Month: June 2020

She was thirsty and hungry. Her skin was cold. She shivered a little. There was an aching in both knees, as if her body had retained the memory of covering miles and miles. She peeked through the gaps in the carriage: more lightly frosted pathways, the silhouettes of dark candlesticks in the windows of large houses, pale people with strange formal clothing that seemed to restrict their movements somewhat, particularly the women. Her eyes swam. She thought back to waking after seeing a man’s hands reaching for a large wooden chest, folding her naked limbs into it, tossing it in choppy white waters, the chest tumbling inside the sea while she screamed. And the sea’s creatures floated above the coppery lock and chain, bright and bewildered, as if something had been lost in translation.

This is a passage from ‘Zinzi from Boketto’, the penultimate story in Irenosen Okojie’s most recent collection Nudibranch (2019) and possibly the best carnival story I have ever read. This section in particular reminded me of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2018 movie A Gentle Creature – the night journey sequence of course, but more generally Loznitsa’s sparing but potent use of speculative elements, which positions his film right on the boundary between the speculative and the mimetic, a kind of dream-reality, or nightmare reality – because it is at this juncture also that Nudibranch seems to be sited.

This book. As with Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season earlier in the year, my relationship with Nudibranch did not begin smoothly. I was finding it difficult to gain traction with it, kept getting the sense that everything was too disjointed, words for words’ sake, that the stories were deliberately eluding me, slipping away down the cracks in the pavement.

Okojie’s use of language was so good I knew this was my fault, not hers, that I was doing Nudibranch a disservice by reading snatches of it late at night when I was too tired to focus properly on what the writer was doing. I began again, making sure to read at least one story in full at each sitting, and bringing the approach that always works for me when I’m finding a text difficult to get to grips with: I started by reading the stories as if they were poems, relaxing my demand for ‘meaning’ in favour of a more instinctive response to the language in and of itself.

It was like a door opening. Less than halfway through the book I realised I was utterly gripped by Okojie’s vision, and by the time I finished Nudibranch, I knew it to be a book I would always want with me, a desert island book that contains so much in terms of both style and content you could keep reading it once a year for the next decade and never get tired of it. Like you could with Bruno Schulz, or Julio Cortazar.

As with both those authors’ works, the incredible thing about Nudibranch is that it combines powerful and intensely moving human drama with stylistic and linguistic experiment of a masterful order. This combination of narrative power with formal innovation is what writing is for me, basically, the aim, the goal, the ambition. And to see that ambition so successfully achieved in Nudibranch did actually move me to tears. I am so glad I read it, so glad it exists.

As speculative fiction, Nudibranch is important because it not only shows what is possible in terms of pushing the genre envelope but also because it reveals the inherent porousness of everyday life, the frequency and power of our daily interactions with the weird, their propensity to be transformative.

The Abbey was a carcass of its former self, its high walls reduced to mere remains. The sound of cars on the roads around it was jarring, alien. Mouth dry, barefoot, he stood slowly, noting the curfew tower in the distance. Exits at either end of the gutted green gladiator-like pit beckoned. He decided to take the exit in front rather than the one behind him. He crossed some stone steps before landing in the graveyard. St Margaret’s Church stood to his right behind the tower a short walk away, bearing a flimsy white banner that said Cafe Open. People passed him, throwing curious looks. Their clothing appeared odd and unfamiliar. He ran his hands over a few gravestones. The rough stone was cold to the touch. {‘Filamo’)

Literary and cultural allusions bloom magically in the midst of the text, bright and familiar flowers amidst a forest of the strange. The power of these stories to tear a hole in societal assumptions, to reveal inequality, to point to commonality – their political activism forms an inalienable part of their richness, their capacity to delight, surprise, terrify and occasionally enrage.

And so Berlin.

I like its slower pace. I like that I could cut a record here incognito and nobody would give a fuck. I could disappear in as much as a black man in Berlin can fly under the radar. I like some of the old memorial architecture, the Turkish areas, the cafes, the bakeries that pop up frequently. Every other person rides a bike. They have content expressions cycling through the city, their corner of a flattened atlas. I watch. It’s a kind of meditation. I search for the scars of breaks just below the surface of skin. I contemplate the dichotomy of how black men really are and how the world expects us to be, how difficult it is to breathe between the tropes that come at you, the roles already written. I think of my own break before Berlin, tectonic plates shifting. {‘Komza Bright Morning’)

For anyone who thinks these stories might be ‘too difficult’ or ‘not quite their thing’, I would urge them to try ‘Grace Jones’, or ‘Cornutopia’, or – possibly my own favourite – ‘Komza Bright Morning’. This story, which forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Kevin Barry story set in Berlin that I read and loved earlier in the year, contains no overtly speculative elements and yet seems to hover, like all the stories in Nudibranch, perpetually on the boundary between the seen and the imagined, the lived and the dreamed.

A talisman of a book, Nudibranch leaves me simultaneously in awe of and headily inspired by the huge and important talent that is Irenosen Okojie.

I have also been reading Broken Places and Outer Spaces (2019), Nnedi Okorafor’s memoir of the spinal surgery that left her temporarily paralysed, her subsequent recovery and journey to becoming a writer.

As a child, Okorafor was a talented athlete who in spite of suffering from scoliosis competed in tennis tournaments at national junior level. In school, she was drawn towards the sciences, with her passionate interest in insect life pointing towards a future career in entomology. At the age of nineteen, Okorafor underwent an operation intended to correct the curvature of her spine. The surgery did not go as planned however, and soon after coming round from the anaesthetic Okorafor was told she would probably never walk again. The battle to regain her mobility left Okorafor feeling isolated and traumatised, the path of her ambition permanently altered:

On the tennis court, there were days when I could see through time. It happened most times when things got really heated. Something inside me would align. The tennis term for this heightened state of being is ‘treeing.’ It is when you are playing out of your mind, when you can do no wrong, when you can make the universe yield to your every whim. I know it sounds intense, because it is. When I treed, sometimes I could predict the future. Not that far, about one second. I’d know exactly where my opponent was going to hit the ball because I’d see it happen right before it did. It was just enough time to make use of the knowledge.

Even before I began to write science fiction, though I didn’t know it, I was sci-fi.

I was lucky enough to see Nnedi Okorafor interviewed by Tade Thompson at the Harrogate Eastercon in 2018. I was especially delighted to learn of Okorafor’s passion for the world of invertebrates, which chimed so exactly with my own I felt instantly on her wavelength. I found her affinity for language and for speculative ideas equally inspiring.

Most traditional science fiction depicts a white world where I was not able to freely exist. But in the science fiction of what I’ve come to call ‘African futurism’ (which is somewhat similar to Afrofuturism, but is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and perspective, where the center is non-Western), my characters inhabit worlds in which I can fight, play, invent, run, leap and fly.

Okorafor is without doubt one of the key voices in contemporary science fiction, and I hoped Broken Places and Outer Spaces would give some extra insight into her working methods and her writing life more generally. In the Afterword, Okorafor tells us about the many revisions and substantial cuts the book has been through since she first started writing it in 1994, just weeks after her botched surgery, and I can’t help wishing she had been a little less brutal with the carving knife.

Broken Places and Outer Spaces was published as a companion piece to Okorafor’s 2017 TED talk on African futurism, and the book seems deliberately designed to echo the approachable, inspirational nature of these popular short lectures. In her TED talk, Okorafor states that ‘science fiction is one of the greatest and most effective forms of political writing’, and she has certainly proved the truth of this in her novels and stories. Her power of expression and originality of approach to science fiction makes spending time in her real world all the more rewarding, and the book would have benefited from more background detail, more insights into her family, more specific commentary on her own work. I would have liked Broken Places to show more of the expressionism and imaginative daring that is so present in her fiction. As it stands, it feels too much like the TED talk it has been paired with, and I can only hope that Okorafor will revisit the memoir form eventually, at greater length and depth.

I was fascinated to read Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild (1984), winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo for best novelette. Butler writes in a bracingly clear, muscular style that carries the reader effortlessly along, and for me this story had the feel of the kind of 70s and early-80s science fiction that first drew me into the genre. I was reminded in particular of a story by Kristine Katheryn Rusch about a young alien female living secretly among humans (I can’t for the life of me remember the title!) which shared similar themes of co-operation and accommodation between aliens and the human colonists who first arrive on their planet.

Butler has said that Bloodchild is not about slavery. I don’t entirely buy that – my gut reaction to the queasily unequal relationship between the Tlic and their human hosts, the service the human hosts are forced to perform directly as a result of that inequality makes it difficult for me to interpret the ‘symbiosis’ between human and Tlic as a fair exchange, and to describe it as a love story – as Butler specifically does – is going waaay too far for me. But I greatly enjoyed Butler’s afterword to the story, in which she talks candidly about her own feelings concerning Bloodchild’s themes and motivations, describing how the story was written partly as an antidote to her horror of botflies and their parasitic life cycle. ‘When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it. I sort out my problems by writing about them,’ Butler says. going on to give a fascinating account of her response to the Kennedy assassination. I love these kinds of insights into a writer’s world and work, and this encounter with Butler left me eager to get to Parable of the Sower sooner rather than later.

To wind up the week, I also had the pleasure of reading Vajra Chandrasekera’s most recent story ‘The Translator at Low Tide‘, published in the May edition of Clarkesworld:

Eesha is a little younger than me, I think, but her hair is still gray. Her library is just one medium-sized room with a few thousand books piled up. I browse through them every week and have grown familiar with these stacks that don’t change. They are like acquaintances I nod to. I’m comfortable with them. They make no demands on me that I can’t answer, but more than that, I know there is no crisis that could make them turn on me, cut me out, leave me to die. You can’t say that about people anymore. There is always some threshold, some hard limit to friendship, to solidarity, even to kinship.

This story reads less like science fiction and more like someone’s real-life journal entries from the year 2060. I’ve never read a story by Chandrasekera I didn’t like, and ‘The Translator at Low Tide’ shows how the depth and fluency of his art continues to increase. I find it interesting to consider this story in conjunction with Ballard’s The Drowned World. Some of the images stand close together but the prevailing moods of the two stories make them quite different. What you have in Ballard is a kind of manic laissez-faire, let it all burn. Chandrasekera shows what life might actually be like if it did all burn. I love both stories and I find value in both approaches but at the time of reading Chandrasekera’s story feels harder-edged, offering none of Ballard’s wilful escapism, and is more frightening as a result.

You can read a recent interview with Vajra here. He says he’s working on a novel. I cannot wait.

This past week I have mainly been reading John Crowley’s 1979 novel Engine Summer. It seems incredible that this book is now forty years old. It might also explain why, several times while reading it, I found myself thinking about John Christopher’s The White Mountains (1967), which for me has something of the same atmosphere, with Rush and Will’s quests and voices not so very dissimilar, and which I would probably have been reading for the dozenth time more or less exactly as Engine Summer was published.

Engine Summer is not what you would call an easy read. From the first page it is elliptical, self-concealing, with a sense not so much of the mysterious as the actively mystical. I enjoy tricky books a great deal, but I became aware early on that Engine Summer was setting itself up to be the kind of novel I don’t normally get on with at all – I’m not keen on fabulism, as a rule, and Engine Summer is not only fabulistic, it is at least partly about fabulism. As it turned out, I not only adored Engine Summer but now feel profoundly grateful to it. For being one of those texts that come along, periodically (and they always do) to jolt me out of my disillusionment with the science fictional mode, to remind me that no matter what kinds of arse might be going on in the community at any given moment, no matter how derivative so much of what is written can begin to seem, there will always be a through-line of texts that create and sustain the field, that provide the intellectual and aesthetic roughage to enliven and stimulate and further the conversation.

And what a stunning, humane, enlightening text Engine Summer is. What liberties it takes with our patience, always rewarded. Crowley’s handling of the post-apocalyptic (old tech viewed as magic, hidden connections with the long-past that are invisible to the narrator but of profound significance to the reader) is sure-footed and brilliant, and much appreciated by me, because old-tech-posing-as-magic is a trope I happen to love.

Most of all, Engine Summer is a beautiful book and a beautiful story. Crowley’s language – his landscape-writing especially – is the hook it all hangs on, the hook that kept me, well, hooked even in those early stages when I wasn’t sure about the rest of it. In laying out, further exploring and ultimately revealing its central conceit, Crowley’s novel is masterful – at no point could any science fiction purist accuse Crowley of taking refuge in either the stolidly mimetic or the overtly fantastical. That it is also masterful as a piece of text, in maintaining and indeed glorying in its core components – language and form – is a much needed poke in the side of anyone, and I mean from whichever side of the barricades, who insists on insisting that science fiction cannot be literature.

Blink said: ‘It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at – but which can never be put back together again.’

See what I mean about it being difficult to believe this book is four decades old? I came out of Engine Summer on a kind of high, feeling energised and nourished and excited and so glad I’d read it. Reading around and behind the book afterwards, i discovered that Ted Chiang cites Engine Summer as a formative work for him, and I’m not at all surprised. In an interview I read with him at The Believer, Chiang makes a comment I think more or less sums up the approach taken by Crowley in his science fiction, but that also seems to encapsulate for me, in a manner I’ve never found so satisfyingly and succinctly expressed, the essential difference between the speculative and the mimetic:

“Science fiction is known for the sense of wonder it can engender, and I think that sense of wonder is something that is generated by stories of conceptual breakthrough. I don’t know if a sense of wonder is engendered by stories of personal epiphany.”

Chiang uses ‘conceptual breakthrough’ here to mean making a discovery that allows the reader to understand the world in a different way, to consider the possibilities for change or development that such a conceptual breakthrough might allow. Looking back on my own reading, I can see it has been these kinds of breakthroughs – intellectual epiphanies, maybe, as opposed to personal epiphanies – that have provided my most energising and memorable moments of engagement with the genre.

Chiang is also great in describing what it is that makes him identify as a science fiction writer rather than simply a writer:

“Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I’ve read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction.” 

The full interview is here, and very worthy of your time.

I also made time to read Paul Park’s A City Made of Words (2019), one of the very excellent chapbooks in the Outspoken Authors series from PM Press. Each of these chapbooks features at least one previously unpublished story as well as an author interview, bibliography and other scarce material and one could gain a fantastic overview of what science fiction is ‘about’ and what it is capable of, simply by reading the volumes in this series. (Now there’s a project waiting to happen.)

Like John Crowley, Paul Park is an author clearly interested in stretching science fiction well beyond its generic envelope, and the results, for me, have made him a touchstone author. I hadn’t previously read any of the stories in A City Made of Words, but the metafictional techniques and original spins on traditional tropes familiar to me from previous encounters with Park’s work are all present and deployed to superb effect. In ‘A Conversation with the Author’ for example, what starts out looking like exactly what it says in the title quickly morphs into a surreal interrogation scene, in which the titular author is subjected to far more than just the standard interview techniques as the questioner attempts to wrest from him his professional secrets:

‘Let me sum up,’ I said. ‘According to you, the study of fiction writing is important to literary scholars, or might be if they agreed with you. The techniques of your discipline are important to essayists, or might be if they studied them. In addition, you have noticed many ancillary benefits. But the one thing you cannot claim is any improvement to your students’ work. Would that be a fair assessment?’

And then after a moment: ‘Why do you think that is?’ This is how quickly the cancer spreads. I was curious despite myself.

And like many people in his situation he seemed eager to speak, to take me into his confidence in order to improve his chances. Though perhaps he had been storing up some venom for a long time. ‘Because it’s based on lies! The things we teach people, it’s not what we do! No writer in the world takes our advice, or at least no good one. Plot, idea, character, tone, voice, setting, description, exposition – no one thinks about those things. It is a vocabulary invented by idiots to describe concepts that don’t exist. No one has any ‘ideas’, and if they do, they’re a waste of time. Once you start asking yourself how to do something, you can’t do it anymore.’

Glorious, hilarious, and never a truer word. Other stories in the volume include the densely knotty ‘A Resistance to Theory’ in which a scholar attempts to investigate the death of her supervisor literally through the theories of the linguistic philosophers she is studying. How Park manages to sustain this I have no idea but it’s brilliant. Still more brilliant is that the story is also a riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For a (slightly) more traditional science fiction story, ‘The Microscopic Eye’ is both ingenious and moving – a perfect demonstration of Chiang’s conceptual breakthrough theory in just a few pages. Reading Park always leaves me both full and hungry for more – and there’s enough in this short book to engage the mind and the imagination long after reading.

For one final recommendation from my reading this week, please turn your attention to an essay by Rob Latham in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Amidst the slew of pandemic and post-pandemic reading lists, think pieces and calls to arms, Latham’s ‘Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus‘, which examines George Stewart’s 1949 science fiction classic Earth Abides within the context of the present moment, stands out for its clarity, intelligence and knowledge of its subject matter, not to mention the fact that it is beautifully written.

‘And this is what science fiction as a genre has to offer us: not blueprints for specific futures, but rather a radical openness to change itself, a willingness to shed old habits and expectations and embrace the new,’ Latham says towards the end of his essay. One of the stranger phenomena – though perhaps not a surprising one – that has come to define these weeks and months is an upsurge in popular interest in science fiction, a curiosity about what science fiction might have to tell us about our current predicament. I hope this interest and curiosity will be lasting, one of the things we bring with us as we move out of lockdown. A willingness to ask questions, and to look in new places. To see where the limits are, and push beyond them.