Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
374 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 18 to February 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A promising and at times evocative novel bristling with the quills of strange magic, Zoo City is dragged down by an excess of cyberpunk (or is it crustpunk?) prose stylings. Living as we do in the dystopian cyberpunk future, I think we can safely discard the now-antique mash of slang and awkwardly futuristic acronyms first pieced together back in the '80s. Perhaps elsewhere it's different, but I've certainly never heard anyone use the term "SMS" in casual conversation -- we just call it "texting," here in this future age. More embarrassing is the tendency for this self-consciously "fresh" and "with it" narrative voice to drop instantly dated pop culture references: "If Huron's grooves were an LP, they would be playing the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt'." I wince just quoting it.
Much of the novel is spent on what I would consider a thoroughly rote and uninteresting noir plot, tracking down a missing pop starlet, which turns out to be mostly a segue into a more interesting but rather rushed plot of magical murders and body part harvesting. The detailed setting and the exotic-to-me fantastical worldbuilding sustain Zoo City at a level well above what its stereotypical prose and initially formulaic plotting would ordinarily support.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Monday, February 23, 2015
2015 read #9: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6, edited by Lin Carter
191 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 10 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Here we are, at last, marking not one but two transitions: this is the last YBFS curated by Lin Carter, master of self-promotion, and it's also the last YBFS covering the 1970s. I don't feel nostalgia for the exit of Carter -- his "particular enthusiasms" introduced me to a heap of grognard testosterone fantasy I otherwise would never have encountered, but I hated or at best endured nearly every page of it. I do feel sadness for the end of the '70s, however, because I did like a good handful of stories from these books, most notably George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," but also "Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole, "The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein, "Falcon's Mate" and "Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh, "The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh, "The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp, and "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson, most of which are hard to imagine in the context of any other decade. There's a rough-hewn texture to most of these stories, quite removed from the dark and gritty (and often preposterous) nihilism of the 1980s, mingling the precocious urban fantasy of Unknown with the blood and thunder of the pulp tradition and yielding something distinct and memorable.
The end of the '70s YBFS books means the end, so far as I can tell, of easy-to-locate collections of fantasy fiction from the era. There might be occasional '70s fantasy stories in various F&SF retrospectives, though the collection The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has, at most, a handful of entries from this decade. I have a book called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment that includes one -- one! -- story originally published in the '70s. Once this YBFS is done, there will be slim pickings from here on out.
The two stories marked with a 1980 publication date -- both penned by Lin Carter, naturally -- were originally published in this volume.
"Garden of Blood" by Roger Zelazny (1979). Red-blooded hack-and-slash number that, while enjoyable in a sanguinary way, left me feeling at a disadvantage. This story on its own is intriguing but frustratingly incomplete -- one of the problems of serial fantasy adventure, when your first exposure to a character and a story universe comes toward the end of a long and built-up canon. I want to know more about this Dilvish and his beast/devil/robot/horse thing Black, and why Dilvish was revisiting a village 200 years after he'd last seen it, so it looks like I'll have to buy Dilvish, the Damned off Amazon one of these days.
"The Character Assassin" by Paul H. Cook (1979). Outstanding bit of metafiction prefiguring the 1980s cliche of "The author's creation is a psychotic force with a mind of its own." Like most new things in the days before they become cliche, Cook's tale has a freshness and clarity to it often lacking in the formulaic horror it augurs. Here, a character or a man (the distinction, fittingly, is left blurry) named Faraday slips into the various continuities of fiction to dispense "justice" to villainous or unpunished characters in classic novels. Cook's writer protagonist retains some pulp-age innocence, and Faraday meets literary justice of his own inside the writer's stalled novel, an ending the more nihilistic boundary-pushers of the coming decade would avoid in favor of, I don't know, the writer carrying Faraday's "justice" into the real world or something. Two stories in, and this YBFS already feels like the turning point I built it up to be, a crease between two vastly different decades and schools of fantasy.
"The Things That Are Gods" by John Brunner (1979). An epic narrative so densely concentrated, I found it hard to read at times. A tale of enormous scope and ambition, though the basic narrative -- a Gandalfian demiurge or godling, constrained to grant wishes to the extent permitted by the fabric of past actions across time, finds his work and his world nearly undone by his own power -- is comparatively simple. Brunner, author of Stand at Zanzibar (a novel so dense and avant garde that I took one look at the first page and gave up), has his demiurge keep all the insights and revelations close to his chest, not letting the reader in on what's going on until near the very end, which led to both frustration in the early going as well as a sense of anticlimax when all was revealed. I don't need every detail spelled out to me, but I felt this novelette was hindered by trying so hard to be sly. Nonetheless, this was an evocative tale that lingers in the imagination.
"Zurvan's Saint" by Grail Undwin (1980). The very last of Lin Carter's pseudonymous elf anecdotes, which despite his fulsome self-promotion, and praise for his own verve and originality, never amounted to more than a brief "Meh." This parting installment actually has the germ of an interesting idea -- I know, I'm as surprised as you are! -- with a medieval Irish priest taking a boat to Faerie and, without perceiving it, slowly altering his faith to suit the local conception of deity. But Carter does nothing and goes nowhere with it, concluding, "[Perhaps] it matters little which god you worship, or whether you worship any god at all, so long as you worship" -- which had to have been a stale old chestnut even in 1980.
"Perfidious Amber" by Tanith Lee (1979). A clever little tale of a poison ring, though somewhat musty in the telling. Diverting but, like most Lee stories, ultimately forgettable.
"The Mer She" by Fritz Leiber (1979). After the last two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories in these YBFS volumes, my formerly high expectations have eroded into a species of dismay whenever I see Leiber's byline in the contents. This entry is, at least, better written than the Xanth-esque foolery of the previous two, but Leiber doubles down on the leering and exploitation, with our hero the Mouser tying up a seeming 13 year old girl "spread-eagled" in his cabin for his own sexual gratification, then playing the inevitable "She was actually a demon preying upon his poor defenseless masculine nature the whole time" trick, so obvious and predictable I had the general direction sussed out the moment a girl with green eyes and silver hair showed up at the wharf. A grognard masculist fantasy if ever there was one; even if it isn't as abysmal as the previous two Leiber stories in this series, it wasn't my kind of thing.
"Demon of the Snows" by Lin Carter (1980). What do you do if the magazine that was going to print your story folds and leaves your manuscript unpublished? If you're Lin Carter, why, you stick the story into your anthology of the "Year's Best" fantasy fiction! Not that Carter would have scrupled to include it here regardless, but such is the history of this, our final Lin Carter story -- hopefully, in my case, the last one ever. Braced for the worst, I found this story to be... not the absolute worst. It was still bland, predictable, banal fare, tracking Carter's Lemurian barbarian methodically from a mangled garrison (whose only survivor, naturally, is a young and supple barbarian girl who jumps Thongor's furs within a few days) to the rather prosaic lair of a dead wizard, whose ice worm, freed from its pit, has been hungrily crushing folks. But for whatever reason, I didn't recoil from Carter's prose as strongly as I do normally. Maybe it was because I was expecting worse, or maybe it's because the reading part of my brain is truly broken -- it has been ages, after all, since my reading progress was this sluggish.
"The Pavilion Where All Times Meet" by Jayge Carr (1979). A promising story struggling mightily to extricate itself from the stale morass of '70s sword 'n' sorcery. Like a lesser version of "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," this story pushes the imagery and language of '70s fantasy -- a haughty woman of power chewing her "perfumed lip" and inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon those who serve her; "bought brawn" and bandits; timeless magic contained within a cold, pestilential Waste -- into the shape of something new and bold, something bigger and subtler than the petty and monotonous battles of barbarians and warlocks, but unlike "Laren Dorr," "Pavilion" doesn't quite complete the transmutation. For one thing, the "woman without a future" doesn't transcend her tiresome "haughty woman of power" archetype, and the "man without a past," while an audacious and intriguing creation from the start, has an all-too-prosaic explanation for his plight. Still, this is a fine and absorbing entry, good if not necessarily great.
"Cryptically Yours" by Brian Lumley (1979). Lin Carter calls this "a wacky little yarn," set in a Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith mold of dueling sorcerers on "the Primal Continent at the Dawn of Time." I found it passably entertaining, a quaint and enjoyable trifle, though fairly predictable from the start.
"Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee (1979). Reading this, I was amazed (well, not that amazed, for I've read enough now to know how this works) at how thoroughly this prefigures Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" (reviewed here). Gaiman's retelling of Snow White is more languorous, told in first person by the doomed stepmother; as can be expected, Lee's take, written during a less vigorous era of fantasy fiction, lacks polish, its faux-antique style stilted and occasionally rickety. Yet while Gaiman's version (in my words) "reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now," Lee's feels grander somehow, less bound to the cliches and expectations of its era. It also has a beautiful moment (only a moment) in which Satan is revealed to be the compassionate, eternally suffering son of God, "the left hand, the sinister hand of God's design," which trumps Gaiman's weird-but-trendy incest angle. I might sniff at its Christological ending, but Lee's story is flat-out excellent -- the first truly excellent story of hers I've ever encountered. I'd have to reread "Snow, Glass, Apples" to decide which is better, but for now, let's say I'm leaning in Lee's favor.
"Sandmagic" by Orson Scott Card (1979). Even leaving aside the recent assholery of Card, because this story was published long before he became quite so vocal about his vile ideas, I'm surprised to find I really like this entry. I didn't think I would at first, but the story grew as it progressed, attaining a scale and a sense of loss and humanity one wouldn't suspect from its unpromising opening. Captured on paper here is a true transitional animal, a sword 'n' sorcery tale halfway between the Howard-derived thews-and-sinews species and the more Tolkien-influenced epics of the coming decade. Maybe a little over halfway, actually. Many of the hallmarks of 1980s fantasy are here: the morally suspect antihero, the first crude and simplistic attempts at psychological realism, the "realistic" and "gritty" (but honestly just gratuitous) gore and violence, magic based on love and hate rather than arcane runes and elder gods. The clearest vestige of the '70s is a certain clunkiness of prose style, but if we're honest with ourselves, much fantasy retains clunky prose to this day.
At last, some thirteen days since I last finished a book, we arrive at the end. At least Lin Carter went out on a high note (though my cynical side questions whether this was Carter's organic choice, and not pressure from the publisher to leave out all that grognard shit Carter loved so much in favor of something the new fantasy audiences might want to read). I might have been reading this book with a narrative of transition in mind, but there was definitely something different going on in this volume. I might miss some aspects of '70s fantasy, but I'm looking forward to the sleek and dazzling veneer of the 1980s.
191 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 10 to February 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Here we are, at last, marking not one but two transitions: this is the last YBFS curated by Lin Carter, master of self-promotion, and it's also the last YBFS covering the 1970s. I don't feel nostalgia for the exit of Carter -- his "particular enthusiasms" introduced me to a heap of grognard testosterone fantasy I otherwise would never have encountered, but I hated or at best endured nearly every page of it. I do feel sadness for the end of the '70s, however, because I did like a good handful of stories from these books, most notably George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," but also "Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole, "The Land of Sorrow" by Phyllis Eisenstein, "Falcon's Mate" and "Ring of Black Stone" by Pat McIntosh, "The Dark King" by C. J. Cherryh, "The Lamp from Atlantis" by L. Sprague de Camp, and "Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard" by Avram Davidson, most of which are hard to imagine in the context of any other decade. There's a rough-hewn texture to most of these stories, quite removed from the dark and gritty (and often preposterous) nihilism of the 1980s, mingling the precocious urban fantasy of Unknown with the blood and thunder of the pulp tradition and yielding something distinct and memorable.
The end of the '70s YBFS books means the end, so far as I can tell, of easy-to-locate collections of fantasy fiction from the era. There might be occasional '70s fantasy stories in various F&SF retrospectives, though the collection The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has, at most, a handful of entries from this decade. I have a book called Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment that includes one -- one! -- story originally published in the '70s. Once this YBFS is done, there will be slim pickings from here on out.
The two stories marked with a 1980 publication date -- both penned by Lin Carter, naturally -- were originally published in this volume.
"Garden of Blood" by Roger Zelazny (1979). Red-blooded hack-and-slash number that, while enjoyable in a sanguinary way, left me feeling at a disadvantage. This story on its own is intriguing but frustratingly incomplete -- one of the problems of serial fantasy adventure, when your first exposure to a character and a story universe comes toward the end of a long and built-up canon. I want to know more about this Dilvish and his beast/devil/robot/horse thing Black, and why Dilvish was revisiting a village 200 years after he'd last seen it, so it looks like I'll have to buy Dilvish, the Damned off Amazon one of these days.
"The Character Assassin" by Paul H. Cook (1979). Outstanding bit of metafiction prefiguring the 1980s cliche of "The author's creation is a psychotic force with a mind of its own." Like most new things in the days before they become cliche, Cook's tale has a freshness and clarity to it often lacking in the formulaic horror it augurs. Here, a character or a man (the distinction, fittingly, is left blurry) named Faraday slips into the various continuities of fiction to dispense "justice" to villainous or unpunished characters in classic novels. Cook's writer protagonist retains some pulp-age innocence, and Faraday meets literary justice of his own inside the writer's stalled novel, an ending the more nihilistic boundary-pushers of the coming decade would avoid in favor of, I don't know, the writer carrying Faraday's "justice" into the real world or something. Two stories in, and this YBFS already feels like the turning point I built it up to be, a crease between two vastly different decades and schools of fantasy.
"The Things That Are Gods" by John Brunner (1979). An epic narrative so densely concentrated, I found it hard to read at times. A tale of enormous scope and ambition, though the basic narrative -- a Gandalfian demiurge or godling, constrained to grant wishes to the extent permitted by the fabric of past actions across time, finds his work and his world nearly undone by his own power -- is comparatively simple. Brunner, author of Stand at Zanzibar (a novel so dense and avant garde that I took one look at the first page and gave up), has his demiurge keep all the insights and revelations close to his chest, not letting the reader in on what's going on until near the very end, which led to both frustration in the early going as well as a sense of anticlimax when all was revealed. I don't need every detail spelled out to me, but I felt this novelette was hindered by trying so hard to be sly. Nonetheless, this was an evocative tale that lingers in the imagination.
"Zurvan's Saint" by Grail Undwin (1980). The very last of Lin Carter's pseudonymous elf anecdotes, which despite his fulsome self-promotion, and praise for his own verve and originality, never amounted to more than a brief "Meh." This parting installment actually has the germ of an interesting idea -- I know, I'm as surprised as you are! -- with a medieval Irish priest taking a boat to Faerie and, without perceiving it, slowly altering his faith to suit the local conception of deity. But Carter does nothing and goes nowhere with it, concluding, "[Perhaps] it matters little which god you worship, or whether you worship any god at all, so long as you worship" -- which had to have been a stale old chestnut even in 1980.
"Perfidious Amber" by Tanith Lee (1979). A clever little tale of a poison ring, though somewhat musty in the telling. Diverting but, like most Lee stories, ultimately forgettable.
"The Mer She" by Fritz Leiber (1979). After the last two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories in these YBFS volumes, my formerly high expectations have eroded into a species of dismay whenever I see Leiber's byline in the contents. This entry is, at least, better written than the Xanth-esque foolery of the previous two, but Leiber doubles down on the leering and exploitation, with our hero the Mouser tying up a seeming 13 year old girl "spread-eagled" in his cabin for his own sexual gratification, then playing the inevitable "She was actually a demon preying upon his poor defenseless masculine nature the whole time" trick, so obvious and predictable I had the general direction sussed out the moment a girl with green eyes and silver hair showed up at the wharf. A grognard masculist fantasy if ever there was one; even if it isn't as abysmal as the previous two Leiber stories in this series, it wasn't my kind of thing.
"Demon of the Snows" by Lin Carter (1980). What do you do if the magazine that was going to print your story folds and leaves your manuscript unpublished? If you're Lin Carter, why, you stick the story into your anthology of the "Year's Best" fantasy fiction! Not that Carter would have scrupled to include it here regardless, but such is the history of this, our final Lin Carter story -- hopefully, in my case, the last one ever. Braced for the worst, I found this story to be... not the absolute worst. It was still bland, predictable, banal fare, tracking Carter's Lemurian barbarian methodically from a mangled garrison (whose only survivor, naturally, is a young and supple barbarian girl who jumps Thongor's furs within a few days) to the rather prosaic lair of a dead wizard, whose ice worm, freed from its pit, has been hungrily crushing folks. But for whatever reason, I didn't recoil from Carter's prose as strongly as I do normally. Maybe it was because I was expecting worse, or maybe it's because the reading part of my brain is truly broken -- it has been ages, after all, since my reading progress was this sluggish.
"The Pavilion Where All Times Meet" by Jayge Carr (1979). A promising story struggling mightily to extricate itself from the stale morass of '70s sword 'n' sorcery. Like a lesser version of "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," this story pushes the imagery and language of '70s fantasy -- a haughty woman of power chewing her "perfumed lip" and inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon those who serve her; "bought brawn" and bandits; timeless magic contained within a cold, pestilential Waste -- into the shape of something new and bold, something bigger and subtler than the petty and monotonous battles of barbarians and warlocks, but unlike "Laren Dorr," "Pavilion" doesn't quite complete the transmutation. For one thing, the "woman without a future" doesn't transcend her tiresome "haughty woman of power" archetype, and the "man without a past," while an audacious and intriguing creation from the start, has an all-too-prosaic explanation for his plight. Still, this is a fine and absorbing entry, good if not necessarily great.
"Cryptically Yours" by Brian Lumley (1979). Lin Carter calls this "a wacky little yarn," set in a Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith mold of dueling sorcerers on "the Primal Continent at the Dawn of Time." I found it passably entertaining, a quaint and enjoyable trifle, though fairly predictable from the start.
"Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee (1979). Reading this, I was amazed (well, not that amazed, for I've read enough now to know how this works) at how thoroughly this prefigures Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" (reviewed here). Gaiman's retelling of Snow White is more languorous, told in first person by the doomed stepmother; as can be expected, Lee's take, written during a less vigorous era of fantasy fiction, lacks polish, its faux-antique style stilted and occasionally rickety. Yet while Gaiman's version (in my words) "reads like a hot mess of cliches to me now," Lee's feels grander somehow, less bound to the cliches and expectations of its era. It also has a beautiful moment (only a moment) in which Satan is revealed to be the compassionate, eternally suffering son of God, "the left hand, the sinister hand of God's design," which trumps Gaiman's weird-but-trendy incest angle. I might sniff at its Christological ending, but Lee's story is flat-out excellent -- the first truly excellent story of hers I've ever encountered. I'd have to reread "Snow, Glass, Apples" to decide which is better, but for now, let's say I'm leaning in Lee's favor.
"Sandmagic" by Orson Scott Card (1979). Even leaving aside the recent assholery of Card, because this story was published long before he became quite so vocal about his vile ideas, I'm surprised to find I really like this entry. I didn't think I would at first, but the story grew as it progressed, attaining a scale and a sense of loss and humanity one wouldn't suspect from its unpromising opening. Captured on paper here is a true transitional animal, a sword 'n' sorcery tale halfway between the Howard-derived thews-and-sinews species and the more Tolkien-influenced epics of the coming decade. Maybe a little over halfway, actually. Many of the hallmarks of 1980s fantasy are here: the morally suspect antihero, the first crude and simplistic attempts at psychological realism, the "realistic" and "gritty" (but honestly just gratuitous) gore and violence, magic based on love and hate rather than arcane runes and elder gods. The clearest vestige of the '70s is a certain clunkiness of prose style, but if we're honest with ourselves, much fantasy retains clunky prose to this day.
At last, some thirteen days since I last finished a book, we arrive at the end. At least Lin Carter went out on a high note (though my cynical side questions whether this was Carter's organic choice, and not pressure from the publisher to leave out all that grognard shit Carter loved so much in favor of something the new fantasy audiences might want to read). I might have been reading this book with a narrative of transition in mind, but there was definitely something different going on in this volume. I might miss some aspects of '70s fantasy, but I'm looking forward to the sleek and dazzling veneer of the 1980s.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
2015 read #8: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome.
Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
181 pages
Published 1900
Read from February 8 to February 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Two stages in the evolution of the leisure classes are of particular interest to me (three if you count backpacking): the "flivver" age, and the mania for bicycle touring immediately before it. I learned about this book not from a Connie Willis time travel novel (which got me into Three Men in a Boat), but through researching "new" H. G. Wells novels to read. It seems Wells wrote a comic novel called The Wheels of Chance, drawing from the experience of a cycling holiday. Amazon reviewers compared Wells' effort unfavorably to Three Men on the Bummel, a tendency I noted but largely forgot about until I ILL'd a copy of Three Men in a Boat that came bundled with Bummel.
On the whole, Boat is the stronger (and funnier) novel, but Bummel is more consistent in tone, eschewing the Romantic and morbid interludes of Jerome's fictionalized river journey. Sadly, little cycling is actually described; Jerome from the outset devotes most of his space to comic digressions and ethnological observations, tossing out a couple bicycling anecdotes for flavor early on but thereafter concentrating on a satirical look at the German in his native land. Two things, apparently, have changed little in 115 years: jokes about bicycle seats, and jokes about the rigid, robotic, obedient German. The back cover blurb notes the "with hindsight, prophetic" insights into the German state of mind, an inadvertent prophecy that really only occupies a couple lines: "Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, all will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
181 pages
Published 1900
Read from February 8 to February 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Two stages in the evolution of the leisure classes are of particular interest to me (three if you count backpacking): the "flivver" age, and the mania for bicycle touring immediately before it. I learned about this book not from a Connie Willis time travel novel (which got me into Three Men in a Boat), but through researching "new" H. G. Wells novels to read. It seems Wells wrote a comic novel called The Wheels of Chance, drawing from the experience of a cycling holiday. Amazon reviewers compared Wells' effort unfavorably to Three Men on the Bummel, a tendency I noted but largely forgot about until I ILL'd a copy of Three Men in a Boat that came bundled with Bummel.
On the whole, Boat is the stronger (and funnier) novel, but Bummel is more consistent in tone, eschewing the Romantic and morbid interludes of Jerome's fictionalized river journey. Sadly, little cycling is actually described; Jerome from the outset devotes most of his space to comic digressions and ethnological observations, tossing out a couple bicycling anecdotes for flavor early on but thereafter concentrating on a satirical look at the German in his native land. Two things, apparently, have changed little in 115 years: jokes about bicycle seats, and jokes about the rigid, robotic, obedient German. The back cover blurb notes the "with hindsight, prophetic" insights into the German state of mind, an inadvertent prophecy that really only occupies a couple lines: "Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continues, all will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."
Sunday, February 8, 2015
2015 read #7: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 5, edited by Lin Carter.
The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 5, edited by Lin Carter
204 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 7 to February 8
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, with the penultimate YBFS volume curated by Lin Carter. You wouldn't think I'd be looking forward to this -- some unexpected gems aside, the stories chosen (and often written) by Carter in the preceding installments were terrible. They were so consistently bad that I found myself reading them for the pleasure of hating them, and subsequently mocking them in my reviews. It was the short story equivalent of riffing B-movies. And, secretly, I also found myself oddly intrigued by the form of '70s heroic fantasy. The problem was the content, not the form. The idea of a serial adventure following a protagonist through a fantasy realm grew on me with each volume, especially whenever I read a serial I liked, such as Pat McIntosh's Thula tales, or Phyllis Eisenstein's stories of Alaric the minstrel (of which, sadly, I've only encountered one so far) -- or George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," which is the apotheosis of the form, despite being a one-off story. This influence has crept perceptibly into my short story writing, nudging me into experiments with "1970s-style adventure fantasy serials," in which a central hero outwits opponents for the Macguffin, or simply runs away with life (though not pride) intact.
All this has, I believe, helped me forget just how terrible so many of these stories have been, particularly those written by Carter (sometimes under assumed names) and those hewing closest to the Carterian ideal of chiseled, Aryan barbarian trudging across the deserts of a lost continent under the weight of a mighty, turgid thesaurus. I can remind myself of that all I want, yet I still feel just a mite bit sad that this volume and YBFS:6 will complete the run of Carter-curated anthologies. YBFS:7 will inaugurate the editorship of Arthur W. Saha; if Amazon reviews are to be believed, the tone of these collections shifts toward the sleek and dazzling fantasy of the 1980s, much to the disgruntlement of those people who actually like this sort of thing.
So I hope to make the most of my limited time in the company of Lin Carter, master of adult fantasy, tastemaker, lecherous creep, and world's most bald-faced self-promoter. I hope the Saha years ahead of me will help me forget all about you, but I think there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the batshit-stupid fantasy of the 1970s (though not for your stories, which are crap).
More so than usual, the publication dates are all over the place, ranging across three calendar years in this "annual" collection. Those stories designated with a 1980 publication date saw original publication in this volume.
"The Troll" by T.H. White (1978). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I said, "This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.... [It] feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated." Lin Carter unexpectedly comes to the rescue, providing the information that "The Troll" was likely written before 1933, and was only published after it "came to light" among the deceased author's papers. I feel like patting myself on the back for catching its anachronistic quality so early in my genre education.
"In the Balance" by Tanith Lee (1978). Mildly entertaining bauble, efficiently (if generically) setting up the situation and pulling a twist ending that, honestly, wasn't so surprising. I could see this getting published in Adventures of Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s, though that isn't a testament to Lee being ahead of her time so much as it is evidence of how much of a throwback that short-lived pro magazine had been.
"The Gem in the Tower" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (1978). Not even Sprague de Camp's participation can elevate Conan fan-fiction, especially when Lin Carter is involved. Carter brags in his introduction to the story that "seldom before [in our Conan fan-fiction] have we mastered [Robert E. Howard's] tendency toward gloomy foreboding and ominous spookiness as well as in this yarn." This foreboding ominousness seems to be conveyed by outright telling the reader that there is (I quote) "ominous foreboding." It's a good thing the text says so, because otherwise the effect would have been lost on me. Conan is a pirate here, with a crew of racial stereotypes, hunting after a dead wizard's gem; he battles a fantasy-Pteranodon (de Camp's influence, I'm guessing), and has a good laugh with his men once the peril is dispatched. A rote effort; I can't even work up enough interest to hate it, which by default makes it one of my favorite Lin Carter stories.
"Above Ker-Is" by Evangeline Walton (1978). Lin Carter, ever the gallant, praises the talents of female fantasy writers, and chuckles, "There's enough sheer inventive genius there to create a brand new universe over the weekend, and still have time to get the dishes done." You know, because they're women, and Lin Carter is a jackass. Anyway, this story was written in 1927 and locked in a trunk, an item of luggage with which seemingly every early fantasist was provided, through some far-sighted lock-stories-in-trunks-for-posthumous-exploitation fund. This happens to be my first Evangeline Walton story. It certainly has an antique feel, close in spirit to T.H. White's "The Troll," yet also hinting at an almost Cosmicist horror of the mysteries of existence -- horrors, in this instance, lurking within human sexuality and attachment rather than in primordial beings and ghastly dimensions. It's a fascinating take on what we would now subsume into faery lore, though as a story, I felt it was only pretty good, not amazing.
"Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin" by Marvin Kaye (1978). For once, Lin Carter's introduction to this story hits the nail on the head: "The spirit of John W. Campbell's Unknown still lives." This sort of droll New York City working-mensch fantasy can trace its ancestry directly to Unknown, which, sadly, I've only encountered in two stories reviewed here. Kaye updates the formula to poke fun at current issues, like those women's libbers wanting to be called "Ms.," and of course our heroine finds happiness, fulfillment, and weight-loss in marrying a successful goblin and settling into the suburbs, but this sort of patronizing was probably considered progressive for its time. A mildly amusing bauble.
"Rhian and Garanhir" by Grail Undwin (1980). "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin," Lin Carter writes, "because I discovered her all by myself." Actually, as we all know, Grail Undwin is Lin Carter, using his Year's Best Fantasy Stories platform to push his pseudonymous productions upon the fantasy-reading public, and heaping fulsome praise upon his alter-ego: "Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." I'm a fan of tales of Faery, and seek them out when I can, yet not even I can discern which rules were supposedly broken in the course of this story. There are distinctly unmagical elves, with little to distinguish them from idealized medieval fantasy knights and ladies; an anecdote of hopeless courtly love is conveyed with little affect; and the story ends. There isn't much here to stick in memory, let alone a bold new rule-breaking direction for fantasy.
"Lord of the Dead" by Robert E. Howard (1978). This is the third "rediscovered tale from a long-dead early master" in this volume so far, in addition to the Robert E. Howard fan-fiction written by the editor and his pal, plus one story written by the editor but passed off as the work of some eccentric new master of the craft. Seven stories, representing the "best fantasy of the year," and only two of them -- the Tanith Lee and the Marvin Kaye -- were original stories actually written and published by contemporary authors who were not the editor. Even by Lin Carter's standards, YBFS:5 has been bleak pickings so far. This story was originally picked up by a pulp called Strange Detective in 1933, which folded and left it unpublished. A he-man detective with the inevitable "cold blue eyes" of a Howard hero, brawling in alleys with Orientalist assassins and ending up berserking with a massive axe through a torture dungeon -- this might be the single most pulp story I've ever read. Really, it's just Conan dressed in city clothes; our "big dick," as Howard terms him, stumbles into some sort of pan-Asian mystery cult slash crime syndicate masterminded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. Perhaps it's even more racist than the Conan stories: "The alley, nameless to white men, but known to the teeming swarms of River Street as the Alley of Silence, was as devious and cryptic as the characteristics of the race which frequented it." There's an iota of entertainment to be found in the sheer testosterone-addled pulpiness of it all, I guess, but if there are any more stories to be found locked in trunks, let them be Evangeline Walton's.
"Child of Air" by Pat McIntosh (1980). McIntosh's Thula stories tend to be a highlight of these books. Her gentle, wary prose is leagues beyond the turgid pulp of Carter's other favorite serials. This story, however, is a bit disappointing, putting our (now former) warrior maid in sexual peril, reduced to a prize to be dueled over by an evil monarch and his gallant and handsome cousin (who happens to be a werewolf as well as a wizard), her agency limited to being the Wolf's helpmeet in wizard-battle. A middling effort.
"A Malady of Magicks" by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978). Nothing to complain of here -- a perfectly enjoyable, funny romp with a has-been wizard and his hapless apprentice. Basic stuff, but good. It's a shame that this is the best story in the book so far.
"St. George" by David Mallory (1980). Lin Carter heaps praise upon the originality of this "newcomer," which immediately arouses my suspicions. Sure enough, googling discloses that the only other item in this fellow's bibliography is a letter printed in Weird Tales #3 a year after the publication of this collection. Grail Undwin is a known alias of Carter's; Philip Coakley, whose only published story is "Lok the Depressor" in YBFS:4, I'm 100% certain is another. I'm only about 99% convinced that this David Mallory is yet another Carter pen name; that letter to the editor seems like too much commitment for a Carter ruse (though perhaps it was just a reader with a similar name; without seeing the letter, I have no idea if it's really the same guy). Certainly the "so original you've got to read it to believe it" storyline (Lin Carter's words) is merely a fumbling attempt at a sex gag: George jizzes in his armor with the satisfaction of slaying the dragon, then becomes "history's first sadist" with poor Sabra, which feels like Lin Carter trying to be saucy and provocative -- and, perhaps, explains why he wanted to stay safe behind a pseudonym. So once again, three of the twelve stories in this book were either written or co-written by the editor. I know you're dead and all, but seriously, you were a real dickweed, Lin Carter.
"Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole (1979). A splendid and startlingly ambitious setting, and glorious heaps of backstory spanning universe upon universe, helps elevate this tale. The plot could have just as easily revolved around mundane travelers swapping favors in a conventional fantasy inn, but the scope of its cosmic setting and its creation-epic imagery were memorable and ahead of its time. With additional polish to its prose, and perhaps some tweaking to modernize and freshen up the side characters, I could see this getting snatched up by Asimov's in the late '90s. Easily my favorite entry in this volume. Stories like this make wading through Lin Carter's regressive tastes and overmastering self-indulgence worthwhile.
"Demon and Demoiselle" by Janet Fox (1978). Solid, satisfying pseudo-medieval sword and sorcery -- as basic an article as they get, but well-made and durable. The descriptions are vivid and the prose goes down easy, and the practical, undaunted heroine -- a sorceress determined to retrieve her demon -- is a refreshing antidote to all the pulp masculinity and the disappointingly meek Thula we've seen in the foregoing stories.
That's it for yet another installment of YBFS. Three good stories, three all right stories, plus a good story I'd already read before -- I guess I'd better swallow my dislike of Lin Carter and give this volume a relatively generous score, even if nothing here is as good as "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" in YBFS:3.
204 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 7 to February 8
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, with the penultimate YBFS volume curated by Lin Carter. You wouldn't think I'd be looking forward to this -- some unexpected gems aside, the stories chosen (and often written) by Carter in the preceding installments were terrible. They were so consistently bad that I found myself reading them for the pleasure of hating them, and subsequently mocking them in my reviews. It was the short story equivalent of riffing B-movies. And, secretly, I also found myself oddly intrigued by the form of '70s heroic fantasy. The problem was the content, not the form. The idea of a serial adventure following a protagonist through a fantasy realm grew on me with each volume, especially whenever I read a serial I liked, such as Pat McIntosh's Thula tales, or Phyllis Eisenstein's stories of Alaric the minstrel (of which, sadly, I've only encountered one so far) -- or George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," which is the apotheosis of the form, despite being a one-off story. This influence has crept perceptibly into my short story writing, nudging me into experiments with "1970s-style adventure fantasy serials," in which a central hero outwits opponents for the Macguffin, or simply runs away with life (though not pride) intact.
All this has, I believe, helped me forget just how terrible so many of these stories have been, particularly those written by Carter (sometimes under assumed names) and those hewing closest to the Carterian ideal of chiseled, Aryan barbarian trudging across the deserts of a lost continent under the weight of a mighty, turgid thesaurus. I can remind myself of that all I want, yet I still feel just a mite bit sad that this volume and YBFS:6 will complete the run of Carter-curated anthologies. YBFS:7 will inaugurate the editorship of Arthur W. Saha; if Amazon reviews are to be believed, the tone of these collections shifts toward the sleek and dazzling fantasy of the 1980s, much to the disgruntlement of those people who actually like this sort of thing.
So I hope to make the most of my limited time in the company of Lin Carter, master of adult fantasy, tastemaker, lecherous creep, and world's most bald-faced self-promoter. I hope the Saha years ahead of me will help me forget all about you, but I think there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the batshit-stupid fantasy of the 1970s (though not for your stories, which are crap).
More so than usual, the publication dates are all over the place, ranging across three calendar years in this "annual" collection. Those stories designated with a 1980 publication date saw original publication in this volume.
"The Troll" by T.H. White (1978). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I said, "This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.... [It] feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated." Lin Carter unexpectedly comes to the rescue, providing the information that "The Troll" was likely written before 1933, and was only published after it "came to light" among the deceased author's papers. I feel like patting myself on the back for catching its anachronistic quality so early in my genre education.
"In the Balance" by Tanith Lee (1978). Mildly entertaining bauble, efficiently (if generically) setting up the situation and pulling a twist ending that, honestly, wasn't so surprising. I could see this getting published in Adventures of Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s, though that isn't a testament to Lee being ahead of her time so much as it is evidence of how much of a throwback that short-lived pro magazine had been.
"The Gem in the Tower" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (1978). Not even Sprague de Camp's participation can elevate Conan fan-fiction, especially when Lin Carter is involved. Carter brags in his introduction to the story that "seldom before [in our Conan fan-fiction] have we mastered [Robert E. Howard's] tendency toward gloomy foreboding and ominous spookiness as well as in this yarn." This foreboding ominousness seems to be conveyed by outright telling the reader that there is (I quote) "ominous foreboding." It's a good thing the text says so, because otherwise the effect would have been lost on me. Conan is a pirate here, with a crew of racial stereotypes, hunting after a dead wizard's gem; he battles a fantasy-Pteranodon (de Camp's influence, I'm guessing), and has a good laugh with his men once the peril is dispatched. A rote effort; I can't even work up enough interest to hate it, which by default makes it one of my favorite Lin Carter stories.
"Above Ker-Is" by Evangeline Walton (1978). Lin Carter, ever the gallant, praises the talents of female fantasy writers, and chuckles, "There's enough sheer inventive genius there to create a brand new universe over the weekend, and still have time to get the dishes done." You know, because they're women, and Lin Carter is a jackass. Anyway, this story was written in 1927 and locked in a trunk, an item of luggage with which seemingly every early fantasist was provided, through some far-sighted lock-stories-in-trunks-for-posthumous-exploitation fund. This happens to be my first Evangeline Walton story. It certainly has an antique feel, close in spirit to T.H. White's "The Troll," yet also hinting at an almost Cosmicist horror of the mysteries of existence -- horrors, in this instance, lurking within human sexuality and attachment rather than in primordial beings and ghastly dimensions. It's a fascinating take on what we would now subsume into faery lore, though as a story, I felt it was only pretty good, not amazing.
"Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin" by Marvin Kaye (1978). For once, Lin Carter's introduction to this story hits the nail on the head: "The spirit of John W. Campbell's Unknown still lives." This sort of droll New York City working-mensch fantasy can trace its ancestry directly to Unknown, which, sadly, I've only encountered in two stories reviewed here. Kaye updates the formula to poke fun at current issues, like those women's libbers wanting to be called "Ms.," and of course our heroine finds happiness, fulfillment, and weight-loss in marrying a successful goblin and settling into the suburbs, but this sort of patronizing was probably considered progressive for its time. A mildly amusing bauble.
"Rhian and Garanhir" by Grail Undwin (1980). "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin," Lin Carter writes, "because I discovered her all by myself." Actually, as we all know, Grail Undwin is Lin Carter, using his Year's Best Fantasy Stories platform to push his pseudonymous productions upon the fantasy-reading public, and heaping fulsome praise upon his alter-ego: "Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." I'm a fan of tales of Faery, and seek them out when I can, yet not even I can discern which rules were supposedly broken in the course of this story. There are distinctly unmagical elves, with little to distinguish them from idealized medieval fantasy knights and ladies; an anecdote of hopeless courtly love is conveyed with little affect; and the story ends. There isn't much here to stick in memory, let alone a bold new rule-breaking direction for fantasy.
"Lord of the Dead" by Robert E. Howard (1978). This is the third "rediscovered tale from a long-dead early master" in this volume so far, in addition to the Robert E. Howard fan-fiction written by the editor and his pal, plus one story written by the editor but passed off as the work of some eccentric new master of the craft. Seven stories, representing the "best fantasy of the year," and only two of them -- the Tanith Lee and the Marvin Kaye -- were original stories actually written and published by contemporary authors who were not the editor. Even by Lin Carter's standards, YBFS:5 has been bleak pickings so far. This story was originally picked up by a pulp called Strange Detective in 1933, which folded and left it unpublished. A he-man detective with the inevitable "cold blue eyes" of a Howard hero, brawling in alleys with Orientalist assassins and ending up berserking with a massive axe through a torture dungeon -- this might be the single most pulp story I've ever read. Really, it's just Conan dressed in city clothes; our "big dick," as Howard terms him, stumbles into some sort of pan-Asian mystery cult slash crime syndicate masterminded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. Perhaps it's even more racist than the Conan stories: "The alley, nameless to white men, but known to the teeming swarms of River Street as the Alley of Silence, was as devious and cryptic as the characteristics of the race which frequented it." There's an iota of entertainment to be found in the sheer testosterone-addled pulpiness of it all, I guess, but if there are any more stories to be found locked in trunks, let them be Evangeline Walton's.
"Child of Air" by Pat McIntosh (1980). McIntosh's Thula stories tend to be a highlight of these books. Her gentle, wary prose is leagues beyond the turgid pulp of Carter's other favorite serials. This story, however, is a bit disappointing, putting our (now former) warrior maid in sexual peril, reduced to a prize to be dueled over by an evil monarch and his gallant and handsome cousin (who happens to be a werewolf as well as a wizard), her agency limited to being the Wolf's helpmeet in wizard-battle. A middling effort.
"A Malady of Magicks" by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978). Nothing to complain of here -- a perfectly enjoyable, funny romp with a has-been wizard and his hapless apprentice. Basic stuff, but good. It's a shame that this is the best story in the book so far.
"St. George" by David Mallory (1980). Lin Carter heaps praise upon the originality of this "newcomer," which immediately arouses my suspicions. Sure enough, googling discloses that the only other item in this fellow's bibliography is a letter printed in Weird Tales #3 a year after the publication of this collection. Grail Undwin is a known alias of Carter's; Philip Coakley, whose only published story is "Lok the Depressor" in YBFS:4, I'm 100% certain is another. I'm only about 99% convinced that this David Mallory is yet another Carter pen name; that letter to the editor seems like too much commitment for a Carter ruse (though perhaps it was just a reader with a similar name; without seeing the letter, I have no idea if it's really the same guy). Certainly the "so original you've got to read it to believe it" storyline (Lin Carter's words) is merely a fumbling attempt at a sex gag: George jizzes in his armor with the satisfaction of slaying the dragon, then becomes "history's first sadist" with poor Sabra, which feels like Lin Carter trying to be saucy and provocative -- and, perhaps, explains why he wanted to stay safe behind a pseudonym. So once again, three of the twelve stories in this book were either written or co-written by the editor. I know you're dead and all, but seriously, you were a real dickweed, Lin Carter.
"Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole (1979). A splendid and startlingly ambitious setting, and glorious heaps of backstory spanning universe upon universe, helps elevate this tale. The plot could have just as easily revolved around mundane travelers swapping favors in a conventional fantasy inn, but the scope of its cosmic setting and its creation-epic imagery were memorable and ahead of its time. With additional polish to its prose, and perhaps some tweaking to modernize and freshen up the side characters, I could see this getting snatched up by Asimov's in the late '90s. Easily my favorite entry in this volume. Stories like this make wading through Lin Carter's regressive tastes and overmastering self-indulgence worthwhile.
"Demon and Demoiselle" by Janet Fox (1978). Solid, satisfying pseudo-medieval sword and sorcery -- as basic an article as they get, but well-made and durable. The descriptions are vivid and the prose goes down easy, and the practical, undaunted heroine -- a sorceress determined to retrieve her demon -- is a refreshing antidote to all the pulp masculinity and the disappointingly meek Thula we've seen in the foregoing stories.
That's it for yet another installment of YBFS. Three good stories, three all right stories, plus a good story I'd already read before -- I guess I'd better swallow my dislike of Lin Carter and give this volume a relatively generous score, even if nothing here is as good as "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" in YBFS:3.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
2015 read #6: The Just City by Jo Walton.
The Just City by Jo Walton
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.
My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.
In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.
Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."
Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.
My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.
In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.
Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."
Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.
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