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!

On becoming an optimist

Well, I wasn’t going to blog tonight (sleeping being very preferable), but while reading in the bath I’ve just had a fascinating collision between three interesting writers, so I thought I’d do a quick post.

So – I’d been planning to start on a novel, but couldn’t be bothered, so took Adorno’s ‘Minimalia Moralia’ in with me. It comes in bite sized chunks that are always deeply thought provoking – perfect! And the paragraph I started on was profoundly and unexpectedly resonant with some other interesting recent reading.

Adorno is talking about the grandiose posturing of ‘spiritual giants’, and notes that it is built on ‘a sublimity ever ready to trample inhumanly on anything as small as mere existence’ (para 53). A page later, he describes the reductive nature of idealist thinking, commenting that it ‘reduce[s] everything in its path as unceremoniously to its basic essence as do soldiers the women of a captured town’, before positing an alternate, more humane way of seeing – ‘contemplation without violence’ – that ‘presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself; a distanced nearness’ (para 54).

That first of all resonated very profoundly with John Gray’s fascinating new book, ‘Black Mass’, wherein he criticises much modern political posturing as being spilt religion; a series of poses that aspire to disinterested, rational liberalism but in fact achieve and are built on a kind of dehumanising apocalypticness, one that redefines mass slaughter as moral good on the ironic basis that it’s eradicating evil from the world. Surely sublime and inhuman trampling in all its terrifying action?

Secondly, it took me back to therapy maven Carl Roger’s ‘On Becoming a Person’, that I’ve been using to (rather surprisingly) help me think about mobile phones. Roger posits an open and engaged state of being as a human ideal; his sense of a live lived fluidly and receptively is absolutely opposite to the kind of self-indulgent, destructive posturing that both Adorno and Gray identify so clearly, and is in some ways an exemplification of Adorno’s ‘contemplation without violence’ in action.

No sublime conclusions to draw beyond ‘how interesting…’ – and now that’s typed up I’m off to bed, feeling thanks to those three coming together much more optimistic than I did last night. Good night!

Pulp street indeterminacy

Well, it’s blog-o-clock again, and today’s pulp fiction pondering has been triggered by an exceptionally interesting essay about different modes of poetry by Reality Street supremo and exceptionally cool modern poet Ken Edwards. Here’s some of his poetry; and here’s the essay.

Edwards launches a sustained assault on systems of reading that privilege a (relatively conservative) mainstream over a (relatively experimental) ‘parallel tradition’, taking as his exemplars competing poems by Matthew Sweeney and Allen Fisher.

The essay’s well worth reading, not just to find out more about modern poetry but to be reminded that the most powerful system of discourse operating within a given field isn’t necessarily the most *right* system, and that such systems can achieve their dominant position for a variety of different reasons, many of them having nothing to with quality of debate or inherent worth.

But something pulpy leapt out at me as well. I was particularly taken by Edwards’ definition of Fisher’s poem as a ‘nonequilibrium structure’. That’s a scientific term; such a structure is one that requires ‘a continuing input of energy to sustain [its] ordered structure’. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one such structure; for Edwards, Fisher’s poem is another, because it requires the ‘continuous creative input of the reader to constellate its energy’.

That energy is needed because Fisher has, very deliberately, avoided writing a poem that resolves into a single fixed and coherent meaning or image set. Rather, it creates an open field of thought and feeling within which the reader is free to play, creating his or her own definition of what the poem is or could be. Deliberately incomplete, Fisher’s work demands the collaboration of the reader to attain one of many possible final forms.

That tends to be the kind of poetry that I prefer, and oddly enough it set me thinking about the visionary pulp writers who lie at the heart of so much of what’s interesting in the great tradition of SF and Fantasy.

There’s an incompleteness to much of their achievement too, but not necessarily such a conscious one; it springs from overwhelming indulgence of deep and exclusive personal obsessions, or an only partial attention to key aspects of the craft of writing, rather than from in-depth attention to literary theory, the deleterious effects of crumbily obvious poetry, and so on.

The Pulp Furies – ferociously obsessive, searingly primal, utterly unputdownable and at their best unforgettably resonant and evocative – created a literature that remains addictively engaging precisely because of its often lopsided incompleteness.

Hurling unhinged imagery, berserk plotting and often terrifying prose out into the void, for the most part not even noticing the classic procedures of fiction, still less paying any lip service to them, they created their own ongoing nonequilibrium structures.

Fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years later, we’re still engaging with those structures, still finding them fresh precisely because of their failure to resolve into any final meaning. As readers, we collaborate with them, filling the gaps that obsession left with our own obsessions and thus finding life in them where other, more formally achieved works come across as decaying, if not dead.

Oh, and I was rooting around on his web page because of this excerpt from his new book, ‘Nostalgia for Unknown Cities’, available here - astonishing writing that I haven’t properly got to grips with, but that struck me on first reading as a kind of assembly code for an entirely personal fantastic.

Science, the future and my Luddite superpowers

Well, it’s been a frustrating time for me technologically over the last week or so; I seem to have developed some kind of weird anti-modernity super power.

On return from America, I discovered that my boiler had stopped working; a plumber came and ‘repaired’ it last Friday, but it’s still not going. Last Thursday, my laptop blew itself up, losing the ability to open Windows. I spent the whole of tonight completely rebuilding it, which hasn’t really achieved very much; it’s moving with glacial slowness, and currently busy pretending it doesn’t have wireless. Even my phone has joined in the fun; today, its mail server started crashing. I didn’t even know my phone HAD a mail server.

Anyway… none of this has detracted from wildly pleasurable memories of last week’s convention. In particular, I’ve been pondering science fiction and realism, after a very interesting bar-side conversation with Ted Chiang.

As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve used this blog in part to mount an ongoing argument about the relationship between realist and genre (specifically science fiction and fantasy) fiction. I’ve argued that in some ways genre fiction is less deceived than more ‘literary’, realist fiction, given its deep honesty about its own unreal status. It’s the literature of things that never happen (to borrow from a phrase from M. John Harrison), and at its best it has fascinating fun with the metafictional status that that stance gives it.

This was the argument I was making to TC last weekend (imbetween ranting about Powell and Pressburger, themselves the most metafictional of filmmakers, and weaving to the bar to get more discussion lubricating pints in), and the one that he undercut. As he pointed out, the above falls down when confronted with the absolute literal mindedness that underpins science fiction.

At its purest, science fiction insists on a deep reality of response to the world. Far from escaping into fiction, it consistently grounds itself in the most current scientific thinking. The apparatus of science fiction might be speculative – space ships, AIs, aliens, etc – but that apparatus is hung on experimentally proven fact. Given this, science fiction can be read as more direct in its engagement with reality than even the most realist fiction, grounded as it is in an absolute, exclusive obsession with the root structures of the world.

So where does that leave my metafictional take on genre? For one, I think it helps create a way of distinguishing between fantasy and science fiction, rooted not so much in genre trappings (if the protagonist flies by space ship it must be sf, if by dragon fantasy) but rather in approaches to reality. Fiction steps into fantasy when it bends reality to its own ends; but it becomes science fiction when it refuses that consolation, instead taking an entirely rigorous approach to reality as a grounding base for the wildest narrative mayhem.

But if I had a time machine I might pop back to the bar and point out that on one very important level SF remains metafiction, insisting as it does on an extrapolation from, rather than a direct reflection of, current scientific thinking. It asks ‘given that the world is like this – what might we become?’ – stepping out of direct realism into the most self-aware, highly imaginative speculation as it does so.

Oh, and for the sake of comparison, here’s someone who refuses to extrapolate from science into tomorrow, finding meaning instead in its intersections with the directly lived world - the wonderful scientist-poet Rebecca Elson. Her single collection, ‘A Responsibility to Awe’, is magnificent, not so much for her poems (which are nonetheless excellent) but for the marvellous sequence of extracts from her notebooks, where the cosmic is interwoven with the quotidian to stunning effect. She died young; a major loss.

HD and Modernism

So – Hal Duncan and Modernism.

Well, his writing (particularly ‘Vellum’, as I’ve still got to sit down properly with ‘Ink’) is profoundly modernist in structure, relying on fractured narratives, parallels between individual sub-narratives, broad, deep allusiveness and massive stylistic experimentation to communicate meaning.

But it avoids the worst excesses of High Modernist mandarin-ism through their deep commitment to the broken and the battered. HD’s heroes are neither the epic good nor the epic bad; they’re the people caught between the two, the ones that see basic humanity as a fundamental virtue to live by rather than a negotiable obstacle to enlightenment.

That commitment is de-fantasised through HD’s repeated return to the narrative and iconography of the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was beaten to death for his sexuality in Laramie, Wyoming in 1999. His outrage at Shepard’s murder both gives the novel its profound ethical core and works as a structural equivalent to Dickens’ ‘dying thus around us every day’ riff in ‘Bleak House’.

It reminds us that that ‘Vellum’, like all stories, results from a process of fictionalisation, a process that always begins with reality; that the brutalities and exploitative imbalances described in the book are indeed happening thus around us every day. One of Pound’s regrets in the broken, defeated ‘Pisan Cantos’ is his lack of empathy; HD takes that empathy and makes it central to his work.

And the resultant sense of ethical precision helps him step around a key Post-Modernist problem. His clear and direct sense that ‘this is just wrong’ underpins the book’s complex, broad allusive range, preventing it from falling into simple relativism.

So that’s it in a nutshell. But of course it doesn’t communicate one key thing; this is wildly enjoyable, profoundly psychedelic and utterly groovy fantasy writing.

At base it makes me think of a comment Jim Morrison made, back in the 60s – ‘The Beatles and the Stones are for blowing your mind – The Doors are for when your mind is blown.’ That’s where Hal Duncan is in relation to much genre writing – so if you haven’t read him, go check him out!

Oh, and apologies for the dodgy lineation of the Pound quotes below – each line should be staggered across the page. I’m having huge problems getting WordPress to lineate consistently. Will have another go later today…

Pounding system

Well, I’ve come down from the weekend a little more but in the aftershock I have put my back out! So now I am hobbling round my flat like a little old lady – but as well as a lovely evening with H watching Venture Brothers et al, memories of the weekend are buoying me up…

Where to start? There’s the deep generosity of Pete Crowther, the wildly comic ongoing Smith & Jones double act, the great joy of seeing the Elastic Press anthology that first brought H and I together win the year’s best award, the Stephen King upstaging Boris the crocheted Dalek, anticipating Black Static, seeing Arvon friends again – but, above all, what made it such a great weekend was epic, wonderful conversations.

One was particularly productive, in a boozy kind of way - chatting with Hal Duncan about the relationship between various aesthetic genres. Specifically, he sees Modernism as the two opposites that Romanticism and Classicism represent, crashing together into the 20th Century.

It’s a fascinating point of view, and goes a long way towards explaining much that seems to be contradictory in Modernism. Take Mondrian, for example; austere classical perfection underpinned by whacky Theosophical thinking. Or James Joyce; a deeply rationalised dissection of multiple literary forms, filtered through journalistically precise observation of Dublin, but underpinned by deep mythical structures.

My deepest engagement with Modernism always came through Ezra Pound. Here, too, you’ve got that kind of binary opposition. One (deeply reductive) way of summing up Pound’s flawed masterpiece ‘The Cantos’ is as an equation: (History + Economics) x (Mythology + Art)/Biography = Cantos.

Hal’s opposed rational and intuited structures co-exist there too, deepening and commenting on each other. But of course, they create a tension – one that in many ways is unresolvable. Pound felt this very strongly, exemplifying it in his famous, repeated lament, ‘I cannot make it cohere’. In the end, he disclaimed ‘The Cantos’, unable to find achievement in them, and writing:

M’amour, m’amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world
The dreams clash
and are shattered –
That I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.

Pound couldn’t merge the Classical and the Romantic, falling instead into Facism and then bleak repentance. Beginning ‘The Cantos’, he’d seen meaning as something to be forced onto the world, using the combined, opposite tools of intuition and analysis. At its end, he could only see it as an emergent property of systems too subtle and complex to be anything other than observed:

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

The project of High Modernism failed, replaced by a Post-Modernism that (generalising wildly) found equal value in all things, on the positive basis that rich meaning could emerge from any one of them, and the negative one that imposition of specific meaning on a non-specific world could lead to very real social and political horrors. Decrying the death of his life’s work, Pound predicted the movement that would succeed him.

Post-Modernist relativity has its own problems; they’ve been rehearsed elsewhere, so I won’t ramble about them here. The real question is – what does all this have to do with Hal Duncan?

Well, I can’t help seeing his work – recent novels ‘Vellum’ and ‘Ink’ – as (in part) an attempt to revive the tools that the Modernist project built, and show how they remain a profoundly useful way of engaging with modernity. But it’s late in the evening now, and I’ve got much to do, so more on this tomorrow…

Flattering amnesia

John Clute makes a fascinating point in the current Interzone – ‘[contemporary planetary] horror is what happens when amnesia fails’. He goes on to reference W. G. Sebald, who alas I haven’t read, so of course I fell to thinking about H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe – and, of course, amnesia itself.

What’s fascinating about the amnesia comment is its implicit definition of the human condition. As people, it makes us forgetters of a disturbing truth we once knew very well. Human-ness – with all its positive qualities – isn’t a fundamental feature of ourselves, of our moral universe. It’s an escapist construct, designed to comfort and protect.

Given this, truth becomes implicitly Lovecraftian. To seek it out is, by definition, a debasing experience. Where, historically, pursuit of truth has been seen as a transcendent activity, it has now become a descendent, devolutionary one. To uncover the truth is to find out that you are in fact much less than you thought you were.

Lovecraft had this down cold. His truth seekers either go mad, retreat into willed ignorance, or just discover that they aren’t in fact human after all. Read from a non-humanist standpoint, the only sane people in his universe are the cultists. If truth breaks any higher good, then you might as well just have fun (and make sure that you’re either the first or the last to be eaten by Elder Gods etc, according to preference and temperament).

By contrast, Poe still has a sense of morality to him. Dig into Lovecraft, and you end up in an existential void; dig into Poe, and you’re condemning murderers, being shocked by necromancers and feeling contempt for swingers. Poe’s world is horrific, but that horror is an aberration, not an innate quality. It’s a place where uncovering truth is cathartic, not caustic. For him it’s the crime, not the context, that’s an act of amnesia.

Poe’s a 19th Century writer, Lovecraft a 20th Century one. We’re in the 21st Century now, and I can’t help wondering what the 21st Century definition of horror will be. I suspect Clute will be able to help there; when I’ve got a minute, I think I’ll be picking up his recent book, ‘The Darkening Garden: a Short Lexicon of Horror’, an apparently fascinating contribution to horror criticism.

But for the moment, I’m not sure what I’d define it as. The real question to ask is, I suppose, where do we find our sense of cultural security at this point in time? Horror subverts security. But that question leads to despair. Poe subverted moral order. Lovecraft subverted flattering illusions of moral order. We remain a culture that finds security in illusion. Where do you go from there?