Fid for a day

This review assumes you know things about Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Anathem that have already been widely discussed in announcements and reviews:  the monastic “maths” peopled by monkish “avout,” the separation between the mathic and “extramuros” worlds, the discussions of familiar philosophical issues, the plot-significance of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, the parallels between the planet Arbre and earth and between the Arbreans and earthlings, and so on.  What many reviews only mention in passing is that the Arbreans’ humanoid physiology is, not coincidentally, like ours; indeed, we (or our descendants) make an appearance late in the book.  Since the role of humans as polycosmic counterparts of Arbreans and other humanoid races is only a provocative sidelight, not a Planet of the Apes-style revelation (when Chuck Heston murmurs, “Oh, my God!” as he espies the Statue of Liberty poking up through the sand) that defines the work, I don’t feel I’ve spoiled too much.

Let me get down to brass tacks:  Anathem does some things very well as a sci-fi entertainment, even though I can’t hail it as the paragon of literary sci-fi art I was hoping to discover as I began my 10-book reading project.

Foremost among Stephenson’s gifts as a writer is his ability to construct a big plot (Anathem is about a thousand pages long—a “thousander,” to misappropriate one of the book’s myriad terms) with an even more massive backstory, and to keep the behemoth moving along at a steady pace.  He uses the first-person perspective of Erasmas, a young avout, as a channel through which to trickle background information about the novel’s world, from the architecture of the concents (monasteries) to the habits and beliefs of the avout to the ways of the outside world to the political and intellectual history of Arbre.  Stephenson’s writing applies an engineer’s precision and economy, page count notwithstanding, to the crafting of a novel.  Nothing wrong with this, although to some tastes it produces a monster less loose and baggy than is called for in a novel.

The Erasmas character is a kind of perfect-fool-everyman who excels at reporting facts and drawing just as many clever conclusions as Stephenson wants to let us in on.  One of my few difficulties in reading this book was the age group of its narrator and how his milieu is handled.  Erasmas is perhaps the equivalent of a college sophomore.  Owing to his contemplative mathic upbringing, he’s probably a few years ahead of a 19-year-old earth lad when it comes to book-learning, but emotionally he’s right on track, maybe even a little behind the curve from lack of hang time at the mall.  He spends time with other dweebs, such as Jesry, the alpha nerd.  The young “suurs” in Erasmas’s peer group are of course the developmental superiors of the “fraas.”  Erasmas learns this when he falls like a ton of bricks for one of his lady-friends, who has been planning their union for months.

Although developments like this are amusing and simply wrought, the level of social interaction is about that of an after-school special.  And this is my main reservation about Anathem:  It doesn’t give adult humanoids much to dwell on and learn from, so it’s not literature that rewards the reader, except as light, entertaining spec-fi (“speculative fiction,” Stephenson’s and others’ preferred expansion of “sf”).

The plot goes all over the Arbrean map, and then some.  Erasmas is drawn out of his concent (“evoked”) and into a sprawling quest across Arbre and into outer space, where he meets aliens from nearby possible worlds who are like himself and us (some of them is us).  Along the way, philosophical conversations (“dialogues”) and musings in Erasmas’s head reveal that the history of ideas and physical theory on Arbre essentially tracks our own.  The book has an extensive glossary, much of which is devoted to mathic equivalents of familiar philosophical and scientific concepts—”Gardan’s Steelyard” for “Occam’s razor,” “Protas” for “Plato,” “Adrakhonian” for “Pythagorean.”  I can’t deny the considerable delight for the nerdish reader in discovering these equivalences, and another of Stephenson’s talents is an ear for le mot juste when it comes to alien-spoofing neologisms.  In fact none of the Arbrean terms is supposed to be a verbatim re-creation of their language; in the introduction to the book, Stephenson spells out that the special words used in the narrative are meant to capture the flavor of Arbrean thought in terms resonant to the terrestrial reader.

It might seem as though the philosophical themes bandied about in Anathem would be of special interest to a philosophy student.  But since controversies such as nominalism vs. Platonism and the catastrophe that is postmodernism are introduced without being plumbed, much less advanced, I can’t say I experienced more than a feeling of solidarity with these aliens from our shared intellectual predicament.

My bottom line on this book is that I don’t regret reading it, yet I wonder whether reading another NS epic will be worth the time spent.  I’m also interested in computers, so I may at least begin Cryptonomicon, which I already own.

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Beam me back down

From about the ages of 10 to 25, I went on sporadic science fiction reading binges with months or years in between.  I think watching first-run Star Trek episodes may have set them off.  My first sci-fi books came from Arrow Books and the Scholastic Book Club catalog that was passed around my elementary school homeroom every month.  At some point, I discovered the Greats of that era:  Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury.  The first two I enjoyed right away.  Bradbury took longer to appreciate.  I’m still waiting to grok Heinlein.  Technically, I’m a “child of the 60s,” but I was literally a child at the time and didn’t have to choose between the hippies and the establishment.  Heinlein was too adult and, to my ear, too oddly written to reach me.

My mother, a high school English teacher, later taught a science fiction course.  She had her kids read books as diverse as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  I followed her list, reading some of the books and getting bogged down in others.  I also acquired an anthology from the “Golden Age” of science fiction and became absorbed with its lurid tales of mayhem and solitude, usually the result of a single scientific extrapolation gone horribly wrong.  There was John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, which became the movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing.  There was Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel, which later got developed by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick into the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  And there was my favorite ripping yarn, though no literary masterpiece, He Who Shrank, in which a guy gets smaller and smaller until he cycles around to a nanoverse that strangely resembles our own.

Competing with sci-fi for my attention were the vicissitudes of youth and “real literature.”  The latter, I thought, should not be so well-defined as to exclude science fiction.  I had to admit that nothing I had read in the genre struck me as great from a poetic or mythic point of view, but sci-fi, I thought, ought to lend itself to great myth-like creations and great reflections on the human condition, and to beautiful prose.  Clearly science fiction was waiting for its transcendent exponents, its Homers and Dantes and Faulkners and Prousts.  It was still a relatively young artform whose time would come.

However naive that youthful expectation, I’ve begun to wonder, 25 years later, whether it might have come true.  All right, not with a Homer or a Dante, but would it kill someone to be science fiction’s F. Scott Fitzgerald?  So I decided to read, say, ten sci-fi novels over the next couple of years.  I would pick them the way I do anything else:  on the internet.  What I ended up doing was some googling and mungeing of numerous lists of “best sf novels of the decade,” and here’s the combined and reduced list I came up with, in no order of preference:

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
• The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
• Glasshouse, by Charles Stross
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks
• Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
• Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
• Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

To this I’ll probably add Little, Big by John Crowley.  It’s a fantasy novel (as is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell), but it has a strong reputation, and Harold Bloom has called it “the most enchanting 20th-century book I know.”  The truth is that I may never read this whole list.  I don’t want to prejudge based on reviews—also gleaned from the net—but I’ve heard some dissuading stuff about a couple of items.  The Miéville, for instance, apparently devolves into a “bug hunt” for the final hundred pages or so.  That doesn’t sound enriching, although for all I know the bug-battle descriptions are as good as Homer’s account of the Trojan War.  An audio clip of a Ted Chiang story struck me as hard-boiled or glib, but maybe he’s the sf Elmore Leonard.  So these deserve a chance, I suppose.  I’ll probably prioritize the list and at least knock off the most promising titles, then maybe do another search.  Will post my reviews here, naturally.

Further recommendations are welcome, by the way, even though I know no one reads this blog.

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Re-awakened to mystery’s life

I have a friend who has been known to read all the novels of a author sequentially. And not just the short ones: the oeuvres complètes of Herman Wouk, for example, or of Tolstoy. Many people seem to do this in less ambitious fashion with murder mysteries, and I can see the attraction. A good mystery writer is worth her weight in gold to the enthusiast, a dependable voice that delivers a trademark experience again and again. I’ve just never been able to stick with it. I’ll read a book by one author—three in a row at most, I find—then move on to someone else. But I am interested in what an author can show, during her brief interview, about the craft of mystery writing, because I harbor the conviction that mystery writing models pretty much everything about the craft part of writing a modern novel.

It would be going too far to say that all modern novels are mystery novels, but I do think the reverse may be true of British mysteries. I find that the better British detective stories differ from the “literary fiction” of the Isles only in their overtness of genre. Perhaps this bespeaks an undue influence of one genre upon the whole of an art, but I think the similarity may be due to a cultural backdrop that a British author, unlike an American one, can still safely assume: a concept of manners taken seriously, the presence of clearly delineated social classes, a concealment of self in everyday discourse that implies a mystery at every turn. There’s a chance these are pet fictions, but I’ve heard tell of ’em.

Amazingly, I had never read a P.D. James novel till a few days ago, when I finished An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, the first of the two Cordelia Gray mysteries (the other being The Skull Beneath the Skin, which I’ve just started). I found it, in its way, perfect of its kind, paradigmatic of the sort of manageably short detective fiction that leaves one entertained, mildly cathartized, and not feeling cheated of literary respect by the author. Unsuitable, for one thing, is the perfect airport-bookrack length of 250 pages (60,000 words, the paperback publisher’s answer to the fashion industry’s size-6 dress).

It’s been a while since I have read an Agatha Christie novel. I used to enjoy them because my parents’ generation did—that vicarious nostalgia that one’s own parents may never have felt but that one adopts out of love for them—and gradually I came to appreciate the wiles of the British crime story. In my childhood years, a Sherlock Holmes phase was as de rigueur as a dinosaur phase, and I went through mine. From late teens onward the fear of not seeming sophisticated enough set in, and I veered from stodgy mysteries to “serious” fiction. Strangely, this didn’t keep me from reading science fiction, but my parallel career as a nerd-in-training will have to wait for another entry.

I suppose I was just out of college when I read Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, and that blew me away. For the first time, I realized that a mystery story need not operate in a morally coherent world, that everyone was “guilty” in his own way, and that not even a culprit was needed, or rather, there were inevitably many culprits, and the choice of which one to assign to the crime under investigation was largely arbitrary, an artifact of societal focus on the “smoking gun”—in this case, a body transplanted from belfry to grave. (I hope that wasn’t too much of a “spoiler.” Incidentally, Tailors also demonstrates how, against every intuition of common sense, bell change-ringing turns out to be of absolutely critical importance.)

Next came a brief obsession with Georges Simenon, who continued my re-education in the mystery genre. I learned from him that temporal order is overrated, as is the perspective of the detective; the perpetrator’s experience can be just as interesting: a whodunnit can be recast just as profitably as a why-dunnit or a how-dunnit or even a will-he-do-it. But there was always something a bit drab about reading a Simenon story, for me. Maybe it was that he wasn’t English (or American, but I confess a greater affinity for British mysteries). I lost interest in what I came to think of as “straight suspense” for years, until I rediscovered it in more savory form in Patricia Highsmith’s novels and novellas.

In fact, when I made an abortive attempt, a few years ago, to write a novel, it was going to be a suspense story, not a mystery. This wasn’t because I had abandoned mysteries but because I felt suspense was somehow more approachable, from the maker’s point of view.

My thought was that, when writing suspense, both my story and my own writerly consciousness could run in tandem (living in the present of the story or, as they say in philosophy, under the “A-series” view of time). Writing a mystery, I reckoned, required not only a sense of the present as the reader would experience it but also a synoptic view (the “B-series” of time as conceived eternally). The author had to know the whole truth of the matter, of which only dribs and drabs would be dispensed to the perplexed but tantalized reader. At the time this seemed to need a lot more art, although I now think that’s a load of malarkey: Every author has the choice whether to lay out his entire story ahead of time—like Nabokov with his notecards on the living-room carpet—or take events as they come—like Vonnegut, who famously said he couldn’t imagine writing a story if he knew how it was going to turn out.

It feels better just to write that. Maybe my next first novel will be a mystery.

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Prescience fiction

The Popular Mechanics web site gives a list of the 10 Most Prophetic Science Fiction Movies Ever (thanks to my brother-in-law Paul for the link). At first it struck me that movies already successful in predicting subsequent science and technology must be ones that have aimed low in their predictions.

For instance, a time-machine epic is not going to make the list, because nobody’s anywhere near being able to bet rationally on a technology of time travel. To mention an example on the PM list: In Blade Runner, designer humans and flying cars are a lot more plausible and almost certainly closer to happening than time machines, yet they’re still too iffy for the movie to claim prescience. (Blade Runner‘s remaining sci-fi hook, its prediction of a dystopic megalopolitan society, mainly amplifies how things already were when the film was made.)

On the other hand, I just glanced at an article about a technique (using low dosages of anaesthetic) for wiping away traumatic memories—or at least the emotions associated with them. Made me think that the premises of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Total Recall might be closer than I had supposed. Maybe prognosticatory prowess in science fiction isn’t a matter of aiming lower but simply of getting lucky.

A few quibbles with the list: Out of sheer preference, I’d replace Short Circuit with Robocop; Road Warrior with 1984 (in the “dystopia” category) or Escape from New York (“life as prison term”); and Soylent Green—despite Edward G. Robinson’s heart-wrenching euthanasia to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony—with Silent Running (“aftermath of environmental decline”) or The Island or Logan’s Run (“escape from Crazyville”). As I go through movie titles in my head, I’m noticing to what an extent dystopias of one kind or other dominate sci-fi. I feel a perverse need to mention Waterworld and The Postman, but we need speak of them no more.

Logan’s Run becomes, if not more probable, much more terrifying as I grow older, but I do think the saner (very well: “yet still appalling”) alternative would be to prune the junior segment of the population, allowing some lucky youngsters to realize the benefits of life experience and education. Yes, I like that a lot better, being already past the cut-off age.

On the other end of the spectrum, can anyone think of a sci-fi film that focuses on individuals who live a very long time?  All I’m coming up with is Highlander, and that’s more fantasy than sci-fi. Extreme longevity has gotten a lot of press lately because of immortalist Aubrey de Grey’s cries in the wilderness, which in the end may not fall on the deaf ears of baby-boomers suddenly in the market for an escape hatch from the Reaper.  At any rate, the best handling of this theme in hard sci-fi seems restricted to various Star Trek (and its spin-offs) TV episodes.  I’m probably overlooking something, but life’s too short.

Finally, I must cast a vote, based purely on a philosophical argument, for The Matrix (or even more aptly The 13th Floor) as perhaps having come true already. There are a number of computationalist philosophers of mind who reason that if world-simulations are possible—and, being computationalists, they’re inclined to think that they are—then it’s likely that in the fulness of time simulations would far outstrip in number the single time-line of “real” (non-simulated) history. This would mean that the odds are prohibitively in favor of our existing, right now, in a simulation.  One has to admire an empirical argument about the ultimate nature of reality.  Rather short-circuits metaphysics, doesn’t it?

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