Category: Science Fiction

  • Reclaiming the Monster

    Reclaiming the Monster

    Woman-as-monster: Medusa, bronze medallion from Pompeii, photo Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons Women can be monsters too. From snake-haired Medusa to the horrifying mama-alien of the Alien movies, female monsters have often embodied male fears of women’s unchecked power. So it makes sense that women writers and artists have been changing the perspective on these archetypes. In her 2022 book Women and Other Monsters, Jess Zimmerman explores how the archetypal women monsters from ancient Greece illuminate women’s experiences now.

    And some recent horror and fantasy novels play with the woman-as-monster trope in a way that doesn’t just make them more sympathetic—they recast old stereotypes as a way to allow women to claim their monstrous power.

    Theodora Goss’s Athena Club trilogy does this on a meta-level, putting the focus on the daughters of such iconic characters as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, Victor Frankenstein, and more. Set in Victorian England and Europe, the three novels follow a band of young women, fictional heirs of the generation of mad monster-creating scientists from over a century ago, as they go on mystery-solving adventures.

    Each character deals with her inheritance differently: Justine Frankenstein, created abnormally tall and strong by her “father” Victor Frankenstein, is haunted by his abandonment; in contrast, Catherine Moreau, a human created from a puma, feels no ambivalence about using her animal strength, agility, and capacity for violence. The analytical Mary Jekyll, the most “normal” of the group, comes to develop a wary but meaningful sisterly relationship with Diana Hyde, a wild child fathered by Jekyll’s alter ego.

    Forging bonds of friendship, they all learn to accept and use their unusual powers to their own benefit. The Athena Club’s transgressive adventures (leading to economic freedom!), give agency to the women in ways they couldn’t have expected in the straitlaced Victorian era. They even argue over the telling of their story, underlining the sense of it as a kind of playful thought experiment.

    Silvia Moreno-Garcia‘s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau overlaps with Goss’s cat-woman character, expanding on the original Island of Dr. Moreau in a more serious vein. Moreno reimagines Moreau’s island as an isolated hacienda in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula in the 1870s. Here, the scientist’s daughter undergoes a slow awakening, beginning as the coddled only child who worships her charismatic father, her only friends the hybrid human-animal monsters he has bred.

    As she struggles with her growing desire for romance and autonomy, Carlota eventually comes to accept her own monstrous power. Subplots around the Mexican peasants’ oppression and struggle for liberation add thematic resonance to this retelling.

    A number of recent YA novels have also shown a willingness to explore a darker sense of self for their protagonists—evidence that teen readers are ready to engage with dark or morally ambivalent characters. Two of my favorites are Melissa Bashardoust’s Girl Serpent Thorn, and Traci Chee’s A Thousand Steps into Night. Both of them go beyond the Western fairy-tale and monster canons: Girl Serpent Thorn takes place in a world that’s informed by  Persian history and stories, and Traci Chee’s A Thousand Steps into Night draws on a rich brew of traditional Japanese folk tales.

    At the start of Girl Serpent Thorn, Princess Soraya is confined to a walled palace garden, having been cursed at birth with a poisonous touch. Though at first she shrinks away to protect the people around her, Soraya’s self-abnegation falls away as she learns the truth of her own history and of the divs, the powerful monstrous spirits who are part of it—allowing her to claim her own power.

    In A Thousand Steps into Night, Miuko, a girl whose loudness and clumsiness has already made her a bit of an outcast in her village, is kissed by a shaoha—a female demon—cursing her to become one herself. As her skin gradually turns a deep, demonic shade of indigo, she finds herself embracing her new impulses to do violence. Her human and demon-selves clash within her, each one trying to get the upper hand. She realizes she needs to kill in order to stay alive and be able to save her companion, but then she would lose her humanity.

    Both these novels allow their young-woman protagonists to weigh the consequences of doing monstrous things, face their darker selves, and make their own complex decisions. Stories like this remind us how thin the veil can be that separates being a monster from being human.

    Read more:

    Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman

    The Athena Club series by Theodora Goss (The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl)

    The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

    Girl Serpent Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

    A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee

  • Our Shared Futures

    Our Shared Futures

    Cover image Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana HudsonCan climate fiction help us see our way through the maze of possible futures we face? Can it help us move forward from our present moment? Andrew Dana Hudson’s slim novel, Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, engages these questions directly, by imagining how four characters’ lives would change in different climate scenarios.

    I kept thinking about this book as COP27 unfolded in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, ending with a promise of progress mixed with larger failures. (COP is short for Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.)

    The good news: a historic agreement to work on a structure  for “loss and damage,” offering aid to the countries most affected by climate change—countries that did the least to cause it, and are least equipped to combat it. On the other hand, the failure, yet again, to set firm commitments among countries for a path to decarbonization that could hold global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.

    Hudson, a futurist and fiction writer, based Our Shared Storm on five scenarios developed by climate scholars and used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They describe broad pathways the world might take over the next decades, leading to differing levels of climate change, with related effects on politics, economic inequality, and more:

    • Scenario 1, “taking the green road,” with the world shifting to sustainable and equitable ways of living
    • Scenario 2, “middle of the road,” with a mix of initiatives and challenges
    • Scenario 3, the “rocky road,” where a failure to take significant action leads to rising nationalism and war
    • Scenario 4, “a road divided,” with poorer areas suffering more than nations that can use their resources to adapt
    • Scenario 5, “taking the highway,” where fossil-fuel use continues to power out-of-control corporate development, favoring giant geoengineering solutions over local ones

    This might seem like a too-tidy formula for generating a novel. But Hudson brings these probable futures to life through four main characters who cross paths at a future COP, held in Buenos Aires in the year 2054. In each story, a huge hurricane looms—they call it a “neverstorm”—and then crashes over the city. The characters come from all over: Noah from the US, Luis from Argentina, Diya from India, and Saga from Sweden. Their experiences are different each time, in ways that mirror the five scenarios.

    But it’s more than that: each person comes to the COP already changed as a result of the different paths they followed over the decades leading up to it. These changes deliver us straight into the different worlds they inhabit, maybe more than any larger events could.

    Luis, for instance, appears variously as a taxi driver, an aspiring entrepreneur, and a guerrilla leader trying to protect his poor Buenos Aires neighborhood. The charismatic Saga is a COP attendee who in one story leads a subversive street action, and in another, having grown up in a climate-refugee camp, is kidnapped. In other versions, she’s an installation artist, and a pop star who channels the grief and massive displacements of her world.

    The characters’ alternate selves gave me that sense of an eerie echoing multiplicity that can emerge from good multiverse stories. In films, we’ve seen this not only in Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, but in Sliding Doors on an individual level, and in manic-epic style, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

    In books, Joanna Russ’s 1975 novel, The Female Man, shows four connected yet different women on different planets in a twist on this approach which, like Our Shared Storm, tackles a massive issue—in that book, how misogyny distorts the self. In Our Shared Storm, the characters’ variations pull us through an emotional portal to help imagine things that are so scary and depressing, we might otherwise turn away from them.

    Hudson brings a sharp eye and satirical flair to the conference negotiations, particularly in the over-the-top, hyper-capitalist scenario in which everyone wants to be an influencer and everyone is their own brand. The scenarios are arranged in a dramatic arc that gets steadily worse, and finally arrives at Scenario 1, the most hopeful of them all.

    Here, the book aligns with Solarpunk, the emerging SFF genre that envisions people collaborating to cobble together a more community-based, environmentally sane future. I read this part with relief, feeling like the exhausted survivor of a shipwreck (or multiple shipwrecks!) finally washed ashore. But this possible future also felt fragile and tenuous, in need of protection.

    The painful truth is that different parts of the world are experiencing these scenarios already. While the scary, depressing ones feel all too familiar, we do see seedlings of a more hopeful future. And we’re facing not only different possible futures, but different possible versions of ourselves. This book reminds us that our choices now are constructing the world ahead.

  • Message From the Future

    Message From the Future

    Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-fiction blockbuster, The Ministry for the Future, has galvanized readers both within and outside the science fiction community—riding the wave of anxiety catalyzed by last year’s extreme weather events, along with increasingly urgent warnings from climate experts and activists. The novel’s power relies on a two-pronged strategy: offering an imaginational way to confront the massive suffering that now seems probable, given humanity’s failure to act in a timely way so far; and a vision of one successful path toward climate solutions and a more equitable world.

    With this double-edged approach, the novel starts with a fatal humid heat wave in India that kills millions. It’s experienced by a young aid worker, Frank May, who becomes one of the few survivors of the climate disaster. That’s the first chapter; the aftermath takes up the rest of the book and centers on a new UN agency, The Ministry for the Future—set up to act in the interests of our descendants and the future well-being of non-human creatures and the land. (This wonderful concept builds on the Native American “seventh generation” principle, and on legal precedents such as Bolivia’s “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,” giving legal standing to the environment.)

    One issue for writers of climate fiction is conveying the scale and multiplicity of the challenges in a single narrative. Robinson is known as a master of deploying complex, large-scale narratives in novels such as The Years of Rice and Salt, which constructs a huge alternate-history tapestry, and New York 2140, another near-future novel about climate change. Many of his books have a global reach, and he’s eminently qualified to bring this approach to bear on the overwhelming scale of the climate crisis.

    There’s a kind of heroic hopefulness here, existing alongside the acknowledgment of terrible loss. The book is also shot through with desperation—not just on the level of plot, which follows Frank as he tries to grapple with survivor’s guilt and the scale of the threat, as well as shadowy groups who turn to eco-terrorism to shift the global balance away from fossil fuels. In this book, It feels to me that Robinson has translated the desperation many of us feel over the climate emergency into a complex, jittery meta-narrative structure that pokes readers beyond their usual immersion in story.

    The novel is stuffed to bursting with different storytelling types, bringing up the question: can one novel hold it all? The intertwining arcs of the two main characters, Frank May and Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry for the Future, actually take up only about a third of the book. Here’s how I see the different narrative approaches and what they bring to the novel.

    • Straight third-person voice. The two main characters’ stories, told this way, give us an emotional rope-bridge over the uncertainties of the immediate near future—the 2020s through the 2040s. Some chapters also follow the point of view of other Ministry staff.
    • Notes.   A few chapters follow Mary’s experience in the form of a stenographer’s notes of Ministry meetings. Their jagged sentence fragments, quick and dirty, propel us through the meat of those policy discussions with an urgency that feels exactly right.
    • First-person voice.   One story-strand follows an immigrant family displaced by climate disruption, through the eyes of different family members. Then there’s the first-person view of a scientist leading a massive geoengineering project in Antarctica. Both of these have the effect of highlighting their stories among the rest, elevating climate displacement and geoengineering as significant issues.
    • Omniscient narrator/authorial idea-wrestling. This voice steps in at times (in about 10% of the chapters), mostly to fill the reader in on major historical events of the coming decades. A related voice, appearing about as often, feels like the author thinking through certain ideas: wealth disparity or Keynesian economic principles, mass extinction, nihilistic social movements. These chapters echo the anonymous, editorializing “Citizen” chapters that were part of New York 2140, and they have an unfiltered, provisional feel that’s similar to the meeting-minutes chapters.
    • Dialogues.   Some chapters are structured as Socratic dialogues between unidentified speakers—a teacher and a reluctant student—debating whether technology drives history or not, for example. These also echo New York 2140’s “Mutt and Jeff” chapters, and may be an homage to Stanislaw Lem’s Dialogues.
    • Riddles.   These micro-chapters retool an ancient language game to render some really abstract concepts into something more embodied and grok-able. Though the riddle chapters are short and infrequent, they effectively poke the reader to shift gears, to think about photons, encryption, or the free market in new ways. The riddles also pop up in counterpoint to those concepts’ emergence in the narrative.

    These, along with the digressive monologues and the Socratic dialogues, are all attempts to “describe the elephant” that is the full-scale problem. For Robinson, that means laying out the role of late-stage capitalism in both causing and obstructing solutions to the problem at hand.

    Yes, these rhetorical variations stop the traditional narrative flow. Deal with it, Robinson seems to be saying to the reader: traditional narrative alone won’t do the trick here. Finally, there are the

    • Collective voices. I think of these as the “We” chapters, which take up a good 20% of the book. They become a kind of Greek chorus, giving eyewitness accounts from all over the world—of floods and drought, employee rebellions and social strikes, and climate-caused displacement. The apotheosis of this chorus comes when, late in the book, we hear a roll-call of representatives of grass-roots organizations all over the world, announcing the work that needs to be done where they are: desert greening, permaculture, reforestation, biodiversity projects. Here we feel the heroic hopefulness, couched in a way that emphasizes the need for collective action. For me, it’s the most “hopepunk” moment in the book.

    This isn’t to say that the book is all optimism. There’s an elegiac note running through it, reverberating from the struck bell of the mass deaths in India that set the book in motion. Frank May is broken by that experience. Mary Murphy has no personal life beyond the office, and her inner life is shaped by the oversized fears and concerns over climate change that it’s her job to consider. In effect, Frank holds a pain that is too outsized for one person; Mary holds the global-sized fear, and the perseverance that’s needed to move forward.

    Change happens through persistence, synergy, luck, and some dirty dealing. That dirty dealing, including black ops and eco-terrorist tactics, seems to indicate some doubt that policy change alone can accomplish what’s needed. On the other hand, Robinson leaves out of his near-future equation  the growing presence of backward-facing movements including authoritarianism, nativism and white supremacy, some fed by climate-caused suffering, and which will make progress that much harder.

    Still, the book brilliantly embodies the near-impossibility of making a global-scale shift in humanity’s relationship to its planet, and the necessity of trying to do that. We’re all members of the Greek chorus. We are the “We” who suffer forest fires, intense heat waves, rising seas, and the “We” who come together to try to do something about them.

  • The Uncanny Valley of Zoom backgrounds

    The Uncanny Valley of Zoom backgrounds

    We’ve all been talking about the Zoom experience. How it’s slightly off from the in-person experience, in ways that can be disorienting and exhausting. Yet, in the months since COVID-19 changed everything, we’ve also embraced it, as something that’s not just useful, but offers a close substitute to being in the same room with our fellow humans.

    The disorientation we can feel reminds me of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that emerged from the field of robotics and was taken up in the worlds of virtual reality and computer graphics. It proposes that as robots, or virtual or computer-animated figures come closer to resembling actual humans, they elicit a sense of uneasiness. In this case it’s the virtual experience of online video interactions that’s close to, but doesn’t quite achieve the comfort level of pre-COVID human interaction.

    I haven’t heard any discussions, though, on the uncanny effect of Zoom backgrounds. You’ve probably seen them—shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, or of corner offices with drop-dead, high-rise views. These virtual backgrounds have been around for several years, with video backgrounds appearing more recently. I’m guessing they served two purposes for the mostly corporate intended users of Zoom and related services: first, to add visual zing to presentations, and second, to cover up what might be a participant’s actual, less-than-presentable environment.

    What I’ve seen in the sci-fi/fantasy community is an enthusiastic upending of those conventions. I first noticed it at the Nebula Awards, the convention put on by SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. The Nebulas was one of the first cons to switch from live to virtual, with a dauntingly short lead time to the late-May event. New SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal rose to the occasion with a “Starship Nebula” theme, and backed it up with a bit of virtual magic: a downloadable porthole template that participants could use as a green screen, allowing them to show a shimmering starscape outside their “cabins.”

    Aydrea Walden, Toastmaster at Nebula Awards 2020,
    with a full complement of virtual portholes showing her proximity to the Galactic core

    As the conference went on, I spotted a number of portholes, working as promised. Toastmaster Aydrea Walden sported a double phalanx of portholes during the awards ceremony. But I also saw:

    • A participant’s t‑shirt, turned into a window on the vacuum of deep space
    • A stuffed dinosaur whose surface rippled with galactic winds
    • Floors and walls falling away into nothingness, leaving bookshelves standing by themselves
    Benjamin C. Kinney at the Nebulas wearing deep space panorama

    Nebula nominee Mimi Mondal managed to make her own still Zoom floral background come alive, as she seemingly dissolved and reappeared from a cluster of giant tropical flowers. She explained later that she was playing with the settings, adjusting for the similarity between her skin-tone and the wall behind her.  The result was that a bug—the sometimes unstable edge between the foreground subject and the background image on Zoom—turned into a feature, as Mimi’s outline softened and merged with the flowers, while the flowers’ colors pulsed with a shifting brightness.

    Sci-fi folks are apparently willing to dive head-first into the Uncanny Valley of Zoom. They show a playfulness toward representations of reality that reflects the baseline of the field—speculating on what-ifs, moving variables around to get a new view. They’re not freaked out by solid objects turning into negative space, or by their own forms being impinged on.

    Nebula Winner Cat Rambo with her bookshelves hovering in the vastness of space

    The enduring popularity of cosplay, which grew out of sci-fi Cons, offers another example of this zest for transformation. It also reminds me of one of the earlier online manifestations of personal malleability, the imaginative screen-names you can still see on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but not Facebook.

    This doesn’t erase the genuine disorientations of online meeting spaces, or the fact that they can’t fully replace the human experience of sharing a physical space. But it feels like we’re witnessing something that could evolve into a new, hybrid form of online expression—another small, positive development to come out of our very strange and difficult Pandemic year.

    Zoom-based image by photographer Jen Kertis-Veit

    Will this playful hacking of the Zoom experience jump into the mainstream? I hope so. Does it have other antecedents that I’ve missed? If you can think of any, let me know.

     

  • Blobs, Orbs, and Starfish: Really Alien Aliens

    Blobs, Orbs, and Starfish: Really Alien Aliens

    Starfish - really alien aliens are known as "starfish aliens"

    Book blogger Shruti Ramanujam recently published a  list of “oddly specific storylines” she loves in books, that made me laugh out loud. And it made me think about what storylines or tropes attract me in a book. 

    One of those tropes, for me, is “really alien aliens.” I find them fascinating, and I’m always checking my inner alien-o-meter: Are they convincing? What is their alien-ness telling me? I love that sense of looking out through unfamiliar eyes, and feeling the expansion that comes with considering other ways of being. 

    I remember the first really alien aliens I encountered: the disembodied energy beings that appeared as strange spheres of blue fire in Ray Bradbury’s classic short story, “The Fire Balloons.” The priests who traveled to Mars to convert them are themselves converted by the sphere-beings to a more open view of religion, sin, and humanity. On TV, I accepted the humanoid aliens of Star Trek—Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians. But my antennae always buzzed for aliens so strange they couldn’t be seen, like the beings trapped in the ship’s innards in “Emergence,” an episode of Star Trek TNG. They sent distress calls in the form of Holodeck characters, embodying metaphors for the help they needed. 

    There are many, many such aliens in science fiction, going back to H.G. Wells’ leather-skinned blobs in War of the Worlds. As a trope, they’re recognized as Starfish Aliens—a term first used by H.P. Lovecraft (in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936). I’m less interested in them as dangerous space-opera foes or dread-inspiring monsters, and more interested in aliens that give us new ways to think about social structure, emotions, and the self. My interest goes even higher when these things are revealed from the aliens’ point of view. 

    Two recent books delivered this for me: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and Ann Leckie’s Provenance, both refreshing takes on the space-opera sub-genre. If you haven’t read them: some spoilers ahead. Chambers’ small, angry planet is indeed occupied by fierce aliens whose way of thinking is hard to decode and puts the Galactic Commons at risk. On the spaceship traveling there, the human crew members work alongside a variety of aliens. 

    One character, Sissix, is an Aandrisk, a reptilian species. Sissix is friendly and naturally demonstrative, and Aandrisk culture features a complex, inclusive family structure that evolves over an individual’s lifespan—a nice departure from that of the usual cold-hearted Reptilian alien. On a supply mission, Sissix encounters an Aandrisk shopkeeper in the marketplace who’s old and alone, bereft of any kind of family. Feeling sorry for the shopkeeper, pulls her aside and they have a snuggle/make-out session The scene is weird, funny, and affecting, and leaves us with a more nuanced sense of Aandrisk culture. 

    In Ann Leckie’s Provenance, we hear about the Geck long before we meet one of them in the flesh. They’re water-dwellers and hate leaving their world, so they usually interact with other species remotely, through robot-like mechs. The single scene in which the main character, Ingray, meets the Geck ambassador floating in a pool is, for me, the strange heart of the book. The ambassador is a blob-creature whose skin telegraphs emotion by changing color. Her language is filled with poetic repetitions that suggest the lapping of waves: “I will tell you a thing. I will tell you. When humans first appeared, many things died. So much died…” 

    The story she tells Ingray reveals much about patterns of affection among the Geck, and how those patterns have been forced to shift by the humans among them. For that one scene, we see the world through her eyes. Her motives become clear, and the plot turns inside out. 

    This got me thinking about how hard it is to imaginatively get inside beings so different from us—especially when they have motives beyond simply wiping out humans. Is that why these very alien aliens make such brief appearances? I don’t know. One such very brief appearance has stuck with me. It’s from Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book in her series Lilith’s Brood.

    Lilith, a survivor of the near-destruction of Earth, has been taken aboard a ship belonging to the Oankali. She needs a lot of time to get used to the Oankalis’ appearance, although they’re humanoid in shape, since their faces and bodies are covered in wiggling sensory tentacles. At one point, her Oankali teacher offers Lilith a glancing vision of his species’ deep past, before many generations of biological mixing with beings from other planets:

    “Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world, we lived in great shallow oceans,” it said. “We were many-bodied and spoke with body lights and color patterns among ourself and among ourselves…” 

    That’s all. But this short description—not even a scene—conveys a strange, Edenic world with haiku-like compactness, giving Lilith and the reader insights into the Oankali’s origins, how they understand themselves and each other. 

    Have I left out your favorite book, scene, or pet peeve about really alien aliens? Any thoughts are welcome. 

  • Elephants and Radium Girls

    Elephants and Radium Girls

     

    The Only Harmless Great Thing coverIn The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander has taken on two strange and disturbing events from the early 20th century: the willfully negligent poisoning of young women painting radium-tinged watch dials for the United States Radium Company, and the public electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903. Bolander somehow burrowed into each story to find their shared DNA, and then performed some recombinant alchemy to merge them into one harrowing and resonant story, with a tragic and poetically just ending. 

    In its under 100 pages, the book brilliantly illuminates the dark side of our attraction to the shining, sparking effects brought by electricity and radioactivity. On top of that, it gives us fresh ways to think about how the DNA of our shared stories spirals through time and culture.

    The book’s central story pairs Regan, a fictionalized Radium Girl, with the elephant Topsy, in a fragile cross-species friendship. In Bolander’s topsy-turvy alternate timeline, Topsy is one of a number of elephants bought and trained by the company to paint watch dials after the Radium Girls’ health issues have come to light. In one of the book’s sublime inventions, the elephants have learned to communicate through an ASL-like sign language using their trunks, so Regan and Topsy are able to converse. (I wish that development could be imported to our timeline.)

    Regan’s ripe Appalachian twang brings the aspect of class into focus—she is a low-class rural outsider in the urban factory, able to get the elephants’ exploitation immediately. The slightly archaic idioms she uses make a strong vessel for her outrage as the story races forward.

    Two other stories frame this one, and they carry meta-questions about how stories are made, how they take root, are preserved, and shape us. In the first one, happening in a slightly skewed near-present time, Topsy’s execution has made an indelible impression on the American psyche, and cemented a pop-culture association between elephants and radioactivity—to the point that a Dumbo-like Topsy has starred in a beloved Disney movie. In this story, a young researcher urges the elephants to agree to have their genomes altered so their skin will glow when it’s near radioactive waste—a signal of danger to humans in the far future.

    The second story-layer gives full, mythic voice to the elephants. An elephant-mother recounts the legend of the revered long-ago ancestor who dove into a tar pit to retrieve the lost stories of her people. The storyteller, we realize, lives in that future time when she and her kind have agreed to be that glowing warning system for humanity. Their vast chain of memory, stretching eons backward and forward in time, shows humanity’s self-narrative to be pretty puny by comparison.

    For me, coming in with a long obsession with Nikola Tesla, Bolander’s Radium Girls-Topsy remix hits a nerve. The electrocution of the real Topsy has been associated with Thomas Edison, mainly because Edison was known to have arranged public electrocutions of smaller animals during the Current Wars of the early 1890s. (These spectacles aimed to show how dangerous Tesla’s AC current was; but Tesla’s AC won the current wars, being superior in numerous ways to Edison’s DC.) Edison most likely didn’t have a hand in Topsy’s death, but the electric-powered public spectacle at Coney Island was surely inspired by his venal stunts.

    Tesla, on the other hand, brought an almost utopian idealism to his electronic innovations. He even pioneered the medical use of electricity, believing that immersion in  electromagnetic fields was good for human health. (We’ve learned to be more careful about the effects of such constant bombardment.) Tesla’s idealism took part in his era’s belief that nature existed as a resource for humanity, in service of the progress of civilization. In Bolander’s vision, both Edison and Tesla are caught, found complicit in a system that blithely digs up radium and conscripts the weakest members of society to handle it.

    Yet the elephants’ understanding takes us beyond this stew of human, animal, and natural exploitation. Topsy recognizes electricity as a mutated form of lightning, and the far-future elephant mother shares that understanding. Even living with the poisonous aftereffects of the nuclear industry, she and her tribe persist, citizens of the natural world, protected  by their collective, long-lasting, storied understanding.

     

  • Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

    Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

    Trinity fireball, with lightning storm behindThe latest production ofDoctor Atomic, the opera about the birth of the Nuclear Age by composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars, saw it coming “home” to New Mexico, where the story is set. In the process, it became a stunning, unrepeatable artistic event. I was lucky to see one of the performances at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, staged only several miles away from Los Alamos, recalling the frantic months leading up to the first atomic explosion in July 1945.

    Santa Fe Opera, before Doctor Atomic performance
    Santa Fe Opera, before Doctor Atomic performance

    With the desert vista spreading around the open walls of the opera house, and Los Alamos lying some 20 miles beyond the open backstage, a rare synchrony clicked into place between opera and site. And Sellars’ new production went beyond this, making other connections tangible that had only been hinted at before.

    Doctor Atomic brings to life the consuming moral conflicts that colored the Manhattan project. Onstage, the characters trace a deadly dance: at the center, the brooding J. Robert Oppenheimer, the research director at Los Alamos; Edward Teller (who would later testify against Oppenheimer), radiating a dark acceptance of the responsibilities they will all bear; another physicist, Robert Wilson, whose attempt to petition the President not to use the bomb was overruled. This staging included a radically simplified set dominated by a huge reflective metal sphere hanging above the stage, and unobtrusive street clothes for costumes.

    First of all, let me say
    that I have no hope
    of clearing my conscience.

    - Edward Teller

    Adams and Sellars have collaborated before, notably on the pathbreaking and provocative operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. In producing the score for Doctor Atomic, Adams has said he wanted to “musically” paint a picture of “this very sci-fi kind of vision”—“this scene of Alamogordo, a very remote desert place… almost like the landscape of the moon, with this eerie tower, with this strange object hanging from it”—the prototype bomb.

    Ed Emshwiller cover art for City at Worlds End, 1953 edition (detail)
    Ed Emshwiller cover art for City at Worlds End, 1953 edition (detail)

    Invited to create a new production for Santa Fe, Sellars leaped in with his usual ferocious enthusiasm, working not only to connect it not only to the land and local history, but to its inhabitants. The Pueblo Indians near the site of the first explosion suffered the first radiation injuries of any human community—weeks before Hiroshima, with effects that have lasted over generations. The director met with these “Downwinders” for months leading up to the performance, and with members of other Pueblo tribes surrounding Santa Fe.

    Ultimately, this led to their participation in the opera, in ways that transformed and deepened it. The members of the Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque Pueblos agreed to allow its members to perform parts of the sacred Corn Dance, before the show began each evening, and as part of the hallucinatory second act portraying the nocturnal countdown to the explosion at dawn on July 16, 1945. And some Downwinders also took part, as still, solemn witnesses to the scenes that had so affected them—including Gen. Leslie Groves’ refusal to notify or evacuate the surrounding towns, though already knowing the toxic effects of radiation. This silent chorus of witnesses ranged in age from youths to people old enough to have been alive then—generations sharing a forgotten legacy.

    This was remarkable in so many ways. In the context of continuing cultural appropriation of Indian traditions, the Pueblos’ decision to make a gift of their sacred dance, for the purpose of a wider societal healing around the history of atomic weaponry—a history that they themselves suffered from—demonstrates a grace and wisdom we rarely see. By this gesture, as holders of the land, they embodied and strengthened a counterposing worldview, one within which the bomb’s making would be inconceivable. In the opera’s libretto, that worldview is represented by a single character, Pasqualita, the Indian nursemaid to the Oppenheimers’ children.

    In the west the cloud-flower blossoms,
    And now the lightning flashes,
    And now the thunder clashes,
    And now the rain comes down!

    - Pasqualita (Tewa Lullaby)

    Before one performance, Sellars talked about the opera’s contrasting of two technologies: a kind of indigenous technology, where “if you dance long enough, and seriously enough, your ancestors will notice and send rain,” with the Western deployment of scientific theory and methods toward a practical goal. The indigenous technology may have worked too well: one night, audience and performers were buffeted by wind and rain, the singers and dancers going barefoot on a rain-slick stage while lightning and thunder cracked around them. At this moment of literal danger (which my friend saw but I didn’t) the boundaries between art, symbol, and life—the actual thunderstorm; the historic summer thunderstorm that delayed the first explosion till dawn (part of the opera’s second act); and the atmospheric explosion of the bomb—merged into one wild, moving, meta-performative whole.

    All this helped move the opera deeper into the territory Adams has described as opera’s strong suit: addressing “large issues of… our collective experience… themes deep in the psyche of a nation [that] can be addressed in a way that no other art form can quite do it.” The place-specific alchemy of this production brought these deep-buried themes to new life in a way that could only have happened here.

    Some of the craziness of the past seven decades has been fed by our massive inability or unwillingness to reckon with the power humanity now has to destroy itself. Doctor Atomic doesn’t resolve those issues, but challenges us to keep them alive for ourselves, as individuals and as a community.

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy

    The Broken Earth Trilogy

    The Broken Earth: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky coversReading each volume of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin left me electrified. The first two books, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, won the past two annual Hugo awards for best novel—a rare occurrence. Her final book in the series, The Stone Sky, is up for the 2018 Hugo. Here’s why I think this science-fiction/epic fantasy trilogy is so important, and why I’m rooting for it to win. (It’s largely spoiler-free.)

    The Broken Earth gives us a vastly-scaled vision of global environmental catastrophe.

    With Essun, the main character, we enter a world that long ago suffered a planet-wide injury, which has locked the earth into unending cycles of convulsion. Periods of relative stillness are punctuated by Fifth Seasons, with earthquakes, eruptions, and toxic fallout that threaten humankind’s survival. The people of Essun’s time call their planet “Father Earth.” This name jolted me whenever I read it, challenging my ingrained understanding of our planet as Mother Earth, Gaia, the Greek Demeter, etc. But rather than seen as nurturing, this Father Earth is viewed as angry, unpredictable, and punishing, like an Old Testament Yahweh.

    A genetically gifted group is the oppressed minority.

    Essun is an orogene, possessing a genetic mutation that allows her to both amplify and calm a geological disturbance. Because untrained orogenes may trigger seismic events when they’re under stress, they are feared, shunned, despised and sometimes killed. Even when adopted and trained in the harsh sanctuary of the Fulcrum, their lives are hedged in by duty, even to the point of forced reproduction. Essun is also a woman of color, but in this world race and gender aren’t markers for oppression, functioning more like ethnicity in ours. Being an orogene is what defines her identity and her fate.

    We feel the destructive effects of oppression burrowing deep into individuals.

    In order to keep her safe, Essun traumatizes her daughter, Nassun, pushing her at an early age to learn to control her gift. Essun herself has been abused and ostracized as a child—and that’s only the beginning of her many psychic injuries. Even Schaffa, Essun’s morally ambiguous, Fulcrum-appointed guardian, is emotionally deformed and controlled by institutionalized pain.

    Essun’s own suffering provides the raw, long-running engine that powers the book and animates the larger story. She’s a mother who has lost her children, to fear of orogenes and to the system that controls them. Over the course of the books, she creates and loses multiple family groups in the same way. Among her other hurts are the harms she is forced to inflict on others, given the narrow range of choices she has in an unjust world. The parallels to the experiences of the enslaved are immediate; the anguish of parents and children separated from each other, more relevant than ever.

    Jemisin’s narrative structure is brilliant, gradually evolving to carry the expanding spheres of the story.

    Essun’s story unfolds in second-person, at first by an anonymous narrator who addresses her as “you.” Later, we learn the identity of the narrator, a character in the story; and in the final book, we learn how that character’s history is central to understanding the sweeping, millennias-old forces that shaped Essun’s broken world. I was left in a state of stunned and grateful admiration at the scale of Jemisin’s writerly authority. By the end we’ve learned how the orogenes began, the meaning of the massive floating obelisks left over from a dead civilization, and the origin of the apocalyptically destructive Fifth Seasons.

    With all its vast worldbuilding, the story grounds itself not only in individual lives, but in what have been traditionally women’s concerns…

    …how we raise children, make and keep (or lose) homes, how we make communities with whatever is at hand—the humble, necessary building-blocks of culture. Among the six nominees for the Hugo awards this year, only The Stone Sky and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 take place on a home planet; the others are all set in space, either on ships, space stations, or faraway colonized planets.

    The romance of space is fantastic and still worth writing about. But Jemisin takes the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler and makes it her own. Like Le Guin, she assumes the continuing importance of women’s everyday lives and concerns in larger narratives. Like Butler, another African-American author, she insists on the need of children and other vulnerable people for community even in the most desperate circumstances. Jemisin adds a commanding voice to this growing continent in the science fiction/fantasy world. All this is why I want to see Jemisin win an unprecedented third consecutive Hugo for The Stone Sky, the shattering finale to a powerful and precedent-breaking series.

  • Coming out as a Fan

    Coming out as a Fan

    Scene from 2001: A Space OdysseyIt’s time for me to come out as a member of sci-fi fandom. I love science fiction and fantasy. I’ve read the books, watched the shows, and seen the movies. I’ve attended Cons. And yes, I have worn Vulcan ears.

    It’s time, because my novel, The Speed of Clouds, which is coming out soon from New Door Books, is about a sci-fi fan who lives a good part of her life in the world of sci-fi fandom. She edits a fanzine, is undyingly passionate about her beloved show’s universe and characters, and learns life lessons through her fan-world relationships.

    I want to come clean, because if anyone wrote a book about fandom without being a fan herself, it would be creepy. Fans have to deal with enough condescension and poking fun as it is.

    Looking back, I realize that it started early. As a kid, I fell into A Wrinkle in Time, The Martian Chronicles, and The Lord of the Rings. I watched the original Star Trek when it came out. Later, I married a sci-fi fan who introduced me to Dune, Ringworld, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Our son watched it with us, and I decided to take him to a local convention. And then another, and another.

    I think Ethan enjoyed going to these Cons, but for me they were a revelation. I’m talking about the fans themselves—some declaring their loyalties on T‑shirts, but others wearing Federation uniforms, and some even in full costume and makeup as various aliens, androids and cyborgs. I admired the purity of their devotion, allowing them to undertake these transformations into someone out of this space and time. This was the heart of fandom, where you could congregate and become part of the fictional world you loved. You might attract stares and giggles in the lobby, but inside you were safe. Your masquerade might be more or less prime-time worthy, but it meant something.

    Then there was the other part—seeing the stars and supporting players, testing out the uncanny space between their own real-life selves and their galaxy-traveling, beaming-aboard characters. That space was thick with the fairy dust of glamour. I believe that in some part of a fan’s brain, seeing those working actors is the same as being in a room with the beings they play. And I say that as a fan.

    In these two ways—the cosplay and the communion with the inner world of the show—you had to be there. Physically. These two pillars of Con experience made it real, in a way that watching or reading couldn’t. They were modern-day rituals of connectivity, bridging the gap between fiction and the non-fictional stuff (dispiriting, difficult or overwhelming) we deal with every day.

    I’m not the best fan. I don’t write fan fiction, although I’ve read it. I haven’t watched every single episode of every single show, and I can’t parse subtleties of canonical history. But I’ve been touched by what I’ve seen—intrigued, annoyed sometimes, inspired—and I’ve wanted to talk about this with other fans. In the end, being a sci-fi fan means acknowledging that our lives on Earth are also situated against the vastness of space, and in the vastness of imagined possibilities that may or may not play out in the future. Stepping into the fan world means you embrace the bigger and wilder perspectives that may help you deal with what’s in front of you. The Speed of Clouds is my homage to that world and to the people in it.

    The Speed of Clouds

    The Speed of Clouds, New Door Books, April 2018

     

     

  • American Bardo

    American Bardo

    A 19th-century stone carved angel in a cemeteryAs I read George Saunders’ daring first novel Lincoln in the Bardo recently, I was struck by its strangely close parallels with another memorable and equally risk-taking debut novel, Chris Adrian’s Gob’s Grief (2000). Both novels use the Civil War as an entry point into crazed and original meditations on the reality of death.

    In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders reimagines the Buddhist concept of the Bardo, a threshold state of the soul that is thought to last a few days after death. His American Bardo is a cemetery in Washington, D.C., filled with a motley group of dead folks too short-sighted to realize they’re dead. At the heart of the book is a new arrival, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, who’s succumbed to typhoid fever, and his grieving father, the President, who is a year into the bloodiest war of the country’s history. History has left the tantalizing suggestion that Lincoln visited Willie’s crypt several times after the boy’s funeral.

    Gob’s Grief takes place during and after the Civil War. The story repurposes such real figures as Walt Whitman, who volunteered as a nurse to injured soldiers during the war, and the remarkable Victoria Woodhull, a feminist, a medium, and the first female candidate for president, in 1872. The emotional crux of this story is the relationship between Woodhull’s fictional twin sons, Gob and Tomo. Tomo runs off to be a bugler with the Union Army at the age of eleven, and is soon killed in battle.

    Gob is sickened by his mother’s insistence that his brother is alive and well in the Summerland, the Spiritualist equivalent of Heaven. Years later, a grown-up Gob builds a massive, Steampunk-like engine meant to bring back to life not only Tomo, but all the soldiers who died in the war. The engine combines “glass tubes and iron gears… bundles of copper wire,” human bones, and an array of glass negatives of fallen soldiers, floating above a set of cemetery gates.

    Both books are wildly non-formulaic and genre-busting. Lincoln in the Bardo is told in a multi-voiced chorus, shifting from the dead cemetery-dwellers to the living—the cemetery guard and the President—along with excerpted historical descriptions of Willie’s illness and death. Gob’s Grief leaps around in time and inside many points of view. But it also alternates between naturalistic depictions of events like the battle of Chickamauga, and otherworldly happenings and characters including the memorably creepy child Pickie Beecher, born out of Gob’s infernal machine. Angels appear in both books, hectoring the living and the dead.

    Both novels are heated into overdrive by the tension between denial and acceptance of death, two landmarks on the continuum of grief. The ghosts surrounding Willie Lincoln suffer from major cognitive dissonance as they struggle to explain their situation, clinging to sad euphemisms: “sick-box” for coffin, and “stone home” for their tombs. Their liberation, and Willie’s, hinges on recognizing the reality of their deaths in this false stage-set they’ve created. An unlikely communion with the dead helps Willie’s grieving father come through a similar emotional passage.

    Gob’s Grief is infused with the craziness of grief. Several main characters, including Walt Whitman, are each haunted by a brother or loved one lost in the war. Gob’s death-defying engine somehow feels like the believable response of someone who’s ready to change the rules of reality to bring back their loved one. Adrian’s later novels, The Children’s Hospital and The Great Night, show a similar willingness to dive headlong into the deepest waters where death and life, fantasy and reality mix.

    The idea of the Bardo came to the West from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist text written as a guide for the newly dead, to help them move through the illusions of the Bardo toward clarity and rebirth. In fact, Bardo can refer to any transitional state, even our waking experience. Is there something distinctly American in the intransigence of Saunders’ ghosts, and Gob’s obsessive quest to undo his brother’s death? Their stubbornness may reflect our cultural prejudice toward happiness, toward holding on to a more pleasant version of things, whether it’s one that existed in the past, or some promised future. In whatever Bardo we find ourselves, only doing the hard work of acknowledging what we’ve lost can liberate us to move ahead.

     

  • Thinking about Gaia

    Thinking about Gaia

    Image of Earth from spaceIn this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia.

    A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak. Yes! That’s a good prompt to contemplate right now. The hashtag elicited a range of responses from funny and snarky to thoughtful and earnest. Some tweeters suggested that the earth is speaking, but we’re not listening. Would that be Gaia? The environmental scientist James Lovelock first formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, proposing that the Earth could be seen as one vast living and self-regulating system, and naming it for Gaia, the primordial Greek Earth goddess. The idea has been borne out since then, but its popularity may owe a lot to Lovelock’s naming it for the Greek Mother Earth, thus connecting it in our minds to the much earlier and long-lived human sense of the earth as a living force.

    In the last week, the earth’s atmosphere reached an ominous new milestone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels broke past 410 parts per million, after hitting 400 parts per million in 2013. The last time atmospheric carbon concentrations were this high was in the Middle Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago. Our continuing to pump carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, combined with the unknown effects of climate feedback, are cause for alarm. For those of us who don’t deny the facts, it’s a scary time. I’ll be at the People’s Climate March in Washington D.C. in a few days, one of the hundreds of thousands of people needing to bear witness to the urgency of this moment.

    But are facts enough to rally people to action? You can’t see carbon concentrations, and even though the earth is now experiencing changes that are much faster than the normal geological time scale, these changes are often too slow, too big, or too abstract for us to easily take in. As author Kim Stanley Robinson has said, “Fiction can tell us how new situations will feel, and also, what things mean.” Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, set in a partially submerged future New York, is one of several just-published works of climate fiction (cli-fi), the emerging genre that invites us to picture the human consequences of climate change. Robinson offers a vision of people muddling along and making their lives in the Venice-like canals of New York, both coping with the disasters that have occurred and aware there may be worse ahead.

    But where is Gaia in this future? If Earth can be seen as a living thing, couldn’t we also benefit from trying to take its perspective—as different from ours as it may be? Science fiction has gone there already. Apparently inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, Isaac Asimov included a newly discovered, sentient planet named Gaia in his 1982 novel Foundation’s Edge. And Piers Anthony made “Gaea” a main character—an archetype of the Earth, embodied in a mortal—in Becoming a Green Mother (1988), part of his Incarnations of Immortality series.

    The Book of Joan, an ambitious novel by Lidia Yuknavitch, just out this month, offers a character who is empathically connected with the Earth. Living only a few decades into the future, the visionary child-woman Joan of Dirt leads a rebellion among the survivors of an environmentally ravaged earth who are now living on an orbiting space-station sanctuary ruled by a billionaire dictator. This Joan of Arc for a nightmare future can manifest volcanic eruptions—her symbiosis with the planet allows it a form of expression that can’t be ignored. It’s a risky novel, also taking on issues of gender, sex and race, and it’s on my to-be-read list.

    These and other cli-fi novels do a great service by bringing the human consequences of climate change into vivid focus, at a human scale we can reckon with. If they tend to be dystopian, that is the kind of future that seems to be staring us in the face, given the forces we have already set in motion.

    The Earth is speaking to us now, in her own language, not just through beautiful sunsets, but through rising sea levels, droughts, and strange weather patterns. Of course we need to be able to imagine the human costs of climate change. That’s how we think, and it is the most promising way toward changes in policy. But I also feel the need to see things from Gaia’s point of view—even if it means facing eruptions of traumatic scale and strength. What may be dystopian for us, may just be a cloudy afternoon for our long-lived planet. We desperately need to de-objectify the earth, and to try to reengage in something more like an “I–Thou” relationship with Gaia—not of equals, but in respect, and awe and wonder. I hope more writers will take up the challenge of imagining what she is saying, and might be saying in the future.

     

     

  • Grieving for a whole planet

    Grieving for a whole planet

    Frozen PlanetWhen I saw the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, I couldn’t get past that moment when Princess Leia sees her home planet, Alderaan, blown up by the Empire. We didn’t even get to see her reaction shot; the first response to this calculated destruction is voiced by Obi Wan Kenobi, saying he feels a “great disturbance in the force.” It’s hard to know how Leia feels about this devastating event, since she moves right into warrior mode and doesn’t mention it again.

    Star Wars is great popular entertainment, of course, and it isn’t the only sci-fi story to feature an exploding planet, or one that’s destroyed by nuclear or environmental disaster, from Superman’s home planet of Krypton to the casual destruction of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    At another end of the spectrum, there’s a novel by Doris Lessing that has stuck with me since I read it, for its unrelenting deep dive into the feelings of a community as it experiences the death of its world. The Making of the Representative from Planet Eight (1982) is the fourth in Lessing’s five-novel series of science fiction novels, Canopus in Argos. It’s a quick but intense read, told in a voice that evokes folk tales or Scripture. (Lessing later adapted the novel as an opera with music by Philip Glass.)

    We’re led through the story by Doeg, who lives on the peaceful, prosperous and temperate Planet Eight, part of the Canopus system. A mysterious cosmic realignment causes the global climate to shift, with blizzards causing a buildup of snow and ice—a swiftly cataclysmic, planet-wide Ice Age. Doeg, whose vocation is Memory Maker and Keeper of Records, reports conscientiously on his own and others’ emotional avalanche as everything about their previous life slips away.

    In one poignant moment, the leaders stage a ceremony to help people accept part of their new reality: they now have to fish in their sacred lake for sustenance, a practice that has always been taboo. Standing on the shore, the community watches as a few people row out to demonstrate how it’s done. The sight of this is too much: “A groan or cry came out from the crowds, and this sound, which had been pressed out of us, frightened us all.”

    In the end, there’s no escape—all life on the planet is extinguished. Doeg and a few others only survive in disembodied form, as a collective “representative” to the Canopic system. Their transformation reflects Lessing’s study of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Through that lens, the story can be seen as an allegory of the soul leaving behind the physical body (the “world” in which the individual lives). Lessing also pointed to another source for the story, in her lifelong fascination with the doomed British Antarctic expedition led by Robert Scott from 1910–1913.

    Now, several decades after it first appeared, and as we move further into our global climate crisis, it’s hard not to read the novel as a stark and cogent allegory of climate change—an early entrant in the growing genre of climate fiction, or Cli-Fi, as it’s been called by journalist Dan Bloom and others. Lessing didn’t talk about this aspect of the work, although she later revisited themes of the collapse of civilizations and ecologies in her two “Mara and Dann” novels, set in a far-future Africa.

    It’s hard to wrap your mind around such a massive phenomenon, especially as it looms over your own life, let alone the lives of your descendants. It is much easier to deny something like climate change while evidence of it builds around you, than to attempt to engage with the scope of its reality. But in the moment we find ourselves in now, we also need to learn to stretch our capacity to feel, and express, the worst that could happen, like the people beside the lake on Planet Eight.

  • An Alternate History reading list for this moment

    An Alternate History reading list for this moment

    Are we living in an alternate branch of history? I’ve been asking myself that question since waking up the morning of November 9, with the feeling that reality had turned sideways. Since then, many of us have shared the stages of shock, denial, anger and sadness that come after a great loss. But when so many people share these feelings at the same time, that sense of things being profoundly wrenched out of place, of being exiled from the world you know, takes on a different weight.

    Elections can be turning points. Millions of people weighed in on the country’s direction—leaving aside the issues of how their opinions were influenced—and this time the joker came out on top, confounding the expectations of many. A shift happened, which we’re just beginning to live through, and which has the power to affect the world. Trying to make sense of this, I keep coming back to the imaginative precedents offered by alternate history.

    The impulse to imagine alternate histories has long roots. Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian Livy speculated on whether Alexander the Great could have defeated Rome. Modern alternate history emerged along with science fiction—in L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 classic Lest Darkness Fall, an archeologist finds himself thrown back in time to a slightly different Rome in the sixth century CE, where he manages to insert enough technology and knowledge to prevent the coming of the Dark Ages.

    pkd-2-covers-rfa-mihc

    The imagination of darker alternate timelines—with the Nazis and other Axis powers winning World War II, for example—has become an enduring strand in the genre. There’s Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which takes place in a post-war America carved up into protectorates of the Nazis and the Japanese. Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy plays out a timeline in which Britain has become a fascist dictatorship following a peace made with Nazi Germany, thanks to the influence of the appeasement faction and American isolationism. Simon Zelitch’s Judenstaat offers another possible World War II outcome, with a Jewish state arising not in Palestine but in the area that for us became part of East Germany, and falling inside the oppressive political orbit of the USSR.

    Then there are novels that give us a vision of a homegrown Fascism taking power in the United States. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America traces an alternate historical path in the 1930s, following the election of Charles Lindbergh as President (in our time, he was a Nazi sympathizer). This leads to state-sponsored anti-Semitism that includes a Jewish relocation program. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here follows a Huey Long-like demagogue who, soon after his election to the presidency, uses military force to establish a totalitarian state. Technically It Can’t Happen Here may not qualify as alternate history, since Lewis was writing in 1935 about an upcoming election, not about a divergent event in the past. [LINK] http://www.uchronia.net/intro.html

    I’ve seen many of these novels cited as parallels to the moment we find ourselves in now. But I haven’t heard anyone bring up a more obscure novel by Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth, which was posthumously published in 1985. Dick also adapted the plot as a story-within-a-story, appearing as a film watched by the characters in his great late work, VALIS.

    Set in the late 1960s, Radio Free Albemuth hinges on the election of Ferris F. Fremont, a corrupt politician associated with a right-wing populist movement. As it turns out, Fremont is also a covert Russian agent. Fremont was partly inspired by Richard Nixon, whose appeal to “Middle America” nominally qualified him as a populist. But as a parallel to our President Elect, Dick’s Fremont hits the trifecta: corrupt dealings, right-wing populism, and Russian influence.

    It was Dick’s swirling mix of paranoia and reality-confusion that I thought of the morning after the election. The Man in the High Castle, for example, sets up not just one alternate strand but several: there’s a book-within-a-book by an author who imagines a different ending to the war, with the U.S. and Britain becoming the postwar superpowers, and this serves to sabotage the novel’s dominant reality. (John Gray delves into this aspect of the novel in an insightful piece comparing it to the current TV adaptation.)LINK BELOW

    Philip K. Dick is not the author I would prefer to choose as the prophet of our coming political time. But the creeping ambiguity of his fictional multiverses feel like a match for the fear and uncertainty pervading the world we find ourselves in now.

  • Other Times, Other Worlds—Fran Wilde & Lawrence M. Schoen

    Other Times, Other Worlds—Fran Wilde & Lawrence M. Schoen

    Cloudbound and Barsk coversI’m excited to be part of All But True’s next author event, “Other Times, Other Worlds,” with two award-winning science fiction authors: Fran Wilde and Lawrence M. Schoen. It’s coming up on November 11—our second time at Mighty Writers West, and our first time focusing on speculative fiction. Here are my thoughts on the novels Fran and Lawrence will be reading from, discussing, and signing.

    Lawrence M. Schoen’s 2015 novel Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard won the Cóyotl Award for excellence in anthropomorphic fiction, and it’s easy to see why. It describes a far future peopled by sapient descendants of elephants and other mammals, “upraised” by humans in the distant past, with the humans now long gone. The Eleph and Fant live in exile from the rest of the interplanetary Alliance, on the rainforest planet Barsk.

    What I love most about this book is how Schoen extrapolates his humanized pachyderms from our own knowledge and appreciation of this endangered species. Fant society is matriarchal, with the more nomadic males moving in and out of the settled, female-centric communities. Adhering to the legend of the elephants’ graveyard, they know the time and place of their death. And they are keepers of memory and history, both for themselves and other species in the Alliance.

    The Fants’ ability to speak with the dead, aided by the psychoactive drug Koph, is a natural and intriguing outgrowth of their strong attunement to the past—and becomes a central element of the story. Barsk builds through widening tiers of revelations, and by the end you’ll learn why and how the Fant became the outcasts of the Alliance, reviled by the furry dogs, otters, bears and other sapient animals in spite of their crucial role as the sole suppliers of Koph.

    Cloudbound is the second book in Fran Wilde’s Bone Universe Series. Updraft, the first book, won Wilde both the Compton Crook award for best first science fiction/fantasy novel and the Andre Norton Award for outstanding young adult science fiction/fantasy. Updraft introduced a world where people fly on silk wings between living bone towers, and followed Kirit Densira’s discovery of her destiny as a Singer, along with the machinations of the secretive Spire.

    Cloudbound picks up after the Spire’s power has been broken, and shifts to the experience of Kirit’s tower-mate Nat. With Kirit and a small band of outcasts, he flees the conflict-ridden City, traveling down into the clouds in search of long-hidden secrets. This book has a more communal dynamic than the first, and delivers the kind of deepening complexity that’s required of a second installment. Nat’s understanding of leadership is tested against unexpected betrayals and misuse of power by those around him. Cloudbound is as gripping as the first book, and as breathtaking in its development of this vivid and dangerous world.

    All But True, a free author reading series hosted by the Working Writers Group

    Other Times, Other Worlds—an evening of speculative fiction, with Lawrence M. Schoen and Fran Wilde 

    Friday, November 11 at Mighty Writers West

    3861 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104 215–244-4005

     

  • Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling makes the world

    Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling makes the world

    Maria Popova has written onstorytelling around the fire her wonderful website Brain Pickings about Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay on the nature of speech, “Telling is Listening.” This brought back to me the sense of how much Le Guin—a master storyteller herself—has made the importance of storytelling a central theme in many of her novels and stories.

    In the essay, from her collection The Wave in the Mind, Le Guin argues that human communication is not some mechanistic process, involving the transmission of data bits from one brain to another, but is a complex and mutually created event. The message, she says, can’t be separated from “the relationship between speaker and hearer.” Language itself is social. In an image recalling the primal experience of listening to the storyteller around a fire, she says, “The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers.”

    That very human experience appears again and again in Le Guin’s work, where she has meditated on its significance in different ways. In The Telling, one of her Hainish cycle novels, an ancient culture has been kept alive by the spoken sharing of its history, myths and poetry, while its sacred texts are hidden away from the authoritarian regime that now rules the planet. Then, even this connection is threatened when the authorities outlaw any gatherings to hear The Telling, as it’s called. Le Guin’s young-adult fantasy trilogy Annals of the Western Shore begins with Erroc, a boy who rejects his inherited gift for “undoing,” only to eventually find his calling as a powerful storyteller. In Voices, the second book in the series, Erroc helps the members of a people whose tradition of learning and literature is under attack by a fundamentalist group.

    These books tell us that stories, spoken or written, are not just information, but the medium that weaves a culture into existence—in the same way that speech, for Le Guin, is the medium of a shared understanding. But in one short story of Le Guin’s that has stayed with me, and that Popova reminded me of, the power of storytelling goes even beyond this.

    “The Shobies’ Story” is another Hainish cycle story, from Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. The crew of the Shoby, an intergalactic spaceship, embark on the first voyage with a new faster-than-light propulsion system that will involve a human crew. No one knows what to expect, and one crew member’s attempts to explain the new system make it sound more metaphysical than mechanical: “‘It is not physical, and it is not not physical,’” he tries. “‘So the ship will be moved,’” another asks, “‘by ideas?’”

    The trip is instantaneous. But where exactly they’ve arrived is not clear; and, more frightening than that, everyone, from the old navigator to the children, seems to be having a different experience—they can’t even agree on what is happening. Something in the trip has fractured their shared reality, and different probable events jostle with each other, all equal in weight. In a later story, a character calls it “‘the chaos experience.’” It’s only when they all sit down at the hearth in their living quarters (yes, this ship has a fireplace) and start to tell a communal story of their journey, that space and time begin to knit back together into a narrative they can agree on.

    Wow. “The Shobies’ Story” seems to suggest that we need the mutual creation of stories not just to share cultural knowledge, but even to create the perceived universe that we all agree on. Without the human sharing of speech and story, that understanding breaks down, and we’re lost in our individual dream worlds. This story may offer a mirror of Le Guin’s classic novel The Lathe of Heaven, a nightmare scenario in which one man’s dreams actually change the world he wakes back up to. But in the Shoby crew’s desperate and humble reenactment of an ancient tradition, Le Guin seems to suggest that the shared experience of telling, in some fundamental way, has the power to make, and remake, our world.

  • The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time

    The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time

    The witches of A Wrinkle in TimeI was in sixth grade when I was swept up in the world of A Wrinkle in Time, part of the first generation of girls to discover it. Madeleine L’Engle’s novel imprinted itself on my imagination and gave me a sense of what speculative fiction could be, before I had read much science fiction. Its tingling sense of possibility, and its fearless leaping into deep territory stayed with me, as I later found and read other pioneering authors like Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler.

    What makes A Wrinkle in Time such a touchstone, a kind of pole star that has helped many readers, and particularly girls and young women begin navigating their sense of themselves in the cosmos? Many people have written about the power of encountering the anti-cheerleader Meg—a twelve-year-old girl who excels at math and science—not to mention Meg’s mother, Mrs. Murry, who is both a working scientist and a loving, understanding parent.

    But it’s not just these two strong female characters that made this book different. L’Engle pulled off something wildly, radically original, marking her own path into a field that is still male-dominated. The title slyly announces its difference: it’s a “wrinkle” in time, not some grand, adventurous noun (Trek, anyone?), but a humble, domestic thing that normally reminds us of fabric—the tangible women’s work of sewing and ironing. Yet this image animates the Tesseract concept that allows Meg and others to leapfrog through space and time on their quest to find her scientist father. Likewise, the story roots itself in the creaky details of Meg’s shabby but welcoming old house before launching into its playful exploration of different planets and ways of being, all without recourse to any of the shiny, tech-heavy details that characterize hard science fiction.

    That’s not all. L’Engle, who knew her world mythologies, offers three characters who are introduced as witches—one of them is even named Mrs Which. But these witches are thoroughly de-demonized. No shrill Queens of the Night or interchangeable Weird Sisters here; these are three old-lady pals who genuinely like each other, each with her own distinct personality. They are in fact mentors and helpers to Meg and her companions, and even as they shape-shift, shedding their gender to reveal more cosmic identities, they retain their profoundly good intentions.

    And then there are the inhabitants of the planet Ixchel, where Meg is taken to recover from the near-death trauma of Tessering through the Black Thing. These huge furred creatures understand the world completely through sensitive tentacles, and communicate without words. Instead of nightmarish, Alien-like insectoids like those encountered in Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game, we’re given many-limbed beings with the enveloping tactile and emotional ambience of the mother-infant bond, as Meg is regressed and re-raised by an individual she names “Aunt Beast.”

    No wonder publishers didn’t know what to do with L’Engle’s manuscript at first. The human characters (Meg and her mom) and the supernatural characters broke the gender barriers of their time. Two archetypal extremes are embodied as female: the celestial, sky-flying, far-seeing witches, and the feelingful, earth-connected species of Ixchel (the planet was named for the Mayan goddess of healing and childbirth). And there are no man-eating monsters among them. If A Wrinkle in Time has given boys something new to chew on in these recast archetypes, that’s great. On behalf of stargazing girls everywhere, I’m grateful to Madeleine L’Engle for letting her imagination fly.

  • Kate Atkinson and quantum physics

    Kate Atkinson and quantum physics

    LifeAfterLife3Kate Atkinson has now won the Costa Book Award twice in the past three years—for her companion novels, A God in Ruins (2015) and the stunning Life After Life (2013). To celebrate, here are my thoughts on the first one, which I just finished.

    Life after Life can be seen as a kind of thought experiment: what if a life, when cut off by early death, could be lived again, and again and again? Would anything change, and would the person who lives it learn anything from her previous experiences?

    This is what happens to Ursula Todd, who is born, and then born again, and again, on a snowy night in England in 1910. She arrives stillborn the first time, but we follow her as she doggedly relives her own life, which gradually extends in length until she lives as far as the London Blitz and, once or twice, into postwar peacetime and poverty. A diagram of the book’s structure would look very different from most novels: more like a tree, with several of Ursula’s early lives cut off by accident and illness (in the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918) at the trunk, and then longer branches developing as Ursula moves into adulthood—some subtly altered, and others veering off in starkly different directions.

    Some moments act as pressure points. One, a lazy summer afternoon in the yard of her large family’s comfortable home outside London, contains the seeds of events that fuel multiple divergences. Other moments feel like twigs rather then branches—possibilities for relationships that never come to fruition. In most of Ursula’s lives, she remains single, and only in one life does she have a child.

    If this were a work of science fiction, we would expect the author to open her hand and explain, or at least suggest, how all this works. Is Ursula the only one who has, or is cursed with, this ability to relive her own life? Or are other people branching away into parallel lives as well? From one life to the next, Ursula feels intimations and omens from her earlier experiences, which can move her to act differently, averting the previous outcome. If she isn’t the only one this is happening to, is she the only one with the sensitivity to break through the membrane of death and benefit from her experiences?

    Atkinson has little interest in spelling out her premise; the closest she comes is an allusion to reincarnation, in conversations a young Ursula has with her psychiatrist, to whom she is sent after a troubling incident rising from one of her trace memories. Of course, Ursula’s experience is different from the traditional understanding of reincarnation as the serial inhabiting of different lives over time.

    But her situation offers a vivid illustration of one aspect of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics—what’s known as a Level 3 parallel universe, in which, at every moment, a person’s choices give rise to other probable universes, each slightly different. The theory doesn’t allow for communication among these universes, but that hasn’t stopped many science fiction writers from imagining it happening. Atkinson’s branching structure also suggests video game progressions, as well as, maybe, a hypertext story. I don’t think Atkinson meant the novel to be any of those things, but it brought up these questions for me as strongly as any science fiction narrative.

    What she does offer, as the magnificent writer she is, is a deeply intimate, richly novelistic sense of a person living her life, and the people and events that surround her. For me, the repetitions and variations through Ursula’s many lives had the effect of intensifying the sense of being inside this character’s skin, as well as that sense of readerly poignancy when recognizing the return of a character or place, just slightly shifted.

    When Ursula lives through several horrifying variants of the Blitz, it becomes more powerful for me, not numbingly repetitive. If a novel is a way of intimately knowing a person or a cultural point in time, then the refraction of Ursula’s experiences among her different lives gives a heightened, more-dimensional sense of her and her time—a kind of turbo-powered literary portrait.

    I wondered at one point if this novel might crystallize a new genre: of alternate lives, as opposed to alternate histories like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. (Life After Life does venture a little into alternate history too.) If there are any more books like this, I’d like to know. On the other hand, I can’t imagine anyone doing it with more breathtaking intensity than Kate Atkinson has here.

  • Remembering Sun Ra

    Remembering Sun Ra

    Limited-edition press of a Sun Ra remix by Brendan Lynch/deUS

    Space is the Place—the wild space-fantasy film starring Sun Ra, the legendary experimental jazz artist—came out in 1974. It follows Sun Ra and his Arkestra as they travel to another planet, where they hope to create an off-earth home for African Americans. Back on Earth, they do battle with a pimp-overlord over the fate of their mission, and play some fantastic music.

    This Friday, Bowerbird will screen a newly restored, digital version of this one-of-a-kind film at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. The event celebrates (just a little late) the movie’s 40th anniversary, and the centenary of Sun Ra’s “arrival,” as he called it, in 1914 in Alabama, as Herman Poole Blount. He settled in Philadelphia for the final chapter of a long and prolific career, “leaving” in 1993.

    I saw Sun Ra and his Arkestra in the early 1970s, a little before Space is the Place premiered. I was a college freshman, and I’d never heard of him. A friend who was a musician took me to a little club in West Philadelphia that looked like a bar on the outside—maybe it was a bar. Crowded in at small tables, we sat just feet away from a phalanx of psychedelic Pharaohs: the members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, dressed in shiny, many-colored robes, and headgear that included some tinfoil. They proceeded to blast me out of any thought I’d ever had about music and what it could be, building to a wailing, clanging, pounding wall of sound, even while the musicians seemed to know exactly what they were doing. That night the Arkestra played their guts out, making sounds that seemed devised to lift the club into earth orbit. Sun Ra may have intended to give black people a sense of transcendence and galactic-level freedom, but he also made room for someone like me, a white teenaged girl who’d studied classical music, to sense the far horizons he was aiming toward.

    That night became a touchstone for me. Sun Ra’s joining of costumed spectacle and no-holds-barred playing made a kind of alchemy happen, and over the years I measured other experimental music and performance against it. No question, Sun Ra achieved serious regard in the jazz world, even as he influenced many other musicians, from George Clinton to Deep Purple to Phish. He may not have managed to transport his people to another planet, but he made music that suggested it was possible.

    Space is the Place, screening as part of Bowerbird’s GATE @ The Rotunda

    Friday January 16, 8 pm / 4014 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

    Introduction by Sun Ra biographer John Szwed / Free / more info at bowerbird.org

  • Nikola Tesla’s hidden contribution

    Nikola Tesla’s hidden contribution

    Tesla cover image

    Tesla featured on the cover of the Electrical Experimenter, 1902

    Nikola Tesla is a hero to geeks everywhere, who will be celebrating his birthday this week. World-famous in his lifetime, the prodigiously gifted inventor fell into semi-obscurity after his death in 1943, even though his inventions helped create the world we live in now.

    Tesla’s fans know about his groundbreaking work in many fields: his invention of radio (sorry, Marconi), his creation of the alternating-current motor, his singlehanded development of remote-control robotics, to name a few—all before 1900. Like some virtuoso of invention, Tesla worked solo, perfecting most of his inventions in his head. Eventually, he held several hundred patents.

    But there is one development for which he hasn’t gotten credit, even as a collaborator. And if you’re thinking it may be the electric car—that’s not it. We should also give Tesla his due for contributing to the birth of modern science fiction.

    Tesla’s imagination never turned off, and he continued to churn out ideas with world-changing implications—if they had been realized. His World Broadcasting System, anticipating the Internet by decades, ended as a half-built ruin on Long Island. He thought up “death rays” made of charged-particle beams, experimented with using principles of resonance to cause earthquakes, and even proposed pulling electricity down from the ionosphere, to provide virtually free energy around the globe.

    These and other huge-scaled projects didn’t come to be, but they inspired others who were part of Tesla’s circle. One of them was Hugo Gernsback, a young writer, inventor and publisher of popular science and science fiction—a term that he coined. (The Hugo award, one of science fiction’s highest honors, is his namesake.) Tesla’s inventions and ideas resonated intensely with Gernsback: articles about Tesla ran regularly in his early magazine, The Electrical Experimenter, and Tesla’s autobiography, My Inventions, appeared in its pages. The young author inserted Tesla into a sci-fi story of his own, The Magnetic Storm, in 1918. A few years later, Gersnback founded the legendary Amazing Stories—the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction.

    Tesla’s work can be seen as a kind of template for early science fiction: they both share a worldwide focus, speculation on war and peace, and a general hope in the possibilities of human progress. The way I see it, it was as if some of the visions Tesla was offering couldn’t be encompassed by society in his time, and had to spill over into the arena of imagination. There they fed the blossoming of a new art form—the first in human history to focus on the future.

    Science fiction has become an immersive background to our lives, via Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, the Matrix and many other imagined future worlds that owe their existence to the genre of popular science fiction. It’s almost second nature for us now to slip into these virtual environments, trying on possibilities and working through ominous scenarios, using the future as a canvas to help us figure out what’s happening now, and where we want to go. We take this time-shifting between present and future for granted—as much as we take for granted the electrical power that surrounds us, thanks to Tesla’s worldwide electrical grid.

    Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla, and thank you for helping to introduce us to the future.

  • Gravity and the Noosphere

    Gravity and the Noosphere

    Earth from space

    I loved seeing Gravity. In my opinion, the Planet Earth should be nominated for a supporting-player Oscar. I drank in the massive, stunning views of the earth in the background of so many scenes—completely convincing, thanks to high-level CGI effects. At those screen-filling distances, you could make out the thin, blue-white film of the atmosphere, the delicate outer membrane that makes life on earth possible. There they were: the biosphere and the atmosphere, as seen from space for real by just a few hundred people so far.

    That soft shell of atmosphere offers a visual analogue to other, unseen layers, both actual and imagined. There’s cyberspace—a zone of reality that’s tied to physical things like computers, servers, satellites and fiber-optic cable, but can’t be seen or felt. We call this domain digital, but what does that mean? It doesn’t seem farfetched to think of this quickly filling-in worldwide web as another, invisible shell surrounding the earth’s surface.

    And then there’s the noosphere, an idea put forward by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin about 90 years ago. He was inspired by Vladimir Verdansky, a Russian scientist who himself gets credit for coming up with the term “biosphere.” With the noosphere (the prefix comes from Greek nous, for mind) Teilhard invites us into a kind of thought experiment: imagine that all of human thought surrounds the earth in an invisible shell. As our mental outpourings grow and intensify, this “thinking layer” fills in and comes into its own. Teilhard suggested that the noosphere would emerge out of technologies “extending a closely interdependent network” around the world. At that time he was referring to radio, teletype and television—but his description seems to eerily anticipate the Internet and our current web of digital communication.

    This promise of the noosphere pulled me in when I first heard about it. It was there when I wrote in the libretto for Violet Fire about Nikola Tesla’s vision of the earth becoming “a single brain” through his planned World Broadcasting System. In Leaving Alexandria, the novel I’m working on, it has helped me envision the accumulation of knowledge, from ancient libraries to our expanding digital cybersphere. We can’t see any of these the way we can see the translucent envelope of our atmosphere, but that doesn’t stop us from experiencing them around us.

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