December 2011

SF/F Commentary

Haul of Books 2.0: Books Received Vol. 7

/

Another edition of things I’ve added to my collection.  Some of these are research selections, as I bought them around the same time when I was putting together a syllabus on postcolonial fiction.  As such, the books below are an eclectic bunch. What I want to know is: What have you purchased recently? Which books below most interest you? Here’s the list: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdey (Penguin) Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.  This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time. Galactic Cluster by James Blish (Signet) Imagine…a galaxy of superworms bound together through telepathy…and a planet whose inhabitants consider the human brain to be a cancerous tumor!  Imagine…an incredible journey to Alpha Centauri that takes ten months for a man’s body–and 6,000 years for his mind!  Imagine…the refugees of the ultimate germ war cowering beneath the crust of the planet.  To remian in hiding means mass psychosis–but to flee to the surface is certain death!  James Blish has imagined all this…and has created from it a universe that is both fantastic and horrifyingly real.  Here is modern science fiction…by one of the acknowledged masters of our time! The King’s Rifle by Biyi Bandele (Amistad) It’s winter 1944 and the Second World War is entering its most crucial state. A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was a blacksmith’s apprentice in his rural hometown in West Africa; now he’s trekking through the Burmese jungle. Led by the unforgettably charismatic Sergeant Damisa, the unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But Japanese snipers lurk behind every tree—and even if the unit manages to escape, infection and disease lie in wait. Homesick and weary, the men of D-Section Thunder Brigade refuse to give up.  Taut and immediate, The King’s Rifle is the first novel to depict the experiences of black African soldiers in the Second World War. This is a story of real life battles, of the men who made the legend of the Chindits, the unconventional, quick-strike division of the British Army in India. Brilliantly executed, this vividly realized account details the madness, sacrifice, and dark humor of that war’s most vicious battleground. It is also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man. Was by Geoff Ryman (Penguin) This haunting, wildly original novel explores the lives of several characters entwined by The Wizard of Oz–both the novel written by L. Frank Baum and the strangely resonant 1939 film. Was traverses the American landscape to reveal how the human imagination transcends the bleakest circumstance. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson (Vintage Contemporaries)(the image is from a different edition) Hailed by the New York Times as “wildly ambitious” and “the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, ‘The Wasteland,’ Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones,” Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture. The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess (Penguin) The dying Freud hustled out of Vienna into exile.  A Broadway musical on the subject of Trotsky in New York.  The last throes of the planet of Earth in AD 2000.  These are all items on The End of the World New.  Psychoanalysis, international socialism and The End–three themes, three stories–outrageously counterpointed into trinity, in a novel stuffed with verbal pyrotechnics, amazing sleights of fantasy, and tantalizing jokes, and which is crowned by a brilliant, unexpected, out-of-this-world finale–all written by one novelist at the height of his powers. Here Comes Another Lesson by Stephen O’Connor (Free Press) STEPHEN O’CONNOR IS ONE OF TODAY’S MOST GIFTED AND ORIGINAL WRITERS. In Here Comes Another Lesson, O’Connor, whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, and many other places, fearlessly depicts a world that no longer quite makes sense. Ranging from the wildly inventive to the vividly realistic, these brilliant stories offer tender portraits of idealists who cannot live according to their own ideals and of lovers baffled by the realities of love.  The story lines are unforgettable: A son is followed home from work by his dead father. God instructs a professor of atheism to disseminate updated Commandments. The Minotaur is awakened to his own humanity by the computer-game-playing “new girl” who has been brought to him for supper. A recently returned veteran longs for the utterly ordinary life he led as a husband and father before being sent to Iraq. An ornithologist, forewarned by a cormorant of the exact minute of his death, struggles to remain alert to beauty and joy.  As playful as it is lyrical, Here Comes Another Lesson celebrates human hopefulness and laments a

SF/F Commentary

SandF Ep. #6.5 (Nihilism in Genre Fiction w/ Paul Genesse) is Live!

/

We’re back with another roundtable discussion!  Here’s the description: Fantasy author Paul Genesse joins us for a lively discussion about darkness and nihilism in science fiction and fantasy. We cover everything from the good vs. evil dichotomy, war, Game of Thrones, Steven Pinker, and much more!  Plus, Paul tells us a bit about his upcoming novel, the Crimson Pact series, and his deepest…darkest…secrets! Only two of those things are true… Download the episode and enjoy!

SF/F Commentary

Haul of Books 2.0: Books Received Vol. 6

/

It’s been a while for a Haul of Books feature, which means it’s time for catching up!  And that’s what this post is all about. What I want to know is: What have you purchased recently? Which books below most interest you? Here’s the list: Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan (Little, Brown) Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.   A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family’s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees—a microcosm of today’s Africa—a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.   Uwem Akpan’s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Harcourt) At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter . . .  Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.  But in the wake of september 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Washington Square Press) Award-winning screenwriter Malla Nunn delivers a stunning and darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid South Africa, featuring Detective Emmanuel Cooper — a man caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the raw hunger for power make life very dangerous indeed.  In a morally complex tale rich with authenticity, Nunn takes readers to Jacob’s Rest, a tiny town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. It is 1952, and new apartheid laws have recently gone into effect, dividing a nation into black and white while supposedly healing the political rifts between the Afrikaners and the English. Tensions simmer as the fault line between the oppressed and the oppressors cuts deeper, but it’s not until an Afrikaner police officer is found dead that emotions more dangerous than anyone thought possible boil to the surface.  When Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, begins investigating the murder, his mission is preempted by the powerful police Security Branch, who are dedicated to their campaign to flush out black communist radicals. But Detective Cooper isn’t interested in political expediency and has never been one for making friends. He may be modest, but he radiates intelligence and certainly won’t be getting on his knees before those in power. Instead, he strikes out on his own, following a trail of clues that lead him to uncover a shocking forbidden love and the imperfect life of Captain Pretorius, a man whose relationships with the black and coloured residents of the town he ruled were more complicated and more human than anyone could have imagined.  The first in her Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, A Beautiful Place to Die marks the debut of a talented writer who reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene. It is a tale of murder, passion, corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined an apartheid nation. Modem Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock (PM Press) Jerry Cornelius—Michael Moorcock’s fictional audacious assassin, rockstar, chronospy, and possible Messiah—is featured in the first of two stories in this fifth installment of the Outspoken Author series. Previously unpublished, the first story is an odyssey through time from London in the 1960s to America during the years following Barack Obama’s presidency. The second piece is a political, confrontational, comical, nonfiction tale in the style of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell. An interview with the author rounds out this biting, satirical, sci-fi collection. 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus) Welcome to 44 Scotland Street, home to some of Edinburgh’s most colorful characters. There’s Pat, a twenty-year-old who has recently moved into a flat with Bruce, an athletic young man with a keen awareness of his own appearance. Their neighbor, Domenica, is an eccentric and insightful widow. In the flat below are Irene and her appealing son Bertie, who is the victim of his mother’s desire for him to learn the saxophone and italian–all at the tender age of five.  Love triangles, a lost painting, intriguing new friends, and an encounter with a famous Scottish crime writer are just a few of the ingredients that add to this delightful and witty portrait of Edinburgh society, which was first published as a serial in The Scotsman newspaper. The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (Anchor Books) Meet Mma Ramotswe, the endearing, engaging, simply irresistible proprietress of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the first and only detective agency in Botswana. With persistent observation, gentle intuition, and a keen desire to help people with the problems of their lives, she solves mysteries great and small for friends and strangers alike. Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (Grove Press) From the author of MASTER AND MARGARITA, BLACK SNOW and DIABOLIAD, a novel which features a Moscow professor who befriends a stray dog and transplants

SF/F Commentary

Giveaway Winners for David Chandler’s Ancient Blades Trilogy!

/

And the winners for the first two books in the series are: Kevin and shadowflame1974. The winner for the full trilogy is: booksandboston! Congratulations to everyone!  You should get an email from me shortly for your addresses. Edit:  Kevin needs to contact me because I have no email address for him.  arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com.  Thanks!

Book Reviews

Book Review: Crack’d Pot Trail by Steven Erikson

/

Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series took the fantasy world by storm when Gardens of the Moon was published in 1999, leading to a 10-novel epic fantasy series, several additional novels written by Ian Esslemont, and a number of novellas.  Earlier this year, Crack’d Pot Trail, a tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, hit the shelves, offering a strangely compelling narrative concept in an over-embellished, long-winded package. Using the backdrop of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas, Crack’d Pot Trail follows the Nehemothanai and their artist/pilgrim companions as they continue their hunt of the infamous Bauchelain and Korbal Broach (a less-than-reputable pair, to say the least).  Stuck traversing the wasteland of the Crack’d Pot Trail with dwindling resources, the artists are pitted against themselves in a feat of narrative prowess:  whoever tells the worst tale may become the next meal.   The question becomes:  Who can play the narrative game with cunning and skill, and who will flounder in a sea of their own artistic deficiencies? Crack’d Pot Trail does two interesting things: It draws upon a rich history of larger narratives told through artists weaving miniature tales.  It provides a meant-to-be-humorous, if not disturbing, scenario involving cannibalism and artists. The first of these will become obvious to anyone familiar with Boccaccio’s The Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (among other stories, new and old).  Erikson plays with the narratives-within-a-narrative to examine the nature of the artist as a complex subject — that is that rather than showing a series of people telling stories, Erikson challenges the nature of the story by deconstructing their origins and their tellers.  What Crack’d Pot Trail does well lies in its ability to expose the boundaries of authorship, which may interest non-traditional fantasy readers more than those who come to fantasy for an adventure (this may also be specific to the Malazan readership, since Erikson’s work has often been cited as a participant in the nihilistic overthrow of fantasy — whatever that means). Erikson, however, explores these questions in a written style which reads as authentic, but comes off as exceedingly convoluted and linguistically excessive.  The result is that much of the book is difficult to read, often at the expense of the narrative (within a narrative).  Sentences are bloated to a degree that they often have to be re-read in order to capture details or meanings.  Such details could easily have been said with greater strength if Erikson wrote with more concision.  For example: Suffice it to say she was the first to set out from the Gates of Nowhere and her manservant Mister Must Ambertroshin, seated on the high bench of the carriage, his face shielded by a broad woven hat, uttered his welcome to the other travelers with a thick-volumed nod, and in this generous instant the conveyance and the old woman presumed within it became an island on wheels round which the others clustered like shrikes and gulls, for as everyone knows, no island truly stays in one place (16). Or: Apto rubbed at his face as if needing to convince himself that this was not a fevered nightmare (as might haunt all professional critics), and I do imagine that, given the option, he would have fled into the wastes at the first opportunity, not that such an opportunity was forthcoming given Steck Marynd and his perpetually cocked crossbow which even now rested lightly on his lap (he’d done with his pacing by this time) (41). Or this paragraph: Is there anything more fraught than family?  We do not choose our kin, after all, and even by marriage one finds oneself saddled with a whole gaggle of relations, all gathered to witness the fresh mixing of blood and, if of proper spirit, get appalingly drunk, sufficient to ruin the entire proceedings and to be known thereafter in infamy.  For myself, I have always considered this gesture, offered to countless relations on their big day, to be nothing more than protracted revenge, and have of course personally partaken of it many times.  Closer to home, as it were, why, every new wife simply adds to the wild, unwieldy clan.  The excitement never ends! (150) The problem isn’t that these sentences are meaningless, but that they often distract from the narrative, either because they are exceedingly long (to the point where comprehension becomes difficult) or because they digress into complicated musings about things that, oddly, play little significance in the story.  Some digressions are amusing, such as when the narrator criticizes critics, but outside of the dialogue (with exception to when stories are being told), Crack’d Pot Trail is a difficult book to read, without offering the kind of payoff you expect from books with complicated styles (such as one would expect with a Pynchon novel).  What should effectively be an exploration of the artist and authorship through the guise of a cannibalistic contest is really a narrative of digressions that seems determined to avoid focus in exchange for abstraction and incompleteness.  This is perhaps why I was disappointed with Crack’d Pot Trail.  Erikson sets up a story that should be endlessly hilarious and compelling, but the result is a rambling mess which, to me, seemed to go nowhere because so many of the stories told are never completed.  Whereas other narratives with similar forms have provided ample room for continued exploration, Erikson’s novel ends without much fanfare or purpose.  The main points are easy enough to pick out, but I found myself unwilling to traipse through the prose to make the additional connections that would lend strength to Crack’d Pot Trail‘s narrative (there are interesting connections to make, though).  Instead, I got to the end of the book, after two weeks of struggling, without much interest in looking at it again — a feeling I don’t wish to have when reading anything, in part because negative critical reviews are the least entertaining to write (in most cases). Crack’d Pot Trail leaves a lot to be desired.  Fans of the Malazan series may love this particular book, yet

SF/F Commentary

Nihilism and Genre: Some Random Thoughts

/

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the issue of nihilism/darkness in genre fiction.  This post will come off as a kind of random exploration of things swimming around in my head. Some seem to think that we live in a world that is far more nihilistic and dark than any other moment in the past.  To some extent, that might be true, particularly if you pick and choose which years you use to make the comparison.  But reality doesn’t hold up well to pick-and-choose methods.  While the present is certainly beset with death, destruction, and violent rhetoric, the same could be said of almost every other moment in our history.  The difference, perhaps, has to do with where those elements are directed. (Note:  by nihilism, I am referring to the form I think most imagine when they say “nihilism.”  That is that morality is not innate to human beings, but a product of our cultural constructions.  In other words, morality is artificial, not natural.  There are plenty of other camps of nihilism, but I make the assumption that people who name “nihilism” do so with morality in mind.) The 50s are often cited as the best years in America by cultural purists; but to make that argument, you have to ignore the rampant levels of sexism and racism, which permeated every level of contemporary 50s culture.  Toss in a few wars, famines, McCarthyism, and other disturbing events and you end up with an era which looks nice for a select cast of individuals living in a select group of nations.  (I make the assumption that few would say the 20s, 30s, and 40s were amazing years for everyone, what with the aftereffects of WWI, the Great Depression, WW2, and so on). If we move to the 60s, what we end up with is an era that, once more, doesn’t look that great.  The Civil Rights Movement was important, but the era was home to some of the worst violent rhetoric we have ever seen, directed at one group of people for pointless reasons.  Then you had the Vietnam Conflict, which bled into the 70s, and numerous other problems the world over.  And let’s not forget the Apartheid government of South Africa, who were playing the racism game in a way that would make the 50s and 60s in America look like a picnic. The point is that there are always wars and conflicts.  There are always battles of ideology.  There is always suffering.  But ultimately, the world gets slightly better every decade.  Usually.  There are fewer conflicts today than ever before, even if America is losing its bloody mind and tearing itself apart from the inside (a product of intolerant people driven by intolerant ideology who refuse to admit to their intolerant nature).  We may be in a bit of a rut right now, but we’re all human beings…and we always come out on top.  Eventually.  We’re notoriously good at survival and progress, even if we’re slow as molasses at it. These developments show something unique about the human species:  that our moral frameworks change and adjust over time.  Men thought it moral to deny women basic American rights, but eventually changed their tune (for the most part).  Whites saw blacks as inferior and wanted to exclude them from white culture, but good people rose up and fought against that racist ideology, leaving us a better world (though racism still exists).  And now the tide of public opinion is changing in favor to gays and lesbians; the push against them stems from a kind of re-imagined racist ideology as anti-contamination narrative driven primarily through narrow-minded and contaminating religious interpretation.  A mouthful, for sure. But things are getting better, and the people who don’t see it are either too focused on this single moment of terror or on their own ideological view of the world, in which change constitutes wickedness. What does all of this have to do with genre fiction? A few have talked about the nihilistic feel of fantasy and science fiction in recent decades.  The good and evil dichotomies, we are told, have disappeared, or been complicated by the dismembering of moral objectivism/naturalism (i.e., through moral nihilism and relativism).  Similarly, we are told that because fiction is a reflection of our time, genre fiction is unreasonably dark. But I don’t buy into either of these ideas.  There have always been optimistic genre stories with clearly-defined sides of good and evil.  True, many of those stories are found on our TV or movie screens instead of on our pages (depending on what you read), but the idea that nihilism, in its moral form, and fiction-as-reflection-of-the-present have done something negative for literature or society seems specious.  When we break down the moral boundaries of our ideologies and start to look at how people are shaped by culture, I think we start to come out of the darkness of ideological purity.  That is that we come to understand one another as members of the same species. Our fiction, I think, reflects this process of developmental understanding more so than it reflects the results (in its intentions, insofar as those can be determined).  I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to see stories in our near future dealing with allegories of the current forms of racism (the West vs. the Middle East).  And those explorations will run the gamut of types:  propaganda for, propaganda against, and deep exploration of both sides.  And reading fiction that deals with these issues helps train us. Those kinds of explorations are good for us.  We need them in order to progress.  Because our literature and our films are gateways to developing a better world, to making us think about where we are and where we really ought to be — in the pragmatic utopianism sense.  Genre fiction is a part of that process.  A great and glorious process of change.  I’d even argue that the nature of good and evil in fiction for young people,

Scroll to Top