Something of a sequel to my first post of that title on the politics and poetics of science fiction.
One Green One Red by *complejo on deviantART
Though its original crest has long receded, the 60s British New Wave of science fiction continues to produce ripple effects. I wonder, in fact, if M. John Harrison’s Light, which I’ve just read (though it was published in 2002), plays a little with the moniker given to that group of writers around Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds with his thematics of a constellation of planets - some artificial - forming pebbles on a beach next to the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract, a porously impenetrable space where all the laws of the universe appear to be confounded.
Harrison himself, a lyrical writer and an accomplished fantasist, continues to sound some of the notes of the critical fugue of the New Wave - the feeling that science fiction had to “grow up”, and that genre fiction should attempt to inculcate a sense of responsibility among readers by showing the consequences of characters’ actions - an ethic that is perhaps distinctly modernist. Here, there was probably a gesture to the sensibilities of the so-called “mainstream” as well as an attempt to reinscribe sf as “speculative fiction” - an exploration of inner space as much as outer space. As a programmatic call to other writers, it has the same sorts of ambiguities any such literary manifesto carries in its wake, but it seems to work for Harrison himself - in seemlessly interweaving philosophical and cosmological questions with the conventions of noir and space opera both in one text.
As space opera, Light works. Although the plot construction is complex, the threads begin to interweave quickly, and the three parallel stories have their own page turning momentum - the respective adventures of Michael Kearney, a depressing scientific serial killer taunted by chance and the roll of the dice at the turn of the second millennium, a posthuman K-Ship Seria Mau Genlicher - once a fragile girl, and an adventurer turned VR addict Ed Chianese grappling his way out of the tank with a little help from his friends, some of whom may actually be real. There’s social satire aplenty, poetic invocations of beauty and terror, and love stories intermixed with frailty and cruelty.
It’s there that I had a bit of trouble with the book. And it seems I’m not alone. I’ve only consulted reviews after reading it myself, but Adrienne Martini at Bookslut has put her finger on it:
It’s a study in how removed your characters can be from events that they are the cause of, like everyone in the book is caught in a maelstrom while taking heavy anti-psychotics with Xanax chasers. It’s hard to like characters who are that affectless.
… as has Adam Roberts at Infinity Plus:
Who writes better than M John Harrison? Of the, let’s say, four hundred writers of cover scanEnglish prose alive today worthy of serious and sustained critical attention, the answer is: very few. Perhaps Updike, or Toni Morrison, or Jim Crace have written better passages of descriptive prose, but none of those writers have the range of reference, the grounded yet estranging vividness, the plotting and world-building imaginative muscle that Harrison possesses. Perhaps DeLillo does better dialogue, and is on a par at capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life, but he doesn’t expand the mind the way Harrison does. Perhaps later Roth captures the wrenching and violent undercurrents of the quotidian better, but Harrison does it without limiting himself to Roth’s monomaniacal single-mindedness of aesthetic vision. Light is the real thing. It is not a comfortable read, it is sometimes ugly and it is often startling, but throughout it declares itself a golden novel in an age, and a genre, of many imitative and reductive exercises in silver fiction.
“Beauty, banality and menace” cuts to the quick. But I’m not sure that Martini is right that the characters lack affect. It’s more that - for several but related reasons - they’ve chosen to inure themselves to it - the posthuman K-Ship through a choice that has effectively trapped her in adolescence, thrashing around and killing and then regretting her inability to revivify the humans and clones that she’s treated as if they were pets or toys. But she does cry after spilling milk, and the inability of Kearney to - live - and to choose without destroying also is a metonym for something real about the masculine condition, as is his perplexity at his ex-wife Anne’s attempts to actually offer him - love. And Chianese surely finds it - if love ala noir is in fact love.
But this blockage of identification and feeling is actually the point. Harrison is trying to catch our attention, draw us in, with the plot fireworks, which like the reality the characters inhabit, seem irreal but compelling. The ugliness is there for a reason - because the ugliness is part of the exact nature of the catastrophe whose dimensions he’s trying to paint impressionistically.
Light is a tale of the will to power, and of the will to represent and capture and the damage done not just to a stable reality but also to the creatures - of every species - trapped within a fundamentally hierarchical universe, even as its precepts provide no foundation for the footsteps we must take:
Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything.
You could see every strange thing out there on the Beach, ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out tubby little ships like these. In the end the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone’s worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all.
There’s the “sense of wonder” for you. And the race to the stars, even if it doubles back on itself into strange tales of a 50s Chicago, is surely not just a trope that represents the imposition of a meta-narrative about the human journey, but that very same journey, described and re-presented in language that often deliberately echoes and references scriptural texts.
The questions Harrison wants us to ponder are pre-eminently political (and personal!) - what is at stake in the violent imposition of narrative closure? What ethical compromises are part of both everyday life and grand projects, and are they worth it? How deeply gendered and embodied are these steps we take?
There’s also more than a ghost of a reference to the Enlightenment project in the title, and in the text.
And, oh, can he write:
‘Hey Seria,’ he said. ‘What’s this, you ask? Well it’s goodnight from me. And a fucking goodnight to you.’
‘He’s on us,’ said the mathematics.
Moire’s ship flickered towards her through the wreckage. It looked like a ghost. It looked like a shark. Nothing she could do would be fast enough. The White Cat turned and turned in panic like one of her own victims, looking for a way out. Then everything lit up like a Christmas tree, and the Krishna Moire was batted away in the blast, a black needle toppling end over end against the dying flare of the explosion. In the same instant, Seria Mau became aware that something huge had materialised beside the White Cat. It was the Nastic cruiser, its vast, mouldy-looking hull, like a rotting windfall in some old orchard, still crawling with autorepair media.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘They bumped him. Uncle Zip bumped his own guy.’
‘I don’t think it was Uncle Zip,’ the mathematics said. ‘The command came from somewhere else in the shop.’ A dry laugh. ‘It’s like the bicameral mind in there’.
Seria Mau felt weepy when she heard this.
‘It was the commander,’ she said. ‘He always liked me. And I always liked him.’
‘You don’t like anyone,’ the mathematics pointed out.
‘Usually I don’t,’ said Seria Mau. ‘But I’m very up and down today. I can’t work out what’s the matter with me.’ Then she said: ‘Where’s that bastard Moire?’…
Fiat lux indeed.
There’s a sequel - Nova Swing. That’s next on my reading list.
Elsewhere: Another review from Jeff VanderMeer at the SF Site.
More of these posts please Mark, they’re bonza! (and it doesn’t just have to be sf…).
I think you hit the nail on the head referring to Harrison as New Wave - indeed, I think it’s his great strength and weakness, and something as a writer that he has never been able to develop - either from or beyond.
Imho, his books all have that quality - dazzling, elliptical, fervid, and yet somehow also removed, abstract, inconsistent, almost trivial in some ways. It leaves me so frustrated; I feel that he is a writer teetering on greatness, yet has never had the courage to leap from the brink of what keeps him comfortable - his inimtable style, which is avant garde by the standards of the genre, perhaps, but he’s been doing almost the same thing for over twenty five years now.
I feel like he’s almost afraid to strip his ideas, take them beyond his splendid, whirling metaphors; as if exposing them to the cold light of prose would leave them small and pathetic, like a nightclub during the day time. This is typified in A Place In The Heart, where the central conceit is never explained, or even described, only alluded to, a glitering Macguffin to power his narrative.
In this respect, I think as you mention, that as a writer, he is like many of his characters - partcularly the ship -: capable of amazing things, but never quite breaking the cycle, lacking an insight - because his books always argue that the insight is either an illusion, or not what you think, and it’s his characters’ reactions or expectations that shape the narrative. For once, I would love to see the real thing, though, and I keep coming back to Harrison in hope of it…
That’s well put, patrickg. I think the Viriconium sequence, for instance, is fairly dazzling as a play with forms and even as the invocation of a mood, but it does leave you wanting a certain supplementary something! Maybe part of the contribution he does make is to stretch the stylistic and formalistic limits - ie in urban fantasy - which other writers can then take somewhere else. But, yep, he does leave you feeling that he’s capable of more himself.
Glad you’re liking the posts!
I would agree with that wholeheartedly, I would situate Harrison as a real bridging influence between old garde genre-benders like Moorcock and the ‘new weird’; of Vandermeer, Mieville, etc. (even though many of these writers have been writing concurrently!).
I have Viriconium sitting right here waiting for me to read. It’s interesting, too, to contrast him with two of those writers: Moorcock and Mieville.
Moorcock’s insane, hallucinatory visions are powered by the centrality of his ideas (imho) - the in-depth exploration, extrapolation and in some cases explosion of whatever trope or metaphor he happens to be interested in.
Mieville, on the other hands, is almost all lumbering, astonishing vision; the only fuel is a class-consciousness simmering underneath. But it’s not just an idea, or a conceit for Mieville; whilst I feel his books lack the intellectual underpinnings (something I’m sure he, and many of his fans would dispute) of Moorcock et al. he doesn’t need them, because he has a concrete reality to play with.
Harrison, I feel, is trapped halfway in between. There’s an intellectual subconsciousness underpinning what he writes, but he’s prepared to let it get subsumed by the intensity of his vision. But only for a while, impulsive and fickle, neither fully committed to one or the other.
This all said, I enjoy and have read, and continue to read books by all three, whatever the flaws may be. They are consistently interesting enough, and put to shame the majority of other writers in the sf/f space (Peter Hamiliton, *shudder*. Terry Goodkind *whimper*).
Nova Swing is really different, but wonderful too. I guess it’s in the vein of the Ed Chianese sections, but it’s doing something different. I think you’ll love it.
Interspersing the two, Peter, with a re-reading of R. A. Lafferty’s Devil is Dead, which I like to reread every few years.
Patrickg, I think you’ll find Viriconium is just a tad Moorcock influenced as well, remembering that Harrison tried his hand at the collective insanity that is Jerry Cornelius and Co. Maybe there’s that New Wave thing again. Moorcock isn’t so much a stylist, I don’t think, though he’s got a very strong command of different styles - ie the almost baroque Gloriana - a lot of which comes from his knowledge of English poetry and plays (particularly Restoration drama). But I think it’s the way the ideas spin that’s key for him.
Anyway, I’d be very interested in hearing what you think of Viriconium.
Incidentally, the first Moorcockian Jerry Cornelius story in a while - “Modem Times” - is newly published.
http://www.multiverse.org/?q=node/67
Just on Mieville and class consciousness, that’s something I was kinda pondering wrt Light, and I’ve kinda alluded to with what I see as a sort of bourgeois ethic as being part of Harrison’s program for (science) fiction. Absent from Light is much sense of the viability of collective action, or insofar as it treats history/cosmology (and it’s unquestionably one of the book’s unifying threads if a bit obscured til the end), anything but a sort of Whig/Deist narrative writ large. But I think he knows that, and the text allows us to inhabit a space that’s critical of it, and the tensions aren’t resolved. Which is also why the ending feels (and arguably is) crap. But that may be either intentional or a sign that he couldn’t resolve - almost in a narrative manner approaching the dialectic - the tensions he’d set in motion.
If that makes any sense!
“Absent from Light is much sense of the viability of collective action”
While collective action may be a major hinge of history, it doesn’t make for page turning narratives. For that, you need to focus on individuals limned in discrete chunks of time and space.
But speaking of “Whig/Deist” narratives written large and smart - check out Roger Zelazny’s ‘Lord of Light.’.
“”You fertility deities are worse than Marxists!”
It’s also the only SF novel ever developed as a film project that was then used by CIA for a deep cover exfiltration operation. In Persia - home of one of the great fire gods. Now that’d make a good film.
And I cannot recommend too much Ian MacDonald’s ‘River of Gods’ which among other things deals with class, caste and citizen mobs in a 1.5 billion people culture/society fragmented into a half a dozen geopolitical entities.
And let us not forget subcontinental writers were pioneers of what is commonly now called science fiction.
MacDonald’s in my pile too, Nabs.
But I’d question this:
Zola? Or War and Peace for that matter? One of the interesting things about Tolstoy’s epic is that the characters are really cyphers designed to dramatise the movement of history, a point that could be made about a lot of 19th century literature. But Zola and Tolstoy, or Stendhal for that matter, are all compelling writers… The attempts to turn War and Peace into a conventional romance and stirring action narrative through abridgement are total failures for that reason.
And Jack Kirby (yes, that Jack Kirby) did some production designs for the proposed film version of ‘Lord of Light’ that was ‘borrowed’ by CIA as cover for a covert operation in Persia.
Like I said, there’s a film waiting to happen about US black ops using SF writers and comic book mavens to provide cover for a grab job in the birthplace of Zoroaster.
(Continuity alert: My previous context-providing comment on this topic may not appear first at first due to the LP antispambots throwing a whoopsie at three or more links per comment.)
Yep, those non-human actors can interfere with the most skilfully spliced narrative arcs of cats and humans!
“Zola? Or War and Peace for that matter? One of the interesting things about Tolstoy’s epic is that the characters are really cyphers designed to dramatise the movement of history, a point that could be made about a lot of 19th century literature. But Zola and Tolstoy, or Stendhal for that matter, are all compelling writers”
Yes but it took the empathy with and plot lines of Lantier and Sorel to lead you into the narrative cathedrals that Zola and Stendhal were constructing.
I’ll spot you ‘War and Peace’ though. A basically unfilmable towering edifice and fucking boring when it was rendered for TV. The exception that proves the rule?
Hmmm, maybe. If I scratch my head or consult a tattered copy of Lukacs’ The Historical Novel, I might be able to think of a few more!
Seriously, though, there is something to the characterisation of the modernist novel as a turn to interiority, which has its own political unconscious. Sf’s interesting in that regard - the poor characterisation in much “hard sf” might be a symptom of something, and the tensions between broad sweep and big forces and little characters that don’t quite get written out in Asimov’s Foundation novels say something interesting as well. It’s a delicate balancing act - Stephenson is obviously aware of it with the sharpness of the breaks within the individual novels of the Baroque cycle, which are conscious narrative devices to foreclose one set of characters and shine the light on another slice of time/history/society.
The end point is probably something like the Jerry Cornelius books, where the characters themselves change with the changing times, even as they try to stop entropy dead in its tracks to preserve their shaky identities and slippery selves. Or LeGuin with the Left Hand of Darkness.
Ps - this is a lot more fun than political blogging, n’est-ce pas?
Well speaking of interior voices and living characterisation in SF, one could, if one was so inclined, break SF into several distinct epochs, each defined not so much by shifts in the science as by shifts in the social gestalt, both in terms of what we expect from the future and from our fictioneers- with odd exceptions breaking out here and there like pimples…or tumours…
Verne, Wells et al were all about man using new tech to blaze broad paths of discovery across space and time and then deal with the consequences with a Victorian technocratic but stable society. (Although I think Captain Nemo is quite a well rounded updating of the classic romantic Byronic hero.)
Then you had the John Campbell era which borrowed plotlines and tropes from everywhere but made serious attempt to rework them with believable tech jargon for an audience also reading Popular Mechanics and National Geographic in the 30 and 40s as the most hi-tech war erupted.
Then you had the Asimovs, Clarkes and Heinlens in the 50s starting to reconnect the science with the big society picture. While at the same time Bester, Simak, Sturgeon, Blish and co were exploring how individual sentient creatures would react to tech-driven new circusmstances. And while Wyndham, Frank Russell and Pohl/Kornbulth were extrapolating possible futures with a shrewd satrist’s eye on the present.
Then in the sixites, the shock of the new and the strange all got internalised by Ellison, Zelzany, Delany, Brunner, Spinrad et in the US and the New Wave in the UK - Ballard, Disch, P
Meanwhile you had writers like Tiptree (now she could do strong characters),Philip Jose Farmer, Moorcock, Kurt Vonnegut and some Dick operating completely suis generis.
There was a lapse into fantasy cheese while the established names ran out their franchises in the seventies.
Then in the early eighties along came the cyberpunks -Gibson, Sterling, Vinge, Rucker etc- that really hotwired the genre - finding new links between pop/music/fashion and the emerging globalised datasphere.
Durng the 90s, there was a bit of retreat back to classic 40s hard SF - driven by a new sense of science wonder spawned from astrophysics research breakthroughs. Universe bsuting concepts explained by cardboard cutouts.
But over the last decae, it’s been open slather - everything SF is conceptually and stylistically up for grabs - as is the world in which it is now created.
The world’s largest, most expensive and most metaphysical science endeavor ever, the Large Hadron (I almost wrote “Hardon” there) Collider goes live in about three months. It’s either gonna find the Higgs-Boson particle and/or God and/or create an ever expanding black hole.
It’s the wet dream, visually and conceptually of most SF writers - brought to life by dull plodding EU bureaucrats and funky iPodded scientists in colourful T-shirts. Meanwhile for the first time in human history, more people now live in urban rather than rural areas. And hundreds of millions of them in vast governance-free sprawls around 2nd and 3rd world megapolisi.
The next fifty years on planet earth are going to be truly amazing, appalling, whacky, weird and well beyond the speculations of Asimov, Heinlen or Clarke.
“The future is already here. It’s not just distributed evenly.”
NB: Of course there’s a lot of SF writers I didn’t mention. I’m doing the big hand waving thing here. Also I’m drunk and not evenly distributed right now.
Feminist sf, particularly in the 70s and 80s…
Don’t mind me, I’m sober! One more ep of Dark Angel before I go to bed!
But, yep, sf is always the future of a particular present.
And despite the attempts to proclaim or unify authors and ideas - ie “post-cyberpunk”, “new weird”, “slipstream”, etc, it’s kinda interesting that the concept of a particular school or movement ran out of steam genre-wise not all that long after the narrative of succeeding art movements ground to a halt in painting - to be replaced by… ? It may be a sign that we have difficulty conceptualising or totalising our present moment.
“..not all that long after the narrative of succeeding art movements ground to a halt in painting - to be replaced by… ?”
Never mind painting (How archaic is that? These days, studio-based artists and artisans with real wit, style, energy and creativity shouldn’t be labouring over one-off products for a volatile global market. You Tube is much cheaper than primed canvas. Classic painting is well on it’s way to being like flower-arranging), the real parallel for SF is with contemporary music, the artform that’s always emerged anyway over the past 50 years in vague harness with SF in terms of how it reacts to and influences mainstream culture.
And like pop/rock, SF has always generally been driven by strange and ambitious people and obsessively tracked by adolescent males, the energiser bunnies of any civilisaton.
But now these days it’s all one big globalised mashup.
But primed canvas ain’t that expensive, Nabs. One of the things about the art market is that the cost of entry is very low, but the potential gain in relation to the initial investment very high indeed (even if your chances of reaching it are very low). But then, a guitar and an amp aren’t that hard to put your hands on, either… so, QED, I spose.
But that wasn’t really my point. It is that a totalised picture of the present is harder to paint than it was for past presents, and given that sf is really about the present, that accounts for the multiple points of light you’re pointing to. I suspect you’ll find we’re agreeing actually. I like the musical analogy too.
I also reckon you’re painting a lot of smart and geeky adolescent females out of the picture. Go hang around an sf bookshop for a while and you’ll quickly see it ain’t all boys.
“I suspect you’ll find we’re agreeing actually.”
Yup.
My point is though that painting is now a very technically limited art form that no longer attracts the best and zaniest talents that want to play around with the current gestalt. Today’s Jackson Pollacks are doing everything old is new again mashups and today’s Ed Hoppers are putting movies on You Tube.
Y’know the American Empire may be fucking up geopolitically and financially but, just the Brtish Empire before it, it’s now really swinging place creatively.
“But then, a guitar and an amp aren’t that hard to put your hands on, either…”
For roughly the same outlay, you can have a complete digital music studio on your desktop with the web as your distribution medium.
“I also reckon you’re painting a lot of smart and geeky adolescent females out of the picture. Go hang around an sf bookshop for a while and you’ll quickly see it ain’t all boys.”
I do patronise places like Minotaur in Melbourne (only for the Boris Vallejo calenders you understand) and it is mainly blokes hanging around the more outre, lurid and futurist material. The dames tend to be more found at the DVD and art comics sections. Look I’ve no doubt there is a large and growing body of women getting into contemporary SF and and Fantasy. My point is that nerdy male energy is always gonna be the prime mover in this area.
The future will always need women, even when weird men are always obsessively test-piloting it.
Mark, this is a wonderful thread! Wonderful!
On class consciousness or otherwise, I would agree with that assessment of Light, and in what I’ve read of Harrison in general. It’s interesting, I think with most British writers - genre of otherwise - class penetrates everything they do so deeply. It seems so obvious looking at it on the outside, but they never seem aware of it (eg Ian McEwan, who’s never met a poor person he could really write about, it seems, unless through the lens of their poverty).
It’s something I really like and respect about Mieville. And it’s interesting, because he courts allegations of being ham-fisted with it, but his response is that you need to be ham-fisted - that it (class struggle) is by nature hamfisted.
Moorcock I’m not so sure about about, his books are so goddamned subversie - even to themselves - and playful, I’m not sure what’s ‘real’ and what’s a subtle or otherwise jab.
With Moorcock, though, patrickg, he’s a pretty prolific political commentator and so we, if we take the time to find out, know what he thinks. The interesting question is how (or if) that shapes the reading of his fiction.
I know you’re quite the Moorcock fan, what do you think? Certainly, the books of his I’ve read (lots of Cornelius, Elric, Thingy at the end of time) weren’t exactly paeans to the proletariat, but at the same time, they’re (esp Cornelius & End of time) all about deconstructing their subjects, really, I found it sometimes difficult to follow all his threads.
I guess almost (and I’m reluctant to either throw this term around or apply it here and there because I think it’s abused and misunderstood, but genuinely applies here) a post-structuralist writer, in way.
Certainly, his essays, as you say, are rife with political commentary, and in his critical writing he definitely seems to value those aspects in other books/authors.
I think Moorcock’s political position as an anarchist colours all he writes, and so I think he’s got a different position on class from a more socialist author such as Mieville. The point about poverty and McEwan makes an interesting contrast - in some ways Moorcock is representing poverty and criticising its romanticisation at the same time - eg with Mrs Cornelius. I think his major target is bourgeois conformity and that comes through in a lot of what he writes - from sword and sorcery to fictions like the End of Time. But - and here his comments about the importance of the feminist movement are important - he sees the counterpart to bourgeois boredom much more in a sense of play and irony and a loose associational politics - so, yep, in a real way, he is a post-structuralist writer.
I’m enjoying it too, despite not having read any SF. Just on War and Peace and collective action; I thought one of his themes was how big moments in history could all turn on a single, to all appearances unimportant individual and his character and action at a crucial juncture?
Could you give an example, su? It’s an age since I’ve read the book!
An age for me too- I read it when my 14 yr old was 6 weeks new. So take this with a grain of salt and check with someone better informed but my recollection was that there was a contrast made between Napoleon and the various intrigues and strategizing that went on before the final battle and the actions of a regular soldier and how what happened at particular location on the battlefield with relatively few actors turned the course of the battle and so history. It seemed to be saying that that what actually ‘made’ the history of that final day was the character and action of one or two peripheral people rather than the experience and strategy of the generals
That might be read as a refutation of the “Great Men” theory of history, though - in the sense that the decisions of apparently insignificant individuals are shaped by bigger forces than the calculations of the great who try to control those forces?
It might be; that would fit with the little I know of Tolstoy. My impression was of great plans being wrecked upon random events but I am happy to be proved wrong on that. I remember being irritated at one point because I thought Tolstoy was offering a convenient rationalisation of his position in comparison to the serfs, all part of the vast plan and design etc. (Again just my personal reaction.)
I think there is a bit of that, su, and you can infer it from his late turn towards Christian anarchism when he was guilt ridden about his previous choices and beliefs.
It did produce a neat book, though - Resurrection.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/6422/rev0323.html
Thanks Mark, you’ve really nailed Moorcock’s writing (from this perspective) with that description, imho. The sense of play in his writing is such an intriguing one, because he manages to maintain his purpose so to speak; the play is trivial but what it’s about is not, if that makes sense.
Interesting to contrast this with other SF/F writers ‘playing’ in the genre, c.f Harry Harrison, Adams, etc. Pratchett, Holt, Aspirin and Martin Scott, and then Rankin, Aylett and the more modern writers. Vandermeer himself would fall in there too, I guess.
Interesting because the societal concerns and critical spirit that animates a lot of Moorcock’s work appears very strongly in some of these writers (e.g Pratchett and to an extent Scott, despite the more cohesive, less outre elements), and yet in others is wholly absent (Aspirin, Holt, Aylett and Rankin).
And also that a criticism frequently (and unfairly) levelled at the genres is that they fail to engage with real concerns in favour of soap opera or perceived juvenile play and/or fantasy. In fact, in some cases this is how they engage with the issues.
Precisely, patrickg.
Though again, getting back to the top of the thread, it’s interesting to consider that angle in terms of Harrison’s own criticisms of the genre.
su, I just checked my copy of Lukacs’ The Historical Novel - he has an interesting discussion of technique in historical fiction where he says that small events and characters lend themselves better to dramatisation on a human scale - even in the epic form - than huge sweeping battles or revolutionary events or whatever. Wrt War and Piece, he writes:
This thread (and a difference of opinion with mr tog a few months ago) makes me realise that I really must revisit Moorcock. I largely gave up on reading his fiction 20 years ago (although I’ve read many of his essays since and have always throught he was a great editor/anthologist) and I’m now suspecting that the me I was then just didn’t “get” him.
I didn’t “get” Pratchett the first time someone gave me one of his books either, and only really got into Pterry about 10 years ago.
Who else should I be giving a second chance?
Mervyn Peake! Mervyn Peake!
patrickg, I think the bookmark that’s been marking Gormenghast at page 23 for mumblety years might be stuck. Should I steam it off?
Have you read Titus Groan? I started with Gormenghast and then went backwards but I might have liked it better if I’d read the three in order. Give it 50 pages at least to settle in.
On the other hand I will always be glad I read Berniere’s South American novels in reverse order. It would have seemed far more mundane the other way.
Titus Groan!!!
Aieee!!! Is good, Ms Tog!!
Gormenghast is too, but Titus Alone goes in for a little shark-jumping.
Not exactly fast-paced, but it really immerses and affects you.
Tig, I can’t remember if page 23 is good or not…
Su, how funny, I went in that order too! I enjoyed Gorenghast the most, but can’t help wonder if perhaps Titus Groan didn’t affect me so much, merely because I had already experienced that amazing world. I’m still undecided. Sigh, I must read those again.
Ha! So must I!
This thread has actually postponed my intention of reading Nova Swing and sent me back to Michael Moorcock’s Blood:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/6422/rev1176.html
patrickg, there’s actually a lot of resonances between Blood and Light so maybe scope for the sorts of comparisons we were chatting about.
Has Gormenghast ever been made into a movie? It’d be fabulous given the Harry Potter treatment, I reckon!
It was made into a miniseries with Jonathon Rhys Meyers as Steerpike. I missed it though so I can’t tell you what it was like.
Ah, cool, thanks, su! I wonder if it’s on dvd.
I’ve often thought it would do well as a musical/opera, though I’m not a huge fan of either.
There just seems to be so much evoked in Peake’s prose that couldn’t translate emotionally to dialogue and cinematography, and EXTREMELY tasteful and diverse music might just do it.
Oooo, I’ll have to read that, too. Once I’ve finished Viriconium, which is proceeding at a nice pace.
We await your review, patrickg!
I’ve just got around to catching up on my Neal Stephenson backlog, and just finished The Diamond Age last week. Future societies dividing into formally acknowledged (and nanotechnologically marked) tribes which one chooses for oneself, and can move between should one’s aspirations change, rather than being born into a tribal affiliation is a very interesting idea.
That is an interesting idea - I’ll have to have another look at Diamond Age myself in terms of my work on sf and utopia and futures. Thanks, tigtog!
Why did Fiat never bring out a Lux?
Because no one could have made the lux interior.
Caveat emptor, as they say.
I really loved the diamond age, I feel that Stephenson is slowly succumbing to megalomania as he gets older, regardless of how entertaining his books are. I feel Diamond Aage didn’t cross that line between enlightening and lecturing, unlike the baroque cycle.
patrickg, I think I’ve found a short quote which sums up Moorcock’s credo:
That’s from Blood, p. 37.
That’s perfect Mark, well caught.
I’m enjoying the re-read, patrickg - it makes a lot more sense to me at 40 than it did at 30 which may be an indictment of me I suspect!
Neato post and thread!
I have to agree about Stephenson - didacticism run wild in some of his recent stuff. I also think his politics have been kinda too foregrounded - his earlier stuff (as tigtog says) had some interesting quasi-libertarian ideas in it, but now he seems to have swallowed a “history of teh free trade and science” chapbook.
It’s an interesting point - there was certainly always an element of libertarian utopianism in Stephenson’s work - but perhaps it was more the techgeek Wired esque creed of the 90s rather than a more overtly politicised ideology. I can’t really speak to the recent trilogy, though, because I didn’t make it the whole way through the first one.
I read the first two, but couldn’t face the third, two many lectures.
Reading about the first mathemetician to measure the distance between wood-gnat’s wings and how this presaged the formulation of string theory, while meanwhile an African tribe of nipple-worshippers has found a chinese man with six nipples and have elevated him to the status of god, whilst he uses their credulity to help him start an empire of orange-traders based on a primitive futures market, that happens to ship oranges to a biologist fascinated by their mould and her daughter’s persistent thrush infection…
Too much. Exhausting, however sublime isolated moments are.
Yep. Frustrating too because the character-driven aspect of the plot, at least before I gave up, was pretty darned good. But it was in danger of being swamped by the lectures!
Later Heinlein is a bit the same - huge fat books basically filled with “What the author thinks”. Whereas his earlier stuff was rip roaring along - ideology in the background ideas for sure - but compelling and tight reading.
Maybe it’s the price of fame. Look at how the Dune books went - even before poor old Frank Herbert died and they got franchised out.
Mervyn Peake deserves to be recognised as one of the major artistic figures of the 20th century - poet, playwright, set-designer, painter, illustrator, War artist in Belsen - let alone his titanic but sadly truncated achievements as a novelist.
I’m often forcing his books on people to later discover they got a few pages in and gave up - I think part of the problem is that his writing is so heavily laden it appears undisciplined, but to me at least, his strength is exactly what people find so problematic - he approaches writing like a painter or architect, and once you begin to get a sense of the structure he is building, it becomes as compelling as any thriller.
And the fragment that was released as “Titus Alone”, frustrating though it is, is actually a sci-fi novel cleverly disguised. None of them would appreciate the comparison, but the first two Gormenghast books are like a strange admixture of Dickens and Nabokov - whereas the third is Kafka and Beckett butting against the steely edges of strange new technology.
Do any Moorcock enthusiasts recall his first (british) wife’s surname? Cherry ….? She wrote an autob. of life with him in “Polly Put the Kettle On” and was working on a bleak future-to-bored-to-arrive book called “The Lone Zonbe” when their marriage broke up.
“Gormenghast” was on TV in 3 or 4 chunks in the late 90s, very colourful and nicely spiced with the indiviudal characters but didn’t actually amount to a narrative - probably because Titus was an insufferable prig but Steerpike, Lady Fuschia and the terrible twins were superb. I think they were played by Zoe Wannamaker.
Me staggered through Children of Dune, but will not touch God Emperor of Dune or Dune: What The Hell Was I Thinking?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock#Biographical
Bailey’s also an sf writer and editor.
Overall, worth chasing down do you think?
Absolutely not - the version I remember aired on the Beeb in about ‘03 as a mini; what I saw was a foolish travesty.
Oh dear. Thanks.
“And the fragment that was released as “Titus Alone”, frustrating though it is, is actually a sci-fi novel cleverly disguised.”
Ye, didn’t work as a coherent long form narrative but was full of some very powerful set pieces like the Scientist’s Factory with the gloves and production line ( elarly infused by Peak’es encounter with Belsen) and the Scientist’s Daughter’s party which was planned as a complete mindfuck masque for Titus but which backfired ‘cos it actually remined him of home )Gormenghast) is the best way.
I remember the TV mini-series. The set design and art direction was very striking if not quite what I hd envisaged in my mind’s eyes. A bit too Eastern European and clean. The bloke playing Steerpike and Prunesquallor were very good, if not quite how Mervyn drew them. However they went a bit too much Robert (the Cure) Smith on Titus himself. And they didn’t cast the young Helen Bonhan-Carter as Fuschia. Who has one of the best death scenes ever in reasonably modern literature.
The real highlight was Spike Milligan as the terminally decrepit Dr Bellgrove, wheeled in to stole every scene he was in without uttering a word. He got the point. It was surrealistic Dickens meets 19th century sardonic Walpolese gothic but would only work if you brought the funny as well.
It’d take the next David Fincher, Guillermo Del Toro or Hayao Miyazaki to do the Gormenghast/Titus story true justice on screen. Someone who would get the look and feel of Peake’s world while also realising the characters and their relationships with each other are the real startlingly-designed and crumbling edifices in the narrative.
Why doesn’t Paul Allen buy the screen rights off Sting (Yes, he had ambitions to play Steerpike) and hand them over, along with 70 million dollars, to Terry Guilliam?
That’d work I think. And if it all fucks up, at least some footage will end up in The Hall of Bright Carvings.
I really fucked up one para there above. Read this instead for para two.
“Yep, Titus Alone didn’t work as a coherent long form narrative but was full of some very powerful set pieces like the Scientist’s Factory with the gloves and production line (clearly infused by Peake’s encounter with Belsen) and the Scientist’s Daughter’s party which was planned as a complete mindfuck masque for Titus but which backfired ‘cos it actually remined him of home (Gormenghast).
And of course the slaughter of Muzzlehatch’s zoo - again echoing the horrors of the total war that Peake had just lived through and documented some of worst excesses.”
It is interesting to note this amazing outpouring of enduring British fantasy/metaphorical writing during the 1940s. Just a short list would include ‘The Gormenghast Trilogy’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, CS Lewis’ Ransome Trilogy, TH White’s ‘The Once And Future King’ and ‘1984′.
Perhaps that stuff stands the test of time because it was written in truly testing times?
Now there’s an idea. I must confess to having enjoyed The Brothers Grimm!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0355295/
Heya Nabs,
Yes, how odd that Sting (still, to my knowledge) owns the feature rights. I understand he wanted to play Steerpike - and the weird thing is, if they’d done it in his youth (about 10 years before he was able to buy the rights), he may have been a good choice.
I’ve often thought that Steerpike (and I hasten to add the books are not silly political metaphors) serves as a cautionary figure for the left; when he is casually picking off the legs of a stag beetle, declaiming to Fuchsia that “equality is not everything, it is the only thing”, or when he insolently calls the sun, “that old treacle bun” - but I wouldn’t want such a genius as Peake drawn into such a trivial pissing war- so I withdraw the observation.
And yer right about the power (and prescience) of the set-pieces in “Titus Alone”; the stuff about genetic engineering particularly - just before he succumbed to the long sickness that was to strip him of his talents, Peake wrote “Boy in Darkness”, which features the most terrifying Christ metaphor since Yeats wrote “The Second Coming”.
He was pretty spiffy in Lynch’s Dune…
Yeah, Guilliam’s Grimm was OK. Th spookiest thing in that was the little well mud creature. A greta screen creation. There was also a real buddy chemistry between Heath and Matt. They turned out to be very comic actors. And of course Jonathan Pryce who’s slowly but steadily become the new Alec Guiness.
If anyone but Guilliam had made that movie, we’d be applauding like stink. But poor old Terry has set such a high benchmark for himself. Like Kubrick or the Stones, his latest work keeps getting compared to the last one. And so on.
It’s very interesting to read the Pythons Autobiography. At first Guilliam was the rather whacky and somewhat resented yank outsider foisted upon all the hard-nosed comedy writing professional Oxbridge chaps. But by the end, they’re all admitting he’s their personal favourite Python and the one true artist for the ages among them.
If they ever made a proper hash of “Gormenghast”, my dream casting for Prunesquallor would be: Tom Waits, Ron Perlman…and then maybe Jonathan Pryce or Vincent Price (deceased).
“Mr Pye” is an often overlooked book by Mervyn Peake. Ostensibly a whimiscal little fairy tale but amongst other things, it features detailed and blood-curdling descriptions of what it’s like to actually and literally cut unanticipated angel wings and devil horns from your body.
And for those of you wondering what the thickpeakydustyfuck we’re talking about, this is not too shabby an online introduction to one of the most original yet weirdly earthed artist/writers spawned out of that great gray slut England in the last century
“And of course Jonathan Pryce who’s slowly but steadily become the new Alec Guiness.”
Ha that is bang on the money.
Gilliam would be perfect. But he needs some sort of collaborator to contain the sprawl a bit. I think I read that the most expensive sequence of Grimm ended up on the cutting room floor. I loved the young woman who plated Jane Eyre in the most recent Beeb adaptation. Would she do for Fuschia?
Ruth Wilson played Jane. She also played the marvellously amoral Jewel Diamond in the black comedy series “Suburban Shootout” (also starring our very own transplanted Rachael Blake), whose appearance was very much not dowdy and grey.
P.S. As someone above invoked Sting in Lynch’s steampunk vision of Dune, I am now compelled to post The Bat.
She was in an episode of Miss Marple too, with yet another look and completely different kind of character. She’s bloody marvellous.
Speaking of good death scenes; I loved the way the Thing met her end (although I would have preferred she hadn’t died at all) and of course nothing can really beat being eaten by owls for dramatic departures. Since that german paraglider almost froze to death in an updraft however, I have had to change my preferred mode of death from being struck by lightening to being struck by lightening while paragliding into the teeth of a storm.
Hm, I’m on a different computer, and now I can’t see the picture I posted of Sting in #73. Can anyone else see it?