Scores

by John Clute

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Science Fiction

Synopsis

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world.

Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively.

125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

Release date: November 24, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Here is another book. It follows Strokes: Essays and Reviews 1966-1986 (Serconia Press: 1988) and Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews (Serconia Press: 1996), which covered the years 1987-1993. It follows, but is not exactly like, either of them. Strokes sorted most of its contents according to the magazines in which those contents originally appeared; Look at the Evidence draped its coverage, year by year, over a set of very intense periodic roundups I’d composed during that period. Both these volumes interspersed essays and reviews. I hope to publish some further essays written over the past decade in a book to be called The Darkening Garden, in a year or so; but Scores contains only three examples of these. One introduces the book, one serves as postlude, and an extended entry from The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Orbit: 1997), has been slipped into the middle. The rest is given over to reviews of sf and fantasy books, not quite 200 titles covered in about 125 separate pieces, almost all of them printed here in the order they were written.

Not every review I wrote between 1993 and the beginning of 2003 appears in these pages. A number of notices published in the Mail on Sunday and the Boston Herald were too short – or too conspicuously directed to readers I could not assume were familiar with the literatures of the fantastic – to be included in a book designed for an Ideal Reader whose central interest lay precisely in those literatures. Other reviews were left out because they focused too narrowly on sectarian issues (I omitted one long piece which ostensibly reviewed Connie Willis, but in fact focused almost entirely on the ongoing scandal of the Nebula Awards shortlist) or dealt with recent writers, like Kay Kenyon or Linda Nagata, about whom I’d like to assemble more sustained sets of responses before putting anything into a book. Still other pieces – everything, for instance, I wrote about John Crowley – have been reprinted elsewhere, and so don’t show up here.

The remaining reviews constitute a partial chronicle of the last decade. A dumbbell graph would show lots of coverage of 1993-1994, and an increasing intensity of coverage after the beginning of 1997, but a thin zone in the middle, when I was going kind of crazy with a couple big books and life stuff and wasn’t reading much new. So Scores is more snapshots than panorama.

Because these are reviews, originally published as immediate interactions with texts new to the world, I think I should explain how I arrived at the texts I publish here. As with Strokes and Look at the Evidence, I’ve used my original version of each piece as basic copy text; I’ve restored some bits and cut others; and I have cleaned up the style wherever necessary, taking every possible effort, while doing so, not to edit out any stupidities or to reconfigure contemporary responses to books with the aid of hindsight. A few terms, like First SF, have been chastely retrofitted. Some reviews – usually those which digress far from the text ostensibly under scrutiny – I’ve tinkered with quite a lot; and indicate when I do so, at the scene of the crime, within square brackets dated 2003. I’ve also interpolated a number of current comments and asides and amplifications and curses, about 200 of them, which are also surrounded by square brackets, set in a different type face, and dated [they should look like this. 2003].

Reviews of quite a few of the older texts mentioned here were collected in Strokes or Look at the Evidence. When it seemed relevant to do so, I’ve indicated where a particular comment might be found in those volumes. I’ve not referred to any of the reviews dating from 1965 to 1987 which, because I had to keep Strokes below 65,000 words or so, never got collected in book form.

Every editor who published every one of these pieces was good to me. They include David Pringle of Interzone; David Hartwell of the New York Review of Science Fiction; Michael Dirda of the Washington Post; Boyd Tonkin of the New Statesman and the Independent; Steve Jones of Science Fiction Eye; Lindsay Duguid of the Times Literary Supplement; Charles Platt, who edited a special issue of Interzone; Craig Engler, Brooks Peck, and Scott Edelman and Brian Murphy of Science Fiction Weekly; Martin Levin of the Toronto Globe and Mail; Lawrence Person of Nova Express; Laura Miller of Salonmagazine; Eileen Gunn of The Infinite Matrix; Andy Sawyer and Farah Mendlesohn of Foundation; and Kim Stanley Robinson, who edited Nebula Awards Showcase 2002.

Scores was designed and published by Roger Robinson, whom I’ve known since 1980, who gazed unflinchingly at the wordcount daily growing; we remain friends. As with Look at the Evidence, the index was composed by Leigh Kennedy Priest, and this time she didn’t have to work eighteen hours a day to fit an impossible deadline. Helen Nicholls and Scott Bradfield have read the manuscript and pointed out stuff that needed pointing out. Thank you. Liz Hand did that and other things in the True North. Thank you. Judith Clute read the manuscript and did the cover. Thank you.

Scores is dedicated to my Mother.

John Clute

London

June 2003

NOTE: All references in this book to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy – or to FE – refer to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1997) edited by John Clute and John Grant.

– an early version of this essay appeared in Paradoxa, vol. 10 (1998) –

1. The Road Not Taken

Here is a short story about academia. It takes place somewhere between 1990 and 1995. It constitutes, I think, a modest but dreadful warning for any young man or women who might be thinking about taking up a career in what used to be the Groves of Academe, when there used to be trees. It is not a story designed to explain retroactively why I myself – many years ago now – failed to enter academia; my reasons in 1960 for drifting sideways of career-track do not constitute an argument for doing so, as my motives were compacted of passion and accidie (bad stuff to make a cocktail out of), not reasoned dissent. But the small story I’m about to tell – had some similar tale been told to me back then – would certainly have given me a more high-sounding rationale for demurring. Because it is a horror story.

Professor X_____, an academic of my acquaintance at the University of Y____ in the American State of Z____, occupies a senior position in this respectable seat of learning. He has accomplished the usual tasks desiderated of his kind of career – has written academic books and essays in his chosen area of specialization; has taught thousands of students, male and female; has done institutional jury duty (I believe he was Dean of his department for a while); and has lectured and chaired symposia and promulgated wisdom. His position – which is properly tenured – is not at risk. This is a milder kind of horror story than that.

Within his chosen field, then, my friend has accomplished according to his career remit, and has been admired and respected according to his worth. In recent years, however, he has turned to something rather unusual: he has begun to spend much of his writing time as a book reviewer, concentrating on new fiction and new nonfiction texts in his chosen field of literature, a field (or genre, or Canon Engine) which continues to flourish at the end of the twentieth century, as the world turns. These reviews, many thousands of words of them [well over 600,000 words by now. 2003], comprise, as a whole, a sane, mature, eloquent, probing, literate, on-going analysis of the literature of his chosen field. Like any reviews of that which has only now come into being, they wrestle with the new. They are a conversation with the real world. Rather like the review-essays of Edmund Wilson, they make up a sustained chronicle of the era they cover.

My friend would not claim to write better or more eloquently than Wilson; but he might fairly claim to write like Wilson, who was the best (though at times the most inflamed, and at other times the most engagingly wrong-headed) reader and explicator of text-in-the-world of the twentieth century. Wilson was his century’s finest examiner of writings that were new to the world until he encountered them, either through research, as in Patriotic Gore (1962), or as a book reviewer. He was never affiliated with any institution of higher learning.

By text-in-the-world I mean text itself in the present tense of its becoming Book; I mean haecceity [a word I overuse but which I love all the same; it means something like the Thisness of Things. 2003], the haecceity [to continue] and order and nuance of the telling of the text itself, the subversive present tense of text before the story it tells can be trapped in the nets of hindsight, or the decontextualizing dry wind of theme criticism, an approach beloved by academics. Thematic criticism depends, it seems to me, on the profoundly deficient presumption that creative writers use ideas the way Bertrand Russell used them: with an absolute minimum of semantic branching, for when Russell said a word meant x, he had an extraordinary capacity both to genuinely mean what he said, and to sustain that meaning – the word as x – through entire texts. If Russell were to be the model of the proper use of words in works of fiction, therefore, individual terms like freedom or death or man or woman or alien or power or spaceship or jurisprudence, being inherently invariant, could be abstracted from texts without cost. Context would be something you free your subject matter from. This would be convenient; it would be convenient to act on the assumption that all writers meant ideas the way Russell did.

But Russell’s fiction suffers, of course, precisely from a lack of semantic branching. His stories dry on the vine of telling. They mean exactly what the dictionary he started with said they were going to mean. Writers of fiction in general live in darker circumstances, down in the bone shop where words branch and writhe, and story bites the hand that minds it. For a critic like Edmund Wilson or like my friend and colleague, to follow the true arrival of a story is not to bookmark iterations, but to sniff spoor.

The anecdote I’m leading up to is, in fact, pretty simple. It amounts to this:

One fine day my friend is approached by a colleague.

– So how are things? asks the colleague.

– Pretty well. Flourishing, really.

– What are you doing these days?

– Still reviewing a great deal.

There is a pause.

– So have you any plans for the future?

– I expect to do more of the same, I suppose, says my friend.

– No no, says the colleague, what I mean is: when do you plan to do some real work again?

We have a problem here, though perhaps it’s not my friend’s problem, nor mine. If there is an intellectual bankruptcy unpacking itself in this anecdote, it is not a bankruptcy of book reviewers, or freelancers; it is a crisis which afflicts institutions of higher learning, insofar as those who work-to-rule within such institutions continue to think that the task Edmund Wilson undertook, the task of assessing live works of literature, is unreal. Given the systemic uselessness of so much academic scholarship to most actual readers of English literature, perhaps the academics who think my colleague is no longer doing real work when he does what Edmund Wilson did should rephrase their question. Perhaps they should ask him when he plans to do his job again.

Even from a distance – a freelance reviewer and critic and encyclopedist such as myself does occupy a niche some light years beyond the pale of the Groves – this all does seem rather tragic. Like most professional writers, I have developed a certain, necessary competence at doing what I do. I can write about an author, I can suss a career. I know how to attempt to cast a strobe light upon a book fresh to the world that only now have I come across (and often, in hindsight, I can tell when I’ve generated more noise than light). I am able to strive for an eloquence that Does Respect to the work on view. I can attempt to make connections, to braid texts into the long line-marriage of genre. I can do orienteering work, just as others do who face the present tense of the book. I – and my colleague – can aspire to enter books the way Edmund Wilson did, though never as well, and never as often, and without mastery of a voice as simultaneously fiery and translucent as his; we can aspire to be, all the same, as Wilson was, voicers of texts.

What seems tragic is the sense that, at this moment, these aspirations do not compute with any academic career I might ever have aspired to.

2. The Two Fires

But all these tasks can be done, all the same. My friend and colleague does real work from the inside of an organization for which his real work is a hobby. I do what I think of as real work outside that bonded sustenance, without clerisy perks, as I am stone extramural. There are times, all the same, when it is possible to feel edgy about the path taken. If we are not performing a professional or professorial task whose terms are delimited by contract and consensus and tradition, what in the world (it is possible to ask) do we think we are actually doing? Are we fish or fowl? Is there a direction home?

Who are we writing what about when to whom and where?

A model of some sort of initial answer came to me a while back, in 1986, sitting in a veranda under the procreative radium winds of fallen Florida; an early version of this thought appeared in the introduction I was then composing to my first collection of essays and reviews, Strokes: Essays and Reviews, 1966-1986 (Seattle: Serconia Press, 1988).

When I try to model the creative process [As I said in 1986, and think now, in terms only slightly modified from those I used then. 2003], I often find myself coming back to Georges Simenon (1903-1989) who, in a career that began in 1920 or earlier and ended only shortly before his death, published way more than 1000 stories (no one has yet established just how many), about 500 novels (a rough total which includes an undetermined number of pseudonymous titles written in the 1920s), and a dozen or so volumes of memoirs which appeared after 1972, when he stopped writing fiction. Over and above its delirious fecundity, what has always seemed most interesting about Simenon’s career lies in a distinction he made, after he started using his real name around 1930, between two kinds of novel he specialized in for the rest of his career – two kinds of writing which engaged him in two varieties of the creative act. The first category of novel, the sort he is most famous for, included the 80 or so books which feature Inspector Maigret; the second category comprised the 100 or so non-Maigret novels, which he always published under his own name after 1930 or so. It was these novels he was most proud of.

Most of the non-Maigret tales follow a similar pattern. We open the book and immediately enter the protagonist’s mind; there is never more than one point-of-view in a Simenon novel, and that point-of-view is never omniscient: from the get-go, we are looking through the eyes of the prisoner of the book. This protagonist is caught at a life-summing point of frozen stress. The story begins. Everything stokes the stress. Then something external, or something that wells up within the protagonist, breaks the seemingly unending moment of uttermost stress, and he breaks or does not break; melts or does not melt; murders (or fails to murder) his wife or mistress or boss; flees or fails to flee. The novel (the simenon) then ends, often in a state of chaos or slingshot into nada: for the world when deranged, the psyche when liberated of the bondage of its life, crosses a borderline into the unknown, where habits no longer work, and reality, for an instant, may just possibly be seen entire, unendurable, profound and cold.

The Maigrets are completely different. We begin in chaos, in the aftermath of some terrible breakdown in consensual reality. We begin just after a "real" simenon ends. The Humpty Dumpty of the skull we row, upstream, against the dark, has fallen. A murder has almost always been committed. Maigret appears, for he is always subsequent to the fall. He senses the chaos and incompletion of the world, and within him something begins to knit back the raveled sleave of things that he has encountered raw. He finds (and in the act of finding he forgives) the murderer. Slowly, intuitively, implacably, he puts it all together again. At the end of the novel he leaves the world like an egg (to quote one of Philip Larkin’s most extraordinary poems) unbroken.

For me, the process of writing a work of fiction can conveniently be modeled in terms of the rage for chaos exemplified by Georges Simenon’s non-Maigret novels, which he always inscribed at great speed as though – like the characters portrayed within – he was walking the plank at a run. He would settle upon a character, and a place, and the nature of the bondage to be shattered; beyond that, nothing. If his character failed him, or if he failed to find a story to ride across the borderline, he would tumble off the plank. The novel would remain unfinished (none ever took more than a week or so to write), the protagonist would remain in prison, and the world unthreatened. Humpty Dumpty would never walk the plank off the wall, never reach the pavement to break out. The image of creation as walking the plank also draws on Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos (1965), where art is understood as that which threatens the prisons of order our human nature imposes on [that word again] raw haecceity.

So writing a novel is fall and suture.

On the other hand, the art of criticism is the art of Maigret: it is an art of reconstitution, but also of closure; for in the critic, as in Maigret, there is a rage for order. Accusations that the critic is inherently parasitical have always seemed to me fatally digressive. Both the rage for chaos and the rage for order, though one may be higher than the other and shake the world more profoundly, are impulses of the creative spirit; and it is in this sense that I feel, when I am acting as a critic, that I am acting as a kind of creator.

So writing criticism is a surgery of the fall.

But surgery is invasion. There is little point in pretending otherwise. The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part. The touch that heals must first touch the chaos wound. It is immemorial. If the task of the critic is that of knitting back (as we have already said) the sleave of things when raw, of recuperating new perceptions into the healing fold of human habit, then any serious critic of the new must betray the new in order to heal it – in order to assimilate it into the body English of all that has been written (I presume there are figures of speech in other languages similar to "body English") and that can be read. For the absolutely new is absolutely not understandable. What the critic does is heal the new into the readable. Once trapped, the work of art may be forgiven its intolerable dying gaze. So it goes.

So book reviewers (the kind of critic whose "real work" I am treating as the kind most relevant to this model of co-creation) are in a sense hunter/gatherers of the raw, First Readers who, in order to cage the raw, range somewhere dangerously close to the free fall region of the present tense of the world. For us, attempting to understand what is encountered there is like inhaling some disorienting vapour, like canaries in a coal mine. But if we choke it means we have failed. Failure, it must be said, is pretty usual for those who do First Reads. The matrices of understanding – the traps we all reforge daily to catch the new in – degrade daily. And when we do return with a book in our beak, it will be half-dead on delivery.

Creative writers, of course, might be inclined to think that high-flown mixed-metaphor talk like this (viz above) is nothing but squid ink designed to deflect attention from the fact that criticism of the sort I’m describing is a digression from the kind of criticism most writers think critics should concentrate on, a task which might be defined as gospel singing. For many creative writers, genuinely attentive criticism is akin to murder. Stick to the Good News, they say. Annunciate the name of the book and scram.

It’s a tough life, a book reviewer might answer.

Which is not quite fair. It does feel something like death to be read. The act of reading is precisely surgery. Reading retells what is read. Reading is opening the book. It must feel almost like death to be opened like that. Still, there is a gap. No matter how closely book reviewers may feel they approach the fire, there is ultimately no magic. The present is an asymptote, which the scalpel never quite reaches. The True Name of things is Boojum.

But we also know, in our hearts, I think, that the vast backward and abysm of our daily lives only makes sense when it is constantly reforged in the burn of that asymptote. It does strike me that a writer in my position, a book reviewer sentenced to life, swinging in the wind of asymptote, is fortunately positioned to keep the Word in view. Thinking so keeps me thinking I am here.

– Interzone #70 (April 1993) –

Red Dust by Paul J McAuley

Slightly Off Center by Neal Barrett Jr

Beautiful Soup by Harvey Jacobs

Into the pot of many colours of the sf of the latter days, once more Paul J McAuley dips a sly palette, but this time he pulls out his thumb. His fourth novel, Red Dust (London: Gollancz, 1993), which is his best by far, takes place on a Mars as full of reflections of the fictions of the past as any Christmas ornament, and tells a story whose profound (though ultimately subversive) orthodoxy serves as a remarkably sustained homage to one of the sf tales which lay at the heart of the genre in America for half a century. It is the story of the orphan who becomes king, and changes the world into Camelot or Trantor. It is the story that Gene Wolfe – McAuley parodies him with loving intensity in a couple of passages [see, on McAuley doing Wolfe, p.259 below] – transfigured into the tale of Severian in The Book of the New Sun, at which point it was possible to think the story could not be told any longer in a new voice: certainly not (as in this book) in the guise of a Martian Western starring Billy the Kid.

Red Dust, which is set half a millennium hence on a Mars long under Chinese hegemony, is indeed new only in the dazzlement of the web of trope it quotes. It is the story of a very young man named Wei Lee, whose nickname is Billy, and to whom things happen like magic (as they do in fables). He is haunted by half-memories of his long-dead parents, the mystery of whose disappearance (and true nature) turns out to be pivotal to any understanding of the history of the planet; he criss-crosses Mars on a serial herd of trusty steeds in search of the knowledge of self which will transform everything, and manages en route to acquire a plethora of enablement icons [Nick Lowe’s term, “plot coupon” which was used in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, is much superior. 2003], all of which turn out to be essential to his quest (and to any understanding of late-genre sf). These icons include an ever-growing cadre of deeply loyal companions; weapons galore; new martial arts; an assortment of virtual-reality eidolons (among them a librarian who searches cyberspace for helpful tidbits); a secret-sharer warrior-sister within the skin (like Severian’s Thecla) who turns out to be profoundly that; an aspect of Elvis Presley who abides in virtual reality but who makes live broadcasts throughout the solar system, espousing (as the real Elvis never did) revolution; a pharmacopoeia of “totipotent fullerene viruses” which seed his brain and body with healants, strengtheners, brighteners, enhancers, little Plot Solvents [Coupons] of the Haloed Nanotechnology beavering away like the Neoplatonic angels who comprise molecular space, in order to do with-one-bound-free routines, liberating the hero from the various rite-of-passage scrapes and wounds and little deaths to which 1990s godlings are heir to before they are permitted to assume the burden of dicing the quick and feasting the dead at the terminus of the book. And the more he learns, and the more harumscarum seems his course onward, the more it becomes obvious (to us and to those he meets) that his true nature is being unravelled as he travels, that he is a holy innocent or bodhisattva, that his arrival at the goal is inevitable, that the old Emperor/King/Pa/God will be identified and dissolved in a great dying cry down the scars and screes of epiphany space into Death.

To say all of this is not to mock Red Dust. There may be echoes of the innumerable futures past of old sf throughout: Leigh Brackett and all the other creators of the Martian planetary romance; Cordwainer Smith (for “When the People Fell"); Greg Bear (for partials) and Wolfe (for aquastors, here called eidolons, and for chilling narrative segués). Here is McAuley turning, as does Wolfe, on a dime:

Perhaps the Great House was great indeed, its rooms and corridors extending through time as well as space, so that if Lee walked out of this room he might find himself returned to his childhood. And then he had the strange idea that if he walked out into the garden he would find his parents, and for some reason that filled him with terror.

And there is the sense that McAuley is clearly a full communicant co-feaster – in company with Geoff Ryman (whose Consensus he invokes in passing), and with Ian McDonald and Colin Greenland and Robert Charles Wilson and Kim Stanley Robinson – in the Agape of the New SF, whose banquet is the old sf. His default imagery may run – like theirs – from Mad Max and cyberpunk and the various enticements of Abyss Frenzy so common to writers at the edge of millennium, and he may dabble in the daft totalizing epiphanies which are equally common to last chapters of books crafted in the latter days of genre. He may also indulge in the occasional writers’-workshop-style device, usually in his case the Cunning Leapfrog Ploy, which comes in Two Parts. The author must first skip salient bits of story at the beginning of chapters in order to “hook” the reader with something which seems “dramatic” because it’s foregrounded by being told out of chronological order. Now that he’s hooked the poor booby, the author must then return to the missed bits and – reader safely in tow – faithfully narrate that which has now, completely unnecessarily, become backstory. (There is a Part Three – reader throws book through window – but Part Three is not taught at Milford.)

Such devices are, however, passing foibles in McAuley’s work, and the web of echoes is the sea a modern sf writer swims in. What distinguishes the McAuley of Red Dust from the McAuley of the previous books, and from most of his contemporaries, is the glad speed and brio of the telling. It is as though, in this pell-mell tale, he had at last found his novel voice, the rate of telling that best acted out his way with a tale, without grimacing. And this may be essential. It may be the case that voice, for Paul J McAuley, is far more a matter of momentum than for most writers, that until the speed of telling blurs the calculus of rhetoric, he remains a bachelor at the agape, a UK joker grinning too slyly at the papier-maché podiums of the Yanks; slightly flummoxed by the fractal selves the mirror informs on. In Red Dust, speed has a further function, too. It’s what the film-maker Norman McLaren famously said about animation. Animation, he said, wasn’t a question of “drawings-that-move”, but of “movements-that-are-drawn.” In Red Dust, it isn’t a question of icons-that-move, but of a web-of-echoes-that-are-drawn. Who can tell the icon from the tale?

There are passing pleasures as well. The Chinese hegemony grants us a protagonist of a different grain; the Western overlay is performed with love and dispatch; the long-defeated Yankees hilariously occupy, in the main city, what looks very much like Chinatown; Elvis is not quite the usual bloat of gas, though McAuley doesn’t quite manage to answer the question so many of us have been asking, timidly, for years, sotto voce, of Elvis-invoking contemporary sf writers: Why Elvis? Why not any of the hundred or so almost infinitely more interesting composer-performers of the last thirty years? I mean, in one song, “Graceland”, even the smooth-faced Paul Simon said and sang more about America and life and death and the future and the past than Elvis did in twenty years of overdosed croon-death. But the main pleasure is the chase, for Red Dust is like a game; but it is better than any game, because it is impossible to lose it.

It could not be said that Slightly Off Center: Eleven Extraordinarily Exhilarating Tales (Austin, TX: Swan Press, 1992) was the best or fullest possible introduction to the work of Neal Barrett Jr. Too much of the book is made up of semi-barbaric yawps about sex and death and drink and deliquescence, tales and sequences set in Texas and environs which evoke but do not match the stone thanatopsical glee of The Hereafter Gang (1991). “Buckstop” (new here) and “Deviations” (1988) are extremely funny, true enough, and instinct with mortality; but they do not reflect anything like the full technical range of Barrett’s work. “Tony Red Dog” (1989) – about an Indian in the Mafia – is on the other hand absolutely competent, though it sounds too much like Richard Condon’s Prizzi novels to quite sta