Luke comes in colours

Just happened to turn on Blade the TV series, and there was a character who looked just like Hillary Clinton, in intensive care, which seemed oddly apt. Anyway, that’s enough reading American political commentary from random pulp gleanings; instead, I’m going to turn to reading the future from random SFnal conversations, which I suspect will be more rewarding.

Or rather, not so much reading the future as – having spent Saturday at the very stimulating and really most excellent PicoCon – pondering why science fiction’s utopian ways can actually be read as working against any sort of future (or at least, cultural survival) at all.

SF is a literature of ideas, granted – but those ideas are for the most part expressed in things. Scientific principle does not good drama make; but scientific principle expressed through giant shiny space ships, galaxy spanning comms technology, nifty hi-tech gizmos, groovy talking robots, astonishing weapons of all shapes and sizes, consciousness capturing silver tubes and so on rocks – I think many will agree – like an out of control battleship.

And that’s problematic, because it opens a profoundly consumerist trap which SF all too often falls into. Narrative advancement happens when things are acquired or used – so, characters go on an odd kind of galactic shopping trip to assemble the scientific-theory expressing things they need to advance to the next level.

Let’s take a random selection of different SF stories, and see how they look read in that way. Star Wars? Luke gets mature by acquiring his own spaceship, coming across like a suburban teenager spinning around in his first car (in that context, ‘reach out with your feelings’ becomes one of the greatest chat up lines in history, a precursor to the magnificent sperm-and-egg meeting sequence that is the torpedoing of the Death Star; Luke heading home afterwards bathed in a post-orgasm glow much like his suburban self after a fantastic snog at an all night party in someone else’s holidaying parents’ house – ‘I can’t remember her name, but MY GOD THE HEAVENS EXPLODED!’)

Or, at the more serious end of things – Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’. Unstoppably cosmic in both aim and execution, and the work of one of the very few dazzlingly authentic visionaries to grace either SF itself or (in fact) 20th Century fiction in general, it does however still define future versions of man largely in terms of the *things* they make and use, and the problems they have making and using those things.

Well, I’m not going to carry on, because it’s late and I’m tired. And, reading back over the Star Wars bit, staying up too late last night to watch ‘Conan The Destroyer’ until the Bit With The Animated Ghost Pteranodon has clearly done odd things to my understanding of SF. And, of course, two examples do not a thesis – or even a trend – make.

But nonetheless I think the argument’s an interesting one to ponder. Stated simply, it would be: Science Fiction is a literature of technology. Technology is incarnate in useful things, made to achieve certain clearly defined goals. So, the acquisition and manipulation of such things to achieve personal advantage will be key to the action of many SF plots.

That’s very close to the consumerist worldview – ‘buy this thing, and your world will improve through its agency’ – and it’s also the point that makes me wonder how constructive a role SF as it currently works can play in the great world saving debates of the years to come.

Beyond politics, we’re facing a species crisis; global warming. That crisis has come about largely because we like making and using things. Not content with an un-utilised world, we’ve instrumentalised everything we can lay our hands on and – a direct result of our great technological prowess – completely buggered up the world.

In this context, how useful is a fiction largely predicated on – er – making and using things? Not such a positive presence, I would suspect, but that very negativity opens up fascinating possibilities for the future of scientific fiction.

Far from being a propaganda of triumphal instrumentalisation, an eco-conscious scientific fiction could come to embody a kind of instrumental minimalism, showing how we can create viable futures rooted in a use of less, rather than more, to achieve our ends – and with that could come a corresponding re-definition of what those ends could be.

Breaking the past, escaping the past

What to say, what to say? The perennial problem of blogging – but sometimes, an entry writes itself, and tonight is one of those nights, because I’ve been reading Steve Cockayne’s marvellous, green-haunted novel, ‘The Good People’.

It’s about a boy called Kenneth Storey, who – it seems – either has a rich fantasy life, or is living in a very traditional kind of children’s book, one that might have been written by a less talented disciple of Rudyard Kipling sometime in the 50s.

For the most part, it’s set in the 40s. In the distance, there is World War II and the Blitz; and so Kenny and his brother retreat into a faerie dream of rural life. The land of Arboria opens itself up, first to them, and to young evacuees Janny and Nadia.

But, in fiction, nowhere can be Paradise; drama needs conflict, and that conflict comes as first Robert, and then Janny and Nadia begin to grow up. As ever, maturity brings complexity; Kenny sees Arboria change to accommodate that complexity, but also slowly begins to realise that, beyond a certain point, such accommodation is impossible.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the plot – to find out the rest, you’ll have to read the book yourself. Brutally honest in its evocation of the rot attendant on curdled innocence, and the ways in which growth can become an existential threat to such willed ignorance, ‘The Good People’ dissects such escapism with a relentless, surgical determination.

But it would be wrong just to say that the book is just a condemnation of fantasy. It’s also an elegy, for a certain kind of England; a place where there was in fact no such thing as fantasy, but rather a living, breathing folklore, passed on from generation to generation and springing from a very specific kind of relationship with place.

The decline of Kenny’s grandmother becomes a way of thinking about the end of that kind of deep-rooted identity. She can be seen as a keeper of ancient wisdom; but, as the book progresses, she falls into decay, senility and at last a slow and gentle death.

Kenny is unable to receive more than a few scraps of knowledge from her, and that which he does receive - misunderstood, largely contextless - poisons him. Modernity demands movement. The kind of deep-rooted, entirely place-specific maturity that she represents, and that he aspires to, is no longer viable.

Robert exemplifies this need for mobility. He can only grow up by disappearing first to a job in a neighbouring town, and then – through call up – to fight battles in foreign lands. Kenny – who refuses to leave his ancestral home, his ancestral place, and who understands Robert’s departure as a kind of enslavement – is left without a viable path to adulthood.

Kenny’s curdled innocence isn’t just a function of an unhealthy relationship with fantasy; it’s also rooted in the modern world’s rootlessness. In the end, that insecurity claims Robert too, as the family business that he has inherited collapses in the face of international competition. His version of the local is just as fragile as Kenny’s, although its fall is far less destructive.

More than just a story about a willed refusal to mature, ‘The Good People’ can be read as a criticism of the conditions which make a refusal to change beyond a certain, personally defined point dangerous.

Climaxing with senility and decay, containing murder and loss, the book uses a final, backwards view of an entirely fractured Faerie to condemn a modernity that makes deeply rooted investment in the past a killing impediment rather than a source of joy and security.

Of course, that’s only one, partial reading of the book. It’s too complex, too subtle to resist easy, reductive definition. So, there’s only one thing to do - go and check it out yourself!

Prove to my daughter that you love her

Well, last night was a gig by the mighty Thomas Truax, so today - by the power of YouTube!!!! - he’s helping allumination celebrate Valentine’s Day. Happy romancing, all! May the tentacles of love rise from their endless dreaming beneath the Pacific and penetrate the hearts of both you and your male, female or otherly sexed partners…

Pound 1, Brancusi 0

Just spent a lovely weekend in Venice, with H; great food, great boozing, lovely company (of course), much architectural beauty, and also of course much time spent looking at art and (as ever) following Ezra Pound around.

This year’s Ezra stalking was particularly successful; our hotel was just round the corner from his and Olga Rudge’s house, and just next door to the quayside where he’d considered throwing the proofs of his first book into the Grand Canal – and, with it, his sense of poetic vocation. He remembered the moment in Canto 76 thus, standing by the:

 

‘…soap smooth posts where San Vio
meets with il Grande Canale
between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos
shd I chuck the lot into the tide-water?
                 le bozze “A Lume Spento”’

I re-enacted the moment, to minimal dramatic effect. Anyway, from there we hit the Guggenheim Museum, amongst other things taking a look at the Brancusi ‘Bird in Space’ they have there. Here’s that:

And it is, of course, rather lovely. But I also found I had a bit of a problem with it.

My problem is that (this version of) ‘Bird in Space’ an entirely optimistic piece of art. It’s about positive, upward flight; a utopian sense of the possibilities of being; an expression of a desire for, and a faith in the possibility of, transcendence. Brancusi described it as a ‘project before being enlarged to fill the vault of the sky’.

That kind of thing used to inspire me, but now it unsettles me. If the 20^th Century was about anything, it was about the problems of transcendence, about the way that transcendent thinking can so easily create an other that needs to be eradicated before paradise can come about.

Brancusi’s work rejects the gross and earthly; in art perhaps laudable, but when that same impulse is translated into politics, and used to image a new, purer reality, one that can be real if only the dross of this world is destroyed – well, you know where that leads.

Which lead me back to Pound. He spent World War II in Italy, broadcasting to America on behalf of the Fascists. After the war, he was locked up in a prison camp near Pisa, and only spared execution by a plea of insanity, which led to 12 years in an asylum in Washington DC.

He then returned to Venice, where he lived out the rest of his life – along the way apologising to a visiting Allen Ginsberg for the ‘stupid, suburban sin of anti-semitism’. The last years of his life were characterised by an almost unbroken silence.

His sense of regret also found expression in one of the final sections of ‘The Cantos’ –

 ‘I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
      Let the wind speak
                   that is paradise

Let the Gods forgive what I
                have made
Let those I love try to forgive
                what I have made.’

Begun as a transcendent project, in the full bloom of High Modernism, ‘The Cantos’ came to embody a rejection of that sense of transcendence. Pound lived the mistakes of the 20th Century, and learned from them.

Brancusi sought to purify; Pound understood what that purification could lead to, and pointed his reader back to direct, passive engagement with what’s already there (‘Do not move / Let the wind speak’) rather than an active attempt to create Paradise by carving away and discarding everything that doesn’t deserve to be part of it.

Why Fantasy isn’t crap, and SF isn’t better

Hal Duncan has been posting very interestingly about sub-divides in genre lately; in particular, that (and other, related conversations) have made me think about the divide between Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has led me to articles / books which seem to position Fantasy writing as being innately conservative, and Science Fiction as being innately radical.

This seems to be based on a particular argument about the nature of Science Fiction. SF is a literature rooted in the procedures and achievements of scientific method; scientific method is driven by an entirely rational quest for a true description of the universe; that understanding, once instrumentalised, will lead to transcendent change of one kind or another.

Therefore SF is at least the most effectively exploratory fiction we have, at most a key component of a broader, transcendental project that has major implications for our development as a species. Of course, SF can play a strongly critical role in that project (witness ‘Frankenstein’, for example), but the project itself remains both valid and exciting – humanity’s last, best hope for progress.

Fantasy, by contrast, is perceived as being innately conservative. It is rooted not in engagement with reality but in abstraction from reality; further, for the most part it takes its content cues not from the future but from the past. Its view of the past – the argument goes – tends to be both idealised and politically naïve, frequently endorsing dubious strongmen, cosy dictatorships and an over-fluffy view of feudal life in general.

Even where it enters the present, it escapes reality rather than engages with it, by privileging unreal powers / events over actual engagement with actual things. Harry Potter is not a scientist, and in fact is anti-science in that his narrative problem solving is rooted in things that could never happen, rather than things that are demonstrably and rationally true.

This kind of condemnation of Fantasy hinges on a contrast between SF and Fantasy that – for me at least – is based on both a misunderstanding of what fiction is, and a failure to engage with the world around us as it currently works.

Taking the first, first. Fiction is not real; it is not the world. It is ink on paper, arranged to create story; it is a partial refraction of one person’s understanding of the world, an imitation of reality created to communicate a given narrative argument. It is inevitably subjective and partial. It can include science, but it is not in itself scientific, because it can never achieve the objectivity of exploration that is core to the method of science.

As such, Science Fiction can act as propaganda for science, but it cannot honestly lay claim to the realist authority that is innate in science. The fundamental aims of science – the development and propagation of an objectively true, reproducible worldview – are in opposition to the fundamental aims of fiction – the development and propagation of a personally true, unique worldview.

In this context, the claim that SF is superior to Fantasy because it is a more accurate reflection of the potentials and realities of the world is meaningless. Science can seed fiction, but it can’t (by definition) be fiction.

Given this, how can one argue that a science fiction novel that explores the political and emotional ramifications of (say) a certain set of assumptions about the possibilities of science (as, for example, the Foundation series does) is superior to a fantasy novel that explores the political and emotional ramifications of a certain set of assumptions about political theory (as, for example, China Mieville’s Bas Lag novels do)?

Taking the second. We live in a world where fantastic rhetoric is far more successful than scientific rhetoric. You don’t believe me? Watch some ads. Rooted in Surrealist shock tactics, the language of advertising is built on entirely fantasised imagery that presents individual brands as the kinds of crusading , transcendental superheroes that critics of Fantasy condemn. More broadly, check out modern political rhetoric. There, too, is fantasy; a conscious, ongoing project to present the world as politicians would like it to be, rather than to engage with it as it is.

Here – and elsewhere – the unreal is overlaid on the real, in service of entirely partisan ends. Science is powerless here; scientific method presupposes an innate respect for a commonly accepted, demonstrably true and entirely objective set of truths. That’s a respect that modern public fantasists just don’t have. Science is a truth that cannot hurt or hinder them, because they feel no need to even acknowledge the results of its judicious researches.

Fantasy is more directly useful here. Writers of Fantasy – by definition – spend much time pondering the relationship between Fantasy and Reality. At it’s most basic level, it’s in service of questions like ‘How can I keep people reading the adventures of Thringor the Barbarian when he’s acting in a world that people have no real reference points for?’.

As it becomes more sophisticated, it leads to questions like ‘How can I use these transparently unreal things Thringor faces as a means of commenting on / amplifying the very real emotional, political, or other issues he has to deal with, which are in themselves reflections of real world arguments I find engaging or important?’.

That knowledge of the uses of Fantasy is key to unpicking the fantastic in the modern world; in some ways, the fantasised is so prevalent in modernity that it demands Fantasy, rather than SF, as a response to it. Fantasised fables of modernity from writers like M. John Harrison and Joel Lane, J. G. Ballard and Conrad Williams, offer guides to modernity that are as pertinent and revealing as anything more SFnal writers have created.

So anyway, that’s enough for one blog entry. In writing the above, I’ve realised that there’s a whole lot more that can be said about the relationship between Fantasy, SF and Fiction in general, but unfortunately that’s going to have to come out in future posts, as time is limited today. Hopefully the above is thought provoking; and hopefully it also works as the beginnings of both a defense of Fantasy and an attempt to break down any argument that posits SF as an innately superior mode of fiction.