Eugene Fischer

Category: Books

Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. –Christian Rudder, Dataclysm

Twenty More Books of 2014

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My last book roundup only had three graphic novels in it. This bunch, though, more than doubles the number I’ve read all year. My rate has also slowed way, way down. (Though I can claim success for my New Year’s resolution of averaging at least a book per week in 2014. No way to miss that mark now.) For both of these, I blame my August move from Iowa to Texas, which sapped huge amounts of my time and attention.

  1. Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies by Dave Itzkoff – This was a gift from my friend Samantha Lange, in thanks for introducing her to Network, which she had never previously seen. It’s a fantastic retrospective of Paddy Chayefsky’s career leading up to the film, and a detailed look into the production itself. Easily recommended for other Network obsessives.
  2. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett – My mother had been singing Patchett’s praises to me, and so I read Run, which I liked but did not love. Friends told me, though, that I should give Bel Canto a try anyway. They were right. This is an utterly gorgeous book, in the mix for my favorite I’ve read this year. It is a deft piece of kaleidoscopic insight and tenderness, which manages to create some suspenseful, harrowing moments without ever seeming to ask for them. An incredible book.
  3. The Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Masamune – I’d bounced off this book a few times, but now have finally made it to the end. I think it was more an act of stubbornness than anything else. I’ve enjoyed many of animated projects based on Shirow Masamune’s manga, but find the book itself cold, cursory, almost flippant. He clearly puts a very great deal of thought and attention into the functioning of his imagined future, but the stories themselves seem little more than excuses to get aspects of that future on the page. All of the elements of the famous and influential movie of the same name are in here, but almost completely lacking in the liveliness they had on the screen. I own his other GitS volumes, but it will probably be a while before I get to them.
  4. Incandescence by Greg Egan – I love Greg Egan. I love his writing, yes, but I also just love that he exists. There is every other hard science fiction writer who has ever been, and then, floating above them in a diamond firmament, is Greg Egan. What he is doing in this book is so much harder than mere hard science fiction that it’s almost a new kind of literature altogether. And while I get great intellectual excitement from that, I don’t mean it completely as a compliment. This novel is, well, hard. Difficult. The idea was to come up with a scenario where a culture inventing science would come up with relativity before Newtonian mechanics. He pulls this off, but it makes for a narrative experience that is didactic and difficult to follow. Exciting if you are excited by the beauty of physical ideas, but a lot more like doing homework than most things I approach for entertainment. In some writing on his website, Egan indicates that he expects that readers will need to keep a notebook nearby to draw some diagrams if they are to get the most out of the novel. Again, I love Greg Egan. I love that someone is writing novels that ask their readers to draw free-body diagrams. But I didn’t do it; I just followed what I could and trusted that it all hung together. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed this book less than I have Egan’s others: this book insists on being appreciated on its own terms, and I didn’t want to put in the effort.
  5. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell – This small novel seems to inspire cultish reverence around Iowa City, so I read it. I enjoyed it. But I don’t really see what all the fuss is about. My experience here may have been soured by overbuilt expectation.
  6. Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds by Gail Simone and Ed Benes
  7. Birds of Prey: Sensei & Student by Gail Simone and Ed Benes – I read these two Birds of Prey volumes sitting on the floor of Karen Meisner’s library during my last visit to Madison. I’ve long been wanting to read the BoP comics, and enjoyed these enough that I expect I will track down the rest of the trades sometime soon.
  8. House of Holes by Nicholson Baker – Verbally clever sex farce. The novelty, and thus the entertainment, wore off for me about 2/3 of the way through. (Suspect I would have loved it if it were a Ralph Bakshi-style cartoon, though.) I’ll give Baker another chance though, on the strength of his prose cleverness and his nonfiction writing about pacifism.
  9. The Hustler by Walter Tevis – I only have two more to go, but it’s starting to look like Walter Tevis never wrote anything that wasn’t good. This, his first novel, is excellent. The prose is rougher than in some of his later work, but in a way that fits the story, so for all I know it was intentional. I watched the Paul Newman movie after I finished the book, and thought it was good in the places where it recapitulated what Tevis wrote, and inexcusable in the places it didn’t. Loved the book, hated the movie.
  10. Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley – I’m a huge fan of his previous work, Scott Pilgrim, so I was eager to read this book, though I didn’t expect it to be more of the same. Thus, I wasn’t at all disappointed. While there are a few notes of Pilgrim-esque humor (including one direct callback), Seconds is it’s own book, and a very successful one. It’s about the spirits of places, and about fucking up your life by altering your own history. It’s great.
  11. Dragon Ball vol. 1 by Akira Toriyama
  12. Dragon Ball vol. 2 by Akira Toriyama
  13. Dragon Ball vol. 3 by Akira Toriyama
  14. Dragon Ball vol. 4 by Akira Toriyama
  15. Dragon Ball vol. 5 by Akira Toriyama
  16. Dragon Ball vol. 6 by Akira Toriyama
  17. Dragon Ball vol. 7 by Akira Toriyama – Moving from Iowa to Texas was long, involved, and unpleasant. While I was doing it, I wanted something to read that would take no effort at all, just pure, mindless entertainment. These fit the purpose nicely. I might finish the series someday. I might wait to do it until I’m similarly stressed out again.
  18. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem – I love Lem. So when I heard that the movie The Congress was based on this Lem novel, I was very excited to watch it with my parents, also Lem fans. It was terrible, a total train wreck of a film. No one should pay to see it. Read the book instead, which is a minor one of his works, but fun and short.
  19. The Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware – I read this many years ago, but had forgotten much of it. It’s truly excellent, though given the universal acclaim you probably already knew that. The reread was inspired by [redacted], who identified this as her favorite novel, graphic or otherwise. Also, having recently read Essex County, I was struck by the similarity between this and Lemire’s book. Since they are both collections of work originally serialized, I’d need to know more about the timelines to even begin to guess at vectors of influence.
  20. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness – I have been a fan of Ness’s writing since I read his Chaos Walking trilogy. This book, illustrated by Jim Kay and based on a concept by the late Siobhan Dowd, is gorgeous. Gorgeously written, gorgeously drawn. A heartbreaking fable of stories and loss, and clearly deserving of its multiple awards. I own a copy of Ness’s novel More Than This, and will probably read it soon.

Karen Joy Fowler, Man Booker Finalist

She made the Booker Award shortlist for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and already won the PEN/Faulkner award earlier this year. Go, Karen, go!

Changing the World Fantasy Award Trophy

The trophy for the World Fantasy Award is a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, a man who, it’s undeniable, was hugely influential on the body of fantastic literature. He was also an exceptionally hateful and unabashed racist. When Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2011, she wrote a thoughtful blog post about winning an award bearing the image of a man who, in life, would have detested her based on her skin. Since then, discussion of the propriety of having Lovecraft on the award statue has grown. Today Daniel José Older (who recently made a great video about why he doesn’t italicize Spanish words in his fiction) put up a Change.org petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Octavia Butler.

My initial response to this idea was excitement. Octavia Butler is among my favorite writers, and the author of my all-time favorite short story. She was also a woman of color who wrote about issues of race with as much nuance as anyone ever has. So with regard to addressing the things that make Lovecraft a troublesome figure to have on the statue, it’s hard to imagine anyone better. With regard to representing the fantasy genre, though, Butler is an odd choice. She almost never wrote it.

Butler published, by my count, 21 pieces of fiction during her life: 12 novels and 9 shorter works. Of those, there are only two that seem to me to be works of fantasy. Her short story “The Book of Martha” is clearly fantasy; the story is all about the titular character having a conversation with god about how to construct an utopia, given a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. The rest of her short works are all either science fiction or realism. Of her novels, the only one that is arguably fantasy is Kindred,1 in which the main character jumps through time between the 1970s and pre-Civil War United States, for no reason that is ever explained. (Daniel José Older obliquely references the book in his petition.) While this fantastic premise is perhaps enough to qualify it as a work fantasy, this book itself is far more concerned with investigating the social structures of slavery than it is with the fantastic element. The time travel, for all that it powers the plot, gets very little focus. And in terms of tropes and rhetorical structures, the novel has much more in common with historical fiction than it does fantasy. In bookstores I’ve seen it shelved in “literature” or “African American fiction” more often than I’ve seen it in “science fiction and fantasy.” So even if Kindred is fantasy, it’s not very representative, or in-genre influential fantasy, wonderful book though it is. And that still puts Butler’s fantasy output at less than 10% of her oeuvre.

If the choice is between Lovecraft and Butler for the World Fantasy Award, then obviously I’m on Team Butler. But if the choice instead is Lovecraft or Not Lovecraft, then I think I lean toward a different sort of Not Lovecraft: I’m on Team Nobody. Why does the award have to be a person? It isn’t named for a person, it’s named for a genre. No one–not Lovecraft, or Dunsany, or Tolkien–encapsulates an entire genre. I think I’m with Nick Mamatas, who proposed that the award be changed to something symbolic of fantasy. His suggestion was a chimera, which I like. In discussion on Twitter, Kurt Busiek spitballed the idea of a globe with fantastic maps, which could be nice too. The convention could have a design competition, like there is every year for the base of the Hugo award (the trophy for which, it’s worth noting, isn’t a bust of Hugo Gernsback). Doing so would undoubtedly produce a great, artistic design, and it would nicely unify a family of closely related awards: the Hugo is a rocket ship, the Nebula is astral bodies, and the World Fantasy Award would be… something fantastic.

  1. Fledgling has vampires in it, but treats them in a throughly science-fictional, biologically rigorous way. There’s nothing fantasy about it. ↩

HANNIBAL and DEATH NOTE: Comparative Synopses

HannibalDeathNoteDeath Note (the manga): A brilliant man with the effortless power to kill targets those who offend his ethical or aesthetic sensibilities, but his work attracts the attention of an equally brilliant though eccentric detective. The detective gets close to the killer, even becoming friends with him and letting him “assist” the investigation, and the two engage in a protracted exchange of diabolical traps and stratagems to try and discover/eliminate each other. Eventually the killer triumphs over the brilliant detective and causes his downfall. The killer takes the detective’s place within the criminal justice organization. But the friends and colleagues of the detective continue to pursue him, and eventually back him into a corner. All throughout, the body count rises steadily.

Hannibal (the television show, through the first 1.5 seasons): A brilliant man with the seemingly effortless power to kill targets those who offend his ethical or aesthetic sensibilities, but his work attracts the attention of an equally brilliant though eccentric detective. The killer gets close to the detective, even becoming friends with him and “assisting” the investigation, and the two engage in a protracted exchange of diabolical traps and stratagems to try and discover/eliminate each other. Eventually the killer triumphs over the brilliant detective and causes his downfall. The killer takes the detective’s place within the criminal justice organization. But the friends and colleagues of the detective continue to pursue him. All throughout, the body count rises steadily.

The more Hannibal I watch, the more convinced I become that it and Death Note are different cultural lenses pointed at the same story.

Unfinished Writing in the Octavia Butler Archives

Gerry Canavan, a literature prof at Marquette University, has been studying the Butler archive and published an article in the LA Review of Books, “There’s Nothing New/Under the Sun/But There Are New Suns: Rediscovering Octavia Butler’s Lost Parables.” In it he outlines the many different options Butler was considering for the third book in her Parables series, Parable of the Trickster.

Nearly all of the texts focus on a character named Imara — who has been named the Guardian of Lauren Olamina’s ashes, who is often said to be her distant relative, and who is plainly imagined as the St. Paul to Olamina’s Christ (her story sometimes begins as a journalist who has gone undercover with the Earthseed “cult” to expose Olamina as a fraud, and winds up getting roped in). Imara awakens from cryonic suspension on an alien world where she and most of her fellow Earthseed colonists are saddened to discover they wish they’d never left Earth in the first place. The world — called “Bow” — is gray and dank, and utterly miserable; it takes its name from the only splash of color the planet has to offer, its rare, naturally occurring rainbows. They have no way to return to Earth, or to even to contact it; all they have is what little they’ve brought with them, which for most (but not all) of them is a strong belief in the wisdom of the teachings of Earthseed. Some are terrified; many are bored; nearly all are deeply unhappy. Her personal notes frame this in biological terms. From her notes to herself: “Think of our homesickness as a phantom-limb pain — a somehow neurologically incomplete amputation. Think of problems with the new world as graft-versus-host disease — a mutual attempt at rejection.”

Over at io9, Annalee Newitz has published an extended email correspondence with Canavan, asking about Butler’s plans for sequels to Fledgling.

And then there were a few tantalizing hints of a novel set a generation or two later, when many more of the vampires can go out in the sun like Shorri, and what they might do when they had no weaknesses and there was nothing stopping them from taking over the world. This is the one that I’m most interested in because it suggest Shorri as a somewhat darker figure than we might have thought — she really is disturbing a delicate ecological balance with her power to walk in the sun, which could cause a lot of problems down the road when played out to its logical conclusion…

Much gratitude to Mr. Canavan for this insight into Butler’s plans and process. I hope to have the chance to look at these papers myself some day.

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

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When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

  1. Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
  2. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
  3. Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
  4. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
  5. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
  6. Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
  7. The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
  8. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
  10. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
  12. Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
  13. Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
  14. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
  15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
  16. Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
  17. The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
  18. Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
  19. The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
  20. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.

WisCon 38

MoxieNot going to do a full con report this year, but I attended WisCon38 and had a generally lovely time. I got to see Karen, Pär, and Jeremiah, all of whom I’m going to miss terribly when I move away from Iowa City and can no longer easily visit. I roomed with Keffy Kehrli and Sunny Moraine, and also spent time with Ted Chiang, Marica Glover, Jen Volant, Meghan McCarron, David Schwartz, David Moles, Ben Rosenbaum, Will Alexander, Genevieve Valentine, Valya Lupescu, Nancy Hightower, Alice Kim, Liz Gorinsky, Richard Butner, Barb Gilly, Marco Palmieri, Greg Bechtel, and a bunch of my friends from the Clarion 2012 class.

The most notable thing for me this year was that I had my first reading at the con. Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe had to cancel their attendance at the last minute, and I got to take one of their places in at the Death-defying Feats of Moxie reading. I read the first three sections of my novella “The New Mother,” and got an enthusiastic reception. Hopefully by next WisCon it will be published.

Thoughts on THE SPARROW by Mary Doria Russell

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The Sparrow won a ton of awards, got rave reviews, and is loved or admired by many people whose opinions I respect. And yet, for years, whenever one of them recommended it to me, it came with the caveat, “It’s a pretty religious book. I’m not sure how you’ll like it.”

My friends know I am not a religious person. Works of fiction where the point is to explore the grandeur of religious feeling are very likely to leave me cold. I am not, though, insensitive to books about the human experience of religion. These I can find as moving as any other exploration of profound human experience. So when I read The Sparrow, it was with the hope it would be that kind of book. And, for about the first nine-tenths, it was. That last tenth, though…. Stop reading here if you are spoiler averse.

Up until the end I thought that the book was engrossing, the characters rendered with deft nuance, the dialog compelling, and the building sense of menace genuinely chilling. Up through, oh, around the time that Anne dies, the book was completely working for me. After that, though, it breaks down. The climax of the book is the moment when Emilio Sandoz is “raped by God,” and everything in the last few sections happens in service of constructing this moment. Characters who have been built with tenderness are dispensed with casually, often off the page1, in a perfunctory deepening of Sandoz’s abjectness leading up to his ultimate violation. All the issues of faith that characters struggle with up to that point are communicated with clarity and naturalness, and I was sympathetic to them even if I didn’t share them. But the perfect, efficient thoroughness of Sandoz’s downfall seemed authorially artificial, and thus an unfair structural thumb on the scale for a teleological worldview. This deviation from the book’s prior subtlety is relevant, because Sandoz’s final conflict is whether to view his experiences as farcically meaningless, or the design of a God (read: author) he must despise.

I said on Twitter that I was trying to decide if Russell failed me as an author, or if I failed her as a reader. And I think it might be a little of both. She failed me with the manipulative heavy-handedness of the climax. I failed her because Sandoz’s ultimate struggle, to answer does it mean something or does it mean nothing, speaks to something I lack. Whatever it is in some people that makes the answer it means something so tragically tempting is not in me. To my mind, Sandoz wasn’t raped by God, he was raped by a bunch of aliens. I understand Sandoz struggling to reach that conclusion, but I am fully resistant to the narrative suggesting that I should struggle as well. When the Father General says, “He is still held fast in the formless stone, but he’s closer to God right now than I have ever been in my life. And I don’t even have the courage to envy him,” it reminds me of nothing so much as Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, announcing, “She would have been a good woman if there had been someone to shoot her every day of her life.” That is to say, the philosophy of a psychopath, or at least someone prone to the fetishistic glamorization of suffering.

I have been brought down by circumstance. I have had my heart wounded by the cruel and belated recognition of my own hand in the authorship of my trials. But at my lowest my mind has always alighted on ontology. These things just happened, as things do, and it is terrible, as things often are. Irony can be punishing, and and challenges to sense-of-self wrenching. But whatever human wiring it is that demands they be signifiers of purpose, that grasps for and resonates with teleology–that is simply absent in me. Or if it is present, it has been roused by neither my own past experience, nor the climax of The Sparrow. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, or a worthy keystone around which to arch a story, but it does mean that I as a reader can’t go along for the ride.

  1. Wikipedia informs me that some of this is to hide the fact that the characters don’t actually die, and are around for the next novel. I don’t consider this to greatly ameliorate my critiques. ↩

New Stories by Octavia Butler

Cover for Unexpected Stories
Well, old stories really, but previously unpublished! Open Road Media has produced an ebook of two previously unavailable Butler short stories, available for pre-order now, hitting e-readers on June 24. The collection is called Unexpected Stories, and contains the stories “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder.” Per the Publisher’s Weekly review, the former is a short story prequel to Butler’s out-of-print novel Survivor (the text of which is easy to find online). The latter is a story set on Earth during the Patternist cycle, about racial tensions between telepaths.

“Childfinder” was bought by Harlan Ellison for Last Dangerous Visions, after Butler wrote it during his week at Clarion. Curiously, the story seems to have been removed from the Clarion archives. In 2008 I went to the special collections library and pulled the stories from Butler’s year, eager to read “Childfinder,” but there were only two of her pieces in there, both very short and unremarkable. “Childfinder” was nowhere to be found.

I’ll get to read it soon, though. Here’s a link to Open Road Media’s ebook page for Unexpected Stories. 

EDIT: Sam Miller informs me that, as of 2012, “Childfinder” is back in the archive. I have no explanation for this. It definitely wasn’t there in 2008.

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