Darwin's Bastards

People who know almost nothing about what they're talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

— Sheila Heti, in There Is No Time In Waterloo

Darwin's Bastards is a very high quality collection of science fiction. It's so good that it doesn't even bill itself as being all Canadian. ISBN 978-1-55365-492-6. Well worth the read.

Just what is the freaking deal with Henry freaking James lately?

Having just finished The Conversion by Joseph Olshan, I find that a plethora, a torrent, a veritable cornucopia of recent gay lit seems to revolve around Henry James, "The Master".

Well, three books anyhow, but three books mark a trend. The first I noticed was the most Jamesian (and by far the best), Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Chronicling upper-class life in Thatcher's Britain, Hollinghurst earned the Booker Prize. His first book The Swimming Pool Library was powerfully charged with social commentary, but The Line of Beauty was stunning, and all about the Henry James.

Next up: Edmund White's 2007 novel Hotel de Dream in which Henry James appears as the villain. A riveting semi-fictional tale of Stephen Crane's last days from his wife's point of view, it echoes some of the death themes White first explored in The Married Man, echoing Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. Although I prefer White's biographical novels, particularly The Beautiful Room is Empty, this is my favourite of his historical fictions thus far.

And finally, back to Joseph Olshan's The Conversion. It is also part of a recent spate of young-gay-Italian-American-Jew-under-a-loggia fiction that is clogging summer bookshelves from Provincetown to Fire Island (but I digress). The Conversion is chock full of Jamesian references, ranging from explicit mentions to flaming manuscripts to the aforementioned loggias. But it surprised me with its layered subtlety and insightful parallels, and it kept me guessing until the end.

Apparently part of the maturity of gay fiction is the rediscovery of the canonical figures from the mainstream whose gay subtexts were so very circumspect. At the same time, gay fiction has entered the mainstream and exists less and less as a separate genre (just try finding a section in a bookstore anymore). Eighty-eight years after his death, Henry James seems to be the model for gay fiction to come. Or maybe some excitable queens are taking the whole "Master" thing just a little bit too close to heart.

Saturn's Children: an homage to Friday

Charles Stross was a bit embarrassed about the cover to his new book Saturn's Children. Charlie's a stand-up guy: he cares about people, women specifically, and I think he was worried people would think he was a creepy lech. But this book is about a lonely sexbot, and the cover doesn't just stand on its own: the book is a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein's Friday, and so is the cover. The book has an engaging milieu and a somewhat bewildering set of characters (personality versioning is hard to keep track of) and Stross maintains the pace and keeps the story moving. It's a good read, and a nice departure from the usual strong-AI-ate-my-balls story lines. It's packed with obscure Heinlein references and in-jokes:

"Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?"

an inversion of a fatuous quote by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

Friday was one of my favourite Heinlein books: for a nerdy gay teenager, an oppressed bicurious gengineered courtesan spy was terribly compelling; plus she was black (covers lie), and she traveled the world in semiballistic missiles, tumbling into bed with various exciting characters of various genders. At the time young-adult fiction didn't really speak to gay kids; at that time gay fiction was exclusively boomers talking to their contemporaries about AIDS and Fire Island (not to say that I didn't devour those books, but they didn't mean as much to then as they do now). At the same time I was obsessed by comic books, particularly the New Mutants, teenagers who were hated and oppressed because their secret mutant powers manifested themselves at puberty. So for a science-fiction-obsessed gay boy, Friday presented a character with whom I could identify.

Cory Doctorow has spoken a great deal about why he chose to write Little Brother, a young adult novel about technology and totalitarianism. He read Heinlein when he was a boy: he explained that young people are very idealistic and looking for different ways of looking at the world. Friday did that for me, but I don't think of Saturn's Children as a young-adult book: it is more of a story-driven contemplation on the evolution of identity with technology. The references to Friday are creative and amusing, and the contrast between the two stories shows how the shape of the future has changed over the past twenty-five years. Saturn's Children is seemingly addressed to people of Charlie's (and my) generation.

Bookshelf: Adam Haslett's You are not a stranger here

I randomly picked up Adam Haslett's You are not a stranger here off the used bookshelf at Little Sister's. The National Book Award Finalist sticker caught my eye, and I said, "eh, why not?" After all, I liked the cover.

Th book contains nine short stories; several are written in a British idiom, and his writing reminds me favourably of an early David Leavitt. The first story Notes to my biographer really caught my attention, and the story Divination gave me a night's dreams. On the whole, a highly satisfying read, and an author that I'll be watching for more.

Also, today I stumbled upon Google Book Search – much like the library feature in BookMooch, or Library Thing, or Amazon's bookshelf, or Shelfari, or Déjà lu (which still isn't released). After missing the boat, I'm missing the train, the bus, the plane, and even the stagecoach and the jitney.

Tales of the City

I've read Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City almost as many times as I've read The Lord of the Rings. At times it was a vice, honestly... it seemed like every semester in university the week before final exams I'd dig into these volumes instead of studying. Alternately silly and tragic, the books now span thirty years. As much as I sometimes malign the cultural accomplishments of the boomers, these books chronicle some of the best stories of the generation.

The latest volume, Michael Tolliver Lives, brings us up-to-date with the San Francisco clan, and is flavoured with not a little of Maupin's current love life (it feels by far the most autobiographical of his books) and is once again focused mostly on the title character. His writing has lost a fair bit of its satirical sting, but the depth of characterizations has improved, as has his subtelty. The sympathy with which he depicts his characters' internal conflict is more moving than ever. And although he leaves it open ended, this book feels like closure, which makes me rather sad – but honestly, I'm very pleased because I never even expected to see it written, and by all indications Maupin never expected to write it, either.

The ever-growing list

I'm reading Stasiland, a book of stories about the East German intelligence apparatus that engaged 2% of the population to spy on itself. It's sad, engaging, and absurdly funny at turns.

If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population.

[The definition of "enemy" becomes] "Too wide," he continues, "to be properly carried out. Within available resources I mean."

Stasiland, pp 200

Which makes me think about various terror watchlists compiled in recent years, with no clear criteria for inclusion or exclusion, which grow longer and longer, and thus mean less and less. When you watch everyone, you watch no one: the Stasi compiled the most pervasive surveillance state so far, but even so they failed to predict its own fall.

So one would assume that list keepers have learned this lesson (let's give them the benefit of the doubt on their competence and intellectual capability). So if these lists are ineffective in detecting or preventing terrorism, then what exactly are they for?

---

Of course, one must also never underestimate the power of stupidity: always assume incompetence over conspiracy. It's hard to credit these clowns with carrying out anything successfully.

Sustained futurism

(I know I keep going on about Mr. Gibson. Indulge me.)

William Gibson's fiction has aged better than most of its cyberpunk cohorts. Although Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired inhabits a similar milieu, and although it remains an enjoyable read, it hasn't aged as well. Gibson is a strong world builder who has succeeded in creating his own continüum, but more importantly his characters inhabit hard lives and have faint hope.

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 20

The key to his success is that he focuses on the human elements, and keeps the technical elements as vague as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the human problems that remain embedded in the technological future, through the lens of our present. Gibson's fiction has been progressively moving from the far future into the near future (with a jog into an alternate past); he is most successful where he provides social commentary on real peoples' lives today: from the down-and-out to captains of industry.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 2^nd-to-last

If that's not a truism today, then I don't know what is.

The unbearable pervasiveness of radical neoconservatism

I recently re-read Walter Jon Williams' City on Fire, and something jumped out at me: phrasing right out of Milton Friedman's masturbatory fantasies:

“There is a recipe for creating wealth,” he says. “It is simple enough. Reduce tariffs, reduce state spending, reduce controls on borrowing and lending. Protect the value of the currency while allowing free exchange, permit the citizens free access to foreign currencies. Permit the citizens to keep any wealth they earn [...] and tax with a light hand, with a tax code renowned for its evenhandedness and a revenue bureau renowned for its incorruptibility...”_p.114

“The companies will be sold. We anticipate no difficulty with that–they were all remarkably profitable, after all. The profits will help to finance reorganization in various other state enterprises, which will also be sold as soon as they can be made efficient. I convinced them, you see, that it had to be done now, while martial law was still in force, because a popular government would not be able to shrink in size with the proper ruthlessness. So the enlarged army will hold the metropolis together while structural changes take place[...]”_p.65

This is a capsule description of the 1973 Chilean coup and subsequent neoconservative sacking of the country (and of Argentina, Brazil, the US, Russia, Iraq, etc.). It certainly is a recipe for wealth, and for an rocketing disparity between the rich and the poor. As we have recently seen, it is also a recipe for opening the door to runaway corruption in the financial markets. It's a recipe, all right: it is a recipe for an entire smörgåsbord of misery to be visited on a society by its ever-more-wealthy ruling élite. Wealth is always measured as a differential, not as an absolute: a differential in income, in life expectancy, in everything that matters.

When this book was written this may have seemed like inevitable truth, promoted by a political class and media intent on reversing the 20^th century gains of the labour movement. The author is by no means a reactionary twit, but he couldn't help absorb some of the constant stream of bullshit that is constantly unloaded on us all. 1997 was just eleven years ago, but these really do feel like ideas from the previous century.

Spooky

I finally got to read Spook Country, William Gibson's latest novel (a delay due to last year's municipal strike). By far his most politically relevant to date, it is set in the recent past, combining spyjinks, geek chic, nouveaux ethnic groups, and his usual theme of "lowlife meets high-tech". I especially enjoyed seeing my adopted city illustrated so vividly. The plot, while mundane, does not fail to surprise: strong characterizations and interesting plot devices keep the story humming along nicely. Without spoiling it, there is a satisfying tie-in to recent world events and reactions to them.

The Perseids

I picked up Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and Other Stories because I had enjoyed Spin (which won the Hugo), The Chronoliths, Blind Lake, Darwinia, and Bios (but not so much A Hidden Place). I started reading it without reading the jacket copy as is my custom: I usually prefer to avoid spoilers. It fit with his usual gloomy themes; imperfect characters (especially the men), loss, and cracks in reality. His plots skate the edge of despair, and these short stories were no exception.

As worked through the book I realized that they were all tangentially interrelated, beyond the setting in Toronto: centered around a book store and a few recurring characters. Mr. Wilson is an American who has lived in Toronto since 1962, somehow without actually becoming Canadian until last year. But with this book he definitely makes his mark on the Canadian science fiction canon. I never knew he was Canadian (his books are not usually set here) but it always had a slight out-of-country flavour, a certain remove when discussing society. His remove goes beyond nationality, however, and puts the human condition in a smaller context of a larger, hostile universe.

Cheerleader of the Apocalypse

Peter Watts is one of the most delightfully pessimistic authors I've ever read. His breakout novel, Starfish, gave me temporary serotonin depletion before it energized me with vicarious grim satisfaction. The cozily hopeless ambiance of inescapable doom continued in the next three books of the Rifters trilogy (yes, it is a four-book trilogy, okay?), but evolved from a self-pitying wide-eyed hopelessness into a grimly enthusiastic, squinting near-nihilism which... somehow... strangely... never failed to lose hope. It is precisely my cup of tea, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the environment, natural disasters, biology, software, and the evolution of geopolitics. Mr. Watts is Canadian, and used to work at the Vancouver Aquarium, and many of the settings are familiar: Vancouver, Toronto, Sudbury.

His stories are grounded in real bioscience – and he provides wonderful notes and references in the appendices. Some of his pessimistic predictions about the timeline for weird bioscience, climate change and various enviro-disasters has been, if anything, optimistic.

"I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me." _{(Footnotes to ßehemoth)}

His fourth (fifth) novel, Blindsight, is a deep-space adventure with a fun take on the nature of consciousness. And vampires. Good stuff.

All four (five) of his books (and many short stories) are available for free download on his site (which is awesome, shiny, rich & deep). I have donated twice to his tip jar (which he dedicates to the care and feeding of his cats); although I bought the books the first time I read them, I subsequently gave them away, but when wanted to read them again I could, so I really appreciate that he puts them online.

Print this book

I recently read the novel Roo'd by Joshua Klein: a near-future thriller that explores themes like body modification, poverty, and runaway corporatism. Although I had printed it in nearly invisible double-sided 4-up I was engrossed as I squinted at the pages on the poorly-lit bus. Although it was not without flaws, it ranked in my personal top 5 for the past year, and comes highly recommended, especially for code-heads of a literary bent. I would compare it favourably with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, with some of the humour of the former and dark characterisations and settings of the latter. The author, a software developer, released the book for free download under a Creative Commons license. I gave the author five bucks, which is a damned sight more than he would have gotten through a publisher. A publisher probably would have made him change the title, though – I guess they're still good for something after all.

The Whore of Babylon

I've been a fan of Fernando Vallejo since I saw Our Lady of the Assassins. After that I dug into several of his books, and when I ran into La Puta de Babilonia (ISBN 970-37-0326-7) I snapped it up. The opening paragraph gave me a frisson of delight:

La puta, la gran puta, la grandísima puta, la santurrona, la simoníaca, la inquisidora, la torturadora, la falsificadora, la asesina, la fea, la loca, la mala; la del Santo Oficio y el Índice de Libros Prohibidos; la de las Cruzadas y la noche de San Bartolomé; [...] la que reprime a las demás religiones donde manda y exige libertad de culto donde no manda; [...] la corrupta, la hipócrita, la parásita, la zángana; la antisemita, la esclavista, la homofóbica, la misógina; [...] la puta de Babilonia, la impune bimilenaria tiene cuentas pendientes conmigo desde mi infancia y aqui se las voy a cobrar.

My loose, unprofessional translation:

The bitch, the great bitch, the greatest whore, the hypocritically pious, the loan shark, the inquisitor, the torturer, the fabricator, the murderous, the ugly, the crazy, the bad; she of the Holy Office and the Index of Forbidden Books; of the Crusaders and the eve of St. Bartholomew; [...] she who represses other religions where she has power and demands freedom of worship where she does not; [...] the corrupt, the hypocritical, the parasitic, the shiftless; the anti-Semitic, the slave, the homophobic, the misogynist; [...] the whore of Babylon, the unpunished two-thousand-year-old bitch has been screwing with me since my childhood and now it is payback time.

It was highly satisfactory as a polemic, and for a fellow traveler it was enjoyable to sit back and enjoy the outrage of a highly informed, deeply knowledgeable and extremely articulate critic of a vain, useless, and obsolete institution. However, the opposite of love is not outrage: it is indifference, and Vallejo remains in the orbit of the Vatican's dark star, obsessed with the enemy he would destroy. I would prefer to let the RC church hang itself on its own rope, as it seems to be doing a pretty good (if sometimes frustratingly slow) job of it.

SF belongs to the boomers

The SFWA kopyright kops kerfuffle is back in the bloglines again. The details are engrossing and terribly boring, combining the contemporary debate on free speech and free society and the desire to maintain outmoded business models: whether the SFWA should be forward-looking or repeat the mistakes of the RIAA and MPAA. Copyright vs communism. Intellectual property vs creativity. The past vs the future. Yes, all of that. But really, it just illustrates the divide between people who still actually write stuff, and those who are living off work they (or somebody they used to fuck) did thirty years ago.

See, Science Fiction^® belongs to the boomers. They grew up with it first, and by sheer weight of numbers, they own it. They control the meaning of the words, which they have cemented in a museummausoleum where the corpse of the genre rots behind glass. SF is dead, and although some new work exists which might seem to carry on its tradition, it really doesn't matter because if it wasn't written by a baby boomer, it is most unlikely to be blessed by the anointed ones. [For some reason they like Neal Stephenson. And some nanotech. But that's it: it's like nothing has happened since 1985 otherwise.]

The new generation would like to make science fiction be about the future, or at least be an engaging commentary about the present, but the boomers haven't wanted anything at all to change since the early nineteen-eighties, and they're not about to let go now. They hold title to the trademark "SF" and they're not giving it up without being lowered into the crypt (and probably not even then).

Steampunk has escaped the deadly SF label; the rest of the genre's refugees need to build their own brand beyond the reach of the zombie corpse of SF, and abandon the corrupt institutions which shamble on, destroying any chance of a future. The boomers are never gonna let it go. It's dead, Jim.

The unreliable narrator

Two of my top ten books of the last decade are Cheap Complex Devices and Acts of the Apostles by John (Compton|F.X.) Sundman. These are two of the richest and most complex pieces of fiction produced in a contemporary, technically proficient vein. He has written only two books, but he has a mastery of literary structure that takes you by surprise. They mangled my mind.

I suggest starting with Acts of the Apostles (ded tree, free pdf). This is presented as a very straightforward Neal Stephenson or Crichton thriller, like Snow Crash or Sphere. Very readable and engaging, with a few tech industry in-jokes to make a nerd feel like a war veteran (DEC, Microsoft, Sun, and their respective personalities appear under aliases). It's been described as “What Tom Clancy would write if he were smart.”

After you've enjoyed that you can graduate to Cheap Complex Devices (ded tree, free pdf). This is not standard genre fiction, and you might not be sure what you're dealing with. The author's notes, the stories, and the meta-story combine in your head to produce an interference pattern. Which of the three versions are you supposed to believe? Perhaps none of the above. I can't compare this to anything I've read before or since.

I first bought Acts when I saw the story on Slashdot back in 2000. Then I bought it again two years ago. Both are available for download, but you may find you want the real thing (CCD is a little different in print). They are self-published, and the author provides quite a backstory – but can you really believe him?