tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33374225213973051502024-03-12T22:04:27.398-07:00 Place Memes<br>
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GIS TOOLS FOR CRITICAL THINKINGGwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.comBlogger202125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-22361010858604435592023-03-14T01:50:00.002-07:002023-03-14T03:32:45.623-07:00Wish I Was Here <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh03EeyeAlJfwTEdJgVZ0f4e17_QTSY1gSD29W5Uu1WG0bM7Kj0odutdIIVFJlRwsAx8GayN0KE87VLksP6w0Zw3gRpgpctFSy53aWidfDSCpRgb9QHGteWQiivAVqARc3fguREZEaUg6wXKeJfLz-nvaIk_5WsLuORc0S8af-EXM5pVzsGGxfRCpc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="311" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh03EeyeAlJfwTEdJgVZ0f4e17_QTSY1gSD29W5Uu1WG0bM7Kj0odutdIIVFJlRwsAx8GayN0KE87VLksP6w0Zw3gRpgpctFSy53aWidfDSCpRgb9QHGteWQiivAVqARc3fguREZEaUg6wXKeJfLz-nvaIk_5WsLuORc0S8af-EXM5pVzsGGxfRCpc" width="149" /></a></div><p></p><p>The title, Wish I Was Here, and the obvious plays that it makes: Wish You Were Here, You Are Here, etc., point out to me that Wish I Was Here, as a title, works in the present tense. This is not, however, some Fossological present-tensing meta-auto-fiction-biography. It does contain fictions, also some theory, and it is, in part, a 'how-to' manual for aspiring or would-be writers.</p><p>I am one of these. I found myself Wishing I Was Here at times during the reading of Harrison's new "Anti-Memoir" as the sub-title refers. But how 'anti-'? This books works as a 'traditional' memoir, and more (as noted above). There are scenes from childhood Christmases in Warwickshire; memories of his climbing days; and scenes and descriptions that sound like they have arrived straight out of a 'bloopers' reel of out-takes that didn't make it into one of the novels.</p><p>The funniest part of this very funny book is Map Boy. What is Map Boy? Or, as Harrison himself puts it in the chapter title on page 14, "Who is the Map Boy"? I see Map Boy as the thematic link between several disparate aspects that are variously about aspects of navigating one's life, but in a mode of creative destruction that calls into question the map-function. Psychogeography, climbing, landscape, constant movement, constant moving of house and home, satnavs and actually consulting physical maps, getting lost, never getting found, leaving trails of books behind in old rented flats: all of these things define Map Boy.</p><p>Map Boy also gives us a whole chapter on The Weird (yes, both capitalised). Here is a bit of it that really resonated:</p><p>"The Weird is a way of writing about the real. It evolved slowly across the twentieth century and then faster than the eye could follow across the first two decades of the twenty-first, arising from constant collisions, engagements and exchanges of fluids between horror story, the ghost story, landscape writing, the hauntological and psychogeographical perspectives. All fictions are cultural, but at the moment the Weird is intensely cultural & self-aware. Do I dar write about it? Or would anything I could say only fix it in some awkward posture? Attribute to it motives it never had? ...</p><p>"The Weird is not 'Lovecraftian': it does not belong to H. P. Lovecraft. Neither is it a subset of the Gothic. It is not the same as Freud's uncanny. It does not belong to the set of 'genre-adjacent sui generis', and it is not, as some affirm, a wholly political position. In each and every case it should be a true idiolect. The Weird is not a genre in itself, but a process. It is also an emergent quality which somehow precedes every combination of events, forms, genres and skills it can be said to emerge from...." (Harrison, 2023, pages 77-78)</p><p>This applies to the present work, but also to the life described. It is one committed to the fact its weirdness, but it is also, oddly, something that might fit quite well in excerpt in the pages of a Men's Health magazine. I'm not saying it's macho (though Harrison's work has, wrongly I think, been described in such terms), but I would say there is something 'manly' about all of Harrison's writing, and that is very much on display here.</p><p>It's somewhat the same feeling I get when I read Walt Whitman, for example. It's a distinctly male-gendered mode of being, but it encapsulates way beyond any reductionism of the male 'gaze'. It's too diverse and open to be so reduced. It's too reductionistic as well to say there's anything Mailer-esque about it, because there's something distinctly French lurking beneath the surface, with the focus on voids, and being as a kind of emptying out. </p><p>Does he talk about science fiction and fantasy? Only in very oblique terms, almost seeming at times a bit Priest-like in his disavowal of any easy equation of certain things (himself) and genre. He says the times when he wrote best, or most productively, seemed to be the times when he least considered himself a writer. This is in keeping with the void at the heart of being. There is no heart. There is more horror in Harrison than we give him credit for sometimes too. The dried out black husk of a heart deep down in the back part of the garden weeds.</p><p>Seasonality is a high point. As are birds, and vegetation. It is all very landscapey. Walking never gets short-shrift, and is extremely high on the list of valued things in life. There is something depressing, but there is also something hopeful, in living a life so free of illusions. It is a stoic vision, and therefore, manly. Don't get angry, ever, visualise the future events of your life, the better to prepare for them. Harrison is best on age, and its relationship to the delusions of youth. Harrison has always been an old soul, this is clear. His life has been one of catching up with himself, of drafting behind that future constantly running away.</p><p>Cling on, he says, you'll get a personal best. But then, too, he hits the wall, like the rest of us. His writing seems to languish for decades, but still somehow to come out the other side. Reading this book had me re-visiting some of my own notebooks, one specifically that I'd considered throwing out. But now I won't. </p><p>Harrison, M. John. 2023. <i>Wish I Was Here</i>. London: Serpent's Tail.</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-39914484516733292152022-12-21T06:19:00.003-08:002022-12-21T06:25:09.789-08:00Reading my own library (Ghost Story, by Peter Straub)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJdXBqd3VWjUIxicRdWUZs-goDLFE-NCFqZJKKI1riNbECMyrQRBChn4-mRqYID7EveFhICIp4bfLKAn8iqlHvzvSdHPDuZyG3PM8h4ypmZ_WR6ezFrInmY9qkZc2QRarpqlIj5-wNIDzQMfUYvs_0qGDB_hL6DwfO-Bs3Uq1kwGpaePjxbf7g-Ng" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="327" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJdXBqd3VWjUIxicRdWUZs-goDLFE-NCFqZJKKI1riNbECMyrQRBChn4-mRqYID7EveFhICIp4bfLKAn8iqlHvzvSdHPDuZyG3PM8h4ypmZ_WR6ezFrInmY9qkZc2QRarpqlIj5-wNIDzQMfUYvs_0qGDB_hL6DwfO-Bs3Uq1kwGpaePjxbf7g-Ng" width="157" /></a></div><br /> In this series, Reading My Own Library, I attempt to read the books I already own. By "read" I mean, "finish", but also "attend to closely". A lot of the books I'm reading now are recent additions to my library, so part of the mission is also to go into the stacks a bit (a lot) and carve away at any stashes that might exist in the farther reaches of my catacombs. By "catacombs" I mean, the books in my garage, in my office, in the back shelves (double stacked) of the lower reaches of shelves behind filing cabinets, in the tomes I've been hoarding for years. <p></p><p>I was asking myself yesterday, "why did I buy all those books so long ago (over a decade ago), by Salman Rushdie?" I've never come even close to finishing a book by Rushdie. The ethos of my current mission to read my own library would stipulate that I at some point finish a Rushdie book. I have several from which to choose after all! With that said, it may take some time for me to actually do the Rushdie. This is a life-long project.</p><p>I recently finished Straub's <i>Ghost Story</i>. It's not a straightforward read, but it's also not difficult. I can see the popular appeal, but it's more of a weird story than a ghost story. The influence of Machen is profound, I think, and I'm glad I'd started making my way through the Oxford World's Classics edition of Machen's stories before I came to this Straub title. The baddies are unknowable monsters from another dimension. The monsters take on human form, but they are not supernatural beings. They are more like weird creatures that at times are seen as masses of white, writhing, worms, or as forest animals. The worm bit has that tentacular edge that is truly of the weird.</p><p>But Ghost Story was published in the 1970s, making it way ahead of its time, at least in terms of this current resurgence of the weird, aka The New Weird. As I got into this novel I realised how much more interesting a writer Straub is than, say, King. Both are, from what I understand, very popular novelists, and I'm sure (though not that sure) that some of Straub's other output must be a bit more pulpy than this. I am after all starting with Straub's (from what I know) most well-received work, critically speaking.</p><p>The form of the text is itself weird, weaving together different timelines, spaces, and dream-image sequences. These are mixed with such artfulness that it becomes impossible to know which one we're in. This puts the novel well beyond anything like what Jackson was doing in The Haunting of Hill House, for example, which is just a straightforward haunted house novel (albeit a very very good one).</p><p>All I can say is, I'm proud to have tackled this fat novel without putting it down for any significant length of time. Unlike the other book I'm in now, which after a hiatus of years, I've picked back up again at page 539, namely, <i>He Knew He Was Right</i> by Trollope. It's so easy to read though, so writerly and flowing, even as much or more than Dickens, that I'll have no problem finishing. Already a couple hundred more pages have flown past. With HKHWR soon to be done, I feel like I'll be starting to do justice to 'reading my own library' at last! </p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-48521027168023116632022-12-05T06:07:00.002-08:002022-12-05T06:07:30.182-08:00The Book Eaters (now back to Jane Eyre)<p>Did I mention I'm reading my own library? The latest book finished was <i>The Book Eaters</i> by Sunyi Dean.</p><p>Immediately upon finishing this book I started reading <i>Jane Eyre</i> for some reason. Well, reason one: it's in my library so I must read it, and two: I hadn't quite finished it, and felt I needed to do Brontë's work justice. <i>Jane Eyre</i> is a great read, by the way, and I speculated that maybe one reasom why Dean's own work reads so well is that she seems to be quite conversant with the emotions and inter-personal complexities of Victorian literature. </p><p>I'm sure other authors are too, but aren't as good as Dean. One measure of how good a writer she is that the novum, if a work of fantasy can be said to have one, shouldn't really work, in theory. But on paper it does! I was very sceptical at first. </p><p>What it is, is this: there are people who are born vampires. So far, so clichéd. However, these are what are called 'mind-eaters', meaning that when the mind-eater sucks the blood of someone, they also ingest all their memories and the vampire temporarily takes on the personality of the mind they've eaten. These vampire mind-eaters can be converted to book eaters, another whole sub-population of vampire, by taking a special drug that is only manufactured by one vampire-family.</p><p>The plotting is spectacular, and the action is enveloping. The emotional connections between characters are drawn in a way that I don't think a male author could really pull off, and this is what I mean the the Brontë-ness of this book. </p><p>I had no problem at all finishing The Book Eaters, and I can recommend it very highly. Now, back to Jane Eyre!</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-46121800126102190402022-12-02T08:42:00.001-08:002022-12-02T08:42:05.110-08:00Pnin<p> In the spirit of reading my own library (as opposed to just acquiring books I don't actually read, or can't possibly get around to reading because it takes too long), I'm writing reviews of the books I complete. The latest is <i>Pnin</i> by Vladimir Nabokov.</p><p>This is the best book by Nabokov I have ever read. There was only one point in the book where I read a sentence I couldn't parse (didn't understand the gist or the sense of it). Usually I get the gist of Nabokov, with his word piles of adjectives and verbs and colours and senses and metaphors, big bulky bouquets of observation and perception.</p><p>For Pnin, the clarity of the bouquets is especially good, you can make out the shapes of his observations clearly. The main character is really clearly delineated, an eccentric Russian-speaking professor who seems to have landed in New England from another planet. One moment he's hilariously eccentric and likeable, but then at other times bewildering and alienating. </p><p>Pnin is a tragedy, an entirely avoidable ending brought upon himself by no one else. The university settings are realistic, the observations of campus life ring true, and we cringe for Pnin when his otherness becomes and tangible as an ideology or bad-breath. </p><p>I understand this novel is formally innovative. The transitions between Pnin himself, his descendant Viktor, and the former tutee of Pnin who could've saved him, were she not rejected by the protagonist himself after he's fired from his job in which he's been underperforming for almost a decade, are wonderful.</p><p>It is these spatio-temporal transitions that are I think the formally interesting part of Pnin. I did think of Nabokov's other novels while reading this: of Lolita, which I remember greatly enjoying, and which got me a bit hooked on Nabokov, in a way that might have mimicked a lot of other undergrads at the time.</p><p>Then Ada, which I only got through part of. I've had Nabokov books kicking around my flat for a lot of my life. I had a used copy of Speak, Memory for a time; Ada's and that one are gone though. I feel lucky to have Nabokov back in my life. Which one should I read next?</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-33426493759155168862022-12-02T01:05:00.004-08:002022-12-02T01:05:59.361-08:00Reading my own library<p>My new year's resolution is to read my own library. A sub-question to the main question (can I read my own library?) is whether I can do so without acquiring any new books while I'm doing it. Like most New Year's Resolutions this one probably won't last past February. But at least that means two months of success, if I make it.</p><p>What started this research impulse was a recent shelfie in which I stacked up a bunch of books I really want to read, and realised that if I acquire new books while attempting to read the shelfie stack, then that attempted reading will most likely fail.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhT1N08mD8UBcj37RI-lMPo8PrFBoAtL660Zvtnv3KTpHcKmTJHgVJrWsWLxQEwynF5hjztkuDKEYC61o0MRJoZIodRe3_MI6oseE-hoHXcuefPAaQEqo9wAW29x90khIWrcYFk1Gnty0LjOVzcf_LYouzapDuq4K53CAoLnyNynH_xFkJFR4_LT-w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhT1N08mD8UBcj37RI-lMPo8PrFBoAtL660Zvtnv3KTpHcKmTJHgVJrWsWLxQEwynF5hjztkuDKEYC61o0MRJoZIodRe3_MI6oseE-hoHXcuefPAaQEqo9wAW29x90khIWrcYFk1Gnty0LjOVzcf_LYouzapDuq4K53CAoLnyNynH_xFkJFR4_LT-w" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I'm going to try (as Yoda's "there is no try" echoes around inside my head) to write a review of these books as I finish them. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I must clarify one thing: by "not buy any new books" I mean <i>new</i> books. Used books are still on the table because one of my favourite ways of socialising here in the UK is to visit my favourite charity shop bookstores and chat with the staff. Sam Beare's in Egham is a favourite; as is Bas Books in Bracknell. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The last book I finished (not picture in the shelfie) was <i>Pnin</i>. I'm a few pages from finishing <i>Ghost Story</i> by Peter Straub. And I'm also pretty close to the end of Sunyi Dean's <i>The Book Eaters</i>. These are great places to start in the push to 'read my own library.'</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In a couple of days then, I'll most likely start either the Priest or the McAuley. I'll send out a twitter poll to decide which one.</div><br /><br /><p></p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-14593118878771064152022-03-24T07:00:00.002-07:002022-03-24T07:04:35.336-07:00THE THIS, sequel to THE THING ITSELF<p>The This</p><p>I've already posted a review on twitter, of this book published by Gollancz, written by Adam Roberts, called The This, which refers to a social media site in which a brain implant (installed on the roof of the mouth) is needed in order to join. You can then 'tweet' your thoughts directly onto the platform by just thinking them. My review was written in the spirit of the book in the sense that I just poured it out of my head directly into my iPhone keyboard without really editing. It ended up being a thread of about six or so tweets, and it was re-tweeted by the author.</p><p>Having now finished the book there's nothing I would take back or majorly revise from what I said before, but a few things did happen in the final hundred pages or so, one of which is that the paradox of extraterrestrial intelligence was broached in the narrative. A contact about 10 light years away communicated with one of the 'individuals' established through the social medias on Earth, of which there were only three. These 'individuals' are in fact amalgamations of the memberships of people assimilated to the sites, so that they are now corporate structures that subsume any of those people into the collective will.</p><p>This is the kind of 'follow through' swing of the novum of this book, which is that there is a dialectic between part/whole, that Hegel wrote about, and that here is enacted in a way consonant with Hegelianism. What Roberts is saying is that if we followed through in practice with Hegel's philosophy, AND utilising the tools of social media to do so, this is what a possible end result of that process might look like. And also, this is why intelligences on other planets haven't contacted us until now. Because civilisation is essentially Hegelian, and history ends, except paradoxically once it does, then that is the prompt for those sufficiently evolved 'individuals' to contact us (and presumably others).</p><p>I would revise only slightly my judgement that this novum is a bit 'faffy'. It is only because Hegel is more faffy than Kant (only by a hair, mind you), and so two novels utilising such philosophical novums to structure their narratives and socially implicated drives, if done well, will reflect to some degree the fuzziness (another way of saying faffiness) of those philosophies. With Kant you had his twelve categories, and Roberts prequel to this novel had twelve chapters to mirror that structure. It was called The Thing Itself, and it worked quite well, in part because Roberts stuck to the spirit of Kant for clarity and took us through a kind of tribunal from the perspective of artificial intelligence, and the ethics thereof in light of Kantianism. </p><p>In this sequel, the novum is dialectics itself, and spirit, and the part/whole idea, in which the material flows from Spirit, which forms the essential core of being. Contradictions are overcome, dialectically, and with material implications but all of this eventuates in a universe of pure spirit, the absolute, or God. The religious aspect of this book resonates really well with his previous one, Purgatory Mount, and that previous book also looks in depth at war. War is a paradox and is therefore treatable dialectically (see also Cormier's book <i>War as Paradox</i> published by McGill-Queen's University Press), as intricately bound up in ideas of peace. One might say the first rule of war is 'DON'T', but this rule isn't followed nearly as often as one would like (because in that case there would be no war). Being a darling of the right doesn't necessarily mean Hegel was a war-monger (I have no idea if he was or not); Hegel is equally a seeming darling of the left: Marx famously used him for his own ends; the surrealists seemed to be enamoured.</p><p>Others highlights of the book: the Bardo sections were really readable incantatory and humourous meditations on all the different ways we can die. There is a nice section that includes a whole sub-strata of footnotes that are just tweets, giving you a real-time perspective on the quality and makeup of what the flow of twitter looks like (mostly garbage really, and links to advertisements). Rich is a very sympathetic character, and so is Ally, and both are caught up in scales of maneuvering well beyond their ken. The punultimate chapter uses Orwellian doublespeak in a really sophisticated way that adds some spice to the closing chapters. Overall this book really stacks up to the last five or six books Roberts has published. This reminds me that the speech capabilities in <i>Bete</i> were enabled by a similar kind of (roof of the mouth installed) technology to this one, and these kinds of continuities and echoes are part of the pleasure of reading this body of work.</p><p>The Real-Town Murders; and By the Pricking of Her Thumb were both great books that I'll be reading again soon; ditto for Purgatory Mount and Bete; and then we have these two excellent ones on philosophers. It's all a great part of a lineup of speculative fiction that now in the beginning of 2022 is really starting to shape up nicely. </p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-59340069911314649532021-08-20T02:26:00.005-07:002021-08-20T02:26:44.879-07:00The Startup Wife<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglInPgGug2MjMlegWQfBakeBjIEe0oif4EVFEov25ARun1wU4MaJ4axq7P0CXrm0vG92qgtPrlz28ZCTVWv6Xa4vU5AzyPRH3ihQwh5uhpK_NDfJi-vQIcGg-Q55nt_JYxyqjNh-egygQ/s2048/startupwife.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1290" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglInPgGug2MjMlegWQfBakeBjIEe0oif4EVFEov25ARun1wU4MaJ4axq7P0CXrm0vG92qgtPrlz28ZCTVWv6Xa4vU5AzyPRH3ihQwh5uhpK_NDfJi-vQIcGg-Q55nt_JYxyqjNh-egygQ/s320/startupwife.jpeg" width="202" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>What is 'dude-bro'? It is a damaging social construct of maleness that, in moments of unreflective white male privilege, I sometimes uncritically accept, which is to say, I question whether it exists at all. I have similar experience when watching, for example, "The Office" or "The Mindy Project", two tv shows I actually really like. But I have also had to stop watching those tv shows when they started to make me really uncomfortable. I'm not sure if the creators of these shows are intentional in how they stereotype the 'dude-bro', the guy that is super-cool and if you have a problem with him it's you, not him, because he's so cool and laid-back, how could you not like him. But then, for example, in The Mindy Project, a bunch of the characters (all dude-bros) will start hooting because they all went to Dartmouth, and they refer to themselves and 'D-bags', which is short for douchebags. So, you see, they are taking the piss, and it is aimed at themselves. But this is a bit of superficial (and therefore gaslighting) reflexivity. It only serves to strengthen the dude-bro into a position of unassailable hegemony.</p><p>The wife in question in this novel is married a real sensitive guy who is not in it for the money. He ends up, of course, with a Zuckerberg-level of power, influence, and, of course, money, that he doesn't want, but takes anyway. This uber-guru, the husband of our main protagonist, is an expert in world religions, is self-taught, and is hyper-technical to boot. He leverages a team together to create the next big tech startup, one that allows users to craft bespoke rituals and religious ceremonies by piecing together the bits and pieces of various spiritual traditions into, for example, burial rites for their dog. </p><p>This novel is really not about the site, which is a bit unlikely. It is about the dude-broishness and how it is a hegemonic feature of the tech world. It is about what it is like to be a woman in such a world, full of sensitive new age guys who also happen to be hyper-capable capitalists. Being the dude-bro means you get to over-ride, you get to decide, and you do it by always being the coolest guy in the room, the one who makes convincing the rest of us to do your idea look so easy. The dude-bro, however, in his hubris, overreaches, and the tragedy lies therein. People, in this book, die because of the social media site that the cool guy made. It's next-level messed up where the users take this site, which eventually, like the marriage, needs to be shut down. So, the startup wife is just that: the experimental trial that you can mess up before you move onto the 'forever' wife/site, consequences be damned. For the dude-bro, it's all in a day's work.</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-68709983223710780602021-08-19T00:56:00.002-07:002021-08-19T00:56:19.629-07:00Under the Blue<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpXLs7fRuPfmyifDoGTVSpHjxzZtwo0XYRLbfmAg142wlJ26zOgclHIS5mR_2rkKeZ51u_nJj2RKsu2cA3NS-KxAe_Lu2kRoIkKEV1QH7i9Rs5JY4oy6giHQkd0SeypQtt1WtR_5oSejs/s2048/undertheblue.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1273" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpXLs7fRuPfmyifDoGTVSpHjxzZtwo0XYRLbfmAg142wlJ26zOgclHIS5mR_2rkKeZ51u_nJj2RKsu2cA3NS-KxAe_Lu2kRoIkKEV1QH7i9Rs5JY4oy6giHQkd0SeypQtt1WtR_5oSejs/s320/undertheblue.jpeg" width="199" /></a></div> <p></p><p>This has been my favourite read of the summer, and I'm trying to figure out why. A couple of things come to mind, but first it's a great story, very well told, and that is reason enough in itself to read this novel. But what makes it exceptional for me is how it builds upon two strands of literature. The first is obviously genre, science fiction, and I thought here of <i>Day of the Triffids</i>, but without the plants. The irony here is that the clear blue skies of the title pervade the book and should bring happiness (both to plants and to people) where there is only sadness. That being said, this is a great beach read, which I know from having enjoyed my hardback copy on the beach in Bournemouth.</p><p>The second strand is post-apocalyptic, but without so much of the genre elements, in which I place the work alongside Camus and Saramago. Specifically coming to mind are <i>The Plague</i> and <i>Blindness</i>. The only problem with this placement is that Under the Blue is science fiction, and an excellent example at that. The novums revolve around AI and drones, and how these two technologies are inextricably intertwined in the vision (and perhaps future reality) of societies of power and control (see my previous review of <i>Attack Surface</i> on this blog as well).</p><p>Patrick Meier, in a humanitarian vein, discusses drones in terms of intelligent flying robots. The AI in <i>Under the Blue</i> is disembodied and remains just a voice in the lab of characters that inhabit one structural half of the narrative. It is this half in which we observe, along with some scientists, the evolving intelligence of the AI that is being 'trained'. The way these sections are set off is almost like bare reportage, giving it a very authentically 'scientific' feel. But other sections here, with odd line-breaks, make very much akin to poetry at the same time. A poetics of science and artificial intelligence emerges that is unlike anything I've ever seen in fiction.</p><p>One thing I questioned was how little of humanity seemed to remain alive, but this is also in keeping with the main character's (an artist) isolated, misanthropic, existence, one with which we become intimately involved in the novel's opening scenes. Here we inhabit the artist's world, and see how little time he has for a humanity he almost seems to see as separate, outside, of his own self. At one level, this book is very much about creation and the isolation of the artist, and the necessity of such in order to maintain the 'purity' of the vision. But the artist's life is anything but pure, from the materiality of his apartment, to the entanglements (romantic and otherwise) that we follow as the characters (more than one from the artist's apartment building) develop. </p><p>A romantic entanglement evolves, and is complicated, as a road trip unfolds, a wonderfully evoked sense of constraint that allows certain freedoms amid catastrophic failure of the lifeworlds of humanity; and in this we have a flipped, and counter-mapped, 'road trip' paradigm that is another of this novel's many innovative features. For so many reasons, and for the way the AI/drone nexus is represented, quite believably and subtly, this book is compelling and, I would say, a 'must-read'. I haven't read <i>Station Eleven</i> yet, maybe it should be the next novel I pick up, as I've seen comparisons to it in reviews of <i>Under the Blue</i>. </p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-50160782898971137272021-08-18T03:54:00.002-07:002021-08-18T03:54:15.043-07:00Attack Surface<p>Do I have anything intelligent to say about zero days or self-driving cars? Cory Doctorow does, and after reading his book Attack Surface, I feel more confident in speaking about the social implications of these technologies. When speaking about technical aspects of hacking and coding there's always someone better than we are: hacking is in this way a lot like running. None of us are Eliud Kipchoge. But what we often do is overestimate how technical we are, and Attack Surface abounds with self-deluded hackers who think they are more technical or are better hackers than they actually are. Your code must be perfect. Otherwise you are open to attack. This is the principal driver of the idea of 'zero days' which are exploitable bugs that the programmers don't yet know about, and that allow a hacker into the program, within which it can be hijacked. </p><p>Such a scenario plays out around the hijacking of self-driving cars which through such hacking activities become driven by interests of police control in a non-democratic state. The targets of the now non-self-driven cars are protestors, and a scenario come in which this kind of activity is translated into Oakland, and protesting around the acquisition and use of surveillance software by its police force. Cars are literally being driven into the protest groups. </p><p>The main character, Masha, is the best, and she is perfect. But she is playing both sides, initially because she can: her ability to generate revenue for herself is a product of her truly superlative knowledge of programming and the systems in which various surveillance and control tools are embedded. But Masha's friends happen to be very savvy professional protesters with legitimate grounds for grievance. The evolution of Masha revolves around how the weight of her loyalty shifts, over 500 pages of breathless narrative, from the power/control group to the radical democratic one. </p><p>A fictional country, Slovstakia, offers a kind of foil, a usefully corrupt and easy-to-loathe totalitarian state for whom Masha initially works. But through the evolution of her story, we come to see that the totalitarianism is being adopted closer to home, that the dodgy banana republic has become the model for the so-called developed territory. In fact map and territory are flipping as one becomes the other, as all subject positions come to be suspect, as Slovstakian activists become themselves totalitarian control freaks; and power/control hackers in 'democratic' states are bled into the radically-distributed ideologies of the do-good left. </p><p>That I could be convinced of the validity of becoming a professional protester, of going on your gut, and protesting 'just because' it 'feels right' is a change that I did not foresee in myself. Doctorow convinces me, and he has also made me just that little bit more technically intelligent, and less self-deluded about my own level of technicality. Unless you're Masha, who is literally a fictional construct, an unobtainable essence, then forget about competing at this level. Go out, instead, and protest the all-pervasive power of the police state; the permeation of AI into everyday lives; the indiscriminate use of databases; the squashing of the immanence of collective power of the crowd, of labour, and mutual aid. Read this book 'just because' it's great!</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-31826968705576643932021-08-17T02:46:00.003-07:002021-08-17T02:46:58.761-07:00The Fortune Men<p>Nadifa Mohamed's Booker longlisted novel is my favourite for the prize, and I enjoyed it even more than the Ishiguro novel that also appears on the list. Set in Cardiff, we follow the lives of Mahmood who is accused of a murder he did not commit, and the lives of a shopkeeper and her family, in the aftermath of the shopkeeper's murder. The thing I take from this novel has overwhelmingly to do with race, and the spaces in which others are judged according to dominant and hegemonic norms of the coloniser. </p><p><i>The Fortune Men</i> is a postcolonial novel that examines the impacts and ongoing effects of damaging colonial legacies on one man's life and family. Critically, Mahmood has married a Welsh woman, a fact that he believes has led to his harsh treatment by the police and the witnesses they call in Mahmood's trial. It is also a tragedy in the sense that the outcomes have a fatalistic yet entirely avoidable (in the sense of possible worlds in which Mahmood's innocence would have been recognised), yet not by hair-thin margins. Mahmood's fate is a brutally predetermined outcome as we see by the actions of individual police as well as institutional sense of generalised policing and surveillance of race as a whole in postwar Wales and England. </p><p>We are there with Mahmood at the end when he loses all hope, then regains it, and loses it again as his hopes fade and both appeals and pardons fail. His wife and children seemingly remain loyal and yet they feel very far away, even through visits to the jail, which is situated only across the street from the family residence. One of the most touching scenes is when Mahmood arranges for his family to stand at the edge of their property so that he can see them and signal to them that while he cannot be with them, he is ok. As the action moves forward we increasingly see how not ok Mahmood is, and how the various institutions with which he interacts are designed to keep him in a state of agitated subjugation.</p><p>We also go into the lives of the family members of the murdered shopkeeper, and we are helped into sympathies with the white people populating this novel. But critically we see that race is itself a tool of oppression, one that is used to its full extent and power by those that wield it, including those whose loss of a sister or aunt, feel so poignantly. The reader here is ineluctably drawn to think about recent events that have led to raised consciousness around race and critical race theory, and the Black Lives Matter activities and visibilities that have circulated on various media platforms recently. From the 1950s in Cardiff, with its Somali and West Indian residents; to present day US; these would seem to be overly wide in time and space, and yet, it is race that brings them together, and this novel is therefore both very timely and very much a toolbox for thinking about race, space, and power in new ways. </p><p>It is also a beautifully written novel that is full of poetry of the places described from Somalian cities of Mahmood's earliest years; to the alternatingly bright and dreary Cardiff byways and docks in which the primary action of the novel occurs. There is such depth in the characterisation and sympathy that loses none of its effect in the critical treatment of how the prisoner is treated; of how he has lived his life imperfectly and yet is so much more believable for all that: Mahmood is deeply flawed and very human; the breadth of his knowledge of the world outstrips those whose narrow circumscribed lives end up stripping him of his humanity, of his intelligence, his sense of self. This is the tragedy at the heart of British life, and here is a unique evocation of how the tragedy continues to play out through and despite complexities of class, race, and their intersections. </p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-38662405040269087872021-02-12T03:47:00.006-08:002021-02-12T03:54:42.928-08:00Purgatory Mount<p> The thing is: it's poetry. For me, this is why I found Purgatory Mount such an effortless read. Roberts defines science fiction poetically, in terms of metonymy (one thing after another) and metaphor (the quality of showing one thing in terms of another), and the structure of this novel both embodies and performs the material in the precise terms of this definition. Not that the structural resonances between the otherworldly mountain of the title and Otty's beehives are strictly metaphorical at all times. There is a direct link between these things, in my mind, despite the ultimate origin of the miles-high and seemingly impossible structure with which the minds of the gods are engaged, really never being explained. That remains the central mystery of the novel but because the mapping is so precise in the storytelling, there was really never any doubt in my mind, even before I realised it explicitly (and admittedly, through a second reading of this novel, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything). </p><p>But Purgatory Mount touches on a staggering array of issues relevant today, and this also makes it exemplary as both a science fictional exercise in sussing out social implications (as it is the duty of serious science fiction to do), and in installing a sense of dread in the mind and body of the reader in the potentiality of those implications. It is also an exercise in examining religious issues and sensibilities here embodied the character of Otty, this story's main protagonist. Her sensibility points to the fact that there is almost a religious aspect to our devotion to technology but, further, that there is a chasm between our sensibilities and those in powerful positions more able to exploit and shape their potentialities to disastrous ends, for the sake of power. Power is, in the final analysis, what this book is about.</p><p>This is clear in the outset, when we find ourselves in a ship made of ice on the verge of a great discovery, and uncover the motivations of its various god-inhabitants, not money but the glory associated with making the find and figuring out what it means. That this quest (and all the book's quests) are ultimately futile is a comment in itself (on the futility of questing), not least on the power that fixed ideas can maintain in the minds of those who should know better (and who often see themselves as our 'betters').</p><p>The map of this book moves in moieties, and its halves are halved again as the main metonymies inhabit the middle, which is split into aspects of war and peace. War is demonstrated to be conclusively bad for all involved, and we have a meditation on that badness through both description of the chaos it invokes, and the real effects it has upon characters we have come to care about. Four teens have fashioned a new kind of artificial intelligence almost by accident (by accidentally being so smart and clever that it seems they couldn't help themselves but to do so), and this drives the plot. The US government takes an interest in the recruitment of said teens (Otty, Gomery, Cess, Kathry, and Allie, the latter of whom is the AI in question), using illegal means of detention and questioning, directly resulting in the deaths of at least a couple of them. Thus, the social implications of war being not just chaos but moral and mortal degradation and unnecessary waste of life. </p><p>The 'adults' in the room occupy the other half of the novel. They are 'gods' in the sense of being highly and extensively evolved to the extent that they have acquired near-immortality and seeming ability to turn their perceptual speeds up and down/ back and forth as though with internal 'control knobs'. This is a kind of novum that enables a time-dilation device for spatio-temporal deixis in the novel itself, one that again fairly precisely indexes it as science fiction in this mode of telling. These gods are seen by the 'pygs' (a lower form of life that would seem to be actually human so much lesser evolved that they constitute a distinct species) to be gods, almost literally so because their 'speeds' have been so attenuated as appear motionless over the vast timescales needed to traverse the spaces separating earth from Dante (the name of the planet that houses the Mount).</p><p>This differential is played to maximum effect to give play to the conflict that arises between the gods, and the leveraging of the pygs loyalty to be exclusively towards Pan, a god more sympathetic to their plight as lesser beings who are actually eaten by the other, non-vegetarian, gods. Thus we have war in the final half-moiety of the book. It plays out spectacularly, and the material in the bookending halves are handled just as well as in the middle, perhaps even better in some ways precisely because they are more metaphorical. There is philosophical speculation in abundance as well and the final section here contains some useful reflections on Dante, namely the time-bound aspect of middle section of Inferno, the purgatory. This section 'requires' sinners to atone through effortful movement from the bottom to the top of the mountain. What the characters of this novel cannot see (none of them apparently) is that this is no metaphor, and that their lives are similarly effortful, though it would take a Dante to make them see. Despite this, and in full knowledge of this work, only the gods do not see. And so we have hubris, and the tragedy of the novel playing out to the final seeming demise of just about all concerned.</p><p>So, it is a comment on the futility and overweening pride of those who contemplate war through the unreflective leveraging of war-potentialising technologies such as drones, phones, and guns, but also less obviously even of books. For the latter are surely technologies that when taken too literally, might quite literally result in war. The bible is a case in point. Here we resonate back to Otty, and her strictness around swearing, with which she cannot abide, the utterance of swear-words in her con-freres being utterly proscribed (by her). This is a kind of superstition, one that also bounds in technologically mediated discourse of which the present work is a case in point. And so we come to see how cleverly it is constructed, and how solid that construction is. </p><p>Compared to his other novels, Purgatory Mount rates very highly. I think I might even rate it Roberts's best book if I didn't already rate others pretty much on par, including pretty much everything else I've read by him on that par. There is very much an evenness to the effort and result of this body of work, and here I place in top-class The Thing Itself, Bete, The Real-town Murders, By the Pricking of Her Thumb, in other words all recent output in the Roberts fiction-machine. And machine it is, and no less artful, clever, and effective for that. I'm even reading one of his few non-science fictional works (The Black Prince) and it almost seems that historical fiction could be his forte, his metier, if that was his thing. But his thing is science fiction, and it is very much to the advantage of the dedicated reader to realise sooner rather than later the central place this writer will have in the genre's history. This body of work, in other words, is no small fact. On the contrary, it is a big fact, one that keeps growing both quantitatively and qualitatively with each passing novel. I plan to continue this journey, and to keep mapping it both for posterity and for my ongoing and increasing interest. I still have a few gaps to fill (a few unread Roberts), and at the rate he writes, I feel almost asymptotically inclined, but luckily I happen to very much like that kind of thing. Luckily, it feels effortless, and I've already reached heaven.</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-31682560419179170922020-12-21T01:10:00.004-08:002020-12-21T01:10:50.996-08:00Top Ten Books of 2020 <i>Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?</i> (Alexander Keyssar)<div>Does justice to the question, and doesn't just break it down into temporal boilerplate, or simplistic explanations. It covers specific examples across time and space, including one very interesting and informative burst of partisam gerrymandering in the "Miner Law in Michigan" case.</div><div><div><br /></div><div><i>Antkind</i> (Charlie Kaufman)</div><div>I had just watched "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" and was completely depressed after that, so what did I do? I went right out and bought <i>Antkind</i> and got sucked right in. This novel is much better than "Ending", and it is much much funnier.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>It's the End of the World</i> (Adam Roberts)</div><div>Also very funny and a useful antidote to gloomy or pessimistic thinking under lockdown. Much more academic, critical, and literary than Bill Bailey's own lockdown-literary efforts, this is also a handbook of useful information on what you might consider reading while you've got the extra time (free of travel, vacations or family visits) over the holidays and beyond...</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The Liar's Dictionary</i> (Eley Williams)</div><div>Another Royal Holloway lecturer hits it out of the park in her debut novel that switches between present-day London and the city in 1899, just before several key words without which it is hard to imagine conducting intelligent discourse had not yet come into being. This is wonderful storytelling and it is beautiful poetry, and it made me think about maps and their #mountweazels, as well as about language and 'the stations at which we post the word', spatialities, etc, EXCELLENT!</div><div><br /></div><div><i>War of the Maps</i> (Paul McAuley)</div><div>I mean, just look at the title, and realise that it's richer than you can even imagine, with so many different levels of not just map, but of being and estrangement coming into play that it just boggles! This is a great book, and it has made me a McAuley true believer...a technical term indicating that from now on McAuley has a 'free pass' from Gwilym (I'll buy anything he publishes from now on).</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Mordew</i> (Alex Pheby)</div><div>I'm a bit of an outsider, but as my appreciation of England deepens I find increasingly resonant vibrations with Dickens and Peake. This book is right in that resonance, and adds significantly to the tradition, with map.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest</i> (Paul Kincaid)</div><div>I'm picking up a bit more Priest in part as accompaniment to the stellar example of academic excellence. Literary criticism will find increasing relevance on my reading lists as I deepen my own academic endeavours in this area, and this is in my top three of all time in the category of exemplary SF criticism category.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The Lost Art of Running</i> (Benzie)</div><div>Beautifully written, and useful in terms of actual running, this book actually does something different, which is hard to do with so many running books out there. We need to get over our fixation on VDOT02max, to realise the fascia that does free work for the runner, look at the muscles and the skeleton more, and how we hold our form. It also has the 'anthropological' take on running, but in a very good way (with map).</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Exercised</i> (Daniel Lieberman)</div><div>This book really changed my whole outlook, and I'm no longer hung up on how much I sleep, or posture (not that I was much hung on posture), and have a firm basis in the science and anthropology of running, and some sympathetic stories around how running impacts lives.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The Motion of the Body Through Space</i> (Lionel Shriver)</div><div>A reactionary take on fitness, but very entertaining, and with some food for thought.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-13353938866592450532020-10-02T07:31:00.002-07:002020-10-02T07:31:14.614-07:00The Left-Handed Booksellers of London<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjaTmqwTNCcMuIiPcZbWWSPemlx6HoPxKChqdXe2spkrcXybwNsvsCY7_15qHD4g2EPd_0lsH_1zjVjDgPtPMQHyO5esTfOe7k9tttZQMpSrDPdUFVwqnURXbEvdFkn8xzl7tPo5GzLA/s500/Nix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjaTmqwTNCcMuIiPcZbWWSPemlx6HoPxKChqdXe2spkrcXybwNsvsCY7_15qHD4g2EPd_0lsH_1zjVjDgPtPMQHyO5esTfOe7k9tttZQMpSrDPdUFVwqnURXbEvdFkn8xzl7tPo5GzLA/s320/Nix.jpg" /></a></div>I sped through this book, not realising until well into it that it is what is considered a 'young adult' (YA) novel, and actually that that might be part of what made it so compelling. The story is brisk and unencumbered with unnecessary non-action. It has dreamy protagonists, and not-so-dreamy bad guys, but most of all it has that stamp of what Stefan Ekman has examined in fantasy as a kind of landscape-agency for the production of all kinds of magical borders, territorialised agencies, and time-dilating areas that produce contrapuntalities between past and present in really interesting and innovative ways.<p></p><p>I admit it is my first Nix title, and I've been meaning to get around the <i>Angel Mage</i> for quite some time now (and I now will get around to it, very soon!). More importantly, this is a title that fits my research profile in a developing line of thinking around how magic and landscape mutually infuse and inform within a certain strand or tradition in fantasy writing. This obviously goes along with Faerie in general, and with Tolkien's work standing at an origin point. Think Lothlorien and the Elves, and how time moves in that part of Middle Earth (if you are familiar with it), and you will start to get the gist of the tradition to which I allude, and to which I argue Nix is a part.</p><p>I've not been to Lake Windermere, and did not know its old name until I read this book, nor did I know that a spirit sleeps beneath Old Man of Coniston, though it should have been obvious from its name. This book is a geographical treasure trove exploring ideas around various interrelated kinds of magic held not only in books themselves, but in the names of things, as communicated down through time from the old days. I did not find any of this corny, and I think this is because the young adult reader today is an extremely discerning one. Furthermore, it could lead one to things like maps, if one were so inclined (and I am). The magic, from what I can tell, is innovative, and avoids cliches associated with the genre. Why do knife, blood, and salt in combination result in a 'holding spell'? They don't on their own: they also require application of the combo by a person 'with powers'. And precisely how all of these characters came to have theirs is a mystery not really even worth digging into because it would spoil the fun. </p><p>The fun comes from immersing yourself into a carefully crafted world with consistent rules and frequent application of them. What you get then, is an excellent curation of effects, alongside some psychedelic characters emanating out of a possible 1983: think paisley, mini-Coopers, London black cabs, and whole lot more firearms than we are used to stumbling across in the UK. Think tons of fun and real page turner, and then you might really want to pick up this book, regardless of your age. It's well worth the price of admission.</p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-58557491719764341682020-09-12T07:19:00.002-07:002020-09-12T08:41:00.507-07:00Representation Without Reproduction: Beyond the Borders of the Science Fiction Map<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dMhlGZHHZhk" width="320" youtube-src-id="dMhlGZHHZhk"></iframe></div><br /><p></p><p>[Presented at London Science Fiction Research Community's "Beyond Borders" conference, 12 Sept 2020 (online)]</p><p>(Youtube video link: <a href="https://youtu.be/dMhlGZHHZhk">https://youtu.be/dMhlGZHHZhk</a> )</p><p><br /></p><p>1 The maps</p><p><br /></p><p>These fragments conjure worlds so like, yet so utterly unlike our own. If not the maps, then the narratives they enframe, are sparked by that enframement: their existence casts the spell by which we see ‘other’ worlds represented. In that representation, other kinds of societies are performed in the dark spaces of the closed book, whose utterance is an opening. Cartographic utterances meet us in beginning, or part-way. Crosshatch sentences elucidate their names, their naming, in the interstices of the polder-book, the fantastical sci-fi, in whose leaves the space-times of other worlds unfurl, watched, watching, always mapped (I think here for some reason of the ‘Mercator projection’ map of Phobos in Baxter’s <i>World Engines</i>, as a kind of cartographic narrative enabler). We push back with the indigenous subject of such books as those examined here (<i>Dune</i>, <i>Helliconia</i>, and <i>Always Coming Home</i>), we challenge the mapped fragments claim to represent with new names always in the language of the coloniser of the maps in, of and for science fiction, we find examples of all three in the three main works under consideration; adding a fourth kind: the map that is science fiction itself , that represents proposed spatialities of future worlds that as always are about now. Science fiction is a map in its particulars and in its totality of speculated, extrapolated future nows that are approached apprehensively, sentence by sentence, book by book. Later I will suggest that the history of science fiction itself might be re-mapped as a history of the Anthropocene through emerging climate fictions, from Wells’s short story “The Star”, with its catastrophic (from the Earthlings, but not the Martians perspective) exo-planet-induced climate change; through the works examined here today, which I posit as bridges into the Anthropocenic sci-fi map proper; and onward to the latest works by Robinson, including for example the non-cartographic <i>New York 2140</i>; or the very cartographic <i>Fall, or Dodge in Hell,</i> by Stephenson. </p><p><br /></p><p>2 Setting</p><p><br /></p><p>Maps are metonymical for settings in many cases, the former acting as ‘pointers’ or mnemonic devices for the latter. Ryan et al (2016, page 38) point out that many societies divide space into sacred and profane worlds, with holy sites acting as portals between the two. <i>Helliconia</i> certainly abounds in such sites, with a dualism between Akha of the underworld and Wutra of the skies, and the ways that this dualism drives both the plot and the mutual fears of various societies of the secondary world we inhabit when we read about Helliconia. The Earth Observation Station itself places Helliconia under constant surveillance, rendering the very obvious map/frontispiece quite the obvious paratextual bit of paraphernalia. But the map is diegetic as well, as we see on page 374 of <i>Helliconia</i>, in Vry’s scholarly stone tower, “[o]n one wall hung an ancient map, given [Vry] by a new admirer, it was painted in coloured inks upon vellum. This was her Ottaassaal map depicting the whole world, at which she never ceased to wonder. The world was depicted as round, its land masses encircled by ocean. It rested on the original boulder – bigger than the world – from which the world had sprung or been ejected. The simple outlined land masses were labelled Sibornal, with Campannlat below, and Hespagorat separate at the bottom. Some islands were indicated. The only town marked was Ottaassaal, set at the centre of the globe.”</p><p><br /></p><p>Dune is a more political work, though its setting is infamous for its ecology. The absurdity of the various workings of water budgets and how these are funnelled through cognitive estrangements of desert-focused technologies, do not detract from the Anthropocenic indigeneities and indignities posited by <i>Dune</i>. We have here another Gaia-like creation (and the genealogies of the Gaia-analogy could form the basis of the entire mapping of this bridge into speculative Anthropocenes of the future), one that again appears diegetically within <i>Dune</i> on page 83, in addition to its obvious placement as the end point/appendix of the work: “the Duke and Paul were alone in the conference room at the landing field. It was an empty-sounding room, furnished only with a long table, old-fashioned three-legged chairs around it, and a map board and projector at one end. Paul sat at the table near the map board. He had told his father the experience with the hunter-seeker and given the reports that a traitor threatened him.” The importance of projection is here quite marked, especially if we note by a glance at the appendix and its metadata that we are looking at a polar projection, something that is quite unusual even in fantasy, where maps of fantastic worlds abound. Ultimately, however, we know that the map is Liet-Kynes’s, the anthropologist gone native whose non-presence nevertheless structures the novel’s plots and politics and schemings. To paraphrase Marlon James, Liet-Kynes is a man who believes in belief. His map is an ethnographic fact. </p><p><br /></p><p><i>Always Coming Home</i> is full of both maps and mappings. It future indigeneities are nonetheless retroactively mapped by the colonising gaze of the unseen, but very much present, anthropologist/ ‘editor’ of the narrative, whose ethics at least extend towards the insider view and its inclusion, most notably on pages 525-526 of the Library of America edition, where the watershed of Sinshan is reproduced with names not only in the native language, but in their script as well. That <i>Always Coming Home</i> includes eight maps, all of which are woven into the very structure and fabric of the narrative, indicates how much more sophisticated, in many ways, the indigenous spatialities of the work have been conceptualised as the insider view of the world being narrated. But as Doreen Massey noted to me at another conference a year before her death, ‘it is not about the maps.’ To quote Le Guin from her short essay ‘On the Frontier’ (from <i>A Wave in the Mind</i>), “[i]f there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.” Le Guin’s map, as she later notes in the same essay, is always already full with indigenous places and names. These are truly maps whose spatialities they claim to represent would not dream of reproducing the indignities of the mundane presencing of the current bad-dreaming Anthropocene.</p><p><br /></p><p>3 Discussion</p><p><br /></p><p>We could discuss all of this in terms of both ladders of objectivity, also known as the View from Nowhere; as well as diegicity/appendicitis, asking, is the scientific-fantastic map always-already diegetic (even more than in fantasy)? Or is it ‘merely’ para-textual/extra-diegetic? When looking at science-fictional maps, or when noting their described presence within narratives, we must examine what their function is in the reproduction of the colonising and/or erasing power of the View from Above. The sketchy map at the beginning of <i>Helliconia</i> certainly seems to fulfil this colonising function, as does Aldiss own map, excavated later from his study, and the same goes, while we’re at it, for the tacked on appendix of the omnibus edition, the one that diagrams the view from space of the planet itself. Furthermore, if the map is a meme, then we can state as well, that so is the appendix, and therefore its presence in any given work is a kind of cultural evolutionary move of which the author themselves may or may not be aware of at that other level at least (I think here as well of Roberts brilliantly explained novum in the appendix to <i>On</i>).</p><p><br /></p><p>If, with Lovelock, we are beginning to move into the Novacene, even as the Anthropocene wraps up, we can note that there are other works that have been based on discredited scientific theories (I’m here thinking not just of Gaia in <i>Helliconia</i>, but of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis in <i>Babel-17</i>, and even to some extent in Le Guin herself). What kinds of maps and appendices will we need in the age of algorithmic and planetary artificial intelligences? Will it be a kind of ‘cloud atlas’? What will be the challenges of representation/extrapolation, i.e. without reproduction?</p><p><br /></p><p>Science-fiction-in-action needs to attend more carefully to the ‘immutable mobiles’ it deploys in the service of its extrapolations and non-reproductive politics of future heterotopias. Our postcolonial ‘others’, not to mention our future selves, will come to depend upon them. There is reason for hope and action. What if, with Kitchin and Dodge, we undertake to re-think maps anew, now as always being remade, as becoming things, rather than static beings? What if the sci-fi novel could itself come to embody such an ideal? <i>Dhalgren</i>, with its <i>Ulysses</i>-like pacing, interiority, and spatiality, is probably the prototype, forming an ideal-type of speculation for which there has probably been no subsequent equal. I set the bar high by placing the origins of this kind of speculated sci-fi map novel with Ulysses, whose famed use as a map of Dublin belies the inherently non-literal, metaphorical basis of the use of the term mapping in literary theory. That Ulysses has a performed and very real spatiality does not mean that it is literally a map; a similar point was made by Gibson in his afterward to <i>Dhalgren</i>. The point is, we need more metaphorical mappings, to use Cosgrove’s terminology, and we need them to perform mutable, mobile, service towards the ends of speculative fictions in the post-Anthropocene world of hyperintelligent cloud algorithms. As demonstrated by Le Guin, Herbert, and Aldiss, colonial mappings, namings, and spatial performances always contain the seeds and anchor points of future post-colonial counter-mappings (think here of the air- and land-octaves of the phagors and humans respectively, and how long their alternation takes), ad infinitum at the right temporal scales. It may be phagor/human on Helliconia; here in the Novacene, it may play out as human/cyborg.</p><p><br /></p><p>These maps literalise the colonising View from Above/Nowhere that meshes very well with the roving/disembodied (3rd person) view each of the works takes, though only in the case of Le Guin is it truly liberating. Only in Le Guin, with her carrier bag fictions, do we truly encounter the counter-map.</p><p><br /></p><p>4 Towards further formalisation of the model</p><p><br /></p><p>Maps when used well help to formalise and spatialise and relationalise the language (names) of speculative fiction. They are sufficient (but not necessary) for enabling these moves. Maps allow the reader to carry around the language in the form of immutable mobile, and thus are tools to be used in the translation of the text. We have various tools, but maps are tradition in fantasy. Other tools are available, other reading strategies – these just happen to be apposite to the texts at hand. The map and the text are interlocking machines: the map contains other texts; the text other maps; interlocking precisely, like a crew and its ship. The map makes explicit the metonymical function of the text itself: that of naming. The secondary world thus represented is allowed its utopian functioning as a corrective to the wrongs produced in the primary world. The map is a metaphor at one level, serving as a metonymical toolbox at another level. These functions operate both vertically (through time) and horizontally (through space). “Gaia” and “Anthropocene” have significant vertical components by now. To what do they refer (and from within the Mass Cultural Genre System)? We need a map of climate fiction!</p><p><br /></p><p>5 Conclusion</p><p><br /></p><p>Maps (in sci-fi) help us navigate the line between fact and belief. If here we find a map of a plausible Gaia, self-regulating, sentient, with evolvable species; over there (in the real world) the idea is more speculation. The age of the world picture demands images of totality. Aldiss and Herbert hid the most interesting things beneath the surface of their images, in the undergrounds of imagination. The counter-map was the text itself, a kind of return of the repressed. Le Guin fully utilises the power of maps, weaving them together as full participants alongside other items of her carrier bag of fictions. Le Guin’s maps are characters in a new species of book.</p><p><br /></p><p>We accept the strictures of fantasy magic even as we let science grow, no, leap, beyond its self-inscribed boundaries. Sci-fi’s polders and crosshatches are made explicit in machines for moving time and space in strange new ways, more generalisable in diagrams of power diegetic and paratextual, inscribed and performed. Their strictures are operationalised in the specialised language of science: the Mercator projection, the polar view, the multi-coloured elevational ‘globe’. The sea-level rise in <i>Helliconia</i> names a new terrain that is anchored in <i>Summer</i>’s beginning, and this is in turn anchored in the map. The magic of the text lies in its rules of procedure, its method of representing the world without reproducing it.</p><p><br /></p>Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-60549705044005901542020-07-03T07:53:00.001-07:002020-07-03T07:58:11.875-07:00War of the Maps<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha8RnjVm5xLlUvDpCsy9p4tANmF8k1qkdhPWipUxWoGjEmP9jsIS5VEmTdEdcsOqz1WDzFuTqP2xvtAasSCITuMQSwjaJ8EYezw9mJzlFf_to31sNeBTCbOMG71XtvSMVzKgfz6DH4VIc/s1600/McAuley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="653" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha8RnjVm5xLlUvDpCsy9p4tANmF8k1qkdhPWipUxWoGjEmP9jsIS5VEmTdEdcsOqz1WDzFuTqP2xvtAasSCITuMQSwjaJ8EYezw9mJzlFf_to31sNeBTCbOMG71XtvSMVzKgfz6DH4VIc/s320/McAuley.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
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Maps has a double meaning in this book. A map means both what we think of when we hear the word (i.e. a top-down view of some topography) and a meaning that is more in line with biological thinking. A map, in this book, can also mean a 'life map'. The latter sense of map (i.e. life-map) is the more important sense of the word 'map' in <i>War of the Maps</i>.<br />
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The book is about biological warfare on a hypothetical planet constructed out of a Dyson sphere. We are given to know this information in the Acknowledgments, where the paper 'Dyson Spheres Around White Dwarves' is cited as the novum for the novel we are reading. As with McAuley's previous book, <i>Austral</i>, we are riding on the shoulder, in third person limited mode, of the protagonist, in this case 'the lucidor' (who also has a name, used only once or twice in the book).<br />
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Despite being, technically, 'hard' or extrapolative SF due to the central novum's leveraging of biological theories of 'mapping' (i.e. DNA manipulation), when you are actually reading the book it feels much more like fantasy. We know that science fiction and fantasy exist on a continuum, and it is one of the many innovative features of this book, one of the things it does uniquely well, to put us on that continuum and slide evenly along it, from the 'harder' biological side, on over to the 'softer' fantastical elements involving 'shatterlings', mind-reading, magic, and other-worldly beings.<br />
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The other-wordly beings and godlings play a major role in shaping the plot, whose entire resolution revolves around being able to locate the site of one of those fallen-from-the-sky. Various networks (again, we are into 'hard' territory here because there is a materiality to how the various beings communicate that relies upon a realistic notion of how the networks function) link the different more-than-human actors, actants, and mediators that inhabit the various territories, islands, continents, and enclaves battling for the spaces of this mirror-lighted 'globe.' One page 27 we see that,<br />
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"a huge latticework globe stood on a plinth of black baserock. Maps, some entire and others patchworked from islands or continents, none bigger than a child's hand, were scattered thinly across the surface. The home map, Gea, was a squarish red tile close to the equator, smaller than most of the rest, and a silvery ball representing the Heartsun was spindled at the centre, and everything was spattered by the droppings of a fractious parliament of vivid green birds which had colonised the globe's pole, chattering each to each and scolding passers-by."<br />
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The islands/continents that make up this world are themselves called maps, and they are also territories and as such, are peopled and cultured, here into wars with each other. This is a comment on human territoriality as much as it is upon the dangers of the manipulations of our biological 'maps'. We are, indeed, reading through a speculation on the philosophical and social implications of such manipulations upon our own worlds, made literal through the use of fantastical titles and trainings attained by the protagonists. Many are philosophical practitioners and, as such, are given great respect on the fantastical world, where in our, real, world they would have none.<br />
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Philosophical speculation abounds with being obvious about it. A less subtle reading would miss this point, but this book could appeal nonetheless, I think, to the less self-aware reader interested only in action-stories and fighting. We do get a lot of scenes of hand-to-hand combat with staves and spells and the like, and aid often comes from quasi-mystical beings and godlings. So we can get our fantasy fix too.<br />
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If you liked <i>Fairyland</i> a lot, then this book is for you, because it is in much the same vein. If you've only read <i>Austral</i> before because you liked its straightforward extrapolation of a climate change scenario focused on Antarctica, then the fantastic side here might appeal less. I, for one, love both <i>Fairyland</i> and <i>Austral</i>, and therefore, I doubly loved <i>War of the Maps</i>. It is the top book of the year 2020 for me so far.Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-58200165089636139072020-06-18T00:36:00.001-07:002020-06-18T00:43:02.563-07:00The Motion of the Body Through Space<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_j154JghRT7jKDE6z5XEsv7y-MImMaCwAHREhyphenhyphenH2lrjbIlZLJQ6_Gf3vU82dJnjJI0R6I8Pjo5NU2w8TJICSXJlPjEPo5zw44IAtYsXh2DWOk_uWQ3EkeKTx3mtjeEgSYKNztAXHi6xo/s1600/Shriver.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_j154JghRT7jKDE6z5XEsv7y-MImMaCwAHREhyphenhyphenH2lrjbIlZLJQ6_Gf3vU82dJnjJI0R6I8Pjo5NU2w8TJICSXJlPjEPo5zw44IAtYsXh2DWOk_uWQ3EkeKTx3mtjeEgSYKNztAXHi6xo/s320/Shriver.jpg" width="220" /></a><br />
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The thing about Lionel Shriver is, I guess, that she's self-deprecating. She is obviously, also, a contrarian, and that is the quality that comes through most strongly in this book. Shriver takes a contrary view on almost every conceivable aspect and item of received wisdom emanating from the fitness industry. And this automatically counts as self-deprecation because of Shriver's own personal investment in the values that industry promotes. We know that this is the case from various interviews Shriver has given over the years, most notably in the <i>New Yorker</i>.<br />
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Let's be clear (if I wasn't above): this book is a relentless attack on both the idea and practice of 'pushing yourself to your limits'. The whole idea of limits is critically tested through a series of limit cases devoted, seemingly, to exercise, but who are revealed to be, instead, devoted to self-harm. The freaks Shriver describes are suicidally hell-bent on perfecting their bodies and attaining personal best times that they acquire, along the way a set of life-threatening injuries ranging from: blown knees, heart attacks, suppurating and infectious blisters, kidney failure, fatal head traumas, deep lacerations, internal bleeding/bruises; and much more, all in the context of the ravages of old age that both the main character Serafina Terpsichore and her husband (Remington) are undergoing.<br />
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Shriver is trying to take down a few notches the likes of, for example, Alex Hutchinson, whose book <i>Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance </i>Remington is observed reading in bed, and it's funny because the husband is so very far from being an accomplished athlete that he comes to seem like a straw-man, set up to be so very easily knocked down, especially in comparison to the company he keeps: a set of hardcore (and all very much younger and more fit) triathletes. Their goal: the MettleMan, a brilliantly conceived triathlon 'event' the approach of which structures so much of the tension that is built up so skillfully in the course of this novel's events.<br />
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Another straw-person is the young buff personal trainer who latches onto Remington during his first (circa 8 hour) marathon. Her name is Bambi Buffer, and she is of course a dissembling shill of a person, so seemingly representative of much of what is branded as 'good for you' by various representatives of the fitness industry today. Bambi is the classic 'other woman' but Shriver, with extremely impressive skill, navigates the cliches and pitfalls such a character might represent, with brilliant and darkly funny aplomb (to borrow a turn of phrase Adam Roberts applied to Joe Abercrombie's book <i>A Little Hatred. </i>Indeed, <i>The Motion of the Body Through Space</i> might quite easily, at times, feel like a good fit into the grimdark fantasy genre).<br />
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Underneath the take-down-y language and critical structure of this novel; it is more fundamentally about a marriage, and a very admirable one (a good one!) at that. Serafina and Remington are enamoured of one another, despite their troublesome children, and various late-mid-life mishaps. It is one of the latter (Remington's early firing from a company to which he has devoted his life and life's work), that has led to the current crises of fitness and bodily-limits thinking that underly the book's philosophical core.<br />
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Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of reactionary material being spewed by Remington and his wife, who at times too thinly seem to resemble Shriver's real-life personae. There is a massive wedge of anti-'PC' libertarian-inflected political ideology that is quite unbelievable. Remington's new boss, who usurps his own perceived entitlement to a management position, is a high-born Nigerian woman with a whole-profile of stereotypically progressive agendas that becomes increasingly absurd as it is conveyed through an almost play-like set of recorded dialogues Remington plays back from a workplace tribunal he underwent immediately prior to his firing. This woman, his new boss, allegedly re-named a street in Albany, New York, 'Robert Mugabe' drive. Which is kind of funny, but also a bit insulting if we are expected to believe this or that this kind of cardboard character actually exists.<br />
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Does this book have a happy ending? The main character, at the end of the final chapter, has a heart attack and does not finish his race. His wife, with a fresh knee operation that is trashed through the tribulations of her finding her lost husband, has to undergo the operations again, and is permanently crippled in the process. But the afterward is a glorious tribute to the wonders and pleasure of old age in the company of a spouse truly and deeply loved and enjoyed, hour by hour, day by day. It came off a bit hokey, if I'm being honest, but that was probably also part of the satire.<br />
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I took the critique of the fitness aspect very seriously, and I am certain it will have a positive impact on my own practices, if not quite anywhere near the extent that Hutchinson's book <i>Endure</i> will, then perhaps in a more subtle way. <i>The Motion of the Body Through Space</i> is well worth reading.<br />
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<br />Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-75156255820618016032020-06-17T08:44:00.001-07:002020-06-17T08:46:50.989-07:00Self & I<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3p5f0doUXrpzpDYFk4869dzJvXDzScf2lqI0YvEgMgOO5zGpRwHrqQz-QF_XZs4xjQnVGzc7oHdch_z3ytHxKXmBzauBMWla9yH4KKN10USAjEUiQ9U_kkYJGZueVE0oi_iXz9XSigz0/s1600/Abaitua.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3p5f0doUXrpzpDYFk4869dzJvXDzScf2lqI0YvEgMgOO5zGpRwHrqQz-QF_XZs4xjQnVGzc7oHdch_z3ytHxKXmBzauBMWla9yH4KKN10USAjEUiQ9U_kkYJGZueVE0oi_iXz9XSigz0/s320/Abaitua.jpg" width="205" /></a><br />
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Will Self has exerted a certain fascination over my life. This is a result of having read only a couple of books by him. In "Psychogeography" he attempts to 'walk' from London to New York, which means, essentially, walking to and from the airports of those two cities. I read most or all (I can't remember which) of "Great Apes" because I was reading a lot of philosophy at that time, and a lot of philosophical arguments in favour of various forms of animal rights, from duty-based, to rights-based, to utilitarian arguments. Self's fiction was the first fiction-based argument I'd come across, and it added a whole new and unforgettable dimension to thinking about animals and their positionalities.<br />
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Recently I read the first section of Self's autobiography "Will", and fully plan on finishing that book later this summer. I like the way he writes, it reminds me of surrealism, of Ballard, and of postmodernism, all with connotations, for me, of freedom of self-expression unconstrained by institutional norms. Abaitua's memoir of his time as Self's personal assistant has helped me to pin down precisely why I've warmed to Self in my lifetime, even as I might, at times, have spurned him for being unserious, wild, or unsober as a thinker and role-model. But these objections are neither here nor there, with Self, because they are irrelevant. All that is relevant is the work itself.<br />
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And Abaitua is correct, I think, in identifying Self as a canonical writer. I had not known this until I read Self & I. But the best parts of this book are the stories of the good & bad times Self & Abaitua shared. It is also a book about how to be a writer, and it is both sympathetic and patient with anyone reading the book who might have such aspirations. Part of the reason for this is that it seems, reading the book, that it has taken Abaitua himself a really long time to settle down within himself, and produce the works he needs to produce in order to create the kind of art that feels true to himself, his vision, and his discipline. That discipline is hard-won, mostly because he's enjoyed his life enough, and this is very apparent here in the book, that for time, it seems, he might never have settled down enough to have actually written anything worth reading.<br />
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But he has. This book is proof. I haven't read Abaitua's science fiction novels, but I will. I will also be picking up those books in my library that I've been putting off so long, for some reason: "How the Dead Live" and "Umbrella" for starters. If you are interested in writing, in fiction, or in Will Self, this is one of the best books I've read on any of those subjects, and I recommend it very highly.Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-90901096185109924712020-06-17T06:28:00.000-07:002020-06-17T06:28:11.387-07:00The Memory Police<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpbN49jYC_q64qgG7WwwzoWP4B0awTb-M6lpMlJdYBLZCwcU9EiG344nguhzXLXtRIoebt4etRJlehSvWwSWi5bFZ6cW9WuCAyckhfD4MhMxp_o7g_zJOesvyZNhQjWU2Ar9aklo3v6Lg/s1600/Ogawa.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpbN49jYC_q64qgG7WwwzoWP4B0awTb-M6lpMlJdYBLZCwcU9EiG344nguhzXLXtRIoebt4etRJlehSvWwSWi5bFZ6cW9WuCAyckhfD4MhMxp_o7g_zJOesvyZNhQjWU2Ar9aklo3v6Lg/s320/Ogawa.jpg" width="211" /></a><br />
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The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, reads so effortlessly in translation that I'm reminded of beautiful moments years ago when I used to lose myself in Murakami. This is beautiful writing of a Kafkaesque kind, and it flows like clear water. <br />
<br />
The plot is simple: objects are being forgotten, one by one. The forgetting is, however, categorical, imperative, and backed up by a brutal police force that constantly patrols the island upon which the novel's events are set, searching for backsliders: the ones who wilfully remember. First calendars disappear, then novels. When calendars are 'forgotten' time itself takes on new characteristics: it is constantly winter for the second half of the book.<br />
<br />
When novels are 'forgotten' the main protagonist, a female novelist and her friend (the unnamed 'old man') cart a wheelbarrow of books to a conflagration in the middle of town where the whole community pitches into chucking books on the fire, which reaches skyscraper-like proportions. Nearby the town's library burns down. <br />
<br />
The whole book is a comment on the nature of naming, language, and memory; politically, it comments on coercion and the collective power of forgetting. As in the Kafka novel, the hero is the individual who can stand up to what a damaging collection of individuals (a community, a state, a class) can decide to do to that individual. One comes to feel targeted, to take it personally, and one begins to resist, first in small ways and, later, on a larger scale that might begin to enlist others.<br />
<br />
The 'other' here is the novelist's editor, who cannot forget. For some unnamed reason the editor, also metaphorically, does not allow himself to ever forget a single category of object that the police have placed on their list of the forgotten. For this reason, the editor is given a special room in the novelist's house, hiding out like a Jewish person during a Nazi occupation. The secret room is the site of much of the novel's most poignant, central, and emotional happening, from birthday parties, to readings, to physical bonding. <br />
<br />
Another main character in the trio of those to whom we come to care about in this very touching narrative, is the 'old man' who lives on a 'forgotten' boat. The old man helps the novelist and editor to set up the secret room to be self-sufficient with toilet, teapot, ventilation, and communications ducts. So many books have resonance right now because they remind us of 'lockdown' during the coronavirus, and this is yet another example. <br />
<br />
Read The Memory Police for how it sheds light on problems both old (around state violence and totalitarianism) and new (subtle but pervasive changes in societal norms that become entrenched). Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-35657160282296560452020-06-17T05:32:00.000-07:002020-06-17T05:32:47.647-07:00They Will Drown In Their Mothers' Tears<br />
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<br />
Johannes Anyuru's nominally science fictional work applies a critically reflexive lens to questions of race, violence, and nationalism. A poetry of terrorism is tempered only through the metaphorical use of the idea of 'time travel' that makes an alternate world, one in which a terroristic act was avoided, possible. This possibility 'saves' the narrative from the implied barbarism of the writing of poetry after such an act (as from Adorno we know such barbarism to exist 'after Auschwitz').<br />
<br />
This is not just a case of a literary novelist appropriating a science fictional trope in order to triangulate the SF back into the literary. The narrative not only would not work, literally and metaphorically, without time travel, but it would also be morally vacuous without the alternate and parallel timeline, in which a young 'Swede' comes to the crucial moment ready to disarm the man who recruited her into killing the author of comic books satirising Islam.<br />
<br />
But I didn't read this book because it is science fiction. I did so in spite of its earning a place within that category. The cognitive estrangement of the novel proceeds from its subject matter, and from the poetry of its presentation. The dystopia it sketches gradually fills in through details of the city in which it is situated (Gothenburg), its architectures, seasons, and the family members of the perpetrators and victims of its violences.<br />
<br />
My brother recommended this book to me. Its translation appears to be an equal partner in its success as a literary work, having been rendered into English by Saskia Vogel, and prose certainly does not in any way detract from the story's momentum, its impetus. This, despite rapid shifts of point of view, in two main structures proceeding first from the young female protagonist's and her doppleganger from another timeline; the other 'I' being that of a young male journalist writing up the story of the attack on the comic book store. Images of this attack bookend beginning and ending sections of the structured story, and alternations of point of view are unmarked, but very easily worked out from context.<br />
<br />
This is very skillful, controlled writing, but equally skillful is the masterful poetic imagery of the 'rabbit yard' and 'building T', incremental architectures of doom in a spectrum of structures designed in a dystopian future Sweden to separate and subjugate its Muslim populations. The racial dynamics and clashes are very resonant for these times we are living through.Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-73762155337916918682020-04-01T03:03:00.002-07:002020-04-01T03:03:41.237-07:00Top Running and SF books for lockdownTop 15 running<br />
<br />
-Eat & Run by Scott Jurek<br />
-Today We Die a Little: Zatopek by Richard Askwith<br />
-The Rise of the Ultra Runners by Adharanand Finn<br />
-Born to Run by Christopher McDougall<br />
-The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe<br />
-What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami<br />
-Pants of Perspective by Anna McDuff<br />
-End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker<br />
-The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei by John Stevens<br />
-Sky Runner by Emilie Forsberg<br />
-The Way of the Runner by Adharanand Finn<br />
-Running With the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn<br />
-Lore of Running by Tim Noakes<br />
-Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzgerald<br />
-Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands<br />
<br />
Top 15 SF<br />
<br />
-Perdido Street Station by China Mieville<br />
-Dhalgren by Samuel Delany<br />
-Helliconia by Brian Aldiss<br />
-Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin<br />
-Bête by Adam Roberts<br />
-Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky<br />
-War of the Worlds by H G Wells<br />
-Rosewater by Tade Thompson<br />
-The Just City by Jo Walton<br />
-Austral by Paul McAuley<br />
-Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham<br />
-Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon<br />
-Cities in Flight by James Blish<br />
-The Migration by Helen Marshall<br />
-Solaris by Stanslaw Lem<br />
-Frankenstein by Mary ShelleyGwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-82848467477981781542020-03-19T04:50:00.002-07:002020-03-19T04:55:04.406-07:00Research State of Play March 2020Before I get swamped by marking again, I wanted to present a 'snapshot' of my current state of play regarding research. On my research profile I list<br />
<br />
-spatialities of speculative fiction<br />
-self-tracking and mapping and<br />
-counter-mapping in northern and developing areas<br />
<br />
as my three main research areas. I remain active in all three areas, both in terms of data collection and the development of theoretical frameworks/reading.<br />
<br />
1. spatialities of speculative fiction<br />
<br />
My latest idea will involve deep engagement with three key texts: 1. Le Guin, <i>Always Coming Home</i> 2. Aldiss, <i>Helliconia</i> and 3. Herbert, <i>Dune</i>. ACO will be posited as an appendix to a massive unwritten text, the content of which provides a set of speculations grounded in an empirical approach to the Aldiss and Herbert texts. This means a deep analysis of the relationships between the main stories and the appendices of both <i>Helliconia</i> (the full set) and <i>Dune</i>.<br />
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A further theoretical innovation is posited in the development that would trace a memetic transmission of the idea of the mapped appendix from Tolkien --> Herbert --> Aldiss --> Le Guin with each subsequent iteration adding to the development of the idea of the appendix as both diegetic and paratextual, with increasing sophistication through time.<br />
<br />
This will involve of course reading all four texts (including of course Tolkien) deeply and annotating diegetic mappings with the main bodies of the texts. I will use Ekman's methodologies for analysing the maps themselves, from his book <i>Here Be Dragons: Exploring Maps and Settings</i>; as well as Marie-Laure Ryan (et al), <i>Narrating Space/Spatalizing Narrative</i>. The latter provides a starting point for examining my conclusions, in which I state that it is Herbert who is responsible for the insertion of mapped appendices and speculative mappings into science fiction, importing the tradition from fantasy (and Tolkien).<br />
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<br />
*<br />
<br />
I have some other ideas around speculative fiction, to do with examining how various subgenres use both literal and metaphorical maps and mappings to build their various worlds. I want to compare cyberpunk, grimdark, and space opera, and am beginning to do so by reading Stephenson, Gibson, Abercrombie, Spark, Banks, and Arkady. These six texts provide a framework for examining for example what kinds of maps operate in and structure cyberspace, operationalizing binaries but at the same time literalizing the idea of the virtual that has always been at the heart of fiction (bolstering the claim along the way that all fiction is science fiction, and therefore that cyberpunk is literally the start of science fiction, Neuromancer the first true science-fictional text), etc<br />
<br />
2. self-tracking and mapping<br />
<br />
Cartographic Anxieties of Running: do people run better without maps? The idea of 'naked running' has taken hold in the running world as a way of countering the idea that 'if it isn't on Strava, it didn't happen'. This means that the legitimacy of your run hangs on whether or not you post it to social media, meaning further that you can be judged. This despite the fact that many running clubs espouse a non-judgemental approach to the sport.<br />
<br />
Alex Hutchinson discusses in his book <i>Endure</i> the case, for example, of runner Diane van Deren who had a partial right temporal lobectomy for seizures. After the surgery, van Deren "was unable to read maps or keep track of where she is on a course, [so] she doesn't focus on the challenge ahead of her...she is also free of the cognitive challenge -- the shackles, perhaps -- of pacing herself" a condition she credits with helping her win races.<br />
<br />
Sam Murphy, in <a href="https://www.sam-murphy.co.uk/way-to-go" target="_blank">a recent Runners World article</a>, talks about links between mental maps and anxieties associated with finding your way while running. I want to extent the discussion around maps and anxiety and 'naked running' by reaching out to my own running contacts, and others in different running clubs, to look for strategies people use in order to overcome their own navigational and pacing issues. This ties, theoretically into research being done, for example, by Neff (<i>Self-Tracking</i>, MIT Press), and extends into territories of surveillance capitalism (see Zuboff, The Age of <i>Surveillance Capitalism</i>) and the fact the we exude data for use by large corporations and that the business models of whole industries rely upon the behavioural modifications apps like Strava enable.<br />
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<br />
'Running naked' is a new kind of counter-mapping, a bit in line with the urge the Google Street View resident take when they blur their houses from the map.<br />
<br />
3. Counter-mapping in northern and developing areas<br />
<br />
My work on Scotland continues, and I am moving forward on a work called 'Braided Spatialities' positing a variety of contrapuntal mappings of tourist and historical cartographic silences and anxieties revolving around the conjunctions of Culloden, the Clearances, and various far Northern Highlands sites of interest. This paper will form a chapter of my magnum opus work-in-progress Contrapuntal Cartographies (in contract with McGill-Queen's University Press) looking at hierarchies and parallels of transatlantic mappings of various kinds of counter-cartography, indigeneities, resistances, and aesthetics.<br />
<br />
My key texts are dual: Pittock's <i>Culloden</i> and Basu's <i>Highland Homecomings </i>provide the key theoretical touchpoints currently. I am reading these very deeply and heavily annotating as I go.<br />
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<br />Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-15980393993713279112019-09-22T06:36:00.001-07:002019-09-23T00:28:08.981-07:00SUMMER SCI-FI READING ROUNDUP 2019<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
The following mini-reviews cover the most memorable reads for me over the last summer (2019):</div>
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Allan's previous effort, <i>The Rift</i>, has made me a permanent fan of this author, who I've come to worship as a writer. Persistent attention to emotion and relationships amidst the unusual, the abnormal, and the strange put Allan in a category of her own. There's an odd little science fiction story embedded into this narrative close to the end, and we have a novel-within-a-novel structure that I liked more than I thought I would. This summer I went to Cornwall, all the way to Land's End, so the latter parts of this story, where the Dollmaker makes his way to see his developing love interest, resonated particularly well for me, especially the description of the otherworldly landscapes of the mining areas.<br />
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I've been prone to do what many Canadians do quite often, namely, diss Atwood for no particularly good reason. We are especially harsh on Atwood probably because she makes such an easy target, always popping up everywhere seeming to claim some kind of hegemonic status in the business of representing Canada's voice on the world literary stage. But her voice is very much her own and that is nowhere more apparent than here. It might be easy, as Atwood herself so ironically demonstrates herself with a cameo in the TV series The Handmaid's Tale, to confuse this author with one of her austere martinet Aunts whose jokes are so very dry, and whose descriptions of life in Gilead could have been lifted from the recent reports of the Commissions into Residential Schooling in Canada. Apparently the ever-perceptive and wily Atwood is aware of this too: the book ends with an academic conference being led by some very present-day sounding First Nations academics leading a 'Gilead Studies' conference discussion. This is one of Atwood's best works but then I've only really engaged with a few of them myself. Judge for yourself by reading this (I would argue necessary) work.<br />
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I'm a bit behind here as this book came out a couple of years ago, and I was not expecting to find the Dick resonances in this work to be so strong. But there it is: you have a biomedical novum about reproductive politics embedded in a parsimoniously strong narrative line with characters you can really care about and grow to love / hate. The prolific father figure is especially compelling and unlikeable, as we are projected into an intergenerational utopia/nightmare of reproductive choice in which individuals can choose any number of parental options: from families of two with only one true parent of offspring; to those with three or more genetic parental progenitors and more, this is a book to make you both think and feel deeply.<br />
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2019 is my #YearOfReadingLeGuin and this has been my favourite volume so far, partly because I was quite familiar with a lot of the Library of America's vol. 1 in the set. This, volume 2, had some new ones for me, the most thrilling of which has to be The Word For World is Forest, the novella upon which Avatar is allegedly based (in fact this is stated in the notes to this book). Le Guin herself comments upon this fact noting how her story was turned around in exactly a way she feared it might. And I can see why she was upset: the indigenous hegemony over their planet/homeland/forest (Athshe) is particularly strongly asserted here, while Davidson is a pathological/psychotic figure in a much stronger way than the movie was willing to assert. This is a much more political work than its cinematic counterpart, and it imparts an urgency into the reader about our own plights on Earth. Five Ways to Forgiveness is absolutely brutal.<br />
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I liked this book a lot, and found it very well written, engaging, and easy to read. It presents a speculative trajectory without overcomplicating or overestimating the power of present technologies into the future. Its one potentially grievous prediction revolves around the idea that the internet might at some future date 'go down' or fail in a spectacular, catastrophic, complete, and irreversible way well before advance modern society has begun to decay or disappear. What this book really is is, first and foremost, a kick-ass cyberpunk narrative about augmented reality in which the rediscovery of this technology post-catastrophe is asserted as a kind of magic (I found this believable actually). What it also is, is a hipster handbook about cool music and mesh networks, and most of all it is about these hipsters in BRISTOL, and in particular a few blocks in that city. The latter fact was a bit annoying, as I don't consider myself to be part of this in-group, nor to be particular au courant with that music/scene. However, I can forgive these things due to the quality of the writing/novum.<br />
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An absolute page turner, I had somewhere in my mind secretly given up hope that such books still exist and/or might still be being written. 1000 pages of blisteringly addictive story are rivalled for me only by my childhood experience of reading <i>The Stand</i> so long ago. T'rain (short for Terrain) forms the backdrop/cyberspace platform upon which so much of this narrative is driven, due to the ability of players to mine economic benefit (gold pieces re-salable in the non-cyberspace world). I guzzled the kick-ass Kool-Aid this story offered. It is in a long tradition of cyberpunk that operates along a two-tier structure positing a more-than-real cyberspace/augmented reality aspect going back to Gibson's <i>Neuromancer</i>. Names/character spiral and map through the multiple spatialities presented, even as the action plays out in very particular (but specifically altered) real-world locales along the Canada/US border (Washington State/British Columbia). Now I can finally move onto the sequel, <i>Fall, or Dodge in Hell</i>.<br />
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I love this book because it is a psychogeographical counter-map against the idea of technological progress. Its enlightened protagonist is an inveterate drinker to the point of pathos, but he clearly has luck on his side. While unimaginably fucking up his life, some powerful interests decide to channel the drunk's momentum towards their own ends, and somehow end up getting this guy a promotion despite his self-destructive determination. The novum is a literal (but not literally existing) map that is a real-time track of everyone with points and lines indicating both positions and trajectories. The existence of the map is a secret that needs to be kept that way, lest others benefit as much economically as certain interests already are. So we are led to a critique of capitalism by the most likeable drunk since Barfly, or the guy in Last Exit to Brooklyn, or hey, Kerouac himself. Clearly a gifted writer, we can only await, and then consume greedily, anything Wiles will write in the future.<br />
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I'm not quite sure yet whether I like Harrison as a writer. I'm re-reading <i>Light</i> currently but I actually started with this one, which was the second book I checked out of the Bracknell Public Library (the first was <i>Slan</i>) after moving to Bracknell in April. Postmodern new wave science fiction's lifeblood and Kool-Aid, I drank this book in on train platforms, sunny plazas, and rainy afternoon rooms, crying and laughing along with the often brutally uglifying words. There's a lot of beautiful and bright trash/detritus blowing around Harrison's narratives and just when you're about to give up, the whole thing seems to take some kind of terrifying shape. I'm pretty sure these books started to take the place of my dreams after a while, and several parts are a bit disturbing. But this nails the poetics of science fiction to the core: it is both poetry and technological novum at one blast: its hot molten core drives us onward into unknown spaces and places across barely thinkable universes. OK, I'll keep reading.Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-38729622087099209972019-06-18T04:53:00.000-07:002019-06-18T04:53:06.717-07:00SIMULTANEITIES VI : Affective labour and physical endurance2019 is my year of reading Le Guin, and so far I'm on track, having covered nearly the whole of the first two volumes of the Library of America's four Le Guin books. Two topics of special interest have arisen in the course of my reading: 1. affective labour of simultaneities and 2. performative mapping of feats of physical endurance.<br />
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The first topic, affective labour in relation to Le Guin's SF novum of instantaneous (i.e. FTL to the extent that no time passes between being in point A and arriving at point B), was explored in great depth in "The Shobies’ Story", "Dancing to Ganam", and "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea". The phenomenology of instantaneous travel across vast interstellar distances of space is treated metaphorically as a kind of initially seemingly insurmountable layering of images of points A (origin) and B (destination) within the minds of the individuals involved in the travel. These individuals are acclimated to a group setting subject to careful selection and crafting well prior to the travel in question, the reason for which is that the 'layering' problem, and its associated disorientation can only be overcome by a kind of collective will or decision-making process.<br />
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Thus, Le Guin, in these three stories especially, enacts a kind of dialectic of individual-collective the emotional labour of which is part and parcel of both performance of cognitive estrangement in the work of fiction; and of the the development of the (fictional) technology that itself instantiates its novum. Affective or emotional labour associated with long-term and spatial dislocations of Le Guin's protagonists is often intense and/or protracted due to the nature of the work being carried out. Often the main character is an ethnographer of some kind. This is the case for <i>Left Hand of Darkness;</i> <i>The Word for World is Forest</i>; and <i>The Telling</i>. In these novels, and the shorter stories mentioned above, the work of processing emotions within the dialectically intensional individual/group setting is mostly performed by women because men are often not quite capable of rising to the task. Or they are simply not part of the society being explored. In a couple of the stories male society has been expelled and women maintain the dominant or hegemonic position within the societal structure, choosing with whom to mate, when, and for how long.<br />
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These alternative, fictional, counter-narratives challenge, in turn, dominant notions produced by a patriarchal science fiction community that, until the so-called New Wave, seemingly dominated the genre. Le Guin played a big role (alongside others like Russ and Delany) in changing all of that, and perhaps (more speculatively) in the survival of the genre in its present form as something more universally acceptable (i.e. not just for socially awkward white males). It may be apparent in this observation that I've been interweaving my Le Guin reading with some of the Cambridge History of Science Fiction.<br />
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The second topic, performative mapping of feats of physical endurance, arose after I had submitted the previous one to a conference from which I had subsequently to withdraw. Both might become papers. I noticed that physical endurance complements the mental/emotional endurance noted above, to the extent that you get the feeling Le Guin had read accounts of explorers journeys to the poles, with quite detailed descriptions of the amount of food carried and consumed forming part of the fictional world, for example, of Left Hand of Darkness. The latter part of that work is the account of an escape from the totalitarian/communistic society of Orgoreyn, to return back to the more anarchic Karhide. This escape can only be effectuated through passage by way of a massive ice/mountain field that takes several weeks to cross. The bodies of the ambivalent 'men' (one of whom is actually two-gendered) and the changes that take places within them are described very effectively. The novum of two-gendered beings comes down quite firmly here on the male-dominant (in our world) side of a kind of taoistic blurring of the boundaries of what it means to be a gendered human, and how blurry the lines between those genders can be. But Le Guin (as she notes in a preface) caught flack for her (allegedly male-centric) treatment of gender, as epitomised in part by the language (specifically pronouns) she used in reference to it. <br />
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This is all tied, I think, to how Le Guin sees the mental and the physical in relation to social constructions of the male and female genders. Each of the dichotomies is proven, in the fictional treatment, to be false, almost binary, in construction, and this I would posit, this breaking down of dichotomies, especially in relation to both gender and to physicality, is the primary impetus for Le Guin's work as a whole. I don't think what I'm referring to counts as novum specifically, because I feel it is much bigger than that, to the extent that I might call it a novum-assemblage that amounts to a kind of speculative anthropological philosophy. If I have time I'm going to try to develop both of these points into a paper (or two?)....Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-9069158944833506182019-02-23T02:36:00.001-08:002019-02-23T03:26:56.809-08:00SIMULTANEITIES V<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm a few weeks into my year of reading Le Guin, and I'm thinking I'm in better shape than if I'd chosen some drastic new fitness program as my new year's resolution. 400 pages into the 'big book of <i>Earthsea</i>' (a volume that includes the first four books) I'm having no problems moving along and staying interested. My thoughts on Le Guin are evolving too.<br />
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<i>Earthsea</i> is a work written for young adults, as far as I know. It has an 'overall' map that begins the volume and that would have (I assume) been included with the first work (<i>A Wizard of Earthsea</i>). Each of the subsequent three books of <i>Earthsea</i> also has its own map, and each focuses in on an 'area' of Earthsea.<br />
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The book, I would argue, 'performs' the map, in the sense that it adds detail in the form of names, descriptions, and actions that enrich and augment its virtuality. There is a very well worked-out philosophy of names/language that evidences Le Guin's spatial anthropological knowledge, and that becomes a 'wizard ethos' and toolkit.<br />
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By which, of course, I mean the casting of spells. The naming side of things in <i>Earthsea</i> is really well worked out. In fact, it is central to the whole endeavour. But what is actually going on in Le Guin's world? We are pulled ineluctably and delectably into <i>Earthsea</i> through a kind of emotional buy-in, and therefore enter the moral world of its environs. In offering us the 'true' names of its wizards, dragons, and 'regular' folk (if there can be said to be any Earthsea), we become privy to the secret knowledge of spell-casting and magic.<br />
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It is about the magic of names. Naming and language are, in fact, the launch-pad for all good works of science fiction and fantasy as Ciscery-Ronay has argued in an early chapter of <i>The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction</i>, and as Le Guin herself argues in <i>Words are My Matter.</i> But in <i>Earthsea</i>, the matter is much deeper than a simple parallel with, for example, the invention of Klingon in Star Trek.<br />
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Klingon is clearly a well worked-out thing, but it is not as fundamental a thing as having an entire philosophy of language forming part of a virtual world like <i>Earthsea</i>. I would argue that this makes the latter a much richer thing (though Trekkies might surely disagree).<br />
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It's that fundamental philosophy that, I think, drives Le Guin's life-worlds forward and that can draw so many kinds of reader, of all ages, in.<br />
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In a previous post (the first of this SIMULTANEITIES series) I said I thought Le Guin had a bit of latent racism, but this was in reference to one of her earliest published short stories.<br />
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The anthropological aspect and mid-twentieth century timing of Le Guin's <i>oeuvre</i> and the fact of that preceding 'K' in her name lead me to believe I'm not far off in my earlier assessment. But this doesn't count against Le Guin, <i>per se</i>. It counts against the genre, I think, because as many (especially Rieder in his <i>Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction</i>) have pointed out by now, the whole SFF genre has a bit of a problem in this regard (post-colonial SF notwithstanding).<br />
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<i>Earthsea</i> is more sophisticated and if I had children I would most certainly be urging them to read this book, but it does of course fall into some of the same traps as Tolkien's great trilogy. However, <i>Earthsea</i> is peopled with beings that are not quite as clearly delineated by racial features, in my opinion, as <i>LOTR</i>. <i>Earthsea</i> contains (unless I'm missing something) beings that are all, essentially, one species (except, of course, the dragons). Race appears, for example, only with reference to varying skin colours that people have in different parts of Earthsea.<br />
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But there isn't that kind of hard-bounded separation and territorialization of racial characteristics into speciation. In this, I think <i>Earthsea</i> is 'less racist' than, at least, some of Le Guin's early short stories.<br />
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The map might be the reason. It is a very well crafted, and thought-through thing. The virtual world it enables is mostly water, which serves as a liquid boundary between the different 'nations' that compose this, essentially anarchic, world. Anarchic in a political, Le Guinean, sense. This sense, and reference, are tenuous, ephemeral, and ever-changing things.Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3337422521397305150.post-35730284210334666452019-01-07T09:57:00.001-08:002019-01-07T09:57:09.378-08:00SIMULTANEITIES IV: The Wind's Twelve Quarters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There's a paradox in Le Guin. One the one hand, she was seemingly an ardent believer in the communitarian ideals of anarchism. On the other hand, she was a libertarian-exemplifying individualist. </div>
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The first assertion might be false in the realm of belief. Perhaps she did not believe in anarchism, but wrote about it as a fictional ideal in which her characters did the believing (but not her).</div>
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The second assertion might be factually false. On the other hand it might be borne out by a gap between actions and words.</div>
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Writers are a pretty self-reliant lot, on the whole. The writing of fiction requires loads of self-directed time through the fog of which no boss looms; there's no external cracking of the whip except that which, perhaps, the paying of bills and generally bringing home the bacon provides.</div>
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So she was one of those. That doesn't make her a right-winger. Look at all those writers on twitter: they're a bunch of lefties, creating an online non-hierarchical community both like-minded and supportive (at least the ones I follow are).</div>
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But Americans are a pretty individualistic lot. Le Guin's ancestors, alluded to both in stories like The Dispossessed, and in her non-fiction, where she describes her settler grandmother out on the frontier in the late 1800s, they had to be self-reliant. At the same time, none would've made it on their own.</div>
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There's a dialectic at the heart of Le Guin's fiction, epitomized in her stories of Martian settlement, of weird sentiences in far-flung solar systems, of pyschologies abnormalized by isolation, fear, and God (in the case of the excellent "Field of Vision").</div>
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Where, before, reading Le Guin I was reminded of how much her anthropoligist father must have influenced her world-view and by extension her writing; now, in reading the short stories, see the influence of Le Guin's psychologist mother.</div>
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These stories are really disturbing. I do mean every single one of them, as well as the volume taken as a whole. It is truly a story made of stories, a short-story collection that surpasses both congeries and fixes to excel at a whole other level of discourse.</div>
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The discursive psychological function of these stories is to present the dialectic of the individual against God, the universe, and the whole; and to break it down. Once broken down, the revolution can occur, as it does in the dual-story structure of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Day Before the Revolution", both award-winning stories. </div>
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I can't say a lot more beyond the existence of the individual/communitarian dialectic Le Guin performs in this collection; but I can say that naming performs a key function. One of the stories is explicitly about names. It is a fantasy story. The naming aspect has to do with not being able to tell others your real name (if they know it they know it, and that is fine), because to use the real name is to control the person/thing named.</div>
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An individual exists in this (fantasy) community for whom no-one else knows his real name. As it turns out, this should have been the first sign that something was amiss. Reading this story I am not surprised that Le Guin had rubbed shoulders at one point with Derrida. Her grasp of philosophy of language is unparalleled in what I have read so far within the SF genre.</div>
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The second set of stories immediately picks up this language-game thread, presenting a series of 'writings' by animals, as presented in a fictional academic publication "Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics." It's fascinating. I'm going to go read more now.</div>
<br />Gwilymhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.com0