Sheila's LiveJournal

I just turned the last page of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, "The Lacuna." I wish it were science fiction and I could recommend it for a Nebula! Easily her best fiction so far, this one is a wonderfully rich story of a likable young man with an American father and Mexican mother who is mostly raised in Mexico, with a cast of characters that includes Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. The prose is lyrical and heartbreaking in turn, the story itself deeply moving but also funny at times. The story turns dark in the J. Edgar Hoover years, surely not this country’s finest hours. I didn’t see the ending coming, but it was fitting; nothing in the book is a throw-away – it all works out in a very satisfying way.

I first encountered Kingsolver’s work when her early novel, "The Bean Trees," landed on the remainder table of the local bookstore. (How’s that for encouragement for those of us whose early work goes thudding into oblivion?) I noticed the blurb from Tony Hillerman and decided to give it a try. From then on I was hooked on Kingsolver. I’ve read almost everything she’s written since, fiction and non-fiction, including her account of the year the family spent living off the land, raising their own food ("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle").

Try this one. I heartily recommended it.

Since my all-too-brief visit to Africa, I’ve been reading accounts of life on that fascinating continent from a variety of sources and countries. Some were accounts written by colonials, some by genocide survivors, and some, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS, were accounts of the process of healing. THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND is an absorbing account of how one teenage boy in Malawi – a high school drop-out (his family couldn’t afford the fees) – taught himself enough science out of library books to build a primitive-looking windmill to supply his family’s small house with electric light.

You can probably imagine, it wasn’t an easy task. Once he got the idea that he could harness the power of the wind that his village had in abundance, William Kamkwamba had to scavenge and re-use other people’s scraps and discards – everything from beer caps to bicycle wheels – to cobble together his first windmill. The small amount of power it produced at first lit only small bulbs recycled from abandoned automobiles, but its effect was magical. Trial and error brought sturdier, more powerful structures, and the family finally didn’t have to choose between choking on kerosene fumes or going to bed when the sun went down. Along the way, William and his family had to deal with devastating famine when the crops failed, a corrupt central government, disease and death. His greatest dream was to go to school, but the family had no money to pay for secondary education.

The story is an inspiration in itself, but it also brings up the point that perhaps we are wrong to think that the way to help Africa solve her problems is by massive financial aid that all too often gets siphoned off by government agents and never reaches the people it was meant to help. The large, sexy projects Western engineers favor are not as useful to people in the villages as the smaller, more homely ones. Windmills for making electricity – compound by compound – or pumping water out of wells, and mosquito nets for every bed, go a long way to making a difference in people’s lives, and they have an immediate effect.

The story is worth reading, told in William’s own words with help from a western journalist with a deep love of Africa. I heartily recommend it.

[Discussion over on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/sheila.finch?ref=profile]

Browsing in the bookstore for something to read, I picked up THREE CUPS OF TEA by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. I'd heard people talking about it, but thought it was going to be another of those lesser stories about Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan published after KITERUNNER became popular. I was mistaken.

In a kind of “as told to” fashion, this is the story of a climber who failed to make it to the top of his goal, K2 in the Himalayas, but by doing so found another more powerful goal for his life – building schools for girls in forgotten villages in the poorest parts of Pakistan, and later, Afghanistan.

But it's more than a tale of bringing schools to the world's poorest citizens. It's also about the fact that the only sure way to counteract terrorism and bring peace to the world is through education. Mortenson's insights into the how and why of the madrassas' teaching of radical Islam scared me – as it should scare all of us. Unfortunately we've spent the last eight years fueling the fires of hatred against us. This well written, absorbing book shows us a glimmer of hope of what can be accomplished by ordinary people meeting and helping other ordinary people, sowing peace country by country.

Highly recommended reading!

A new entry I wrote for the SFWA Nebula site has been posted. I did some thinking about the boundaries of genre, and how some things published outside our genre are truly science fictional:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/i_know_it_when_i_read_it/

At the Eaton Conference recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. The conference had taken as its theme science fiction about the moon, and Bradbury was an honored guest. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work.   

I wasn't disappointed. Bradbury's prose sings – it really is best when read aloud. Being introduced to Bradbury's work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago, I had fallen in love with the voice of these stories, saturating myself in his music. I realized, as I re-read of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably never existed even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in their poetry. I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

    It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

    And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when all the apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I re-read the book, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless tunes of simple words.

And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas. I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. The date I'd inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I'd hated “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Thomas and the poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept off my feet by the sheer emotional torrent of words, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

    ...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold  money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. The thing is, these aren't the places Bradbury and Thomas lived either; they're myths about those places, more real than bricks and stones. That to my mind is good writing; that's Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with the images they contain but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn't teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

I have to say I'm delighted that The Yiddish Policemen's Union won a Nebula. If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor.

(And if you want more encouragement, you could look up my review in a previous blog: "What Makes a Story Science Fiction.")

Dave Truesdale has released reviews back to his reviewers because the online version of Tangent is taking an unconscionably long time to be born (or re-born). Since there are probably many fans of cyberpunk here, I thought I'd post it. (Please, don't throw stones at the poor reviewer if she didn't like your favorites!)


REWIRED: THE POST-CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY,
 Eds. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel,
Tachyon Publications, October 2007.
420 pp + xvii pp introduction.
ISBN 978-1-892391-53-7
www.tachyonpublications.com

Reviewed by Sheila Finch


Table of Contents:
Bruce Sterling, “Bicycle Repairman”
Gwyneth Jones, “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland”
Jonathan Lethem, “How We Got In Town And Out Again”
Greg Egan, “Yeyuka”
Pat Cadigan, “The Final Remake of 'The Return of Little Latin Larry'”
William Gibson, “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City”
David Marusek, “The Wedding Album”
Walter Jon Williams, “Daddy's World”
Michael Swanwick, “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”
Charles Stross, “Lobsters”
Paul DiFilippo, “What's Up Tiger Lily?”
Christopher Rowe, “The Voluntary State”
Elizabeth Bear, “Two Dreams on Trains”
Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Calorie Man”
Mary Rosenblum, “Search Engine”
Cory Doctorow, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”


Cyberpunk a quarter century later: What's changed? The editors of this anthology make the claim that cyberpunk hasn't given up its core concerns of transformative technologies, global outlook, subversive attitude and playfully irreverent style, but has added plot and character development – characters who may be skeptical but are not cynical. Cyberpunk lives on the edge of civilization as we know it, the world after Vernor Vinge's singularity. Science Fiction doesn't set out to make prophecies about the future, only to depict possibilities that make us think deeply, and the possibilities cyberpunk describes are disturbing indeed. At its inception, some of the writers of this new child of  SF gleefully announced the death of the parent and were roundly condemned for hubris. What the best stories in this collection (all previously published between 1996 and 2006 in magazines such as F&SF, Analog and Asimov's and original anthologies) show is that cyberpunk has grown past its rebel stage and is now not only capable of dazzling us with surfaces but also of speaking of the human condition – a concern that was often missing in the beginning.

Two of the best stories in the collection are “The Calorie Man,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Greg Egan's “Yeyuka.” Both depict worlds in which the foundations we depend on in daily life – in the first, energy, in the second, medicine – have altered radically. Bacigalupi has taken the apparently gleaming promise of bio-energy to a darker result: the tyranny of agri-business in a world still experiencing famine and suffering. Egan maps a world in which the affluent no longer have much to fear from disease, thanks to the “HealthGuard” ring which hunts down viral infections in the wearer's blood and manufactures drugs to extinguish them, while the Third World deals with yet another devastating plague . What distinguishes these stories is their focus on character – neither Lalji, an antique dealer in “The Calorie Man,” nor Martin, a cancer surgeon in “Yeyuka,” is a typical cyberpunk character. In these stories, technology is background, its effects on human behavior foremost. Both characters are fully formed with histories, families, failings and desires; both have to make uncomfortable decisions as a result of their clashes with the world they live in. Egan and Bacigalupi have provided thought-provoking and satisfying stories.

David Marusek (“The Wedding Album”) and Walter Jon Williams (“Daddy's World”) take a typical cyberpunk meme, simulated people, but go beyond that to ask the prime science fictional question “What makes us human?” Both stories take us from gentle humor to stark, almost tragic endings, and neither is easy to forget. Charles Stross (”Lobsters”) asks us to consider the right of any creature, even crustaceans (sentient in this case), not to be used for human purposes. The story begins as an account of exuberant entrepreneurship in this brave new world, and ends as a meditation on fathering children.

 Bruce Sterling's “Bicycle Repairman,” is on the surface a more typical cyberpunk story, but it too displays a greater focus on character – Lyle, the title character has a mother and even goes home to have dinner with her. It's a charming little story, and makes no pretense of having deeper implications. A couple of the stories raised the question for me of the boundary between cyberpunk fiction and traditional fantasy. Gwyneth Jones's “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” and Michael Swanwick's “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” make very little of the scientific underpinnings of their cyberworlds, or the significance of their themes; indeed, that's not important to the stories which could both be described as fantastic romps.

Least satisfying, surprisingly, were two stories by prominent cyberpunk writers, William Gibson and Cory Doctorow.  Gibson's “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City” is a series of descriptions suggesting human habitation but strangely empty of it, and left me asking “so what?” In his defense, I admit that Gibson has said his aim is not to explain the moment, but to make the moment accessible, and in that he is successful.  Doctorow's “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” is an unabashed hacker wet dream with all the glitzy computer technology and brassy style that might have been published twenty-five years ago.

Rewired includes excerpts from private correspondence between Bruce Stirling and John Kessel. All things considered, I'm inclined to agree with the editors that cyberpunk has come of age.

Last Sunday, I went to see Atonement;  I'd previously read the book and didn't particularly want to see the movie but my cousin persuaded me into going right after our regular Sunday night dinner out. I'll admit right up front that I didn't care for either the book or the movie. I've read just about everything Ian McEwan has written and I'm definitely a fan (Saturday is one of my favorites), but his latest novel disturbed me – not because of the story but because of the way it was told.

So I've been musing over what causes me to cry “Dirty Trick!” about a book or a movie. Obviously I don't mean a surprise ending if it's properly prepared for. I actually love to be misled by the author and not see the ending coming, especially if I find myself slapping my head and thinking, “I ought to have seen that!” because all the clues were there but I failed to spot them. The best thrillers and detective stories are like that. Sometimes the story is told chaotically or incongruously because that's the character's experience. And sometimes when the author plays a very risky game of telling the reader the ending in advance, and still manages to shock or surprise, well that's just wonderful. Take for example, Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her, which explains how the horrifying murder of the lead character's wife which ends With No One As Witness came to be. In this “prequel” we know the ending without a shadow of doubt, but the story is engrossing anyway. Ruth Rendell has done this sort of thing a time or two also.

And I don't mean varying views of what actually happens, according to the characters. (Rashomon, anyone?) Or events told out of chronological order, as long as that contributes to the reader's pleasure in the story (as in the movie Memento) and isn't done for its own sake or to confuse.  What I don't appreciate in a book is being in a character's head and not being allowed to know what the character knows. That's not fair. I don't buy into the excuse that if I'd known what the character knew there wouldn't be much of a story. Precisely!

Now to my objections to both the book and the movie versions of Atonement. I'll overlook the massive coincidences and/or character stupidities of the young man giving the child an unsealed personal letter to deliver – let alone the unbelievable fact that the letter “just happened to be” the truly unacceptable version which he meant to throw away – or the guest at a dinner party in his honor at an English country estate rushing out and committing rape during the distraction of looking for runaways. And I didn't see the need for the movie's several sequences of the child's view followed by “what really happened” (I think the viewer is smart enough to figure it out without a cheat sheet). What really annoys me in both book and movie is that we're sucked into accepting a sugar-coated ending only to learn it's a “gotcha!” But since the whole story is supposed to be the novel the child-as-adult writes when she grows up (her atonement), then we should've known it wasn't true. Or, we should've just been allowed to experience the novel version. I don't think the author can have it both ways. We're asked to see the story through the child's eyes, but at the same time we're expected to react to the story as if it's the novel she's writing.

Dirty trick, in my book!

[Ishould add that Roger Ebert, whose movie reviews I respect, doesn't agree with me.]

 Maybe this sounds like a rather dumb question.  Haven't numerous people already taken a crack at it, such as critics Darko Suvin and Leslie Fiedler? And writers from Hugo Gernsback to Isaac Asimov to Kim Stanley Robinson have tried to pin it down. Norman Spinrad seemed to throw his hands up in despair, claiming, “Science Fiction is anything published as Science Fiction.”

I've been thinking about this lately because I read two books that weren't published as science fiction yet seem to me to fit the bill. I have to admit that I'm usually not a big fan of the works produced by mainstream writers when they wander into our genre. Theodore Sturgeon said, “Ask the next question;” I find most mainstream incursions into science fiction fail to do that, adopting our tropes but failing to go much further.

But recently I read two novels that I think are worthy of high praise, if not Hugos and Nebulas: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union (still eligible!) And Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (unfortunately past its shelf date).

Chabon's work is obviously speculative from the very first chapter. We are introduced to a colony of Jewish refugees in Alaska, re-settled there after something unspecified but obviously dire happened to the state of Israel. It's sixty years later, we're told, and the colony is about to revert to Alaskan control. The main character is a hard-boiled detective type –  in the Raymond Chandler mode but klutzier – named Meyer Landsmann, and the case he is called upon to investigate leads him very far afield indeed. Yet Chabon doesn't lose sight of the way the characters' lives would be affected if the situation he describes were real. I won't spoil the story for those of you who want to read the book, but you'll find that it is by turns hilariously funny and thought-provoking, especially if you're interested in the big themes of good and evil. The presence of Yiddishisms in this arctic landscape alone makes the book a fun read, alternate history if not exactly what purists think of as science fiction.

I'd read Ishiguro's earlier work such as The Remains Of The Day. I think I'd vaguely heard that he'd strayed into our genre recently but when I picked this one up I'd forgotten that possibility. Consequently, I came to the novel with no preconceived ideas about how to read it. This is a first-person narrative from a character named “Kathy H.” (Nobody has last names in this book which at first annoyed me as a possible affectation on the author's part, but later added to the ominous tone that develops.) Kathy tell us that she is something called a “carer,” never defined but gradually coming into focus as the book progresses. Her time as a carer is about to run out, and there's something odd about that because she's still young and good at her job. At first we're treated to beautifully detailed vignettes about children growing up at a boarding school somewhere in the English countryside, juxtaposed with rather vague pictures of Kathy's work that we sense is somehow dark and possibly sinister. What prevented me from putting the book down in frustration was that it becomes increasingly clear that the reason Kathy spends no time agonizing over her situation is that she finds it absolutely normal. As the parameters of her world and her expected role in it emerge for the reader over the course of the book, the central story becomes horrifyingly clear. Yet while the reader is shuddering, Kathy takes her fate for granted. And that is the scariest part of the novel – and the most science fictional. The fact that what Kathy accepts as normal turns out to be the unthinkable is all the more compelling. Ursula Le Guin once described expository lumps in fiction this way: The captain of the starship turns to his men, in the middle of a huge battle, and says, “As you know, men, this starship runs on the X method.....” No such lumps in this wonderful science fiction novel!

So, what's the answer to the question we started with? Not just stories about the future, or even about future technology, obviously. It's the exploration – comic or tragic – of the way the lives of ordinary people would be changed, by technology or societal upheaval, from what we consider the norm that makes a story memorable. I want a book to ask the next question...and the next. It should go beyond sensational into meaningful.

But of course that's true about genre stories as well, isn't it?

I just submitted my first professional book review, something I'd never particularly yearned to do. I wouldn't even have considered it, except old friend Dave Truesdale asked me, in the interest of getting new blood into the reviewing process at Tangent Online. How hard could it be, really? Having been on the receiving end of both smarmy and snarky reviews, I thought perhaps I could breeze through the assignment if it was something I'd be reading anyway. So I said yes, reluctantly, but only if he sent me material that had something to do with language. And I sat back, secure in the knowledge that only a tiny handful of short stories a year would fit the bill.

Fat chance. The book Dave sent me – immediately – was Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology just published by Tachyon Publications..

My first reaction was panic. I hadn't read any cyberpunk since Mona Lisa Overdrive and I hadn't enjoyed Gibson's work in any case. I'm not a techie (Anyone who knows how inept I am with my own computer can vouch for this.) My second reaction was to reject the assignment indignantly as a breach of (unwritten) contract. Cyberpunk is definitely not linguistics.

But I've had one rule since starting to take my writing career seriously: Never say No. This has frequently landed me in very hot water, as you can probably guess, forcing me to do graduate level research into fields I knew absolutely nothing about to begin with, going out onto dangerous limbs to support various opinions I didn't actually hold, writing advice on subjects where I was a beginner myself. Say Yes and have the heart attack afterwards was my motto.

So I didn't send the book back. Instead I procrastinated for most of the first two weeks, glowering at the book as it lurked on my bedside table trying to lure me into reading it before falling asleep. I'm a reading junkie: I absolutely have to read before I sleep, even if I go to bed at 2 am. In order to avoid Rewired, I read – in no particular order – the latest book about Mother Teresa, a book about ravens and crows (research for the next novel, honestly), Out Of Africa by Karen Blixen (because I'd just visited her house in Nairobi) and another book about a lovable, free spirited Labrador retriever who gets into comical situations – followed by a book about dog training by that “dog whisperer” who's all the rage these days.

REWIRED continued to lurk. Finally I ran out of excuses and picked it up gingerly. It was hard going at first. (What can you expect when you try to read the likes of Sterling and Doctorow and Gibson right after absorbing the happy adventures of undisciplined dogs? Especially at 1.58 am.) I figured I'd be on safe ground if I read all the female authors' stories first, and there are four of them in the anthology. How difficult could it be to understand a female perspective on the future – even if it's post Vernor Vinge's singularity and is written in a language apparently designed to make the reader cross-eyed with confusion?

Aha! Dave's secret was out. One of the obsessions of cyberpunk, as the book's editors admit, is “cultivating a crammed prose style,” which translates as “jargon-laden, grammatically tortured, idiosyncratically spelled, and all-around mysterious to the non-techie.” Exactly the kind of stuff a self-proclaimed lover of alien languages should enjoy decoding. With that mystery solved, I settled down to read the stories. And, you know what? I found myself enjoying them, some a great deal, others less so, a couple not at all. But that's what would happen with a collection of stories about linguistics,  or anything else, for that matter. I learned something about my own fiction preferences in the process. It's not the subject matter, or the style, or even the genre that matters to me. It's the theme. I prefer serious work to glib or comic work, but more than that, I expect the author to have something important to say about the human condition. I want to meet characters who resemble real people, who show some depth, and who wrestle with real problems against interesting backgrounds – even when I don't totally understand the jeopardy because it's beyond my technical experience. I don't expect all stories to end well, or even to be optimistic about the future, but I don't want the author to stack all the odds against them in the first place so their only option is to give up in despair.

Those are my criteria for fiction. They're probably not everybody's. What do you judge a story by? I'd be interested to hear.

Which stories did I love and which did I hate? I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few days until my review's posted then zip over to find out: http://www.tangentonline.com 

Publisher's Weekly ran a review today of my new collection, The Guild Of  Xenolinguists (out next month). I can't afford a subscription, but my editor just sent me the review. I'm not kidding when I say I was stressing this one so badly I hesitated to open the email when I saw the subject line.

But PW gave it a very nice write-up so I can breathe easily again -- and resume the stressing over the sick dog and not the writing.

If you'd like to read it, here's the link:

http://reviews.publishersweekly.com/bd.aspx?isbn=19308464878&pub=pw