rushthatspeaks | May. 6th, 2015

May. 6th, 2015

Tracker, C.J. Cherryh

This is the somewhere-in-the-low-double-digits-I-have-frankly-forgottenth of Cherryh's atevi books, and it is not where you start. At this point, this series is almost less a series of novels to me than it is a series of yearly family visits. How is Ilisidi's leg? What has Cajeiri's terrible pet broken recently? Oh, Bren got his apartment back, how nice, my, that was quite a complicated thing, some people's children, you did mention something about that last year, yes, I will have some more tea, thank you. This impression is not weakened by the fact that all the book titles ending in -er or -or means that I cannot assign a book's events to the book they took place in with any degree of accuracy. I was able to pick out this book as the newest one in the shop because it was the only one in hardcover, and I can actually recite with fair accuracy what has happened in the series to date, but ask me whether Precursor comes before or after Betrayer and I'll be like I DON'T KNOW THOSE ARE CERTAINLY BOTH WORDS. So, the kind of family visit which you have, about once a year, and greatly enjoy, but which has gotten into a rhythm, where you know how it is going to go to such a point that you almost do not need to go.

Which is not to say people shouldn't read these; they're lovely. Merely that I urge you to cultivate a sense of calm and detachment about the pacing of the overall plot.

There is a thing which can happen to writers of series, where they write a book, and it comes out, and they want to have a time skip before the next one, and they hand in an outline or possibly even a manuscript to their editor, and the editor says 'I have absolutely no idea how the situation we find ourselves in at the start of this next book could have happened during this time skip, please write a novel set during the time skip because your readers are going to be totally lost'. And then the writer does, and that book comes out, and the writer brings back the original outline/manuscript, and the editor says 'That's better, but we still haven't had xyz things explained, you need to write another book set during the time skip before we can get back to the plan'. And the thing is, this can go on basically indefinitely. It very famously happened to George R.R. Martin, but I've also heard of it happening to Rosemary Kirstein, and to Elizabeth Wein, and in all cases years and years and books have passed and we've either only just gotten to the post-time-skip or it hasn't turned up yet at all. I am about eighty percent certain that this precise situation happened to Cherryh with the atevi series, and that it happened right after the re-establishment of Tabini's government, and all the books we've gotten since have been explanations Cherryh originally thought we should have been able to infer between the end of that book and the beginning of... and this is the nice thing about Tracker, actually... the next book in the series from now, whatever it turns out to be called. If this is what happened, Cherryh was wrong and we couldn't infer all the things that would have been elided, but the editor was also wrong and we could have had at least two fewer books. As of next book, we shall resume our regularly scheduled actual series plot.

In the meantime, these are people I've really liked seeing once a year, because one always worries that Bren is overworking (he is) and not eating or sleeping enough (the eating's fine, the other isn't). The cover of this installment is also damn close to priceless. Presently the other shoe will drop, but until then, more more tea, thank you.

The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu

In an essay somewhere in The Language of the Night, Ursula Le Guin asks the question of whether a science-fiction or fantasy book should be a novel, that is, whether it should attempt the three-dimensional portrayal of its characters with sufficient complexity as to make them mimetically convincing. (She also asks the question of whether a science-fiction or fantasy book can do this, but that's fairly easily dealt with by finding examples of it happening: yes, it can.) After pondering the question for a while, Le Guin confesses that it's difficult for her to work with, as a question, because to her it is so obvious that not only can it be done, but that we have not seen anything like the full potential of what could happen when it is done well, and consequently it ought to be done. So she's entering the question with bias, she says, and therefore puts it down again.

It is true that one of the principal forms of SFF, and a form which it does not share with much else in literature except possibly historical fiction, is the depiction of long-term, very large things at a scale far greater than the human, in a manner which remains engrossing without containing any complicated or even remotely mimetic characters. Take Olaf Stapledon-- Stapledon is gripping. Entire galactic civilizations rise and fall, and it's almost pure sense of wonder and brilliantly written, and if Last and First Men has any characters whatsoever I certainly failed to notice them and did not care about the lack. This is the kind of thing one would like to see continued, as a literary tradition.

And of course those of us who do hold that an SFF book should be a novel-- and I am with Le Guin on this, always and forever and unequivocally; it can, it should, it ought to be-- would like to find some way of fusing the two, of having the novel-as-world-schema, covering aeons and/or concepts on the macrocosmic scale, having that be the same book as the novel with the three-dimensional characters that become, for the reader, real people to the point of being friends and enemies and family you look in on every so often.

This is, I expect, why there's a blurb on the cover of The Three-Body Problem by Kim Stanley Robinson, who is one of the people in the field who works hardest at fusing the two. The Three-Body Problem can be read as an attempt at such a fusion. The thing is, though, I think that's erroneous. I think that all the characters in Three-Body are types, and intentional types, and that each of them represents a specific viewpoint in the complex intellectual structure of speculation that the book is setting up, and nothing else. I think this because none of them ever does anything surprising, not once; the book itself is what does surprising things, the twists and turns of that intellectual structure as expressed through the overall narration and not through the actions of individual people.

Taken that way, it's a very good book. It's one of the better books of its kind I've seen. And I am not frustrated with it for not being a fusion of the story based on ideas and the novel of character, because I don't think it's trying to do that at all. But it's never going to be a favorite book of mine, because, as I said before, I'm with Le Guin. Lots of people have written good books based on ideas this way, and lots of people have written good novels of character, and very few have explored the space between and that's what I want to read, personally. Read, and write myself, and if I fail at one or the other aspect of the fusion what I am actually good at writing is character.

And this leads into an interesting thing about the Hugo Awards, since Three-Body's nomination was why I got around to reading it. The Hugos are trying to judge chalk and cheese, in the novel category, which is pretty standard for the Hugos. This year there are three honest nominees for Best Novel, by which I mean nominees not gamed onto the ballot for political reasons. Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy of manners and entirely a novel of character. It's very good at what it does. The Three-Body Problem is hard near-future SF and entirely a story of ideas. It's very good at what it does. Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie, is an attempt at a fusion between the two things, and a sequel to a fusion between the two which actually worked and was both, and I'm about a third of the way through it so I'll get back to you on how good I think it is at what it does and whether it falls into being entirely one or the other of its subcategories. But, assuming it is also very good at what it does, how is one to choose between these three? They're not trying to do anything like the same things. Not by how well they meet their own ambitions, because it's possible to be infinitely ambitious in each direction, and at least the Addison and the Liu Cixin appear to have lived up to their authors' hopes for them. Not by personal inclination towards whether I prefer a novel of character or a novel of ideas, because that inclination on my part has nothing to do with the quality of the works. It's an interesting problem.

[The Puppy factions, as far as I can tell, would like the novel of character to remove itself from SFF and go stand in a corner somewhere being abstruse. This is what they mean when they say they want 'good old-fashioned storytelling'-- they want characters who are types, because then they can be intellectually challenged on the macro level without being challenged about their conceptions of people on the personal level. Including any elements in a character which don't fit into the character types they grew up with is read and taken as a challenge to their conceptions of people on a personal level, which is why they seem to have missed the intellectual structure of Leckie's Ancillary Justice and its questions about AI, personality, and identity, in a great morass of being distressed about the universal 'she' pronoun used throughout it. To a person who wants only idea-driven fiction a la Stapledon, every character attribute must directly contribute to the overall scaffolding of the idea, regardless of whether people would actually behave this way or not. It doesn't matter that the characters aren't acting like real people-- that's not what they're there for. They're there as a device. So those of us who say, for instance, that we would like more women in our novels, more GLBT people, more cultural diversity, they see that not as assisting the depiction of more mimetic characters but as complicating the idea structure with things that aren't an integral part of the device. Because everything other than the very vaguest sketch of a character is non-integral, and, due to any number of factors including outright horrible prejudice and/or character traits not being things the writer of ideas cares about, the very vaguest sketch of a character tends to come out as the cultural default of straight, white, male, cis, ablebodied. That's why there are some Puppy-types who keep saying 'but we do have characters who are black, or gay, when it's necessary to the story!' and then looking confused when we growl. What they don't seem to understand, or claim not to understand, is that those of us who want diversity in our fiction don't have anything against novels of ideas. Or even against character types. What we want is to change those types, because it will make the outcome of the thought experiments in the novel of ideas more interesting. Change the defaults. I found the type characters in The Three-Body Problem way more interesting than most other two-dimensional characters I've encountered recently, because they are sketches from a different culture.]