Astrogator's Logs

The Oracle of Dhelfoí, known by her title of Pythía, was the closest equivalent to a shaman in classical Hellenic culture. In the official version, she delivered her prophecies by entering into a trance and becoming possessed by Apóllon – or by the displaced original owner of that temple and its myth: Python, the serpent/dragon that signified The Great Goddess.

In reality, the prophecies were almost certainly formulated after information had been gleaned from informants and spies (which explains the fabled ambiguity that earned Apóllon the moniker Loxías, Slanted). As for the trance, some archaeologists have linked it to the hallucinogenic effects of ethylene gas, which could have been released into air and water from the hydrocarbon reservoir beneath the limestone strata whenever the bedrock around the temple shifted or cracked. Many argue that the Pythíai were just mouthpieces for Apóllon’s “interpreter” priests. However, the fact that they were post-menopausal women from families of good standing (which, outside Athens, usually implied a modicum of education) suggests that they were more than mere passive vessels. They may have exerted real political influence behind the veils of incense, mystical blather and suffocating male authority. Either way the temple was a hive of political intrigue, as can be garnered from the surviving lists of who consulted it and what replies they received.

Given the influence of Dhelfoí and the centrality of the oracles to its function, it’s surprising that there have been so few stories about the temple’s doings. I can only recall two: Jenny Blackford’s novel The Priestess and the Slave (Hadley Rille, 2009) and Barry King’s novella Pythia (Colored Lens, Spring 2012). Both have problems that nag at me, but they’re not the disasters that often result when Anglo writers attempt to recreate another culture from the inside – especially classical Hellenic culture, which is invariably treated as public domain.

The two works share more than just their focus; they:

– eschew heroic/famous protagonists in favor of ordinary people;
– are first-person narrations by women who are decidedly non-kickass;
– take place in the same time period, just before the Persian wars (The Priestess and the Slave consists of two stories told in alternating chapters that never intertwine or converge; one of them centers on a Pythía, so I will discuss just this strand vis-à-vis King’s novella);
– incorporate extensive research and wear this effort on their chitons;
– use the occasional Hellenic word to increase verisimilitude;
– teeter on preciousness and melodrama but also contain passages of vivid prose;
– contain a fair amount of cliché situations and cookie-cutter dialogue;
– have many secondary characters that are two-dimensional stereotypes.

The first two choices are unusual, especially in combination: most writers delving in that era chose aristocratic men as protagonists, because they were free to roam physically and intellectually, able to initiate and/or witness pivotal events. The few exceptions (Bagoas in Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, Xeones in Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, Sappho in Peter Green’s The Laughter of Aphrodite) are either commoner men or noble women. Only Lykaina in Ellen Frye’s The Other Sappho is a common woman (though a gifted one), like Blackford’s and King’s protagonists.

This combination made me read both works very closely. My verdict is that Blackford treats her protagonist and starting material better than King does his, despite his stylistic bravura. As Pythíai, the narrators must deal with fake prophecies connected to Spartan ambitions: King Kleomenes in The Priestess, a soldier called Trivviastes (more about names anon) in Pythia. Both priestesses find themselves involved in events that could change the fate of many, and here is where the authors’ approaches diverge. In simplified terms, The Priestess is adult Apollonian history whereas Pythia is adolescent Dionysian fantasy. Fittingly, the totem of The Priestess is a wolf, that of Pythia, a lion(ess) – animals linked to different aspects of Apóllon, though the latter is more closely associated with his sister Ártemis, The Mistress of Animals.

Thrasylla, the narrator of The Priestess, exhibits stoic endurance and the clear-eyed, slightly weary worldview of a woman in her fifties. She had an arranged marriage to a decent, average smallholder and mourned a stillborn daughter and subsequent barrenness. She believes in the gods, but calmly, matter-of-factly. There’s no rapture in the duties she discharges soberly and scrupulously. Iola, the narrator of Pythia, is young, a virgin who starts having ecstatic, orgasmic visions after a brick falls on her head in the storeroom where she’s hiding while a Spartan soldier is raping her mother. Whereas Thrasylla tries to guide a fellow priestess who is seduced by riches (the Pythíai were a rotating triad during the temple’s heyday), Iola abandons herself to the god inside her head who manifests as was customary with his type: a playmate who morphs between human and animal, lover and ravisher.

The Priestess retains an even temper and tempo throughout; there are no jolts in it and its ending is open. It is also a relatively linear narrative, with minor flashbacks when Thrasylla thinks back on her younger years (especially her encounter with a rabid wolf, which highlights the combination of uncanniness and pragmatism that makes her an effective Oracle). Thankfully – for me, at least – Thrasylla is a rounded character who does not need to embark on a quest nor has “unfinished business”, the near-obligatory gimmicks that drive too much genre fiction. She is a fully grown human firmly embedded in her context. Despite the gender hobbling of that time and place, her privileged position gives her some power; she is aware of the consequences of wielding it but does not sidestep the associated responsibility.

Pythia reads like an angsty teenager’s diary; it’s full of jolts and indulges in time jumps to such an extent that they make the story’s sidelines hard to track (although plot is not a primary concern – it’s a Cinderella tale with Apóllon as fairy godfather). Iola is a survivor of traumatic events that broke her both physically and mentally, though they also gave her the visions that secured her the position of an atypically young Pythía. Given this premise, it is inevitable that she’s fixated on reconstituting herself and her family and avenging the wrongs done to them. However, the responsibilities of power frighten her, so she decides to “trust the Force.” Lo and behold, when she abandons all agency not only does the villain get his comeuppance but her mother and adoptive father miraculously reappear – married to each other, yet, and owners of a solid homestead where Iola can remain happily ever after.

The Apollonian/Dionysian distinction carries into the stories’ styles. The Priestess adheres to plainness that sometimes shades into grittiness. This decision means that The Priestess lacks the “echoes” that make a story haunt its reader. One example is Thrasylla’s temptation to investigate the Python legend, which is left to lie fallow. Another is the total absence – even in rumor – of Ghorghó, daughter of King Kleoménis, wife of King Leonídhas (of Thermopylai fame), and a formidable political presence in her own right. The sole flourish is the wolf leitmotif, which surfaces whenever there are glimpses of the madness of power. Pythia, besides Iola’s visions (which contain beautiful, if overheated passages) has two symbol-laden recurring images: the serpent, morphing from regenerating lizard to chthonic dragon, the older manifestation of the god that once was a goddess; and the cracked pot, which brings to mind the endless rows of fragmented, imperfectly reconstituted ceramics in museums.

At the same time, it is clear that Blackford has been to Hellás whereas the physical background of King’s story, painstaking research notwithstanding, is the generic “Mediterranean” that also mars such otherwise interesting efforts as Rachel Swirsky’s retelling of Ifighénia’s tale, A Memory of Wind. This difference carries into two other domains: the historic underpinnings of the stories and the names of the characters. Blackford makes the historical references plain in her characters’ dialogue, whereas King omits names and otherwise obscures events to such an extent that even someone steeped in Hellenic history cannot follow without an effort. This may be an attempt to reinforce the mythic atmosphere of the story, but it ends up as a distracting affectation. The names Blackford gives her characters ring mostly true, though she strikes a few false notes; King’s name choices are less fortunate. Spazakia (Iola’s nickname, which is supposed to mean Broken) is plural neuter – plus it is contemporary Hellenic, not classical. The villain is given the subtle name Trivviastes… which means Thrice-Rapist, not a name that even a hard-bitten Spartan parent would endorse.

The result is that Blackford’s novel sustains suspension of disbelief despite its workman prose and even when her characters’ actions are so contrived as to reek of soap opera (such as a seasoned Pythía literally pouting over her colleagues’ jewelry). In contrast, King’s novella, despite its layers and beautiful passages, punctures illusion because of the disempowered protagonist who embodies a gendered cliché, the too many coincidences, the forced obscurity and – for me, specifically – the names.  I appreciate what each author tried to achieve; I also appreciate the effort they obviously put into researching the background of their stories. Yet both works could have been far more resonant with a demanding editor and a few more discussions with natives of the culture they chose to depict.  If anyone wants to see the theme of a wounded young woman beset by visions treated well, I recommend Evghenía Fakínou’s Astradhení, which I discussed in The Unknown Archmage of Magic Realism.

Images: Aeghéas consulting the Pythía, red-figure kylix, ~450 BCE; Jenny Blackford’s The Priestess and the Slave — its cover depicts another notoriously ambiguous Oracle; Candice Raquel Lee’s Pythia, what the Oracle might have been like pre-Apóllon.

I’ve been an addicted bookworm ever since I taught myself to read at the age of four. My parents never restricted my book access, leaving me to roam untrammeled through full-bore fiction and non-fiction from the get-go. My fairy tales and myths were unexpurgated; so was my country’s painful history, unfolding right before my eyes. Whenever I dipped into “age-appropriate” books, I detested the didacticism, the insipidity, the contrived dilemmas. Even with my limited life experience, I knew watery gruel when I tasted it.

So I hardly ever read Young Adult (YA) works, even when I was YA myself. From time to time I try again, only to confirm that my allergy appears to be permanent. This puts me in several quandaries: SF/F, one of my mainstay genres, has an enormous YA component – in fact, can be considered YA almost in its entirety in terms of its proclivities; the YA domain is a major venue for women writers and a major showcase for women protagonists. Yet I constantly run into bumps, even when authors try hard… sometimes, especially when authors try hard.

One of these bumps is magic, which I find tiresome with few and ever fewer exceptions. Most fantasy magic is paper-thin, incoherent and shifts arbitrarily to fit plot points and generate dei ex machina (two better-than-average recent fantasies, Sherwood Smith’s The Banner of the Damned and Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts would have been far better works without magic, in my opinion). Another is the persistent neoteny I discussed in a previous essay. Within that category, a near-constant irritant is the “finding one’s self” theme endemic in Anglophone YA fiction. Which brings us once again to cultural parochialism, lack of imagination, possibly market niche cynicism… plus that dreaded term: agency.

“Finding one’s self” appears as a near-default trope for a culture obsessed with youth’s trappings (Flat bellies! Hard muscles! Perky breasts and perkier penises!) that still believes in the libertarian myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: the idea that you can become rich, famous and powerful provided you’re Chosen and that everyone has a near-infinity of choices for everything, from their breakfast cereal to their identity. So in a standard YA – and not just YA – story arc the protagonist must find himself (I use the male pronoun deliberately, since this narrative is essentially defined by masculine/masculinized parameters), usually through a conflict that ticks off the ersatz-mythic checklist points of the Campbel/lite quest.

Reading bits of contemporary YA SF/F (a few pages at a time is the most I can manage before breaking out in hives) it hit me why “personal growth” quests are omnipresent in them: most of the stories are products of cookie cutters. The characters are not individualized enough to register as fully dimensional people, so the canned conflicts are meant to give them some substance as well as move the standardized plot along (including the almost-mandatory assembly of the quest team, a direct import from RPG games). There is no personality delineation beyond occasional resort to verbal tricks for quick recognition, which is one reason why almost all the recent SF/F YA works I read form a single lumpy blur in my memory banks.

Mind you, Homer used such tricks: “gray-eyed Athena”, “horse-fighting Hector”. However, these occurred in a long oral epic in which they served as memory aids to both bard and audience. Furthermore, Homer did not confine his characterizations to these shortcuts. We know what Hector felt when he took leave of Andromache and Astyanax. We know what Achilles felt when Priam was begging him for Hector’s body. Homer (or whoever wrote the Iliad) did not have to write those passages, they’re not critical to the forward motion of the epic. But by doing so, the bard made us care – and Andromache, trying not to weep as she watches her husband’s jaunty helmet plume dwindle in the distance, brands herself in our memory.

The default setting of semi-infinite flexibility also plays a role in the boilerplate depictions of what constitutes self discovery. An occasional critique I get for my fiction is that my protagonists are usually fully formed when my stories start and don’t “evolve” to satisfy the growth-through-adversity mandate. Sort of like Antigone and Odysseus, who also appear fully formed, even though their actions are shaped by the sum of their external and internal circumstances. Yet I doubt either would be considered a dull thud: they have urgent lives to manage beyond just “growing into their full potential”.

My native culture has undergone more than its share of upheavals, and the ensuing hardship and instability make it less able to luxuriate in choices; by both tradition and necessity, it also demands that its members make many crucial life decisions early – and often the choices are constrained so strongly that they appear almost preordained. These constraints, incidentally, also hold for such domains as contemporary research science. For someone with my cultural background and professional experiences, the concept of fiction protagonists spending endless sequels rolling dice for their D&D designations appears neither organic nor compelling.

Not surprisingly, this brings us to agency – women characters’ agency in particular. Agency – aka women as more than decorative or useful furniture – has been a perennial issue in speculative fiction, especially in the grittygrotty pornokitch subgenre cave. On parallel lines, people have observed that the still-too-sparse SF/F women protagonists are deemed fully worthy only if they “kick ass” (with video game prototypes like Lara Croft leading the way). However, the problem is more systemic than that: characters of all ages get shoehorned into the Procrustean bunkbed of the teenage self-discovery quest. This is simply more obvious for women because, with the exception of the occasional magical crone, most SF/F hardly ever shows women past the age of “peak attractiveness” – which for the US has been relentlessly shifting to the younger and thinner end of the spectrum, except for the obligatory pneumatic breasts.

In almost all SF/F YA works we rarely if ever see full adults, especially women, doing the nuanced, shaded things adults do: work at things they care for and often are good at; love, hate and everything in between; create and preserve and sometimes destroy; grow old and experienced, if not always wise; but above all, go through the myriad small struggles and pleasures that constitute a full life. The artificiality and interchangeability of the standard conflicts makes most YA books as individualized (and as nutritional) as movie theater popcorn – in large part because their readers’ cortices register that nothing really crucial is at stake, no matter how many djinn or dark-magic wizards are involved.

To put it simply, heroes in both real life and non-popcorn fiction often have little choice (and to be crystal-clear, “heroes” include non-male people – once again I use the term deliberately because “heroine” has very different connotations). What makes non-messianic people heroes is when in unusual circumstances they surpass their usual selves. Heroes feel fear, doubt, guilt, grief for their actions; what they don’t do is navel-gaze, because they’re busy with far more substantive struggles. Give me an artisan with a thickened waist whose arthritis is hobbling her but who retains the passion to push against formidable obstacles while still appreciating her wine. I’ll take her over all the homogenized teenager Chosen Ones of YA SF/F.

War for the Country

By Viktoría Theodhórou – Poet, resistance fighter

A soft mat she found and sat down, upon the leaves.
A song emerges from the flute of her throat,
softly, so her dozing companions don’t awaken,
just so it accompanies their dreams.
Her hands don’t stay still, she takes up thread and needle
to darn their wool socks with the hand grenade
she always carries at her waist, with it she lies and rises.
The grenade inside the sock, round and oblivious
to its fire, thinks it’s a wooden egg,
that the country was freed and the war ended
and Katia is not a partisan in the snow-covered woods –
that she sits by the window behind the white lilacs
and sews the socks of her beloved, who came home whole.

Images: 1st, Tree of Books, by Vlad Gerasimov; 2nd, Hector and Andromache, Giorgio de Chirico; 3rd, magical crones: Fin Raziel in Willow (Patricia Hayes), The Oracle in The Matrix (Gloria Foster)

[Re-posted modified EvoPsycho Bingo Card — click on image for bigger version]

One of the unlovely things that has been happening in Anglophone SF/F (in line with resurgent religious fundamentalism and erosion of democratic structures in the First World, as well as economic insecurity that always prompts “back to the kitchen” social politics) is the resurrection of unapologetic – nay, triumphant – misogyny beyond the already low bar in the genre. The churners of both grittygrotty “epic” fantasy and post/cyberpunk dystopias are trying to pass rape-rife pornkitsch as daring works that swim against the tide of rampant feminism and its shrill demands.

When people explain why such works are problematic, their authors first employ the standard “Me Tarzan You Ape” dodges: mothers/wives get trotted out to vouch for their progressiveness, hysteria and censorship get mentioned. Then they get really serious: as artists of vision and integrity, they cannot but depict women solely as toilet receptacles because 1) that has been the “historical reality” across cultures and eras and 2) men have rape genes and/or rape brain modules that arose from natural selection to ensure that dominant males spread their mighty seed as widely as possible. Are we cognitively impaired functionally illiterate feminazis daring to deny (ominous pause) SCIENCE?!

Now, it’s one thing to like cocoa puffs. It’s another to insist they are either nutritional powerhouses or haute cuisine. If the hacks who write this stuff were to say “Yeah, I write wet fantasies for guys who live in their parents’ basement. I get off doing it, it pays the bills and it has given me a fan base that can drool along with me,” I’d have nothing to say against it, except to advise people above the emotional age of seven not to buy the bilge. However, when they try to argue that their stained wads are deeply philosophical, subversive literature validated by scientific “evidence”, it’s time to point out that they’re talking through their lower digestive opening. Others have done the cleaning service for the argument-from-history. Here I will deal with the argument-from-science.

It’s funny how often “science” gets brandished as a goad or magic wand to maintain the status quo – or bolster sloppy thinking and confirmation biases. When women were barred from higher education, “science” was invoked to declare that their small brains would overheat and intellectual stress would shrivel their truly useful organs, their wombs. In our times, pop evopsychos (many of them failed SF authors turned “futurists”) intone that “recent studies prove” that the natural and/or ideal human social configuration is a hybrid of a baboon troop and fifties US suburbia. However, if we followed “natural” paradigms we would not recognize paternity, have multiple sex partners, practice extensive abortion and infanticide and have powerful female alliances that determine the status of our offspring.

I must acquaint Tarzanists with the no-longer-news that there are no rape genes, rape hormones or rape brain modules. Anyone who says this has been “scientifically proved” has obviously got his science from FOX News or knuckledraggers like Kanazawa (who is an economist, by the way, and would not recognize real biological evidence if it bit him on the gonads). Here’s a variation of the 1986 Seville Statement that sums up what I will briefly outline further on. It goes without saying that most of what follows is shorthand and also not GenSci 101.

It is scientifically (not politically) incorrect to say that:
1. we have inherited a tendency to rape from our animal ancestors;
2. rape is genetically programmed into our nature;
3. in the course of our evolution there has been a positive selection for rape;
4. humans brains are wired for rape;
5. rape is caused by instinct.

Let’s get rid of the tired gene chestnut first. As I’ve discussed elsewhere at length, genes do not determine brain wiring or complex behavior (as always in biology, there are a few exceptions: most are major decisions in embryo/neurogenesis with very large outcomes like Down syndrome, aka trisomy 21). Experiments that purported to find direct links between genes and higher behavior were invariably done in mice (animals that differ decisively from humans) and the sweeping conclusions of such studies have always had to be ratcheted down or discarded altogether, although in lower-ranking journals than the original effusions.

Then we have hormones and the “male/female brain dichotomy” pushed by neo-Freudians like Baron-Cohen. They even posit a neat-o split whereby too much “masculinizing” during brain genesis leads to autism, too much “feminizing” to schizophrenia. Following eons-old dichotomies, people who theorize thusly shoehorn the two into the left and right brain compartments respectively, assigning a gender to each: females “empathize”, males “systematize” – until it comes to those intuitive leaps that make for paradigm-changing scientists or other geniuses, whereby these oh-so-radical theorists neatly reverse the tables and both creativity and schizophrenia get shifted to the masculine side of the equation.

Now although hormones play critical roles in all our functions, it so happens that the cholesterol-based ones that become estrogen, testosterone, etc are two among several hundred that affect us. What is most important is not the absolute amount of a hormone, but its ratios to others and to body weight, as well as the sensitivity of receptors to it. People generally do not behave aberrantly if they don’t have the “right” amount of a sex hormone (which varies significantly from person to person), but if there is a sudden large change to their homeostasis – whether this is crash menopause from ovariectomy, post-partum depression or heavy doses of anabolic steroids for body building.

Furthermore, as is the case with gene-behavior correlation, much work on hormones has been done in mice. When similar work is done with primates (such as testosterone or estrogen injections at various points during fetal or postnatal development), the hormones have essentially no effect on behavior. Conversely, very young human babies lack gender-specific responses before their parents start to socialize them. As well, primates show widely different “cultures” within each species in terms of gender behavior, including care of infants by high-status males. It looks increasingly like “sex” hormones do not wire rigid femininity or masculinity, and they most certainly don’t wire propensity to rape; instead, they seem to prime individuals to adopt the habits of their surrounding culture – a far more adaptive configuration than the popsci model of “women from Venus, men from Mars.”

So on to brain modularity, today’s phrenology. While it is true that there are some localized brain functions (the processing of language being a prominent example), most brain functions are diffuse, the higher executive ones particularly so – and each brain is wired slightly differently, dependent on the myriad details of its context across time and place. Last but not least, our brains are plastic (otherwise we would not form new memories, nor be able to acquire new functions), though the windows of flexibility differ across scales and in space and time.

The concept of brain modularity comes partly from the enormously overused and almost entirely incorrect equivalence of the human brain to a computer. Another problem lies in the definition of a module, which varies widely and as a result is prone to abuse by people who get their knowledge of science from new-age libertarian tracts. There is essentially zero evidence of the “strong” version of brain modules, and modular organization at the level of genes, cells or organ compartments does not guarantee a modular behavioral outcome. But even if we take it at face value, it is clear that rape does not adhere to the criteria of either the “weak” (Fodor) or “strong (Carruthers) version for such an entity: it does not fulfill the requirements of domain specificity, fast processing, fixed neural architecture, mandatoriness or central inaccessibility.

In the behavioral domain, rape is not an adaptive feature: most of it is non-reproductive, visited upon pre-pubescent girls, post-menopausal women and other men. Moreover, rape does not belong to the instinctive “can’t help myself” reflexes grouped under the Four Fs. Rape does not occur spontaneously: it is usually planned with meticulous preparation and it requires concentration and focus to initiate and complete. So rape has nothing to do with reproductive maxima for “alpha males” (who don’t exist biologically in humans) – but it may have to do with the revenge of aggrieved men who consider access to women an automatic right.

What is undeniable is that humans are extremely social and bend themselves to fit context norms. This ties to Arendt’s banality of evil and Niemöller’s trenchant observations about solidarity – and to the outcomes of Milgram and Zimbardo’s notorious experiments which have been multiply mirrored in real history, with the events in the Abu Ghraib prison prominent among them. So if rape is tolerated or used as a method for compliance, it is no surprise that it is a prominent weapon in the arsenal of keeping women “in their place” and also no surprise that its apologists aspire to give it the status of indisputably hardwired instinct.

Given the steep power asymmetry between the genders ever since the dominance of agriculture led to women losing mobility, gathering skills and control over pregnancies, it is not hard to see rape as the cultural artifact that it is. It’s not a sexual response; it’s a blunt assertion of rank in contexts where dominance is a major metric: traditional patriarchal families, whether monogamous or polygynous; religions and cults (most of which are extended patriarchal families); armies and prisons; tribal vendettas and initiations.

So if gratuitous depictions of graphic rape excite a writer, that is their prerogative. If they get paid for it, bully for them. But it doesn’t make their work “edgy” literature; it remains cheap titillation that attempts to cloak arrant failures of talent, imagination and just plain scholarship. Insofar as such work has combined sex and violence porn as its foundation, it should be classified accordingly. Mythologies, including core religious texts, show rape in all its variations: there is nothing novel or subversive about contemporary exudations. In my opinion, nobody needs to write yet another hack work that “interrogates” misogyny by positing rape and inherent, immutable female inferiority as natural givens – particularly not white Anglo men who lead comfortable lives that lack any knowledge to justify such a narrative. The fact that people with such views are over-represented in SF/F is toxic for the genre.

Further reading:

A brief overview of the modularity of the brain/mind
Athena Andreadis (2010). The Tempting Illusion of Genetic Virtue. Politics Life Sci. 29:76-80
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender
Alison Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution
Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour
Edouard Machery and Kara Cohen (2012). An Evidence-Based Study of the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Brit J Philos Sci 263: 177-226

Long ago,
I became astrogator in the arcships.

— the beginning of Spacetime Geodesics

Two publications appeared almost simultaneously: Bull Spec issue 7, which contains my poem Night Patrol; and The Moment of Change, a reprint anthology of speculative feminist poetry edited by Rose Lemberg and published by Aqueduct Press, which contains Spacetime Geodesics and Night Patrol. The cover (shown) is Sister, Brother by Terri Windling.

The anthology contains seventy poems. Some names you may recognize: Ursula Le Guin, Catherynne Valente, Delia Sherman, Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Jo Walton, Nisi Shawl, J. C. Runolfson, Vandana Singh, Calvin Johnson, Shweta Narayan, Mary Alexander Agner, Theodora Goss, Yoon Ha Lee, Greer Gilman, Claire Cooney, JoSelle Vanderhooft.

In other words, a sky dragon’s hoard.

I have the bad habit of site-jumping when a topic snags my interest.  Recently, starting with a tale of blatant plagiarism by a top YA book reviewer (who issued the standard non-apology and accused her victims of being mean to her, thereby setting up a bullying spree by her followers), I found myself skimming the plagiarized pieces.  Two dealt with blogging don’ts.  Those who know me will guess the rest: I looked up “blogging no-nos” in Google.

Several sites later, suffice it to say that the advice is as harmonious as a skua rookery.  There are, however, a few near-consensus points for non-business blogs:

1. content über alles (if only);
2. fast loading good, pop-ups and multi-clicks bad (unless they help the site’s hit count);
3. also bad: spelling mistakes, eye-hurting design and music autoplay (the latter makes it hard to secretly net-surf at work, for one);
4. well-chosen pictures are mandatory (a thousand words and so forth);
5. so is replying to all comments and having painless spam filters (everyone’s whims must be catered to the max, otherwise they won’t keep reading the blog);
6. don’t exceed a certain length (below 1,000 words good, below 750 even better – after all, people are busy surfing);
7. use social media – newsletters, Share buttons, Twitter (establish a presence!);
8. do 10-Things lists, polls, contests (with awards);
9. update frequently or risk being forgotten (people must be constantly entertained, after all);
10. find a content niche and stick with it like a burr (or else no community for you).

Now, the first four are commonsense and should be obvious – though judging from what I saw during this particular dip, they’re not.  This observance-in-the-breach includes the common associated clause of “don’t be negative” for point 1: if anything, flamewars seem to feed blogs like dry twigs feed brushfires.  However, I break the last six with abandon and in full consciousness.  This may explain why my blog flipflops wildly at various ranking sites, and why I haven’t yet been awarded a Pulitzer or a regular column at, say, Nature or Tor.

Points 5-9 can only be followed if your blog and the activities it promotes are the focus of your entire existence – or you’re paid what passes for a pro rate (whatever that is, in today’s “content yearns to be free” mindset).  It does so happen that I don’t live in my parents’ basement pushing XBox buttons: I have a research lab and an academic job that demand more than passing attention.  Besides, I’ve seen Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal close up and found them less than enticing.  “Loyalties” that spring from social media are shallow and brittle.  It takes more than exchanging snarky soundbites to build sturdy alliances that go beyond “Like” or “Headdesk”.

More fundamentally, having entered the last third of my life, I sometimes tire of old issues springing up again and again like dragons’s teeth: the relentless fundamentalist war on women’s rights in this country and elsewhere; grittygrotty SF/F authors calling their pornokitsch fiction subversive and invoking “rape modules in male brains” (although I and several others tackled this from the writing angle and I intend to discuss it in a near future post from the biological angle); young women and self-labeled “progressive” men saying that feminism is passé, having achieved its goals (equal pay? easy access to contraception?); fanboiz whining that I’m elitist because I don’t like Avatar, Accelarando or the pronouncements of Kurzweil, or that I’m hard on armchair tourist authors who get famous (or at least solvent) from tone-deaf depictions of non-Anglo cultures.  Which brings us to the major issue, point 10: content focus.

What people write on their blogs depends on their goals.  Some use them as pulpits, others as public diaries, yet others as marketing tools (“Here are my Hugo nominations, now go vote!”).  Focused-content blogs tend to become watering holes for the like-minded.  In some cases, their owners become oracles to a worshipping group of reader-acolytes.  Personally, I’m interested (more than casually) in several domains: science, history and language, literature and the arts, space exploration, politics.  I also believe that none of these strands can be examined in isolation.  To give a recent example, my critique of the John Carter film included all these angles – and when I was asked to take out “the review bits” for possible reprinting on a popsci-oriented blog, I realized I couldn’t do so without essentially rewriting the entire piece.

I’m also allergic to acolytes because at some point they take you over.  Not that women attain prophet status without becoming Ayn Rand or the equivalent, mind you – women who denigrate their own, thereby becoming pillars of the status quo.  Being a non-Anglo woman who is a non-joiner by temperament and falls between more stools than I can either avoid or count, I’m reconciled to the idea that if I were a man I would probably be knee-deep in accolades, awards and groupies eager to have my babies.  But I’m happy to be a feral nomad instead.  “I cannot be tethered, while I still hear the night winds moan and call.” [1]

So here we are – done in less than 1,000 words this time!  Bottom line: this blog will continue to be unapologetically eclectic in topic selections but neither a diary nor a collection of laundry lists. It’s a salon where friends and passing guests gather for conversations, subject to my tides of mood and health; a review along classic lines that reflects its opinionated editor’s interests and viewpoints.  For me it is a window to the world.  All kinds of neat things alight here as I sing for my own pleasure.  And that’s good enough for a pagan outlaw loner like me.

[1] From Though I Grow Old with Wandering… in Realms of Fire

Images: 1st, Curious Cat (Jane Burton); 2nd, self-explanatory; 3rd, how I see the blog.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist, SF aficionado (plus a coda by Athena)

Part 1

Burroughs’ Influences

ERB had several strong influences while creating the fictional world of Barsoom. One came from his experiences in the late 1890s as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant in Arizona (still a US territory at the time). The vast desert landscape of the Southwest served as a geophysical model for his drying and dying Mars. The surrounding Native American population became the Tharks. The native women – whom he found to be haughty, beautiful, and very proud – may also have served as ERB’s involuntary muses for Dejah Thoris.

ERB’s other prominent influence for the formation of Barsoom came from a fellow who was also a resident of Arizona around the same time: Percival Lowell. A member of a very prominent Boston Brahmin family, Lowell became fascinated with Mars after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observing a series of long, straight dark lines on the Red Planet starting in 1877. His intense and focused interest in Mars (along with his wealth) led Lowell to build a professional observatory in remote Flagstaff, Arizona, where he felt he could properly study our neighboring world to better discern its compelling features.

Lowell and others soon came to the conclusion that such formations had to be artificial in nature. Lowell believed that a race of beings much older, wiser, and more advanced than humanity dwelt on Mars. These Martians built a vast network of giant canals to bring water from their arctic regions of ice to their cities on and near the equator. Their plan was to stave off extinction as their ancient world began to dry up, taking the native flora and fauna with it in the process. Lowell and his followers thought they were witnesses to the last great act of an alien civilization.

Lowell’s hypothesis for Mars were not completely pulled out of thin air, for his ideas were based on a combination of contemporary thoughts and observations: From what astronomers could see through their telescopes about the Red Planet from their vantage point on Earth many millions of miles away, the fourth world from the Sun appeared to be more like our globe than any other place in the Sol system. Mars possessed two white polar caps, an axial tilt and rotation rate very similar to Earth’s, and light and dark regions which changed in color, shape, and size through the long Martian seasons. Many conjectured that these mobile surface markings were the life cycles of native plants or even the migration of animals.

Another idea popular at the time was the Nebular Theory of solar system formation. This plan declared that the outer worlds cooled and condensed first ages ago from the cosmic cloud of dust and debris that would become our Solar System. These places would thus develop  the conditions to support life sooner than the worlds closer to the warming Sun. As a result, the outer planets would also one day find themselves becoming less able to sustain their ecosystem sooner than the inner planets. This is why Lowell concluded there were canal-building intelligences on Mars without being able to actually see any such beings to learn whether he was correct or not.

Whether Percival Lowell was eventually right or wrong about the true state of the Red Planet ultimately mattered little to authors such as ERB and H. G. Wells. They found in Lowell’s ideas a fertile field for their imaginary worlds, though of course in Wells’ case, the Lowellian conditions on Mars served as a literal springboard for his octopus-like inhabitants to seek a better place to live, by force no less, thus creating the alien invasion scenario that remains popular to this very day. The only major difference between Wells’ creatures and their fictional descendants is that they now spring (mostly) from worlds circling other suns.

In contrast, ERB’s Martians remained on Barsoom despite the similarly debilitating environmental situation. There was and is a lot of high technology across Barsoomian society in both the novel and the film, including aerial flying machines, but they did not seem to focus on space travel, if you exclude the Therns’ guarded method of celestial transportation. Nevertheless, at least Helium appears to have had some rather powerful ground-based telescopes, as in the film version Dejah Thoris eventually realized that John Carter was a native of Jarsoom, while in the novel the princess was well aware of human civilization on Earth long before Carter arrived on her world.

Obviously the main reason I am emphasizing the John Carter connection with Lowell’s Mars is due to its important influence in bringing about the world of Barsoom. My other motive for bringing up the era defined by what Lowell created, pursued, and essentially preached about the Red Planet – namely from the latter half of the nineteenth century to July of 1965, when the American robotic probe Mariner 4 revealed with its t relatively crude images of the planet’s surface and other measurements a shockingly Moon-like Mars – is to highlight a period of astronomical history that is both fascinating in its own right and a relevant lesson in our current pursuit of extraterrestrial life.

John Carter did give some tantalizing hints about the Lowell era of Mars at the beginning and end of the film, very briefly displaying some real early hand-drawn maps of the planet. Included among these charts was one of the famous Lowell maps of the Martian canals, where it turns out that ERB rather closely modeled the various city-states and other features of Barsoom upon in numerous cases. See here for the details:

I also took special pleasure in noting that John Carter’s tomb looked rather similar to the one Percival Lowell was buried in on Mars Hill at his Flagstaff observatory in 1915.  It is these touches and obvious indication that someone did their historical research which I appreciate very much.

While it is clear to us (and a number of astronomers from that era) that Lowell went much too far in speculating on what the Martian canals were all about (sadly, even the canals turned out not to be real but rather optical illusions caused by real surface features being just beyond the resolution of most telescopes), his influence and imagination were the important catalyst in spurring both classic works of fiction and the people who would go on to study and explore the real Red Planet. A film about that era could be quite successful in my opinion. Certainly there would be enough real excitement, romance, and drama to work from.

Final Thoughts – The White Messiah

When Athena initially asked if I was interested in writing a review of John Carter, we briefly touched upon the “White Messiah” complex that exists in most films such as Avatar, Dances With Wolves, and certainly the John Carter series.  Of course one could not create a John Carter story absent of its white male American hero without radically changing the focus and point of what ERB was trying to do (in addition to making a living at writing): to get American boys to become manlier like their forbears were presumed to be.

While researching John Carter, I read that ERB was concerned about the growing population move from the farms and fields to more urban areas.  ERB felt that boys who were not able to spend their youths hunting, fishing, and partaking in other outdoor activities were in danger of losing their manhood and possibly becoming – gasp – intellectual sissies!  So ERB conceived of a character that would inspire young males to become bold, daring, and adventurous (along with pursuing beautiful women) under the guise of an entertaining plot.

I have my doubts that this idea was actively considered or even known of by the makers of the John Carter film.  If anything, the snachismo concept Athena has written about here in her blog was quite in play:  John Carter was still indeed a manly man, but he was also shown to have a sensitive and caring side, including a back story that did not exist in the novel so far as I know.  And for a “Gentleman from Virginia” of the Nineteenth Century, Carter recognized and respected Dejah Thoris’ numerous abilities, despite her being – gasp – a woman.

The White Messiah idea does have some literal merit for John Carter (note the initials).  This article in Slate magazine goes into some interesting and revealing depth on the subject.  One has to wonder why our society seems to always be waiting and hoping for one particular individual (or even an advanced ETI) to come along and save the rest of us from ourselves?  Is it just because we are social mammals hardwired to defer authority to an Alpha Male?

While works like John Carter were not really aimed at exploring this topic, they can stir us to move beyond these basic plots and concepts to create our own ideas and stories of worlds and beings who think and operate in ways different from our current culture.  After all, that is one of the key features of science fiction, to imagine alternate scenarios and societies and see how they might play out.

It was nice to see on the big screen a fairly well done rendition of and tribute to a series that inspired so much of our popular science fiction stories today.  Now that a century has passed, I think it is time for cinematic science fiction to start graduating to more complex and daring concepts, which we did see a few times in the pre-Star Wars era.  If done and sold right, I think audiences are becoming sophisticated enough to handle stories outside the mainstream “comfort zone”.  At the very least, perhaps next time we will have a story about a Dejah Thoris type who simultaneously inspires young women and saves the world.

Athena’s coda: I already expressed my views of how well-made/progressive I deemed the JCM film in part 1.  ERB is one of the forefathers of the grittygrotty contingent in SF/F.  Its members are invariably linked with regressive tropes, evopsycho paradigms that extol reactionary mores as universal (the Alpha Male canard among them – there are no such creatures in the human species, biologically speaking) and hack writing.  I won’t list names, lest I spread the disease; nevertheless, it’s indicative that this contingent went ballistic because the JCM film updated the novel to lighten its deeply reactionary nature vis-à-vis women and non-whites.

Percival Lowell’s social prominence and wealth allowed him to indulge in his passionate hobby, and concrete good came of it: namely, the discovery of Pluto (he could have spent his money on golf clubs or financing conservative politicians).  However, it was already widely accepted during Lowell’s heyday that the Martian canals (a mistranslation of Schiaparelli’s original term, which meant channels) were natural formations.  It’s entirely likely that his “maps” of Mars and Venus were in fact depictions of his retinal blood vessels.

Mars, by dint of all its intrinsics as they gradually unfolded before us, has been a perennial object of fascination.  The issue of whether it once did or still does harbor life has not been resolved and I, for one, am all for a crewed expedition that will not only attempt to definitively answer this question but will also be useful in showing up the pitfalls and limitations of longer space travel.

On the art side, it’s true that there hasn’t yet been a film depiction of Mars that does it justice.  The obvious candidate (for a series rather than a standalone film, given its length) is Stan Robinson’s trilogy.  But for my taste, the hands-down choice would be Alexander Jablokov’s River of Dust: it shows a Mars that harbors a precarious but culturally vibrant underground human colony after a terraforming attempt failed, and it overflows with mythic echoes, dramatic situations that matter, exciting ideas, unique settings and vivid characters.

Images: Lowell’s “map” of the Mars south pole (1904); Lowell’s mausoleum; Valles Marineris, one of the largest canyons in the solar system (NASA/JPL); Alex Jablokov’s marvelous River of Dust

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist, SF aficionado (plus a dissenting coda by Athena)

There is an interesting parallel between John Carter as the main character of the Mars series of adventure novels begun by Edgar Rice Burroughs (from here on called ERB) one century ago this year, and the recently released Disney film of the same name.

Both arrived on their respective worlds – the fictional man Carter on planet Mars, a.k.a. Barsoom, and the motion picture John Carter in cinemas all over planet Earth (a.k.a. Jarsoom) – with relatively little fanfare. Both Carters initially encountered natives who had no real idea who they were and were ready to kill them off. Yet somehow both survived their hostile environments and slowly earned the understanding and respect of their newfound worlds, eventually going on to change things for the better and having a wild time in the process.

Now of course the film version still has a long road ahead to achieve its equivalent of what the novel hero achieved in his fictional and serialized lifetime. To be honest, I do not know if it will ever become as popular and influential as the novels were in their day, if for no other reason than too many other fictional series influenced by the ERB works have left their much stronger mark on the cultural mindset in the intervening century. In addition, while John Carter is better than I feared, the very ironic fact that it looks rather derivative of the very genre it spawned may permanently hobble its journey across the cinematic and cultural landscape.

So why should I make a big deal out of a film and series that its parent company will probably write off as a financial loss, one that most of today’s audience is almost totally unfamiliar with, and in truth its core plot was not terribly original or new when ERB produced its first installment back in 1912?

For the following reasons: The film did not become the bloated mess that I thought Hollywood was going to turn it into (and which many film critics who I do not think would know or understand science fiction and its history if they proverbially bit them continue to insist it is while mentioning its big budget in the same breath). The John Carter series deserves to be honored, understood, and appreciated for all it has done both for science fiction/fantasy and for influencing later real scientists like Carl Sagan, who talked about his love for the series as a youth in an episode of Cosmos. Finally, the real story and history behind the influences – hinted at in the film – that spawned John Carter and affected our views of life on Mars and elsewhere are more than worthy of being reintroduced to new generations as well.

The plot of John Carter is essentially that of ERB’s first novel in the series, A Princess of Mars: Confederate war veteran and Gentleman of Virginia John Carter goes into a cave in the Southwestern United States and wakes up millions of miles away on the planet Mars. There he meets several of the remaining native populations on that world, all of whom are battling with each other and the elements as Mars is slowly drying up. Carter’s Earth-developed muscles allow him to jump quite high and punch very hard in the lower Martian gravity, abilities which quickly earn him the awe and respect of key natives. In the end, our hero defeats the bad guys, wins the hand of the beautiful Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris, and then involuntarily ends up back on Earth.  Carter spends most of his Jarsoomian exile trying to get back to Mars and his wife, which he eventually does.

I must confess: I did not read any of the John Carter novel series until rather recently, despite knowing about them for most of my life. I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction and that is what I considered these works to be. I also assumed that the prose would not have aged well in the intervening decades.

I have since read the first novel and, like the film, found it to be not as bad as I feared. Both were rather entertaining and I found myself actually caring about the characters, always a key point for me with any story. As just one example, I recall being both surprised and moved when it was revealed in the novel that Sola was the daughter of Tars Tarkas.

Based on past experience with Hollywood’s efforts at science fiction (and John Carter really is basically SF and not fantasy), along with Disney’s historical habit of making major changes in their productions to suit their intended audiences and their less-than-stellar promotional efforts for this film, I expected John Carter to be an expensive and flashy mess, one that was as much about the original A Princess of Mars as the “re-imaged/re-invented” Star Trek film from 2009 was about the original Star Trek television series: A shell resembling the franchise but full of hot air and junk underneath. Instead I witnessed a film that actually got the main characters and plot points, along with the essence and feel of the novel – no small feat there. I just wish that more people were aware of this and could appreciate it. Ironically, science fiction is starting to become more “acceptable” to the mainstream audience due to the reimaged Battlestar Galactica and especially The Hunger Games series, whose first film came out right after John Carter and financially steamrolled our Martian hero and every other current movie in its path.

I found the film to capture the feel and look of the novel as I and others imagined it quite well. From the flying battle cruisers to the appearance and behavior of the warrior Tharks, this cinematic world of Barsoom is one I think ERB would have said well matched his visions of his creation.

There were a few notable changes from the novel, most of which only make sense in light of the medium and era. One was the addition of clothing on John Carter and the residents of Barsoom. In the novel, most natives went either naked or nearly so and did not even think twice about being in such a state (Dejah Thoris only wore strategically-placed ornate jewelry, for example). John Carter even arrived on Mars sans clothing. For obvious reasons the film could not replicate this situation from the novel; besides, it probably would have been too distracting even if such a thing were allowed by the modern film industry.

The women of Barsoom fared rather well from their “modernization” in the film, though it should be noted that even in the first novel I did not find them to be just the damsels-in-distress one might be led to believe from the decades of artwork depicting that alien world.

The two main Martian city-states depicted in the film, Helium and Zodanga, employed female soldiers as readily as male ones. I had to wonder if this situation was due to the fact that the Martian environment was dying and people and resources were in ever-dwindling supply, but no one ever seemed to question or even react to the idea of women in their military. The audience was not given enough cinematic time to learn very much about these societies in any event.

The Thark Sola was an intelligent and compassionate individual in addition to being a strong warrior. She endured a fair deal of suffering from her harsh culture to remain true to herself and her beliefs. Sola also became open to new ideas as the story progressed, such as flying, despite her father and chief Tars Tarkas earlier intoning that “Tharks do not fly!”

The most notable woman of the series is of course Dejah Thoris. While she remained a beautiful princess and the focus of John Carter’s admiration and desire, for the film Dejah also became a highly capable scientist as well as a warrior who more than held her own in battle. When the Helium leadership was ready to cave in and acquiesce to the demands of the Zodanga leader to marry Dejah in the hope of saving their society from defeat and destruction, Dejah was the only one who not only balked at this forced union but saw how Helium’s being united with the more barbaric city-state of Zodanga would actually undermine her culture and eventually all the people of Barsoom.

Dejah’s demonstrated scientific knowledge and technical skills were strong enough that the main “bad guys” of the film, the highly advanced species known as the Thern, considered Dejah to be a serious impediment to their plans for Barsoom while simultaneously admiring her abilities. As for the actor who played the Princess of Helium, Lynn Collins was an excellent choice for the character. She not only played Dejah with both intelligence and an air of royal nobility, Collins’ years of martial arts training also showed convincingly in her numerous scenes of hand-to-hand combat – including the several occasions when Carter got behind Dejah for protection!

The Thern are another cinematic modification from the novel. In A Princess of Mars, Martian natives make a trip down the River Iss when they feel ready to pass on from this life. They believe at the end of that river is where they will meet the goddess Issus and go on to a paradisiacal afterlife. Instead the mythology and the journey are a trap set by the Thern, descendants of the White Martians, who use monstrous creatures such as the white apes to kill and eat the unwary pilgrims and enslave or consume in turn those who survive the ordeal.

In the film, the Thern are an advanced alien race (they appear as humanoids but can also shapeshift) who travel from one inhabited world to another and “feed” off the energies expended by the native populations as they struggle with each other and use up or neglect their planet’s natural resources. One Thern named Shang implies to Carter that Earth and humanity are next on their menu once they are done with the dying Barsoom.

The Thern have a very interesting and quite alien technology which looks like a tangled mass of blue fibers, whether it is one of their structures or a weapon (Dejah Thoris recognizes its artificial nature). They also travel between worlds by sending “copies” of themselves similar to a fax using a medallion that operates on specific verbal commands. Whereas in the novel, Carter mysteriously arrives on Mars after simply falling asleep in a cave, our hero is accidentally transported to Barsoom by Thern technology. While of course there is no actual explanation given as to how the mechanism works, the audience is at least handed some kind of plausible reason for Carter’s celestial journey that is no worse than using a faster-than-light drive for a fictional starship. Besides, the JC series is all about the destination, not the journey.

The film version of the Thern left me wondering if perhaps there are advanced societies in the galaxy who view other alien species as lesser creatures to either be ignored or utilized for their own purposes. While they held some genuine admiration for Dejah Thoris, I got the impression that their whole attitude about using Barsoom until it was dry and dead and all the other worlds they have come across could be summed up as “It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

I have often wondered if an advanced ETI, using the Kardashev Type 2 or 3 labels for simplification, would mow over whole worlds and species as they developed their interstellar existence in the same way a construction crew would run over an ant colony on their building site. I would like to think that such sophisticated and experienced beings would be a bit more sensitive than that, but we are still so very clueless about anyone else in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

Athena’s afterword: Unsurprisingly, my view of John Carter (henceforth JCM) is far more jaundiced than Larry’s.  JCM is dull, curiously inert, with zero frisson or sensawunda despite the non-stop eye candy.  Although the novel it’s based on predated and influenced Star Wars, Avatar, etc, it was a given that the film’s late arrival would doom it to looking stale unless its makers were truly bold.  Pressing Pixar’s Stanton into service made success a possibility but Disney standard hackery prevailed: the deletion of crucial words from the film’s title (Mars, because other films with Mars in their titles bombed; Princess, because… it might give the film girl cooties) signals this fatal lack of conviction.

True, JCM is not a total failure; however, given its semi-infinite budget and the longueurs recognized even by its champions, this is a pathetically low bar.  It’s a near-failure even as film space opera — which by tradition has low standards for coherence, opting instead for assaultive FX pyrotechnics.  Of course, JCM’s science is non-existent even within its own silly framework (example: the intermittence and variability of Carter’s locust-like jumping abilities).  At least, unlike Cameron’s Na’vi, Stanton forbore from putting breasts on female Tharks.  In fact, JCM’s core failure lies in its clumsy, generic narrative and its paper-thin worldbuilding and characters, for whom it’s impossible to care.  Additionally, by being mostly faithful to the novel, JCM’s makers reproduced its highly problematic underpinnings.

The cultures in JCM are based (snore) on ancient Rome and the Celtic and German nations that opposed it  – as filtered through the lens of someone who learned history from comics or fifties Hollywood films.  JCM’s obvious muscular-christian underdrone further underlines its poverty of imagination.  There is no internal logic to the conflicts: they must simply exist, so that 1) we can see the neat-o flying machines and 2) the savior can become indispensable and lead his disciples to victory.  Its pace is as lumbering as its six-legged war beasts; neither its tone nor its visuals ever coalesce.  The relentless battles and fights are choppy and muddy.  The dialogue is clunkier than that of Lucas (a feat I considered impossible), the characters look and speak like Pharaonic wooden statues and the two leads have as much chemistry as pet rocks.  The aptly named Taylor Kitch, blander than lo-fat cottage cheese, doesn’t deserve Lynn Collins’ hot chili and the best that can be said about Thoris and Sola is that neither is a bimbo… or a blonde.

The clichés that literally sink JCM have dogged Hollywood space operas even in their self-labeled progressive incarnations like Star Trek: the White Messiah who out-natives the natives and has their princesses begging for his babbies; the lone feisty-but-feminine metal-bikini-clad woman among a sea (desert?) of men, bereft of any female interactions; the total absence of mothers, when even the non-dyadic Thark family structure gets twisted into providing Sola with a father; natives as noble savages who prevail, Ewok-like, over much superior technology once they choose the right (non-native) leader; hierarchical dog-eat-dog warrior societies; imperial rule by charismatic autocrats as the sole viable method of governance; the dog-like mascot whose sugary cuteness could elicit a full-blown diabetic coma.

People will undoubtedly try to argue that ERB was “a man of his time”.  This is an excuse used ad nauseam for other SF/F “founders” such as Tolkien – who in fact was deemed a regressive throwback even by his own circle before he got canonized into infallibility by his acolytes.  Ditto for ERB.  As one example, John Carter is a “gentleman of Virginia” who served with distinction in the Confederate Army.  Romantic lost causes aside, it means that ERB deliberately made his hero someone who chose to uphold the institution of slavery.  And, of course, the names… oh, how they thud!  Zodanga.  Woola. Tardos Mors.  Barsoom (rhymes with bazoom and va-va-voom, underscored by the Frazetta opulent pornokitch depictions so adored by Tarzanist evopsychos).

Such material can be salvaged in only two ways: either by radical re-imagining (which briefly was the route of the Battlestar Galactica reboot before it collapsed under its maker’s pretensions) or by being played as stylish high camp (which was why the Flash Gordon 1980 remake was such a breath of fresh air).  Like a good bone structure underneath flesh gone to flab, there were glimpses of what might have been had Stanton and his paymasters been braver.  But that would be a parallel universe where Barsoom truly came alive.  Stanton tries to elicit extra sympathy (and remind us of Wall-E) by dedicating JCM to Steve Jobs – but his latest opus resembles a clunky, bloated Microsoft PC.  It makes me once again think how immensely grateful I am that The Lord of the Rings was not directed by an American.

Images: John Carter (Taylor Kitch) realizing that not even super-jumping abilities will get him out of this mess; Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) all undressed up with nowhere to go; Dejah Thoris and John Carter trying to find escape clauses in their contracts; Sola (voiced by Samantha Morton) in WTF? posture.

Part 2

by Calvin Johnson

I’m delighted to once again host my friend Calvin Johnson, who earlier gave us insights on Galactica/Caprica, Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire. Because the essay is slightly longer than usual blog length, it appears in two parts.

The Mysterious Story, Part 1

The Mysterious Story, Part 2

Opening questions are how a story starts the seduction of our minds. To keep us reading, a story must carry out a balancing act, like a good joke, between logic and surprise.

If, for example, Tolkien had never answered the question of “what is a hobbit,” but instead zoomed off to examine the lives of Russian serfs, we might well feel cheated of the logic of the story. If, by contrast, Tolkien had written, “A hobbit is another name for a rabbit, the end,” we might feel the story lacks enough surprise as a reward.

Understanding that a story balances logic and surprises gives underlying support for many so-called “rules” of writing that seem irritatingly arbitrary to novice writers. Deus ex machina endings, where a sudden character or event out of nowhere “solves” the problem, violate the principle of logic. Chekov’s dictum, that a pistol on the mantle in the first act must be fired in the third act, also feeds on the principle of logic, as well as what I call the “reverse-Chekov dictum,” that if you are going to fire a pistol in the third act, better introduce it in the first.

Classes and books on fiction writing often advise one to write stories wherein the main character, or a main character, changes; e.g. Rick in Casablanca, who evolves from an aloof, uninvolved man to a freedom fighter. In truth, such character evolution isn’t formally necessary at all, but character arcs do provide a powerful and logical pattern for our minds to tease out. Rick’s story is made all the more logical, and more compelling, by the fact that he had previously been a freedom fighter.

# # #

Logic alone is not enough. There must be surprises as well.

But surprise is a tricky thing. One method of introduce surprise is introducing a random event.  While common, it is a weak structure, because randomness is the opposite of logic.  A random event–such as a cyclone ripping through the fields of Kansas, or an old flame walking into your gin-joint–can kick off a story, but the response must be rigorously logical and one cannot rely upon too many random events. It doesn’t matter that real life is full of randomness; our minds demand patterns and rebel when the patterns don’t make sense.

Another strategy is through concealing information.  The logic is there, but only apparent in hindsight.  Again, this is a tricky strategy.  Simply withholding information from the reader so you can spring a surprise on them can tread dangerously upon logic.  Too many weak plots, especially those built on mistaken identity, rely upon characters making assumptions that few normal people would make.  Concealment can work, however, if the character concealing the information has good reason to.

A third and stronger strategy is misdirection.  One give a logical alternative while dropping clues to the real solution. This is a favorite strategy of J. K. Rowling, making Snape, or Lupin, or Sirus Black appear to be a villain, while quietly laying the groundwork so that when the true villain is revealed, you say, Ah! That makes sense after all. (Rowling is not above using heavy-handed concealment when it suits her, though.) Alternately, one can frame an situation to imply a wrong assumption, which is how the joke about the grasshopper works.

Surprise doesn’t have be just in plot. It can be in character as well.  My two favorite pieces of advice for constructing characters are, one, work against cliché and convention (i.e. instead of making the female love interest pale, thin, and helpless, make her dark, large, and kick-ass), and two, in addition to a primary character trait, add a secondary, seemingly contradictory character trait. A globe-trotting archaeologist who is afraid of snakes. A gangster who shoots his rivals yet gives money to the poor. A wizard powerfully skilled in dark magic who still worships the memory of his one true love.

Exercise: read a story carefully, taking note of the surprises, especially those beyond the initial hooks. What mechanism is used for those surprises? Going further, is the response to the stories logical?

And, for you writers out there, here is your final exercise: write a marvelous story, full to the brim with surprise and logic, that delights us with the patterns they weave in our brains.

For further reading: Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 Words,” which can be found in his book, The Jewel-hinged Jaw:  Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1977; revised 2009). An excellent essay on how we read, and especially how we read science fiction.

Images: 1st, Anton Chekhov, who grew increasingly more sophisticated in the use of loaded guns in his plays (painter: Osip Braz, 1898); 2nd, Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (illustrator: Richard Powers).

by Calvin Johnson

I’m delighted to once again host my friend Calvin Johnson, who earlier gave us insights on Galactica/Caprica, Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire. Because the essay is slightly longer than usual blog length, it appears in two parts.

The Mysterious Story, Part 1

You all know this one:

A  grasshopper goes into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender brings the beer to the grasshopper and says, “You know, we have a drink named after you.” “Really?” says the grasshopper. “You have a drink called ‘Larry’?”

Most jokes rely on a combination of logic and surprise. We know the bartender is referring to the drink called a ‘grasshopper.’ But we think of ourselves primarily not by our species but by our personal names. Thus the pleasure in the joke is seeing the grasshopper’s response is perfectly logical though unanticipated.

Much of fiction works the same way.

Theories of fiction are as old as Aristotle. Many of these are prescriptive: for a story to be good, it should do this and that. I want to develop a descriptive theory of fiction: why do we perceive certain stories as effective? By understanding how stories works, we can write better stories.

# # #

Humans are outstanding at pattern recognition. The discernment of complex patterns spread over space and time has been the secret of our success, allowing humanity to develop agriculture and technology, and consequently for civilization to flourish.  Our talent for pattern-recognition is so overdeveloped, in fact, we see patterns where they don’t exist: spirits and gods, astrology and magic, constellations and conspiracy theories.

It is my thesis that our innate skill for pattern-recognition drives our love of story, and governs what we consider a good story. A good story is like a good joke: it is logical, so that we see the sense of the pattern, but contains enough surprise to give our pattern-recognizing machinery a workout.

I don’t claim my thesis is completely new, though I will suggest less common ways of closely reading texts. The closest antecedent is Samuel R. Delaney’s work on how science fiction texts are read, and read differently from mainstream fiction, in particular his classic essay “About 5,750 Words,” which I highly recommend if you can get your hands on it.

# # #

A necessary component of the drive to recognize patterns is our insatiable curiosity. Fiction does this by provoking questions in our minds–and, teasingly, withholding the answers.

For example:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit

grabs our attention: what is a hobbit? It is particularly enticing because the answer seems just out of reach: “hobbit” is reminiscent of “rabbit,” a similarity enhanced by the fact said hobbit lives in a hole in the ground like a rabbit. But is it a rabbit? Curious minds want to know, and soon we are off in the story.

So here is an exercise: take any piece of fiction, and read the opening paragraphs. Read slowly, sentence by sentence, and pay particular attention to how questions in your mind immediately start popping up. These questions, these mysteries, these hooks engage our pattern-seeking minds and draw us along.

I’ll do a worked out example: the first two paragraphs of Connie Willis’ award-winning story “Fire Watch.”

September 20 – Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire watch stone. And of course it wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the fire watch stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow help. It didn’t.

The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time. I had not gotten either.

Now let’s go through it again in slow motion, sentence by sentence. I’ll add boldface to emphasize text that raises questions, with parenthetical questions and comments inserted. But imagine you are reading the opening for the very first time:

September 20 – Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire watch stone.

(Q: What’s a fire watch stone?)

And of course it wasn’t there yet.

(Q: How could the narrator look for something that isn’t there yet?)

It wasn’t dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940.

(Experienced SF readers will recognize this is a time-travel story–a partial answer to the previous question–but it raises several new questions. Q: How did the narrator get here? And why is the narrator here?)

I knew that. I went to see the fire watch stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow help. It didn’t.

(Q: What crime? Help with what?)

The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time.

(This partially tells us the story’s location in space as well as time. But our question about why the narrator is here is heightened.)

I had not gotten either.

(Q: Why not? Has something gone wrong?)

(Full story available free at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm)

Such hooks come more rapidly in recent (late 20th-century) fiction and in short stories. Fiction from older, less hectic times is more leisurely in suggesting mysteries, and the longer length of novels allow for slower development.

Nonetheless, I propose that effective fiction works this way. Whether rapidly or at leisure, fiction lays out mysteries, provoking our curiosity. Now for different kinds of fiction the primary mysteries will be different. In so-called literary fiction, the mystery is often primarily of character: who is this person, why are they this way, and how does it affect their lives?  Other fiction is primarily plot driven: will the character succeed or fail? In the genre called “mysteries” there is a specific question: who committed this act (usually a crime)? In fantasy and science fiction stories there are also mysteries of setting: what is this world; science fiction can also have the additional mystery of “how did we get here”?

Furthermore, when a story is carefully read, you can trace how questions arise, are answered, but new questions replace them. For example, we quickly learn that a hobbit is a small person, but that’s not the end of the story; a wizard has come calling on the hobbit and proffered an adventure. How will that adventure end? And so on.

To amplify on the previous exercise: take a short story you like very much, and go through and determine the major mysteries: where are they raised, and where are they resolved.

The Mysterious Story, Part 2

Images: 1st, a perfect logic/surprise combo from Gary Larson, a champion of this trope; 2nd, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) tries to parse the mysteries of his long contract; 3rd, Willis’ Fire Watch collection (likely artist: John Jude Palencar).

I sent notes to 27 authors I wanted as contributors to my projected anthology. I expected long silences, because of the holidays. Six days later, 17 of them want to participate.

It’s premature to mention names, because I know we will have the usual attrition. Let’s just say that everyone who reads SF will recognize them. But I will share my framing criteria:

— Space opera(ish) and/or mythic, but it must be science fiction, not fantasy;
— Female protagonist(s) who do not (nor are made to) feel guilty about career versus family;
— Content and style geared to adult readers, not young-adult “finding one’s self/place”;
— No “big ideas” Leaden Age SF, nor near-future earthbound cyber/steampunk.

It is my fond hope that having an offbeat editor will shake something unusual out of these frames.

I can hardly wait.

Update: The final starting roster stands at 22.

Photo: Foléghandhros (one of the Cyclades), by RALF.

“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

— Philip K. Dick

When Margaret Atwood stated that she does not write science fiction (SF) but speculative literature, many SF denizens reacted with what can only be called tantrums, even though Atwood defined what she means by SF. Her definition reflects a wide-ranging writer’s wish not to be pigeonholed and herded into tight enclosures inhabited by fundies and, granted, is narrower than is common: it includes what I call Leaden Era-style SF that sacrifices complex narratives and characters to gizmology and Big Ideas.

By defining SF in this fashion, Atwood made an important point: Big Ideas are the refuge of the lazy and untalented; works that purport to be about Big Ideas are invariably a tiny step above tracts. Now before anyone starts bruising my brain with encomia of Huxley, Asimov, Stephenson or Stross, let’s parse the meaning of “a story of ideas”. Like the anthropic principle, the term has a weak and a strong version. And as with the anthropic principle, the weak version is a tautology whereas the strong version is an article of, well, religious faith.

The weak version is a tautology for the simplest of reasons: all stories are stories of ideas. Even terminally dumb, stale Hollywood movies are stories of ideas. Over there, if the filmmakers don’t bother with decent worldbuilding, dialogue or characters, the film is called high concept (high as in tinny). Other disciplines call this approach a gimmick.

The strong version is similar to supremacist religious faiths, because it turns what discerning judgment and common sense classify as deficiencies to desirable attributes (Orwell would recognize this syndrome instantly). Can’t manage a coherent plot, convincing characters, original or believable worlds, well-turned sentences? Such cheap tricks are for heretics who read books written in pagan tongues! Acolytes of the True Faith… write Novels of Ideas! This dogma is often accompanied by its traditional mate, exceptionalism – as in “My god is better than yours.” Namely, the notion that SF is intrinsically “better” than mainstream literary fiction because… it looks to the future, rather than lingering in the oh-so-prosaic present… it deals with Big Questions rather than the trivial dilemmas of ordinary humans… or equivalent arguments of similar weight.

I’ve already discussed the fact that contemporary SF no longer even pretends to deal with real science or scientific extrapolation. As I said elsewhere, I think that the real division in literature, as in all art, is not between genre and mainstream, but between craft and hackery. Any body of work that relies on recycled recipes and sequels is hackery, whether this is genre or mainstream (as just one example of the latter, try to read Updike past the middle of his career). Beyond these strictures, however, SF/F suffers from a peculiar affliction: persistent neoteny, aka superannuated childishness. Most SF/F reads like stuff written by and for teenagers – even works that are ostensibly directed towards full-fledged adults.

Now before the predictable shrieks of “Elitist!” erupt, let me clarify something. Adult is not a synonym for opaque, inaccessible or precious. The best SF is in many ways entirely middlebrow, as limpid and flowing as spring water while it still explores interesting ideas and radiates sense of wonder without showing off about either attribute. A few short story examples: Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree’s A Momentary Taste of Being; Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life; Ursula Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea; Joan Vinge’s Eyes of Amber. Some novel-length ones: Melissa Scott’s Dreamships; Roger Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows; C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station; Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite. Given this list, one source of the juvenile feel of most SF becomes obvious: fear of emotions; especially love in all its guises, including the sexual kind (the real thing, in its full messiness and glory, not the emetic glop that usurps the territory in much genre writing, including romance).

SF seems to hew to the long-disproved tenet that complex emotions inhibit critical thinking and are best left to non-alpha-males, along with doing the laundry. Some of this comes from the calvinist prudery towards sex, the converse glorification of violence and the contempt for sensual richness and intellectual subtlety that is endemic in Anglo-Saxon cultures. Coupled to that is the fact that many SF readers (some of whom go on to become SF writers) can only attain “dominance” in Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft. This state of Peter-Pan-craving-comfort-food-and-comfort-porn makes many of them firm believers in girl cooties. By equating articulate emotions with femaleness, they apparently fail to understand that complex emotions are co-extensive with high level cognition.

Biologists, except for the Tarzanist branch of the evo-psycho crowd, know full well by now that in fact cortical emotions enable people to make decisions. Emotions are an inextricable part of the indivisible unit that is the body/brain/mind and humans cannot function well without the constant feedback loops of these complex circuits. We know this from the work of António Damasio and his successors in connection with people who suffer neurological insults. People with damage to that human-specific newcomer, the pre-frontal cortex, often perform at high (even genius) levels in various intelligence and language tests – but they display gross defects in planning, judgment and social behavior. To adopt such a stance by choice is not a smart strategy even for hard-core social Darwinists, who can be found in disproportionate numbers in SF conventions and presses.

To be fair, cortical emotions may indeed inhibit something: shooting reflexes, needed in arcade games and any circumstance where unthinking execution of orders is desirable. So Galactic Emperors won’t do well as either real-life rulers or fictional characters if all they can feel and express are the so-called Four Fs that pass for sophistication in much of contemporary SF and fantasy, from the latest efforts of Iain Banks to Joe Abercrombie.

Practically speaking, what can a person do besides groan when faced with another Story of Ideas? My solution is to edit an anthology of the type of SF I’d like to read: mythic space opera, written by and for full adults. If I succeed and my stamina holds, this may turn into a semi-regular event, perhaps even a small press. So keep your telescopes trained on this constellation.

Note: This is part of a lengthening series on the tangled web of interactions between science, SF and fiction. Previous rounds: Why SF needs…

…science (or at least knowledge of the scientific process): SF Goes McDonald’s — Less Taste, More Gristle
…empathy: Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst
…literacy: Jade Masks, Lead Balloons and Tin Ears
…storytelling: To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club

Images: 1st, Bill Watterson’s Calvin, who knows all about tantrums; 2nd, Dork Vader, an exemplar of those who tantrumize at Atwood; 3rd, shorthand vision of my projected anthology.

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.

— William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

My mother used to joke about me, “Put a sheet with moving shadows in front of her and she will watch them.” Indeed, outside the lab I’m restless unless I’m reading books or watching films that engage me; both activities make me go instantly still for as long as the process lasts. My first encounter with le Carré was the film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in the late sixties. Shot in stark black and white, with Richard Burton and a luminous Claire Bloom, it was that rare thing – an adaptation that honored its source.

So the day after I saw the film I marched into my extremely well-endowed high school library, searched the “Restricted” section (where all the interesting books were sequestered) and pounced. The librarian already knew me too well to object; I spirited my booty to safety and devoured it during my more boring classes, tucked inside textbooks. This was how I imprinted on le Carré. My appetite for him has remained unslaked down the decades. Among his (happy sigh!) still-lengthening output, my favorites are The Little Drummer Girl, The Constant Gardener and the two bookends of the Smiley trilogy.

Le Carré succeeds in what most authors dream of but few achieve: he creates fully realized worlds inhabited by complex human beings (well, men) dealing with complex issues. He manages this without resorting to infodumps or appendices. He is so self-assured that he commits several cardinal sins, according to the recipes of writing workshops: he always starts in media res, he never explains terms (Circus, mole, lamplighters, scalphunters, babysitters, wranglers, inquisitors) and he shifts viewpoints constantly and unapologetically. We get strobe glimpses of people and events from multiple angles. As these accumulate, they coalesce into a shimmering tesseract: the puzzle that inhabits the center of each story.

Le Carré’s books require attentive reading and are genuinely thought-provoking within their framework, whether this is Cold War rivalries, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or big pharma shenanigans. To put it succinctly, they’re meant for mental and emotional adults. This defining attribute places them far above run-of-the-mill genre hackeries. It comes as no surprise that he was nominated for the Booker Prize. His characters highlight the often irreconcilable dilemmas of personal versus professional loyalties; in this he continues the work of Graham Greene, without Greene’s sanctimonious religiosity.

Much has been said about le Carré’s George Smiley being the antithesis to James Bond. Bond is the cardboard alpha male, festooned with glitzy gadgets and pneumatic trophy women. Smiley is one of the competent faceless geeks who uphold the world. In le Carré’s world of ambiguous morality and shadow games, Smiley hews to one lodestar: loyalty to “his people” – the people who become his chosen extended family by dint of putting flesh-and-blood humans above abstract principles or power plays. When he passes judgment on Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy it is clear that in his eyes Haydon’s real betrayal was to choose status over people: the casual use and disposal of lovers and colleagues, not of the sorry parochial “principles” of the British Empire.

Smiley rarely wins: in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold he loses Alec Leamas and Liz Gold; in Tinker, Tailor he loses his home plus most of his clan. But when summoned to be a nettoyeur of Augean stables, he metes out justice like a Hollywood vigilante. Except he does it not with a gun but with information files; not with jazzy torture devices but with understanding of the fault lines that run through the hearts of men. Which brings us to the blind spot of Smiley and his creator. [Those of you who glaze over at the mere mention of women can skip the next three paragraphs and resume reading when I get back to issues deemed “universally” interesting.]

People will argue, correctly, that in showing the arrant sexism of mid-twentieth-century Britain le Carré was simply hewing to reality – as Prime Suspect did, decades later. After all, we speak of a culture that still manages to publish all-male “best of” anthologies and whose contemporary “literati” still publicly defend the use of cunt as an acceptable term of censure. However, le Carré’s women are not just abstractions on the page – they’re also abstractions to their own men. They fall into two overlapping categories: Bitch Goddesses and Distant Beacons, Arwens to pre-Andúril Aragorns. Bear in mind that le Carré is neither reactionary nor prudish: he included homosexuals without ostentatious ado even in his early works (Jim Prideaux, Connie Sachs) and Bill Haydon is a poster case of the Alkiviádhis-type lethal bisexual charmer. Yet his women fade into a pre-Raphaelite haze of watercolors and violin strings.

Ann Sercombe Smiley is both Bitch Goddess and Distant Beacon to everyone within her radius. Yet all we learn of her is that she is nobly born, radiantly beautiful and joylessly promiscuous (heaven forfend that even a heavenly “slut” should enjoy her urges). Most le Carré women are solely there to spur the men into action: the prototype is the tragic Irina, who’s summarily dispatched after she awakens Ricky Tarr’s slumbering conscience in Tinker, Tailor. Similar fates befall Liz Gold, a maiden/mother helpmate in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Katya Orlovna, almost entirely a parade of creaky pseudo-delphic utterances, in The Russia House (at least she may get ransomed); and Sophie Maplethorpe in The Night Manager. Louisa Pendel is there essentially as a bromance conduit in The Tailor of Panama. And Tessa Quayle, the ostensible moral center of The Constant Gardener, is safely dead and pedestalized before the novel even starts.

The exceptions are telling as well: Connie Sachs, the formidable intelligence analyst in the Smiley novels, is that universally derided stereotype, the bluestocking fag hag (“All my lovely boys!”). Her lesbianism, inexplicably elided in the recent film version of Tinker, Tailor, is shown as the constricting “loving jailor” Yourcenar/Frick variety. Charlie No-Last-Name of The Little Drummer Girl is an actress who is literally an empty vessel to be filled in by the men around her. Interestingly she was played by Diane Keaton, another male muse who was essentially a collection of tics, although the role was meant for Vanessa Redgrave, who knows full well what it means to be a strong woman embedded in dynasties of male-only “begats”.

Le Carré’s two depictions of quasi-real women occur in Smiley’s People – possibly because they are the baits he uses to reel in his Soviet doppelgänger and nemesis, Karla, and hence they must demonstrate they deserve their glory-by-association. One of them, Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova (the always peerless Eileen Atkins), even breaks the mould of La Belle Dame sans Merci: she is almost elderly, unglamorous… and ferociously alive, attaining the stature of le Carré’s other fully realized humans. The other, Alexandra/Tatiana, is a tortured cipher who nevertheless shows glimpses of a specific person/ality buried in the cliché.

Alexandra is Karla’s daughter by a lover he adored but killed because he considered her a danger to the purity of his goal. Smiley uses this chink of humanity in Karla to break him. It is characteristic that he sunders all of his own human ties before this undertaking, so that he has no Achilles heel that jeopardizes his final task. In the end, Smiley reverses roles with Karla. By defecting to protect his daughter, Karla becomes flesh; by using Karla’s daughter to defeat him, Smiley turns to stone. Le Carré himself, moving from early Smiley to late Karla, maintains his stance of ambiguity up to his middle-late works. However, after the Cold War novels, his moral judgments become more absolute as his novels move out of the cloistered enclaves of MI6 and into the larger world where boardroom power games translate to millions of deaths and stunted lives.

Inevitably, many of le Carré’s works have been adapted to the screen. Given their complexity and the artificial demand that they be fitted to two-hour slots, they are mostly shadows of themselves. Beyond The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the partial exceptions correspond to three of my four favorites. Le Carré agrees with my assessment, because he makes cameo appearances in two of them: The Little Drummer Girl and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The Little Drummer Girl retains a fair amount of le Carré’s Chinese puzzle structure and draws riveting performances from Klaus Kinski (a fiery Martin Kurtz) and Sami Frey (a spellbinding Khalil). However, the film is doomed by the total miscasting of Charlie (Diane Keaton, as discussed earlier) and Gadi/Joseph (Yórghos Voyagís) who drain their pivotal characters of both charisma and erotic chemistry. The Constant Gardener flattens most of the plot and character intricacies but boasts Ralph Fiennes as Justin Quayle (Ok, you can take away the smelling salts now…) and Rachel Weisz (Tessa Quayle) who can convey intense intelligence despite her beauty, as witnessed in her depiction of Hypatia in Agora.

And so we come to the jewel in the crown – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The film has enormous shoes to fill: it must measure up not only to the book but also to the BBC series that also includes the other bookend, Smiley’s People. I watched it several times, once in a marathon session of fifteen hours spanning a new year transition. A TV series has the room to do justice to plot complexities and to showcase the ensemble acting of enormously talented professionals that has been a traditional glory of the British. Indeed, many people consider the BBC diptych the definitive version of the works. Its atmospherics are impeccable, exemplified by the increasingly frowning matryoshkas and a haunting rendition of Nunc dimittis in the credits. The characters are brought to electrifying life by the illustrious likes of Ian Richardson (Bill Haydon), Ian Bannen (Jim Prideaux), Alexander Knox (Control) and with Alec Guinness as the calm but formidable eye of the storm. The series unquestionably deserves all the accolades it gathered.

Tomas Alfredson’s film also boasts impeccable period atmosphere (a feat, considering the distance from the time the book was written as well as the era it depicts) and once again the ensemble acting of high-octane professionals. Standouts: Mark Strong (Jim Prideaux), breaking his usual typecasting, speaks volumes with his eyes; Tom Hardy (Ricky Tarr) is as feral as the young Brando; John Hurt (Control) pulses with obsession and choler, wreathed in whisky fumes and cigarette smoke; and Benedict Cumberbatch (Peter Guillam), here shown as a closeted homosexual rather than a lady-killer, is a reluctant but conscientious convert to Smiley’s philosophy.

Gary Oldman, one of the few blonds in my personal gallery of talented eye candy, gives us a restrained, nuanced George Smiley. We cannot help but extrapolate to the turbulent waters underneath, if only from his previous portrayals of such tortured souls as Sid Vicious, Count Dracula and Sirius Black. Also, the fact that he’s a decade younger than Guinness when he portrayed Smiley makes the sudden yawning emptiness in his life far more palpable and poignant. Not surprisingly, there is incredible plot compression but the film never condescends to its audience: like the book, it demands focus and attention. There are countless small touches that convey enormous amounts of information – glances exchanged across tables, the lowering of a car window to let a bee fly out, a hand tightening on a banister.

Several items have been changed, some in the service of streamlining, others clearly aesthetic choices on the director’s part. I found two objectionable: Ann Smiley, whose face is never shown, is nevertheless implied to be far younger and more vulgar than her rarefied book persona (maintained in the series by the otherworldly Siân Phillips). Also, Jim Prideaux kills Bill Haydon with a long-distance rifle instead of snapping his neck, although in both cases Haydon is shown as aware and accepting of what is about to happen. This diminishes the emotional weight of the action, particularly on Prideaux’s side of the equation.

These caveats aside, the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a worthy incarnation of the book, different enough from the TV series to be appreciated in its own right. Like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, it is an unexpected gift. And gods and demons know how rare such gifts are, especially for someone like me who will still watch moving shadows on a sheet, but would rather watch truly original retellings of old myths.

Images: 1st, Shadow Theater Tales, Alexander Ovchinnikov; 2nd, Eileen Atkins as Maria Ostrakova in Smiley’s People; 3rd, the final matryoshka in the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy BBC series credits; 4th, husked grains in Tinker, Tailor: Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy), Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch).

Charles Tan, the Bibliophile Stalker, interviewed me for SF Signal.  The result just appeared on SFS.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Do you have a preference for SF or fantasy?

I will read anything that is not a hack job; what matters is the quality of the story telling, not the mode.  Of course, I have preferences, just as I like dark chocolate and goat cheese: I gravitate to stories that are hybrid and/or hard to categorize; I still have a soft spot for well-written space opera (with C. J. Cherryh and C. S. Friedman at the top of that list) and particular types of alternative history fantasy (for example, Jacqueline Carey’s Renaissance Europe, in which Celtic Ireland and Minoan Crete are still going strong); I tend to dislike cyberpunk, though I loved Melissa Scott; and steampunk makes me break out in hives, automata in particular – to say nothing of corsets.  At my age and exposure, I can tell from reading the first and last page if it’s worth my while to read the whole work.”

ETA: Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams caught all the echoes of the interview in his recent entry Reflections on a Mythic Voyager.  I originally had a link to it, but removed it when his post got deluged by comments from nerdtrolls “explaining” why Paul was terribly, terribly wrong in liking the words of a dark female ethnic, no matter what objective credentials she has.

Cool Cat by Ali Spagnola

Restoree, The Ship Who Sang, Crystal Singer, Dragonflight.  I read them in the 70s and 80s alongside the like-minded works of André Norton.  I knew then intuitively what I know now from reading biographies: the person who wrote these stories opened a lot of doors previously closed to women.  Many of her works have aged badly (to say nothing of some of her views).  But her best works were seamless fusions of SF, fantasy and romance — as it should be, as it can be.  And her women protagonists changed worlds while getting to savor (and why not?) beautiful men.

Fair winds, Anne Inez McCaffrey, Weyrwoman of Pern.

Image, used with permission: Lessa, dragonrider of golden Ramoth, Weyr of Benden © 1988 Robin Wood (who created lovely portraits of many Pern characters).

“I wish to be as God made me.”
— Emily Brontë

My father’s nameday happened to fall during my last visit to Hellas: Saint George, whose day often falls during Easter celebrations. His DVD player had been hit by lightning, so my sister and I bought him a replacement as a gift. To check the new gizmo, we used a DVD of Jane Campion’s The Piano.

I saw The Piano when it first appeared, twenty years ago. It made an indelible impression on me and has been in and out of my thoughts ever since. For one, it was filmed in Aotearoa, one of my three Valinors – the other two being Hellas and Alba, particularly their islands. Aotearoa became home to one of the few bona fide seafaring cultures on the planet, and I still pinch myself to ensure that The Lord of the Rings really was made in that wondrous place, rather than on Hollywood plywood sets. For another, The Piano is a witch’s brew of potent myths: part Wuthering Heights, part Demetra/Persephone, part Lilith, Lucifer and Adam – but primarily it’s a tale of what happens to an uncompromising creator who happens to be a woman.

The hero of The Piano is brought to mesmerizing life by Holly Hunter who deserved the slew of awards she got, including the Oscar. Fierce Ada McGrath, a Victorian mail order bride with a fatherless daughter, has decided to communicate with the world solely through a self-invented sign language, the occasional terse written message… and, most crucially, her piano. The two men she encounters in New Zealand, the stunning landscape she finds herself in, her precocious child (who turns from devotee to traitor, played by a young Anna Paquin at her fey best) all influence her life dramatically; but for Ada, the crux of her existence is the piano.

Unlike a “proper” lady, Ada does not merely tickle its ivories. She’s a composer and virtuoso player of immense talent and of course there is no possible place for her among either the Scots colonialists or the Maori natives. Nobody comprehends her, not even her ensorcelled child or her besotted lover, even though they love her in large part because of her uniqueness. There is no place or companion in the world, then or now, for a woman of implacable will and focus who will not compromise or yield in her determination to pursue her vocation.

If Ada were a man, she could choose the roles highlighted by the two male characters. She could embrace her own culture wholeheartedly like her husband, or attempt to “go native” like her lover. But for a woman, either choice would mean submission to a rigid, confined existence. Westerners are more familiar with Victorian women’s suffocated lives, yet Maori women fared little better in a culture as hierarchical and despotic as any of its European counterparts. In either case, Ada would have to renounce her music – an outcome equivalent to losing her life.

So there are two endings to the film, though the second one is truer: after a forcible mutilation, Ada almost joins her piano in the depths of the Pacific. On the surface of things, she decides to stay with the living – now a tamed hausfrau teaching colonial children their piano scales, a tiger pulling a plow, a queen ant who has shed her wings; but in her dreams, which are more real than her awake moments, she is underwater, swaying above her now-silent piano like a strand of kelp.

Something similar happens to another hero of an Aotearoa-based film: Paikea Apirana (Keisha Castle-Hughes) in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider, adapted from Witi Ihimaera’s book. Pai is clearly destined to be the next chief: she has the bloodlines, the talent and charisma, the stamina and will. In mythical terms, not only did her father (himself a maverick) name her after the legendary Maori ancestor who came from Hawaiki riding a whale but she also bears a second soul: that of her twin brother, dead at birth along with her mother. But… Pai has the wrong equipment between her legs. This makes her useless to her grandfather, who considers Pai’s efforts “defiling to the tradition” and tries to train anyone except his granddaughter for the position of chief.

Paikea tries every possible way to reach the core of the crusty old jerk. Finally, when he emphatically rejects her by not coming to a school presentation she has dedicated to him, Paikea in her great desolation calls to the sea. A pod of whales follows her voice, and they beach themselves to reach her. They are slowly suffocating and the rescue efforts of the community prove fruitless, until Pai straddles the pod leader and spurs it back into the water, making the rest follow.

Like The Piano, Whale Rider has two endings: in the happy one, Pai’s grandfather finally embraces his granddaughter as the next chief; her sculptor father finishes his abandoned waka and the entire community joyfully launches the canoe, with Paikea presiding over a crew of both women and men rowing warriors. But this is only possible (barely) because Paikea’s demonstration of prowess is so spectacular and so public that failure to acknowledge it would be disrespecting the ancestors. The real ending of the film comes earlier, with Pai on the whale as it slowly submerges, taking Pai with it into the depths. Her grandfather is right: like Ada, Paikea has no real place in her culture. If she cannot conform, she must die or, at best, live as a lonely outcast: the witch by the forest clearing; the madwoman in the attic; the Yorkshire parson’s three “touched” daughters, circling the kitchen table reciting passages of their novels to each other.

This is the near-universal fate of women who defy the roles set for them and demand real concessions to their talent. People may love talented women, often because of their gift; but the all-too-common aftermath consists of testing whether these women will give up their vocation as proof of love, abjure or dilute it as a way of fitting into the glass slipper or the red-hot iron shoe. There are no meet companions for women like Ada; just as Tsars interred their daughters in the terem because they had no companions of their rank, female creators must live alone and die early – or live long enough to curse the despised talent that devours them like fire consumes faggots.

Persistent, the Yorkshire parson’s daughters kept “scribbling” and paid to get their books published: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey. The one who survived long enough to bend to conventionality stopped writing after her marriage; she died soon afterwards, during a troubled pregnancy imposed by her husband to seal her surrender. As the least conventional of these three sisters intuited, only elementals can be mates to such women: the Moon; the Heath; the Wind; the Sky; the Sea.

Elizabeth Lynn reached the same conclusion in The Woman who Loved the Moon.  So did Diane Duane in Lior and the Sea. The story, part of Duane’s Middle Kingdoms universe, appeared in Moonsinger’s Friends, a collection in honor of André Norton. In it, unlike Le Guin’s Earthsea, female wizards wield rods of power without celibacy strictures and with nary a ripple in the society. Lior is a very powerful Rodmistress who has chosen to practice in a small fishing village even though she could be the equivalent of an Archmage. She has willing and happy bedmates of both genders, yet none is her equal; none comprehends her magic.

In her aloneness, Lior talks with the Sea. And just as the whales hear Paikea, the Sea hears Lior, and learns to love her. It sends avatars to woo her: first a beautiful horse; then an equally beautiful man. Lior finally has a true companion who fills the chambers of her soul. But in the end, the Sea must return to its element. Faced with her possible futures, Lior decides to join the Sea — just like Ada and Paikea in their far likelier bleak alternative endings:

“But few who say so have stood on that jeweled beach by night and heard the Sea whisper again and again, as if to another self:

“You dared…”

Images and sounds: Ada (Holly Hunter) and Flora (Anna Paquin) McGrath, The Piano; Paikea Apirana (Keisha Castle-Hughes), Whale Rider; Ada’s signature theme by Michael Nyman.

by Joan Slonczewski

Today I have the great pleasure of hosting my friend Joan Slonczewski, who will discuss how textbooks can fire the imagination of future scientists.  Dr. Slonczewski is Professor of Biology at Kenyon College where she teaches, does research in microbiology, and writes a leading undergraduate textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She is also an SF author well-known for incorporating real science in her fiction, as highlighted by her justly famous A Door into Ocean.  Her recent SF novel, The Highest Frontier (Tor/Macmillan), shows a college in a space habitat financed by a tribal casino and protected from alien invasion by Homeworld Security.

When the film Avatar opened, it drew many critiques based on science. The planet Pandora could not exist around a gas giant; the neural-linked ecosystem would have no predators; and the Na’vi should have six limbs, like other Pandoran fauna. The greatest flaw was that the Na’vi have breasts, although their class of creatures are not mammals. Non-mammals having breasts would be an error unthinkable in real science.

Yet I wonder what might happen if an introductory textbook in biology were to receive scrutiny similar to that of Avatar.  If non-mammals should not be shown with breasts, does it follow that true mammals, named for the mammary gland, should indeed show breasts? The typical textbook section on “mammalian diversity” shows scarcely a mammary gland. One would never guess that we drink milk from cattle, mares, camels, and reindeer. The more modern books do show prominent breasts on a human. In other words, a view of life surprisingly similar to Avatar.

I first saw the fictional aspect of textbooks from the viewpoint of a science fiction author writing a college text, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton).  As a fiction author–my book A Door into Ocean won the Campbell award–I well know the dilemma of “hard SF,” which aims to invent a future world of gadgets that don’t yet exist based on science that actually does. Even “hard” science fiction often dodges inconvenient points about exceeding the speed of light, breathing the air on any planet where the starship lands, and mating with the seductive native “aliens.”

A textbook, I thought, would be different. My coauthor John Foster would correct what I wrote, and our publisher provided a throng of editors and expert reviewers. The art budget paid for stunning visuals from a first-rate graphic arts firm whose artists actually check details in the primary literature.

Our early illusions about textual perfection fell away in the light of reviewer comments based on errors entrenched in other books, and editorial “corrections” that often made clearer English but muddier science. But the art process was what really made me think of fiction. Early on we chose a “palette” in which color conveys information: DNA was purple, RNA was blue, proteins red, yellow, or green. And cell interiors, with their nucleus, mitochondria, and so on, offered a rainbow of colors from lilac to salmon. Our color-coded figures are more than informative; they are gorgeously attractive, so much so that prospective adopters have been known to caress them on the page.

But DNA is not “really” purple, and RNA is not really blue. Chloroplasts are indeed green, as typically shown, but mitochondria are not red aside from a few of their iron-bearing proteins. And what of individual atoms as ray-traced blue and red balls and sticks? This aspect of science art goes beyond fiction–it is fantasy.

Despite their limitations, the visuals in a textbook illustrate in that they form a pattern in the reader’s mind; a pattern that deepens understanding of a concept. This aim of illustration is actually shared by the best science fiction. Frank Herbert’s Dune illustrates how water scarcity drives an ecosystem. Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood illustrates how organisms trade genetic identity for survival.

So if textbook art is “fictional,” what needs to be “correct”? The mental patterns formed by the text and art need to be honest; to spark genuine insights that lead to understanding. A cell’s nucleus is not “really” lavender in color, but the colored shape draws attention to the nucleus as a compartment enclosing the precious DNA. By contrast, an image depicting the nuclear contents as spilling out of the cell would not yield insight, but confusion. A troubling new group of textbooks aim to sow such confusion–books with titles like Exploring Creation with Biology and The Lies of Evolution.  Such books aim to inoculate “inquiring preteens” against the founding principles of biology, geology, and cosmology.

If deliberate confusion is the worst sin of any book, the next worst sin is boredom. Teachers can make students read the most boring book; but will they stay awake?

A key decision we made for Microbiology: An Evolving Science was to tell stories. We told how Bangladeshi women taught the world to fight cholera. How life began out of atoms formed by stars that died long before our own sun was born. How a high school boy testified at the Scopes trial that humans evolved from microbes. How Louis Pasteur as a student discovered mirror symmetry in biomolecules–a tool that astrobiologists may use to reveal life on other worlds.

A textbook, like science fiction, should raise questions. Is there microbial life on Mars–and what might it look like? Textbooks should take the reader to new places where we’ve never been–and perhaps could never go, such as the interior of a cell, the electron cloud of an atom, or a planet where people have three sexes.  Like science fiction, a textbook should inspire people to learn more about real science, and even become scientists.  After Jurassic Park came out, some scientists felt embarrassed by the book’s technical flaws and its portrayal of money-mad dinosaur cloners.  But so many students came to Kenyon College wanting to clone dinosaurs that we founded a new program in molecular biology.

My latest work of fiction, The Highest Frontier, has already drawn complaints. The space elevator won’t work; the casino-financed satellite can’t be built; and the aliens could not really evolve like viruses. Let’s hope at least the book inspires students to pursue virology.

Athena’s coda:  Readers of this blog know the reasons why I detest Avatar, which go beyond its sloppy science; so do some attendees of Readercon 2010, because Joan and I had a lively exchange about it in a panel.  Even so, I entirely agree with what Joan says here, as attested by The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction.

In my essays and talks, I have repeatedly used A Door into Ocean as an example of outstanding “hard” SF that does not trumpet its hardness and also contains the additional layers and questioning of consequences that make it compelling fiction.

I also had the privilege of reading the penultimate version of The Highest Frontier.  The novel is an unusual combination of space opera and grounded near-future extrapolation — and Harry Potter aficionados would love it if they found out about it (unfortunately unlikely, given the proliferation of unlinked subgenre ponds in speculative fiction).  It’s fascinating to compare and contrast it with Morgan Locke’s Up Against It, also from Tor.  Both are set in beleaguered space habitats where cooperative problem-solving is the only viable option; both literally brim with interesting concepts, vivid characters and exciting thought experiments.

The two novels are proof of three things: women can write stellar hard SF; scenarios for a long-term human presence in space that ignore biology (very broadly defined) are doomed; and I need not despair of finding SF works that engage me… provided that authors as talented as these continue to be published against least-common-denominator tides.

Images: 1st, a Sharer of Shora (from A Door into Ocean) as envisioned by Rowan Williams; 2nd, Slonczewski’s microbiology textbook opens with the NASA Phoenix lander and asks, “Is there life on Mars?”; 3rd, a glimpse of the habitat in The Highest Frontier.

My dreams of space exploration never wane, no matter how dismal its prospects look. So I’ll be one of the hopeless (hopeful?) romantics giving presentations at the 100-Year Starship Symposium, organized by DARPA (in Orlando… at least it’s not Las Vegas).

On other fronts, I moderated and participated in a discussion of Lavie Tidhar’s new novel, Osama, which just went live on SF Signal. And Rose Lemberg will include my two Bull Spec poems (Spacetime Geodesics and Night Patrol) in her anthology of feminist speculative poetry, The Moment of Change from Aqueduct Press.

Now if only my neuroblastoma lines would behave…

Cool Cat is by Ali Spagnola

Note: This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011.

Part 1: Science

Recently, I read a round table discussion at the World SF blog whose participants were international women SF/F writers.  The focus was, shall we say, intersectional invisibility.  One item that came up was the persistence of normalizing to Anglo standards.

Also recently I started Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani travelogue.  In the prologue I ran into the following sentence: “There is not much here about his wartime service in Crete, where for two years in the mountains he organized the resistance to the Nazi occupation.”  In other words, for those who read this introduction (or Anthony Lane’s and David Mason’s swooning accounts of Fermor), the Cretans became sidekicks in their own country, in their own struggle – like the Arabs in T. E. Lawrence’s memoirs.

There are two asides to this.  Fermor’s best known doing, the Kreipe kidnapping, conferred no strategic or tactical advantage, although the German reprisals were very real: they slaughtered and burned the village of Anóghia, the home of bard Níkos Ksiloúris.  Like most of its kind, the action served to maintain Allied control over the “unruly” native resistance.  Additionally, Fermor was frequently airlifted to Cairo, to decompress and receive his wages.  The Cretans were not invited along.  They remained in Crete, subject to said reprisals.  But Fermor was British gentry.  It was his version of reality that got heard, became canon history and granted him fame and fortune.

In Part 1, I said that if I wrote about New Orleans, readers and critics would be on me like a brick avalanche.  I followed the recent conniptions of the British SF contigent over Connie Willis’ depiction of WWII London.  She got terms wrong, she got details wrong, blah blah blah.   Care to know how many things Greg Benford got wrong about Bronze Age and contemporary Mycenae in Artifact?  Care to know what I think of Neil Gaiman’s “There is nothing uniquely Greek about the Odyssey?”  For that matter, you hear endless hymns about Ian McDonald’s books – until you discuss Brasyl with a Brazilian or Hyberabad Days with an Indian.

Myths and history that recedes into legend reach us already as palimpsests.  When The Iliad became standardized, the events it recited were already half a millennium old.  Such stories bear all kinds of revisionist tellings, and the more resonant they are the more ways they can be re/told.  If you want to see a really outstanding retelling of Oedípus Rex from Iocáste’s point of view, watch Denis Villeneuve’s film Incendies based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play Scorched.  However, whenever people embed stories in a culture they haven’t lived in and know intimately, I’m wary.  This, incidentally, is true across genres.  For example, I can’t quite trust Martin Cruz Smith’s Russia, although Arkady Renko is a truly stellar creation.  If you read John Fowles’ The Magus side by side with his French Lieutenant’s Woman, the disparity in authenticity is palpable.  Marguerite Yourcenar knew Hellás; Mary Renault, not so much.

There is nothing wrong with writers using other cultures than their own, especially if they’re good storytellers with sensitive antennae.  But when such works are taken for the real thing, the real thing often gets devalued or rejected outright, just as real science gets rejected in SF in favor of notions that are false or obsolete and often duller than the real thing.  It’s like people used to canned orange juice disdaining the freshly squeezed stuff because it contains pulp.  Or like James Ruskin forming his opinion of women’s bodies from classical statues and then struck impotent when he discovered that real women possess pubic hair.

There’s another equivalence between science and non-Anglo cultures in speculative fiction.  Namely, the devil’s in the details.  You need to have absorbed enough of your subject’s essence to know what counts, what needs to be included for verisimilitude.  You may get the large picture right by conscientious research; you may get by with bluffing – but small things give away the game even when the bigger items pass cursory inspection.  The diminutive of Konstantin in Russian is not Kostyn, it’s Kostya.  Hellenic names have vocative endings that differ from the nominative.  The real thing is both more familiar and more alien than it appears in stories written by cultural tourists.  And often it’s the small touches that transport you inside another culture.

When outsiders get things right, they get saluted as honorary members of the culture they chose to depict and deserve the accolade.  Outsiders can sometimes discern things in a culture that embedded insiders cannot see.  Mark Mazower wrote riveting histories of Salonica and my people’s resistance during WWII that I recommend to everyone, including Hellenes.  Roderick Beaton and Paul Preuss wrote absorbing novels set in Crete that are inseparable from their setting (Ariadne’s Children and Secret Passages).  And Ellen Frye’s The Other Sappho may have dated considerably in terms of its outlook – but you can tell that Frye lived in Hellás for a long time and spoke idiomatic Hellenic, whereas Rachel Swirsky’s A Memory of Wind suffers from a generic setting despite its considerable other merits.

Then we have the interesting transpositions, like Jack McDevitt’s A Talent for War.  If you don’t know he’s loosely retelling the wars of the Hellenic city-states against the Persians, you enjoy the story just fine.  But if you do know, the underdrone adds emotional resonance. By knowing Hellenic history past the surface, McDevitt got something else right almost inadvertently: Christopher Sim is a parallel-universe portrait of Áris Velouchiótis, the most famous WWII resistance leader in Hellás.  On the other hand, Ian Sales turned Eurypides’ careful psychological setup into wet cement in Thicker than Water, his SF retelling of Ifighénia in Tavrís (to say nothing of the name changes, with Orris and Pyle for Oréstis and Pyládhis winning the tin ear award).

Previously, the costs and intrinsic distortions of translation stood between stories of other cultures told by their own members and Anglophone readership.  With SF/F writers of other nations increasingly writing in more-than-fluent English, this is no longer the case.  The double-visioned exiles that camp outside the gates of SF/F might be just what the genre needs to shake it out of its self-satisfied monoculture stupor.  The best-known examplar of this is Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) whose bewitching stories have never gone out of print, though her Kenyan memoirs have their share of noble savage/colonial glamor problems.  Of course, one swallow does not bring the spring: reading one author per culture won’t result in major shifts; singletons cannot serve as blanket representatives of their culture — they remain individuals with unique context-colored viewpoints.

I think we should encourage cross-fertilization or, to use a biological term, back-breeding to the original stock.  We need to listen to the voices from outside the dominant culture, if we don’t want speculative fiction to harden into drab parochial moulds.  We need to taste the real thing, even if it burns our tongues.  Burt Lancaster (but for the accent) was a memorable Don Fabrizio in the film version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo; but Ghassan Massoud swept the floor with his Anglo co-stars as Salahu’d-Din in The Kingdom of Heaven.  Although, to be thorough, Salahu’d-Din was a Kurd.  So he might have had blue or gray eyes.

Images: 1st, Peter O’ Toole in another quintessence of palatable exoticism, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia;  2nd, Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar; 3rd, Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan in Villeneuve’s Incendies.

Related entries:

Iskander, Khan Tengri

Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

A (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards

Evgenía Fakínou: The Unknown Archmage of Magic Realism

Added note:  Almost concurrently, Aliette de Bodard and Cora Buhlert discuss aspects of the same issue.  The synchronicity suggests that the time may be ripe for a change!

Note: This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011.

I originally planned to discuss how writers of SF need to balance knowledge of the scientific process, as well as some concrete knowledge of science, with writing engaging plots and vivid characters. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this discussion runs a parallel course with another; namely, depiction of non-Anglo cultures in Anglophone SF/F.

Though the two topics appear totally disparate, science in SF and non-Anglo cultures in SF/F often share the core characteristic of safe exoticism; that is, something which passes as daring but in fact reinforces common stereotypes and/or is chosen so as to avoid discomfort or deeper examination. A perfect example of both paradigms operating in the same frame and undergoing mutual reinforcement is Frank Herbert’s Dune. This is why we get sciency or outright lousy science in SF and why Russians, Brazilians, Thais, Indians and Turks written by armchair internationalists are digestible for Anglophone readers whereas stories by real “natives” get routinely rejected as too alien. This is also why farang films that attain popularity in the US are instantly remade by Hollywood in tapioca versions of the originals.

Before I go further, let me make a few things clear. I am staunchly against the worn workshop dictum of “Write only what you know.” I think it is inevitable for cultures (and I use that term loosely and broadly) to cross-interact, cross-pollinate, cross-fertilize. I myself have seesawed between two very different cultures all my adult life. I enjoy depictions of cultures and characters that are truly outside the box, emphasis on truly. At the same time, I guarantee you that if I wrote a story embedded in New Orleans of any era and published it under my own culturally very identifiable name, its reception would be problematic. Ditto if I wrote a story using real cutting-edge biology.

These caveats do not apply to secondary worlds, which give writers more leeway. Such work is judged by how original and three-dimensional it is.  So if a writer succeeds in making thinly disguised historical material duller than it was in reality, that’s a problem. That’s one reason why Jacqueline Carey’s Renaissance Minoan Crete enthralled me, whereas Guy Gavriel Kay’s Byzantium annoyed me. I will also leave aside stories in which science is essentially cool-gizmos window dressing. However, use of a particular culture is in itself a framing device and science is rarely there solely for the magical outs it gives the author: it’s often used to promote a world view. And when we have active politics against evolution and in favor of several kinds of essentialism, this is something we must keep not too far back in our mind.

So let me riff on science first. I’ll restrict myself to biology, since I don’t think that knowledge of one scientific domain automatically confers knowledge in all the rest. Here are a few hoary chestnuts that are still in routine use (the list is by no means exhaustive):

— Genes determining high-order behavior, so that you can instill virtue or Mozartian composing ability with simple, neat, trouble-free cut-n-pastes (ETA: this trope includes clones, who are rarely shown to be influenced by their many unique contexts). It runs parallel with optimizing for a function, which usually breaks down to women bred for sex and men bred for slaughter. However, evolution being what it is, all organisms are jury-rigged and all optimizations of this sort result in instant dead-ending. Octavia Butler tackled this well in The Evening and the Morning and the Night.

— The reductionist, incorrect concept of selfish genes. This is often coupled with the “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” evo-psycho nonsense, with concepts like “alpha male rape genes” and “female wired-for-coyness brains”. Not surprisingly, these play well with the libertarian cyberpunk contingent as well as the Vi*agra-powered epic fantasy cohort.

— Lamarckian evolution, aka instant effortless morphing, which includes acquiring stigmata from VR; this of course is endemic in film and TV SF, with X-Men and The Matrix leading the pack – though Star Trek was equally guilty.

— Its cousin, fast speciation (Greg Bear’s cringeworthy Darwin’s Radio springs to mind; two decent portrayals, despite their age, are Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Counts and The Winter of the World).  Next to this is rapid adaptation, though some SF standouts managed to finesse this (Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean, Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite).

— The related domain of single-note, un-integrated ecosystems (what I call “pulling a Cameron”). As I mentioned before, Dune is a perfect exemplar though it’s one of too many; an interesting if flawed one is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Not surprisingly, those that portray enclosed human-generated systems come closest to successful complexity (Morgan Locke’s Up Against It, Alex Jablokov’s River of Dust).

— Quantum consciousness and quantum entanglement past the particle scale. The former, Roger Penrose’s support notwithstanding, is too silly to enlarge upon, though I have to give Elizabeth Bear props for creative chuzpah in Undertow.

— Immortality by uploading, which might as well be called by its real name: soul and/or design-by-god – as Battlestar Galumphica at least had the courage to do. As I discussed elsewhere, this is dualism of the hoariest sort and boring in the bargain.

— Uplifted animals and intelligent robots/AIs that are not only functional but also think/feel/act like humans. This paradigm, perhaps forgivable given our need for companionship, was once again brought to the forefront by the Planet of the Apes reboot, but rogue id stand-ins have run rampant across the SF landscape ever since it came into existence.

These concepts are as wrong as the geocentric universe, but the core problems lie elsewhere. For one, SF is way behind the curve on much of biology, which means that stories could be far more interesting if they were au courant. Nanobots already exist; they’re called enzymes. Our genes are multi-cooperative networks that are “read” at several levels; our neurons, ditto. I have yet to encounter a single SF story that takes advantage of the plasticity (and potential for error) of alternative splicing or epigenetics, of the left/right brain hemisphere asymmetries, or of the different processing of languages acquired in different developmental windows.

For another, many of the concepts I listed are tailor-made for current versions of triumphalism and false hierarchies that are subtler than their Leaden Age predecessors but just as pernicious. For example, they advance the notion that bodies are passive, empty chassis which it is all right to abuse and mutilate and in which it’s possible to custom-drop brains (Richard Morgan’s otherwise interesting Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is a prime example). Perhaps taking their cue from real-life US phenomena (the Teabaggers, the IMF and its minions, Peter Thiel…) many contemporary SF stories take place in neo-feudal, atomized universes run amuck, in which there seems to be no common weal: no neighborhoods, no schools, no people getting together to form a chamber music ensemble, play soccer in an alley, build a telescope. In their more benign manifestations, like Iain Banks’ Culture, they attempt to equalize disparities by positing infinite resources. But they hew to disproved paradigms and routinely conflate biological with social Darwinism, to the detriment of SF.

Mindsets informed by these holdovers won’t help us understand aliens of any kind or launch self-enclosed sustainable starships, let alone manage to stay humane and high-tech at the same time. Because, let’s face it: the long generation ships will get us past LEO. FTLs, wormholes, warp drives… none of these will carry us across the sea of stars. It will be the slow boats to Tau Ceti, like the Polynesian catamarans across the Pacific.

You may have noticed that many of the examples that I used as good science have additional out-of-the-box characteristics. Which brings us to safe exoticism on the humanist side.

Part 2: Culture

Images: 1st, Bunsen and his hapless assistant, Beaker (The Muppet Show); 2nd, the distilled quintessence of safe exoticism: Yul Brynner in The King and I.

Related entries:

SF Goes McDonald’s: Less Taste, More Gristle

To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club

Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome

Ghost in the Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix

Between long hours at the lab and a bout of lingering illness, I have let the blog go quiet for a while.

However, I haven’t been totally inactive. A year ago, I wrote an essay about the fact that writers feel free to use Hellenic contexts (myths, history, location), blithely assuming they know my culture well enough to do so convincingly. In that essay, I also stated that Hellás may be home to the best magic realist alive right now: Evgenía Fakínou. As a follow-up, I wrote a brief introduction to her work, which appeared today at the SFF Portal helmed by Val Grimm. Here is the conclusion:

“Fakínou’s books are full of vision quests, awakenings, boundary crossings. All have open endings, with their protagonists poised at thresholds on the last page. At the same time, they make their readers whole by reclaiming a past that might have led to an alternative future. Fakínou is a windwalker, a weaver of spider silk. I’m sorry she is not world-famous, but even sorrier for the dreamers who will never get a chance to lose – and find – themselves in her work.”

Image: Astradhení (Starbinder), Evgenía Fakínou’s first novel.