Author: Jason W. Ellis

Alastair Reynolds’ “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” is a magnificent post-apocalyptic tale about a teenage girl following the Campbellian hero myth that illustrates Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The story is fresh and fascinating, because Reynolds skillfully usurps the typically male gendered hero myth to establish a female hero/ine.

The story takes place in the far future as the “Great Winter” is waning and after a long forgotten, yet on-going war between humanity and the “jangling men,” which are an army of rebellious robots. The Earth bound characters equate past technology and recovered artifacts as magical or wonderful. They exist in a pre-industrial society that is occasionally encroached upon by fallen “angels” from both sides of the unseen war. The scrap and wreckage of these fallen bodies is referred to as “skydrift,” i.e., strange matter that falls from the sky.

The title character and heroine is Kathrin, a sixteen year old girl on an errand to deliver two hog heads and twenty candles to Widow Grayling, an old woman that is sometimes called a witch, but she’s someone that Kathrin trusts and does not fear. Kathrin rises above her station as “the sledge-maker’s daughter” by challenging the explicit and undesirable advances of a privileged male. This episode steels Widow Grayling to pass on two gifts to Kathrin. These gifts are male tools/symbols of masculine authority and power, because they originate from a fallen human male soldier in the future war. Grayling obtains these tools after showing compassion to the fallen “angel.” Additionally, the soldier gives her an understanding and knowledge above the male power hegemony of her community as embodied in the “sheriffs.” Grayling choses to pass on the technological artifacts as well as the power of knowledge to Kathrin, which imbibes her with power both in might and understanding. As the story closes, the reader sees that she also has wisdom to control her new found power, and it signals the beginning of her new life as the heroine setting out on the path of her own choice.

As an example of feminist SF, it is effective and intelligently written. However, it’s not as reactive as works by authors such as Joanna Russ or Marge Piercy. Though, I can see its alignment with Piercy’s later work, He, She and It, and Reynolds’ story has a more active female character than Tenar in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan.

I definitely recommend everyone check out this story. You may find it in Interzone #209, April 2007.

Hal Duncan’s latest short story, “The Whenever at the City’s Heart,” is a veritable textual comic book about the unraveling of time held constant within a city at “the end of time” populated with bitmites, humans, and unkin. It’s comprised of sections that follow the actions of one character within a particular context, and these sections are further divided into subsections that remind me of comic panels. Duncan’s style and descriptive word choice add to the feel of the story as a visual work rather than a descriptive one. His layering of multiple narratives are all tied to the “DOOM” sound of the bells in the Watch Tower.

Some interesting aspects of the story include the autonomous floating machines: the bitmites. They sound larger than nanotechnology, and they maintain the city. Additionally, they, as a collective, serve as an omniscient narrator for the action of the story, often referring to themselves as “we.” The unkin, such as the craftsmith and the lawscribe are not exactly human, and are operating in ways to control humanity within the city. Then there is the “Houri’s Eye” within the Mechanism at the heart of the Watch Tower. Through this, the watchman is able to peer through time.

The story is slightly confusing on a first read, because it’s heavily engaged with Duncan’s The Book of All Hours duology comprised of Vellum and Ink. The story is packed with fascinating imagery and ideas, which suggests there may be more to the series than this one short story.

This is the first story that I’ve read by Duncan. Also, he sounds like an interesting fellow according to an interview with him in the pages preceding his story. You can read both in Interzone (Issue 209, April 2007).

Iain M. Bank’s Use of Weapons is an interesting SF novel about the Special Circumstances division of the Culture. Banks plays with the narrative structure to tell two stories about different people, who we’re led to believe are stories about the same individual.

The Culture is indebted to the imperialistic, white man’s burden of British history as well as the policing/meddling of post-WWII America. Banks portrays the Culture as an anarchistic collective of worlds filled with people who follow “agreed upon objectives” instead of “orders.” Also, the Culture is made out to be an altruistic bunch, who have the good of others as well as the galaxy in mind. Actually, it’s Minds with a capital M, A.I.s, that determine what’s best for the destiny of other worlds not yet part of the Culture. In a sense, Banks’ universe is full of machines that incidentally contains people who go rushing about with knees bent to fulfill the simulated vision of the machines.

I don’t buy into the altruism of the Culture, and I’m not sure if Banks wants us to do so either. In Use of Weapons, the protagonist, Zakalwe is a mercenary who implements the Culture’s plans for other worlds. The omniscient narrator describes his thoughts on this about a third of the way through the novel:

[He] saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that–if nothing else–at least it lives.

And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons (159-160).

Zakalwe is a tool of the Culture. However, he enjoys the things that he’s assigned to do. The people that Zakalwe and the Culture manipulate are objectified as means to an end. As a result of their work, real people suffer and die. Yes, it can be argued that the Minds are attempted to reduce the amount of suffering in the universe, but altruism on a macro scale is problematic, because statistically there is unlikely they’ve collected enough data from previous altruistic work with control groups (as mentioned in Banks’ “The State of the Art”) to effectively gauge the “right” course of action. Also, the unique factors in any given conflict on a variety of worlds with different mores and cultural norms would make understanding a conflict, much less guessing the best course of action, mind numbingly complex to the nth degree (I don’t care how mind boggling intelligent and inductive the Minds are–Banks makes them seem too godlike).

There is a redeeming quality to Zakalwe in the Use of Weapons. As Le Guin uses a bargain to establish the utopia of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Banks uses Zakalwe as a character that makes the Culture utopia possible. He’s made to suffer physically and psychically so that the Culture may do the things it sees best, and Zakalwe gets to enjoy the life he wants to lead despite its many discomforts. Essentially, he gets his hands dirty so that others don’t have to. By extension, the Green Berets in Vietnam or Special Forces in the Global War on Terrorism serve a similar purpose to maintain the American World Power hegemony, which may be described as an “American utopia.” Yet, Zakalwe chooses to take responsibility for the things that he’s done.

Banks engages questions about utopias that many earlier authors neglected. What is the real nature of utopia? He approaches this through a singular cynical humor that can be quite enjoyable, but you don’t always know if he’s joking. Also, he builds his utopia on narrative voices that aren’t particularly human such as with the multitudinous machines and different species. Additionally, he uses opposing or shifting dialogs to present different yet overlapping stories in the novel to further explore the Culture’s utopia.

Use of Weapons is a fun novel to read, but there are some character decisions that clash with what we’re led to believe is their history. This causes a bit of confusion, but it’s all explained in the end. It would also be useful to read more about the utopian framework of the Culture in Banks’ novella, “The State of the Art.” To learn more about the author and his works, check out his official website here.

Paul J. McAuley’s 1988 short story, “Karl and the Ogre” is a fascinating story about a fairy tale future brought about by our genetically building super smart children who overthrow the adult hegemony. The “superbrights” were even further different than the adults who engineered them. However, the children knew children’s stories and fairy tales, so they transformed the world as they believed it should be.

In this future, Karl and Shem are normal people who were children at the time of the changing. They were allowed to grow up, and they serve the interests of the “changelings” by hunting “ogres,” normal people who escaped the change and hid in the forest.

This story mirrors many Cold War narratives of command and control systems or intelligent systems overthrowing humanity. In this case, our offspring rise up and over throw the adult/parental system, because they can. What child wouldn’t want to have things their his or her way? And, with new found abilities inscribed by the parental system, the children enforce their world view. This goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and continues through films such The Forbin Project (1970) and The Terminator (1984).

It’s interesting to note that the hunters are all male in the story, though we’re told that hunting parties are either all male or all female. Additionally, Karl remarks that the ogre they track down is another female, implying that there were others and this is common. The ogre, who we learn has the name Liza Jane Howard, is a virgin, which is important, because we learn that the unicorn would have speared her with his hor had she not been a virgin. Even though we’re told that boys and girls (i.e., the generic ‘children’) contributed to this magical world, what we see is a world where men are privileged over women (e.g., the water girl changeling transforming into a moth, human to insect, does this represent a loss or a lessening?).

I read this story in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, but it’s available on archive.org in Interzone #23 (Spring 1988) here. If you’d like to find out more about the author, you can find his official website here, and his blog here.

On April 15, I wrote about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1984 novel, The Wild Shore. We talked about this and the other two books in his Three Californias Triology: The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge, during our Utopias seminar today. Before class, I collected some notes that I wasn’t initially aware of when I read The Wild Shore.

John Clute’s entry on Robinson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has a lot of relevant information about the author and this trilogy. The author earned his PhD in English from the University of California in 1982 and his dissertation was published in 1984 as The Novels of Philip K. Dick, which is still an authoritative work on the subject.

Clute goes on to state that The Wild Shore was originally released as an Ace Special, and he says that, “[it] lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of US SF pastoral typically set after an almost univeral catastrophe” (1015). Also, the three books, “may be read as three versions of the same story, each nesting within the other” (1015). Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to read the other two novels yet. Sunshine and Christian each took one of the other novels to speak about in class.

Another valuable resource is Helen J. Burgess’ “‘Road of Giants’: Nostalgia and the Ruins of the Superhighway in Kim Stanley Robtinson’s Three Californias Triology,” which appears in Science Fiction Studies, #99, Vol. 33, Part 2, July 2006. Burgess writes about the highway infrastructure of the United States and how it came about as a corporate construction of the mythopedic ideal of the open road and American expansion into the West of the future. Car manufacturers utilized nostalgia of American west expansion and they projected that nostalgia into the future to sell more cars and construct new roads. Nostalgia is therefore turned into a created construct when it’s applied to futurity. She draws parallels between this and William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” because of the use of nostalgia and the choices we make about the future.

She goes on to makes an argument about the uses of nostalgia in The Wild Shore:

The Wild Shore uses the longings of a group of people in post-apocalypse America to show that nostalgia for the technological ‘progress’ of the past, and the wish to rebuild that past, repeat dubious patterns of nationalism and manifest destiny. The Wild Shore thus attempts to make a distinction between irresponsible uses of nostalgia as a tool in the service of reconstruction (278).

Connected to this is Robinson’s recurring character in the trilogy, Tom Barnard (however, each novel is a separate time line sharing the same space so Barnard in The Wild Shore is not the same Barnard in the other novels):

[He’s] a kind of oracle/conscience/trickster voice, a story teller relating sometimes nostalgic, sometimes critical tales of the past in The Wild Shore. Barnard is a tricky and unreliable narrator, often lying about or concealing true details–for example his age of his location at the time of the holocaust. But he uses the details chiefly didactically, in the service of parables that convey both nostalgia for the past and the recognition that the past was destructive (286).

Through Barnard, Robinson uses parable and stories to reach out to the other characters as well as the reader to instruct and guide as is often the case of the guide in utopias.

Again, I recommend The Wild Shore, and I’m looking forward to reading the J.G. Ballard-like dystopia of The Gold Coast and the utopic vision of Pacific Edge.