2015 Clarke: STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

If you've been reading along, you know I have a soft spot for when writers who are taken more seriously in literary circles try their hand at science fiction. This has become more and more common in the last decade or so, but awards nominators seem uninterested, so I haven't had a lot of opportunity to review many of these books under the purview of this blog (though I do sometimes anyway). The Arthur C. Clarke award, which gave its fist novel trophy to Margaret Atwood, is a little friendlier to the lit crowd than most, and their 2015 award went to this finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. I continue to think that genre and literary writers each bring something to the table.

Mandel's book mostly follows the collapse of civilization due to an extremely virulent epidemic that people call the Georgia Flu (originating in the European nation rather than the American state but quickly spreading through air travel). We get scenes of the immediate aftermath, a "present day" story twenty years after the epidemic that focuses on a traveling symphony/Shakespeare-performing dramatic company where our main character Kirsten Raymonde. We also return continually to the the life of famous actor Arthur Leander, who died onstage the night that the Georgia Flu arrived in Toronto. Kirsten likes to escape into the world of space opera comics about a character named Dr. Eleven, who lives on the titular Station Eleven. These stories of creative expression and survival in the past, present, and future weave in and out of each other throughout the novel, building a case, I think, for the idea that we influence each other in deep, abiding, and sometimes surprising ways that can leave ripples that survive past death and even the end of the world.

Mandel is a great writer, and she creates some really beautiful moments, even if this isn't the most innovative post-apocalyptic scenario or the most compelling plot. Some of the connections (and especially the reunions) here border on contrivance, and my biggest complaint is just how familiar this non-linear structure has become in 21st-century lit fic.

With its evocative prose and rich characters but unoriginal sf plot, this is almost the exact opposite of The Three-Body Problem, but I really enjoyed both books.

Grade: A-

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE by Charles Yu

Charles Yu is really good at freezing a moment in time - not necessarily a particularly important moment - and picking it apart. Within these moments, he manages to detail every conflicting emotion, all of the personal history and potential, and the interplay of little background vignettes. In this novel, Yu hand-waives his way through some science fiction traditions like time machines and temporal loops as an excuse to create some of these frozen-in-time moments. We get to see every detail of a father and son meeting in a park, for instance, because the narrator is reliving it.

Just as with Super Sad True Love Story, we’re back on the topic of literary/sf crossover. I generally try to avoid excluding books with labels, but I’m going to put my cards on the table and say what I think about the genre elements here: while Shteyngart is an example of a literary writer doing science fiction, this novel is an example of a writer using science fiction references to write a postmodern, literary novel. I spent much of my decade away from reading science fiction reading “po-mo” novels by the likes of Pynchon and Auster, so I know these things when I see them. There are a lot of genre tropes here, but this is really a story of an unhappy man thinking about his father and about where his own life went wrong. Heinlein, LeGuin, Niven and others get name-checked, but there’s not much of their spirit here – which is not inherently a bad thing, though perhaps it is misleading.

The narrator, Charles Yu (first sign we’re in a postmodern novel: the author or his/her name appears somehow) is a time travel machine repairman in some sort of meta-universe that is finite, shifting and crowded with characters and ideas from science fiction (Luke Skywalker’s disgruntled son appears – it’s totally non-canonical if there are any hardcore Star Wars expanded universe fans out there reading :P ). Yu finds himself in a time loop, and he kind-of-maybe has to solve the mystery of the book he’s in that we’re reading (now we’re really getting po-mo!) and find his Dad. He’s aided by a cute computer program named TAMMY and his retconned dog Ed (if you don’t know what a retcon is, you don’t read/watch enough serialized storytelling). That’s kind of the plot, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. We mostly get these detailed deconstructions of scenes of Charles and his dad as they struggle to build and market the first time machine.

I have mixed feelings about these freeze-frame analyses. As I said, Yu does a great job with them, and there are moving moments and a few beautiful lines in the mix. On the other hand, they tend to drag on and maybe even get a bit repetitive. And they’re pretty damn self-indulgent. And, if you don’t like them, there’s not much going on in the rest of this short novel other than some po-mo games with illustrations and metatextuality. But, when the book is moving, it really is moving. It feels like there’s a lot of raw emotional truth on the page, trying to hide behind the games, and (deliberately?) failing. I kind of admire Yu’s sincerity, even if I didn’t always completely enjoy it.

I’m having a hard time rendering a verdict on this novel. I'm glad I read it, but I didn’t love it. I admired the emotional content and enjoyed some of the po-mo games about half the time, but found them cloying and tedious the other half. I liked its metatextual engagement with science fiction, but found it too shallow in the end to say that it added all that much…

I think I’d give this novel a mild recommendation, but I’d like to see more work from Yu, specifically something more ambitious and straightforward. I wish the sf literati had taken a harder look at Super Sad Love Story, but they weren't missing much here (even though this book seemed to get a little more attention in sf circles - I guess its the title).

Grade: B-

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart

As I've discussed before, things often get uncomfortable when authors from the amorphous world of “literary fiction” crossover to the world of science fiction. You get elaborate excuses from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut about how their dystopias and time travel space epics ARE NOT science fiction, and the major awards promptly ignore and reject their work (unless it’s the first year of the Clarke). I can’t say things went all that differently with this novel by a young lit fic sensation – I don’t see it on any sf award nominee lists – but this does feel well grounded in the world of sf. In fact, this novel read a lot like Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (review coming soon), touching as it does on singularity and post-humans, social networking, physical books, and generational issues. But, it’s like awesomely way better.

Set in the post-literate near future, we follow the journal of Lenny Abramov, the almost-forty son of Jewish-Russian immigrants to New York who acquires clients for a company offering immortality treatments. Abramov is something of a throwback, he likes actual physical books, and he, like, reads every word of writers like Tolstoy and Chekhov. On a business trip in Italy, he falls in love with a boisterous-but-damaged girl in her early twenties named Eunice Park. We alternate that journal with emails and chats from Eunice, who thinks she could score a hotter guy, but Lenny seems so sincere and easy. They move in together in Manhattan, in an America in steep decline. Debts are heavy all around, people with low credit ratings are discriminated against, America is losing another foreign intervention in Venezuela, privatized National Guardsmen harass people on the streets, and the world has become shallow and obsessed with their rankings on social networks, which are displayed on apparati (basically smaller iPhones with more social networking features).

So, lots ofcyberpunk/dystopian material we’ve seen before, as I mentioned, but the differences are huge and all fall in Shteyngart’s favor. Most importantly, Lenny and Eunice are incredibly rich characters. They both can annoy, they both make bad choices, and their relationship is a trainwreck, but they also both feel real, and even young shallow Eunice has hidden depths of compassion. This deft touch with character is what sets some these literary types apart, and I do think it speaks to all that crossovers have to offer in an area where science fiction has been, traditionally, pretty weak.

Maybe I'm biased because Shteyngart clearly shares my anti-singularity, anti-post-human pessimism in another clear difference from most sf these days. For Vernor Vinge, the destruction of books and the alienation of the elder generation are birth pangs on the way to something bigger (man, I wish I'd gotten to my review of Rainbow's End before this), but Shteyngart focuses on the class issues and the unpredictability of technological advance. Of course, post-human technology will be the province of the super-rich for a long time, and of course there will be setbacks and unintended consequences. Shteyngart is clearly aware of the discussion of these issues within science fiction, and he makes some smart, incisive additions to the debate. That said, I’m not so convinced that the US will collapse into a corporate security state, but there’s plenty of echoes of our reality to keep things believable.

The one area where I felt the book did fail, and even admitted defeat to some extent, was in the portrayal of a post-literate world. Yes, people think books are smelly and gross, and no one seems to have the attention span to focus on longer pieces of text, but Shteyngart’s voice for Eunice is full of evocative language. He even has characters comment on this, calling her a “born writer.” There’s clear growth in her style throughout the book as well, and I couldn’t help but feel that this was part character development and part Shteyngart throwing in the towel on writing a solid portion of a novel in semi-literate txt speech.

Either way, I really enjoyed this novel. It has a lot to say about love, relationships, and mortality, and it says it all while presenting an insightful view of the future. It’s everything I want from science fiction; who cares if it’s written by someone not so immersed in the genre (has anyone not in the SFWA ever gotten a Nebula nomination?) Maybe we can set up some sort of lit fic/sff exchange program?

Grade: A-

1987 Arthur C. Clarke – THE HANDMAID”S TALE by Margaret Atwood

The first Arthur C. Clarke award goes to a mainstream literary hit, Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia. It’s always interesting to see what happens when a respected literary figure writes a piece of speculative fiction – usually book reviewers twist themselves into pretzels explaining why “it’s not really science fiction” and the science fiction establishment more or less looks the other way. Atwood did garner Locus and Nebula nominations (next to her Man Booker Prize nomination), but Hugo stuck with Orson Scott Card and L. Ron Hubbard. Her next sf work, Oryx and Crake, which I liked even more, got no recognition from sf awards.

In the near future, religious fundamentalists have seized control of the US government and turned it into a sexist and racist totalitarian state. Pollution has caused high levels of infertility, so women that can have children are highly valued and kept as slaves called handmaids. The narrator is known as Offred (we never learn her real name), and she tells a series of parallel stories – her life with her husband before the takeover, the difficulties and hardships of the takeover itself and her subsequent training as a handmaid, and her present position as a handmaid in the household of a powerful “Commander.” Her freedoms are constrained, she’s surrounded by violence, her intellectual life is completely closed off (she’s not allowed to read), and she must perform a ritualistic sex ceremony with the Commander every month in the hopes of reproduction.

The one problem I have with the novel is that it feels a bit over-the-top. Even the craziest of Christian Fundamentalists have never called for any society like this that I know of. You could argue that it’s a metaphor for the loss of basic choices for women that some political leaders advocate, but I think it’d be more interesting to see a more realistic portrayal of an anti-feminist society; show what’s really at stake. This story seems too easy to dismiss as paranoid fantasy. 1984 is a ridiculously intrusive and controlling society, but it’s still not too hard to imagine most of it coming true. It's not hard to imagine a repressive, reactionary society that destroys women's rights either; it's just wouldn't look much like this.

The real attraction, as is always the case with Atwood, is the writing. Atwood’s prose is smart, incisive and flows with ease and power. The non-linear narrative creates intriguing mysteries without ever losing the reader. All of the characters, even the Commander and his jealous and menacing wife, feel real and compelling, as does Offred’s sense of loss. Atwood is one of the greatest living authors, and it’s always wonderful when she works in science fiction, even if I did have a few suspension-of-disbelief problems with the world she created.

Grade: A-