Conversation about 2312

If you've read Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, which has gotten probably more attention than any other book published in our genre last year, I'm confident you'll be interested to read Vandana Singh's post reporting on her own reading of the book. I reviewed 2312 myself, for Strange Horizons. I knew at the time I turned it in that my review was in no way comprehensive, particularly that there were thorny difficulties that I thought of as resulting from the main characters' extraordinary privilege. In my private conversations with Vandana since then (which in turn prompted me to reflect further), it struck me that I'd been presuming that the characters' assumptions of privilege had been meant to be read critically, with irony. Ironic readings, I was compelled to acknowledge, are explicitly generous readings in which the reader adds a layer of interpretation that may or may not be explicitly invited by the text and that in any case a multitude of readers will not automatically lavish on the text. I believed the choice of Swan for the main character, and the critical depiction of her thinking, attitudes, and behavior, itself elicited an ironic reading. (Probably because I myself am in the habit of serving up horribly flawed main characters I expect readers to read against.) Arguably, I simply found the text I wanted to find.

But Vandana's reading resonates powerfully for me beyond her focus on the novel's main characters precisely because the book's structure and style would have allowed the emergence of other voices and perspectives. I also agree with her statement

The baldly stated notion that that humans are “meant to inscribe ourselves into the universe” is not that different from the kind of ideology that justified the British plunder of India, or the French and Dutch mangling of Africa — manifest destiny on a solar system scale.

This notion of human's inscribing themselves into the universe is not a new idea (or assumption) for Robinson. Some of his characters in the Mars Trilogy, for examples, believe this fervently. I've come to wonder if Robinson himself believe it-- or whether, again, its an idea he's implicitly critiquing.

After reading Vandana's post, you'll also want to check out Niall Harrison's post here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/blog/. This conversation, I'm sure, will (and needs to) continue.

Some Stuff of Interest

Here are a few links you might find interesting:

--Allison Flood's Gender bias in books journalism remains acute, research shows reports on Vida's compilation of statistics for 2011:

It was the year when VS Naipaul infamously declared no woman writer to be his equal, so perhaps it's not surprising that new research shows a huge skew towards male authors and reviewers in the literary establishment in 2011.

Vida, an American organisation supporting women in the literary arts, has compiled statistics on the gender split in books coverage at publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, each of which showed a substantial bias towards using male reviewers and covering male authors.

At the LRB last year 16% of reviewers were women (29 out of 184) and 26% of authors reviewed (58 out of 221); at the New York Review of Books 21% of 254 reviews were by women, 17 of 92 authors reviewed were female and 13% of 152 articles were by women. Of 1,163 reviews in the TLS in 2011, 30% were by women, and of 1,314 authors reviewed, 25% were women. Granta was the only publication to have more female contributors, at 53%, but much of this was down to its women-only feminism issue.

Flood's article notes that gender bias is worse for nonfiction and quotes editors of the publications preferring to review work by males over work by women effectively blaming women for not stepping up to the plate and sententiously "hoping" that the Vida reports will "encourage women." (What this has to do with getting women's books reviewed absolutely mystifies me.) She concludes with a comment from Jennifer Weiner:

Author Jennifer Weiner, who, with Picoult, has campaigned against the continuing gender bias of book reviews towards men over the last year, felt that the best response was to let the "vital conversations" take place elsewhere. "Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration," she said. "In the end, it's going to take a New Girls' (and Boys') Network to counter the Old Boys' Network. Men and women committed to change are going to have to step up and speak out, (and, of course, risk being called shrill, hysterical, annoying or 'just jealous' of the attention the men receive when we do)."

I suppose that Weiner's remark may be interpreted by some as pursuing a separatist strategy, but I think, rather, she's suggesting that men and women need to join together to create new venues where women's work will be treated with respect. That may be considered a kind of separatism, but it isn't gender separatism. I rather like the idea of allowing the old male-dominated bastions of the commercial literary world dry up on the vine, myself. (Link thanks to Wendy Walker.)

Two links to posts by Amanda Marcotte:

--When we say they hate women, we mean they hate women is prompted by Rush Limbaugh's despicable attack on Sandra Fluke, but sees it as part of the ongoing war on women underway in the US today:

I'd point out that most animals fuck according to the ideal Rick Santorum model: joylessly, infrequently, and only for procreation. Most even wait until the female is ovulating, to minimize the time they spend rutting! If your objective is to not be like other animals, the best strategy is to fuck all the time and take advantage of our unique ability to enjoy sex for its own sake.

Beyond all the hatefulness, prudery, and misogyny is just the plain weirdness of all of this. Reading the right wing reaction to Sandra Fluke, you get the strong impression that they think that a single woman in her mid-20s who is sexually active is some kind of freakish outlier, as if Fluke admitted to being a mercenary with side business in running drugs to pay off law school. In reality, Fluke is as normal and American as apple pie. Being sexually active before marriage is just what people do; 93% of Americans have premarital sex before turning 30. We can safely guess there's no love here for women whose main pregnancy prevention strategy is to only have sex with women. Additionally, since no distinctions between women who use contraception in or out of marriage are being made here, women who use it to have monogamous sex with their husbands are being rolled into the "town dump" category as well, which means that basically, the utterly normal and nearly universal experience of being female is being characterized on the right as something disgusting and beyond the pale. Which is just a long, roundabout way to say they straight up hate women.

--Marcotte also has a brief post about the endless GOP primary season: It's the Race that Never Ends that made me nod my head and say, yes, it does feel as if it will never end. And then led to the reflection that the reason that no end is yet in sight is because so many whackos have the support of very, very, very, very rich patrons, who have endless amounts of money to lavish on obscenely expensive campaigns for losers eager to serve them and their interests (and no one else's).

--Kim Stanley Robinson has an essay about climate change and the utopian in his novels at arena: Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change:

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution.[i] This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we’re not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

Through the essay, he moves through fascinating territory until he arrives at a startling (but utterly plausible) conclusion:

How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity.

This is a must-read essay. Do please check it out. (Link thanks to Niall Harrison.)

--Common Dreams reports on an insurance industry meeting about how uninsurable parts of the United States are becoming because of climate change. The meeting occurred just one day before the latest devastating tornados slammed the Midwest and Southeast US:

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”

“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re's sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”

Cynthia McHale, the insurance program director at Ceres, issued a more unequivocal statement: “Our climate is changing, human activity is helping to drive the change, and the costs of these extreme weather events are going to keep ballooning unless we break through our political paralysis, and bring down emissions that are warming our planet. If we continue on this path, extreme weather is certain to cause more homes and businesses to be uninsurable in the private insurance market, leaving the costs to taxpayers or individuals.”

Resonates with Stan Robinson's essay, no?

A detail from Robinson's Galileo's Dream

I've been slowly working my enjoyable way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream. I'm about two-thirds of the way through (it's a big book!) so I can't review it yet or offer any substantive comments other than that Robinson has drawn an amazingly vivid, plausible character who is very much of his time in the way most historical figures in fiction tend not to be. (For an excellent review, check out Nic Clarke's here.) An interesting aspect of reading the novel at such a leisurely pace is that I'm finding that details from the book linger in my thoughts, long after the scene in which they occurred, and because of that leisurely pace, I've granted myself ample time to think about them. One of these details in particular is affording me immense satisfaction. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it's because I am so often vexed and irritated by novels embedded in history. Of course Galileo, in this novel, is set in at least one alternate timestream to our own (at least so far as his own personal biography is concerned). The passage in which the detail is set depicts Galileo talking with Hera, a woman he is visiting via "entangler," living in the 31st century. Hera has just mentioned that a century before, people in her culture were in favor of spending enormous amounts of energy ("the complete sacrifice of the two outermost gas giants") placing entanglers in various times and places in the past. She remarks,

"It has all since been reconsidered. By no means everyone agrees it was a good idea."

"I should think not," Galileo said. "Why did they do it at all?"

"Some wanted to retroject science analeptically into a time earlier than it had naturally appeared, in the hope of making human history a bit less dire."

"Why bother, now that you are here?"

"The intervening years were more dire than you know. And we are not just here; we are there too. You are not really comprehending what I have told you.We are all connected and alive in the manifold of manifolds."

Galileo shrugged. "Things still seem to happen one after the next."

She shook her head. "In any case, what you see here is a damaged and traumatized humanity. It was felt for a while that work on the past could make that better. A kind of redemption."

"I see, I think."

And then Galileo, bored, changes the subject.

There are two sets of thoughts that come together for me when reading this passage. The first set of thought is about how an educated person living in early 17th-century northern Italy conceptualizes the past. For such a person, their image of the past is likely to be the one conceptualized by the humanists in the previous three centuries: that the peak age of man lay in the past-- in classical Greek and Roman cultures. (Vico, one of the earliest intellectuals to think about history as History, was born in 1668, a couple of generations' Galileo's junior.) The whole idea of the "Renaissance," after all, is tied up with the idea of leaping over centuries of the past, to try to recover (and maybe even "progress" from) what has been lost. It's rather sad, actually, to think that they had so little sense of more recent history and thinkers (say, those in the eleventh and twelfth centuries) that they did some reinventing of the wheel (again!). Robinson correctly depicts Galileo as feeling irked by the authority of Aristotle (Aristotelian and Aristotelian-derived texts hung in there pretty tenaciously throughout the middle ages, not least because Arab scholars passed them along)-- but at the same time viewing Archimedes as one of his few equals (in all of history). But not many thinkers of Galileo's time thought of history as a flow of events that could be studied for itself (rather than a chronicle of the past that can be ransacked to prove one genealogy or another, whether of political entities (cities or states), theology and ecclesiology, families, possession of property, ideas, etc).

Since Natalie Zemon Davis's History's Two Bodies is still somewhat fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but thinking of the image she considers about "giving to History" and then dismisses as "too unchanging, too sober." :

For a time, I considered adopting the Angelus Novus, the new angel of Paul Klee's watercolor, which Walter Benjamin acquired in 1921 and kept with him until he fled from Paris in 1940. You will recall that Benjamin, in one of his last aphorisms, made this the angel of history: "His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.... His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise...[It] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is tuned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Hera of course is aware not only of history as an accumulation of wreckage, but also that the wreckage cannot be escaped-- even if one physically moves off the planet on which the wreckage has occurred. The wreckage is part of who one is. The idea of making history less "dire" is a dream, of course, of removing that weight of that wreckage from who humans are. There's certainly a good deal of irony in the 30th-century people imagining that if they managed to start the scientific revolution earlier (say back in Archimedes day) the wreckage could be avoided. Galileo's notion of his own genius-- absolutely characteristic of early modern thinking-- is a sort of index of the larger problem that is, of course, invisible to him. (See, for example, Michael Swanick's Jack Faust.)

Of course, now that I've started working on my novel again, I might not be able to keep reading it, at least not until the residency is over and my attention is no longer being held captive.

An Informative Question

I see that over at the Sci-fi Wire, Paul Di Filippo is asking

Why does the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature hate us?

By "us," I mean, of course, hardcore writers and partisans of fantastika, people unafraid and unashamed to boldly identify themselves primarily with the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, rather than with mainstream, mimetic literature.

I think I can safely say, without being privy to their secret deliberations, that the jury has never once seriously considered confering a Nobel Prize on any writer whose overall body of work has been in science fiction, and who has forthrightly labeled himself or herself an SF geek.

Hmmm. Mr. Paul Di references Kim Stanley Robinson's criticism of the Booker Prize. Could this be his inspiration, do you think, for complaining about the Nobel? To my ear, Stan Robinson's comments lacked the "why do they hate us" tone... I wonder if the analogy is appropriate, myself. For one thing, the Nobel Prize goes to an author for a body of work, not to specific books. I don't imagine that when they gave Doris Lessing the Nobel they were thinking it was for all her work except her science fiction. Mr. Paul Di does concede

Now, it's true that quite a few Nobelists have dabbled in fantastika to a greater or lesser degree. Here's a partial list, in chronological order of their award: Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Hesse, Bertrand Russell, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Harry Martinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Gunter Grass and Doris Lessing.

That's an honorable lineage of fantastical writers, many of whom you would find in the library of any broad-minded fan. But not one of them is a truly satisfying representative of the beating, sense-of-wonder heart of modern science fiction, those unabashed proponents of ray guns and aliens, space operas and cyberpunk, dystopias and steampunk, time travel and miraculous technology.

And he proposes

This blatant, painful injustice is why we feel compelled to nominate eight writers whom we feel truly deserve a Nobel Prize. Eight names of artists who have enriched our literary culture at least as much as, say, Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939); Eyvind Johnson (1974); or Wisława Szymborska (1996).

Now, while there are scads of living writers in our field who have produced monumental works of value, we've acknowledged in our choices the fact that the Nobel judges exhibit certain prejudices: They like to pick older writers with a certain extra-literary gravitas and political-cultural credentials. So that eliminates for the moment such figures as Ian MacLeod, Ken MacLeod and Gwyneth Jones, whom we at first considered.

Here are our candidates, ranked in order from least likely to get the nod to a possible shoo-in.

Needless to say, not all of the people commenting agree with his choices. You can see who they are here.

Reading the Forty Signs of Rain Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain triology last week, and so I had the odd experience when reading George Monbiot's One Shot Left: The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation in Tuesday's Guardian of feeling the lines blur between one kind of reading experience and another, between reading fiction and reading nonfiction. This has rarely happened to me before, and so it prompted me to think about why it happened. For those unfamiliar with it, the trilogy consists of three sequential novels: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, totaling roughly 1600 pages of near-future science fiction.

The novels' primary setting is Washington D.C., deep in the bowels of the federal government; its primary characters are scientists and politicians. Unlike most scientists depicted in science fiction (the physicists in Carter Scholz's Radiance offer a finely depicted exception), many of the scientists in these novels are also administrators. The crux of the overarching narrative is the administrator-scientists collectively formulating and acting upon what they call "The Frank Principle" (named after one of the books' central characters, Frank Vanderwal): saving the world so that science can proceed. The inception of collective action coincides with the stalling of the Gulf Stream and concomitant onslaught of extreme weather, thus bringing a convincing level of plausibility to Frank's argument that a Kuhnian paradigm shift is necessary. Given the federal government's general disregard for science and scientists, there is very little infrastructure for coordinating such an effort. He therefore proposes that the NSF become the political and organizational means for directing confronting the problem of global warming.

The narrative includes many documents that reminded me of Monbiot's article; the documents are, of course, a part of the fictional narrative. But the sorts of events and statistics they describe are not far off from the flood of such reports to be found in science journals, magazine, and newspapers today. As such, Robinson's documents serve the novels' sense of verisimilitude admirably. But the similarity between the fictional and the real cannot alone account for my sense, reading Monbiot's piece, that because of these books, the lines between fiction and reality have become blurred in my mind. I've been reading narratives that include life-like documents for decades and have never had that experience before now. Something else is at work here, something that speaks to the quality of Robinson's achievement with these books. To see what it is, it helps, I think, to look at the narrative choices Robinson makes.

First and most important, he chose not to write a thriller in which disaster strikes and politicians are made fools of and a lone scientist almost single-handedly saves the day. He could easily have inserted the basic facts and characters of his story into the sf thriller formula. Of course if he had done that, he would have rendered the issues themselves trivial-- since all it takes in such a story is the brilliance and powerful will of one individual to solve a discrete and pressing problem. (The presumption of such a storyline would be that after the scientist had saved the world from the stalling of the Gulf Stream, the book would have ended with everyone realizing that This Can't Go On... and the world would have set about with a will to stop or even reverse global warming. Book over. Warm and fuzzy feeling for readers assured.) Such a narrative would have raced by, speeding from one dramatic moment to the next. The narrative's documents would have provided key information at crucial points and have been used to great dramatic effect. And as if with most thrillers, once finished, the reader would have forgotten most of it within hours of closing the book.

Instead, there are no dramatic moments in these books, though there are numerous events that could have been presented with great dramatic flair. This was a risky strategy for Robinson to take, a strategy few sf writers would even consider (and even fewer editors would be likely to endorse). But it works (mostly). And where it works, it works powerfully. What Robinson does, instead, is weave for the reader the fabric of particular characters' lives-- chiefly, in the first book, that of Senate staffer Charlie Quibler (and, to a lesser extent, his scientist wife, Anna Quibler), and, in the second book, Frank Vanderval. (Robinson drops the pattern in the third book, Sixty Seconds and Counting, which I logically expected to take up the lives of either Diane Chang or Drepung, a displaced Tibetan Buddhist, and I think this accounts for the weakness of that novel and the trilogy's conclusion as a whole.) The events are subsumed to the fabric and take their meaning from the effects it has on the fabric.

Charlie Quibler, while a part-time policy wonk working for liberal Senator Phil Chase (a job he does mostly over the phone and via email), is first and foremost the caretaker of his toddler son, Joe. A significant portion of Forty Signs of Rain is devoted to depicting in unusual and utterly believable detail what being directly responsible for the welfare of an infant is like and, more particularly, a plausible male version of that role. I hasten to add that this is the kind of narrative that is usually open to criticism when produced by a woman-- as it has indeed been done. I'm not signaling this book out for its innovation tout court. But it is rare to see this kind of narrative in a book of hard science fiction. It isn't only that the narrative pays such close attention to the life of caring for a child that matters here: rather, it's the narrative's insistence on viewing all the players in these books as living interconnected lives, where the realms of science, policy, and daily life are inextricable and impossible to view meaningfully in isolation from one another.

In the second book, Fifty Degrees Below, the character whose life is under close examination, Frank Vaderwal, decides that he lives a "parcellated" existence-- one in which he comprises numerous selves living compartmentalized lives. He may think that; he may feel his consciousness is split any number of ways; but the reader can plainly see the interconnections and never forgets them. Frank is the most inconsistent and fluid character in the series, but for me he is the most true-to-life. He is more like the scientists I have known than just about any scientist I've encountered in science fiction. That when he finds himself homeless he builds a tree house in a park and creates a social routine that substitutes for the habits of "home" strikes me as just the sort of thing I could imagine certain scientists I've known doing.

The upshot of the slow, nondramatic pacing and drawn out attention to detail is that the reader ends up knowing the characters to a degree they never get to know the crisply depicted characters in thrillers (or, indeed, in most hard sf novels)-- and by knowing them so well, also cares about what happens to them. Okay, so I'm saying these are good novels. But what do the virtues of Robinson's narrative have to do with my blurring of the documents in the novel with Monbiot's report?

It's this: over the span of 1600 pages, the characters repeatedly read or generate reports about different aspects of global warming. And in showing the characters doing this, the narrative subtly teaches us to read the documents in a particular way. And so, while reading Monbiot's piece, certain key themes popped out at me. For instance, after writing--

But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.

--Monbiot then asks:

Is it too late [to stop runaway climate change]? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun.

This question, in the trilogy, is revealed as double-edged and part of the mechanism of denial that prevents governments from doing anything about global warming. As the books' cientists note, merely asking the question plays into the hands of the fatalists who say there's no point in trying to salvage the world-- global destruction is inevitable. But the flip side of that is that as long as scientists say there's still time to do something, then politicians (in the US, anyway) will insist that that means there's no need to do anything.

Monbiot is probably grimmer than the trilogy, though:

The Tyndall paper* points out that annual emission reductions greater than one per cent have "been associated only with economic recession or upheaval." When the Soviet Union collapsed, they fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

* Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. "Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138

http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf

Anderson and Bows state that "The framing of climate change policy is typically informed by the 2 degrees C threshold; however, even stabilizing at 450 ppmv CO2e [parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent] offers only a 46 per cent chance of not exceeding 2 degrees C." This estimate is given in the following paper:
Malte Meinshausen, 2006. "What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates." In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.


Oh, and one last thing: the second novel, Fifty Degrees Below, opens in a Washington D.C. that has been devastated by flooding and has Congress refusing to allocate the funds needed to clean it up and restore the public facilities and private housing that was damaged or destroyed in the storm. The release date for the book was November 2005, just two months after Katrina, which means it was probably at the printers when Katrina struck. Have to say, Robinson sure did nail that one.

ETA: Perhaps I ought to add one more thing: the narrative style of the trilogy reinforces at every level that the disaster story that is global warming is a collective problem (however much it visibly affects individuals differentially) that can have only a collective solution. But even as it approaches the problem collectively, Robinson's narrative focuses our attention through the prism of individuals' life stories. This is something the news media fails at accomplishing, miserably.