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starladyIs really, fundamentally boring, if you believe these dudes.
Kelly, James Patrick & John Kessel, eds. The Secret History of Science Fiction. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2009.
Okay, well, this book. I'm totally going to pound out this review in the 22 minutes remaining in the decade, because I don't want it following me into 2010. Oh, this book. I am not dispassionate here.
The editors, from the introduction, seem to have their heads screwed on straight, and say a lot of really exciting things about the uselessness of genre and the absence of any meaningful divide between science and literary fiction. Unfortunately, their highfalutin words are in no way borne out by the stories they select, at least in my opinion.
It's an irony here that the best story in the book, Ursula K. LeGuin's incomparable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" isn't even science fiction. It's pretty unequivocally fantasy, and I have nothing against including fantasy as a string on the "genre fiction is literature" bow, but not without acknowledgment. This is Ursula K. LeGuin, for pete's sake, the author of the Hainish cycle and the woman who coined the term "anisble"; if she hasn't written one single sf story worthy of its place in this book, I'll eat this book.
The second- and third-best stories, Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent: A Planetary Romance" and Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange," are similarly close to fantasy, in that Chabon's story is unequivocally alternate history steampunk and Millhauser is lost in the interesting wilds between science fiction and fantasy.
But the real crime of this book isn't that it elides the fact of fantasy in favor of promoting science fiction, but that, rather than showing the literary (boredom) in science fiction, it trumpets forth the science fictional elements in the literary (boredom).
I should admit that this really might be just me, but seriously, almost none of these stories are actually exciting. Most of them are deeply, fundamentally boring, where they aren't predictable. I don't know. There's plenty of literary science fiction out there, but these stories aren't it. And assembling a collection of New Yorker-rejects stories doesn't help the cause.
Another, more serious flaw is that the editors can't be arsed to give the inter-story quotations about the nature of science versus literary fiction proper attributions, which completely short-circuits further discussion of their points. I recognized the source of one of the Michael Chabon quotations as one of the pieces in Maps and Legends, but seriously, what the hell? Why include these quotations if you're just going to be lazy and not say whence they came?
In retrospect, the fact that there's no Samuel R. Delany or Joanna Russ in this book should have been warning enough. And no Kelly Link, either. These editors are idiots.
Really what this book shows is that there's no justice in the world. Good people are talentless and talented people are bastards; Michael Chabon's work is utterly thrilling and, in its gender politics, utterly distasteful to me, but I can't help but love his work anyway. Science fiction is where it's at, but half the good writers aren't in this book and those who are are represented by terrible stories. So it goes.
Kelly, James Patrick & John Kessel, eds. The Secret History of Science Fiction. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2009.
Okay, well, this book. I'm totally going to pound out this review in the 22 minutes remaining in the decade, because I don't want it following me into 2010. Oh, this book. I am not dispassionate here.
The editors, from the introduction, seem to have their heads screwed on straight, and say a lot of really exciting things about the uselessness of genre and the absence of any meaningful divide between science and literary fiction. Unfortunately, their highfalutin words are in no way borne out by the stories they select, at least in my opinion.
It's an irony here that the best story in the book, Ursula K. LeGuin's incomparable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" isn't even science fiction. It's pretty unequivocally fantasy, and I have nothing against including fantasy as a string on the "genre fiction is literature" bow, but not without acknowledgment. This is Ursula K. LeGuin, for pete's sake, the author of the Hainish cycle and the woman who coined the term "anisble"; if she hasn't written one single sf story worthy of its place in this book, I'll eat this book.
The second- and third-best stories, Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent: A Planetary Romance" and Steven Millhauser's "The Wizard of West Orange," are similarly close to fantasy, in that Chabon's story is unequivocally alternate history steampunk and Millhauser is lost in the interesting wilds between science fiction and fantasy.
But the real crime of this book isn't that it elides the fact of fantasy in favor of promoting science fiction, but that, rather than showing the literary (boredom) in science fiction, it trumpets forth the science fictional elements in the literary (boredom).
I should admit that this really might be just me, but seriously, almost none of these stories are actually exciting. Most of them are deeply, fundamentally boring, where they aren't predictable. I don't know. There's plenty of literary science fiction out there, but these stories aren't it. And assembling a collection of New Yorker-rejects stories doesn't help the cause.
Another, more serious flaw is that the editors can't be arsed to give the inter-story quotations about the nature of science versus literary fiction proper attributions, which completely short-circuits further discussion of their points. I recognized the source of one of the Michael Chabon quotations as one of the pieces in Maps and Legends, but seriously, what the hell? Why include these quotations if you're just going to be lazy and not say whence they came?
In retrospect, the fact that there's no Samuel R. Delany or Joanna Russ in this book should have been warning enough. And no Kelly Link, either. These editors are idiots.
- Thomas M. Disch, "Angouelme" -- Later in the book Disch is quoted complaining that he and his fellow Third Wave writers couldn't find an audience to sustain them. Based on this story, this was because they were RIDICULOUSLY BORING.
- Kate Wilhelm, "Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis" -- The Hunger Games did this concept infinitely better.
- T.C. Boyle, "Descent of Man" -- The narrator's girlfriend leaves him for a sentient chimp. OH THE MASCULINITY.
- Don DeLillo, "Human Moments in World War III" -- Roundabouts the time I started thinking "This character doesn't sound like someone from Minnesota at all", I realized that I'm so totally over Don DeLillo. Sometimes, as in White Noise, piling up nouns and adjectives in a suggestive, metonymical pile leads to a brilliant accretion of meaning. Most times, it just makes painfully clear that the emperor really doesn't have any clothes.
- Gene Wolfe, "The Ziggurat" -- I slogged through 40 pages of this boring, chauvinist monster before giving up, still 1/3 of the way from the end. If this is the best story he's written, that's sad, and I don't care if the wee folk were aliens or what the fuck ever. Do the New Sun books have these skeevy gender politics in them? I get too caught up in their incomprehensible awesomeness to be able to tell, though I did drop The Knight after a few chapters for similar reasons.
- Karen Joy Fowler, "Standing Room Only" -- I would never have thought this woman was one of the founders of the Tiptree Award. This story has absolutely nothing science fictional about it, and I will maintain that to my grave. I don't have any quibble with people crossing genres, or with Kelly Link-style fantasy, but Karen Joy Fowler is no Kelly Link. Why couldn't her controversial Nebula Award story have been in here, instead of this one?
- Jonathan Lethem, "The Hardened Criminals" -- Vaguely interesting conceit, but the narrator isn't educated enough for the observations he makes, and really, JL, get over the orphans already.
- George Saunders, "93990" -- This story made me bash the book against the sofa in anger at its sheer pointlessness while shouting "WTF?!" Seriously, WTF.
Really what this book shows is that there's no justice in the world. Good people are talentless and talented people are bastards; Michael Chabon's work is utterly thrilling and, in its gender politics, utterly distasteful to me, but I can't help but love his work anyway. Science fiction is where it's at, but half the good writers aren't in this book and those who are are represented by terrible stories. So it goes.
