That explains it!

Have just learnt Sturgeon's Revelation that states, more or less, that it's not surprising there's so much bad SF out there because "Ninety percent of everything is crud."*

Not that I'd be shallow enough to dismiss a whole genre on the basis of one dodgy book with a naked blue girl on the cover!**

But I wish I'd thought of that first.


*Thanks to Laura for posting it at sarsparilla.

**No, really. In fact, I jumped back on the horse and read a 1960s Russian SF book I didn't understand either (of which, more another day.)

Gossip from the Forest

Last week I read and was extremely puzzled by
Tom Keneally's Gossip from the Forest.

Now I haven't read many of his books. At least part of the reason for this is that I saw the movie version of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith when I was really little and had nightmares for weeks about the evil treatment poor Jimmie received (because he was an Aborignine trying to fit into the white world) which made him go and kill lots of white people with an axe. To be accurate and not very PC, I was far more upset by the axe-murdering than the cheating of him out of his wages for however many yards of fencing it was. Poor Jimmie. This was probably the first time I'd ever come across a story about "the Olden Days" that showed our pioneering forefathers in a bad light. And it was a really scary movie!

Another reason for not seeking out Keneally is because his twinkle-eyed face has been all over the telly and newspapers for the entirety of my life as "famous Australian author Tom Keneally". (And it is a nice uncle-ish face.) His every publication is extracted in the press and reviewed at length so that I feel like I've read it even though I probably haven't. I'm not even sure if I've read Schindler's Ark but I really really disliked the sentimentality of Spielberg's movie. So even though he's part of the national cultural furniture and he writes accessible books on really unusual topics for an Australian writer, I haven't had much to do with him. The only exceptions I can think of are Flying Hero Class about being in a plane when's it's highjacked and Towards Asmara about the interminable Eritrean war for independence. Both of these was thoughtful, well-researched and well written.

Which brings me to Gosip in the Forest: a phantasmagoric, absurdist bit of historical fiction about the men negotiating the armistice at the end of World War I. This is something we dealt with at school in five minutes: the Allies destroyed Germany with excessive reparations whcih led to economic troubles for a decade and created the ground for the rise of Hitler. This ignorance makes ask, do I believe it's all strictly true because Uncle Tom wouldn't lie to me? Or is it all made up?

The book is about a meeting between the French and English on one side and the Germans in a train in a French forest. At the beginning, the chief negotiator, the French Marshal Foch, desperately wants to make his name as a latter day Napoleon (except successful) by using the American armies, newly arrived in Europe, to invade Russia to put down Bolshevism. He doesn't want to compromise the onerous terms and is not at all interested in what happens to the German navy. The English want the navy destroyed.

The German envoys start off in Berlin where the soldiers have joined a socialist revolution. There is utter chaos and they have a Pynchon-esque journey where they're more worried about being shot by their own side than the enemy.

Basically, they're desperate for peace. The Allies refuse to believe in the level of chaos in Germany and won't compromise very much.

One of the weird things was some of the background to the lives of the negotiators. For instance, a German count who spends most of the novel drunk and raving claims at one point that his aristocratic mother only saw him for 10 minutes a day and, because his odd brother murdered his sister in the nursery and no-one believed this, he himself had to eat with a spoon till he went to boarding school (and faced various atrocities there). He then claimed that the German Kaiser had a similarly unloving childhood which made him not listen to commonsense.

Now I don't know what to make of this. Apart from not believing for a second that such a man even in extremis would make such a confession to an acquaintance, it sounds a bit like the way Upstairs Downstairs explained the class system to viewers who hadn't lived through it. The book was written in the 1970s, a time remote from the events depicted with a great deal of cultural distance between the German aristocrats, so this sort of clunky explanation for German militarism could be needed to help the reader. But it seems discordant with so much of the book which was thoughtful and subtle and psychologically insightful. (There are some wonderful passages about how long it took to realise cavalry didn't work any more and about the tragedy of the millions of new widows and bridegroomless young women.)

What a longwinded way of saying "this book was kinda ok". If you don't believe me, please note that it has the mixed distinction of being shortlisted for the Booker prize.

Weird Science

One of the many joys I find in secondhand book shops is discovering cheap old science fiction, especially by people I've never heard of and especially, for some reason, Gollanz yellow hardcovers. Sometimes I even buy the trashy paperbacks with the naked girls on their covers if there's likely to be an interesting story inside (and then I imagine I'm getting funny looks on the train when I'm reading them and feel awkward.)

I'm sure many people have said so before but science fiction is a great barometer of the preoccupations of its era. The Corgi SF-27 collection of new science fiction from 1977 is no exception to this. Instead of the optimism of earlier decades with people merrily populating the universe, many of the stories have a sense of impending doom and the futility of effort. Problems are both environmental and political. New technology is dangerous. Bureaucracy impedes action. Politicians lie and walls that are meant to be keeping people out may instead be keeping people in. Pollution kills thousands each day. Governments hate students and turn colleges into public housing.

It's also fun when guessing makes them seem a bit prescient. In one story, people in 2010 (not so far away!) are driving through the Chunnel in an old 1998 car (I had one of those!) to a London with areas where private vehicles are banned to reduce pollution.

I almost didn't buy this book because it had a story by Brian Aldiss but he was the only one I'd heard of so I got it anyway. And the cover! A lion is holding a naked blue girl with a very abundant bust - about size 8 double F if you can imagine. (And I'm going to make you imagine because I'm too squeamish to go looking for it online and I still haven't sorted out the whole camera-computer interface)

Most of the stories were ok - some good images that have nagged at my subconscious in recent dreams. But the gender politics of two of stories was the dodgiest thing about the collection. I don't know if it's how the genre developed as a bloke thing - I didn't read much SF when I was a kid because I thought of them as "boy books" - or if it's just what crappy popular fiction was like then - and we are talking about the era of Sydney Sheldon - but in both cases the punchline was about disempowering older women. As a good thing to be doing, I mean. One story was about the slightly unethical but worth it in the end plot by a father to ruin a relationship between his adult son and an older woman (it's not clear how much older she is but she's a retired filmstar who's had plastic surgery, therefore must be a hag. She's certainly depicted as exceedingly unpleasant because she has money and uses it to influence others). At least there's a sense of moral ambiguity in this story.

The other had a complicated and really quite interesting plot about entering the mind of a man in a coma in order to find some secret he'd supposedly discovered. But it turned out to be a convoluted way of getting rid of the woman in charge of a secret service organisation who no-one liked but everyone was scared of. Once again, we aren't told how old she is but she's got a surprisingly young face and completely grey hair. And she's a complete cow. In this case, I diagnose an acute case of the author not liking his boss - who's probably a bit hard on him because he spends all his time at work making up science fiction and chatting up the younger and prettier of the women in the typing pool.

Lesson of the day: Most of the time there's a good reason why you've never heard of most of the people in science fiction anthologies from the 70s.

Time for something different

I've been quiet for a while because I took far far longer than I should have to limp through to the ponderous conclusion of Richard Powers'annoying book. (That's a "don't waste your time on this one" from me. No more to be said.)

Then I spent over a week trapped in one of those deadline induced states where I felt like all I was doing was working, eating, working, sleeping, working and more working. Mercifully, this is all SOMEONE ELSE'S problem now.

But then, on the week-end, I read the utterly delighful Pelagia and the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin. Who is a joy and a tonic should be bottled or at least sold in capsule form in the medication aisle of the supermarket. Thank you, USSR for collapsing and creating the conditions for a writer of pre-revolutionary nostalgia who won't be sent to
Siberia. (Can you tell I liked the book?)

This is the first of the "Sister Pelagia" mysteries and, tantalisingly, starts with the principal characters of the good nun and her Bishop (whose name I can't type) having a sterling reputation for detection. This leaves much scope for prequels as well as sequels! As a nun, Sister Pelagia is pretty inconspicuous and has various devious means of hunting clues in all levels of society. She also has some forward thinking ideas about the need for female education - they live in a poor province so she argues her pupils won't have dowries and should learn physical sport to make them more physically attractive.

Akunin loves the society he's created in a remote province on a certain "River" in the east of Europe. This province is a feudal never-never land with tolerance of religious minorities, bribery reduced to practically nothing and the church helping the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants. Into this sleepy world, intrudes a big city procurator, keen to stir up trouble and make a name for himself. Dananana!

And the cover art was lovely too.

Two more wrong things

I'm STILL reading this irritating book. The good bits are intriguing enough to keep me going through the extremely DULL and UNBELIEVABLE bits.

It's been two weeks now and I have ten other things to read but I still feel compelled to see how it ends. I wish flipping to the last page worked. It's taking so long because I can only read 20 pages at a time before needing to put it down to get rid of the sugary taste.

Oh and I had a meeting yesterday and missed out on a piece of cake that a colleague brought in to celebrate Donald Rumsfeld's departure.

Wrong

I just feel WRONG today. I'm wearing white socks with black shoes. I haven't done this, except in jest, since highschool.

Keep expecting someone to leap out and yell "Fashion crime, take those socks off at once."

In my defence I can only say I have new shoes that need thin socks to stop me getting blisters and I also wore them earlier in the week so by Friday white frilly ankle socks are all that's left.

I'm going to hide behind my desk all day.

Three good things and one practical tip

1. On the week-end I found out that Susanna Clarke, author of the fabulous Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrel, has written a new book. It's called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Hurrah! Something to put on my Christmas list!

2. I just won $11.50 and a bottle of wine in the office Melbourne Cup Sweepstakes (thank-you Pop Rock) and novelty hat competition where a popcorn-covered hat blitzed the admittedly-limited competition.

3. Accidentally dropping an earring down the sink doesn't necessarily mean it's gone forever if you can be bothered dismantling the S-bend.

1. When reassembling an S-bend, it's important not to throw away those strange bits of rubber that fall out of the joins. If you do this, water comes out later when turn on the tap.

The Time of Our Singing

This week I've been reading The Time of Our Singing, another overblown intergenerational tale of a family's particular problems in embracing the American Dream. (It's clearly far too soon to be reading this after Middlesex .)

The book's about what happens when a German Jewish physicist marries an African-American classical singer and produce three mixed-raced musical prodigies in the 1950s.

It's full of descriptions of listening and performing classical music and these parts are really really good. I haven't read a book about music this convincing since Vikram Seth's tale of lovelorn violinist An Equal Music.

But I'm having trouble with the other main theme which is how bloody difficult it was to be neither black nor white in 1950s America, even if you weren't in the South. Lynchings are described. These kids are neither fish nor fowl and cause consternation wherever they go. When the family travels together, the mother sits in the back of the car to avoid trouble. Synagogues are getting vandalised and their European cousins haven't been heard of since before the War.

I'm at the point where the civil rights movement has just started but i think this is going to take over because they've foreshadowed that one of the kids grows up to join the Black Panthers.

Anyway, I'm not really believing in this stuff. I mean in the context of the book - not that it happened. After all I've read Soledad Brother and Alice Walker. And I think most of my problems are because yesterday I found out this photo of Richard Powers.

And I wonder why I'd believe he could imagine himself back in that time and position any better if his parents were Jewish and African Amercan. Because that's clearly what my subconscious would prefer. I mean, it's fiction. Silly brain.

Time for whining is done

Today I signed two petitions. One was Amnesty International's about bringing David Hicks home.

The other one was to save The Glass House.

While I'm in the mood for gestures, I might lodge a protest against Amanda Keller being voted off Dancing with the Stars. Not that I watch the show; I just think she's nice and it's a shame she had to go.

More television moaning

They've axed The Glasshouse. Those bastards! And the Prime Minister says he didn't do it!!

Now I'm starting to wonder if an international cartel of librarians is conspiring to destroy all sources of televisual pleasure so we'll read more books.