When good sci-fi goes bad

I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me: I start reading a science fiction book, particularly something supposedly "classic" from the 1940s to the 1960s, and I get so excited about it, because the story and the characters are both interesting, and then...and then, the Big Idea of the book takes over, and the novel goes downhill.

I was halfway through Philip Jose Farmer's The Unreasoning Mask, when the didactic Big Idea of Farmer's novel took over, and the characters and the story took a decided (and much regretted) backseat. It is as if the writer somehow feels the story of these characters in this particular time is not enough -- that he must supplement it somehow with these grand pronouncements and a "solution" to the nature of the universe or some huge revelation about space/time travel, human nature, or insert-your-own-Big-Idea-here. It culminates in the undoing of a lot of potentially good science fiction novels, and results in a big sigh of disappointments, nearly every time, from me.

Farmer's novel had a really great opening -- a space ship captain, a former Muslim turned atheist, steals an artifact from a planet they've visited, and the artifact just happens to be considered the "god" of the people he took it from. In attempting to outrun the pursuing aliens, who want their god back, the captain and his crew also encounter a massive, planet-killing force which seems somehow tied in with the stolen god. Sounds interesting, right? It was, until about two-thirds of the way through, when it gets trippy and explication of the Big Idea takes over for the story. You can tell this happens when dialogue -- the main character Explaining The Nature of the Universe -- takes over for the actions and details of the plot.

I've got maybe fifty pages left, and I don't even want to finish it. I'm sick of the lecture.

The main thing science fiction genre writers need to learn is that the story itself is sufficient. Place us in the world, show us some of what you've got, but you don't need to explain everything to us. A little mystery is just fine with a reader, even preferred. That moment in science fiction, when the writer seems to say "ok, now, let me tell you how it is" -- that moment just induces a groan from the reader.

Ah well, on to the next one.

My Review, and the Week of Potter

First off, my Brooklyn Rail review on The Apocalypse Reader is finally up here. The print edition has one of the best covers for the Rail I've ever seen. I'm sending it home -- I hope my mother takes that Jesus-crucified-on-a-fighter-plane with her to church services at First Baptist, Memphis. I'd love to see their faces.

(Actually they probably wouldn't mind -- they're pretty liberal for a Southern Baptist church.)

And thus we come to the Week of Potter. People are freaking out, ya'll. And yes, I pre-ordered. Didn't you? Oh c'mon, don't act like you're above it.

Having said that, this article in the Washington Post makes some very good points. I don't think the marketing and popularity of the Potter books is as much to blame as this reviewer seems to think -- personally, I think the failure of our public education system is behind this. We're not creating a well-educated, thoughtful, literate citizenry, and thus, we have airport-novel readers who just want something easy or who want the latest, most buzzed-about thing. The Potter phenomenon is just the mirror reflecting this back to us -- and some of us don't like what we see.

One of the "pet projects" I've always dreamed about involves getting great novelists into public schools -- to teach, do readings, talk about writing and books. Mostly at the elementary or junior high school level. They don't have to read their own work -- I think it would be extremely cool for someone like, say, Jonathan Lethem to read from the young adult novels that he loved at that age. One of the strong influences I had as a child was the presence of strong, passionate readers -- my parents, a few teachers, etc. I have a very fond memory of my fifth grade teacher doing a wonderful reading of "James and the Giant Peach" -- that's the kind of thing that cultivates a desire to read, I think.

Get 'em while they're young -- that's how you do it, folks.

Prick Flicks

There is a really interesting article by Gloria Steinem here which proposes that, just as we label "women's media" as chick-lit and chick flicks, perhaps we should group all male-oriented media under the heading "Prick Flicks." Here's my favorite quote:

"Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll's House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde "chick lit," only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars."

That's it: from now on, I'm calling myself Nancy Hawthorne.

***

It occurred to me this morning while reading Andrea Levy's Small Island that part of the novel's genius is that it doesn't limit itself to depicting the racism of Britons during World War II -- Levy devotes herself, almost equally, to showing how class snobbery still played a role, even when London was under heavy bombing. The middle class still sniffed and complained over the lower classes taking refuge on their respectable streets -- even when these people had nowhere else to go! This book really does deserve all the praise it has received -- in addition to being extraordinarily well-written, it maintains distinct character voices with a wonderful fluidity, and it covers a very broad range of human experience.

That being said, I've got to finish it before Harry Potter arrives, or I'll have to put it down to read that first. (I'm only slightly kidding.)

I Am Legend/The Whole

My reading weekend was interesting -- I polished off John Reed's The Whole and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend in less than forty eight hours, in addition to cleaning, seeing friends and immersing myself (temporarily) in cable television while cat-sitting for a friend. (My rule about cable -- 24 hours once a year, and I'm over it and don't need to watch it again for another year.)


I Am Legend was a fast and interesting read. Originally published in 1954 and set in a fictional, nightmarish version of the 1970s, it tells the story of Robert Neville, last survivor of a bacterial plague that has rendered all of humanity into a vampiric, parasite-plagued species. Neville survives by boarding up his house, constantly working to replenish his supplies and his independent generator, and never going outside after sundown. The book is interesting, not because of the horror of his situation, but because of the small details Matheson bothers to elaborate -- the psychology of being the sole human left, the boredom, the use of alcohol as a crutch, and the monotony of working constantly at a bare-bones level of survival. That level of detail draws you into the story -- a simple fighting-vampires story would not be enough here, and Matheson knows that.


This is also a more philosophical horror novel. There is a wonderful twist here, which is less about vampires and more about questioning the idea of what we consider "normal". I won't give away the ending, but this is worth a read if you like a good vampire story. I'm afraid the upcoming movie version is going to take out the best bits of the book in favor of a Hollywood ending, but hey, what can you do?

I had also started The Whole about mid-week and then finished it on Saturday afternoon. Here's a caveat -- John Reed is my editor at the Brooklyn Rail and my former teacher, so I suppose I'm biased. Also, I am a huge fan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Reed's book is very evocative of that story. There are other reviews out there about this book that give a plot summary and a better analysis than I could, but what I particularly liked about this book was its language. The book satirizes modern-day youth language as much as it does anything else, and there's a creative playfulness in it that I really enjoyed. That being said, I'm still scratching my head over the ending, which was so ramped up into absurdity that I don't even know what to make of it.

In other news -- I keep meaning to mention that Annie Dillard has a new novel out. I'm pretty excited about that. She granted an interview, which is here, and there's a review of the novel in the Times, which is here. I have mostly read her nonfiction essays, but the novel sounds like a quick, dazzling read. I'm even tempted to invest in a hardcover version, which is a rare thing for me.

I'm on to Andrea Levy's Small Island now -- I'm reading it for the multi-narrative style, which I'm also using (far less successfully?) in my own work.