viriconium (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} viriconium) wrote,@ 2008-10-11 11:39:00 |
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Vests, Zippers, Goggles, Gears
On Thursday night I went to SF In SF's steampunk reading, the only Litquake event I've felt like going to this week (nobody I know was interested in roadtripping to Palo Alto for Neil Gaiman. I miss Quan). Yes, the subculture is horrendously overplayed, the latest in a long series of embarrassing lifestyle choices for geeky fetishist types with a love of pseudo-Victorian garb (mixing styles from completely different periods without regard to how they clash). I came for the readings; the authors in attendance were Kage Baker, Joe Lansdale, and Rudy Rucker, and happily, none of them were particularly enamored with the subgenre (Lansdale in particular expressed his appreciation for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells but a distaste for cyberpunk, steampunk, and anything else called -punk). Stumping for the pro-side was some useless humorless convention organizer (with the ultra-gay name of Dick Bottoms -- that manages to be even gayer than the guy from Faith No More/Imperial Teen!) who had nothing to say besides vague comments about steampunk's essential optimism (oddly, there wasn't a mention of the strain of urban fantasy written by China Mieville or Ian MacLeod for the whole night, and only Baker briefly touched on the subject of Dickens) and plugs for his con.
Baker read half of "Speed, Speed The Cable" (available online here at the moment), a Company story which follows mid-19th Century agents of the Gentlemen's Speculative Society (including Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax) in their dealings with two footnotes to the history of technology: the trans-Atlantic cable (in its brief period of use before it was burnt out and wasn't touched again until after the Civil War) and Monturiol's wooden submarine. It's mildly amusing, although it contains little by the way of character, the attempt to draw a comparison to the Internet with respect to intellectual property theft is strained, and she brings no new perspective to a point about the inevitability of world-altering technological progress that has been made countless times before. Lansdale read an excerpt from some novel about Mark Twain and Jules Verne meeting a superintelligent seal who was created by the real life Doctor Moreau and hung around with the real life Captain Nemo. This was much less painful than the description makes it sound, and was helped by Lansdale's quick reading speed, pleasant Texas accent, and nice comic timing, though I'm pretty sure the novel would become tiresome if he didn't keep up the same level of invention throughout. Rucker read a momentum-killing section of The Hollow Earth and stopped just when he'd settled into the right rhythm for his drunken mooching Edgar Allen Poe.
As was to be expected, the Q&A session was inane [1], with such "questions" as, "Do you think there's any connection between steampunk and the New Weird?" The discussion kept being turned back to an incredibly pointless attempt to define steampunk despite everyone in the room having a different and conflicting idea of what's covered by the subgenre, and none of this was helped by host/moderator Terry Bisson, who seemed to be halfheartedly trying (and failing) to get an argument going between the panelists. But the venue was nice and comfortable, and Barry Malzberg is doing a reading next Saturday, which is probably worth checking out.
Meanwhile, Geraldine is reading tonight (Saturday) in the Mission (with Kim Addonizio, as part of the Litcrawl). Be there.
Richard Grant, Through The Heart
This is the only Grant novel I haven't read besides Another Green World (his most recent novel, and the only thing he has come out with in the past decade), so it made sense to check this out beforehand. A little background: Grant's career can be divided between his four mid-80s/early-90s SF fantasies, which are kind of post-apocalyptic (but in different ways) and all reference each other and may take place in the same world in a very distant sense (I know that certain phrases and songs definitely recur), and his three late-90s magical realist/urban fantasy books, which take place in the more-or-less modern day world and have character overlap. I don't know yet if Another Green World continues in this milieu or goes in a completely different direction, though the fact that it's from another publisher and appears to take place during World War II leads me to lean towards the latter.
On the future SF: I've bounced off Saraband Of Lost Time more times than I have bounced off any other novel. It took me almost a decade of regularly reading the first 50-100 pages, setting it down for 8-10 months, and starting over again before I finally soldiered through a little farther and found I couldn't put it down [2]. The momentum off of that helped me to get through Grant's Rumors Of Spring, which is longer and even slower to get going but still ends up magical. Views From The Oldest House is probably closer to Pynchon's Vineland than anything else I've read (way more than Tom Robbins, the most frequent critical comparison, for example) -- not to say that it's as good (Grant's prose is neither as pleasing nor as dense as Pynchon's), but the backwater countryside setting and the mix of idealism gone to seed and fascination with/horror of the power of demagoguery and fascism result in a similar feel.
As for the modern day books, Tex And Molly In The Afterlife takes a premise that could have been cheesy (an old hippie couple dies and sticks around to foil some evil developers) and treats it seriously (though not without a great deal of black humor), illustrating their worldview without snobbery or scorn and rendering the intimacies of a long-time couple -- their personal language, the minor or obscure things significant only to the two of them -- in a way that rings true and has all the weight of shared history it should have. In The Land Of Winter might contain the least supernatural content of all of Grant's books, despite starring a practicing witch. Pippa Rede is a wiccan single mother who manages to get by, and despite being new agey and rather dim, she makes a great, incredibly loving mom; when a conservative born-again mother and some dubious "experts" get the authorities to take away Pippa's daughter due to the standard witchcraft satanic abuse "harmful environment" allegations, Pippa is horrified and shattered, and she determinedly takes any and every step necessary to get her daughter back, supported by a few pagans, burnouts, and civil liberties wonks who are sympathetic to her plight. Kaspian Lost is a coming-of-age novel focusing on a minor character from Winter, Kaspian, the sullen, rebellious stepson of the fundamentalist bitch. He undergoes a mysterious disappearance that may be connected to leprechauns and/or elves and/or aliens, and in the wake of the consequences (he's shipped away to a special school for behavior modification), he works through issues of identity, morality, politics, and (most of all, as is to be expected of a teenage boy) sex.
Grant won the Philip K. Dick Award for Through The Heart, and he strikes me as a very Philip K. Dick Award-style author; he's interested in the ways technology affects and shapes people's everyday lives, he's politically liberal in a way that informs his fiction (ecological concerns, for example, drive many of his plots, especially with the enormous forest whose will manifests itself in Rumors Of Spring, not to mention the motivations of the dead hippie protagonists Tex And Molly) but rarely gets preachy about it, and he's generally an excellent, compassionate, sincere, and mildly but constantly experimental writer (Views, especially, does some surprising and fantastic things with narration). Another plus: all of Grant's books are filled with strong, rounded women and gay men (few lesbians, unfortunately) as main/viewpoint characters and in important roles.
Through The Heart is the last of the future SF novels, and by far the most straightforward of the lot, mainly owing to the fact that it follows one viewpoint character instead of juggling the perspectives of a dozen characters with elaborate interlocking subplots (as Grant does in Saraband, Rumors, and Views). It's a richly imagined coming-of-age story about a young boy named Kem. Kem's father sells him to the Oasis, a vast city-size mobile mechanical landship (I remember one reviewer describing it as like a Jawa sandcrawler, which gives you the idea) inhabited by the Crew, who service the ship and keep it moving on its constant yearly circuit around the world (which is mainly desert), and Residents, who live on the Oasis because it provides some form of treatment for the crying, a deadly STD with all sorts of social stigma attached. Kem's circumstances change frequently; whenever he thinks he has an idea of his place on the Oasis, something changes and he's reassigned to a different job or forced to reevaluate something he considered to be true. He falls for a girl from afar, contrives over time to get close to her, and learns that she's similarly interested in him. When they do finally get together, he's disappointed when she turns out to be a human being, with her own interests and likes and dislikes. Yet Grant doesn't stop at the "Wow, Women Are People Too" point, and she doesn't just exist to provide this lesson for Kem; Grant takes stock figures (the gay best friend with a bit of a crush on the protagonist, the kindly old dying man, the boss who mentors Kem and treats him like a son, the mysterious intense stoic captain) and complicates them, fleshing them out with history and humanity. When Kem chances to meet his father and one of his sisters again, he comes to understand the economic realities of the lives of his family members, and how deeply the act affected them; there are no fireworks, no tearful reunions or apologies, just the gradual realization that like everybody else, Kem's father is a fallible human being with his own childhood, his own imperfect first love, his own compromises made for survival, his own soul-gnawing mistakes.
Other good points: the chilling sequence when Kem discovers a talent for manipulation when he is given one day to infiltrate a city, find an adolescent girl and boy with very specific qualities, and convince them to sign up with the Oasis of their own free will. Also, there's a moment when Kem's queer best friend seems to have come down with the crying and I remembered that this was from 1991 and thought, oh, no, painfully obvious AIDS metaphor ahoy; I was relieved to find that the scene was a total red herring (and, eventually, that it had an important function beyond Goosebumps-style he's-dying-no-he-isn't chapter cliffhanger shock), and that the crying plays a much more elaborate symbolic role in the world of the story that I would never spoil because it's great. I could see this book finding a wider audience if it were reprinted and marketed as YA, with its anti-bildungsroman revolutionary ending-that's-really-a-beginning. I mean, see here:
I would have loved this when I was young. I know that I love it now.
The author's note at the end reveals that in addition to having started work on Tex And Molly, Grant had at this point finished another novel, Ravens, about an aging motorcycle gang. Maybe he couldn't find a publisher for it? It's dispiriting to think that there are more completed Grant novels out there that will never see the light of day for no good reason.
[1] Here is the sole close-to-worthwhile observation of the night: in Dracula, they're fighting an ancient evil using cutting-edge technology. PROTO-SF HORROR!
[2] I must stress that there's nothing especially daunting about the book or anything; the experience was a personal fluke, and I wouldn't have even kept trying if it hadn't been interesting enough to continue.
On Thursday night I went to SF In SF's steampunk reading, the only Litquake event I've felt like going to this week (nobody I know was interested in roadtripping to Palo Alto for Neil Gaiman. I miss Quan). Yes, the subculture is horrendously overplayed, the latest in a long series of embarrassing lifestyle choices for geeky fetishist types with a love of pseudo-Victorian garb (mixing styles from completely different periods without regard to how they clash). I came for the readings; the authors in attendance were Kage Baker, Joe Lansdale, and Rudy Rucker, and happily, none of them were particularly enamored with the subgenre (Lansdale in particular expressed his appreciation for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells but a distaste for cyberpunk, steampunk, and anything else called -punk). Stumping for the pro-side was some useless humorless convention organizer (with the ultra-gay name of Dick Bottoms -- that manages to be even gayer than the guy from Faith No More/Imperial Teen!) who had nothing to say besides vague comments about steampunk's essential optimism (oddly, there wasn't a mention of the strain of urban fantasy written by China Mieville or Ian MacLeod for the whole night, and only Baker briefly touched on the subject of Dickens) and plugs for his con.
Baker read half of "Speed, Speed The Cable" (available online here at the moment), a Company story which follows mid-19th Century agents of the Gentlemen's Speculative Society (including Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax) in their dealings with two footnotes to the history of technology: the trans-Atlantic cable (in its brief period of use before it was burnt out and wasn't touched again until after the Civil War) and Monturiol's wooden submarine. It's mildly amusing, although it contains little by the way of character, the attempt to draw a comparison to the Internet with respect to intellectual property theft is strained, and she brings no new perspective to a point about the inevitability of world-altering technological progress that has been made countless times before. Lansdale read an excerpt from some novel about Mark Twain and Jules Verne meeting a superintelligent seal who was created by the real life Doctor Moreau and hung around with the real life Captain Nemo. This was much less painful than the description makes it sound, and was helped by Lansdale's quick reading speed, pleasant Texas accent, and nice comic timing, though I'm pretty sure the novel would become tiresome if he didn't keep up the same level of invention throughout. Rucker read a momentum-killing section of The Hollow Earth and stopped just when he'd settled into the right rhythm for his drunken mooching Edgar Allen Poe.
As was to be expected, the Q&A session was inane [1], with such "questions" as, "Do you think there's any connection between steampunk and the New Weird?" The discussion kept being turned back to an incredibly pointless attempt to define steampunk despite everyone in the room having a different and conflicting idea of what's covered by the subgenre, and none of this was helped by host/moderator Terry Bisson, who seemed to be halfheartedly trying (and failing) to get an argument going between the panelists. But the venue was nice and comfortable, and Barry Malzberg is doing a reading next Saturday, which is probably worth checking out.
Meanwhile, Geraldine is reading tonight (Saturday) in the Mission (with Kim Addonizio, as part of the Litcrawl). Be there.
Richard Grant, Through The Heart
This is the only Grant novel I haven't read besides Another Green World (his most recent novel, and the only thing he has come out with in the past decade), so it made sense to check this out beforehand. A little background: Grant's career can be divided between his four mid-80s/early-90s SF fantasies, which are kind of post-apocalyptic (but in different ways) and all reference each other and may take place in the same world in a very distant sense (I know that certain phrases and songs definitely recur), and his three late-90s magical realist/urban fantasy books, which take place in the more-or-less modern day world and have character overlap. I don't know yet if Another Green World continues in this milieu or goes in a completely different direction, though the fact that it's from another publisher and appears to take place during World War II leads me to lean towards the latter.
On the future SF: I've bounced off Saraband Of Lost Time more times than I have bounced off any other novel. It took me almost a decade of regularly reading the first 50-100 pages, setting it down for 8-10 months, and starting over again before I finally soldiered through a little farther and found I couldn't put it down [2]. The momentum off of that helped me to get through Grant's Rumors Of Spring, which is longer and even slower to get going but still ends up magical. Views From The Oldest House is probably closer to Pynchon's Vineland than anything else I've read (way more than Tom Robbins, the most frequent critical comparison, for example) -- not to say that it's as good (Grant's prose is neither as pleasing nor as dense as Pynchon's), but the backwater countryside setting and the mix of idealism gone to seed and fascination with/horror of the power of demagoguery and fascism result in a similar feel.
As for the modern day books, Tex And Molly In The Afterlife takes a premise that could have been cheesy (an old hippie couple dies and sticks around to foil some evil developers) and treats it seriously (though not without a great deal of black humor), illustrating their worldview without snobbery or scorn and rendering the intimacies of a long-time couple -- their personal language, the minor or obscure things significant only to the two of them -- in a way that rings true and has all the weight of shared history it should have. In The Land Of Winter might contain the least supernatural content of all of Grant's books, despite starring a practicing witch. Pippa Rede is a wiccan single mother who manages to get by, and despite being new agey and rather dim, she makes a great, incredibly loving mom; when a conservative born-again mother and some dubious "experts" get the authorities to take away Pippa's daughter due to the standard witchcraft satanic abuse "harmful environment" allegations, Pippa is horrified and shattered, and she determinedly takes any and every step necessary to get her daughter back, supported by a few pagans, burnouts, and civil liberties wonks who are sympathetic to her plight. Kaspian Lost is a coming-of-age novel focusing on a minor character from Winter, Kaspian, the sullen, rebellious stepson of the fundamentalist bitch. He undergoes a mysterious disappearance that may be connected to leprechauns and/or elves and/or aliens, and in the wake of the consequences (he's shipped away to a special school for behavior modification), he works through issues of identity, morality, politics, and (most of all, as is to be expected of a teenage boy) sex.
Grant won the Philip K. Dick Award for Through The Heart, and he strikes me as a very Philip K. Dick Award-style author; he's interested in the ways technology affects and shapes people's everyday lives, he's politically liberal in a way that informs his fiction (ecological concerns, for example, drive many of his plots, especially with the enormous forest whose will manifests itself in Rumors Of Spring, not to mention the motivations of the dead hippie protagonists Tex And Molly) but rarely gets preachy about it, and he's generally an excellent, compassionate, sincere, and mildly but constantly experimental writer (Views, especially, does some surprising and fantastic things with narration). Another plus: all of Grant's books are filled with strong, rounded women and gay men (few lesbians, unfortunately) as main/viewpoint characters and in important roles.
And his chapters
tend to end
like this.
tend to end
like this.
Through The Heart is the last of the future SF novels, and by far the most straightforward of the lot, mainly owing to the fact that it follows one viewpoint character instead of juggling the perspectives of a dozen characters with elaborate interlocking subplots (as Grant does in Saraband, Rumors, and Views). It's a richly imagined coming-of-age story about a young boy named Kem. Kem's father sells him to the Oasis, a vast city-size mobile mechanical landship (I remember one reviewer describing it as like a Jawa sandcrawler, which gives you the idea) inhabited by the Crew, who service the ship and keep it moving on its constant yearly circuit around the world (which is mainly desert), and Residents, who live on the Oasis because it provides some form of treatment for the crying, a deadly STD with all sorts of social stigma attached. Kem's circumstances change frequently; whenever he thinks he has an idea of his place on the Oasis, something changes and he's reassigned to a different job or forced to reevaluate something he considered to be true. He falls for a girl from afar, contrives over time to get close to her, and learns that she's similarly interested in him. When they do finally get together, he's disappointed when she turns out to be a human being, with her own interests and likes and dislikes. Yet Grant doesn't stop at the "Wow, Women Are People Too" point, and she doesn't just exist to provide this lesson for Kem; Grant takes stock figures (the gay best friend with a bit of a crush on the protagonist, the kindly old dying man, the boss who mentors Kem and treats him like a son, the mysterious intense stoic captain) and complicates them, fleshing them out with history and humanity. When Kem chances to meet his father and one of his sisters again, he comes to understand the economic realities of the lives of his family members, and how deeply the act affected them; there are no fireworks, no tearful reunions or apologies, just the gradual realization that like everybody else, Kem's father is a fallible human being with his own childhood, his own imperfect first love, his own compromises made for survival, his own soul-gnawing mistakes.
Other good points: the chilling sequence when Kem discovers a talent for manipulation when he is given one day to infiltrate a city, find an adolescent girl and boy with very specific qualities, and convince them to sign up with the Oasis of their own free will. Also, there's a moment when Kem's queer best friend seems to have come down with the crying and I remembered that this was from 1991 and thought, oh, no, painfully obvious AIDS metaphor ahoy; I was relieved to find that the scene was a total red herring (and, eventually, that it had an important function beyond Goosebumps-style he's-dying-no-he-isn't chapter cliffhanger shock), and that the crying plays a much more elaborate symbolic role in the world of the story that I would never spoil because it's great. I could see this book finding a wider audience if it were reprinted and marketed as YA, with its anti-bildungsroman revolutionary ending-that's-really-a-beginning. I mean, see here:
People were dying all over the place; the trail that Kem had followed here was a bloody one. This made him more angry than sad -- angry, he guessed, because he wanted all the deaths to make sense, to mean something, the way other things meant something. Sentences, symbols, crumbled fountains, lines on a chart, irises blooming in an old garden -- all of these things meant something other than themselves, and it seemed to Kem that death ought to stand for something too. There ought to be a pattern, as there were patterns in a story, the kind of pattern Tallheron had once talked about: how a disease in a story was not a particular disease but disease, the idea in its broadest sense, the whole pattern and not the part. When a character died in a story it was like that; it was not a single death but death, it stood for something and there was a reason for it. Death was not pointless, in stories. Kem wanted life to be like that. He wanted life to make sense the way stories made sense. He wanted to understand it, and he wanted to understand why people he had known and loved had died. (p. 317)
I would have loved this when I was young. I know that I love it now.
The author's note at the end reveals that in addition to having started work on Tex And Molly, Grant had at this point finished another novel, Ravens, about an aging motorcycle gang. Maybe he couldn't find a publisher for it? It's dispiriting to think that there are more completed Grant novels out there that will never see the light of day for no good reason.
[1] Here is the sole close-to-worthwhile observation of the night: in Dracula, they're fighting an ancient evil using cutting-edge technology. PROTO-SF HORROR!
[2] I must stress that there's nothing especially daunting about the book or anything; the experience was a personal fluke, and I wouldn't have even kept trying if it hadn't been interesting enough to continue.
