landingtree

The No-show, by Beth O'Leary

Romance novel in which one man stands three women up for dates on the same day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. And then the book follows these three women in their lives and in their relationships with the man. They are a tree surgeon, a retail worker who left her old life at a law firm for Reasons To Be Explored, and a life coach, each with their own small well-realised cast of side characters. And the man is absolutely sweet, too good to be true - evidently, since he isn't telling the three women about each other. The book presents a tension between the dickishness of his behavior, the non-dickishness of his vibe, and the fact that, well, he's the romantic lead, isn't he? Or is he? But for which romance?

I can see finding the way it all checks out annoying - I did for a bit, but came round on it.


The Rest Of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness.

The chapter titles of this YA novel describe the adventures of teen protagonists that you might find in a Buffy-esque TV show - i.e. Chapter the First, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate.

This describes what is happening at the same time as the chapters. What happens in the chapters is mostly something else entirely: the lives of an unrelated group of teenagers living realist-ish teen-novel lives at the same school, having normal, well-rendered problems like OCD and parents. Except that Buffy is happening in the next clique over, and it always has been. Something opened a Hellmouth under the gym when your parents were teens - they don't talk about it much. Who knows what it was. But every so often the big story is a bit too close to your own small story for comfort.

You have to do it well to sell the premise of 'The cool tropes you like to see? This book is about not-those, about the negative space of those,' and this does. Also I just really like the structural conceit, and it plots and characterises economically.


The No-show is in conversation with romance novels - its structure means you know from the start that it can't exactly play the genre straight - while being one. Another book I read slightly longer ago, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, is in conversation with romance novels (and contains a significant romance novelist) while not being one - and The Rest Of Us Just Live Here has a lot of teen romance running through it, but is very specifically not ending on anything like settledness or permanence, while The No-show - well, it has something to say about interpersonal settledness and permanence, anyway. As someone who's read very little in the romance genre, these an interesting three to have in my head at the same time!

Next I'm reading Alexis Hall's Confounding Oaths, a regency romance narrated by Puck.

This is an amnesia story, where the protagonist finds herself in a situation she doesn't understand and has to work out what happened; and where she turns out, along the way, to be a person of remarkable power and importance. As such, it zips along. I find the amnesia both too convenient (it's carefully targeted to avoid causing any problems that aren't useful to the plot) and really effective. Adding to the paciness, the protagonist (who doesn't initially know her own name) shares with other Butler protagonists I've read a clarity and force of mind and motive: around her, things will get done, and they'll get done well.

It's fun to start amnesia stories not knowing any more than the character does, but also in this case maybe not. Plot description commences here: it's vampires. Or something like them. The protagonist quickly finds that she wants to drink human blood, and that when she does so, the person she drinks from becomes emotionally bound to her, extremely interested in her welfare, and extremely suggestible. Being fed upon is a sexually charged pleasure. This starts out uncomfortable because the protagonist appears to be about eleven years old, but quickly does a partial flip and becomes uncomfortable in the opposite direction as well: the protagonist has to reckon with the control she's achieved before even knowing what kind of being she is, and with the circumstances that deprived her of that knowledge.

( Late-book spoilers on how this power dynamic shakes out )

Regions of impossible physics have occurred on Earth, full of alien detritus that's deadly or valuable by turns. In daylight, government officials enter to brave the deadly and retrieve the valuable; at night, it's the turn of the stalkers, a new professional group of smuggler-ranger. The book's protagonist works both sides.

It's always interesting to see if the source material survives its offspring. I've met two things inspired by this book, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and the Tarkovsky film of it. They're both to some degree faithful adaptations, and did they exhaust this book? Not at all! It's one of those novels I get to the end of and go, "How was there this much novel in only that many pages?"

The answer-

(structural spoilers commence)

-is that it moves through time at a much quicker clip than those other two works. The Tarkovsky film moves with the patience stalkers themselves require; the book doesn't. It knocks scenes, places, and characters into existence with one or two blows of the hammer each, fully confident in the integrity of the structure it's building.

One of the things that makes the Zones interesting is that it's so unclear whether they'll change everything or nothing. An opportunity appears and humans exploit it, do crimes with it, make it into batteries and maybe weapons too: close enough to what we were doing before that at times the job of stalker seems only a metaphor for any other kind of precarious getting-through-the-day. Also they're an existential threat of a never-before-seen kind that might change or obliterate the world in another half-hour.

The hypersignificance of each small detail in the Zone-navigating passages reminds me - and maybe it's just because a scene in the Tarkovsky film, which is working from further outside the characters' heads than the book is, had made me think this first - of a children's game. A small stretch of ground is doing a huge amount of work. Pebbles become threats to life and limb, and a twig becomes a road to safety. There's nothing really there, and what you're witnessing is a person moving very slowly, full of tension and patience, over a small, normal-looking stretch of ground. How often did I cross a stony creek as a child, pretending that my choice of stone was vitally important? That's part of the satisfaction of the Zone story for me: the skill-set of knowing a place's hidden rules. The book gives another, adult example of place-knowledge working: at one point the stalker protagonist escapes from police by applying his skills to a perfectly ordinary neighborhood he knows equally well.

There's an offhand misogyny to this book - the Zone itself is at one point described as a bitch - which I think is part of what Nova Swing is written about and against.

This book starts with three giants on a spaceship. They've grown so much since getting on board that they can't move, but are compressed into the spaceship's rooms like people trapped in tiny cupboards. And they have to keep talking to each other, because the spaceship, Audition, is powered by the sound of their voices.

There is room to doubt what I've just said, because the whole first part of the book consists of dialogue. I wondered sometimes if there was really a spaceship, or if these people were talking for some other reason. It's interesting that the book begins this way, since the two other Pip Adam novels I've read begin in mundane life, and only gradually reveal how speculative they are. This book moves the other way to those ones, beginning with a surreal s.f. premise that's mostly explained by the end of page one, and then offering the possibility that some other account of things will undo it: a different dialogue with the mundanity or weirdness of what's going on.

Like the other books, this takes something that's absolutely a metaphor, and treats it literally beyond the metaphor's requirements: in this case, the experience of being a giant stuck in a spaceship.

Pip Adam's books have been ones I fall under the influence of. After reading The New Animals I went walking in a strangely altered state. I couldn't tell you what exactly had just happened, but I'd been submerged in that book. This one, to go with the water metaphor, feels like it's full of little rips and currents and shallows. Now and again it pulls me under, or pulls me along quick, and then I'm viewing another bit of it from a distance while I crawl over a sandbar. I really like some things it does, and may read it again to see if they all cohere next time, but at the moment I don't feel that they do.

Some possible reasons for this: it's a more complicated book. It's a book which puts the giants in a spaceship ahead of the apple cart, in a way that removes the particular satisfaction I took from the other two: difficult daily life, matter-of-factly described, with some estranging mysterious factor that points beyond it. All that's here, but shuffled. Like the other two, this is a book in dialogue with the question, 'Is this plausible?' and more than the other two I kept on having the reaction, 'No it isn't.' And: this book is didactic. At a talk last year (which I may be misremembering) Pip Adam has talked about her increasing comfort with didacticism, with just taking the point you want to make and putting it in there. I like some extremely didactic books, but in this one I experienced a scattering of lines that landed 'bonk' on my head instead of feeling braided into it. The metaphors are rising close enough to the surface that maybe I like the interviews and articles that go alongside this book better than the book itself. (Also it's the first of the three books that seems to me to contain, and to be partly about, hope of systemic change - I remember my reaction to Everything For Everyone was partly 'Oh how nice a book about systemic change' because I read it after Pip Adam's Nothing To See, which is so much not that).

Under the cut I'll say what some of the metaphors are metaphors for, though don't read the book's jacket copy either if you don't want to know that.


( Read more... )

A Haunting on the Hill, by Elizabeth Hand.

This authorised sequel to The Haunting of Hill House was taking on a difficult task. I don't think it manages to live up to the earlier book, but it does get some good mileage out of bringing the earlier book to dwell unsettlingly inside itself. And this is one of those books where I so much wanted to know what happened next that I stayed up far too late reading it and finished it tired, which in itself recommends it even if I wasn't satisfied with where it got to.

The outline of the story is similar to the original: a group of people come to spend a few weeks in Hill House, and it Does Not Go Well. Where the original group were trying to study the house itself, and therefore treated its early manifestations merrily, this book has a group of people putting on a play, with their various degrees of investment in it.

I really like the whole opening sequence, sliding toward Hill House down a gentle greased slope. I like all the real estate details. Later on, what I said to myself was 'The special effects don't work': I'm neither as interested in what lies between these people, nor as frightened of how Hill House reaches out to exploit it, as I wanted to be.

Hand knows her folklore. This may be more effective for people who knows exactly what she's bringing in, or who know the original better than I do?




Fire & Decay - The Destruction of the Large New Zealand House, by Terence E.R. Hodgson.

This is an odd, not very good book: slender, illustrated with black and white with photos of houses which have since burned down or been demolished. You'd think from the title that it was about a systematic phenomenon, but it isn't really – except, I guess, for ‘Big houses were often made of wood here’ and ‘Rich people often stopped maintaining their houses because they lost their money or moved elsewhere’.

The book is made up of accounts of the houses and pocket biographies of their owners, but neither the houses' architectural points of interest, nor the stories of their collapse, nor the lives of their owners, are really dwelt on, and the photos often aren't great, leaving me unsure what the author's motivation was in putting the book together – except, perhaps, to gently compliment rich people. His view, coming across in offhand comments, is that society has forgotten what diligence it took to be an early settler with masses of family money. The introduction says the author will scrupulously avoid the term 'mansion' not only because most of the houses aren't big enough, (which seems true in many cases), but because "The term also reflects a style of wealthy ostentation which was actually repugnant to the early prosperous New Zealander." I feel that once he's talking about homeowners importing white swans to populate their artificial lakes, this claim begins to need some defending. (There's also a line praising the good work Edward Gibbon Wakefield did planning Wellington from a jail cell; the fact that he's in the cell for abducting a fifteen year old in order to marry her for her wealth is mentioned only so it can be minimized.)

The houses in this book I found fun to read about were The Wattles*, because it has trellises on it and plants growing all up to the second floor balconies, and its owner was a taxidermist and keen gardener; and Alexander Bickerton's Wainoni. Bickerton was a scientist with a passionately wrong theory about star formation: he thought new stars appearing in our sky were caused by two existing stars banging into each other and chunks breaking off them. In 1896, he turned his house into the Wainoni Federative Home, where thirty people shared out chores between them, some being employed elsewhere and some running the house’s firework factory. Sadly, all this was a complete economic failure, and the house, meant to house a hundred, soon dispersed. Bickerton disapproved publicly of marriage, so of course The Federative Home was in often in the papers of Canterbury as a hotbed of immoral sex as well as socialism. The essay I went off and read about him doesn't corroborate this book's assertion that his disapproval of marriage was based on his observation, as a government analyst, of many conjugal poisonings; what it does say is that he believed unwanted marriages were bad for women (true) and were also causing genetic deterioration of the species (false). This book doesn’t mention that he himself was married until two pages after stating his disapproval of marriage, and then only in the context of Mrs Bickerton becoming the house's sole resident after Mr Bickerton had moved back to England. The book doesn't mention that this took place after the house had been converted into an amusement park, which then also failed financially. I want to know more about all of this!

So yes, not a good book for general interest, and totally useless as research into Hamilton, which is the city I wanted to know about and which is skipped entirely. But a spur to further reading.




*all the house names in the book are italicised.

This year I'm doing the Writing for the Page masters course at the Institute of Modern Letters; basically, it's a course in which ten people end up with a draft novel each by November. More on this later! But I keep not getting around to writing about the course, so here are some excerpts from the reading diary it asks students to keep. It's a rainy, windy day, thirteen degrees out, i.e. cold enough for my liking, and I just cycled home exuberantly, singing in the Mt Vic Tunnel (all the cars honk and I have to join in somehow).

~

08/03/2023

...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).

12/03/2023

Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).


13/03/2023

Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.






*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]

**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]

Games:

My sleep habits which tend also to be my computer gaming habits are in a spiral which passes through normal pretty frequently, but also pass occasionally through the station of 'does not sleep all night but instead rediscovers a love for the game Starseed Pilgrim.'

A lot of my favourite games center on exploration and discovery. There's Outer Wilds - exploring a solar system in a small spaceship, learning environmental shortcuts and the history of the strange situation you've been placed in - and Bloodborne - difficult boss fights against gothic abominations are fun, but mainly, for me, because then you can open the next door and walk into the next area - and in a sense The Beginner's Guide, a game which freaked me out very much early on with the sheer extent of what I did not know about it, because I come to horror knowing to expect monsters but I came to this knowing only to expect... something.

And then there's Starseed Pilgrim, in which you are a small person standing on some blocks of one color next to some blocks of another color with a number floating over your head and no tutorial. The mechanics, when discovered, are elegant and fun, the skill of play is fun, but there's an extra step first which is 'What on earth am I meant to be doing?' Whether that's a pro or a con will vary - I've never gotten into any game with a frustration component quickly, this and the souls-like genre* I've gotten into by trying a bit, and then saying 'Not worth it, but not so definitely not worth it as to google all the answers' and drifting away, then drifting back, doing a bit more, drifting away, finding myself suddenly hooked again two years later apparently. There's some revelation left imbedded in this game, whose elegance suggests that everything which doesn't yet seem to exist for a reason, has a reason behind it, and I will poke it and try things till I find out what it is. I thought I'd worked it out. In fact I still think I've worked it out, but I don't know how to get to [redacted].


Books:

In some moods, if I read someone mentioning a book that sounds up my alley, I check the local library and put it on reserve if it's there. This habit is totally distinct from my assessment of how much reading I'm doing, what kinds of reading, how many books I reserved at the library yesterday... I find I now have nine books pending with one ready for pickup and three already beside my bed. It is excellent, I want to read them all, I... certainly might not just keep on reading Ginn Hale's The Rifter on kindle.

I wrote the rest of this post a week ago and rediscovered it when going to post something completely different, so can now report: this did not happen, I finished The Rifter, I still have not read any of my library books cover to cover and there is still urban planning book club book and most of the Norsunder War. (Today I ordered another book at the library. Corrigement came there none).

It's a long time since I read a straightforward 'protagonist falls into fantasy world' book. The Rifter, recced by rachelmanija at some point, is a single very long novel chopped up into segments the better for ebook sale. It's almost comedic setup (protag John's flatmate is clearly a magical member of an assassin priesthood from another world, only John hasn't read enough fantasy to notice, and is merely bemused by flatmate's odd hours, intense weaponry, surprise and delight at modern conveniences, mystic tattoos, musculature...) quickly becomes something quite dark (the assassin's mission is fraught, the magic we see from his world starts at blood and skeletons and gets worse from there).

Things I like about this: the suspense of the answer to large questions, how are the worlds connected and why, [spoilery thing], and what is the assassin doing, will John get home again, how does this world work with its priesthoods and egg-laying weasels? Also, the slow-building romance between John and the assassin, crossed by some serious institutional homophobia stars (and also in some cases their own decisions being characterfully terrible). And there is some zingy characters-can-achieve-things power fantasy going on, assassin is very good at assassing, with knives made of portals.

Things I don't like: I find portions of the book quite flat, this is down to prose doing nothing flashy, minimal description, and characters occasionally staying where they're put doing nothing for long periods because they've got to where the plot needs them to be and can stop. Egg laying weasels and interesting geographical features there may be, but in very much a factual, 'The reader is informed of the weasels and now we can move on' style.

( Also, some spoilers, mainly structural: )

So I am not saying run out and buy this book (or to the people sharing my kindle account, run in and read this book), but if you feel like a long interesting portal fantasy, I enjoyed this one.


My other recently finished book, and I deduce from this that I was reading old rachelmanija reviews at some point last month though I cannot actually remember the event, was The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, by Grady Hendrix. My touchstone for this is 'What if the person summoning the anxieties, fears, and horrors of modern America and putting them into a monster was someone I agreed with more than Stephen King?'** The book starts light and zesty, with a group of housewives forming a book club and friendships. But when a man of no fixed abode turns up all smiles, needing just a little bit of help organising his life and i.d. and things so as to join in with this most proper, safe, well-off community - which he likes, because its folk think crime and danger are best kept away by being respectable and keeping the lawns mowed, and he knows how to do 'respectable' - what follows has all the content warnings arising in the venn diagram of 'misogyny' and 'vampires', i.e. icky and enraging, sometimes both at once. The outcome's in the title, and never a blood-sucker deserved it more, but it doesn't come easy. Really good and much more harrowing than it first seemed.




*which is structured around fighting difficult boss monsters and dying and dying and dying and then winning and getting to explore for at least twenty paces before the next boss monster.

**which is not a totally arbitrary touchstone, because Stephen King is namechecked in the novel, but it's also true that lots of horror writers do this and Stephen King is just the one I listen to a podcast about. I haven't even read his horror, only The Dark Tower (and Apt Pupil for some reason).

I just finished (re)reading The Locked Tomb books. Once again, I really like them! They have various good Diana-Wynne-Jonesnesses which I've seen anatomised by skygiants, to wit, people the reader likes often dislike each other in very petty ways, you can imagine any one of the characters wandering offstage and having a really long letting-off-steam conversation with their aunt while sweeping the patio (if they had aunts or patios), and at any given time, about half the characters are somebody else.

There's a scene in Nona the Ninth where a screen is being prepared for a public broadcast. The screen is made of tesselating white hexagons. It has to be stretched onto a framework like a fitted sheet, and keeps coming loose at the corners. Because of this delay, the broadcast, an incredibly color-saturated video-call, starts halfway through - delivering vital information to the people assembled to hear it, and fairly vital information to the reader too. At the end of the speech, someone murmurs something in the speaker's ear, and they say "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," and start the speech over again from the beginning.

This scene is typical of the Locked Tomb series in three ways. First, it obfuscates information. Partly in the common s.f. way of making sure characters don't pause and define terms unless it makes diegetic sense - I read an interview where Muir cites Neil Stephenson's Anathem as a world-building inspiration, and Anathem is a book whose first few pages are intriguing yet incomprehensible because of the number of terms they don't define. But also in the mystery-box way. It would make perfect worldbuilding sense to start a broadcast at the beginning; this one starts in medias res because that's a bit juicier, a bit more destablizing. Characters in these books often don't share information when they perfectly well could - at least once per book someone is about to reveal something important when they're interrupted from offstage - and the framing makes sure the reader can't quite see, oh I don't know, the face of a certain person, or the object hanging in the sky, until it's been a question mark for at least a few pages. The danger of mystery-box stories (here, the one in the title is literal) is always that the box might be empty - and by the end of this book I still don't know whether a bunch of events in book one happened for any reason other than 'it made for a cooler plot'. But even if that's true, (and there have been hints that isn't) the climactic revelations haven't yet failed to be climactic, it's not doing the 'What's in the hatch? A countdown! What happens at the end of the countdown? I don't remember, probably there's another hatch!' thing; and also,

Second: these books evoke mundane reality really well. Setting up the broadcast is practical, annoying, and slightly odd. There isn't a lot of straight description, but necromantic vassals of incredible power eat off paper plates, the awesomely powerful god-emperor is endearingly shit at metaphors (other things he's shit at are much less endearing, 'I should be god-emperor' being the best answer to nearly zero questions); and see above re. aunts and patios (there is, in fact, at least one aunt), and the broadcasting screen is annoying in a very familiar way even though in this case it's probably powered by necromancy. (Wait, can it be powered by necromancy given [spoilery fact]? Unclear).

And third, it's very funny! When the broadcaster got to the end of the broadcast, was told it had gone wrong, and wearily started again, I laughed, and I laugh a lot in these books. Muir is very good at shifting tones, often though not always for comedy; sometimes her jokes are incredibly, immersion-breakingly obvious, sometimes they're subtle enough that I don't get them on first reading - I assume there are plenty I still haven't noticed - and sometimes they're just, yes, right, of course the broadcast didn't work, I don't know why I expect anything to work, why do I even turn up.

Leaflemming asked me the other day whether he should read these books. The above are reasons I'd generally say yes. This series is also for you if you especially like: bones, gender, heretical forms of Christ, and loyalty unto/beyond/back from/unto death. Reasons one might say no:

1. They're absolutely full of described gore, viscera, bones, teeth exploding into shards, etc. This is gleefully true of book one, yet more true of book two (because its central character knows the names of more bits of anatomy), and much less true of Nona; when there is gore in this book it's mostly described slantwise. This may not make it less disturbing.

2. They're about incredibly fucked-up and often abusive relationships and most of their major plot beats involve significant amounts of pain. This is true, again, Nona less so than the other two. Nona proves that Muir could write a book that wasn't at all fucked up if she wanted to, without particularly indicating that she'll ever want to: Nona has way more sunniness than the other two books and centres the simple goodness that human relationships can have. At the same time, a description of this book as 'the most cheerful entry in the Locked Tomb series yet!' really would not stand up to a list of the events that happen in it.

3. The alternation of tones can be completely immersion-breaking, as on the Discworld but with less buildup to get you there. To me this one turns out to actually be a selling point, but mileages vary. Characters whose relationship to our era is initially vague will use memes from the 2010s during heartfelt emotional scenes. Some characters reach for insults such as "Th'art lowlier than the toad squished at Our Lady's foot" and others are like, yo, suck it mate, I didn't know you were into toads. Portions of this have possible in-world explanations, but I feel like verisimilitude, to this series, is mainly another thing to play with. Again, less true of Nona, and I think more artfully done since Gideon (not that I thought Gideon was bad at it, but to me Gideon feels a bit like a first novel and Harrow jumps right to feeling like an umpteenth novel). Also I turn out to be fairly meme-blind, so some of them I just don't notice!

...

( Thoroughly spoilery Nona reactions below the cut, and continuing in the comments )

I am going to visit leaflemming except I'm waiting to hear the result of my flatmate's covid test (is the fact that they can't taste the ginger in the ginger chocolate we have a cause for concern, along with their sinus symptoms? Probably not! However.)

Over the course of having a really annoying (non-covid) throat infection these past weeks, media which sustained me included:

1. A Half-built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

The hard work of fixing climate change has begun. Where Terra Ignota posits non-geographic nations, this book has even more geographic nations, risen through slow organisation and revolution, whose remits are determined by the watersheds they monitor and care for, regardless of previous arbitrary national boundaries.

But this is a first contact novel. The aliens land by chance in one particular watershed; but they land, also, on a planet none of whose old powers have gone away, and all of whom want a piece of the future the aliens offer.

Some narrative dislikes of mine are in this book - the protagonist spends a long time vacillating over a choice which had me peering out between my fingers shouting "No! No! Do the other thing! Don't do this thing!" and in general I am slightly agonised by the book's commitment to people making poor decisions under pressure. Something in this territory may be why I read Winter Tide with enjoyment but never wanted to pick up the sequel. I'm going to pick up that sequel now, though, because the things I liked about this book I liked so much. Especially its imagined future of work, the algorithmically-mediated network voting system the watersheds use - quietly as augmented-reality as it needs to be despite having none of the corporate aesthetic - which weighs votes against the community's pre-established value sets, and assigns representation to rivers and forests, where the flipside of people's tendency to make mistakes under pressure is a system which can tolerate any individual mistake. I really really want to work in one of those. (In fact, reading about it helped me understand why I have these several years been looking at the prospect of getting a full-time job and responding with white noise, avoid, avert).

( Some spoilers )

I also really like the way the book complicates the idea of having a protagonist with its intermissions, small glimpses of outside perspective, was really good - minimal, yet effective in showing that the main characters don't have a privileged position in events, that the degree to which the book can have main characters is itself a sign that times are strange and norms disrupted. And the diplomatic importance of babies was great, and the non-monolithic future of gender - you can see current gender expression culture evolving in two different ways, and the aliens have their own non-monolithic stuff going on.

And now my flatmate has tested negative for covid! And so, to be cautious, have I, so I am setting forth without writing about the thing I was watching during my throat-infection-ness: Andor, a series which I've been gleefully following along with episode by episode beside the crew of the podcast A More Civilised Age. (Such good designed environments, such acting, such zingy dialogue, if you are fully tired of charming rogue dudes this might be one to miss but he has a good cast of people who are agentive and not rogues and not dudes, and, and, enthuse enthuse, okay leaving house now)

Vic Serotonin is a travel agent. He guides people into - and, if they're lucky, out of - the Saudade Event Site, a fragment of impossible physics fallen to earth in the manner of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky, where the familiar is made strange and the smallest motion might ramify out into a maze to trap the unwary. The tourists go in hoping to find something, perhaps themselves. And Vic? He doesn't seem to hope for anything much. He's a travel agent. He no longer dreams.

On this particular morning, a woman arrives wanting to be guided into the Site, a job which seems routine, but goes a little bit wrong almost at once, because - this being noir, and I haven't read much noir but I sure have heard this about it - an out-of-place woman who needs help will be more trouble than she seems.

Meanwhile, at a bar called the Cafe Surf, there is a reply to the activities of the travel agents. Entirely new people are emerging from the Event Site, and the local Site Crime department would really like to know why, and whether it will make reality change forever, and whether they can stop it.

This book is short, stylish, clean, opaque. M. John Harrison novels always offer me questions such as 'The chapter titles were following a pattern, but chapter five broke it; why?' I read the start of this one slowly, taking notes, turning those questions over. It's perfectly possible for me to read on over the top of all the subtext going 'Yes, yes, there's something here for sure, I'll come back to it later,' because it's not as though there isn't a plot to be apprehended right there on the surface. However, that plot generally consists of people wandering around not managing to do anything for a couple of hundred pages before convulsively achieving or else not achieving something, so the 'leave it to the second reading' approach has probably contributed greatly to the hate part of my love/hate relationship with M. John Harrison. Closer sustained attention certainly helps with the love part, though the fact that it's required means I'll probably never read him often.

(Having got out the notebook, I then needed to zoom back out a bit, or I become a conspiracy theorist. The place the book begins, Straint Street, anagrams to: interstates. Vic Serotonin anagrams to: coinventor. Both leave letters out, and, as the book proceeds, neither will seem to yield very much. These shots aren't worth calling: there can and will be relevant word games in M. John Harrison novels, but he plays fair, and actually points out the ones he thinks you need to catch).

A nova is an explosion of light; Nova Swing is a companion book to the earlier space opera, Light, a thematic reply if not explosive then at least skeptical. In Light, a hundred alien species have tried and failed to explain the impossible astronomical entity called the Kefahuchi Tract; the first thing Vic says in Nova Swing, when his friend is about to suggest an interpretation of the Event Site, is 'If you're just going to talk nonsense don't even bother.' In Light two different interstellar drives can rely on incompatible physics models and both work; the second thing Vic does in Nova Swing is refrain from commenting on the stupidity of the claim, "Everyone's entitled to their opinion." It's ironic that I don't easily experience these novels - as though they themselves contain the merely worldly and the transcendent aspects of existence between which, as some of them would have it, we spend our lives bobbing - since all the characters in Light had trouble with distance from reality. One of them starts inside a VR tank, cycling through meaningless fantasies; another starts as a spaceship and isn't totally happy to be there. This is not exactly the problem faced by the characters in Nova Swing. Here, it's if anything more difficult. The Event Site, the Zone, the mysterious centre of things, is right over there, you can walk in, the police might try to stop you but honestly they don't seem to be trying very hard. When asked about going inside, Vic Serotonin says there's nothing easier... but there is also risk. In the first chapter we meet someone who, instead of switching between virtual lives, is a mind regrown day after day into different disposable bodies, so he can go off and have spectacular, bloody fights in the ring. This is one hundred percent unsimulated and might be no different to the VR tank. You can experience - and then what? Action takes a toll on you; the explorer Bonaventure gets old young, leaving his daughter Edith to care for him and dream of her own glory days as an accordion player, visible to herself only in a long-past light. "The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it," Vic Serotonin says. "Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

So I thought early on that this would be the book about being acted on as opposed to acting: a detective where in Light there was a murderer, a Zone that's come down to earth instead of the Kefahuchi Tract, which hangs there in the sky waiting - a book in which some interstellar drives might, who knows, just not work, because the world has teeth. This applies to the book, but it's not that simple. Nobody acts alone; the result of a multitude of actors may be chaos; solipsism is a road you can walk down almost as far as you like.

...

I was suspicious when I saw a character called Fat Antoyne. I had just read a clever science fiction writer using a fat body grotesquely as plot machinery, without bothering to include anyone else fat to indicate that there might be another reason to include multiple body types, and 3000 Years of Longing didn't clear the fatphobia bar for me either. (I have so much goodwill towards that movie, it wouldn't have taken much). But by the end of the book another character has been offhandedly described as fat, and the self-presentations of other characters are similarly emphasized - the detective is referred to as resembling the older Einstein every time we see him, and at a certain point it's made clear that the older Einstein is a package face you can buy off a shelf - so I ended up happy with how Antoyne played out.

Three times in this book the narration goes 'she was one of those women who-' and god knows my experience of the world and people and women is limited, but what came after the 'who' never sounded more like a coherent explanatory type to me than "She was one of those women who wore a yellow left sock but never said the word 'partial'. Whether this is insight I lack, or failure of insight, or deliberate setup of something to be skewered later, I have not parsed out; but some of the sexist nonsense is here to be skewered for sure. It is ages since I've disliked a character as much as the detective Aschemann. He is avuncular, and awfully charming if you get him in the right mood. Over the course of the novel, he does remarkably little detective work. Instead, he plays conversation like a game, judging his assistant's questions on a pass/fail basis by some mysterious rubric, muses abstractly about his method, and regularly tells other people, especially women, how they're feeling. When we first meet him we get the line, "He beamed down at the toddler, who burst into tears." Yes toddler so would I.*

It is notable, early on, how many minor-seeming female characters get interiority. Scenes here often follow the character you wouldn't expect - staying behind with the women sitting in the bar when the travel agent bustles out of it, or with the detective's assistant after he's gone off chasing a lead. The book is interested in what women in noir are supposed to be, but doesn't play it straight. The most dangerous type of artefact that can emerge from the Event Site, the type which don't remain inert but causes knock-on problems, is called 'daughter code' - but it was a man who decided to name it that. I almost feel like it's a thematic spoiler to answer the question 'Does this book get around to not being sexist?' but then again, I don't care, because if it didn't I wouldn't be recommending it.

M. John Harrison never looks at something bad and says "Let's start somewhere else then, let's go over here." He starts in the unfulfilled desire, the confused motive, the bad dream, the sexist nonsense. All the books of his I've read know there's a way out of it, and all of them start inside it.










* Well, actually, when I last met one of them - a theological dentist - I and a bunch of others argued with him for an hour. He seemed delighted by this. Now, I'd probably just disengage.