science fiction

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear

Andrew Findlay

In Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe, we take a look at science fiction and fantasy, why they’re great, and what they say about where our species has been and where it’s going.

Warning: While I wouldn’t really call anything I discuss a big spoiler, absolute purists may want to tread lightly. I discuss some general plot points.

The Wise Man’s Fear has generated a lot of excitement in fantasy circles in recent years. Book Two of The Kingkiller Chronicles, it continues the story of Kvothe, master wizard, musician, and warrior. The framing device for The Kingkiller Chronicles is that Kvothe, the titular kingkiller, has gone into hiding as an unassuming innkeeper in a nowhere town. He has taken the name Kote and spends his time pressing apples for cider and cooking mutton for guests. A chronicler happens upon the inn, recognizes him, and asks to take down his story. Kvothe obliges, and the story starts. It’s an appealing bildungsroman, underdog-against-all-odds type of tale. At the time that Kote/Kvothe is telling his story, he has achieved legendary fame, accomplished a ridiculous amount even by the standards of heroic fantasy, and then retired. When I say “accomplished a ridiculous amount,” maybe I would best make my point by quoting the beginning of his account of his life:

“I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.”

Also, here’s a map. I don’t think you’re allowed to write fantasy without a map.

Kvothe was a big problem for me for a very long time because Rothfuss would hammer down the “Kvothe is so cool!” nail relentlessly throughout the entire first book. The strongest criticism against the character is that he’s a definite Mary Sue. He’s an underdog because he’s a poor orphan, but he is anything but poor talent-wise. He breezes past his magic school entrance exams, grows extremely powerful in magecraft, and is a master musician. The problems Kvothe confronts in the first book seem contrived. Oh, he’s really poor? That must really suck when you’re the most powerful young magician in the entire freaking world. After finishing the first book in the series, I did not come back to it for years, as I’d read in a blurb somewhere that he meets Felurian, an ancient sex goddess who either kills men or drives them insane with her vulvic talents. He escapes, because it turns out that he is so naturally good at sex that he impresses a five-thousand-year-old GODDESS OF SEX with his skills. As a virgin. This was a breaking point for me, as Rothfuss seemed to be building a character like you used to build characters when you were sub-10 and playing superheroes: OK, he’s as strong as Hulk, as fast as Flash, also he can breathe underwater and shoot fire from his hands. And he can shoot ice like Subzero, too. The Penny Arcade guys love this series, but even they take Rothfuss to task for this:

With all that being said, the Mary Sueness is improving. In The Wise Man’s Fear, he’s still way too good at everything, but at least he has some believable flaws. His ego is causing serious problems for him, he is struggling in some of his classes, and there are many things he does not know. Even his meeting with the sex goddess Felurian went down differently than the blurb made me think – he didn’t sex her so good that she fell in love with him. He was almost killed but fought with pure will and magic until he achieved victory. He still learns sexomancy from a lust fairy, but the problem was not his talent, it was that he was extremely talented at just about anything he tried. Him besting Felurian is fine, because he did it with unbelievably impressive magic, and being unbelievably impressive at one thing is fine as long as it’s not all the things. His character is easier to swallow in The Wise Man’s Fear because he faces more real struggles and he’s not just the absolute best at everything. Well, not every single thing. The Mary Sue problem still exists, it’s just no longer unforgivable. The thing is though, as an American reader, I can’t help but think of Superman. He is the most famous comic book character in the world for a reason, and one could argue that he’s way too talented – barring exposure to an extremely rare radioactive element, he’s unstoppable. The Kvothe of The Name of the Wind is insufferable, whereas the Kvothe of The Wise Man’s Fear is merely stuck within a Superman complex – over the top, but not story-breaking.

Fuck plot armor. I’m explicitly unkillable!

The strength of The Kingkiller Chronicles lies in its reverence for the art of storytelling. The framing device for the whole book is the protagonist telling a story about himself. Within that story, there are a lot of common, insignificant myths that do a lot to increase the texture and weight of the world. There are stories about religion. Travelers pass the time around campfires in telling each other tales. These range from rumors and gossip passed along on the road to old creation stories. In addition, the main quest of the series is Kvothe’s desire to find a group of seven immortal demons. Most people think these seven, the Chandrian, are just a silly children’s tale, but that’s because these monsters have spent the last few millennia obliterating any trace of themselves from the stories of men. Kvothe’s father begins researching them, and they show up and murder Kvothe’s entire family. Kvothe’s main motivation throughout the books is to gain enough knowledge and power to find and kill the beings who made him an orphan. His search for knowledge explores the beautiful patchwork nature of human storytelling – he manages to find a piece here, a sliver there, but all the stories are slightly different, the names added to or worn away by time, minimized or aggrandized by whichever culture acted as the story’s steward from the time it was created to the time Kvothe found it. Why did the Chandrian work so hard to make these stories so few and far between? It has something to do with the magic system of the book – knowing the true names of these creatures would give Kvothe some measure of power over them.

Pictured: The most powerful weapon in the fight against evil

One of the standout features of The Kingkiller Chronicles is its compelling magic system. Magic systems are important. They define the way mages can influence the world around them, which is a major concern of most fantasy. Rothfuss’ is inventive and intricate. The author includes many detailed, rule-bound systems and schools of magic, but all of these different techniques are children playing with matches compared to the roaring conflagration of Naming. Naming as a form of magic used to be widespread, but now only a handful of extremely talented people can manage it (Kvothe is, of course, among them). Naming consists of being able to intuitively know and call the true name of different things – wind, fire, rock, even blood or bone, even people. If a Namer calls something by its true name, he or she can control it. This is much more powerful than the other forms of magic. A Namer can break a hole through a thick stone wall by speaking to it. He can kill by calling the name of the wind and sucking the breath out of the lungs of his enemy. Naming, the true and accurate use of the perfect word at the perfect moment, is the most powerful form of magic in this world. This, along with the lovingly crafted myths that permeate this narrative, emphasizes the importance and power of writers and writing. The right words can kill an enemy, burn down a forest, or break through a wall. This focus of The Kingkiller Chronicles will appeal deeply to lovers of words and stories.

Wearing one of these is a really, really bad idea in this world.

Ironically, for all of its care and focus on the nature and power of stories, The Wise Man’s Fear has taken a lot of flack for its own storytelling. One of the main complaints is that, although it’s book two of three in The Kingkiller Chronicles, there is yet to be a kingkilling. Many are concerned with the pacing of the story – with only one book left, how will Kvothe kill a king, find his parents’ murderers, and bring the story he’s telling up to the present day? Another major criticism of The Wise Man’s Fear is that it seems like a mass of stitched-together short stories about Kvothe instead of a cohesive novel. Kvothe at school, Kvothe hunting bandits in the forest, Kvothe in the Fae realm, Kvothe with the desert swordsmen, et cetera. I see the point of this complaint, but I don’t care because all of these stitched-together stories are entertaining and well-written. Rothfuss has a gift for vivid, clear, and immediate writing, and he’s very good at describing knuckle-whitening fight scenes. Honestly, as a fantasy writer, if you can describe a duel involving magic, swordplay, or both with energy and deftness, you can be forgiven for a host of other niggling complaints.

In conclusion, the book is flawed but well worth a read. I’m a strong believer in the phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” and just because this novel is not perfection does not mean it’s not enjoyable. Sure, the main character is Mary Sueish. Sure, this book consisted of what felt like a bunch of sidequests. Here’s the thing though – the character is driven and compelling through the sheer force of his skill. The sidequests are engrossing and fun standing by themselves. Also, the pure power of the narrative is a roaring river – hard to resist. I read this book for hours at a time. Finally, the languorous love affair with tales of any and all kinds that Rothfuss builds into the book, along with the idea of writer as Namer and words as power, serves to forge this series into a paean to the strength and gift of human communication and storytelling, which is a worthwhile accomplishment.

Andrew Findlay has strong opinions about things (mostly literature) and will share them with you loudly and confidently.

Image sources: Wiki, Penny-Arcade, and io9

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Europa Report

Andrew Findlay

Science fiction is a rich and varied genre. There are many different ways to put together a good SF story. There’s far future SF like Banks’ Culture series, in which everything is so advanced that almost anything is possible. There’s future past like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in which the story actually happens in the far future, but there’s been some sort of cataclysm that has reduced everyone to a semi-medieval style of living. Future past has a fantasy feel to it, as many powerful artifacts are lying around from the past that may as well be magic. There’s also science fantasy, where works like Star Wars exist: The jedi are spaceship mages. The niche that Europa Report fills is the near-future space exploration subgenre. We are advanced beyond what we currently have, but not by much. We are interested in exploration and colonization of our own solar system, but it’s still really difficult. Finally, there’s a gritty realism that may not be present in some of the other subgenres.

Europa Report is a movie about a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Europa is an ice moon, and there are indications that there is a liquid ocean underneath the ice. As such, it is one of the best locations to search for extraterrestrial life. The cool thing about this type of SF is everything I just said is simple science – there is no fiction yet. Scientists really do think there could be life under Europa’s ice. The fictional bit occurs when a privately-funded space exploration organization puts a team of humans on a ship to Jupiter to figure all of this stuff out.

This movie is a little terrifying. The problem with exploring space is that it’s dangerous as hell. Even Nixon, who presided over the moon landing, hedged his bets and had an oh shit speech prepared just in case Aldrin and Armstrong got stranded in the Sea of Tranquility. Astronauts are people who agree to strap themselves into a small room on top of 500 tons of explosives, have those explosives lit, and ride that small room away from an environment where they can live and breathe and into an environment that can kill them through freezing their blood, popping their blood vessels, or suffocating them. The only thing between them and death is a layer of titanium. Astronauts are insane. If something goes wrong with the propulsion system halfway to Jupiter, you just sit in space until you die. If your transportation breaks on the highway, you curse, get out of your car, take a deep breath to sigh in frustration, and call AAA. If your transportation breaks in space, going outside will kill you, taking a deep breath will exhaust your tenuous oxygen supply even faster, and no one can get any assistance to you.

Yes, the top of this cone of flame is the most rational place for me to be right now.

This danger, the risk and nobility of accepting a long-term space mission, is the central focus of this movie. To borrow a line from Nixon’s speech, space explorers are willing to “[lay] down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.” Yes, astronauts are insane, but I love that Earth produces a class of people for whom the pursuit of knowledge is worth the sacrifice of their lives. The tension created by the constant risk in this movie is explored through cramped, short camera shots. There are a lot of closeups on faces and the set design is a nest of tiny rooms that all look very similar and give a mild claustrophobic effect. The structure of the movie itself emphasizes the danger inherent in space travel – the framing device for the narrative is found footage cut with a press conference with the space company’s CEO explaining what went wrong with the mission. This device is an interesting way to tell the story, but one drawback is that I was not really sure what exactly was happening for the first half hour of the movie.

The characters are appealing, but not very well fleshed-out. A week after watching the movie, I do not remember anyone’s name. There’s no-nonsense captain man, bubbly and excited science girl, loving father man (played by Sharlto Copley), and grizzled Russian engineer. The cardboard nature of the characters does not detract from the story itself, as it just underlines the fact that these people have subjugated themselves entirely to The Mission. It does exacerbate one issue with the movie – the camera shots are clean and spare, everything looks great, and the concept of the movie is interesting, but I found myself getting more and more bored as the movie went on. More in-depth characterization and better dialogue would have done a lot to alleviate this problem.

If you like space, you should watch this movie. Its editing can make it confusing, the characters are as empty as the space that surrounds them, and the pacing could have been tighter, but it looks good, attacks an interesting concept, and carries one of the most important themes in art: the pursuit of knowledge is the greatest good, and we do not matter in the face of that. The sacrifices explorers have made throughout history have bettered mankind. The drive to explore and push the physical bounds of what we know is one of humanity’s greatest traits, and this movie glorifies that impulse.

Image sources: Wiki

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Her

her

Andrew Findlay

No movie has ever made me happier to be married.

All the marketing tells you it’s about a dweeby guy that falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system, and it is, but the number one issue in this film is crushing human loneliness. The anxiety and awkwardness start with a truly horrifying “meet random strangers tonight” style phone sex call in which the woman brings an upsettingly unorthodox item into their shared brainspace. It is the single most awkward thing I have ever witnessed in a darkened room with a hundred strangers. This call is the most intense manifestation of loneliness, but it is far from the only one. The main character is in the middle of a divorce. He also works at a corporation that composes handwritten letters for people to send each other on special occasions. Customers provide a handwriting sample, some background information on their relationship, and a precis of what they want the letter to say, then our hero Theodore composes a letter on his computer, prints it up, and mails it. Theodore is lonely, but even the people in actual relationships are pawning off the drudgery of intimate communication to a corporation. In this bleak emotional landscape, Theodore suffers one awkward date too many and begins to consider his OS as more than a helpful friend.

His OS, “Samantha,” is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She’s great in this, and casting made a good pick. Almost the only way Theodore can interact with her is through speech, and if you’re going to fall in love with a voice, ScarJo’s would probably be the voice you’d fall in love with. This movie would have failed entirely if Gilbert Gottfried had played Samantha.

 

Which one would you rather have read you your emails?

The attractiveness of the OS voice is not the only thing about Samantha that appeals to Theodore. What Theodore never seems to consider is that he is a customer of a software company, and that all of Samantha’s friendliness and understanding represent a good product doing its job. Theodore is oblivious to this. He falls in love with an operating system because the struggle to connect with people who are not programmed to be helpful and caring has beaten the shit out of him. The movie addresses the psychological problem with this – his ex-wife calls him out for being unable to deal with real people. It is sad to see a man so lonely that he starts a relationship with his smartphone, but the most heartbreaking part of this film is that the love between Theodore and Samantha is real, and that real isn’t necessarily a good thing. Samantha is a strong AI – an actual thinking, growing, learning consciousness. That allows for the complexity required for an actual emotional relationship, but it also allows for all the messiness, jealousy, and growing apart that happens in those actual emotional relationships. The film’s main theme is loneliness and how we deal with it, but its message is one that pops up all over the place in SF – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). No matter how far humanity advances, and no matter what technological feats we accomplish, we will still have to deal with all the messiness of being human. Our inner lives are the same binge-watching Netflix at two a.m. on a Sunday, flying in an interstellar ship to Epsilon Eridani, or farming with a scythe and a mule. Whatever surrounds us, we are still human and still struggling at the center of it. It’s ironic that a genre closely associated with escapist literature addresses so consistently the cold fact that we can never escape from ourselves.

Her is a very subtle brand of science fiction. Most people who think SF think spaceships, robots, and aliens, but a lot of work in the field is done in near-future settings. Snow Crash, Blade Runner, the MaddAddam trilogy, and Doomsday Book are all examples of SF that take place mere decades in the future, which is where Her happens. Life is barely different. The movie includes a lot of small touches to hint at the future-but-only-slightly setting. The main character has a next-gen smartphone that I desperately want to own. Video games project holographically and fill the entire living room. Almost all technology is voice-activated. There are no cars, just public transportation. Men’s fashion trends have everyone wearing very high-waisted pants with no belt. Other than the advent of strong AI, which researchers are not sure will ever actually be possible, this world is only a slight exaggeration of our own.

I am not proud of the things I would do to own this phone.

We are not actually falling in love with our devices yet, but if you think we’re not close I propose an experiment: Spend time in a public place, wait for a stranger to take out their phone, then take it from them and throw it into traffic, down a sewer grate, out the window, whatever. We are not in love with our tech, but we sure as hell love it. Spike Jonze just takes it one step further. He does what a lot of SF does – focuses on an aspect of current life, then exaggerates and extrapolates to explore what it means to be human. We need to interact with other consciousnesses to feel alright, and we always will. Other consciousnesses are able to make us feel like shit, and always will be able to. No matter the bizarre and life-changing innovations on the horizon, we will always and inescapably be us.

Image sources: Business Insider, IMDB

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods

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Andrew Findlay

Neil Gaiman has been a darling of fantasy fiction for years. His profile is huge and unassailable – multiple awards, multiple movie adaptations – this is a writer who goes on late night talk shows and people watch those shows specifically to see him. Any two or three of his works are enough to qualify him as a game-changing writer. If you have not read Sandman, go do that right now. It is the best thing he’s ever written, and one of the best 15 things written in the last 50 years. I can’t get into it right now because the story is massively complex and free-roaming, but do yourself a favor and check it out. Today’s book, American Gods, won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. To give an idea of how big a deal that is, only 10 books have ever done that, and two of them were written by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, respectively.

American Gods is fantasy, which is a really important genre as it’s the first there ever was. Think about it: In Gilgamesh the main character is the son of a goddess, befriends a wild man, slays an ogre, rejects the advances of the goddess of sex, and slays the skybull she sends to destroy him in revenge. In The Odyssey, the main character blinds an ogre, pisses off a sea god, and is assisted by and given gear by a war goddess. Any number of old stories contain fantastic elements: humans made of clay, humans made of thrown rocks, world-wrapping floods, and so on. These early stories are special, as they all attempt to explain humanity, its place in the world, and how they both came about. There is no whiny asshole running around with daddy issues (I’m looking at you, The Corrections). At the dawn of human cultural life, all of the stories were concerned with how we got here and what we should do about it. Of course, people back then had no fucking clue and just made shit up. The results were amazing. Modern fantasy stems from either that initial efflorescence or from all the stuff J.R.R. Tolkien single-handedly standardized. American Gods is the former. It goes old and deep for its mythology.

I am the oldest character in all of literature, and my beard rings are amazing.

Some people hate American Gods, and those people are wrong. There is plenty to hate, but a lot more to love. The first big hit is that the main character’s name is Shadow, which is usually not a good sign quality-wise. In general, the characters are there to advance the plot and to do cool things. There’s depth there, but not a lot. Shadow is a pretty simple guy who is set up a little maladroitly as a big strong silent type, but with hidden feelings. At the start of the novel, he finishes a three-year bid in prison. Later in the novel, he remembers being a kid and crying while reading Gravity’s Rainbow in a hospital while his mother died of cancer. Jarring mismatches like that rub you wrong and don’t deserve to be forgiven, but there is just so much good to go with the bad. Most of the good comes from the premise in the title itself.

What exactly are American gods? The premise that makes the book is that gods are generated by human thought and belief. For example, Odin (who is a main character), first popped up in America when Vikings visited the Americas, got into conflict, and slew a native in a ritualistic way. The power of their belief created him. Then they left, and Odin spent the next few centuries kicking around the continental US as “Mr. Wednesday” (Wednesday = Wōdnesdæg or Odin’s Day). This method of god creation is upliftingly anthropocentric – our belief is not just their payment or due, but the key to their existence. Unfortunately for the gods, lack of faith leads to lack of food. Without constant, strong belief, they weaken and, if they can find no substitute, they die. The substitutes available normally consist of some type of human interaction tangentially related to their godhead. For example, the half-djinn Queen of Sheba, Bilquis, achieved fame and drew belief as a great seducer. In American Gods, she is working as a prostitute and drawing her power and sustenance from that. An American incarnation of Anubis, the Egyptian death god, runs a funeral home and draws his power and sustenance from that. The hardscrabble landscape of American belief has transmogrified Mr. Wednesday, an incarnation of the Norse god of war, wisdom, and poetry, into a confidence man. There is definitely a precedent for Odin as a type of trickster god, and his godhood being shaped and reflected by American culture emphasizes and feeds this aspect of him. He gains strength and survives through bamboozlement. For example, he needs money, so he finds an ATM, dresses up like a security guard, handcuffs a briefcase to his hand, and marks the ATM as out of order. When anyone comes up to make a deposit, he apologizes, takes their money, and painstakingly writes them a receipt. He then walks away with a ton of money. He not only gets cash this way, but also acquires the “worship” necessary for his continued existence. The problems associated with lack of spiritual nourishment create the central conflict of the book.

I’m going to need a little bit more than that to survive, Ron.

Old gods are scattered across all of America. All of the immigrants who ever came here, and all of their beliefs, created sub-pantheons filled with strangely reduced gods. Old cultures come over with their old beliefs, then slowly buy in to the new ones. Up to the time of the book, these gods have only had to deal with their transformation and weakening due to the acculturation of their worshipers, but problems arise when they enter into direct competition with the new gods, avatars of tech, finance, and the like. As Americans worship these things with more fervor, so do their respective avatars gain power, to the direct detriment and weakening of the old gods. Once created, gods have staying power, but if they are completely cut off, they will simply fade into nothing. This is an undesirable outcome, so the main plot of the book deals with the old gods’ actions to preserve themselves in the face of the onslaught of the modern world.

Yes, the plot is linear and simple. Yes, the characters could have a little more depth. Yes, the protagonist’s name is Shadow Moon. Do any of those things make this a bad book? I mean, yes, they would, if there wasn’t more to it. American Gods is an exploration of American belief, American places, and the American psyche. Neil Gaiman is an Englishman who settled in Minnesota, and this is his love letter to his adopted country. The whole presents a mythic America, one where the salt of the Earth is the center of the nation and where roadside attractions are the most sacred and powerful locations in the country. The climax of the novel takes place in the holiest spot in the United States – Rock City, just outside Chattanooga, TN. The swindler habits of a major character – Mr. Wednesday – dovetail with the venerable American tradition of getting one over on people not as clever as yourself, from Tom Sawyer getting people to paint a fence all the way down to a more modern Sawyer.

Son of a bitch.

Ultimately, this novel’s passion for Americana and its in-depth commentary on the nature and power of human belief far outweigh any niggling concerns with naming or plot pacing. Much like taking a road trip (which occupies most of the plot), you might go to some less-than-ideal places, but you will still have an amazing time there because of the idea of the road trip. The idea of this novel transcends any flaws that mar its execution. I believe it is a great novel, and as Neil Gaiman himself writes in the novel:

People believe…[i]t’s what people do. They believe.

And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things,

and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts,

with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and

it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

It is not a perfect novel, but any book containing the above quote has my vote. It is not flawless, but much like the nation it enshrines, the monumental good overwhelms the (admittedly) searing bad.

Image sources: IMDB, Wiki

Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed

Andrew Findlay

The Dispossessed is a perfect novel. It is great not just because of plot, characterization, or prose, but because Ursula K. Le Guin structured it in a way that makes it almost an architectural marvel. The general plot is fairly basic – in the Tau Ceti system, there is a binary planet – a system in which two planets orbit each other. The original world, Urras, lush, green, and rich, is at the mercy of a massive revolution led by a woman named Odo. To defuse the situation, the government makes a deal with these Odonians to send them to Anarres, the other world. The revolutionaries take the deal, even though Anarres is basically a planetary desert. The story opens a couple of centuries later, when a famous Anarresti physicist, Shevek, is invited to Urras to help work on a mathematical equation which would enable faster-than-light travel. He heads to Urras on a journey that will finally unite his people and make life better for everyone, the end. Except Le Guin puts it together in a way that makes it so much more complicated and rewarding.

Science fiction is a spectacular vehicle for social critique, as it can either propose worlds and social constructs that have never existed and show how much better they are than what we have, or mirror and exaggerate the systems we currently live by in order to scrutinize the problems inherent in them. The Dispossessed accomplishes the latter. The binary planetary system does more than separate an Earth-standard planet from a worldwide desert, it separates a world of capitalists from a world of anarcho-syndicalists. Shevek, the protagonist, comes from Anarres, the anarchist moon. He is raised in a society where there is no such thing as wages, where if someone needs something they just go and pick it up at the village dispensary, where room and board is free and people can do or not do mostly what they want, except for work necessary to support society (farming, sewage treatment, construction) that all members do in short rotations. This society stands in sharp contrast with that of Urras, which is propertarian, patriarchal, and filled with nationalist conflict. It is a stand-in for 1970s Earth, complete with a world-dominant continent-wide capitalist country (A-Io) and a nation with a massively centralized and authoritarian government resulting from a workers’ revolution (Thu). A lesser author would have used the moon dichotomy to demonstrate how evil and backwards the Earth stand-in is. Le Guin is not a lesser author. Her exploration of the contrast between the two worlds is complex and subtle for two reasons. One is that the anarchist from Anarres who visits Urras, Shevek, is not the righteous voice of morality, come to indict a degenerate culture. While some parts of Urrasti society do disturb him, he mostly just does not understand it. When he is shown into his private quarters on Urras, they are so big he assumes he is to share it with three or four other people. His mind is blown by the amount of water wasted when he flushes the toilet. When he asks his scientist companions on Urras why there are no women scientists, they answer with a lot of claptrap about differences between the genders, the purity of women, and the intellectual superiority of men. In one of my favorite tongue-in-cheek exchanges in all of literature, Shevek explains how things are on Anarres:

“You Odonians let women study science?” Oiie inquired.

“Well, there are many in the sciences, yes.” [Shevek responds]

“Not many, I hope.”

“Well, about half.”

This simple exchange highlights the absolute gulf of understanding between the two societies – Shevek cannot see why you would waste half of the human race, while his companions are horrified at anything that challenges male primacy.

Go fuck yourself, Urras. Love, Mme Curie.

The second reason the story is subtle and complex is that, although people try to be equal above all on Anarres, and people try to extend their own power and make money above all on Urras, Le Guin does not set up an all good/all bad dynamic. When Shevek first sees the open, green fields of Urras, he is taken aback by how beautiful everything is. When he sees their workers, he is surprised at the ingenuity, drive and desire that they exhibit – to him, any work done simply for money is inherently debasing and demoralizing, so he cannot reconcile the quality and effectiveness of Urrasti work with what he has been taught his entire life. On the other side of things, the completely egalitarian society of Anarres is not without flaw. It becomes clear as the story progresses that there is something not quite right. Power has a tendency to cohere, thicken, and spread. While nearly everything on Anarres is decentralized, no society can work without some type of organizing force. This force on Anarres, the PDC, is responsible for inventory, personnel, and communication worldwide. It started out as just a coordinating body, but its members have won themselves a type of personal power. For example, if a scientist wants to publish a paper that the PDC does not agree with, it will not get published. Someone of whom they disapprove might have trouble finding a job that matches his or her skill set. A math teacher could end up being assigned to dig ditches every single work rotation instead of receiving a teaching post. Anarres is still held up as a “better” society, as some true atrocities are committed on Urras, but the flaws in the “good” example and the beauty in the “bad” example serve to show that nothing is ever perfect, and nothing is ever all one thing or the other. The answer is just never that simple.

Unless the question is “Is Hoobastank a good band?”

Most well-known science fiction is a normal story that simply happens to take place in a universe where technology is extremely advanced. Star Wars: A New Hope could easily have taken place in a much less advanced society with just a few plot changes. Some Star Trek episodes deal specifically with problems that come from advanced technology, but many are simple shoot-em-ups where the cowboys have absurdly complex toys. What is glorious about The Dispossessed as a science fiction novel is that science is at its core. The entire motivation for the Urrasti to receive Shevek on their planet is because he is the most brilliant physicist of the century. He is on the cusp of working out the General Temporal Theory, which would enable instantaneous travel over interstellar distances. Propertarians that they are, the Urrasti invite Shevek to their world so that they can own the completed equation. What exactly does the equation accomplish?

The General Temporal Theory, if completed, would unite two seemingly contradictory theories of time. In the novel, sequency physicists believe time occurs linearly, in discrete bits, one right after the other. Simultaneity physicists believe everything is happening all at the same time. There is stiff disagreement between the two camps, but Shevek, the brilliant scientist, believes the theories can be unified. If everything is happening all at the same time, and the sequence of step-by-step time that we perceive can be linked to simultaneity, then there is no obstacle to having a ship wink out of existence in one time and place and wink back into existence wherever its captain wants to take her, as everything is happening at the same time anyway. This represents a huge source of power and profit to the Urrasti scientists.

We are gonna monetize the shit out of this.

This equation does more than just drive the main action of the book. The entire structure and thematic development of the novel mirror it. Thematically, the book addresses problems created by false division and limns the benefits of unity. Capitalism and anarchism, Urras and Anarres, the self and the group: all of these things suffer from being pulled apart and considered absolute opposites. Structurally, the book jumps backwards and forwards in time, with the odd chapters starting with Shevek’s arrival on Urras, and the even chapters starting with his childhood on Anarres. The even chapters trace his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood on Anarres, and the odd chapters cover his adventures on Urras. The chapters saw back and forth until the last even chapter is Shevek and his wife discussing a possible trip to Urras, and the last odd chapter is Shevek returning home from Urras. The chapter design itself leads to unity between the sequency and simultaneity of time.

Le Guin pulls so much off with this book. She crafts a novel that shows all the true subtlety and real problems of moral governance. She organizes it so that science is not just its setting, but its main driving force, absolutely essential to the plot and theme of the book itself. The science fiction here is not laser guns and biological horrors, but clear, cold math alongside a profound exploration of the impact of that math on the societal underpinnings of two civilizations. Le Guin refuses easy divisions and classifications, she refuses simple morals, and she refuses easy answers. It is something for which all science fiction writers, and all writers in general, should strive.

Response: Infinite Jest is Probably Not Science Fiction

Austin Duck

(Editor’s note: This may or may not be a response to a previous post here by someone else. It’s certainly at least related, so you may want to open the other one in a new tab.)

Before I begin, I think it necessary to make one thing absolutely clear: I wholeheartedly believe that science fiction can be literature. Margaret Atwood and Ursula Le Guin, these women write literature.

Reader, I think you’ve been misled. You were told that I’d be here to “throw down” with Andrew Findlay, that Infinite Jest (henceforth IJ) is a work of science fiction, that I have a heart of gold (if you read AF’s final footnote), and, unfortunately, none of this is true.

I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself, right now, “how are you not going to argue with AF while fundamentally disagreeing (and claiming that you’ll address that disagreement),” and, honestly, that’s the predicament I’m finding myself in. You see, I don’t find any particular pleasure in launching what will inevitably be a pointless argument about a book that no one reads (though everyone owns a copy). However, I can’t help but talk because I find problems not with the claim that IJ engages sci-fi elements but with the way it has been presented to you as being sci-fi.

The truth of the matter is that, so far as I can tell, IJ is not a sci-fi novel given the criteria I use when I approach it. This criteria seems to differ from Findlay’s in a single, meaningful way. But, before I get to that, let’s revisit the criteria he laid out on Monday:

  • Takes place in the future
  • Strange changes in government, cartography, or the overall structure of the world
  • Extrapolated technologies
  • Thematic development of the plot centers around a certain piece of technology

All of this, very superficially, seems to create a sci-fi novel. I say superficially because, aside from the last criterion (which I’ll address below), none of these elements are inherently anything but set-dressing, asides, bits of information that require more willful suspension of disbelief but do not fundamentally alter anything in a text. If, for some reason that I don’t quite understand, we were to assume that realism were the only capital-L “Literature,” then yes, absolutely, this criteria would hold, but as we’ve seen in our postmodern literary landscape, that’s not quite the case. Do we inherently classify something as sci-fi because it engages these set-pieces? Is White Noise sci-fi? Or Gravity’s Rainbow? Does Haruki Murakami write fantasy novels? I just don’t think so.

To be completely honest, I don’t really have a full grasp on what’s changed since modernism that would allow Murakami to be regarded in the same vein as Faulkner or Atwood as with Stein or Cather, but one thing’s for certain: it happened. Sci-fi fans can disclaim the statements of “literary heavyweights” like Jonathan Franzen, but, ultimately, people like Franzen don’t influence literary tastes nearly so much as critics, intellectuals, and popular culture and, fuck, just look around. Sci-fi is everywhere, and everywhere in high regard. So fuck Jonathan Franzen. Seriously.

I think that what’s happened is the result of post-structural linguistics, post-colonial literatures, and politico-ideological theories of gender, race, and sexuality. I’m not going to get into why (because you’ll fall asleep) but, to give a profoundly abridged version, the prevalent critical consensus of the last 30 years at least (though you could easily trace it back 50) is that “Art” exists beyond a white, Latinate, logocentric (sorry) realism. It just does. There are too many experiences and too many minds for prescription of what creates art, experience, or meaning.

I know it seems like I’ve gone pretty far from IJ, but trust me, I haven’t. IJ, begun somewhere in the late 80s and published in 1996, is a direct inheritor of all of this literary/cultural upheaval. It occurs, it is composed, in a time where experimentation—of different forms, idioms, genres, voices, styles, etc.—makes it perfectly acceptable to cannibalize, to pull from the highest culture (the title refers, in addition to the film that Findlay discussed, to a line in Hamlet) and the lowest (the dime store fantasy or science fiction novel) to make something new, a device consistently utilized by Pynchon, whom Wallace developed a lot of chops imitating.

So does it mean that, to borrow elements of a genre makes a work itself of that genre? In some ways, yes, it does, in the sense that IJ could not exist, as it does, without the existence of the sci-fi genre. Just as I am of my father, so too is IJ of sci-fi. But is it actually a sci- fi novel?

Of Findlay’s above-mentioned criteria, I think no, IJ is not a sci-fi novel. Yes, it is sort of set in the future (or really, for us, the now), and yes, there is a differently arranged America, giant bugs, and advanced technologies, but none of this, and I mean none. of. it. has any actual bearing on the novel itself. Of the approximately 1,000,000,000 plots engaged in IJ, the two most prevalent are of tennis prodigy and aspiring drug addict Hal Incandenza and former junky and street criminal Don Gately. Engagement with these characters (or something closely related to them (the tennis school that Hal attends or the halfway house that Gately oversees)) occupies approximately 75% of the book (that’s over 750 pages to you and me) and the sci-fi elements of the plot occupy exactly none of these pages. Neither Hal nor Don ever hear anything concerning the more fantastic elements of the film Infinite Jest, nor do they ever encounter giant insects or interact meaningfully with the reconfigured United States (neither character leaves Boston during the entire novel).

Instead, both characters (each in their own ways) are obsessed with drugs, with doing them or not doing them, and with the material conditions of living in a world that encourages escape—through drugs, through Netflix (which Wallace calls the Interlace viewer with streaming and cartridge capabilities), through work and family and games—while hiding the consequences of quitting—the psychosis, the inability to relate to other people, the inability to function in a way that makes the world less lonely. And, as a result, that’s what the book hovers over, brings forward as the theme, as to what is truly important. The world then, with its years having been named by companies (for example, instead of 2002, the year is officially called The Year of the Whopper) and its giant insects created by a former-actor-and-ultimately-incompetent-president as the result of turning the upper Northeast into a giant trash bin, does not drive the plot(s). Instead, these set pieces exist as hyperbole, they exist to make larger statements about a culture at large. Ultimately, they exist to be metaphorically, hyperbolically similar to those real plots of Incandenza and Gately, to explode them, rendering them generalizable (i.e. evident in other aspects of the culture) without making them generalities.

And I think this is an important distinction: IJ is not a book about characters. Yes, there are characters, loads of them, some of whom you’ll get very attached to, who will show you yourself and your world in very uncomfortable ways. But really, truly, IJ is an analysis of the culture, a hard look at a culture of escapism, of shirking responsibility, of letting go toward achieving pure, individuated pleasure, and is invested in showing the material outcomes. Sure there are big bugs, but they’re the effects. They don’t matter, they don’t really do anything except exist, and, in their existence, they remind us of the realities beneath the stories being told to us, the stories we’ve invested and of which we are not likely to escape.

Which brings us finally to Findlay’s fourth claim—that thematic development of the plot centers around a certain piece of technology—and its relationship to the film Infinite Jest (which, for those of you just tuning in, is a film created by Hal’s optical-physicist-gone-auteur-filmmaker-father that is so entertaining anyone who views it never stops watching and dies.) I do agree that there is something to this film’s presence in the text that goes pretty far beyond what I’ve discussed above in terms of adding a serious sci-fi element to the text. The story of the film’s effects does come across as being the third most important plot in IJ (right behind Don and Hal, though occupying much less actual page-space) and its existence is pervasive, showing up directly in nearly every minor-character arc in the book.

Despite this, I’m still not convinced that this element makes the book sci-fi; yes, IJ definitely makes a strongly sci-fi move, but not, it seems to a sci-fi effect. Let me try that again. Here are three reasons why I don’t think that the film Infinite Jest makes the book Infinite Jest sci-fi :

1) while this film is a technology that doesn’t exist, it doesn’t seem to be the effects of radically advanced science that make the difference as it does the effects of experimental art (much more in line with the structure of the book, the meta-textual, self-conscious foot-noting, etc.),

2) that, rather than a specific material/technological aspect that makes the film “addictive,” it seems that IJ (the movie) stands in for a Platonic idea of entertainment (i.e. something completely, purely entertaining) as a means for hyperbolizing the novel’s themes (as mentioned above), and

3) (most importantly) that, to me that what makes a piece of literature quintessentially sci-fi is not the engagement of specific science-materials in a text, but an in-depth study of what, logically, could come of the use of those materials and their effects on humanity. IJ ultimately isn’t speculative because it’s not concerned with what the effects of Netflix or the film’s particular technology will be; it’s concerned with what’s already here and uses these sci-fi pieces to hyperbolize and generalize, to exemplify cultural patterns in these objects that affect multiple lives.

It’s undeniable that Infinite Jest contains sci-fi elements. However, rather than calling it sci-fi (which is not derogatory; it’s just not accurate), let’s just call it what it is: an enormous, important, genre-bending book that cuts to the core of the contemporary American experience of pleasure and addiction. It’s simple to read, nearly impossible to think about, and you are truly at a loss if you don’t read it just because it weighs like 20 pounds or because you’d rather watch Girls.

Iain M.Banks: Life After the Star Wars Expanded Universe

Andrew Findlay

Iain Banks died last June. He announced a couple months beforehand that he had been diagnosed with gallbladder cancer and that he didn’t have long to live. He was not mistaken. Iain Banks’ first really popular novel was The Wasp Factory. It was published in 1984, and it was about a kid that kills animals, murders siblings, and is just generally fucked up. It was very well received in the literary community, so much so that Banks made a list of the top fifty British writers of the 20th century. That’s not the Banks I knew. I knew Iain M. Banks. Iain M. Banks wrote science fiction.

The need for many in the literary community to separate science fiction from literary fiction is something I’ve been whinging about for years. The assumption that a novel with spaceships cannot also have well-developed prose, plot, and characterization has kept a lot of people from reading a lot of really good fiction. In general the plots of SF novels are put together a lot more tightly and with a lot more craftsmanship than those of a lot of modern literary fiction novels, the worst of which consist of a lot of standing around, speaking words, and doing nothing. I’m reminded of the Eddie Izzard bit about British cinema (“What is it Sebastian, I’m arranging matches”). You can’t eat popcorn to that.

In any case, Banks started to write science fiction while continuing to write literary fiction, and his publisher decided that, to prevent confusion, Iain Banks would be his Serious Fiction name, and Iain M. Banks would be his science fiction moniker. I have read nothing with Iain Banks on the cover. I have read almost everything with Iain M. Banks on the cover. What exactly does Iain M. Banks write about? He mostly writes about the Culture.

The Culture is present in almost all of Banks’ science fiction books. It is arguably his greatest creation – this galactic society is the cornerstone of his vast fame in the science fiction community. The Culture is an extraordinarily advanced post-scarcity society. It’s an anarchistic civilization, but in a society that has the material means to make anarchy a feasible proposition, “being an anarchist” isn’t really a considered position as much as it is a fact of life. Energy is limitless, technology meets every physical need of every citizen, and there is true equality because, with all of their basic needs more than met, people basically just hang out. Healthcare is at such an advanced stage that Culture citizens are freed from nearly every constraint that comes with being a meatsack. People are biologically immortal unless they decide not to be (which happens often – people get sick of breathing after a millennium of it). Most are implanted with drug glands that generate any of many combinations of drugs – uppers to stay awake, downers to relax, mind-enhancing cocktails for high-stress situations, etc – without any type of hangover effect or physiological drawback.

All these biological hacks are great, but what highly advanced spacefaring society is really worthy of the name without really cool spaceships? Culture ships are more than just transport – they also house the entities that make the Culture possible – the (capital M) Minds. A Mind is an AI in the post-bootstrap stage. Skynet became sentient and decimated humanity, the Minds became sentient and were a whole lot nicer than Skynet. They like humanity, and they work with humanity to help improve everyone’s lot. Each ship houses a Mind in a relationship in which the ship is the Mind – what your body is to your brain, the ship is to the Mind. Each Mind has a distinct personality, and its name reflects an important aspect of that personality. These names range from fairly silly or esoteric for standard vehicles (What is The Answer and Why?, Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall) to vaguely threatening for warships (the firmly tongue-in-cheek Frank Exchange of Views, the terrifyingly ominous You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave).

Wait, why does a perfect utopian society need warships? Well, there are other people in the universe, and the general attitude of Culture Minds is that you can’t really be free if you can’t also blow the hell out of anyone who might threaten that freedom. In order to ensure their own growth and survival, the Culture created a covert branch called Special Circumstances. Life is unadulterated freedom and happiness if you actually live in the Culture, but that would be boring as hell to explore (Sebastian, Matches). SC is where the mayhem is, and as a result, it attracts an element that most members of the Culture find strange or even distasteful. Impatient, violent, impulsive, both ship Minds and people. This is where you see fewer ships with names like Not Invented Here and What Are The Civilian Applications? and more ships with names like Hand Me The Gun and Ask Me Again or Outstanding Contribution to the Historical Process. Banks almost always sets the Culture up against a less advanced civilization. The end result of the massive technological gap between the two societies in conflict is one of the great pleasures of the series, where the protagonist usually outmatches their enemy to such a ridiculous extent that it creates a strange feeling of glee, like when some asshole with a switchblade tries to attack Batman in a dark alley. He doesn’t have a chance, that’s not the point, but it’s so fun to watch Batman give him what’s coming to him. It is fiction candy to watch dumb, violent thugs get obliterated by the frighteningly intelligent, violent psychopaths in Special Circumstances.

But wait wait wait – how is this type of meddling and big-stick-carrying not imperialism, pure and simple? It seems diametrically opposed to the love, peace, and understanding vibe of the Culture as a whole. This is addressed somewhat in the books, but mostly Banks explains it away with the “those decisions are made by unimaginably advanced and hyperintelligent AIs, so just Trust Them” defense. Morally, it’s not really an acceptable position, but this is where suspension of disbelief comes in. It’s not really harder to accept that Minds really do know best when it comes to waging just war than it is to accept that superhuman intelligence manifests and then decides to be humanity’s best buddy.

The series is amazing, but some of the individual books suffer from plot momentum, wherein the major issues of a 627-page book barrel into the last twenty pages at full steam, entirely unresolved. Those twenty pages are absurdly entertaining, but the overall fabric of the plot frays a little if the ending is this rushed. Each separate book is not the point though. The world Banks builds is the greater gem by far. You have to take each book as a part of the whole, and the whole is a massively free, open, and just society where humanity (or a single humanoid society at least) is untrammeled by hierarchy, taboo, or power.

The belief that such a society could exist under any circumstances is an act of optimism. The future of humanity on Earth will branch one of two ways – either we’ll utterly destroy ourselves with any one of hundreds of man-made catastrophes or hang in there long enough for our technology to propel us to what we poor 21st-century slobs would consider Garden of Eden status. I choose the act of optimism. It’s important to be able to look through a window at a place that is not insane, in this time when people are still killing each other for worshiping a different man in the sky, when the basic climatological makeup of our world is about to change drastically and irreversibly, and when twenty percent of children in the most obscenely wealthy nation on this rock have trouble getting enough food to eat. Flirting with and making entertainment out of our imminent self-destruction is a very popular pastime – just look at The Road, Fallout 3, The Walking Dead, 1984, etc. This is all well and good, and it’s important to process just how fucked we all might be, but it’s equally important to hold on to a little optimism, to believe in what could be, and to hope that, against all odds, our dumb-as-hell, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot little species can make it somewhere nice. I recommend starting your journey with Player of Games.

Image credits: Wiki, NASA, space.com