Category: Science Fiction

Angela Carter’s 1974 short story, “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” continues on the “daughter” theme of the previous Alastair Reynolds post, but Carter’s story is significantly different. It was originally published in Fireworks, and I found it in Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 8.

It’s a story about an ambiguous time and place on Earth. It’s like she’s focusing a telescope down on the story’s small community and watching them from afar, but she can see through walls and see the dirty side of a filthy existence. In fact, there is no dialog in the story. It’s all descriptive, and is primarily about the executioner and his daughter. It’s a gruesome tale that’s about incest by siblings as well as fathers. There’s no mention of mothers in the story, only the coveting of the singularly “beautiful daughter.” It’s a powerfully wicked story that concerns things that families in the past often didn’t or wouldn’t talk about. This story isn’t for everyone, but it reminds me of the importance of organizations such as the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

Another theme in the story has to do with the problem of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who guards the guards). The executioner enforces his society’s one law, which is no one is to commit incest. The story begins with the executioner publicly killing his own son for his involvement with his sister. However, he indulges himself on his daughter without concern of punishment.

Also, it’s reminiscent of Avram Davidson’s “The House the Blakeneys Built,” which is also about an incestuous primitive community that’s on another planet in the far-future.

A great website with lots of information about Carter and her works can be found here.

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.