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 reviewed2312 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.
This week's Strange Horizons has not only a new installment of Vandana Singh's Diffractions Column, but also a roundtable discussion among science fiction writers about Writing Climate Change. The panel, moderated by Niall Harrison, includes Vandana Singh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Joan Slonczewski, Glenda Larke, Tobias Buckell, Maggie Gee, and Julie Bretagna, all writers who've written about climate change. Vandana's column, I might also note, concludes with a call to writers:
Assume that the planet must be saved. Not that we won't suffer the effects of global warming for a long time to come, but let us assume that we can do what it takes to limit it as much as possible so that one day it could be reversed. That is, less than 2C of warming. What would that take? What kind of action, re-thinking, re-imagining everything from technology to how we live to what we write and what we read—what would it look like on the way to saving the world? Science fiction is full of end-of-the-world stories, apocalyptic hereafters. It is so much more difficult to imagine and to bring to paper or screen the messy, complicated, partial, unsatisfactory, creative ways and means that might affect a solution. But it is a task both necessary and urgent. If we are the imagineers of the world, we must imagine, or re-imagine it in ways that involve other paradigms as well as other technologies.
There are two main stereotypes of the Western scientist: the mad scientist and the coldly logical Vulcan. One type is distanced from emotion entirely, while the other is literally deranged, with an emotional spectrum restricted to the dark pleasures of world domination. Both are usually male. In the Western perspective, science itself is emotionless, as is the universe at large, a view well expressed in the classic SF story, "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin. Reading Justine Larbelestier's excellent book, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, I was struck by how overt early American science fiction is with regard to both women and emotion. In one early SF story it is only after women are eliminated that humanity (i.e. men) can found a truly scientific culture. Other stories and letters from readers of the era reveal an attitude that conflates the existence of women with emotion, and science and real science fiction with things that are emotion-free.
Check it out.
Strange Horizons is also running a review, today, of Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes. If you haven't already read this novella, you probably need to know that the review is loaded with spoilers. Whether that matters to you or not depends, of course, on the kind of reader you are.
Aqueduct Press has just released several more titles--all of them in the Conversation Pieces series-- in e-book formats. The latest titles are:
Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman Candle in a Bottle by Carolyn Ives Gilman A Brood of Foxes by Kristin Livdahl Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh De Secretis Mulierum by L. Timmel Duchamp Shotgun Lullabies by Sheree Renée Thomas
Each can be purchased for $5.95. You can find them all here.
--Nick Mamatas takes a look at "Wacky Will's" claims that Racefail 2009 and particularly coffeeandink led to his novel's being rejected by the publisher then considering it and getting no bids at a subsequent auction.
--Gwyneth Jones, in a post titled Shora to Shari'a, has more to say about the state of feminism today.
--Stephen Sohn at Asian American Literature Fans: A Veritable Literary Feast has posted a Small Press Spotlight on Aqueduct Press, which includes reviews of Vandana Singh's Distances and Of Love and Other Monsters, Claire Light's Slightly Behind and to the Left, and Mary Anne Mohanraj's portion of Without A Map.
--Paul Graham Raven reviews Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things for Strange Horizons at great and chewy length. He concludes:
And I’ve already mentioned the deftness and space left in Jones's stories, which always leave you slightly wanting; the gaps she’s left are tantalizing, sometimes even infuriating, like the last bit of table peeping mockingly through an unfinished picture-puzzle. It's a powerful play, and has to be handled just right; give too little, and the reader will feel justly cheated. But give just enough, and that missing piece will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned . . . to the point where one finds oneself hand-cutting puzzle pieces at 3 a.m., making minute adjustments to get them to slot into place, worrying at the hangnail question she's planted in your mind. Jones is resolutely anti-consolatory, staunchly contraPanglossian. She fits out every story with enough ideas to power a lesser writer's novel. She will break your heart, and she will make you think. She will challenge what you think science fiction is about, what it is for, and what it can do in the hands of an expert.
--Don D'Ammassa reveiws Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire:
Here’s an unconventional fantasy for you, set within the theater community around 1890. Two very different performers travel to Chicago where they become part of the world of minstrel shows and vaudeville. One is half Native American, the other a voodoo practitioner. There’s a good deal of peripheral magic, some of it ambiguous, involving such things as mind reading and out of body experiences, and these are contrasted with the technological wonders being displayed at the current World’s Fair. It’s also about the role of art in transforming society. This is a very ambitious book, and it’s far enough out of the mainstream of fantasy that it might daunt many potential readers. Comparisons are imperfect, particularly with really original work, but this should appeal to fans of John Crowley or Tim Powers.
Aqueduct Press has added e-book editions of three of its titles to its e-book list, in both epub and mobi formats. These are Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire, Vandana Singh's Distances, and L. Timmel Duchamp's The Grand Conversation. You can purchase them (and other Aqueduct Press e-book editions) here. The Wizard's Tower Bookstore will be selling them soon, also. And, of course, they are also available through amazon.com. We'll be releasing more e-book editions through the summer.
One of the best things I've read lately is Kristin Livdahl's novella from Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series, A Brood of Foxes. Her husband Alan may be biased, but I agree with everything he has to say in his post about it: "There are a lot of gestures in the fantasy field lately toward having an imaginary world mimic contemporary concerns–but in A Brood of Foxes, the shape of the narrative changes to reflect the very human cost of these concerns. There are no quick fixes or any lame “journey of the hero(ine)” knock-offs while paying lip service to some kind of transgressive ideal. No boss battles!" It is gorgeous and strange and lives up to the series' title.
-- Fred Cleaver reviews80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin for the Denver Post. He concludes:
Some of the tributes provide insights into the great writers paying tribute, such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Nancy Kress. It's a book of personal messages for someone I only know through her writing, but it's a joy to read these tributes from those who also know her as a friend and teacher.
While I was away in La Push, several Aqueductistas were attending Arisia and the Carl Brandon Society awards ceremony held at Arisia. Although I can't offer a report of a con that I didn't attend, I do have some pictures, sent to me by Andrea Hairston and Vandana Singh, taken by Andrea's partner Pan Morrigan and Vandana's daughter, respectively. At once, looking at the pictures of Andrea, I was thrilled to recognize her style as right out of Redwood and Wildfire.
Am I the only one to have noticed this? Locus Online has chosen to exclude one of the awards announced last week by the Carl Brandon Society from its coverage of the news. I say "chosen" because the exclusion was obviously not inadvertent, since the site confirmed the erasure in its headline. Although reading that news item might make you wonder, I firmly believe that Vandana Singh will indeed receive the CBS's 2008 Parallax Award for her novella, Distances, when the awards are officially made at Arisa.
To me, the slight feels a slap in the face. Am I being ridiculously sensitive? Perhaps I am. But such disrespect also seems to bode ill for the Carl Brandon awards, since they're still very young.
The Carl Brandon Society have just announced their 2008 and 2009 awards:
The winners of the 2008 Carl Brandon Society awards are Vandana Singh, who received the Carl Brandon Parallax Award for her novella Distances, and Tananarive Due, who received the Carl Brandon Kindred Award for her story "Ghost Summer" from the anthology The Ancestors.
The winners of the 2009 Carl Brandon Society awards are Hiromi Goto, who received the Carl Brandon Parallax Award for her novel Half World, and Justine Larbalestier, who received the Carl Brandon Kindred Award for her novel Liar.
--Kelly Jennings reviews Eleanor Arnason's Mammoths of the Great Plains and Tomb of the Fathers for Strange Horizons.
--Aliette de Bodard's essay The View from the Other Side, a discussion of non-Anglophone sf-- has been posted at Asimov's SF (though minus its endnotes).
-- I may be the last person alive to have heard about this, so it will probably be old news to everyone reading, but DC comics have not only given Wonder Woman a costume makeover, but also eliminated her Amazon history and replaced it with a trauma-driven, rootless history. Here's a snippet of Shelby Knox's take on it , in a post titled "Wonder Woman in Pants Is Not A Feminist Win" (link thanks to Suzy at Echidne of the Snakes):
Here we go again, it seems. Wonder Woman donning what looks like skinny jeans is being spun as a direct result of the successes of the Women’s Liberation movement, a reaction to requests that female superheroes do a little less baring of buns and a lot more kicking them. Yet in stripping Diana of her overt sexuality the new writers have missed the reason Wonder Woman was a feminist heroine in the first place. As originally portrayed, Diana Prince was sexy not because of her bare legs and cleavage but because her personhood wasn’t defined by them and her powers not derived from fashioning herself for the male gaze. She could work a 9 to 5 job, hold down a relationship, subvert international conspiracies and toss the villains in jail, and perhaps, as the first cover of Ms. magazine suggested in 1972, even be president—and the way she looked was, as it should be, simply an aside.
While it’s yet to be seen whether this costume change signals an intent to again strip Wonder Woman of her super powers, it’s disconcerting to learn that the writers are creating a new back story for the character that deprives her of her upbringing on Paradise Island with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, and her Amazon sisters in favor of being smuggled out of her homeland as a baby as it was destroyed. Wonder Woman’s original feminist creator’s intent in giving Diana the Paradise Island upbringing was to insinuate she knew gender equality existed because she’d lived it and that her powers were derived from living with and learning from her sisters. In effect, all women could become “Wonder Woman” if they tapped into the feminine power around them and strived for a gender just world that, we know from real live history, really did and can exist. Is this rewrite an attempt to impose the myth of “post-patriarchy” on the character, in which she no longer needs to dream of and fight for equality because she’s achieved it?
Real heroes, I guess, invent themselves out of nothing.
One of the interesting things about the Tiptree Award is that its juries often provide comments about their choices. I had to rush off to my semi-annual dentist appointment this noon, so I didn't have time to post either the jury's specific comments on works published by Aqueduct or the long list.
Here's the long list:
Stephanie Shaw, “Afterbirth” (in Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, Small Beer Press 2009)
Jeremiah Tolbert, “The Godfall’s Chemsong” (Interzone 224, 2009.09-10)
Helen Keeble, “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, as Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.06.01-08)
Sarah Schulman, The Mere Future (Arsenal Pulp Press 2009)
Cat Rambo, “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.10.26)
Shweta Narayan, “Nira and I” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.03.16)
Sylvia Kelso, Riversend (Juno 2009)
Claire Light, Slightly Behind and to the Left (Aqueduct Press 2009)
Alaya Dawn Johnson, “A Song to Greet the Sun” (online at Fantasy Magazine, 2009.10.26)
Xiaolu Guo, UFO in Her Eyes (Chatto & Windus 2009)
And here's the comment on Vandana Singh's Distances:
Singh has packed this novella-length work with an amazing complexity. Distances is: the story of a woman’s development as an artist in a context where science, art and religion are indistinguishable; a meditation on the uses of knowledge and the power structures they engender; and a nuanced depiction of cultural difference, loss and exile. While not as directly focused on gender as some other works on our list, we saw Distances as a work that expanded and challenged a number of inherently gendered cultural categories. Also, almost incidentally, there are some very interesting depictions of alternative sex and gender arrangements.
And finally, here's what they say about my Marq'ssan Cycle:
After reading the thousands of pages in L. Timmel Duchamp’s five-volume Marq’ssan cycle (Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the Fruit, and Stretto, following decades of changes across the world in both large-scale politics and the everyday interpersonal beauties and violences of individual lives, you don’t emerge quite the same as you were when you went in.
Gender is a central focus, as we experience a very gender-segregated society largely from a female point of view and occasionally from that of a post-gender alien species. But any separation of one of the cycle’s themes must necessarily be a shallow depiction of what it is like to read these novels.
Some readers will focus most on the story of human engagement with an utterly different alien race, determined to alter the course of human politics yet determined to be something other than colonizers. Some will be most fascinated by the tale of the Free Zones, anarchist enclaves where co-operative, anti-authoritarian politics develop over decades in the US and elsewhere. These communities are not utopian but are filled with conflict and occasionally violent, yet they remain optimistic nevertheless. For other readers, the most memorable aspects of the cycle will be the near-future dystopian image of an intensely class-divided United States, with its startlingly prescient depictions of torture, imprisonment, and political violence, told with an unsettling understanding of the oppressors’ perspective and yet never without losing sympathy for the victims. And for yet more, it will be on the level of character that Duchamp’s work inspires: her many point of view characters––almost all women––whose personal and political transformations, power-laden interpersonal, frequently sexual relationships, and critical analyses of the world, drive the many intersecting narratives.
Reading this makes my inner 35-year-old weep with emotion. But then back in 1986, for me, James Tiptree Jr. was still male, and there was no place in the world for anything like the Marq'ssan Cycle. I can't begin to express how gratified I am by this recognition.
ETA: Scratch the penultimate sentence. James Tiptree was not male in 1986-- not even to me. But finishing the Marq'ssan Cycle made me more lonely than I can say, until I was finally able to put it away and half-forget about it. This morning (Thursday), thinking about all this I'm finding it very strange-- disorienting, actually-- to find myself living in a world where the Marq'ssan Cycle makes the kind of sense it now does. And yet I have the sense that my thinking was a lot harder-edged, less accommodating, back then that it is now. But how can one know? One's past life, indeed one's past self, is a foreign country.
A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Greer Gilman for Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales and Fumi Yoshinaga for Ooku: The Inner Chambers, (volumes 1 & 2)
The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the 2009 Tiptree Award has two winners: Greer Gilman’s trilogy of interconnected stories, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales (Small Beer Press 2009) and Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate-history manga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) (VIZ Media 2009).
The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on Memorial Day weekend at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. Each winner will receive $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate. A panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2009 jurors were Karen Joy Fowler (chair), Jude Feldman, Paul Kincaid, Alexis Lothian, and Victor Raymond.
Cloud & Ashes contains three memorable and poetic tales that draw images and elements from folk tales and ballads of the British Isles. Told in lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect, the stories are striking for their language and their originality.
Juror Paul Kincaid praised Cloud & Ashes as “A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of.” Jury chair Karen Fowler reflected on the intriguing complexity of the interwoven themes in the work: “Patterns repeat, but also mutate in kaleidoscopic fashion and then mutate again…. Power shifts about, much of it gender-based; time eats itself like a Möbius strip.”
The first two stories in Cloud & Ashes were published previously. The first, "Jack Daw's Pack," was a Nebula finalist for 2001. The second, “A Crowd of Bone,” won the 2003 World Fantasy Award. The third story, “Unleaving,” is original to Cloud & Ashes.
Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) explores an alternate version of feudal Japan, in which a plague has killed three out of every four boys. In this world, young men are protected and sheltered; women have secretly taken positions of authority and power. The Japanese ruler or shogun and the feudal lords are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the shogun's harem. The title of the work refers to the living quarters for the shogun’s harem, contained within Edo Castle.
The selection of Ooku: The Inner Chambers marks the first time that manga has been chosen for the Tiptree Award. Though no one on the jury is an expert on manga or on Japanese history, the jurors fell in love with the detailed exploration of the world of these books, a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. Throughout the two books, Yoshinaga explores how the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios. “The result,” juror Jude Feldman writes, “is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center.
Ooku was awarded the Sense of Gender award by the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005), the Excellence Award at Japan's Media Arts Festival (2006), and the Grand Prize in Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (2009).
The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:
“Beautiful White Bodies” by Alice Sola Kim (online at Strange Horizons, 2009; published in two parts on 12-7 and 12-14) — a heartbreaking meditation on the meaning of beauty and femininity in the media and popular culture.
Distances by Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008) — a novella-length work packed with an amazing complexity. Expands and challenges a number of inherently gendered cultural categories.
“Galapagos” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009) — a mysterious space disaster, a terrifying alien reproductivity, a story reminiscent of the work of Octavia Butler. There can be no higher praise.
Lifelode by Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009) — explores the coexistence of a very traditional social hierarchy and understanding of marriage alongside an accepted polyamorous structure. Makes the world of polyamory feel comfortable and cozy and the threat of a new monogamous order feel alien and terrifying.
“Useless Things” by Maureen F. McHugh (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009) — A non-reproductive woman makes idealized child-objects in an uncertain world. An incredibly evocative, sparely written, powerful story.
“Wives” by Paul Haines (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009) —A sharp and powerful but deeply ugly look at white working class Australian masculinity in a world where women are scarce.
In addition, the jury wishes to extend a special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle, noting the importance of this stunning series, which envisions radical social and political change. Published over a period of four years, this five-book series began with Alanya to Alanya (Aqueduct Press, 2005) and concluded with Stretto (Aqueduct Press, 2008).
The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.
The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.
Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications and one is in print and available from www.lulu.com and directly from the Tiptree Award website. The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.
In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a “mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award,” the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.
Reading for the 2010 Tiptree Award will soon begin. As always, the Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org. You can also find more information about the award and about past winners at the website.
For more information on the Tiptree Award or this press release, contact Pat Murphy at zapmurphy@gmail.com or write to the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council at 680 66th St., Oakland, CA 94609.
Winners of the 2009 Tiptree Award:
Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press 2009) Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media 2009)
Honor List
“Beautiful White Bodies” by Alice Sola Kim (online at Strange Horizons, 2009; published in two parts on 12-7 and 12-14)
Distances by Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008)
“Galapagos” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009)
Lifelode by Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009)
“Useless Things” by Maureen F. McHugh (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009)
“Wives” by Paul Haines (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009)
A special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle
For me 2009 was a year of much-hoped-for change, particularly in the area of climate politics. Although the Copenhagen summit was a dismal failure, the rise of youth and citizen climate movements around the world, and their catalytic meetings in Copenhagen, have given birth to a new hope for this beleaguered planet. Jim Hansen of NASA has pretty much come out and said it: the only hope we have left is global civil resistance. Kim Stanley Robinson puts it bluntly in an interview: the war is now between science and capitalism. We live in tumultuous times where new paradigms must be born --- or old, discarded ones find new relevance.
In my reading and viewing this year (necessarily curtailed by the demands of a full-time job and various personal responsibilities), I found much that reflected the current critical state of the world. Some of what I read only obliquely echoed these concerns, but I found insight in them nevertheless.
For intellectual highs I needed to go no further than Anathem, Neal Stephenson’s magnum opus. Although this is a flawed work (with one particular science flaw that stood out to this once-particle-physicist) it is a GREAT flawed work. I’d rather read something ambitious that doesn’t quite reach its goal than something competently mediocre. Well, Anathem was mindblowingly ambitious. What I liked best about it (and what made me weep with envy) was the conceptualization of an intellectual community where philosophy and gardening and physics and sociology were happily combined, minus the artificial barriers we raise in our educational system between subjects of study. Among the failures of the book are the poorly imagined romantic and familial relationships that felt trite and false to me. The plot was really quite interesting, especially the integration of philosophy and physics with action, but the other thing that stood out to me was the sense of place, and the lovingly lyrical and precise descriptions of different locations on the planet Arbre. It came as no surprise to me to learn later that Stephenson’s college degree is in geography. I also loved all the expositions, whether philosophical or mathematical, that littered and enriched the book. If I lived on a world like Arbre you’d know where to find me.
Another intellectual treat was the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. The opening reads like some kind of traditional fantasy, as we follow the protagonist, Steerswoman Rowan, in her search for a mysterious jewel, fragments of which have been found in disparate locations on the planet. The Steerswomen are truth-tellers and knowledge seekers, and theirs is also a community of intellectuals, with the difference that the steerswomen are wanderers who go into the world seeking knowledge. So as we follow Rowan we discover how, through careful observation and reasoning she finds the truth about the jewel fragments. A lovely fictional elucidation of the scientific process! My favorite in the series was The Lost Steersman, in which I came across the most interesting invention of an alien species and civilization that I’ve read recently, or ever. This is great science fiction indeed.
Both books, however, either ignore or only glancingly address what to me is a major concern: the issue of science and ethics. For instance, in the Steerswoman series the need to know, to learn and to understand, is elevated as a virtue --- it is in fact a criterion for being selected as a Steerswoman or Steersman. In Anathem also the yearning to know and understand distinguishes the mathic world from the Saecular one. But in neither book is the question raised as to the possible costs of wanting to know. The Nazi scientists who experimented on Jews during Hitler’s reign were presumably doing science, wanting to know and discover truths. Yet nobody in their senses would excuse them on those (or any) grounds. So why is it that when we teach science or write science fiction we don’t talk about the ethical limits that we must impose on the search for knowledge? When is it appropriate to say: my wish to know must come second to the well-being of another? Perhaps we do not ask this question because we still experiment on lab animals, even knowing from modern science that many of them are sentient, aware, intelligent beings. In fact in a terrible scene in one of the Steerswoman books, Rowan has to become a party to torture in order to extract information --- something that made me stop reading the series for many months. Later Rowan appears to redeem herself in her interaction with the alien species that I mentioned, but again there is no explicit discussion of the ethics/cost/philosophy of knowledge-gathering. And I write this as one who is as susceptible as the next person to the gosh-wow charms of scientific discovery.
Perhaps it is this divorce of science from ethical constraints that has contributed to the crisis in which we find ourselves. There is much in science fiction that warns about the dangers of technology, from nuclear war to climate collapse. Apocalyptic scenarios are very common and presumably intended as warnings that if we continue on our current course we cannot avert disaster. Yet however lofty the aims of these works their ubiquity points ultimately to a failure of imagination and of courage among us science fiction writers. If science fiction is about re-imagining the world, toppling tired old ways of being, then we have failed hopelessly. It is easy to write apocalyptic scenarios --- much harder to imagine a way of life, a movement, a historical path that would avert the apocalypse. The latter takes research, exploration, personal life changes, the guts to make mistakes, to go out on a limb, to reject consensus reality, to examine one’s most beloved assumptions. Hard work. And yet it must be done.
A book that I read this year that comes closest to such a re-imagining is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, part of his Three Californias trilogy. We are introduced to a utopic community and its struggles and human entanglements mainly through the eyes of Kevin, a fascinating, innocent and determined young man. The central plot point in the book has to do with control over water, and arguments in the town council about whether the last untouched hill in the area should be built-over. This sounds mundane and boring in the extreme, but it isn’t. It is a realistic and unpretentious evocation of relationships --- among people, and between people and the land --- in an imperfect utopia. It is also one of the most moving books I have ever read.
A counterpoint to Pacific Edge is The Gold Coast, Robinson’s imagining of a California (specifically Orange County) where runaway capitalism/consumerism has taken hold. It is a story of the struggles of a young, rich son of an arms engineer who tries to rebel against the system. Set in a backdrop of giant malls and freeways and designer drugs, the book asks the question as to whether it is possible to rebel against such a system while one’s survival depends on it. A deep and uncomfortable question.
Imagining a utopic community is one thing --- getting there is another. This is where L. Timmel Duchamp’s novel Renegade comes in. An unflinching look at the politics of power, where conventional assumptions and loyalties are overturned by the coming of the mysterious alien Marq’ssan, this second in the series continues the story of Kay Zeldin and her confrontation with the US Security forces. What power can and will do to destroy the will of the renegade is realistically and horrifically portrayed --- in fact it took me a long time to recover from the conclusion of the book, even as I had to admit (and admire) its rightness in the context of this long and rich saga. There is a lot more to this book that cannot be captured in a paragraph --- read it!
The role of power on the global scale is revealed just as unflinchingly in a remarkable play by Delhi-based writer Manjula Padmanabhan: Harvest. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time and finally got the chance this summer, since it was one of the readings at the IIT Science Fiction Workshop in Kanpur, India. A clever, moving, devastating drama about organ transplants, featuring a lower middle class Delhi family and the affluent Americans they serve, it is a remarkable work by one of India’s best SF writers in English. I also had the chance to read Padmanabhan’s first novel (she has mostly written short stories before): Escape. The journey of a young girl through a land where women have become rare, if not extinct, where she must travel disguised in the company of a relative to the boundaries of another country, it is a great and frightening portrayal of a destroyed civilization and its wounded inhabitants. The coming-to-awareness of the protagonist, who hardly knows what it means to be female when she starts on her journey, is one of the most beautiful things about the book.
Anil Menon’s YA novel The Beast with Nine Billion Feet made its debut this year also. A complex, scary, phantasmagorical ride through a futuristic Pune (in the year 2040), a city caught in the grip of new technologies co-existing with poverty and exploitation, it is a story of a friendship between the protagonist, Tara, and two very strange children, Ria and Francis. It is full of uncomfortable things, such as the loss of love, the alienation of brother and sister, father and son, the persistence of poverty, the promise of a new age with terrifying possibilities. And yet these are the issues that young people must face in the world we are creating for them, and therefore this is a brave and necessary book. It is not perfect, having some flaws that come with first novels even from seasoned writers (Anil is an exquisite short-story writer), but its steadfast refusal of despair and its celebration of friendship are worth noting.
Science fiction writers have re-imagined our world in various ways, creating or uncovering paradigms that overturn our assumptions about how we exist in the real world. Going into a possible future is one such approach; I’m thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin’s stunning work, The Dispossessed, and its sophisticated sociological world-building (which makes similar attempts in Anathem seem quite naïve). I’ve read The Dispossessed many times, and to me it is one of the seminal works of science fiction. More recently Le Guin has done it again with her novel, Lavinia. This time she has gone into the deep past, into an imagined history. I found Lavinia to be a spare, beautiful evocation of a time long past, where humans, animals, and landscape were not separate from each other. The voice of Lavinia, given only a mention in Vergil’s Aeneid, is very moving and believable in this novel. A rare celebration of the notion of duty (in a form I recognized to be quite similar to the Hindu notion of dharma) in the context of a civilization deeply connected with the non-human world, it is a unique work, subversive in a subtle way because it tells us without actually telling us that there are other ways to be in this world. Better than my ramblings is to read the actual book and to listen to this videotape of the author reading a section aloud.
I’ll mention only two non-fiction books I read, mostly in the interests of conserving space: one is a small and elegant book by MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel: What We Know About Climate Change. Written for the Boston Press as part of a series of works explaining important ideas to the public, this tiny book is very readable and communicates with enviable clarity the science of climate change. The other book is ethologist Marc Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals, which brings the reader up to date on what science and experience have taught us about animals and their emotions. Which is, that we share with them (and mammals, certainly) quite a wide range of emotions. This is a delightful work and a necessary one in a society where animals have been considered little more than commodities. To what extent this attitude has contributed to the crisis of global warming is left as an exercise to the reader.
I don’t get to see many movies but this year was different. I saw quite a few. Two of them were Hindi movies, the first being Delhi 6. While deemed by many to be a flop, this movie from Mumbai’s great film industry is really quite enjoyable. The music is awesome and wildly eclectic (a signature of the genius of A.R. Rahman) the story --- of a young man settled in America who goes back with his dying grandmother to the ancestral home in Old Delhi and finds not only love but himself --- oscillates between realistic and surreal, and it has enough of the good old Bollywood masala while dipping into serious issues like religious conflict. The other movie I saw was the classic 1951 Bollywood movie Awara. I grew up with its songs and its story but had somehow not managed to see it, even though it is iconic, and wildly popular in and outside India (at least among earlier generations in China and Russia). It is the story of a wastrel, a wanderer whose mother was thrown out by his rich judge father after she was kidnapped and released by a man wrongly accused and imprisoned by said judge. The songs are wonderful and the movie is surprisingly daring for its time, not only in terms of clothing worn by the actors but in its characterization of Rita, a passionate, brilliant young female lawyer, wonderfully rendered by the inimitable Nargis.
The movies Up, The Battle of Terra, and Avatar all have a common theme of exploitation of natural resources by greedy humans. Of these Up is enjoyable but lightweight, The Battle for Terra has more substance and good animation, set on another world whose inhabitants have given up war and high tech for peace, but are then invaded by humans. As for Avatar, it is a stunning gem. I saw Avatar in 3-d, which enhanced the immersion into a truly other world, but the technical oomph was not the only thing to rave about. Although the story of Avatar is not uncommon in the genre, the medium and the world-building, with its astounding biological and geographical detail and complexity, made the story real. It is, to me, the story of the American Indians the way it should have happened. I am curious to find out how people of the various American Indian nations have reacted to this sad, tragic, familiar story that had the ending Black Elk and others dreamed of. Since I read Black Elk Speaks last year, I couldn’t but help think of it as I watched the movie. So while it descends to cliché at times, it is not simply a white-man-to-the-rescue kind of movie and it avoids some of the problems of the much older movie Dances with Wolves. It is a story of going native, of the unambiguous embracing of a way of life that we’ve lost with the genocide of the Indians and the homogenization of the world. I remember reading that in the old days when the Americas were being settled by Europeans, settlers kidnapped by Native Americans did not wish to return to their original white families, whereas Native Americans captured by whites tried to escape at every opportunity. This is not to romanticize or trivialize the dangers of living in the wilderness (nor am I unaware that different Native American cultures were different in their interactions with the environment, or that various indigenous peoples haven’t done great environmental harm --- the Sahara being a case in point, perhaps), but to point out that perhaps in giving in to our fear of nature we’ve lost something really important. When I think about such ideas and movements as transhumanism and so on, I see in them that alienation from the environment, and the fear of natural, biological processes, such as death. People who live more connected lives on this Earth must fear death too (who doesn’t?), but perhaps they don’t give in to this fear as readily as we, the so-called civilized, do. Perhaps being connected to something larger takes the edge off this fear. And in fact one of the great pleasures of Avatar is the invention of a humanoid people who are such an integral part of their environment --- an environment rendered in stunning and luminous detail, rich with stupendously imagined flora and fauna. (Incidentally the written work that came to mind when I watched Avatar was Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest).
A couple of other stand-out movies included 9 (the animated post-apocalyptic movie, not the more recent movie of the same name) and Steamboy. Both deal with scientists whose work unleashes the potential of evil, although the ending of Steamboy is rather ambiguous on the subject. Another movie that deserves wider distribution and reviews and publicity is the remarkable work Ink. A low-budget art film about a girl who is taken away by a mysterious, damaged soul in her dream, it is a great genre movie that transcends genre. It is about the transformation of a man’s soul, the lure of money (again, the evils of capitalism make an appearance) and the attempts by various storytellers (people who bring humans dreams) to rescue the girl. It is moody, atmospheric, rich with metaphor and general weirdness. I loved it.
We find ourselves, at the end of 2009, faced with a dying biosphere, insensate greed on the part of nations and corporations, and a growing human population content to sit in front of their giant TV screens like the mindless consumers of Fahrenheit 451 while the world burns. But we also have a growing civic movement for a sustainable world, and writers and film-makers imagining alternate endings for our great, shared story. Although I don’t believe Art has a purpose apart from the pleasure of creation (at least, on the few occasions when I’ve attempted to create something with an explicit message, my Muse has run away screaming) --- I do believe great works of art have the happy side-effect that they make us think. And thinking differently might change us enough to change our world.
Vandana Singh is the author of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (Zubaan, 2009), some very fine short stories, and two novellas published by Aqueduct Press in the Conversation Pieces series: Of Love and Other Monsters and Distances. She lives in Boston with her family, where she teaches physics.
Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, which I recently had the pleasure of reading, will appeal to a lot of Aqueduct's core readers. (Big surprise, hunh?)
The collection offers ten stories, each with its own finely grained world. When in the last story, "The Room on the Roof," I came across pov character Urmilla's conclusion "that the world she lived in was not a separate, self-contained thing, but actually an intersection of many worlds. There was the world of the beetle, the world of her mother pounding spices in the kitchen downstairs, the chess world, where her brother battled the evil enemy king, and who knows how many hidden worlds outside her awareness"(181), I found myself thinking that her observation distills a sort of subtext of the collection as a whole. Of course more world than one is evoked in each story, but one of the things Singh does well is give us a sensual taste of the particularities of the daily in her characters' lives.
I'd read several of the stories before and found them well worth a second read. I do have favorite stories in the book, though: the inexplicably powerful "Hunger," the poignant "The Room on the Roof," and "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet." The latter is a classic feminist sf story that imparted a sense of wonder even as it made me giggle with its sly, not-to-be-denied humor. The story is told from the point of view of the middle-aged Ramnath Mishra, who grows increasingly frantic to restrain Kamala, his wife, who is in the process of becoming a planet, from disrobing in public (and private). Here's a sample:
He caught her just as she was about to run out into the driveway in nothing but a petticoat and blouse, in full view of street vendors, cricket-playing children and respectable elderly gentlemen. He wrestled her into the bedroom and tried to slap some sense into her, but she continued to struggle and weep. At last, frustrated, he pulled half a dozen saris out from the big steel cupboard and flung them on the bed.
"Kamala," he said desperately, "even planets have atmospheres. See here, this gray sari, it looks like a swirl of clouds. How about it?"She calmed down at once. She began to put on the gray sari although the fabric, georgette, was unsuitable for summer.
"At last you believe me, Ramnath," she said. Her voice seemed to have changed. It was deeper, more powerful. He looked at her, aghast. She had addressed him by his name! That was all very well for the new generation of young adults, but respectable, traditional women never addressed their husbands by their names. He decided not to do anything about it for now. At least she was clothed. (45)
You can buy The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Storieshere.
