https://themillions.com/2022/09/reading-soviet-sci-fi-at-the-end-of-the-world.html The Millions [ ] * Find Books * Essays * Lists * Reviews * Q&A * YIR * | * Support The Millions * About * Twitter * Facebook * Instagram Reading Soviet Sci-Fi at the End of the World Essays Patrick McGinty September 26, 2022 | 5 books mentioned 12 min read Related Books: cover The best encapsulation of my emotional relationship to technology during the pandemic comes from a Russian novel published in 1991. Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra opens with the titular Omon recalling his youth, when he was obsessed with space. On playgrounds, young Omon plays pilot. On his aunt's TV set, he pauses on any channel broadcasting an airborne object. When visiting the Industry Achievements Expo, Omon gazes upon an artistic rendering of an astronaut whose "arms were stretched out confidently towards the stars, and his legs were so obviously not in need of any support that I realized once and for ever that only weightlessness could give man genuine freedom." Because the point of view at this juncture is that of a boundlessly enthusiastic boy, and because Pelevin can write his absolute ass off, the sentence does not end at freedom. It takes off, which, incidentally, is why all my life I've only been bored by all those Western radio voices and those books by various Solzhenitsyns. In my heart, of course, I loathed a state whose silent menace obliged every group of people who came together, even if only for a few seconds, to imitate zealously the vilest and bawdiest among them; but since I realized that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space and was not much interested in what was happening on earth. Well hello. That last big sentence full of big ideas arrives on page six in Omon Ra. It speaks of freedom and hearts and spirit, each little clause punctuated by its own invisible kiddy exclamation point, because what is an exclamation point if not a rocket ship? The ones I'm imagining after "aloft" and "conscience" seek to transport Omon and the reader up and away from the "boring" West and also the "vile" Soviet state. And yet this soaring scene is not one that anticipated my pandemic-induced techno-frustration. That came later, when Omon and his friend, Mityok, attend a summer camp called Rocket. A glum Mityok shows Omon "a little plasticine figure with its head wrapped in foil." The figurine is an astronaut; Mityok acquired it by disassembling one of the model rocket ships in the mess hall. Mityok explains, "in a thoughtful and depressed sort of voice," how the toy astronaut had been stuck to its chair. The entire machine had been built around him. "There was no door," Mityok explains. "There was a hatch drawn on the outside, but in the same place on the inside--just some dials and the wall." To Mityok and Omon, this astronaut is not an inanimate toy. The figurine is a stand-in for their heroic dreams and imagined futures, and they are irate at discovering, for the first time, that the Soviet Space Program they'll soon enroll in is not especially interested in fostering technological environments in which humans can actually live and dream (and depart at will). The toy astronaut has not been granted soaring conscience, total freedom, and mapless exploration way out beyond the political monotonies of Earth. The astronaut has been entombed, and at this juncture I set down Omon Ra with a shudder, checked the time on my iPhone, and scrambled to log my son into his pre-K Teams classroom. While I booted up my own Zoom classroom, I took a look around my house, thinking: the pandemic has entombed me in devices, and I'm not seeing many exits. * I did, at some point, have a half-baked reason for embarking on a Soviet sci-fi reading spree. It went something like: Covid-19 seems destined to finally snuff out the overlong afterglow of so-called American excellence, and so there might be unpredictably relevant and resonant moments hiding in the literature of the final years of the USSR. It now seems clear that what I needed was a brief detour from the Bored Addict tone I found in much of contemporary American fiction, an approach to technology that often read less like an inventive artistic gesture than a servile bow to realism. For much of the pandemic, I was bored. I was addicted to technology. It's hard to explain then exactly what I wanted from art, but the simplest way I can say it is: I didn't want to read about people who were in similar spots to me, and I didn't want to overdo it by reading about people who were in far worse spots than me, but I did very much want to think critically about what I was going through, and I also wanted to refract this experience via art that was foreign yet immediately recognizable. coverThis, then, maybe explains how I wound up in Soviet sci-fi, which is a term I am not qualified to employ any single word of. I began my reading journey without a strong grasp of Soviet history; I am ending it still quite capable of failing any quiz offered me. Despite having recently published a novel, Test Drive, that occasionally gets labeled as science fiction, I have never been exceptionally versed in the terminological debates around the genre. I am a citizen of the sentence first and foremost, and so when I read Pelevin uncorking a massive, soaring line from within Omon's young consciousness, I did not think: "does this qualify as Soviet if it's about the Soviet space program but it's published in 1991?" I read that rocket of an early line and thought: I am on the readerly correct path; I will soon learn things from the geographically distant past about my own claustrophobic present. * coverI did learn things. The more I read, the more it started to make sense that Soviet writers would be so preternaturally gifted at envisioning future realities, given the political challenges they faced if they attempted to write bracingly about the present. In the introduction to The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction, translator Mirra Ginsburg outlines how much of the work in the collection was written under the "vigilant eye of those who hold that art and literature must serve," those who demand that Soviet art display "the wretched destinies of the non-Communist world." The best of the genre, Ginsburg argues, "ignores the pressures and continues to create free and valid works of the imagination." This sentiment is echoed by Ursula Le Guin, in her introduction to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic: "Soviet writers had been using science fiction for years to write with at least relative freedom from Party ideology about politics, society, and the future of mankind." covercoverThese heroic depictions of Soviet sci-fi writers can make it seem as though the best work in the genre is that which confronts and bursts through every oppositional force, yet I confess that the more directly confrontational narratives didn't especially resonate with me. In rereading much of Solaris author Stanislaw Lem's work, I came to agree with a sentiment that Jonathan Lethem expressed in a recent London Review of Books feature about the Polish titan of sci-fi: "His targets in Memoirs [Found in a Bathtub]--organized Christianity, self-referential academic scholarship, the state security apparatus--are fish in a barrel, which, rather than shooting, he hammers to death." I, too, didn't want to read critiques that hammered away at institutions and ideologies; I already had Twitter. It would be corny but accurate to say that I was instead seeking a feeling of hope via fiction. I wanted to find some person or place, either in the historical past or imagined future, that offered a road map for how to escape my own little rocket ship, where Zoom-versions of classes and readings and other human events once core to my identity and existence played on an endless loop. What I found was not a roadmap for escaping my circumstances but a strategy for how to operate within them. I discovered this approach in the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, a book I fell so hard for that I have said aloud, more than once, and only half in jest, that it is the greatest literary work in any language or any genre, ever. The gist: a "highly advanced alien civilization" visits Earth, but no human sees them arrive or depart. Their "Visit," as it comes to be known, leaves behind strange, dangerous aftereffects in six neighborhood-like "zones" around Earth (for instance: step in the residual hell slime, and your leg bones might melt). The Strugatsky brothers chart the predictable human responses to the Visit: scientists seek to study the almost supernatural effects on the human objects in these zones, government types attempt to weaponize them, mobsters gin up a decent life by trafficking items to and fro. So-called "stalkers," the Indiana Joneses of the zones, facilitate much of this activity via their artifact retrieval. The interpretations of Roadside Picnic have occupied a similarly diverse, predictable range. Some theorists believe it is clearly the work of Soviet dissidents. Others say it's obviously a pro-Soviet critique of capitalism, given how the zones cram the world with dangerous everyday items that people waste their lives obsessing over. These competing interpretations exist because Roadside Picnic doesn't "hammer," to use Lethem's verb. The story itself offers multiple reasons for the genesis of the Visit. The novel takes its name from one such theory, offered up by the story's Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr. Valentine Pillman. Dr. Pillman is credited with aptly theorizing the location of the zones ("Imagine taking a large globe, giving it a good spin, then firing a few rounds at it"), but the theory is all "how"; the "why" has remained a mystery. When asked in a cozy booth at a "good old fashioned pub" what he really thinks of the Visit, 13 years removed, Dr. Pillman sets his coffee aside. He lights a cigarette. "Imagine," Dr. Pilman says, a car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radio, cameras.... A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning, they leave. The animals, the birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about...Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp...and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone's handkerchief, someone's penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, filtered flowers from another meadow...." In other words, the objects that scientists are studying and that mobsters are trafficking and that governments are weaponizing could be, in this reading, little more than refuse from some "picnic by the side of some space road." The scientist says that it's "not even a hypothesis, really, but an impression," and this impression, at least initially, became my organizing principle for how to frame my own digital activity during the pandemic. It suddenly seemed obvious--everything in the online zones where I spent my days was just random radioactive trash. The trending topics section of Twitter was a total, complete, and utter roadside picnic of whichever politician doubted science or performed racism. Touching any of it would dissolve the bones of my day. If the pandemic was going to turn me into the astronaut in Mityok's tiny doorless ship, and if the various gauges on all the screens were going to bombard me with junk, the trick, it seemed, would be discipline, if not outright avoidance. Don't click, don't even look--it might melt you. And yet I soon realized that this framing undersold the degree to which Roadside Picnic functions as an effective capitalist critique--and, to be more specific, a critique of me. I am someone who has opined publicly and at length about driverless cars and cryptocurrency, the latter of which in particular is a topic that screams--screams--"this topic is covered in a kind of hell slime that will draw attention to your handling of it but will also probably mutilate your leg bones and also your soul." I, like a Strugatsky "stalker" creeping into the zones to retrieve artifacts, have waded into online discourses so as to extract observations and news, then repackaged my findings as "analysis" for my own writerly profit. If capitalism is a kind of gangsterism, a seizing and reselling of whatever can be seized and sold, then Twitter was my perpetual, trashy roadside picnic where I could always find things to write about. It got worse. I didn't merely stalk these artifacts and sell my takes. I was, year after year, repackaging these efforts in my academic review file, demonstrating that my "stalking" was in fact an act of scholarship. Then, then, not content to merely play the role of "scholar" or "stalker," I started exploring a new kind of backstage gangsterism; in an attempt to promote a forthcoming novel that was a rather pointed critique of the driverless car sector and tech sector at large, I began participating in the politely seedy black market of literary promotion--I give a review and you get a galley, an interview done over there to get a podcast appearance here, all of it about tech and the future, sure, sure, but all of it also very much about the digital space I can occupy in that future. In the first year of the pandemic, I would often say, "That right there is a real roadside picnic, and I refuse to touch it." In the second, I found myself saying: "Christ, I am hopelessly enmeshed in this roadside picnic." * As the third pandemic March began, so too did a new phase of my journey through Soviet sci-fi. It was at this point that I realized that the many people to whom I had professed my love for this genre now wanted to know if I had any special insight about the atrocities in Ukraine. (I don't.) It now seems quite clear that I have spent the pandemic not reading Soviet sci-fi but misreading it--divorcing it from its various contexts and instead injecting it hungrily into my own American veins, the kinds of veins that pump blood around a person who can freely say ridiculous, privileged things like "I am a citizen of the sentence." I confess that I became somewhat disinterested in constructing context around Soviet sci-fi after an especially revealing instance in which context was seemingly stifled. Earth and Elsewhere, an anthology of Soviet sci-fi novellas published in 1985, is the only anthology I have ever held that does not have an introduction, afterword, or writerly profiles. The book has scant jacket copy. It feels like a risky document, a monolithic one, as though a Soviet editor handed an unmarked envelope containing five novellas to an American counterpart on a park bench in [redacted]. To contextualize and interpret these imagined futures--to stand in front of the work with a clarifying signifier of any sort--would be to endanger the project and its writer. At the time, it felt like that was all the context about what it was and is like to write, publish, and edit in what is now Russia. I have thought often of the absence of explicit context in Earth and Elsewhere while watching Russian protestors stand quite publicly and quite dangerously in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg. The protestors have not remained in their little Mityokian cockpits. They have not examined the trash of their society and said "I'm steering clear of that roadside picnic," nor do they seem to be asking "how can I profit from this roadside picnic." The protestors have created and literalized a context for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, recording, with their bodies and for history, that large numbers of Russian citizens do not support this military act. The images I find myself lingering upon are those in which citizens raise their phones at the state, be it in the form of buildings or at police. The protesters have weighed their tools (phones and bodies) and also what events the state would find most disconcerting (large gatherings and unregulated broadcasts) and have wedged these tools into the proverbial socket of the Russian state. A similar calculation occurs in the most stunning inclusion in Earth and Elsewhere, "A Tale of Kings" by sentence goddess Olga Larionova. Larionova is laugh-out-loud-while-reading funny--the protagonist, Artem, shakes as he copes with his sudden immersion into a new strange reality, and slurps his beer "like a bear cub drinking milk from a baby bottle in a circus act." She is what I would call a narrative riot, entertainingly slipping between third and first person then also "we" and "you"; she is a stranger telling stories at a wedding table, the kind you want to slyly Google and you just know she'll be the best dancer but above all, you just want her to keep talking, forever. The idea of "forever" presents a problem for Artem, who is trapped in this bizarre metaverse with a strange girl. The two are alone, and though the altered reality bends to their needs, nothing ever really happens. Artem begins to correctly guess "that they were in the power of some insane but omnipotent maniac, and the only question was how long the insanity would remain within the bounds of the harmless." Artem and the girl continually fail to crack the code of their existence, until Artem arrives at what he sees to be a final calculation: burn down their environment. He begins lighting newspapers on fire, hoping to ignite the house, the experiment, themselves. The plan: "If they had been dragged here, and this demonic pavilion created for them, and they were fed and every reasonable desire was satisfied, that meant someone needed them very badly. So now this 'someone' would have to take steps to save his living exhibit." On cue, an alien arrives. The creature did not respond to multiple pleas. It did not respond to some of Artem's riskier explorations. This creature responded only when its carefully designed system was under a terminal threat. The alien's appearance does not solve the drama in "A Tale of New Kings." It merely starts a new phase of it, one in which the characters realize that power does not bow to mere customer complaints. Ukrainians are long past this point of acceptance when it comes to confronting their neighbors. Anti-war dissidents in Russia, too, are past the point of polite rebuttal, and in the first weeks of the invasion, my own Soviet sci-fi reading habit felt silly and safe. To read fiction that had originated from an imperiled part of the world in private felt like an insignificant act when people around me were marching and fundraising and hanging flags. Yet months later, these activities have receded or achieved stasis, and Americans have, by and large, responded to the crisis in Ukraine by obsessively discussing gas prices. We have exited the lockdown phase of the pandemic, escaping our technological entombments and emerged into the tomb that is America, and as I grapple with this transition, I find myself returning to the same Soviet sci-fi texts two years later, drawing more inspiration and direction now than I did then. These novels, stories, and anthologies are full of big sentences and big ideas, most of which concern how to be a human in an oppressive power structure. They are full of brilliantly drawn characters, some of whom escape oppression, though tellingly, when they flee, the texture of that structure remains intact. Other characters work the margins for profit, but again: there's no change to the system, and in fact, the characters in this arrangement wind up dependent on the power structure. Confrontation, then--not escape, not capitalization--is the only avenue that leads to transformation. The apex of such an effort might resemble the anti-war protests in Russia and certainly the Ukrainian resistance. At present, I'm most drawn to characters whose resistance starts with a mere thought, like the one Larionova's Artem has while negotiating with the alien: "I'm thinking that you are a computer son of a bitch, immortal perverts who call themselves gods but who are powerless to force me to do their bidding." Get the best of The Millions in your inbox each week! Subscribe for free. [ ] [Subscribe] [*]Yes Please [ ][ ] [ ] The Millions' future depends on your support. Become a member today. Patrick McGinty lives in Pittsburgh. His debut novel about the driverless car sector, Test Drive, was published in May of 2022 by Propeller Books. He teaches in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing at Slippery Rock University and can be found on Twitter at @PatrickMMcGinty. Essays Dragons Are for White Kids with Money: On the Friction of Geekdom and Race Essays Daniel Jose Ruiz May 11, 2017 | 5 books mentioned 149 5 min read If geekdom was never coded as hyper-white, why then is there such a loud resistance to the inclusion of non-white, non-male, non-binary, and non-heterosexual stories and characters? Essays Daniel Jose Ruiz | 5 books mentioned 149 5 min read * * * Essays Cliffhanger: On Extreme Survival Books Essays Hilary Menges June 17, 2011 | 5 books mentioned 7 5 min read This plotline rarely changes; the details are grisly, the scenarios harrowing. Yet we can't get enough of such stories. 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Essays At The Blue Dolphin: On Mothers and Sons Essays Rachel Basch March 11, 2015 | 5 books mentioned 6 7 min read I wanted to be the mother, but I did not have the least idea of how to do that. This is the love I have, I told him. It feels big and powerful, but there's no way to know if it, if I, will be worthy of you. Essays Rachel Basch | 5 books mentioned 6 7 min read * * * Essays Special Effects: Gone with the Wind and Genre Difficulties Essays Brian Ted Jones February 14, 2012 | 5 books mentioned 5 8 min read 1. One problem with modern American romance is that very little can prevent two Americans who love each other from getting married. (So long as they don't share a combination of sex chromosomes, and it's fair to say the tide is turning on that one.) This freedom -- relatively unheard of in human history -- is perhaps why we have more romantic comedies these days than romantic epics. It's a limitation dictated by the times. Any story where two heterosexual Americans face any serious obstacle on the path to marriage is going to strain credulity or just plain bug people. While I've seen neither Valentine's Day nor New Year's Eve -- and at the risk of being factually incorrect -- I simply can't imagine those kinds of movies trade in a currency of love problems whose snags aren't pretty easily untangled. Such stories, as a classical matter, deal, rather, in misunderstandings, missed signals, crossed signals, and bunglings of translation from one heart to another. They're nice and all, but does anyone out there get hit where it really hurts when they see or read a romantic comedy? There's something better, obviously, a more heightened version of the old Boy Meets Girl, Loses Girl formula. I'm talking about the previously mentioned romantic epic, and I'm talking about this because I've had a running conversation with my dear wife over the last few years about just what makes a romantic epic epic. This conversation hit a high point recently, as we're finishing Gone with the Wind, a book I've been reading to her since last June. Somewhere out there, you're thinking, "Oh my God, I'm a Gone with the Wind fanatic!" Look -- I don't want to insult you, but if you're a harder-core fan of Gone with the Wind than my wife, I'll wear a red dress and dance the Macarena on the courthouse lawn. They just don't make Gonezos ((c)) any bigger than my spouse. You cannot physically restrain her from paroxysms of joy when the damn thing's on. She quotes from the film's dialogue the way 2003-04 circa college guys spat lines from Old School. We've never been to the "Road to Tara Museum," but it is strictly a matter of time. She's not alone, obviously. Gone with the Wind inspires mad devotion, in part, I think, because it works as both a romantic epic, and a tale of female empowerment. One reason for the story's universal appeal, in fact, might lie in how neatly it nails a tricky middle ground between the Left and Right on issues of feminism. Scarlett is a thousand percent devoted to women's rights -- except really in any plural or political sense: Scarlett wants freedom for herself; she's only truly interested in economic freedom; and could frankly give a damn about the rights of other women, or political liberty, voting, etc. She understands -- with a clearsightedness that would be cynical if it weren't so simply observant -- that having money means you don't really need to vote. For instance, late in the novel, she and Rhett entertain Georgia's Scallywag Republican Governor at their tacky new McMansion, and even though Scarlett bears a real grudge against the Gov and all his Yankee ilk, she butters them up nonetheless, the better to use them for her own purposes. In this sense, Scarlett is both a proto-feminist hero, and an almost Ayn Rand-y paragon of self-advancement. Not only does she tickle the imaginations of liberals and libertarians, but her canny progress from marriage to marriage takes place entirely within the boundaries of so-called "traditional" womanhood -- something I'd bet more than a few Schlafly-types have found validating. Even Scarlett's devoted anti-intellectualism works to her advantage. You will not find a character in American fiction more rigorous in her disdain for abstract or philosophical topics (except as they give pasty old Ashley Wilkes something to be amazing at). Scarlett is interested in nice things, food, money, property, and getting what she wants -- nothing else. The key feature of her character is therefore a sort of materialistic pragmatism -- and since every branch of American politics considers itself "the practical one," Scarlett occupies prime real estate to be adored by all sides. All that being said, and just as ludicrously fantastic a character as Scarlett O'Hara is (the highest compliment you can pay a fictional character is Odyssean, and boy oh boy, is Scarlett Odyssean), none of this would register if Scarlett weren't given an appropriately larger than life backdrop against which her labors could unfold. The Civil War? Check. Gone with the Wind also wouldn't work, though, unless there were real problems for the story's centerpiece romance. Something has to impair the parties' full consummation in order for the love story to qualify as epic. The more grand the obstacle, the more epic the romance. A quick survey of romantic epics bears this out. War, of course, is about the grandest and most epic obstacle a love affair could ever trip over. (See The English Patient). Class distinctions also place high on the list. (Likewise Atonement). Tragic events (cue flute from "My Heart Will Go On") are obviously another. In my opinion, the most epic American romance of the past ten years was a little flick called Brokeback Mountain (based on the short story from Annie Proulx's "Close Range," whose lingering after-effects are a version of the same gut-gnawing pity induced by the movie). Brokeback Mountain is a romantic epic for the same reason only same-sex couples are really good candidates to have epically problematic love stories, at least in modern America: the problem for that story's couple is pretty damn intractable, given their time. In fact, Brokeback Mountain has a harder edge than other classic romances, because the characters aren't simply kept apart by grand circumstance, but by a threat of doom. Some band of redneck vigilantes would definitely have murdered Jack and Ennis if they'd ever tried to live together happily. The fact that death was a strong possible outcome -- because of their love, and not incidental to it -- puts that story on a high plane, stakes-wise. Of course, Scarlett and Rhett face nothing like that. In fact, the inductions drawn from this drive-by survey point to a troubling conclusion for Gone with the Wind's "epic" status. Scarlett and Rhett aren't really kept apart by the Civil War. Rhett's such a dastard that he sits most of the conflict out, right there in Atlanta, with Scarlett and the other ladies, speculating in foodstuffs and running off to England every now and then. Scarlett is in mourning, of course (her first husband died almost immediately after the War broke out), so preemptive norms of seemliness might interrupt the pair's march to happiness -- but Scarlett didn't even like Rhett at that point, and all Rhett was interested in (I don't think this scandalous wrinkle is mentioned in the movie) is having Scarlett be his mistress, his (goddammit, but it fits) "no strings attached," "friend with benefits." Rhett does eventually run off to fight, in the last days of the Confederacy, and by the time he and Scarlett cross paths again, Scarlett's desperate for cash to save Tara, and throws herself into Rhett's arms, an offering of virtue given in sacrifice for the survival of Tara. Rhett sees right through this (with help from Scarlett's grubby little turnip paws, of course), and flat, dropkick rejects her, sending her right into the arms of old Frank Kennedy. Once Frank dies, Rhett swoops in and proposes marriage, knowing he can't wait forever to catch Scarlett between husbands. They marry, seem fond of each other, until Rhett figures out Scarlett is never going to get over that God damned Ashley Wilkes, and it's "Adios amiga." Microphone drop. I don't give no damn. But take a closer look: What does this story lack that other romantic epics have? Are Rhett and Scarlett kept apart by war? Class distinction? Tragedy? Disease? Threat of destruction? Nope. They get together because they can, and they break up because one gets pissed at the other. A less grand set of circumstances could not be found. This is not epic -- this is mundane. 2. At this point I'm in deep trouble. If the takeaway from this essay is that Gone with the Wind lacks the status of an epic romance -- that it is, in fact, nothing but a love story with two rather bratty protagonists -- my wife is not going to be happy with me. Fortunately, the genuine size of Gone with the Wind, the sheer land area it occupies in the American imagination, offers enough glitz and orchestra to rocket even the flimsiest of romances up to orbital heights. Whether we're talking about the novel or the movie, this story is celebrated. The film is such a gigantic deal that it's easy to forget how enormous a deal the novel was: It won the Pulitzer Prize, captivated the nation, is apparently (if you believe Pat Conroy's introduction to my copy) given a Biblical place of honor on many a Southern coffee table, and had its movie rights sold off for the unheard of at the time sum of $50,000. At any serious gathering of top shelf American cinema, Gone with the Wind would be at the Kane , Casablanca, Godfather table. Even as non-pop-culture-obsessed a writer as Flannery O'Connor has a story (one of her weirder ones (and that's saying something)) that involves the famous Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind: "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," which in classic Flannerian style makes us feel both sorry for and annoyed by a cranky genteel Southern White who thinks too highly of himself, in this case because they gussied him up for the movie premiere in a Confederate military costume, which now that he's way older thinks is actually his original battle uniform and so insists on wearing to special occasions. Think about that. Gone with the Wind is such a huge deal, Flannery O'Connor wrote a story that hinged on its status in the texture of Southern life. Flannery O'Connor. It doesn't get any bigger than that. Which is all to say, something is epic about this story. Can it be an epic because it makes us feel epic? A horror story scares us, a comedy makes us laugh, a tragedy makes us cry -- I suppose a romance makes us feel, uh, twitterpated -- is that, then, the real mark of genre? Not some academic's induction based on a leisurely survey of the available material, but the specific kind of blast the story delivers, the special effects it drives into the hearts and guts of readers? If that's the case, then I think I'm sitting pretty with my wife. Because Gone with the Wind has got the chops in spite of the fact that the love problem at its center is not only mundane, but teenagerly so. Rhett really does love Scarlett, but has to act like he doesn't, to protect his feelings, because he knows Scarlett never got over Ashley being the one man she couldn't have. Drop that love triangle right into a CW plotline and nobody's going to raise an eyebrow. In other words, Gone with the Wind surpasses the un-epicness of its romance, and makes us feel romantically epic all the same. This is a serious accomplishment. I wish I could explain how it's done. Of course, part of it is the historical backdrop, but I think a more important factor is just the expansiveness of the couple, particularly Scarlett (though Rhett's a pretty insanely intriguing character, too -- I've heard rumors he was based on Sam Houston -- go read about that crazy bastard some time). But maybe it's epic because it's just so successful as a story. I think we need to feel that a story is about everything in order to let it in, let it move us. That's the mark, I think, of the true masterpiece, and if anything could coherently separate "literature" from "fiction," that'd be it. It's a pretty simple standard, actually -- all any story has to do is just show us the meaning of life. Gone with the Wind qualifies. Something in Scarlett's practicality, something in her determination, something in her hunger (I don't mean the turnip-eschewing kind, I mean the way Scarlett from the very first scene is driven by this crazy, all-consuming, no-boundaries-recognizing hunger for everything, the way she just wants it all) -- there's something brutal and fine to that. In her strange optimism, too, the way she pushes everything unpleasant from her thoughts, so that faced with the collapse of her third marriage, she is almost transported, idiotic, almost insensate, in her belief that she can fix it all, have it all, that she can get Rhett back -- which of course wouldn't mean that she'd have to give up on Ashley, too -- and, most impressively, in her faith that tomorrow holds all the space you'll ever need to get what you want, and keep it. This is one of the strange centers of the world, a vein of pure human talent, unearthed and irrefutable, mysterious, friendly, beckoning, and fully beyond us. Essays Brian Ted Jones | 5 books mentioned 5 8 min read * * Essays How China Mieville Got Me to Stop Worrying and Love the Monsters Essays Bill Morris September 9, 2010 | 5 books mentioned 32 11 min read This is a story about how China Mieville opens eyes. It begins in Detroit in the 1950s with a boy who flat loves to read, who can't get enough of Dr. Seuss, the Hardy Boys, and the Flash (Marvel and Zap Comix will come much later). He reads an actual newspaper every day, and he cherishes his first library card the way kids today cherish their first iPhone. (This doesn't make him wiser or better than kids today, just luckier.) When the boy's mother enrolls him in the after-school Great Books Club, he's thrilled to discover such "grown-up" writers as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle, then Hemingway's quietly complex Nick Adams Stories. Some 50 years later that boy is me, a writer who has spent his life reading novels and short stories that can fairly be regarded as the offspring of that Great Books Club - what some people call "literary" fiction and others call High-Brow Rot. This dutiful quest for quality has familiarized me with most of the pantheon's usual suspects, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. But it left little time for supposedly inferior "genre" or "mainstream" fiction. Only a few things seeped through - the addictive crime novels of my fellow Detroiters Elmore Leonard and Loren D. Estleman; a few best-sellers that rose above the herd by being deeply felt and sharply written, such as Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent and Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. As for science fiction and fantasy, only select boldface masters reached me - Verne, Wells, Tolkien, Huxley, Orwell, Ballard, plus the trippy paranoia of Philip K. Dick. I've read too few contemporary poets - Philip Levine and Fred Chappell are beloved exceptions - and I've never read a western, a vampire novel, a bodice-ripper, a self-help book, a political or showbiz memoir, or a single piece of chick lit. Overall, a pretty limited roster, and on bad days I began to suspect that my high-mindedness had blinded me to whole worlds of reading pleasure. And that, conveniently, was when China Mieville came into my life. He was recommended by a friend who has been a life-long fan of fantasy and science fiction. I trusted her because she's smart and she made a documentary movie about William Gibson in the 1980s, when Gibson was helping forge the "cyber-punk" sub-genre of science fiction. At her urging I read Gibson's early short stories, and I was blown away by their prescience and hip wit, particularly "The Gernsback Continuum," "The Winter Market," and "Burning Chrome." To top it off, the writer who coined the term "cyberspace" didn't even own a computer. He wrote on an old manual typewriter. My kind of Luddite! Despite the pleasant surprise of reading Gibson's short fiction and Neal Stephenson's splendid SF novel Snow Crash - what's not to love about high-tech skateboards in the service of on-time pizza delivery? - I had modest expectations when I opened China Mieville's first novel, King Rat. Published in 1998 when the author was just 26, it tells the story of a Londoner named Saul Garamond who is wrongly suspected of murdering his father. He's sprung from his police holding cell by a mysterious creature in a gray overcoat, the furtive, foul-smelling rodent of the book's title. What ensues is a mind-bending journey across London's rooftops and through its sewers as Saul learns that he's part human and part rat and therefore a vital weapon in the war against a murderous Pied Piper figure who wants to annihilate all of the city's rats and spiders. It ends with an orgy of violence at a Drum and Bass rave called Junglist Terror. I wasn't quite sure what to make of the novel. Was it just a delicious stew of weirdness? Was it an allegory about the need for solidarity among the underclass as it fights prejudice and oppression? Whatever it was or was not, the book whetted my appetite for more. While King Rat was a respectable debut, it barely hinted at what was coming. Perdido Street Station, published in 2000, anointed Mieville as a star of the fantasy genre - or the "New Weird" - and gave birth to a cult following. The novel is an astonishment, the work of a writer with a fecund, feverish, inexhaustible imagination, a brilliant world-maker. We are on the world of Bas-Lag, in a suppurating cesspool of a city called New Crobuzon, where humans and strange races and brutally altered convicts called Remades jostle and thieve and whore under the eye of a vicious, all-seeing militia. The city festers around the spot where the River Tar and River Canker meet to form the River Gross Tar. It's peppered with evocatively named precincts - Smog Bend, Nigh Sump, Murkside, Spatters - and rail lines emerge like an evil spider web from the titular train station. There are human frogs called vodyanoi, half-bird half-men called garuda, green-skinned cactus people, and intelligent beetles called khepri. People get strung out on shazbah, dreamshit, quinner, and very-tea. In their midst, a rogue scientist named Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin receives an unusual commission: a garuda needs a new set of wings because his were hacked off as punishment for some obscure crime against the garuda code. And then there's Mr. Motley, the crime boss who commissions Isaac's khepri girlfriend to immortalize him with a life-size statue fashioned from her spit. Mr. Motley is one malevolent eyeful: Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor... "So," he said from one of the grinning human mouths. "Which do you think is my best side?" Then, just when you're starting to get your bearings in this otherworldly world, Mieville brings in the slake-moths. These are flying beasts that use the pooling light on their wings to mesmerize their human prey, then proceed to suck the dreams out of their skulls, leaving behind drooling, inert zombies. For good measure, the slake-moths then spray the city with their excrement, fertilizing a plague of nightmares. A simple question comes to propel the galloping narrative: Will the humans and constructs and Remades of New Crobuzon find the will and the way to defeat the ravenous slake-moths? The answer makes for one very wild ride. Perdido Street Station would have been a career peak for many writers, but Mieville was not yet 30 and he was just getting warmed up. In 2002 he returned to Bas-Lag with The Scar, but instead of revisiting the dank alleys of New Crobuzon he took to the high seas, where two New Crobuzon natives have been captured by pirates and sequestered on Armada, a vast floating city made of lashed-together boats, all of it dragged slowly across the world by tug boats. As they plot their escape, Bellis Coldwine, a gifted linguist, and Silas Fennec, a vaguely disreputable adventurer with curious powers, piece together the great mystery and mission of Armada: its rulers are working to raise a mythical mile-long beast from the deep, the avanc, so they can lash it to the bottom of the city and move at much greater speeds - toward... what? Once again the fauna is irresistible: the Lovers, the autocratic couple who rule Armada and cement their bond by constantly giving each other identical scars; a Remade with octopus tentacles grafted onto his chest who gets gills cut into his neck and becomes an amphibious human; huge mosquito women who split open their prey (hogs, sheep, humans) and then suck them dry; amphibious cray who inhabit underwater cities festooned with seaweed topiary and 8-foot tall snails; a human killing machine named Uther Doul; and, of course, the monstrous avanc. Together they propel a rollicking, swashbuckling adventure. By now my original questions were coming into focus. I realized Mieville was not writing allegories, in which things stand for something else in order to convey a deeper, unstated meaning. Mieville's humans and hybrids and monsters are not symbols; they are simply what they are, and they demand to be taken literally. This was stunning to me, and I realized it would not have worked if Mieville were not so good at creating unforgettable characters and creatures, at making sentences, at telling compelling stories. I also realized that a couple of themes run like strands of barbed wire through all the books: the dubious merits of demagogues and messiahs, and the vital importance of resisting absolute power. These are grand themes, and in Mieville's hands they help turn good books into great ones. He expanded on these themes in Iron Council (2004), in which a group of renegade workers commandeer the construction of a railroad that is crossing the continent, crushing everything in its path in a mad quest for profit. With a civil war erupting back in New Crobuzon, the renegades succeed in traversing the uncharted, forbidding continent, ripping up the tracks behind them and re-laying them in front as they inch along, writing history. The train itself, this Iron Council, soon goes feral. It's led by Judah, a master at making golems out of dirt, corpses, air, even time, and eventually it must decide if it should return to New Crobuzon to help the revolt, or continue on its epic journey. Interrupted by a long flashback in the middle, the novel is more overtly political than its predecessors, with a subtext about the pain of unrequited love between saintly Judah and a male disciple named Cutter. It's both brutal and tender, with plenty of monsters and combat and high adventure, but fans and critics were sharply divided. After its publication, Mieville cited Iron Council as his personal favorite among his books. It's not hard to understand why. The writing is lean, free of pyrotechnics, fearless, a sign that the writer has attained full confidence in his powers, in his characters, and in the weird world they travel through. Mieville no longer had anything to prove to himself or anyone else. What writer wouldn't revel in such liberating self-possession? Mieville was entitled to a breather, and he took it in 2007 with Un Lun Dun, a delightful children's book that posits there are "abcities" that live alongside real ones - London has Un Lun Dun, and then there's Parisn't, No York, Lost Angeles, and others. Into Un Lun Dun come two London girls, Zanna and Deeba, lured to the abcity because, as they learn, Zanna is the much-coveted Shwazzy (a play on the French word choisi, or Chosen One), who supposedly possesses powers that will help the residents of the abcity defeat the virulent Smog. This noxious organic cloud, fed by London's pollutants, threatens to burn everything in Un Lun Dun - books, buildings, people - then inhale their smoke, increasing its size and power and knowledge until the abcity vanishes. One of Mieville's themes - the dubious nature of messiahs - is cleverly tweaked here when it turns out that Zanna is a zero and Deeba, the unchosen one, is the true heroine. As Alice did in Wonderland, Deeba fearlessly negotiates the wondrous abcity with its donut-shaped UnSun, its flying double-decker buses, its "moil" buildings (Mildly Outdated in London) made of discarded TVs and record players, and Webminster Abbey, a church made of cobwebs. She teams up with a kindly bus conductor, a talking book, a cuddly milk carton named Curdle, and the binja, protective trash bins that know karate. Their battle against the Smog and its devious human allies draws on Mieville's twin strengths - his boundless imagination and his ability to whip a narrative into a frenzy. He even illustrated the book with deft pen-and-ink sketches. Next came The City & the City (2009), which, though it just won the 2010 Hugo Award, strikes me as the weakest of Mieville's novels. It's essentially a noir police procedural set in a pair of intertwined cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space but never interact. Under threat of severe penalty, citizens of each city learn to "unsee" the other. Mieville is to be applauded for resisting the temptation to get too comfortable on Bas-Lag, in London or in Un Lun Dun, but for me the novel is a one-trick pony, under-worked, thin. Not everyone agreed. The novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Locus Award for best fantasy novel of 2009. Mieville returned to London with this summer's Kraken, which is the German plural for "octopus," and a bit of a misnomer because the novel's titular creature is actually a giant squid. When it disappears mysteriously from the Natural History Museum, a curator named Billy Harrow is drawn into the police investigation and soon finds himself in the other London - a netherworld of cultists, magickers, angels, witches, stone cold killers, and some people who are trying to engineer the end of the world. One of them is a talking tattoo. Another wants to erase the achievements of Charles Darwin. More than a few people believe the giant squid is a god. The novel is Mieville's grandest achievement to date, brainy and funny and harrowing, its pages studded with finely cut gems, such as: "The street stank of fox." And: "The presence of Billy's dream was persistent, like water in his ears." And: "All buildings whisper. This one did it with drips, with the scuff of rubbish crawling in breezes, with the exhalations of concrete." This other London, Mieville writes, is "a graveyard haunted by dead faiths." Like all of his worlds, it is not merely plausible, it is engrossing precisely because it demolishes old notions of plausibility and writes its own. In other words, it's an eye-opener, a revelation. By the time I finished reading Mieville's novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else's idea of what's great, what's good or, worse yet, what's good for you. What matters is a writer's ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Mieville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I've come to see, is far more precious than a book's classification, its author's reputation, or the size of its audience. As the late Frank Kermode said of criticism, Mieville understands that fiction has a duty to "give pleasure." He does this by working that fertile borderland where pulp meets the surreal. He's an equal-opportunity plunderer of the high and the low, mining not only the texts of his chosen genre, but also mythology, folklore, Kafka, children's literature, epics, comics, Melville, westerns, horror, and such contemporary pop culture totems as graffiti, body art, and Dungeons & Dragons. For all that, his worlds are surprisingly low-tech, more steam-punk than cyber-punk, which speaks loudly to the Luddite in me. People use gas lamps, typewriters, crossbows, flintlock rifles, and bulky "calculation engines." There are no spaceships, death rays, or other threadbare hardware that furnishes so much old-school SF. The one exception is a witty nod to "Star Trek" in Kraken, including some acts of teleportation. But it's the exception that proves the rule. Best of all, Mieville's worlds are not governed by tidy morality any more than they're governed by the strictures of hard realism or hard science fiction. Virtue is not always rewarded and evil often goes unpunished, which is to say that his weird worlds have a lot in common with the world we're living in today. In fact, weirdness for Mieville is not something that exists outside reality; it's just beneath, and next to, and right behind, and inside of the everyday. "'Weird' to me," he has said, "is about the sense that reality is always weird." In the end, his fantasy novels are not about otherworldly worlds, not really. They're about the possibilities that are all around us, waiting for someone to open our eyes so we can see them. Someone with the imagination and the writing chops of China Mieville. For him, weirdness is not an end in itself, but a means to a much higher end. He has said that his "Holy Grail" is to write the ripping good yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde. The only better description I've heard of his writing came from a fan who wrote that, in Mieville's books, "Middle Earth meets Dickensian London on really good acid." Perfect. As fine as it often is, Mieville's writing is not flawless. Especially in the early novels, over-used exclamations become tiring, such as "By Jabber!" and "godspit!" A handful of words get worn to the nub, including "judder," "drool," "thaumaturgy," and "puissance." Some predators "predate" their victims instead of preying on them. Mieville - godspit! - has been known to use "impact" as a verb, which ought to be an international crime. And like many middle-aged faces, his prose would benefit from a little tightening here and there. But these are quibbles, and they should have been addressed by a halfway competent copy editor. Besides, they're a bit like walking away from a sumptuous banquet and bitching that the shrimp weren't big enough. No writer is perfect, mercifully, but a few, like Mieville, start with a bang and just keep getting bigger and stronger and weirder and better. That's as much as any reader has a right to ask of any writer. Word is getting out of the genre ghetto. Even the Decade-Late Desk at the New York Times gave Mieville the full treatment after the publication of Kraken - an interview in his London home that duly noted his middle-class upbringing, his shaved skull and multiple ear piercings, his degree from the London School of Economics, and his numerous literary prizes. "And," the article concluded with tepid Gray Lady praise, "his fan base has come to include reviewers outside the sci-fi establishment." True, as far as it goes. But the Times article barely touched on what might be the most startling aspect of Mieville's career to date. Rather than trying to distance himself from the fantasy genre, he has embraced it. Another writer who has done this is Neal Stephenson. "I have so much respect for Neal on that basis," Mieville once told an interviewer. "I could kiss him. So many writers perform the Stephenson maneuver in reverse. They perform the (Margaret) Atwood - they write things that are clearly weird or in the fantastic tradition, and then they bend over backwards to try to distance themselves from genre." Not China Mieville. Which is why I've written this mash note - to thank him for helping me see that genre books, that any books, can be great, and for teaching me to quit worrying and just kick back, relax, and realize it's totally cool to love the monsters. Essays Bill Morris | 5 books mentioned 32 11 min read * * Essays On Motherhood, Rumaan Alam, and Sheila Heti Essays Joshunda Sanders May 22, 2018 | 5 books mentioned 4 min read I have never been able to shake having lunch with a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in Berkeley before leaving the Bay Area and asking her what she thought about having a child. "It is," she said, "A ball and chain. You will be shackled for life." Essays Joshunda Sanders | 5 books mentioned 4 min read * * * (c) PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. counter Quantcast