully experienced). But its puzzled, dread-filled approach to that classic sf theme, "transcendence," is more than welcome.

Tim Major, "Like Clockwork"
I read this story, centered on a powerful man who tries to make his Martian environment as much a nostalgic portrait of Earth as possible, as a critique of sf's frequent tendency to retreat inwards, playing around with "tropes" and trying to make everything always-already familiar. (In this way the steam-, gears-, and train-oriented nature of that portrait is particularly telling.) That it performs this critique without being condescending — indeed, with a very sympathetic sadness — is impressive. Meanwhile, the editors' comment that the "detail of Tim Major’s world and the strange characters who inhabit it recommended this story" to them is almost horrifying in its tone-deafness, the world being very pointedly undetailed (when pieces of the world outside bleed through toward the end it is with a jolt), the characters being anything but strange.

Terraform

Yes, Terraform. I'm as surprised as you.

Julie Steinbacher, "Inter-Exo"
This story of teenagers sneaking off to get out of their body-covering suits (which they must wear at all times to avoid contagion) and have sex is little and almost inconsequential, but wonderful in its sense of bodies and the amazement of embodied, tactile experience.

Mark von Schlegell, "How a Dream Machine Works, Exactly"
This story is, frankly, 90% stupid bullshit of various kinds, but something in the other 10% nags at me. Every once in a while its account of reality's encounter with its own destruction-from-within (most of which account is, again, just bullshit) brushes against something that resists articulation.

tor.com

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "And the Burned Moths Remain"
More than anyone — anyone — else who uses the contemporary sf formula (the one-line opening and closing paragraphs, the heightened, "poetic" diction, etc etc), Sriduangkaew seems to me to be, one, using it in order to slip more lively work past editors who wouldn't otherwise know what to do with it, and two, thinking about what this formula is doing. To a large degree this just makes me sad, thinking about what she could be doing if she weren't forced into it (as with all of her stories that I've read this one seems to be straining uncomfortably against limitations not of its own choosing and not conducive to its own health), but nevertheless it is nice to see.

Uncanny

Richard Bowes, "Anyone with a Care for Their Image"
I can easily see a reading of this story that would dismiss it as "kids these days with their newfangled internet," but there's much more going on here than that. It's not even, as it would be easy to think, about disconnection, because its narrator is very often In The Thick Of Things and very well aware of it. It's more to do, perhaps, with the shifting of priorities that occur when mediation — or representation — achieves both primacy and invisibility, and of course with the infinite weirdness of the rich.

---------------------------------------------------

So...it's both better and worse than I'd expected. Worse, because it's looking like sorting through all the noise to find the good work will be an unsustainable amount of labor. Despite the interventions of so many editors, it's essentially still slush reading. I'd hoped to be able to identify a good magazine or three but, again, it's already apparent that there are none, there are only randomly-placed good stories. Then, too, it is disheartening to realize that, though some of the magazines have distinct characters, there is no real difference between the large magazines and the small ones — the small ones serving mainly as overflow for the large ones. There don't seem to be any magazines taking advantage of their smaller size to publish work that could not find a place elsewhere.

But better, because I didn't expect when I started out to be able to recommend nineteen stories in this post — if we're talking averages, almost ten a month. (Speaking of statistics, yes, I'm aware that these stories skew male, at a rough count slightly more than the field-at-large does. I could speculate as to why this is, but it would probably sound, possibly be, disingenuous, and I prefer to wait and see if the pattern repeats itself.) Though then again — will any of these stories matter to me, or anyone else, after any amount of time has passed? They've all lingered in the mind enough that I didn't have to refer back to any of them to write these blurbs, but even just a year from now, or even next month? It's hard to say. With "Manifesto" as one major exception, in most cases it seems unlikely.

A Cavalier History of Science Fiction

Science fiction* divides itself almost suspiciously neatly into decades, doesn't it? It seems so to me, at any rate. What follows is perhaps not to be taken immensely seriously as The One The Only Truth, and obviously there are always exceptions to any generalization (hence the name, "generalization"), but it is striking, no?

*I am speaking here, as I usually am, of the entity that named itself that: i.e., the field of literary endeavor (and, later, other media) that began in, then branched out from, the American magazines — which is not to say only American writers and only ever American magazines — including the novels and other books that eventually began to be published, and including also those semi-autonomous areas that defined themselves (explicitly or otherwise) in part or entirely as reactions against this field.

1910s-20s: Science fiction establishes itself as a distinct, self-aware entity. It finds itself in the pulps not by choice but by default.

1930s: Sf refines this self-image, establishes its own protocols separate from those of the rest of literature (including both the "mainstream", broadly defined, and other "genre" or "category" fiction), and accomodates itself (usually enthusiastically) to its pulp identity.

1940s: Further refinement, now in the form of channeling previously disparate strands into one specific path (i.e., Campbellian sf dominates both in and to a lesser extent out of Astounding, and either way Astounding dominates sf).

1950s: Explosion as that one path becomes increasingly untenable/exhausted.

1960s: Post-explosion burnout. Flailing, sometimes successful, attempts at rapprochement with the interests of the "mainstream" (including the "avant-garde").

1970s: Revolution(s).

1980s: Backlash leading to an ultimately successful counterrevolution.

1990s: Entrenchment of counterrevolutionary gains. Revolutionary impulses allowed expression as long as they are placed and contained within the larger counterrevolution.

And then 2000s-10s? What might be said of the current and previous decade? I'm tempted to say that they are essentially "the long 1990s." But they do have their own distinctive character, one defined perhaps... by contradictory urges toward amnesia and nostalgia? By a full and almost relieved embrace, at long last, of the devotion to formula implied by the word "genre"? By a vehement denial that there should or could be anything distinctive about sf beyond a suite of decontextualized and impoverished images, a denial that there exists any value apart from the "literary"? By a process some might call "evaporation" but which I would say is more like metastasis, by which sf has become inseparable from the mainstream?

The age of conquerors (not a term of praise) and inconsequential scribblers (not necessarily a term of disparagement), with nothing in between? Of fracturing over both arcane non-differences and genuine life-and-death matters, with little distinction made between the two? Of internationalism, in both its cooperative and imperialist forms? Of diversification, both for good ("inclusivity") and for ill (assimilation, "diversification" in the sense of a stock portfolio or a multinational corporation)?

Science fiction, "characters", and individualism

There's a pair of things that people say frequently. Often the same people, often in the same breath. And it's not so much that the two assertions are incompatible — indeed, they're both true, after a fashion — as that I wish the strangeness of their juxtaposition would make people think harder about what the two mean, to what extent they're true, and in what ways they might be incomplete. The two statements are:

1. Traditional American sf is irresponsibly and chauvinistically beholden to individualist ideology, and
2. Up until [year/decade/movement/writer/editor/magazine x], sf was no good at creating believable, complex characters; after the revolution in character portrayal brought about by x, the field became mature and worth reading.

Obviously there's a sense in which the two are easily compatible: the individualist (almost always white male) "hero" is neither believable nor complex. QED. But there is another sense, one which I for one feel much more deeply, in which they are antithetical. After all what is a "character" — or rather, what is a focus on the literary illusion that we call "character" — other than a demand for the sheerest individualism? I would go so far as to argue that "character" in fiction, as we currently understand it, emerged a handful of centuries back as one of the primary tools in the creation, even the enforcement of that poisonous individualism so central to western, modern, capitalist ideology. In this sense the move to character in sf is surely a move towards, not away from, individualism.

(This may be one reason why the British "New Wave," with its focus on the "exploration of inner space," is so eternally iffy to me.)

White, macho heroics are a central support in the structure that is the science fiction of the American magazine tradition, it's true. There's a great deal of profound ugliness there, a great deal of still-unreckoned culpability, and I wouldn't dream of denying it. But nothing is all one thing. And for a long time — since long before I could make even this kind of a beginning at articulating it — this sf tradition has been my refuge from the constant pounding of this ideological drum. Escapism perhaps, but sf has been one of the few areas of the culture in which I could find some respite, and maybe even the beginnings of an alternative.

What we for convenience call "characters" in the work of this tradition are usually nothing of the sort. To refer to some of my usual touchstones once more: think of the van Vogtian (supposed) "superman", who far from the juvenile power fantasy he is usually made out to be is much more the literal presence in the work of the reader's bewilderment upon encountering the work; or of what Joseph F. Patrouch referred to, pejoratively, as Isaac Asimov's "labels for different parts of the story machine"; or of the figures in Clare Winger Harris's stories, who exist for no purpose other than to spout glorious science-like nonsense and to partake in ritualized, curiously impersonal melodrama; or of the "characters" in Rendezvous with Rama, who simply show up when they are necessary and vanish when they are not. And almost at the precise beginning of this particular tradition stands (or floats) the entirely hypothetical observer to the etherless negative whirlpool in the first chapter/installment of Ralph 124C41+, who may not be real but certainly carries a pipe.

(This is to say nothing of the long and wonderful tradition, whose most noted practitioner is likely Stanisław Lem, of sf-without-characters, which apart from certain rigid formulas — the "list story," for example — has died down considerably in recent years but which continues, intermittently, in freer form to this day, in multiple media.)

These are not characters, in the sense that word typically carries. These are not concatenations of words and sentences and recurring patterns seeking to convince us that there exists somewhere beyond them some kind of a coherent, separate self — and to convince us thereby that this is what we are. Instead they are figures that exist in order to allow the work to unfold. They are "people" only in the sense that thinking minds must intrude in order for an unfolding to be an event;* in a sense they remind me of the Greek tragedy, at least as it is explicated for a contemporary anglophone audience by people like Gabriel Josipovici, who takes great pains to remind us that the mimesis Aristotle famously ascribed to tragedy is "not the imitation of human beings, it is the imitation of an action which involves human beings."

*Or vice versa? I'm uncertain of this phrasing.

I do not argue that all this is how these works have by and large been read. Obviously they have not, or if they have it has had little influence; one has only to look at the sleazily individualist and bigoted behavior of the larger chunk of the sf readership (and writership) for proof. Nor were all of these works "intended" this way. But they are legible in this way, with remarkable consistency; it is how I have read them, and how I have internalized them. And I have to think that it is at least in part some similar reading that drew to the field the very people who are so often claimed as both the innovators of "character" in sf and the revolutionaries who led the field away from individualism. People like Joanna Russ (whose We Who Are About To... is one of those [movement X] works that creates spectacularly successful characters, but which does so in order to stress that they are untenable), Octavia E. Butler (whose Kindred is "about" an individual primarily in the sense that the whole human context impinges on each of us, and whose Patternmaster revolves around "characters" just as masked, just as extrapersonal as any figure in Greek tragedy), and even Samuel R. Delany, who has sought more successfully than most to merge the better aspects of the bourgeois novel of character with the social- and object-focused aspects of sf. I have to think that it is in part some similar reading that made them, like me, think sf had created a new kind of space.

I am not headed toward any grand conclusion here. I simply would ask people to think about the assumptions that underlie the received opinions that get bandied about; to wonder if all the "literary character-based" sf we're bombarded with today is really an advance; to perhaps try to be open to alternate readings, and through these alternate readings to be open to different kinds of writing and what they might be doing.

In order to respond to Jonathan McCalmont

[Once, twice, three times an update]

Jonathan McCalmont's recent quartet of posts on short science fiction — first Short Fiction and the Feels and then the series on the first month of both Uncanny and Terraform — have been getting a lot of attention. In some ways I'm glad about this: I think he touches on many important points, and just in general I'm glad someone is taking a contentious look at the field as a whole. It's sorely needed. But in other ways I find the attention, and the lavish praise from some quarters (including many people I deeply respect), bewildering and frankly disturbing. Not because I disagree that the current state of the short science fiction field is unhealthy, but because McCalmont's arguments rest on many premises, and reach many conclusions, that I find profoundly compromised and often just plain wrong — sometimes obviously, sometimes less so. These problems are so tangled, so deeply intertwined even with the good points he makes, that to fully elucidate them would require almost a line-by-line close reading of all four posts, but to everyone's relief — not least my own — I don't have nearly the energy for that. So here instead is a sampling of some of the issues that, for me at least, would need to be dealt with before I would feel able to engage with any of the points he makes that I do find valuable.

In case this post comes to the attention of people other than my handful of regular readers (who know this already), I want to make one thing extremely clear up front: in saying all of this, I am not defending the short science fiction field as it stands; any presentation of this post as a vindication of the field against McCalmont's "attacks" would be a misuse of it. I'm at least as grumpy about the field as McCalmont is, and in some respects my take on it overlaps with his. But this does not mean I can accept his argument, either.

(In what follows I will be treating all four of McCalmont's posts as, essentially, one continuous work, and will jump around in them assuming an audience that has read them all. I will also be mainly free-associating, so my apologies for any formlessness.)

• There being more work out there than anyone could ever read, more than could ever be effectively filtered and discussed, is hardly a problem unique to sf. It is in fact the situation of all literatures in this age of enormous populations and near-universal literacy, and no literature has really come to terms with it yet. This does not mean that there should not be discussions of the specific form the problem takes in the sf field, but it does mean that any discussion of it as a problem specific to sf, supposedly arising from causes intrinsic to the field and the people in it, is essentially a smear, not a discussion. (That said, let me be the first to point out that I have been guilty of similar smears, and may be again in the future. We're none of us perfect.)

• I haven't read "We Are the Cloud" (and am unlikely to), but McCalmont's take on the problems with its "worldbuilding" just makes no sense — bears no relation to reality as I know it — as written. He complains that this "world’s economics are somewhat confusing as some characters wind up needing to hustle and sell off too much of their brain in order to stay alive despite the state evidently paying through the nose for their upkeep." Again I haven't read it and as such I am only responding to McCalmont's description and not the story itself, but if this is what the story presents it is not, as McCalmont asserts, a "lack of precision" but on the contrary a very precise portrayal of what life is like for the very poor and those otherwise at the margins (unassimilated gay and queer people, for example). That many will have to struggle to stay alive while the state pays through the nose for their upkeep is practically the definition of a capitalist welfare state!
  
  Meanwhile, his assertion that New York as a "decaying hell hole" is an "outdated future" out of 80s cyberpunk, "in which the privatisation of public space and the gentrification of down-at-heel neighbourhoods never happened," suggests that McCalmont thinks gentrification (and privatization) are ubiquitous, homogeneous across that ubiquity, and above all permanent. If he believes that, there are some crumbling, empty, very recently high-end condos that I pass by every day of my life that I'd like to sell him.
  
  And finally the mix of "mid-21st century" technology and a "clutter of games consoles and televisions" from the early 1990s that he objects to seems pretty closely equivalent to, say, the fact that I'm quoting him from my brand-new e-reader while writing on an almost twenty-year-old laptop and sitting next to a pile of records that were pressed before I was born, or that people of the generation after mine seem to be returning to tape cassettes of all things, or that I frequently see teenagers on tumblr obsessing over Deep Space Nine and The X-Files. This is, simply, how people live. "The future," when it comes and thus is the future no longer, does not replace (what is right now) "the present" and "the past," it stacks another layer on them. Which is, in fact, something (some) sf writers have long understood.

• Indeed in general McCalmont's notion of the future seems to be bizarrely unitary — once something has happened, something contradictory to it can never happen. In addition to the point above about gentrification, consider for example his insistence that humanity has had a "complete loss of interest in space exploration" in the light of the current push to Mars (bracketing the fact that to talk about "humanity" rather than the state and capital as being the relevant parties in this "interest" is and always has been mystification). This attitude reminds me of Lester Del Rey, who in his intermittently informative (often against his intentions) 1979 history of sf crankily insists that any portrayal of the future needs to behave as though feminism has by then either "won" or "lost," because the "issue" will surely be "resolved, one way or the other" soon — as though it were not an ongoing struggle but a singular incident. If I were better read in Marxism I would probably say something about the dialectic here.

• Very closely related: McCalmont's insistence that sf once dealt with "the actual future" in order to help people deal with the accelerated rate of technological and social changes is a bit of bizarre philistinism of ancient vintage in the field; the vaguely embarrassed awareness, which used typically to accompany it, that this claim was mainly propaganda for proselytizing efforts (sf is useful! honestly! you can use it in the classroom!) seems to be absent here. Such a claim requires one to take seriously Alvin Toffler's "future shock" (which I at least do not, though I hasten to confess that I haven't read the book of that title). It requires one to discard any sf story that did not accurately predict the future as retroactively irrelevant, to discard any sf story that did accurately predict the future (not that any ever did) as also irrelevant (it's already served its purpose), and to discard those works that were manifestly uninterested in actual prediction of any potentially imminent future (i.e., the vast bulk of what's actually been written as sf). It requires one to believe that "the future" is a thing that actually exists rather than a fictional construct, and much, much more. (Let's leave aside for the moment that, as we continue to see to this day, traditional sf fans are frequently among those worst prepared for the changes that actually occur, especially but not by any means only the social ones. If this really is what sf has been for, it has been a comprehensive failure.)

• I find the hurry-hurry to praise — essentially to advertise for — Terraform disturbing in itself. While I'm no fan of Uncanny (and I think he's sometimes very incisive on the reasons why it's not likely ever to be any good), the worst you can say for it, in terms of McCalmont's objections at least, is that it's just people being inane — as people will. But meanwhile he is pleased that Terraform "owes absolutely none of its funding or visibility to the hierarchies of genre culture leaving it relatively free to carve out a different kind of niche." And I suppose it's true that Murdoch-funded hip-for-the-kids plausibly-deniable propaganda in support of the worldwide technofascist-in-leftist-clothing future so ardently hoped for by elites is a different kind of niche. Yay?
  
  UPDATE: I'm not sure that I made my point explicit enough here. It is this: that McCalmont (often entertainingly, often perceptively) lays into the goofy social interactions of the online sf world, as exemplified by Uncanny, while just as emphatically praising the actually much more dangerous top-down capitalist intervention that is Terraform. Intense criticism of people being people versus praise for capitalists being capitalists. I'm not defending the former — and yes, admittedly, by phrasing it this way I'm downplaying its worst aspects, which are real and bad beyond the fiction itself — but this is, to put it mildly, a strange set of priorities.

• Related to this, Terraform's "rush" to turn news stories into fiction "before the news cycle end[s]" is not only a disturbing phenomenon in itself — but one which pleases McCalmont immensely — it is also obviously at odds with his insistence that the magazine's stories are about "the actual future" (and with his — on-point — mockery of "the PR bubble surrounding new [fiction] releases," as though the quote unquote "news cycle" were anything other than a PR bubble).

• He writes that "The editors of Terraform have the courage to set a creative agenda whereas the editors of Uncanny" do not; I have no argument with the second part but given that McCalmont himself later discusses (as if it were a good thing!) the fact that Terraform's "content" is page-view based it's hard to understand how he can believe the first part, or what he even means by it.

• Gratifying as it may be to see McCalmont making fun of online sf culture's outsized horror when Terraform's introductory article behaved as though they didn't exist, at the same time I wish he would display some awareness that Vice's entire modus operandi is to be irresponsibly ignorant of the important details of every single thing it covers (or, rather, to manufacture such ignorance among its readers).

• Then, too, the person he quotes to discuss this mentions Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show as one of the important online sf magazines — and in that culture it is as if that magazine does not exist. He does not seem to notice that this muddies his points.

• Though I have no doubt that Uncanny's non-fiction is and will be by and large trivial, he literally criticizes it on the specific grounds that it is not in the form of Buzzfeed-style listicles. I don't feel that I need to explain why this is unacceptable to me. And really this is just one expression of what seems to be his general attitude that the most important question, for the fiction and non-fiction alike, is whether a large number of people read the stuff (or, really, if people click through), rather than whether the stuff is any good. What people read in large numbers seems to be ipso facto good in his argument, which even aside from anything else is disturbing given, again, the issue of money and propaganda.

• But speaking of, McCalmont's assertion that "After more than ten years in the field, I have never once seen anyone discuss either a piece of genre poetry or an article that appeared in an online fiction magazine" is strange, seeing as oh my god of course he has. Leaving aside the poetry as not particularly in my sphere, I've even discussed sf magazine articles with him myself! More than once! In public! While other people were talking about them too! Not to mention that I'm not sure what he thinks the enormous discussion around Renay's article about writers responding to criticism — which he talks about in a post written in the midst of the four I'm examining now — was if not a discussion of an article in an online magazine.
  
  I mean obviously I agree that the critical discourse in this field leaves much to be desired, but these weirdly untrue claims are not helping anything.

• McCalmont does not understand gay life at all and frankly I wish he'd stop acting like he does. This is clearest in the objection I raised with regard to his discussion of "We Are the Cloud" and its version of the future (he obviously has no idea how poor and/or unassimilated gay people live — I imagine he'd be utterly perplexed by most of my friends, for example), but it is pervasive, far beyond that point alone; every time he discusses any story with gay characters it all just rings false (which is not to say that any of the specific stories are necessarily any better). And this is, after all, the man whose post on Blue Is the Warmest Color referred more than once to "the contours of LGBT life," as though that movie were about people who "are LGBT," whatever that would mean, rather than specifically about lesbians — a word he is bizarrely reluctant to use in that post.

• Related to this but not limited to it, his implication that it is somehow invalid to dismiss Truesdale-style criticism on the grounds that it is founded on a suite of violent bigotries is, frankly, obscene; and given his position in this world's hierarchy of status-groups he has no legitimate standing whatsoever to make such an implication.

• Referring to Ryan Holmes' viciously homophobic review of "We Are the Cloud" in Tangent (incidentally, McCalmont makes no mention of the mini-tempest this review sparked and in which he participated as it happened, pretending instead that he alone decided to pay attention to the story in response only to the review itself; he says some things in this section that to my reading border on lies), McCalmont writes, "Some might say that Holmes' reaction makes him a bigot who should shut his stupid mouth but I would argue that all reactions to art are legitimate as long as they are genuine." I will refrain from expressing fully how this makes me feel. But on a very basic level, if Holmes' reaction had actually been "genuine", it would have read closer to "Enforcing the oppression of gay and queer people results in material benefits for me, so I am going to engage in some of that now" than what it actually said.

• (I'm going to get extremely angry here, but maybe my putting it in parentheses will soften the blow a little. A bit earlier than what I just quoted, McCalmont had written that "It is quite obvious that reading about teenaged boys having sex made Holmes feel uncomfortable (or possibly confused)". The parenthetical, of course, invokes that favorite bit of dogma — and favorite piece of yuk-yuk "humor" — among straight liberals, namely that homophobes are really "just in the closet." They never seem to get tired of this disgusting bit of victim-blaming, most likely because it takes them off the hook: no, it's not straight people who perpetuate homophobia, it's those stupid cowardly gays! stop oppressing yourself!, not to mention that it also allows them to engage in homophobia — it is, after all, nothing more or less than making fun of people by calling them gay — while thinking of themselves as "allies" ("No, you don't get it, I only called him gay because I knew it would bother him!"). I would like to take this opportunity to remind all you straight assholes that in fact it was you, not us, who invented the closet; that we who are "out" of it spend our entire lives being violently pushed back into it, by you, and having to claw our way back out of it again, over, and over, and over, and that it is fucking exhausting; that what we do, how we act, while we're in it is survival and none of your fucking business; and that if some of us do behave oppressively toward others of us because of the closet, that is, one, an intra-gay issue to be dealt with by us on our terms and again none of your fucking business, and two, your fault for inventing the goddamn closet in the first place.)

• Further, McCalmont's condescending amusement at white people who, unlike him, have decided that sometimes it's best to shut our mouths and not always jump in with My Authoritative Opinion On That is not only misguided but just extremely tiresome as well. Timidity can be obnoxious, yes, and Uncanny has more than its share of it; but I think McCalmont often interprets as timidity what is actually letting go of unearned, harmful mastery.

• In general the fact that oppression is something real and concrete that actual human beings have to deal with every moment of their lives, and not just an abstract "issue" for people unaffected by it to have fun opinions about, is something that McCalmont seems utterly unable to grasp.

• Moving on.

• The praise for Terraform's "hard word limit" as if it were somehow unprecedented and radical is bizarre, considering that this field's inability to publish any significant quantity — let alone quality — of fiction in the lengths between short-short and the bloated novel series is at crisis levels.

• While I understand where he's coming from with it (and agree to a large extent with his take on where the field is with this), just because the current sf field has created an artificial dichotomy between "feels" and "ideas" doesn't mean we have to go along with it!

• Not to mention that I wish that just once the people who talk about sf as "the" (or even "a") "literature of ideas" would ask themselves: what is an idea? what do I mean by that word?, or would at least remember, as Delany points out in his third "Letter to Science Fiction Studies," that the phrase itself (which, admittedly, McCalmont does not use here, but on which he seems to me obviously to be drawing) comes not from science fiction but from Balzac and therefore describes something sf has in common with other literatures, not something that distinguishes it from them.

• And on this note, though I do not think that the gendered associations with the (utterly false) emotion/intellect dichotomy in themselves invalidate this aspect of McCalmont's argument, they nevertheless have at least to be addressed; and to be perfectly honest it seems quite apparent to me that they do play a major role in McCalmont's argument as it stands.
  
  UPDATE: I'm increasingly unhappy with how I phrased this. What I mean here is that McCalmont bases his argument almost entirely on the untenable, demonstrably and comprehensively false, ineradicably misogynist (that is, so wrapped up with misogyny that it cannot be untangled from it even in putatively non-misogynist contexts) "emotion/intellect" dichotomy. To this extent his argument is both weak in rhetorical terms — i.e., easily dismissed by anyone who knows the problems with this dichotomy — and essentially nonsense in substance. This is a shame, however, because despite this incalculably huge flaw there is a genuine observation of a real problem in the field at the heart of his argument, one he muddies by behaving as though the "feels/ideas" dichotomy he observes is real, rather than an example of the field's conforming to reactionary ideology even when it thinks it's breaking from it. By doing so he not only undermines his argument in its own terms, he also makes it easier for people already unsympathetic to it to dismiss it entire, including the aspects of it that are important. This is one reason why I think — as I obliquely suggest way down there at the bottom of this post after the bullet points stop — that a better lens through which to look at what McCalmont's seeing is the sf field's ever-present but exponentially increasing self-alignment with "mainstream," "realist," "literary" fiction. But that would be a matter for that other, as yet unwritten, post.

• One of the metaphors that guides the three posts on the new magazines is most clearly stated when he writes:

  At a textual level, Terraform publishes stories that are more urgent but feel less polished... Uncanny is a conventional genre magazine filled with carefully constructed artefacts that have been tweaked and massaged to be everything they can possibly be. Compared to the manicured lawns and exquisite tea services of Uncanny, Terraform feels a bit like a frontier town; wild and woolly but still not quite finished. [ellipses original]

  Later in the same paragraph he even more explicitly, if now somewhat indirectly, compares Terraform to a colony. And though I think the metaphor is both surprisingly accurate and extremely damning as far as these examples go, I think it is damning to both, where McCalmont seems to think he is speaking highly of Terraform — meaning I suppose that he prefers the violent front guard of colonialism to the comfortable home life that violence provides. (And again, need I mention the gendered implications of this as well?)
  
  I find myself wondering: is nothing imaginable in this, whoops, "literature of ideas" outside of one end or the other of empire? (Note that neither he nor I am here referring to the "content" of the stories — by all means write sf stories about colonialism! — rather to their behavior and worldview, and that of the venues in which they appear.)

• Meanwhile, having read a few of the stories Terraform has published, I fail to see the "urgency" he refers to.

• McCalmont laments that "names seem to carry a lot more weight in genre culture than either genre or choice of subject matter," going on to say that people don't so much "aspire to writing about time-travel or zombie sex-play" as to appearing "in a magazine that publishes famous authors like Neil Gaiman and buzzy authors like Sofia Samatar." Certainly "genre culture" is driven far too much by celebrity (though unlike Gaiman, Samatar, who more than just about anyone else I can think in recent memory of has gained her buzz specifically through intense public discussion of her work itself,* seems an odd example). I had much the same reaction when Uncanny first announced its list of who it had early commitments from: "Oh, them again?" (On the other hand it is disingenuous to say the least to ignore the fact that Terraform's launching with Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling was just as pointed — and in a much more dangerous direction, at that.)
  
  *And who has people from far outside of sf reading her stories, even when published in sf spaces. It never would have occurred to me that I would ever see Kate Zambreno talking about a story in Lightspeed, but it happened.
  
  And an interesting argument could be made, too, that such attention to names is historically inappropriate in sf (where the author, perhaps, died younger than in other fields?); but that argument is not made here and anyway the rest of this is just sheer nonsense. Every single sf work, from the most bloated series to the tiniest of flash fictions, is hyped according to its microscopically detailed sub-sub-sub-genre ("swashbuckling m/m weird portal mythic steampunk!") and its subject matter ("it has talking cats!"). And perhaps no, individual writers do not "aspire" to stay forever within one specific sub-sub-sub-genre and to write only about talking cats, but I have to wonder why anyone would think they should.
  
  UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more, as William Henry Morris put in comments, "the dig at Samatar really bothers me." And as I responded down there: "I haven't read 'Selkie Stories' and have no comment about McCalmont's, uh, comments on it (beyond what is obvious from the other things I said in the post), but she just SO obviously does not fit the profile he's complaining about that it seems a clear case of something else about her bothers him and he won't admit it, maybe even to himself - and so he shoves her into his grand narrative wherever he thinks he can make her fit." If you've read the post to this point, you probably have a good idea as to some of what I suspect this something else might be.

• Everything in McCalmont's view — and this has bothered me in his critical writing for a long time, not just in these pieces — seems to come down to a question of "authors' rights" versus "readers' rights," McCalmont siding with the latter. All kinds of objections could (and should) be raised against this framing — is it really zero sum? what are "rights" and where do they come from? isn't this just part of capitalist individualist ideology? do we really want a world where readers are entitled to writers' labor? don't enough readers feel this way already? shouldn't critics be opposing this kind of reduction of art to just another free market? etc. etc. And once more, for all his insistence that what he wants is a focus on the work rather than social hierarchies, the work itself vanishes underneath attention to social hierarchies.

• And one of the "readers' rights" he pushes for hardest in this piece is the right to know what to expect before you even begin reading. "Genre culture routinely lionises work that 'breaks down genre boundaries' without ever bothering to understand why genre boundaries existed in the first place," he writes, and so far he gets no argument from me, except of course for my objections to the word and concept, "genre," in the first place. But he continues: "Genre boundaries were not for writers but for readers; they were a way of telling people what to expect when they picked up a book or magazine." And here, of course, is my objection to "genre." Because he's right: this is what genre — as opposed to the concepts I prefer, those of fields and traditions — is for. It is for making sure that art never surprises you, never catches you off guard; it is for making sure it is always safe, will always leave you unchanged. And in the midst of a series of posts in which McCalmont presents himself as opposed to the spoon-feeding safety of sf culture in favor of the supposed rough-n-tumble macho-colonialist well-financed rebellious on-brand 'tude of Terraform, it is bizarre to find him suddenly upset that with Uncanny he doesn't know what to expect (hardly true; the magazine almost couldn't be more predictable, as he himself argues), and pleased that with Terraform — and here he is right in fact even if his perspective on that fact puzzles and disturbs me — "I know exactly what to expect the next time I stop by their website."

Etc., etc. There is more, much more, that could be said, but I have to stop somewhere. Then too there are more fine-grain problems (as when he compares the story about Netflix to the one about Uber and bizarrely insists that the latter "names names" where the former doesn't — apparently because Netflix isn't his personal least favorite corporation, or something), but again: I'm not about to do a line-by-line close reading.

But now, perhaps, with all of this out of the way, one might be able to respond to the provocative aspects of McCalmont's argument. Ever since he first posted "Short Fiction and the Feels" I've had the idea of writing a response to it, to be called "Science Fiction and the Reals," which may indicate some of the tack I'd planned to take with it. I never got to it because the prospect of all of the "though I don't agree with..." "though I object to..." and so forth that I'd have to go through exhausted me. I still don't know if I'll get around to writing it, but at least now it would begin to be possible.

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.