Book Zone
I think SF should be sensual...if you want to know why, have a peek here.
I've just finished Stieg Larsson's marvellous crime thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's the third book in a trilogy, but with typical incompetence, I bought the second book - The Girl Who Played with Fire - before the first, and read it on holiday. So I have been reading them in the wrong order (and I also won't read the third book until it's out in paperback.)
It's a tribute to the quality of Larsson's storytelling that the books make sense this way round - book 2 scrupulously explains all that has happened before, so I had no trouble following it. And I found it rather satisfying to see events happening in Book 1 to which I knew the consequences.
And both novels are densely plotted, gripping, and rich in amazing characters, several of them extraordinary at a genetic level (though even so, this is a long way from being science fiction!) I'd say that all the praise heaped upon these books is deserved. They are, admittedly, written in heavily expositional prose - sometimes verging on guide-book prose - and there were times when it felt like being trapped in a lift with a garrulous history lecturer. But Larsson's a storyteller, not a stylist; and I was hugely impressed at the way he interweaves his different tales. In Dragon Tattoo, he pulls off the rare feat of bringing a murder story to a climax - and THEN re-embarking on the novel's original story, which is all about a crooked financier, and having a second climax that is even better than the first.
I always think that when you read a great novel, you end up loving the author. Stephen King, for instance, is present on every page of his best novels (when the 'King' voice is absent the books are sometimes, though not always, less good.) And it's impossible to read a Neil Gaiman without believing that you know and are best friends with this amiable, witty, soft-hearted, hard-headed richly imaginative guy.
In the same way, I felt I came to know and like Larsson. I could tell, from the way he writes, that he's a 'fact' person, an intense person, an obsessive person; but also that he has a big heart, and a love of life. He's very interested indeed in sex, and loves and understands women. And his political fervour and insight is utterly genuine (he had a career as a radical journalist before writing the three books of his Millennium trilogy.)
Do you get that feeling too? A sense that a writer whose work you love is at some level your friend? Someone you'd love to spend time with?
Tragically, that will never happen. Larsson died at the age of 50, of a stupidly capricious heart attack, just after delivering the manuscripts of his three novels.
I knew about Larsson's untimely death before I read the books, and thought it was very tragic. But now I've actually read the books - I have a feeling of actual grief. Of course, I never knew him; of course, he never knew me. But dammit, I miss him.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen.
This is the opening line of a book I consider to be one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. It is the story of a future world controlled by an all-powerful dictatorship which punishes rebellious thoughts as savagely as rebellious actions. It tells the story of an ordinary man - Winston Smith - who comes to doubt the very foundations of his society. It dawns on him that history is falsified on a daily basis - for he is one of the people charged with falsifying it! - and that the people are controlled, not by fear, but by a form of mind control known as 'doublethink'.
I read this science fiction masterpiece first as a teenager, at about the same time as I read the classic works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, and Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. These were all works of fiction which expanded my horizons, and made me think about the world, and challenged my received ideas, and which transported me to amazing and often ghastly imaginary worlds.
And the opening sentence above exemplifies all that I love most about the science fiction genre. It's a humdrum, ordinary, prosaic descriptive sentence - it's April, it's cold, we're in boring old England (where you can expect to be cold in April), and the clocks are striking thirteen. And it takes us a few moments to realise - clocks don't strike thirteen. Logically, they could; but in our world, they just don't.
And so, all of a sudden, we find ourselves inhabiting a world that did not exist until we embarked upon that deceptive first sentence.
And it's a world that, as the story continues, proves to be richly conceived, and beautifully described, in Orwell's wonderfully cadenced and eloquent prose. Every citizen of this world has a television set in his or her living room; these televisions, known as 'telescreens', are ubiquitous in public places too. But unlike the televisions we are familiar with, these telescreens are two-way artefacts; the telescreen watches us while we watch it.
And so privacy is impossible. Dissent is impossible. Every waking moment, the citizens of this world are watched and scrutinised on behalf of a supposedly beneficent dictator known as Big Brother.
The book I'm referring to of course (obviously! the cover of it is at the top of this blog!) is 1984, by George Orwell. And it's a work of fiction that has become a byword for political and sociological prescience. So much of what Orwell imagined in 1984 has come true in our own world. And the fact that 'Big Brother' himself has become the inspiration for a television reality show can be regarded as either witty post-modernism on the part of the programme-makers, or a chilling validation of Orwell's dystopian vision, depending on personal taste.
I've always regarded Orwell's novel as a template and benchmark for what can be achieved in the science fiction genre. It's magnificently written, it's emotionally profound, it's sensual and sexual, it's intellectual, it's terrifying. I used to love reading the old pulp SF stories about green aliens and Lensmen and Barsoom and Null-A and the like; but 1984 shows that a science fiction novel can also be great literature.
The status of 1984 as an SF icon has been an article of faith for me for many years; so it came as a major shock when I discovered a while back that some people don't think this book is science fiction at all. And these are of course the same people who don't think The Hand Maid's Tale is science fiction, or don't accept that His Dark Materials is one of the great masterpieces of the Fantasy Genre.
There are, in fairness, some plausible reasons for supposing that 1984 is not in fact science fiction. The reasons are twofold; Orwell himself almost certainly didn't think it was science fiction, and many of his literary admirers also don't think it belongs to that genre. So shouldn't these opinions be heeded? Isn't it for the author of the book, and the fans of the book, to decide the genre of the book?
I am going to argue otherwise; sorry, George, like it or not, what you wrote is sci-fi.
Richard Burton as O'Brien, in the Michael Radford movie also starring John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton
So to tackle the first of the above reasons - does it matter what the author thinks, when it comes to defining the genre of a piece? I would argue not. After all - writers can be the maddest of people, and they should be judged on what they write, not what they think they've written.
Genre is a fluid and oft-evolving beast, in any case. For example, in nineteenth century England, one of the most successful literary genres was the 'shocker', as written by the great Wilkie Collins. But the shocker genre no longer exists; Wilkie Collins' books are now generally found under Fiction, sometimes in the same editions as Tolstoy and Jane Austen. Shockers have mutated into 'literature'. But Collins' great thrillers always were 'great novels'; and they still work as shockers. A book can be several things, all at the same time.
Interestingly, one of Collins' finest 'shockers' was The Moonstone, which is now considered to be (probably) the first ever detective novel. And yet Wilkie Collins did not write in the 'detective novel genre', for no such genre existed at that time - since he above all others was instrumental in creating it.
My point here is that the author's notion of the work's genre doesn't necessarily have the casting vote. The Moonstone is a detective novel because it is is a detective novel; it observes all the rules and traditions (before they became traditions) we associate with that type of writing. It's structured as a mystery and who-dun-it, it has narrative shocks and twists, it has suspects and red herrings, and it plays fair with the reader - i.e. the writer doesn't withhold vital information. Later writers like Agatha Christie turned these rules into the principles behind a parlour game type of detective fiction.
So how can genre be defined? Is the genre what the writer says it is, or what the publisher says it is, or what the reader thinks it is? The truth, I would argue, and as the brilliant film genre theorist Rick Altman argues, is that all these perspectives play a role in creating the magical, nebulous, active entity we call 'genre'. Genre is like language; it lives and changes according to how it is used.
So let me ask again: is 1984 a science fiction novel? The author wouldn't necessarily say so; the publisher didn't publish it as such; some critics regard it as an insult to the book to tar it with that brush. But for the loyal reader of SF, this novel fits the bill in every vital respect. For 1984 has all the vital distinguishing hallmarks of a science fiction novel, as its readers and critics know and love it.
So let me try and tick the list of those hallmark SF qualities which Orwell's novels exemplifies - and if I've missed any, do let me know in the Comments box.
First, this is a book based around concepts - speculations and extrapolations about a future world which are challenging and fasinating and would make the book worth reading even if it weren't so well written. Newspeak, IngSoc, the notion of a perpetual and non-existent war, the control of memory, the Two Minute Hate, the factories where fictitious news is created, Room 101 - these are all fantastic, audacious ideas that linger in the mind and the imagination long after the book has been finished. This to me is the very definition of a science fiction novel - it makes the reader think about ideas. (As Ray Bradbury wrote, 'Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilisation birthing itself. ' The first phrase rather over-states the case, but the underlying point is, I feel, totally valid.)
Another key fictional strategy which we SF readers look for in our books is world building. This of course is a vital element of both the science fiction and the fantasy genres. A great science fiction novel will create a planetary civilisation, or even a galactic civilisation that is visualised and conceived in the finest detail - from Asimov's Foundation Empire to Niven's Known Space to Hamilton's Confederation to Banks' Culture. (And in similar fashion the great fantasy writers will also conjure up entire civilisations, usually in places and times where magic was/is possible, and often with accompanying maps.) This 'world building' technique isn't all that different to what Dickens and Tolstoy and Jane Austen do; the difference is that the SFF writers have to make it all up.
And there's no doubt that 1984 is a magnificent example of 'imaginary world' world building. The buildings, the people, the places, all are evoked with spectacular vividness. We follow Winston Smith into the world of the proles and their pubs, we see the long windowless hall of the Records Department, we even understand the geography that connects the Ministry of Love with the Ministry of Truth. We watch with amazement the choreographed idiocy of the Two Minute Hate. Almost every aspect of this imaginary world is conjured up with a superb degree of realism, and a loving attention to detail.
Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell in the 1950s BBC version of 1984, adapted by Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale
And a third defining characteristic of SF is its fondness for Future History. And this above all is the clincher in the debate, for Orwell throws himself into the task of creating a Future History with a zest that utterly betrays his inner nerd. One of the longest (and, admittedly, the least engaging) sections of the book contains the revolutionary text of Goldstein, which outlines in remorseless detail every facet of the Future History of Orwell's imagined world. This is not the work of a literary novelist 'slumming it' with fantastical ideas; this is the creation of a writer so in love with his Future History that he can't stop telling it all to the reader. Orwell even creates his own language, Newspeak, and has an appendix explaining it. Is there any difference between that and Tolkien's creation of Elvish? Or my copy editor Bella Pagan's admirable obsessiveness in creating an alphabet and syntax for the Flame Beast language?
(It should, by the way, while perusing the above paragraph, be taken as read that as a card-carrying science fiction novelist I regard the word 'nerdish' as a compliment, not a criticism.)
It could be argued that despite all these defining SF characteristics, Orwell's novel fails as science fiction (or rather, fails to BE science fiction) because it's a satire, not a realistic novel. As many critics have correctly noted, 1984 is actually a polemical commentary on 1948. Hence, its 'predictions' should not be taken at face value; Orwell is mocking the present, not attempting to foresee the future.
And, I would concede, in the case of Orwell's Animal Farm, I think this argument is totally convincing; for this book is not a 'fantasy' about talking animals. Rather, it's a satire about Communism; you're meant to enjoy the wit, but you aren't meant to believe in the characters.
And in 1984 there is an undoubtedly a comparable satiric element in the accounts of the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love; and the way Winston Smith is brainwashed and forced to recant clearly echoes the Stalinist show trials of the 1940s.
But it's worth bearing in mind that many of the best science fiction novels have an element of satire and political commentary woven in with the extrapolation. Two of the canonical works of SF literature - Gladiators-at-Law and The Space Merchants by the glittering writing team of Pohl and Kornbluth - are both blistering satires of their age; and yet they also work as extrapolative SF. And Charles Stross's tremendously powerful novel Glasshouse posits a far future world in which human bodies can be moulded, and minds downloaded; and then forces his far future humans to take part in experiment in which they live the lives of 20th century humans. It's a superb SF concept; but it's also a delightfully witty exploration of how human society of the kind that we actually live in manipulates and brainwashes citizens through the cunning use of peer pressure and social convention. It's SF and it is satire.
The key issue here, I would say, is about the degree of realism. Animal Farm is written in such a way that we always know the aniamls aren't really animals; we read it ironically, with a degree of detachment. But 1984 is first and last a 'realist' novel. At every stage, Orwell uses his considerable powers as a writer to make us believe that everything that is happening is true.
And Orwell also, in the book's last section, explicitly compares his dystopian future world with the Russia of Stalin; and then explains how the world of Winston Smith is far far worse. This is not satire per se; it's satire mixed with extrapolation, unified and exalted by the author's own belief in the truth of his imaginative creations.
For all these reasons, it seems to me that 1984 is a great novel which is also a great science fiction novel. And even its flaws are typical of the flaws to be found in many otherwise fine SF novels; namely, a tendency to favour exposition about the minute details of the imagined world over dramatic development and character interaction. (Winston only has one real relationship in the whole book; and the way he is captured is infuriatingly cursory!) And that's because, in my view, Orwell-the-SF- nerd is, in these sections, winning out over Orwell-the-great-writer.
And this is why the long chunk of Goldstein's text is there - it kills the drama stone dead, but boy, if you're a nerd, it's fascinating!
My view is that if you cut that section altogether, or at least down to the bone, and made Winston's arrest less inevitable, less the consequence of his own utter dumbness - then the book would be richer, and more thrilling, and more satisfying. Still, it's a masterpiece anway, so who am I to nitpick?
And there's a reason I want to claim 1984 as 'one of ours'. For in my view, it's an SF novel that shows what SF can really do. It can be satirical; it can be polemical; it can also be beautiful.
For me, it's the bar raised as high, pretty much, as it can go.
If you are squeamish, stop reading this blog now. I mean NOW.
Here goes. Imagine you are in London in the early twentieth century, watching a vampire stripper on stage. And this is what you see:
Isolde clamped the blade between her thin lips and used both her hands. She worked the edge of her self-inflicted wound with her nails and peeled back the skin of the right side of her chest. As she moved, exposed muscles bunched and smoothed. With...
No - let's stop there! A striptease in which the stripper flays herself?????
That is truly the most scary and appalling piece of prose I've read in many a year; it's also astonishingly vivid and skilfully written. It appears in Kim Newman's awesome The Bloody Red Baron, which I've just read, and which will haunt me for some time to come.
Let's be frank; if you write horror novels, you can't be namby-pamby about it. They have to be scary. However, I've always had a very limited appetite for blood and gore for its own sake; this is why I've never read widely in the horror genre. But some writers - Stephen King is one, Kim Newman seems to me to be another - who can shock and appal and yet never lose sight of the heart and humanity of their characters.
The Bloody Red Baron is a sequel to Newman's Anno Dracula (which I have to read next!) It's an alternate history story in which Dracula's Terror at the end of the nineteenth century has created a world in which vampire and humans ('warmfellows') co-exist. But Dracula's rampant ambition has caused him to start World War I; he is now commander in chief to the Kaiser, and the world is plunged into carnage.
In this version of World War I, we still have trenches, there are still aerial dogfights, and there is still a Baron von Richthofen with his Flying Circus of fighter pilot killers. But vampires fight side by side with warm soldiers; and night flights are far more common because vampires see so well in the dark.
It's a daft, baroque, but rather persuasive premise, executed with astonishing skill. Newman is a master stylist - his prose is restrained, cadenced, beautifully in period, and hauntingly visual. He has a genius for stamping vivid images in the reader's imagination - I can still see and smell and savour the thrilling events which make up the book's major setpieces. I can see a prostitute being sucked dry by vampire mouths; I can see the desolate wilderness of No Man's Land; I can still, shockingly, see every moment of the scene in which our hero Winthrop has to climb from the back seat of his fighter planet into the front seat, whilst airborne.
Writing images is the hardest thing to do - words flow easily enough on to the computer screen, but images have to be hinted at, with prose that states the image but also evokes the experience of seeing it. Newman achieves this with astonishing confidence, and also has the knack of creating characters we truly care about - from the weary Charles Beauregard, to the heroic but increasingly deranged intelligence officer Winthrop, to the bespectacled vampire journalist Kate Reid.
It's also a slyly witty book, full of injokes and metajokes. This alternate reality is littered with fictional characters who are real, co-existing with real characters who are radically changed, such as the vampire Churchill, lacing his blood with Madeira, and Von Richthofen himself, a real historical figure here portrayed as a chillingly inhuman killing machine. (And that's before he became a vampire.) One of the main characters is Edgar Allan Poe - who now prefers to be known as Edgar Poe - and he co-exists in the evil castle lair with Dr Caligari and Dr Mabuse, both characters from classic movies. A No Man's Land deserter is called Mellors - the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover - but D.H. Lawrence himself is also referenced as existing in this world. And, my favourite twist of all, Beauregard's secret missions are run on behalf of the Diogenes Club, a society of establishment figures dominated by Mycroft Holmes, cleverer brother of Sherlock.
The cover of my edition of the book is deliciously schlocky - it features a vampire German soldier hanging upside down. And as a horror novel, it delivers all the thrills and chills you could hope for. (There's a great story twist, which I won't betray, which leads to some of the most fantastic action sequences you could ever hope for.)
But this is, at heart, a rather serious book. Newman writes knowledgeably and lovingly about his period, and he achieves the rare trick of making the reader think hard, and worriedly, about the calamity that was World War I. The horror of the war itself - all real! - far eclipses the horror associated with the vampire characters.
And so Newman achieves the rare trick of creating a genre novel that has a real 'literary' substance - it's not just shock 'n' scares, it's a novel designed to make the reader think, and feel, and regret.
Till now, my favourite vampire novel ever has been Stephen King's masterly epic 'Salem's Lot; but The Bloody Red Baron seems to me to be just as good, in its very different way. King's approach was to create a vampire story that is also a portrayal of a 'typical' (and hence quite extraordinary) mid-Western town. His model was Moby Dick - which is not a horror novel, and has no vampires, but which represents the 'bar' for a modern epic American novel.
Newman is steeped in a different literary tradition. His book is slim, it's not an epic; but it follows in the footsteps of great English genre writers, from Conan Doyle to Wilkie Collins to Margery Allingham (less well known, but who in my view is one of the greatest of the English detective novelists.) His book is a 'shocker', but it's also understated, and full of British stiff-upper-lippishness. Almost all the characters speak almost all the time with a calm, grave courtesy, and yet behave monstrously. The effect is a delightful blend of the terrifying and the well-mannered.
If you are squeamish, even just a little bit, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. But if you can cope with horror that curls darkness around your heart and makes you wake screaming in the night - this is the novel for you. It blends fantastical horror with real-life terror; and this wicked chimaera is then slivered with eerie eroticism, and seasoned with artfully clever wit.
On the 30th April the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel published last year will be announced, at a ceremony held in tandem with the London Science Fiction Festival.
This year's shortlist has attracted some controversy, since, as well as works by established masters like Ken McLeod and Richard Morgan, it includes a number of book which aren't obviously SF at all. Some in the biz have argued that the judges have passed over some excellent candidates for the shortlist in favour of more 'literary' fare. (My own agent, John Jarrold, has argued this pithily, and with his usual authority - he's read every book on the shortlist, plus every single SF novel that he feels should have been on the shortlist.
I'm not so well read, so I'm attempting to educate myself by reading some of the novels on the shortlist that might otherwise have passed me by. I have Sarah Hall's The Carullan Army on my shelf; and I've just finished reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which I thought was delightful and funny and often very moving.
But is it SF? Hall himself argues, very sweetly, that he's happy for it to be called SF, because it's not for him to tell the reader how to read it. That's a devastatingly good and wise argument.
Being a genre nerd, however, I love to have things more firmly pigeonholed than that. Dammit, Steven, stop being so fair-minded!
And for my money, though I loved it, I don't think of Hall's book as an SF novel. Because I didn't, ultimately, believe a word of it, and I don't think I was meant to.
And what I mean by saying this is that for me SF is a genre that demands total suspension of disbelief. However silly the story elements may be (dilithium crystals, Barsoom, Stargazer aliens, variant 13s, um, flame beasts, etc) we, the SF readers, like to believe it might all be true. We will forgive occasional science cheats, and plot cheats, and even moments of utter absurdity; we'll forgive almost anything really, if we're enjoying the read. But when I journey into outer space, or inner space, I want to believe I'm really going there...
Hall's novel, however, is much more postmodern than that. It's a book which requires to believe its story; and also to disbelieve it. It's overtly metatextual, as some literary theorists might say. And it's very much in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges - the writer of wonderful metaphysical conceits - and Paul Auster, the postmodern crime novelists who is referenced several times, rather than the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov and Reynolds and Grimwood and Macleod and Hamilton and Macdonald, who all wrote about or write about worlds they believe in.
To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the plot of Hall's book so
BEWARE!!! PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!
The Raw Shark Texts is about a man called Eric Sanderson who wakes up and doesn't know who he is. A psychologist explains he is suffering from amnesia, induced by pscyhic trauma after the tragic death of his girlfriend Clio. But then Eric gets a note from his former self (the First Eric Sanderson) explaining that he, Eric Two, is being stalked by an actual monster called a Ludovician Shark, which is a creature that exists in the n-dimensional realm of ideas.
There's some science to justify this - on the basis that life is a hardy little bugger and can evolve in the strangest of places. So why can't it evolve in the realm of ideas???? As Eric 1 explains to his later self:
The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect....The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on human memories and the instrinsic sense of self.
This is superb; but for me, it's also knowing, defiantly metaphorical, and not intended to be believed literally. And I like that aspect of the storytelling. The hero travels through a tunnel made of books - well which of us hasn't, metaphorically? And he is almost killed by a conceptual fish - as his personality is unpicked because of his deep grief at the tragic death of the woman he loved. And again, the postmodern strings are showing, as the novel reveals itself to be 'really' about something other than what it seems to be about.
But, by contrast, a similiar but totally science fictional piece would be Eric Brown's masterful short story The Time-Lapsed Man. I won't plot-spoil this one, but I would just say that, though the premise is utterly absurd, just as absurd as the notion of the Ludovician shark, the writer made me believe it was true for the duration of my reading. And of course, because I believe the story is true, I care.
Having said all this, I have to quickly add that if anyone wants to argue that Hall's book genuinely is science fiction, I'd be happy to give that view credence, and shelf-room, and indeed to argue the point over a pint or two, since that's always a good way of enlivening a pint or two. It's not for me to be the Ferryman on the River Charon, deciding who and who shouldn't get across.
But my only anxiety is that any lover of SF who reads this book expecting to have a science fictional experience might be disappointed. It doesn't, in my view, deliver as SF; but it does deliver as what it is, a tour de force piece of lunatic idea-spinning which is full of gags and has some of the most tender love scenes I've read in a long time.
I guess the judges' aim is to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn't modern SF. I argued in another blog that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods isn't, in fact, an SF novel, though some claim it is. (On this score, I'm as one with Winterson, who witheringly refuses the SF label.)
But my point really is to passionately stress and affirm the common purpose of pretty much all the SF that I've ever enjoyed - namely, an underlying respect for rationality and of the ideas and sense of wonder which underly the scientific enterprise.
I may be wrong, however, in my opinions on this book. I may in fact be destined to become the next victim of a conceptual shark that swallows up all my ideas and memories and leaves me gibbering, and indeed, in much the state I was in on the morning after the last Eastercon.
But I would strongly recommend The Raw Shark Texts to anyone who wants a rollercoaster ride through the realm of ideas. (And I hope my plot spoilers don't give away too much - it's no more than is explained on the back cover.)
I've just finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson.
I became intrigued about this book after reading a delightfully waspish review of it by Ursula K. Le Guin. Winterson had publicly stated that her novel - which features space travel and robots and takes place partly in the future - should emphatically not be regarded as 'science fiction'. This is a statement commonly made by literary novelists who write novels which are undeniably science fiction, but then decline to be associated with the hoi polloi SF writers who actually make a living in this genre.
And so, clearly niggled at Winterson's words, Le Guin performed a forensic dissection of the novel, analysing its story-telling flaws and its tendency to lapse into nakedly expository writing - with long chunks of what Le Guin refers to as 'As you know, Captain' dialogue, of the kind that seasoned SF writers try to avoid.
I'm a great fan of Le Guin; but also a great fan of Winterson. I haven't read her complete works, but I love what I have read. My favourite of her novels is her magic realist masterpiece The Passion, which is full of images that haunt the mind.
So I decided to make my own mind up. And, after reading the book, I came to an interesting conclusion. Winterson is right; this is not science fiction at all. It looks like SF, it has all the elements we commonly associate with SF but it's really a different genre of book entirely.
To explain what I mean by that, I have to define SF - which is easier said than done. I always get annoyed when commentators assume that SF has to be set in the future, or feature spaceships, or be obsessed with technology, or be devoid of satirical intent. SF is in fact a broad church genre. It ranges from space opera to personal drama, it can be set in the past or in an alternative present, it can be satirical and polemical, it can be character-based, it can be all manner of things.
But there are certain defining characteristics that make a novel SF. One of them, I would argue, is 'extrapolation', an imagining 'what if' process which takes aspects of the present and projects them into a different world (future, alternative present, or alternative past), in an exaggerated form. And in my afterword to Debatable Space I define SF as the genre in which extrapolation, speculation and imagination collide.
But another defining characteristic, I'd suggest, is that all SF has to be inspired by science. That doesn't mean it has to be crammed full of scientific facts and figures. It means that SF is fiction which absorbs and adores the scientific paradigm and zeitgeist. It finds the drama in scientific theories like quantum physics and relativity; it imagines the human consequences of scientific developments like spaceflight; and it speculates about what would happen if impossibilities like time travel were to become scientifically possible.
But it's the spirit of science that it is at the heart of SF. An SF novel can't have magic, because magic is the antithesis of science. And an SF narrative can't be illogical (or at least, it shouldn't be!) or self-contradictory. Because science depends on consistency of theory; even bewildering theories like quantum physics which allow a particle to be in two places at the same time make sense.
Winterson's novel, however, is a tale which makes no sense. I'm not referring to occasional errors and inaccuracies - all writers make such mistakes, and the copy editors can't hope to catch all of them. But at a fundamental, philosophical level, this novel doesn't make sense; and it isn't intended to make sense....That's not the game Winterson is playing.
To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the details of the plot; so if you haven't read it, BEWARE, PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW.
The Stone Gods is a novel made up of very different sections (like David Mitchell's excellent Cloud Atlas, which is partly science fiction, partly historical drama.) The first section tells the story of Billie, a rebellious woman living on the planet of Orbus. Almost all the inhabitants of Orbus are Fixed - they have fixed their genes so that they do not age. Billie, however, is defiantly unFixed, and hence mortal.
Orbus is in a state of terminal collapse because of global warming, and Billie joins an expedition to the new colony world of Planet Blue. She is accompanied by a Robo sapiens called Spike; and Billie and Spike fall in love. The Captain, Handsome, embarks upon a plan to rid Planet Blue of its dangerous land animals - dinosaurs - by crashing an asteroid into the planet. The plan goes wrong and the asteroid collision destablises the ecosystem to such a degree that all life is threatened. Spike and Billie survive together for some time, with Billie detaching Spike's limbs to prolong her existence; and finally Spike dies.
The second section is set in the past and tells the story of the Easter Islanders who rendered themselves extinct.
The third and fourth sections tell the story of a young woman called Billie Crusoe on Earth after a third world war. She is a robotics expert who is developing a robot called Spike. And on a whim, she takes Spike's head for a walk into the forbidden territories, where she finds rebels and mutants and discovers the secret of her world after intercepting a radio message from the distant past.
This secret unlocks the mystery of the novel. The action in the first section is not - as most readers would assume - a tale about humans in the far future. It is a tale about humanoids in the distant past whose meddling led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and hence made the evolution of mankind on Earth aka Planet Blue possible.
This is a nice twist, though hardly unexpected; and in this respect, the story is a beautifully told and elegant example of an 'uplift' narrative in which we learn that mankind evolved because of aliens.
But hold on a minute - how come the lead character in the first section has the same name as the lead character in the later sections? 'Billie' in the far distant past has a robot companion called Spike; 'Billie' in the near future has a robot companion called Spike also.
And to compound the confusion, Earth Billie is reading a novel called The Stone Gods which she describes as 'science fiction'. But if the Orbus story is true, no one on Earth can know about it. It all happened 65 million years ago!
This makes no sense; and I believe it quite deliberately makes no sense, in the way that abstract art and certain kinds of modernist poetry make no sense. It is non-sense, but not nonsense.
As I mentioned, Earth Billie is reading a book called The Stone Gods. And the Orbus Billie, in parallel fashion, is reading the journals of James Cook; again, an impossibility since Cook was born 65 million years after Orbus Billie. And Earth Billie - whose surname is Crusoe - meets a guide called Friday. What are the odds on that, then, eh?
This is not, I would strongly maintain, bad writing. It's skilful and very good writing of the avant-garde variety. At a very basic level, Winterson is confuting and mocking the underlying principle of science and hence science fiction - that ultimately, everything has a rational explanation. Seemingly impossible events may happen in SF, but they will always be explicable by the laws of physics - even if these are not the laws of physics as we know them. But Winterson's laws are the laws of poetry; she connects by simile and metaphor and mirroring and impossible coincidences. The most beautiful connection of all concerns Spike the robot. In the Orbus story, Spike is a whole robot who is dismantled a limb at a time until all that remains is her head. It's a deeply evocative sequence which for me echoes the experience of a person seeing a lover die slowly of old age - as limbs and organs fail and all that is left is the shining, shimmering personality of the lover in her husk-like dying carcass.
In the Earth story, Spike hasn't yet been built so Earth Billie carries her around as a head. Thus, Spike-Head in one story becomes Spike-Head in the later story; and that mirroring is somehow rather wonderful.
The Easter Island interlude is easy enough to interpret - it's not causally connection, it's just a variation on the theme (of human beings destroying their own habitat.) But the other sections are written in non-rational logic; and that is why I say they are not science fiction. It's a fine book, a beautiful book, and a clever book; but SF it ain't.
And this, I now believe, is why Winterson has said her novel isn't SF. It doesn't mean she hates SF (Earth Billie says she hates SF - but that's clearly a writer's gag!) It also doesn't mean that Winterson has failed to understand the essence of SF. In fact, the book shows a sophisticated grasp of world-building and scientific extrapolation which suggests to me Winterson has read a fair bit of science and SF and is fascinated by both. But her intentions, on this occasion, are Other.
That leads to the question; what genre is this book? It's not magic realism, in my view - because even magic realism has rules and consistencies. One impossible thing is allowed before breakfast - like the village where no one grows old, in Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude. But characters and events always feel real, and consistent; and actions always have consequences.
So this book is, in my view, a particular form of literary construct - a prose-poem, not a realist novel. It reminds me strongly of Italo Calvino's Invisble Cities, in which explorer Marco Polo gives accounts of the cities he has visited to Kublai Khan. Some argue (as I do in my radio play Marco Polo) that Marco Polo was a fantasist who never visited any of the cities he describes. And, playing with this idea, Calvino's book is an evocation of imaginary places, rather than a realistic travelogue. Here is Marco writing about the city of Leandra:
Gods of two species protect the city of Leandra. Both are too tiny to be seen and too numerous to be counted. One species stands at the doors of houses, inside, next to the coat rack and the umbrella stand; in moves, they follow the families and install themselves in the new home at the consignement of the keys. The others stay in the kitchen...they belong to the house, and when the family that has lived there goes away, they remain with the new tenants.
Or there's the spiderweb city of Octavia, in which the entire city is hung from hempen strands. Or another city where the citizens are constantly engaged in dialogue; the same dialogue will continue for centuries, because as each speaker dies a new citizen steps up to continue the dialogue.
At one point, Kublai Khan complains to Marco: 'Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed.' But there's no doubt that these imaginary cities exert a powerful hold over the reader; and this slim volume by Calvino has had a remarkable influence over many writers. I kept it by my side when I wrote Marco Polo; and now I come to look at it again, I realise how much I've been subconsciously influenced by Calvino in writing about the cities of Ketos.
And I have a strong hunch that Winterson knows this book, probably far far better than I do, and is consciously or unconsciously using it as the springboard for her imaginary worlds in The Stone Gods. Take this passage, where the crew swap stories about planets they have seen or heard about:
There's a planet they call Medusa. It's made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times there's nothing solid - just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick strands of hair...
There's a planet called Echo. It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty...
We found a planet, and it was white like a shroud. The planet was wrapped in its own death. We lowered ourselves through mists like mountains, cragged, formed, shaped, but not solid. Put your hand out and you put it through a ghost. Every solid thing had turned to thick vapour.
Later, we're told that the white planet is the original home of the Orbans; and that it shares a sun with the blue planet. This implies that the Orbans originally come from Venus, then travelled to a far planet somewhere else, before returning to Earth. Except...that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So it's easier by far, in my view, to regard all these tales as being Winterson's own Invisible Planets - far fetched fables of wonder and delight.
It's clear I would hope from the passages quoted above why I adore the playful imagination of Jeanette Winterson's book. And much of the prose (especially in this first section) is rich in verbal beauty, with cadences that stir the soul, and a command of style that reveal Winterson to be one of the finest writers of our age.
Overall, though, I have to say that the book disappoints. It overeggs its pudding - I love the story told by Captain Handsome which explains how history is destined to repeat itself. But to hammer that point home by showing history repeating itself on Earth, complete with two characters with the same name, seems to me to be talking down to the reader somewhat. It's a wonderful idea - we get it! - now move on, and tell us more about these magical two characters, Orbus Billie and Spike, and their fantastic 'lesbian' (is that the right word for sex between a woman and a female robot?) love affair. That's the bit where the book really takes fire; it's written with passion and pain and honesty, and then it stops, and clever satirical stuff takes over. Much of this clever satirical stuff is very good; but it never feels true in quite the same way.
Also, by switching narrative horses so radically, Winterson lumbers herself with a major practical problem; having created one vivid world, on Orbus, she now has to create a second and radically different post World War 3 world, on Earth. That's possible; but to do justice to her Post-3 War world she needs more time, more pages, more words. Instead, she pours the exposition on like gravy on turkey. And the subtle delicacy of her style is lost entirely.
It's still a very good book though, and I hope to give it a second read. As a final note, I should just say that the designer of the cover is an artist in her or his own right; it's beautiful and, if you look closely, it is also a superbly apt commentary on the novel's content.
Everyone has their favourite country for holidays....mine is Italy. I've been to Lake Garda, Umbria, Tuscany, Florence, Lake Garda again, Florence again, and of course Rome. This year I went to Crete which looks a little bit like Italy, and once again I pursued my favourite holiday pastime - reading detective novels set in Italy whilst actually being in Italy. (Or in Crete - my mind is very easily fooled.) And the key holiday texts for me are the novels of Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin (author of the Aurelio Zen mysteries) and the great and under-appreciated Magdalen Nabb. Nabb's unlikely hero Marshal Guarnaccia is a carabinieri officer with poor deductive powers, very little social self-confidence, who is absent-minded to the point of rudeness, and who essentially muddles his way through every case aided by his astonishing memory, his instinct for people, and his passion for truth. He is like Columbo, but less suave. (!)
Nabb's books are stylishly written, understated, and rich in emotion and truth. She evokes an Italy of forests and feuds and bitter neighbourhood disputes; almost every chapter features the Marshal having a long boozy lunch and sleepwalking his way through the afternoon's amiable interviews. As who-dun-its, they wouldn't feature on anyone's Top Ten list; but as evocative studies of the queerness of folk, they are unique and special .
Years ago there was a TV adaptation of one of the novels, which misfired really because of the incongruity of English thesps playing Italian characters. And after that, there was a period when the Marshal books seemed to go out of print - although that was no handicap really, since like all lovers of detective fiction I'm devoted to second hand bookshops and was always able to obtain my fix.
Sadly, Magdalen Nabb has just died, in Florence, on the 18th of August. Her final novel Vita Nuova will be published in 2008, after which there will be no more Marshall Guarnaccia mysteries.
I will miss him, and her.