May 08 2017

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

One of the things I particularly liked about All the Birds in the Sky is how Charlie Jane Anders chose to break up the story. It’s a two-sided, save-the-world story, and all of the basics are there: interesting leads, good counterparts, quick pacing, fun dialog, and so forth. She’s strong enough on the essentials even in her debut novel that it’s more interesting to talk about the more advanced parts of telling the story that she has chosen.

The setup: Patricia is a witch; her childhood friend Laurence is a scientific genius. They are very close in middle school (the story is set in the US), but drift apart and are then dramatically separated. They meet again as young adults, advanced in their respective realms, as the world is starting to get badly out of joint. They are still drawn to one another, but find themselves on opposite sides of attempts to prevent catastrophe.

That bare summary does not do justice to the wry humor and the warmth with which Anders tells their stories. Part of it is where she chooses to put major breaks in the narrative. Book one introduces each of them and brings them together briefly, with chapters set when they are small children. Patricia discovers that she can talk to animals, and the birds take her to a Parliament of Birds that meets at a great Tree in the deepest part of the forest. Laurence builds a time machine that can jump two seconds ahead in the future, and runs away to MIT where there’s a rocket launch and he discovers a group of students who followed the same schematics he did to build their own two-second time machines.

Each of them has had a glimpse of their place in the world, but it is only a view. Patricia comes back from the woods and doesn’t hear from the animal world again for years, despite her best efforts. Laurence’s parents pick him up from MIT and drive him back home, all the while lecturing him on how life is all about responsibility not adventure. In the back seat, he doesn’t hear a word as he zips through a newly acquired copy of Have Spacesuit — Will Travel.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/08/all-the-birds-in-the-sky-by-charlie-jane-anders/

May 07 2017

“The City Born Great” by N.K. Jemisin

“The City Born Great” by N.K. Jemisin should win this year’s Hugo for short story. The conceit of the story is that great human cities have a life of their own. Maybe that life awakens quickly, maybe it takes centuries or millennia, but at some point the genius loci becomes a thing in itself. Birth is never easy, not every potential new life makes it into the world, and Jemisin’s story tells the tale of New York’s attempt from the point of view of its midwife. Who has no idea what he is doing. He mainly knows that some very strange things are happening, and maybe all is not as it seems and he is seeing a higher reality, “Or maybe my mama was right, and I ain’t never been right in the head.”

What makes this story great is the sheer exuberance with which it’s told. It’s fast, it’s furious, but it’s also tremendous fun. And sure, it’s a power fantasy, too, but if that gives readers sentences like “I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.” then let a thousand fantasies bloom. It’s a story about life, and living, and that’s what it’s most full of: the very stuff of life.

There’s more going on, too. Stories about cities as things in themselves have a long SF tradition, including James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels from the 1950s and 1960s or John Shirley’s punk approach in City Come A-Walkin’. Not for Jemisin the cool distance of Blish’s technocrats, or the dark decline of Shirley. Jemisin’s city overwhelms; it’s on all the time in Ultra HD saturated color 3-D overdrive.

But Paulo’s full of shit, too, like when he says I should consider meditation to better attune myself to the city’s needs. Like I’mma get through this on white-girl yoga.

“White-girl yoga,” Paulo says, nodding. “Indian man yoga. Stockbroker racquetball and schoolboy handball, ballet and merengue, union halls and SoHo galleries. You will embody a city of millions. You need not be them, but know that they are part of you.”

It’s also a story of the chosen one, because every city needs an avatar. And it could be a riff on Christian themes, because the one who is chosen is among the least of these: black, gay, homeless, teen, broke, thrown out of his churchgoing home, street artist, hustler, con man, uncertain, and scared. But also confident, brilliant, unabashed, and willing. He’s terrific.

“I sing the city,” writes Jemisin to start the story. Echoing Langston Hughes, without the qualifying “too.” Echoing Walt Whitman. Echoing Bradbury. Singing a new New York into the world.

+++

The short stories were the fifth bit of Hugo-related reading I have done this year, and the second I have written about.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/07/the-city-born-great-by-n-k-jemisin/

May 02 2017

Deathless (Leningrad Diptych #1) by Catherynne M. Valente

There’s no denying that this is a beautifully written book. Catherynne M Valente takes Russian and Slavic folktales and melds them with Russian, particularly Leningrad, history of the early 20th century. Her descriptions of falling in love and of the secret languages and compromises of marriage make for compelling, wholly believable and empathetic reading.

And yet, and yet. When I find myself disliking a book but not actually able to elucidate why, I tend to turn to other reviewers to see if they felt similarly but had an easier time of describing their discomfort. In the case of this book, especially, that helped a lot. Many other reviewers, especially those of a Russian/Slavic heritage, brought up the issue of cultural appropriation. I can’t really speak to the authenticity of her work, to how Russian it really is (a bit more on that later) but I can tell you that when she talks about life and power, my entire being rebels at the ideas she’s presenting as, if not somehow good and aspirational, at least acceptable, even romantic.

I’m not even sure if the rest of this discussion counts as spoiler-y because Deathless is less a story than a whole lot of metaphors layered and strung together. Quite artistically, granted: there’s no doubt that Ms Valente writes beautifully. Essentially, a young woman — no. A girl in Leningrad falls in love with Koschei the Deathless, who here is presented as the Tsar of Life, a god/archetype who represents the long, grinding, materially rich but ultimately despairing fate of all mortals: to succumb to his brother, the Tsar of Death. Life is presented not as a gift but as a burden, not as a source of joy but a font of pain. It is made out to be grotesque. And yes, it is all these things, but it’s also so much more. Life is endless possibilities and hope and renewal, but that is rarely (if ever!) brought up in this book. To a certain extent, Deathless was very much like a long discussion with my depressive Bulgarian friend, Slav: he and I are not unfamiliar with the trope of the Eastern European as nihilist, one he occasionally propagandizes for all he’s worth. But his lived experience is not the only kind of Slavic experience, and that lack of diversity in a book that claims to retell the folklore of the region is, at best, disquieting.

That was my issue with her representation of Life. Now we get to the even more problematic representation of Power. Politically, I thought she did a good job, but when it came to the personal relationships, I was, once more, aghast. The creepiness of the romance between Marya and Koschei aside (honestly, it felt a lot like a better written, more explicitly fairy tale version of 50 Shades Of Grey,) I really, really hated the oft-bandied idea that the main concern in marriage is “Who rules?” I’ve been married for 7 years now, more or less successfully: my husband and I get along quite well, and we have three wonderful children we’re devoted to. We have never engaged in the insane power struggles that define the romantic relationship at the heart of this book. Our marriage recognizes each other as individuals, and we try to be good to one another while still honoring our own needs. We don’t make threats and ultimatums like Marya and Koschei (and later Ivan) do because that is all toxic bullshit. We’re not a perfect couple by any means, but we’re in a far, far healthier place than the self-destructive insanity of the main romances depicted in this book.

And it’s not like I think bad marriages shouldn’t be depicted in popular culture. I loved the dysfunctional marriage at the heart of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl because it was never romanticized. Marriage can be a shitshow, but representations of such should be considered a cautionary tale, not a love for the ages. Which is why it was even more perplexing when Ms Valente would write so movingly about the compromises of matrimony. Any relationship involves a push and pull, but the healthy ones aren’t about controlling your partner: two vastly differing concepts that Ms Valente never reconciled in this book.

And then the book just sort of ended, and I was all “Ugh, I have to read another book to get an actual story out of this?” Maaaaaybe I will, eventually? There’s no denying that Ms Valente has some great ideas and a lovely style, but her endorsement of mentally unhealthy attitudes (wrapped up in a vaguely “oh but this is just how Russians are” veneer) really bothers me. I really wanted to like this book, but instead I’m kinda grossed out.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/02/deathless-leningrad-diptych-1-by-catherynne-m-valente/

May 01 2017

Tales of the Squee

The height of my to-be-read pile could be measured in years, if the books could somehow fit into a unified pile. And that doesn’t count a particular moving box in the basement, in which some really good books, or at least some really interesting-looking books are awaiting their turn to come upstairs. (Some of them do make it!) Nor does it count the acquisitions on my phone, some recently made, even though I am nowhere near finished with the great set of books I picked up for silly cheap from a Humble Bundle a couple of years back. (Some of those get read, too! I’ve even written here at Frumious about nearly a dozen books from that bunch.) Nor does it count the unread books on my Kindle. Now, I am not the Frumious contributor who discovered that there is in fact a limit to the number of books that fit on a kindle (she actually reads them all), but the miraculous technology of the 21st century has left me with lovely books there, too, just waiting to be read and savored.

What was I thinking when I bought them? Generally, it was more than “How do I round out the order of other stuff so that I get free shipping from Amazon?” although that has happened sometimes. I have a to-buy list that I can dip into when that happens. And I suppose the existence of that list reassures me, because without it the t-b-r piles (notional as they are) would be higher by another good year or two.

I wasn’t thinking any one thing; I’m not buying by color, or to get familiar with a subject area, or to collect an author’s complete works, although I have done two of those three in the past. So here is a glance of the shelves of unread books on paper, along with what I think possessed me to pick each one up at the time.

1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts (1913: The Summer of the Century) by Florian Illies. Published in 2012 in advance and anticipation of all of the centenary observations of the start of the Great War. Illies got famous for a book titled Generation Golf (named for the VW car, not the game with the dimpled ball), which was funny, and this looked like something more serious but still accessible. Besides, it was 2013, and I thought I might like thinking about the last of Belle Epoque Europe. I still might.

Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania Edited, translated, with an introduction and notes by Catherine S. Leach. Isn’t that title a splendid example of what it illustrates? To be perfectly, or at least more, accurate, I read patches of this back when I was in a graduate seminar about the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Back then (during grad school, not during the time of the Commonwealth of Two Nations), copies were more difficult to come by, and I read from copies made at the Library of Congress. I mentioned Pasek a couple of times when I was writing about Milosz’s History of Polish Literature. The memoirs are a hoot, not quite like anything else ever. My used copy has enthusiastic marginalia in the first three years of the memoirs. Someday I hope to read further myself.

Embassytown by China Miéville. I enjoy reading Miéville’s work; the only early one of his I put down is Un Lun Dun, and the only one I haven’t picked up is King Rat. I think that I liked The City & The City best, but I have liked all of them to varying degrees. I haven’t read Embassytown or anything more recent, which puts me about five years behind on his career. I’m a Hugo voter this year, though, so I expect I will read This Census-Taker by the end of July.

The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs. Roman legions on the Texas frontier, with gunslingers and monsters. What’s not to like? This looked like a fun mix, and indeed it was in the first 30 pages that I read before distraction got the better of me. Sometimes I just start in again wherever I left off; sometimes I go back to the beginning. [Update: I went back to the beginning, read it all, and liked it!]

Foreign Devils by John Hornor Jacobs. One of the things about buying actual paper books at an actual bricks and mortar store in a non-English-speaking country is that if you don’t grab a book the first time you see it, there isn’t a second chance. Of course there’s the whole internet to get around that problem, but somehow that’s not as much fun. This is a sequel to The Incorruptibles that I picked up on the principle that I might not see it again. [Update: Good, but very much a middle book. I also acquired and read the third book in the trilogy.]

The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic was very weird and very Russian. More, please. I read it not long before we really got going here at Frumious, but when I get around to The Doomed City I will write about it so I can remember more of what I thought of the weirdness. I don’t think I saw it in the store here, so thank you internet.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Back when Coates was engaged with his blog at The Atlantic, I was a semi-regular commenter. I enjoyed the back-and-forth, mainly regretting that the difference in time zones meant that I missed out on a lot of live discussion. I think he’s extremely sharp, and am pleased to have witnessed at close hand part of the development of a major public intellectual. How could I not get his new book? (I like the writing he has done on Black Panther, too, though I am getting the compilations rather than the monthly book.) [Update: This is a great book.]

The Issa Valley and Native Realm by Czeslaw Milosz. His To Begin Where I Am is a book of essays I would go back to again and again, if I were the kind of person who went back to books of essays more often than I do. Which is to say I thought they were terrific, even profound in parts. These two books are novels set in the areas where Milosz grew up, when they were part of inter-war Poland. Several of the best essays in Milosz’ collection were also set in the area. I bicycled across the countryside not too far away, now that they are part of post-Soviet Lithuania. I look forward to seeing how all three — essays, novels, bike tour — line up. Someday. [Update: It turns out that Native Realm is a memoir, and a very good one at that.]

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/01/tales-of-the-squee/

Apr 26 2017

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

“And I must of course acknowledge Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it.” — Kij Johnson

In the Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Johnson turns much of Lovecraft’s novel of a dreamworld on its head. The main characters live in the dreaming world, which is as real to them as Earth is to its inhabitants. Almost all of the characters are women; men play but fleeting roles in the quest.

Vellitt Boe, the protagonist, has settled down from a life of far-traveling to become a professor of mathematics at the Women’s College of the University of Ulthar. At the story’s opening, one of her most promising students has fallen for a man from the waking world and followed him there. The University is a very old-fashioned place, and such a defection could confirm the doubts that the powers-that-be have about educating women. Worse, the missing student is the daughter of a high official. His wrath could close the College just the same. Vellitt (Johnson generally uses the character’s personal name) resolves to retrieve the student from the waking world and save the College.

The opening scenes riff on cloistered educational institutions throughout fantasy — from Hogwarts to Pullman’s Jordan College and onward — and they are a fun mixture of social observation and speedy action. Soon, Vellitt is out the gates of Ulthar in pursuit of the wayward student and her man.

From that point, Dream-Quest becomes two different things: a character study of Vellitt, as she recalls her younger wanderings and makes her way back into the world, and a reprise of the journeys in Lovecraft’s book, seen, after a fashion, from the other side. Vellitt is an interesting companion. She is capable and experienced, and the University has provided her with funds to cover her journey, so much of the ordinary worries of a traveler are taken care of at the start. The story starts out as one of hot pursuit, but shifts, as a dream will do, into a different mode.

I read Kadath when I was a bit older than Johnson was that first time, and I have retained only the dimmest recollection of its contents. Quick research, however, shows me that Vellitt revisits many of the same locations where Lovecraft’s protagonist, Randolph Carter, journeyed. Vellitt and Carter even traveled together for a while, at least in Johnson’s telling.

On the whole it’s interesting. People in the dream world have but 97 stars, and they cannot believe that Earth’s sky is just plain blue. Theirs is much more interesting. They might prefer to have distances that do not change, but on the whole they have lived with the way their world works. I found myself skimming a bit toward the end, as Johnson’s tale banged up against one of the structural difficulties of quests: one damn thing after another. Fortunately, that part did not last long, and the conclusion is both satisfying in itself, and how it addresses questions implicit in Lovecraft’s narrative and setting.

This is the second Hugo finalist I have read this year, but the first that I have written about. It was nominated in the category of novella. The winner will be announced at Worldcon 75, August 2017 in Helsinki.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/26/the-dream-quest-of-vellitt-boe-by-kij-johnson/

Apr 25 2017

Germany: Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor


Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery in London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015. He is now Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. His best-known previous book is A History of the World in 100 Objects. That background goes a long way toward explaining his approach to German history in Germany: Memories of a Nation, a book that accompanied an exhibit at the British Museum and a radio series on BBC Radio 4. He builds ideas about history from concrete objects, using their nature and stories to illustrate larger themes in German history.

This book is a testimony to contemporary publishing technology, a latter-day tribute to Gutenberg’s heirs. There are some two-page spreads that are only text, but they are few and far between. Such a lavish use of images would in previous decades have been confined to art books or more traditional exhibit catalogues. Digital publishing means that several hundred examples are right at a reader’s fingertips, and at a reasonable price. While Germany: Memories of a Nation has some of the functions of a catalogue, it is more several arguments about Germany, illustrated not only by the author’s writing but also by pictures of the objects in the exhibit. These add up, first, to a corrective of how Germany is typically seen in Britain; second, to a reconsideration of Germany for general readers; third, to a quick guide to the contradictions in Germany history.

The first argument arises from the title of the book’s opening section: “Where Is Germany?” If Germany is not quite, as has been quipped about Poland, “a nation on wheels,” its location has not been nearly as fixed as that of other European nations.

In thinking about the intellectual history of any country, a good place to start is its oldest university, the place where that society first organized the public teaching of ideas. For France it is unsurprisingly the capital, Paris; for Scotland, the seat of the archbishop, St Andrews; for England, nobody really knows why, insignificant Oxford. For the Germanophone world, it is Prague, where in 1348 the emperor Charles IV founded the first German-speaking university. For centuries Prague, capital of Bohemia and occasional residence of the Holy Roman Emperors, was at the heart of German cultural and intellectual life. The Karls Universität, the Charles University, stands at the head of the great German university tradition. (p. 39)

MacGregor adds Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, to Prague in a chapter titled “Lost Capitals” to illustrate the history of cities that were key to German history but that now are claimed by other nations. “It is not just that the political boundaries of the German lands have always been many and moveable, but that from the early Middle Ages onward, German-speaking communities settled all over Central and Eastern Europe as a result of conquest, partnership, or invitation.” (p. 40) In this part, MacGregor glosses over the variety of German that were spoken across that range. Dialects from Frisian to Swiss to Bavarian to Transylvanian to Silesian to Volga German were by no means mutually intelligible, even if they were all some form of German. “Most of these [communities] were extinguished brutally in 1945, but in the German cultural memory they remain, like phantom limbs: once constituent parts of the body, greatly valued, now definitively amputated and lost. The only comparable phenomena are perhaps the long-established Greek elites in Constantinople and Alexandria, equally integral to the national cultural self-image, and similarly dissolved by the politics of the twentieth century.” (pp. 40–41) To those two I would add, on a more compressed time scale, Russian communities across the expanse of the former Soviet Union.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/25/germany-memories-of-a-nation-by-neil-macgregor/

Apr 24 2017

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters is a hell of a book. The premise is that amendments to the US Constitution in the 1860s preserved the Union and averted the Civil War, but at the cost of continuing to accept slavery in states that chose to keep their peculiar institution. In the 21st century, a world of smart phones and GPS, slavery is still around in the Hard Four states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and a merged Carolina. Slave labor isn’t as useful for picking cotton in modern times, though “persons bound to labor,” as the book’s euphemism runs, still do that. They also work in factories making things from clothes to cars. Surveillance is up to modern standards.

So are attempts to escape, to reach the underground airline of “baggage handlers” who deliver slaves eventually to freedom in Canada. And so are the efforts of the slave catchers. Winters’ novel follows one of those, a man who is himself a former slave, back and forth through both sides of the looking glass as runners try to run and maybe catchers try to catch but maybe try to set themselves free of the system or maybe are just telling lies all around.

Through the eyes of the first-person narrator, readers see what oppression could, does, look like in 21st century America. People play roles, play dumb, until it’s hard to see who is getting played. Except every play leaves the white people on top, and the vast number of black people on the margins or worse.

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That’s what those kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freeman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation (p. 140)

Winters’ protagonist is human, and unreliable. That view of society stands in contrast to how he feels another night:

The great bulk of my life, then, had passed outside the Hard Four, in the free part of the land of the free. But even after all these years, I still found myself astonished daily by the small miracles of liberty. Just walking out of a restaurant with a clear head and a full stomach, holding a Styrofoam box with leftover food inside it. Just lingering in the parking lot a minute before getting in the car, smelling the wet asphalt, feeling a light drizzle as it condensed on my forehead. Just knowing I could take a walk around the block if I wanted to, go to a park and sit on a bench and read a newspaper. Just getting in that car and feeling the vinyl give under my ass, feeling the cough and purr of the engine. All these things were small astonishments. Miracles of freedom. (p. 12)

In due course, some of the novel shows what corporatized slavery is like: factory songs, uniforms, schedules, enforced company cheerfulness. It would probably be familiar to many kinds of workers around the world today.

The book is a taut thriller; there are characters from all sides of the institution, and they have depth and complications. There are fools, sinners, and plenty trying just to do the best they can. It isn’t perfect. To my mind it misses the everyday corruption that such a system would require, and its enforcers are capable in a way that cogs in a totalitarian machine generally aren’t. But changing those aspects would make Underground Airlines closer to The Foundation Pit, and that’s not what Winters is aiming for. He aims for, and delivers, a harrowing, compulsively readable story of a plausible America, one that reflects the real America in all too many ways.

+++

Doreen’s more political review is here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/24/underground-airlines-by-ben-h-winters/

Apr 23 2017

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

There are lots of reasons to commit suicide, but most of the people I know who’ve done it or attempted to have had a lot of Really Bad Shit going on in their heads from Really Bad Shit that comes from their past, or from a present so at odds with their perception of self that self-obliteration seems the only way out of this existential conflict. And the raison d’etre for this book, the character whose Thirteen Reasons Why she committed suicide propel the narrative, just wasn’t one of these people.

I feel that Jay Asher meant well. The subject matter is thought-provoking and there’s a lot of nuance and intelligence. It’s just not a very well-written novel. The dialogue is clunky and overwrought and there’s too much assumption of emotional atmosphere instead of actual reflection, particularly in the present day. I didn’t like the guy narrator, Clay, enough to feel bad for him, and I couldn’t help but feel impatient at the girl, Hannah’s, self-destructive streak. I felt bad at all the horrible things that happened/were done to her, but I also didn’t like her enough to care about her. And I think that’s entirely a function of the writing, that it couldn’t make me care despite what is easily a highly sympathetic situation.

Other reviewers with far more experience than I in this matter have noted that the book glamorizes suicide and that Hannah’s death is more performance art than escape. That’s worrisome. It’s hard for me, personal morality aside, to pronounce on whether someone has a “good” reason to kill him/herself, so I couldn’t tell you if Hannah’s reasons were believable. They definitely weren’t written in a way that made me care about her, tho.

Anyway, I’m glad if this book reaches people and teaches them that suicide is not the answer (tho it bothered me that the version I read didn’t include any information on what to do if you’re having suicidal thoughts,) and if it encourages people to be nicer to and look out for one another. But I did pick up this book thinking that I’d read it before watching the Netflix show… only now I don’t think I’ll watch. There’s something depressingly shallow about this book despite its attempt at meaningfulness, and I doubt the show would be able to fix its shortcomings. I could be wrong, but I suspect that a dramatization would just make me dislike the characters and story more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/23/thirteen-reasons-why-by-jay-asher/

Apr 23 2017

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick

Okay, so I came to this book from the very excellent Amazon show, and it almost seems unfair to review it now when I’ll always have the comparison in my mind. As source material for the very excellent show, it’s very rich in subject, and I was impressed by Philip K Dick’s ability to get the mindset and cadences correct, of living — or having lived — in a nation that is essentially an Asian colony. Childan is easily the most interesting character here, a man whose inner rage at being seen as lesser is perverted into both a lusting after Japanese culture and a hatred of, paradoxically, both Japanese people and his own background. Frank is the most sympathetic, a man seeking his destiny while realistically and humanely viewing his circumstances. I liked Tagomi a lot and thought his struggles with his conscience were more profound than Frank’s. Juliana is at once the smartest person in the book and yet the hardest to identify with. She is not a stable person, or a very likeable one, yet Mr Dick clearly meant her to be the heroine of the piece. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around her. I don’t know if I don’t like her because I kept being told I ought to, instead of persuaded, or whether it had to do with her casual racism and, to a certain extent, a misogyny that permeated the writing of her. It’s just that, compared to the richness of all the other (male) main characters, she seems more like a sketch, more an unmedicated bundle of neuroses than a real person. I don’t think Mr Dick meant to make her lesser than the men, but I don’t think he knew how to make her the heroine he wanted her to be.

He does an amazing job of writing alternative history within alternative history, and this definitely ranks as a sci-fi classic. And yet, and yet. Once you watch the Amazon show, you realize how broadly and deeply you can go with what was begun here. Essential reading, yes, but if you can, you should really watch the show.

The Man In The High Castle by Philip K Dick is available from all good booksellers, including

Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/23/the-man-in-the-high-castle-by-philip-k-dick/

Apr 23 2017

The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

Where to even begin with The Foundation Pit? The author, Andrey Platonov was born in Russia in 1899, the son of a railway worker, and later worked as a land reclamation expert. He was a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution; during the 1920s he supervised the digging of wells, construction of ponds, and draining of swamps in Soviet Ukraine; he was a war correspondent during the Great Patriotic War. Stalin, who read some of his work pre-publication, reportedly called him “scum” and urged that he be beaten. Platonov’s son was arrested as an enemy of the people and returned from the Gulag with terminal tuberculosis. Platonov contracted the disease while nursing him, and died of it in 1951. Much of his work, including The Foundation Pit, was not published in Russia until the time of glasnost; some of it was not published until the 1990s.

The Foundation Pit takes place during the time of the first Five-Year Plan and Total Collectivization. It begins with the mobilization of various people to dig out the space that will serve as the foundation for a gigantic and grand edifice. What should be built is never specified, but the characters are led to believe that it will be shining and splendid, a monumental achievement at the edge of their otherwise unremarkable town. In the meantime, work brigades are rushed here and there, ever more people are brought in for the collectivized effort, even as the available tools remain utterly inadequate for the task at hand. Things get stranger from there.

As the translators write in their afterword, “All these works appear at first glance—especially to a reader unversed in Soviet history—to be highly surreal. This impression, however is misleading; they contain barely an incident or passage of dialogue that does not directly relate to some real event or publication from these years. Platonov’s focus is not on some private dream world but on political and historical reality—a reality so extraordinary as to be barely credible.” (p. 157)

Read as a surreal and symbolic parable, The Foundation Pit is unsettling; read as something more literal, it is even more troubling. It’s also funny in parts, poignant in others, and just plain strange in yet others. Platonov’s Soviet Russia of the 1920s is far, far more alien than Asimov’s New York millennia hence.

Even with the notes provided by the translators, I am sure that I just skimmed across the surface of The Foundation Pit. There’s a lot going on in the book; I wouldn’t want to try to calculate its fractal dimension. (Indeed, a German journal of East European studies, Osteuropa, devoted an entire issue to Platonov’s work in 2016.) The translators again:

One day, no doubt, someone will publish a commentary listing the abnormalities in each sentence of The Foundation Pit and the expressive power of each of them. Platonov used language more creatively than even the greatest of the great Russian poets who were his contemporaries, and there is no simple answer to the question of why he wrote as he did. Sometimes, as we have seen, he deviates from the norm in order to summon up a biblical, cultural, or political allusion. Sometimes he orders the most common of words in an uncommon way so as to bring out in full the meaning of a word that we normally take for granted. … Sometimes Platonov puts something in an unusual way in order to bring out how trapped his characters are in a crushingly materialist view of the world. … At other times, however, this materialism shifts into an equally extreme idealism. (pp. 172–73)

This is a journey to another world, recognizably human, but seen through the veils of history, language, culture and the author’s own imagination to make it more distant than what is found in much of science fiction. “The reality of life in Stalin’s Russia will always remain hard to understand. No sources of information—no memoirs, no diaries, no reports by informers for the secret police—are entirely trustworthy. It is easier to be sure of the true beliefs of such distant figures as Chaucer and Dante than of the true beliefs of many of Platonov’s contemporaries. Even against this background, however, the degree of uncertainty around Platonov himself is extraordinary. There is hardly a single important work of Platonov’s, or important event in his life, that is not veiled in ambiguity.” (p. 162) The Foundation Pit gets deeper, but no nearer completion.

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