The Memory Police

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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). 

They Will Drown In Their Mothers' Tears

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').

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.

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.

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.

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.

Top Running and SF books for lockdown

Top 15 running

-Eat & Run by Scott Jurek
-Today We Die a Little: Zatopek by Richard Askwith
-The Rise of the Ultra Runners by Adharanand Finn
-Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
-The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
-What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
-Pants of Perspective by Anna McDuff
-End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker
-The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei by John Stevens
-Sky Runner by Emilie Forsberg
-The Way of the Runner by Adharanand Finn
-Running With the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn
-Lore of Running by Tim Noakes
-Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzgerald
-Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands

Top 15 SF

-Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
-Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
-Helliconia by Brian Aldiss
-Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin
-Bête by Adam Roberts
-Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
-War of the Worlds by H G Wells
-Rosewater by Tade Thompson
-The Just City by Jo Walton
-Austral by Paul McAuley
-Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
-Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
-Cities in Flight by James Blish
-The Migration by Helen Marshall
-Solaris by Stanslaw Lem
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Research State of Play March 2020

Before 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

-spatialities of speculative fiction
-self-tracking and mapping and
-counter-mapping in northern and developing areas

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.

1. spatialities of speculative fiction

My latest idea will involve deep engagement with three key texts: 1. Le Guin, Always Coming Home 2. Aldiss, Helliconia and 3. Herbert, Dune.  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 Helliconia (the full set) and Dune.

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.

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 Here Be Dragons: Exploring Maps and Settings; as well as Marie-Laure Ryan (et al), Narrating Space/Spatalizing Narrative.  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).

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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

2. self-tracking and mapping

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.

Alex Hutchinson discusses in his book Endure 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.

Sam Murphy, in a recent Runners World article, 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 (Self-Tracking, MIT Press), and extends into territories of surveillance capitalism (see Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) 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.

'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.

3. Counter-mapping in northern and developing areas

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.

My key texts are dual: Pittock's Culloden and Basu's Highland Homecomings provide the key theoretical touchpoints currently.  I am reading these very deeply and heavily annotating as I go.

SUMMER SCI-FI READING ROUNDUP 2019

The following mini-reviews cover the most memorable reads for me over the last summer (2019):

Allan's previous effort, The Rift, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 The Stand 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 Neuromancer. 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, Fall, or Dodge in Hell.

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.

I'm not quite sure yet whether I like Harrison as a writer. I'm re-reading Light currently but I actually started with this one, which was the second book I checked out of the Bracknell Public Library (the first was Slan) 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.

SIMULTANEITIES VI : Affective labour and physical endurance

2019 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.

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.

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 Left Hand of Darkness; The Word for World is Forest; and The Telling.  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.

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.

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. 

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?)....

SIMULTANEITIES V

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 Earthsea' (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.

Earthsea 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 (A Wizard of Earthsea).  Each of the subsequent three books of Earthsea also has its own map, and each focuses in on an 'area' of Earthsea.

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.

By which, of course, I mean the casting of spells.  The naming side of things in Earthsea 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 Earthsea 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.

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 The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, and as Le Guin herself argues in Words are My Matter.  But in Earthsea, the matter is much deeper than a simple parallel with, for example, the invention of Klingon in Star Trek.

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 Earthsea.  I would argue that this makes the latter a much richer thing (though Trekkies might surely disagree).

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.

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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.

The anthropological aspect and mid-twentieth century timing of Le Guin's oeuvre 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, per se. It counts against the genre, I think, because as many (especially Rieder in his Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction) have pointed out by now, the whole SFF genre has a bit of a problem in this regard (post-colonial SF notwithstanding).

Earthsea 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, Earthsea is peopled with beings that are not quite as clearly delineated by racial features, in my opinion, as LOTR.  Earthsea 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.

But there isn't that kind of hard-bounded separation and territorialization of racial characteristics into speciation.  In this, I think Earthsea is 'less racist' than, at least, some of Le Guin's early short stories.

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.