REVIEW: BRAVE NEW WORLDS (ed. by John Joseph Adams)

Today is the last day of Dystopian February, so I must post my review! I had thought to re-read a classic, but in the end I chose an anthology, and have already discussed a few of its stories in my latest SF Signal column. The book I selected was John Joseph Adams' Brave New Worlds, a large, somewhat imposing anthology of dystopian tales that draws deep from the well of 20th-century short fiction. The book is full of excellent stories, old and new, and while seem only slightly inspired by the dystopian spirit, the collection demonstrates the breadth of approaches that are informed by it.

The anthology opens with an introduction by the editor, who frames the collected tales as not just about politics: "the best dystopias speak to the deeper meanings of what it is to be one small part of a teeming civilization. . . and of what it is to be human." While I prefer a more politically-conscious and engaged idea of dystopia, this collection does exhibit a range of insights into the human response to the social effects of dysfunctional or oppressive systems.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" enhances this idea as the lead story. As Lenore pointed out in her review of the story, its power lies in the combination of normalcy and acquiescence that infuses the writing itself. We get none of the common dystopic tropes: there is not alienated member rebelling against the society, the power dynamics are buried under layers of banality and any sense of politics is kept far in the background. What we do get is a chilling tale with a fatalistic sense of closure and an implied lesson on accepting evil as an everyday need.

The stories that follow tend to be less subtle, although the themes of assimilation via obedience to oppression, and of embracing violence as a norm, appears in a number of ways. S. L. Gilbow's "The Red Card" normalizes vengeance as an act that government and society can control. Geoff Ryman's wrenching "O Happy Day" humanizes the effects of a genocidal revolution on those who are a part of the system and those who are its victims, and demonstrates that the line between those distinctions is artificial. Caitlin R. Kiernan's "The Pearl Diver" demonstrates the trauma that complete surveillance can have on a person's psyche, a violence that tears at the mind and spirit directly.

It is edifying to compare these stories to some of the more classic tales, such as Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (which is one of my favorite stories). The power of dystopian ideas to shape style comes out strongly throughout the anthology. Sometimes that power directly fuels the progress of the story, as in Paolo Bacigalupi's harrowingly disjunctive "Pop Squad" with its direct utopian/dystopian contrast and the brutal effects of that contrast's dissonance on the central character. Sometimes it sends the story a bit off-track, which I found in Cory Doctorow's "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away." Despite a fantastic title, that story was not as affecting as many of the others, clever in some of its ideas but with neither the shock nor the empathy that engaged me in most of the collection. The stories that I found most compelling were not just built on interesting ideas, but got the characters to inhabit them.

In most of the stories presented, this is what makes them effective: there are profound disconnects in the world the characters dwell in, and significant consequences that saturate their thoughts and actions. A few stories fell short of fulfilling that goal, while others found innovative ways to attain it; this was especially true in Carrie Vaughn's story "Amaryllis," which feels unlike any dystopian story I have read, and imparts its tale with a shrewd, quotidian style that surprises you in the end. The strength of this collection is that, despite an initial sensation of similarity, the stories are not just examples of dystopian literature, but active employers of that spirit to tell us many different things about what makes us human.

All the Little Moments Between

Yesterday as I was riding the bus to work I opened my bag to take out Jo Walton's new novel Among Others, which is a wonderful and heartfelt, but not schmaltzy, book that I look forward to reviewing in full soon. But when I opened my courier satchel, I found that I had left the book at home, and instead had a few duplicates that I was bringing to the store to trade in (it is a bad habit of mine to see a book, bring it home, and later find its twin elsewhere in the collection. The other returns were The Master & Margarita, Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Yorkist Age). One of the books was Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is one of my favorite books of his and is one of the best examples of fantastika of the 20th century. I got so absorbed in it that I missed my stop, and I was honestly surprised that I could get so lost so quickly.

This morning I left Walton at my bedside and brought along Jeff VanderMeer's new collection Monstrous Creatures, which is also in the review queue. I read "The Third Bear" which was a lot of fun, and finished "The Language of Defeat" before I got downtown (and got off at the right stop this time). This piece was downright inspirational, in part because Jeff makes what I think of as an anthropological argument for looking at genre's effect on our conceptions of literature. In particular, his discussion of "the syntax of defeat" resonated with me, because the ideas of symbolic capital that inhere to certain genre categories and distinctions can powerfully affect how we look at books and their place in our creative and imaginative lives.

What I took away from that was an odd thought: that in both over-valorizing or denigrating particular literary categories, formations, and ideas, we miss all of the little moments between conceptions, when literature works its way into our minds and our ontology, makes us feel and dream and reassemble our view of the world, if only for a few seconds. It was heady to read the Murakami and feel those strange episodes dance with the warm ideas of Walton's book. I wonder how I would have responded to the golden beasts in the Town's fields as a teenager like Mori, far more damaged than she but with far less magic in my life, except that of the library. Back then these moments in-between were blurred as I fled for the solace of genre, for the security of escapism and the comfort of books that had nothing to do with the world around me.

The syntax of defeat is part of a struggle on multiple levels, of meaning, belonging, and representing our conflicts and desires. People would not invest so much energy in these debates if there were not affective elements to them. Sadly, this does not make the debates much more useful, unless people do use them to better understand theirs and others' ideas of the power and joy of literature. Wrangling over an "umbrella term" for fantastic literature, for example, seems more about authorial or critical identity, about one's position in relation to various literary conceptions and communities, than about finding an agreeable way to characterize a massive swath of literature. Don't misunderstand; these debates fascinate me, and I personally stick by "fantastika" as a useful term, but they do contain within them some of that syntax of defeat.

The trick is to think about those moments between, what lies inside and between the categories and assumptions that we project and ingest and wrestle with as we read and think and imagine. It is easy to conflate the cultural and literary utility and pleasures of genre with other considerations, and create not just borders, but outright barriers that inhibit our ingenuity as readers and writers and editors. The syntax of defeat creates obstacles, rather than conditions for creativity. The question for me is, what ideas enrich our experience of literature, increase our insights into what it gives us, and help us to recognize and incorporate the little moments between into the life of the mind and spirit that literature invigorates in us.

Because it in those moments that the magic of the word becomes powerful, when it evades and exceeds expectations and pretensions, when an assemblage of words is becoming literature. A "science fiction book" is not literature until we apprehend it, overlay our notions and understandings on it and turn its symbols into a literary experience. Those moments between are individual instances of sense and comprehension that we pattern and render significant. Genre can give them added meaning or shape, or help us relate them to constellations of stories in our heads, give us another angle of perspective or flavor of experience, but when we lose all sight of them, and think of them as building blocks rather wonders in themselves, we give strength to the syntax of defeat and lose a bit of the gift that literature gives us.

The future is, well, murky at the very least

Happy Dystopian February everyone! Lenore over at the Presenting Lenore blog is presiding over another month-long celebration of dystopian literature. I decided to join in since I am reading several such works for a SFSignal column (coming out probably in two weeks). So, at some point I will review a dystopian novel for the blog, maybe Jack London 's The Iron Heel. I'd like to read some of the YA stuff coming out, but time is my enemy.

I am a little leery of "celebrating" dystopia, for reasons that I have touched on before. On a certain level (especially given some comments on Lenore's blog that there are people who "love" dystopian fiction [and they are not alone]) I feel that an event like this normalizes dystopian writing, buffs the sharpness of its potential for unease and critical ideas, and that bothers me. It becomes another setting for entertainment, rather than debate and reflection. But it makes more sense to me to join in, since I am discussing the subject, and have my review and thoughts added to the mix. I hope that some good conversations get started as a result.

I've been thinking about dystopia as I draft my next SFSignal column, which is on the need for us to not only champion but engage "difficult" works, not just those with tough messages or dark content, but those that challenge us through poetic language and surrealism or non-standard associations. Dystopian fiction began as a reaction (sometimes a very reactionary one) to utopian fiction, but then became somewhat more sophisticated, although a lot of dystopian works have a sharp, singular point to them. But there have been periods where dystopian works have not been heralded as entertaining and have made people consider the shortcomings of the world around them, and the one that they were helping to make. It seems that today a lot of dystopian writing has lost that edge, just another sort of difficult literature domesticated for mass consumption.