Saph

Sometimes you hit the end of a book and immediately think 'I'd like to read that over again' because there's some sort of big twist that you know will make you experience the whole thing differently, and sometimes you hit the end of a book and think 'I'd like to read that over again' not because of any Major Plot Reveals, but because the book is woven together in an interesting enough way that you want the chance to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit now that you've seen the full puzzle.

This second case was my experience with The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from 1995 that came back into print last year and that I did not quite manage to read in time for the Readercon book club (so I extremely appreciate kate_nepveu's extensive notes on it including the intertextuality with Moby Dick.)

The book is narrated by Maya Andreyeva, a 'camera' -- a cyborg news-reporter modified to provide not just full sensory experience but also associated memories, context, etc. to the viewing public. When the book begins -- well, when the book begins, it has already ended, as Maya tells us; her whole audience has already experienced all the relevant events through her eyes, and now she's telling it to us again, in a narrative that she can control and that's on her own terms, contextualizing only what she wants to contextualize and hiding what she wants to hide. Which is a very fun way to begin a book, by consciously keying you into its distortions and elisions, and for the most part I think the text lives up to it.

Anyway, when not the book but the story begins, Maya has decided to put together a series commemorating the anniversary of a major [future]-historical tragedy, and has just gotten assigned a new screener for the project -- a sort of editorial figure who sits in between the camera and the audience, filtering out bodily functions and bad words and anything else that could be trouble for the network. Because of the amount of time they spend immersed in the heads of their cameras, screeners tend to become rapidly very enthusiastic and romantic about them! Maya's new screener Keishi is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who is, indeed, very enthusiastic and romantic about her! And definitely not keeping any secrets about her skills, her identity, or her reasons for being there working with Maya, no sir.

In true noir mode, Maya's initially normal-seeming historical research into a tragedy that's as long-ago and terrible and world-shaping for her as the Holocaust is for us ends up leading her increasingly out of the bounds of conventional society down a dangerous rabbithole, at the end of which lies forbidden knowledge about the world, forbidden knowledge about her own past, and forbidden knowledge about a really sad whale. And, following along with her, we as readers gradually start to piece together not only the particular dystopian shape of the world -- the parts that Maya already knows and the parts that Maya doesn't -- but also the shape of the story, the themes that it cares about and that have actually been driving the plot this entire time: embodiment, censorship, the atrocities we commit to end atrocities, and the power and beauty and absolute hard limits of queer love, just to name a few.

I don't know that everything about the book has fully aged well. I understand the well-meaning failure mode in cyberpunk that leads an author to posit a Monolithic Utopian Isolationist Africa when the rest of the world has gone to dystopian shit, but I think it is a failure mode. I also admit that I thought the entire grayspace digital-world sequence was a little bit boring. But for the most part the book is not at all boring, it's interesting in the way that only a book that actually trusts its readers to be doing an equal amount of work as they go is interesting. I did not in fact actually then read the book over again, upon hitting the end, because it was extremely overdue at the library [and I had five more equally overdue books on the pile] but I expect I will do so sometime in the nearer rather than the further future. Maybe I'll have the chance to hit another book club.

genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where ( various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience. rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.