Day of the Dead

Here's the portrait of my kids from the British Museum's Day of the Dead celebration that I mentioned in my rambling misanthropic blather below. Isbo had her face painted like a skull, btw.

A Long Post About Jack Vance's Durdane

One of life's great pleasures is hunting out old Jack Vance paperbacks. Wherever we are, if I spot a second hand book shop and can spare a moment, I'll nip inside and check the shelves for any of those old old Sphere, Coronet or New England Library paper backs (always with great covers by Chris Foss or Jim Burns) that I haven't read before, hoping for a new treasure.

Vance was terrifically prolific, and it seems there's always something new to find. A lot of those books are forgettable pot boilers, of course - The Five Gold Rings is one I read recently that was just a threadbare pulp fiction detective plot mechanically articulated through wooden characters, barely held together by Vance's deft turn of phrase. I suppose it's the latter that keeps me buying, as there's always some wry turn of phrase in a Vance novel to make it worthwhile. Plus they're always short and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, the sort of book you can finish between Tuesday and Thursday on the commute to work.

I prefer to hunt my Vance in the wild rather than purchase farm-reared Vance from Amazon sellers - the hunt is part of the thrill, and life is long so why use it all up at once? - but even after twenty-odd years of foraging there are some gaps in my Vance reading. I recently got to fill one of those gaps by reading the Durdane trilogy: The Anome, The Brave Free Men and The Asutra. I owned volumes one and three for quite some time in a couple of nice matching Coronet editions (from 1975, I think) but hadn't been able to track down the middle volume until late last year. Alas, it's not a match to the other two, but a rather nasty Ace edition (from 1978) with paper so coarse you could getter a splinter from it. Maybe I'll have to replace that rotten tooth in my collection using Amazon sellers...

Anyway, Durdane is second-tier Vance (in my estimation) but still contains much of interest especially for the Vance afficianado. It has all the classic Vance elements – isolated communities with eccentric customs, a wilful boy who rebels against the local martinets, Vance's famously melifluous prose and dark imagination. I could write about all that, about the interesting political questions that Vance raises or his curious treatment of women in this story, but since finishing my course, I've been thinking a bit more about books from a technical writerly persepctive. I find myself trying to peek behind the curtain to see if I can spot the writer at work, and this series of books gives quite an interesting perspective into Vance's development.

What follows is a rather lengthy rumination on plot and structure in Durdane. Just as a warning, unless you're really, really interested in jack Vance, you might find this a bit boring. Fair warning, this is me in full three-sheets to the wind boring SF didactic mode. A few years back I wrote a profile of Vance for the Zone, and that's an altogether easier place for the casual reader to begin, and the Vance afficianado might be interested to read my review of Vance's last (perhaps last ever) novel Lurulu, also on the Zone.

First published in 1970 (serialised in two parts in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) it was only the second series he completed, after the four Planet of Adventure novels, having apparently abandoned the Demon Princes series after three novels in 1967.Both of these earlier series are very rigidly structured around concrete setting details: the hunt and destruction of each of the five Demon Princes and Adam Rieth's encounters with the four civilisations of Tschai. In each series, every new book starts with the plot dial set back to zero, with the previous events having little impact on what comes next. I think that's why Vance likes these isolated communities. He can have a bit of action there and then move the cast along somewhere else without having any impact on the long-term narrative. In Durdane, I think he's attempting to produce a longer narrative with rising action that relies less on the this type of episodic picaresque.

He nearly pulls it off. The first two volumes tell a reasonably seamless story of Gastel Etzwane, a young man native to the continent of Shant on the Planet Durdane. He escapes religious slavery in the canton of Bashon and vows to return home one day and and free his mother and sister from indenture to the vile chiliites. To do this he must petition the Faceless Man (the titular Anome), the unseen ruler of Shant who controls the population through explosive collars around their necks. What follows has a restless quality as Vance searches for the main narrative: Etzwane's escape from the Chiliites occupies the first third of The Anome. Over the next third he seeks his fortune as a travelleing musician while saving the money to pay for his mother's freedom, as instructed by the Anome. When he returns to Bashon, though, he finds that the inhabitants have been slaughtered by rampaging Roguskhoi, beast men who have been sweeping into Shant from north. He petitions the Anome to fight this scourge, but is refused. Incensed, Etzwane sets about to rouse the people of Shant against the Anome, and this, and fight against the animalistic roguskhoi, take the action to the end of volume two, The Brave Free Men.

These first two volumes read very much as a single narrative. In fact, The Anome doesn't end, so much as stop almost mid-scene. There's much less of the wandering picaresque in this story than Vance's earlier and Etzwane returns to various locations and meets up with continuing characters who develop and change. At the end of The Brave Free Men, however, this story is done, and the new government of Shant is established. The roguskhoi have been traced to their source (the Asutra, spidery-squiddy aliens that can infiltrate the body of a human being and control their actions) and driven from Durdane.

Unable to extend the narrative beyond the first two books, Vance falls back on old habits to wrap the story up. The third volume finds Etzwane and his ally Ifness travelling to Durdane's other large continent, Caraz, to trace the Asutra. Posing as a travelling merchant, Ifness is secretly a Fellow of the Earth Historical Institute and provides Etzwane with assistance throughout the series. He's a convenient deus ex mechina whose handy Earth gadgets get them out of many a pickle. Ifness can only be of limited assistance, as the Institute rules certain interventions as illegal. In this regard he's more of a Vancian wizard, in particular of Shimrod from the Lyonesse series who acts under principles enforced by the master magician Murgen. These two travel around Caraz for half the final novel, and the characters and situations that had been the focus of the previous two volumes are forgotten. After a series of encounters at isolated communities, Etzwane finds himself kidnapped and taken to the Asutra homeworld, where humans are being used as cannon fodder in the course of some internal conflict. There he fights and finally defeats the Asutra on their own turf.

Or so he thinks, because the ending has got a really strange coda.

While he's on Asutra, Etzwane witnesses a huge space battle between the Asutra's flying bronze disks and the familiar black globes of their enemy, but this time a new type of ship intervenes sleek and silent and powerful. A couple of black ships are destroyed before the silver ships arrive, but then the bronze ships flee. Etzwane and his companions fight their way back to the camp and over-run it. They lay a trap and hijack an Asutra bronze disc space ship to take them back to Durdane. The Asutra are strangely passive, but Etzwane is exultant – he has rescued hundreds of humans and returned to Dyrdane.

But what of Ifness? Over the many months he was a slave for the Asutra, Etzwane held out hope that Ifness would come to the rescue, but he never turned up and Etzwane assumes that Ifness was unable to convince the authorities of Institute to break their code and intervene. When he returns to Caraz, he collects Ifness's boat and returns to Garwiy on Shant to discover what has happened to his ally. He discovers Ifness in Fontenay's Inn, somewhat displeased to see him. Etzwane asks why he did not rescue them and Ifness explains bruskly that he returned to his masters on Earth where he arranged for all the humans to be freed from the bondage of the Asutra. The sleek ships that Etzwane and his fellow slaves saw were Earth ships. By the time of the battle that Etzwane witnessed, the Asutra were already defeated, that's the only reason Etzwane and his fellow slaves were able to escape: they were to be evacuated in any case.

Suddenly, Etzwane's victory is snatched from him. His enemy was already defeated. And what's more, the man whom he assumed was coming to his rescue had no such intention, and dealt with matter without regard to Etzwane's safety. In the end, after all their adventures together, Ifness hardly seems to notice Etzwane at all. Etzwane longs to travel the universe, see Earth, but Ifness dismisses him as he might dismiss a bumpkin. The series ends on a sour note: in the end, Etzwane even refuses to join his old musical band. He sits and broods and drinks.

Vance could easily have contrived matters to have Ifness and Etzwane reunited on Asutra during the attack, but he deliberately marginalises the hero and really you've got to wonder why. I think Vance was always attracted to tragedy and melancholy, but the standard heroic narrative doesn't really allow for it. The Demon Kings ends on a similatly down beat note (as noted by David Langford in Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (ed. A E Cunningham).

His first great work, The Dying Earth is a kind of very fractured mutiple viewpoint novel, but subsequently he stuck to close third-person narratives until the later, longer series. In Durdane and The Demon Kings he pushes this linear plot scheme as hard as he can. In this series, he might have had a strand with Finnerack and Ifness and thus extended the action and added a bit of depth to the tale. It has the structure of those later series, but not the breadth. The multiple view-point narratives allowed him to explore levels of success and failure, and to weave in patterns of set back and victory for the main characters to drive the narrative.

This is where I need some neat homily to wrap this all up, but I haven't got one and it's my blog, you know, not a PhD panel, so I'm gonna just stop. I've read the Lyonesse trilogy quite recently (in the last couple of years, at least) but it's been a while since I read the Cadwal Chronicles, and I don't think I've ever read Throy. Consequently I'm interested now to dig them up and see how they measure against my theory here. On the other hand, I've already got a pile (three books!) and so I'll wait for now. Time is so short, the number of books to read so huge, and ever-growing!

Geology humour

I've stopped giving my friends slabs of metamorphic rock: no more Mr Gneiss Guy!

"Presentism" in SF

This article by Cory Doctrow explains to the uninitated (the people we called "mundanes" in our whacky, seventies pre-teen hey day!) that - duh! - SF is about the present, not the future. Since emerging from my pre-teen coccoon, I've always assumed this was self evident. I guess not, and one has to say it again and again.

However, it's not quite that striaght forward. It seems to me that SF could be divided into adventure novels with a futuristic or fantastic background provided for exoticism, and examinations of current trends into a "if this goes on..." formulation (as, I believe, Heinlein put it). Now, I like both, but they're doing different things, and I think this is what's at the heart of those writers who like to enrage SF fans by claiming they're not writing SF (Atwood, Vonnegut etc). They are writing "presentist" stories, and not the adventure fluff that gets lumped in with them. Sometimes people call this speculative fiction.

I can understand why Atwood doesn't want to sit on a shelf next to John Ringo or Peter F Hamilton, and I'd say it's important for her readership that she say these things. Similarly, J K Rowling's got too much at stake for people to "mistake" her HP books for stuff like Wheel of Time or the Shanara series (in practice, though, I'd say these same readers are an important segment of her readership).

These arguments expose the divide between the literary concept of science fiction, and the bookshop category. The bookshop category encompasses romances (in the old fashioned sense), satires (closest to the literary definition) and symbolist works (where the SF "novum" is highly symbolic). This spread of ideas is often missed by the SF community itself, where Steve Aylett of Tom Disch literary wierdness can sit cheek by jowl with a fat comics fan dressing up as Servelan from Blake's Seven.

It's a topic I mull over as I sit at the hopeful early stage of my career pondeirng agents and publishers. What sort of writer am I, actually? Am I satirist (as my current project is very squarely a satire) or am I bookshop SF writer (I enjoy those adventure-romance types of books and could easily write one if I turned my hand to it)? I think I want to avoid being stuck doing one thing over and over. My current project shares some similarity of tone with Pratchett and Douglas Adams, but I wouldn't want to feel I had to write a giggle fest everytime. At the same time, though, I don't think I could do straight writing, with no comedic or absurdist elements - that stuff is etched into me with a laser for some reason. Well, maybe it'd be a nice problem to have...

Cynicism

Cynicism is just unharvested naivety left in the fields to rot.

Loving Our Museums to Death

In the weekend I took the kids up to the British Museum for their Day of the Dead celebration.
We had a great day, but didn't get to see everything because it was insanely busy. We got there early (eleven in the morning or so) and were able to leap right in to mask making, but we queued about half an hour for face painting, then another half an hour for making (extremely cool!) Day of the Dead portraits in the digital suite. When went up to the Grand Court for the procession but could only see the guys on stilts.

There was more to see - an exhibition and the altar - but by then the kids were getting fractious and - to be honest - I too was ready for a bit of fresh air, so we left at about about three-thirty. By this stage there was a massive queue just to get in stretching around the front courtyard and through the gates and on to Russell Street. The queue was making slow progress and it looked like a good twenty to thirty minute wait for entry.

This brought to mind a trip we'd made to the Natural History Museum a couple fo weeks before. It was kind of off the cuff thing - we hadn't been for a while, and the kids like the dinosaurs, so we hopped on the train and off we went. What did we find - queues! Massive queues just to get in the front door (although the back door didn't have a queue so we cunningly got in quick) but we queued for dinosaurs for twenty minutes or so shuffling slowly through like shades shuffling around Hades. I'd wanted to take the kids around some of the more obscure bits, but by the time we'd done this they were fed up. Isbo's verdict on the Natural History Museum was "it's hot and boring".

I think one of the great things about living in London is the easy availibity of these fantastic resources but I'm beginning to feel crowded out of these places. Admittedly, the dinosaurs at the NHM are possibly the most popular museum display ion the city, and the Day of the Dead thing was a special occasion, but dear god, the idea of queuing just to get in fills me with horror.

I think that a great museum needs to give you space to share with the exhibits. In crowded museums I spend more time resenting my fellow curiosity seekers than in relaxed contemplation of the richness of human culture. In the interests of justifying their funding, I'm sure they have to reach out and attract people, but they've become part of the tourist treadmill now, filled with people ticking off a page in the guide book rather than pursuing an interest in the objects on display - bored looking gaggles of Italian, French or German school children and oddly dressed gangs of Japanese stopping in front of everything and taking a photo (a stereotype, I know, but if you want it confirmed just follow them around!) The only ones that that are getting a real kick out of it are the roving patrols of Bible Study tours, and they should clearly be forbidden entry unless they can prove they aren't Creationists.

I'll admit, I don't get this scalp-hunter approach to tourism. When I'm on holiday there's nothing I hate more than "doing" a museum in an afternoon or something. I'd rather not go than race around in a lather out of a sense of obligation - it's supposed to be a holiday for Christ's sake!

The same thing's happened to South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall - it used to be (like, a decade ago) a nice, slightly underdeveloped out of the way place to have a drink buit it's turned into a circle of Hell. It's hard to find a place to eat even on a Wednesday night these days, and cool in-the-know type things like the Meltdown sell out completely before the catalogues even hit our doormate.

So, what's to be done? I think the Museums are doing their job too well and need to introduce a greater level of elitism and incompetence into their public communications. Tourists need to examine their priorities - will filing past the Elgin Marbles really improve your life? Why not mill around Harrods and get your photo taken with Kylie's bum at Mdme Tussauds like you really want to. And finally, I'll be changing nappies at the Wallace Collection or the Wellcome Institute in future, I suppose.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrson. It was quite enjoyable, with a well-paced plot and good juicy messed up family dynamics. It hinted, gently, at a couple of agreeable political slants (white-collar crime and violence against women) without them becoming intrusive on the one hand or particularly urgent or relevant on the other.

It avoided the machismo and nihilism that puts me off a lot of crime thrillers without either having a tougher-then-nails she-devil as the protagonist or being twee and bloodless. Actually, I suppose the character of Salander is rather a tougher-than-nails she-devil, but there's an awareness of how difficult and damaged such a character would be. I was little disappointed when she fell for 50-something financial journalist, but that's part of the genre, I guess.

My wife had this one haging around from her bookgroup, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. I'd seen all the ads on the tube and although I generally don't read a lot of commuter fiction. , I was curious about it. I wonder if public transport is the only thing that keeps for the market these things healthy? Translation rights for any territory with a big commuting class are a gold mine for thrillers with the bland international style of an economy hotel - Freddy Forsyth and Len Deighton, back in the day, and now Robert Harris and Andy McNab. At the upper extremes you've got writers like John le Carre, I guess, and The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum struck me as just smart-arse versions of the same thing. Anything to pass the hideous half an hour to ninety minutes spent jammed up with your fellow homo domesticus as you're ferried from field to barn to milking shed and back again!