Larry’s Silly Survey of Silly
Over at OF Blog of the Fallen, Larry has put up a bunch of seemingly random and bizarre questions for folks to answer. The following are my equally silly responses: 1. Do you believe that global warming could be ameliorated if there were more pirates in the world? Unfortunately, no. Because pirates have a tendency to burn things — such as boats and makeshift cigarettes and small coastal towns ripe for the picking — they contribute at least 50 times the amount of atmospheric pollutants as all volcanoes combined. In truth, to stop global warming, we would have to systematically hunt down and imprison all pirates. I’m told the Federated League of Ninjas is waiting for the call… 2. What is the last book you read and would you recommend it to a hobo who likes to speak in alliterations? Libidinal Economy by Jean-Francois Lyotard. And, no, I would not recommend it to an alliterating hobo, as to do so would constitute a violation of the Violence Against Hobos Act of 1996. 3. Which cartoon group, the Smurfs or the Care Bears, would most likely be condemned by “family” groups today? The Smurfs, obviously. They look and act suspiciously like immigrants, and they’re always pestering Gargamel, who is nothing less than an honest businessman. 4. Should there be more catfights among SF Fandom and/or authors? Yes. In fact, I think SF needs to announce a state of emergency and immediately start an internal war to cull the unworthy from its masses. There are too many people in this community who shouldn’t be here; we should do what we can to get rid of them, just like the Smurfs. 5. When I finally decide to post a photo of myself here, should I go with a beret or just merely a scarf wrapped around my neck in a diffident manner? Oh, Larry, you should always go for a beret. It is appropriately pretentious and, as the Internet has taught me, it makes it easy for people to dismiss you as nothing more than a Condescending Liberal Grad Student (even though you are nothing of the sort). Or you could go for a scarf if you just want people to think you drink coffee… 6. Does book porn make you think inappropriate literary thoughts? Yes. I’m currently on trial for indecent acts with a book or book-like object. This is the result of excessive amounts of images of book covers and people’s book collections, which are available all over the net… Make sure to check your local laws to avoid landing you in prison for overlying enjoying book porn. 7. If you have a Twitter account, how many literate squirrels do you follow on there? That I’m allowed to tell you about? One. But there are many others who wish to remain anonymous. They work for the Ministry of Knowledge in the central government of Squirreltopia. To tell you their names would jeopardize their missions… 8. Which genre of books should I review more often: pirates, westerns, ninjas, squirrels, Shatner? Shatner ninjas. Duh! 9. If you could get me to ask any question to any author, what would be the most inappropriate question that would come to mind and to which author would you want that question addressed? To China Mieville: “Have you ever considered writing Hentai?” 10. What was the best book that you ever read and ended up kicking across a room? I don’t kick books. I molest them and occasionally sniff their pages, but I believe it a sin to physically harm books. You can psychologically damage them, though. 11. What is more erotic, the sound of pages turning or the smell of an old book’s binding? The latter. But I’m weird. As previously mentioned, I sniff books. I sniff books a lot… That is all.
Book Review: In the Lion’s Mouth by Michael Flynn
(Note: This review was originally intended for publication, but certain professional and personal obligations prevented its completion. My apologies for its lateness, but I could not sit on this version any longer. Thanks to Abigail Nussbaum and others who viewed it in earlier incarnations.) Michael F. Flynn’s In the Lion’s Mouth is a space opera of the new variety, which is to say that it takes a genre that once stood for oversimplified adventure, sometimes of the Campbellian mode and redolent of the pulps, and infuses it with political intrigue and sociological awareness. The planets that make up the novel’s empire have ceased to be spaces only of conquest, adventure, and wonder, and become contained worlds connected by a common but divergent history. This is not to suggest that Flynn’s novel has abandoned the tropes of the adventure story, but that it brings a rigorous examination of the conditions of the empire in which that adventure occurs. In the Lion’s Mouth is compelling not because of its adventure elements, but because it is at once an exploration of the inner workings of its network of worlds and an almost satirical play on the conventions of the old, pulpy space opera. In the Lion’s Mouth alternates between two stages of Ravn Olafsdottr’s journeys through the labyrinth of the Lion’s Mouth, the bureau that oversees an exceedingly efficient class of assassins known as the Shadows, which has begun splintering into competing factions. The frame narrative concerns her attempts to convince a rival organization, the Hounds, to put their cards on the table of the civil war raging within the Lion’s Mouth. This narrative also forms a clever stage upon which Ravn can demonstrate her manipulative talents as she relates another tale through flashback. That second strand concerns an intimate of the one Hounds: husband and father Donovan buigh. Donovan, a former Shadow who had his mind split into multiple personalities by an as-yet-unknown agent, was, we learn, kidnapped by Ravn to fulfill, willingly or otherwise, a purpose in the war. As the frame narrative cuts into Donovan’s story, we also learn that Ravn is up to much more than truce and explanation. Rather, she’s up to something vaguely sinister. Flynn uses this structure to tell two unique tales of intrigue, both deeply political and both productive of an edge-of-your-seat reading experience that always has a surprise in store – even on the last page. The frame narrative, far from being merely a stage for Flynn’s “story time,” has a hidden agenda of its own, which Ravn and the Hounds eventually unearth. As Ravn remarks, in the heavy accent of Confederal, before embarking on the first piece of Donovan’s story: “This will be a tell to tangle your strings, oon my word; but I will give it to you in my oon way and reveal things in their oon time. Life is art, and must be artfully told, in noble deeds and fleshed in colors bold” (28). Here one might find Flynn’s satirical play on space opera, forming an astonishing tale of Donovan’s and the Shadows’ extraordinary feats in the Lion’s Mouth through Ravn’s (admitted) flawed retelling of the events: “Tell me,” [Bridget, the Hound] says, “how you can know the thoughts of Donovan buigh, when I doubt even he knows them so well?” The Confederal [Ravn] smiles. “You must grant me two things. The first is many weeks of conversation between us, in which he may have revealed his mind to me.” “That would be quite a revelation as I understand things. And second?” “And second, you must grant me some poetic license.” (53-54) Should we take Ravn’s words as gospel, as Donovan’s daughter believes we should (“I think she tells the truth. The Donovan she describes is a man I recognize. If she has embellished his thoughts, she has not done so falsely” (55)), even if she fills in the gaps with her own “poetic” imaginings? Or are the embellishments meant to distract us from the signs that something is amiss? For Ravn, it seems, the myth is a means to an end, not the property of a particular body politic to retell the story of history. In other words, the tropes of traditional space opera – the empire, the grand adventures, the loose attachments to actual mythological forms – are exposed by Ravn for their farcical nature: they are little more than devices of empire, broadly speaking. And for Ravn, that means it’s a device than can be retooled for different purposes, even to work against the established structures of power. In a way, In the Lion’s Mouth as new space opera is a response to Darko Suvin’s assertion that space opera is sub-literature – a literary form which has more in common with the elements of myth and fairy tales than with the literature of cognitive estrangement, inside of which he places science fiction. Flynn, whether intending to or not, sets the stage for an internally rigorous re-imagining of the space opera (though certainly he is not alone in this endeavor). This rigor is evident in a number of elements, but for the sake of space, I will only briefly discuss two: language and the world. While dialects are not new to science fiction, Flynn puts language to a particular use: manipulation. Ravn’s centrality in the narrative, as already mentioned, provides an ambiguous reading of events, but so too does her language. The consistency with which Flynn elaborates on Ravn’s accent is eventually made questionable by her intentional slippages: “It is a rhetorical trick, this abrupt dropping of the hooting accent, but no less effective for that. It freights her pronouncement with greater significance” (26). If it isn’t clear by the 26th page that Ravn is a questionable figure, then the numerous slippages of language to follow and her dubious alliances should do the trick. As much as the text is a performance, so too are the characters who are playing in it. But Flynn never fully reveals