I have plenty to say about this story, but I need to straighten my thoughts out, since I'm well and truly shaken, like the lone explorers on the planet beset with earthquakes where this story is set. And this, in itself, is quite telling: how a physical experience can translate so well into an emotional equivalent, when you're writing, and reading science fiction.
It's an interesting exercise to read this story in tandem with Hal Clement's little known 'Hot Planet', also anthologized by David Hartwell in his superb sister anthology 'The Science Fiction Century', published a while after the legendary 'World Treasury of Science Fiction'. These two anthologies make the strongest case for SF as a literary genre that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing first hand, apart from the Norton Book of SF, and the two stories by Clement and Le Guin offer two distinct takes on the classic explorer themed SF story set in alien planets.
Clement's story focuses on a band of astronauts set out to gather data on Venus (if I'm not mistaken), and an otherwise dull outing is turned on its head when the quakes start getting worse. It's a classic problem tale, where the the underdog ingeniously saves the entire team through a scientific loophole. Character interactions serve to highlight the physical problem at stake, and it's a realistic, well written story: no aliens, or deus ex machinas in sight.
It's basically a story about people doing things, as opposed to thinking about what situation they are in. Many many days ago I was told that literary fiction is often about the 'why', as opposed to the 'what' and the 'how', which is yet another way of saying that it's less about the details and more about what we make of the details, where the details themselves are secondary, and only important inasmuch as they affect the reader, or the characters. Literary fiction is often obsessed, if this notion is to be believed, with the 'why' of why we feel something. We aren't taken with the technicalities of event, but those of its consequences on the mind.
Yet another way of saying it is: literary fiction is obsessed with the manner of telling, with the style, with the figures of speech employed in getting a point across, with the arrangement of events, with the pacing: in short, all the tools you'd need to create a work of art. That's not to say, however, that the story you write would be a work of art if you only paid attention to the abovementioned, but it's at least a start if your head's screwed on 'right', where 'right' is that eternally tilted, slightly skewed vision of reality.
Hal Clement once said that for him, a Hard SF story is like a game he engages in with the reader. He sets out the elements, and poses the problem. The reader decides if the solution is in keeping with the verisimilitude of the details at hand. If it is, the author has been successful at arriving at a version of reality closest to what is there in real life. He often does this at the expense of realistic psychological descriptions.
However, in Le Guin's tale, the clones sent to mine a fault in the planet for the ore are the conundrum, not the earthquake or the physical phenomena leading to the deaths of all but one of these clones. They are a conundrum to the two 'regular' humans, who are at a loss when it comes to their extreme co-ordination, almost mechanical and flawless in execution, and the bewildering absence of irony in their behaviour. That's not to say they are cold: Pugh and Owen are made uncomfortable at their distinct lack of shame when it comes to lovemaking, or privacy. The clones are 'posthuman' in the sense that they waste no energy over the emotional spectrum that makes us so unpredictable. They are efficient, but they are also beyond petty prejudice. They aren't, in short, prudes. But what is even more interesting is the structural role both parties play in the story. If Clement's story had a physical phenomenon that was the problem, here it is the problem of loneliness. Loneliness is that grand theme in SF, whose greatest chords were struck by Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick and of course, James Tiptree Jr., but a good point could be made for every SF writer at some point of his or her life. Almost all SF protagonists are in some way estranged. They are what they elicit in the reader. In this, SF is the most metafictional genre imaginable.
It's an interesting fact that if we consider this latter story more literary, it is because we have defined literature to mean psychological realism, over anything else. But if we are to ask ourselves what psychological realism is, we'll come away with half baked justifications amounting to an admittance that only society sculpted by those in power will decide what is psychologically real at some point, and what isn't. At the end of the day, the 'literary' is what we can still relate to with the most urgency and the most transparently. But that's the ideal, generalized reader. What about those who choose to specialize? What about those who make a living out of knowing how to 'do' things? Are their view of reality any less potent? Is it escapist? If we label it escapist, are we not taking away the democratic freedom of the arts?
What I arrive at then, is the tragic. SF that is considered literary is almost always tragic, or has that hint of loneliness in it. It's not a foolproof theory, but I'm sure there is some truth in it. Look at what are considered the greatest SF tales ever conceived, by popular opinion: Nine Billion Names of God? check. Nightfall? check. Flowers for Algernon? double check. A Rose for Eclesiastes? check. Mars is Heaven? yes. The detractors to this rule are those who are read by the select crowd: Blish, Schmitz, Smith come to mind. But there is, almost always, something very elegaic about the most affect riddled SF. Or any fiction, for that matter.
SF, in that sense, stripped of everything, is a literature of change, a literature of phenomena, a literature of loneliness. When it hits all three notes at one and the same time, you get a masterpiece like Le Guin's Nine Lives.
Rating: *****/5 stars
Year: 1968
Bears comparison to: Hot Planet, by Hal Clement is the 'hard SF' spiritual sister story. Can't think of another similar clones story. Mieville's massively flawed but intriguing Embassytown must obviously have been inspired by this one.
Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell
It's an interesting exercise to read this story in tandem with Hal Clement's little known 'Hot Planet', also anthologized by David Hartwell in his superb sister anthology 'The Science Fiction Century', published a while after the legendary 'World Treasury of Science Fiction'. These two anthologies make the strongest case for SF as a literary genre that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing first hand, apart from the Norton Book of SF, and the two stories by Clement and Le Guin offer two distinct takes on the classic explorer themed SF story set in alien planets.
Clement's story focuses on a band of astronauts set out to gather data on Venus (if I'm not mistaken), and an otherwise dull outing is turned on its head when the quakes start getting worse. It's a classic problem tale, where the the underdog ingeniously saves the entire team through a scientific loophole. Character interactions serve to highlight the physical problem at stake, and it's a realistic, well written story: no aliens, or deus ex machinas in sight.
It's basically a story about people doing things, as opposed to thinking about what situation they are in. Many many days ago I was told that literary fiction is often about the 'why', as opposed to the 'what' and the 'how', which is yet another way of saying that it's less about the details and more about what we make of the details, where the details themselves are secondary, and only important inasmuch as they affect the reader, or the characters. Literary fiction is often obsessed, if this notion is to be believed, with the 'why' of why we feel something. We aren't taken with the technicalities of event, but those of its consequences on the mind.
Yet another way of saying it is: literary fiction is obsessed with the manner of telling, with the style, with the figures of speech employed in getting a point across, with the arrangement of events, with the pacing: in short, all the tools you'd need to create a work of art. That's not to say, however, that the story you write would be a work of art if you only paid attention to the abovementioned, but it's at least a start if your head's screwed on 'right', where 'right' is that eternally tilted, slightly skewed vision of reality.
Hal Clement once said that for him, a Hard SF story is like a game he engages in with the reader. He sets out the elements, and poses the problem. The reader decides if the solution is in keeping with the verisimilitude of the details at hand. If it is, the author has been successful at arriving at a version of reality closest to what is there in real life. He often does this at the expense of realistic psychological descriptions.
However, in Le Guin's tale, the clones sent to mine a fault in the planet for the ore are the conundrum, not the earthquake or the physical phenomena leading to the deaths of all but one of these clones. They are a conundrum to the two 'regular' humans, who are at a loss when it comes to their extreme co-ordination, almost mechanical and flawless in execution, and the bewildering absence of irony in their behaviour. That's not to say they are cold: Pugh and Owen are made uncomfortable at their distinct lack of shame when it comes to lovemaking, or privacy. The clones are 'posthuman' in the sense that they waste no energy over the emotional spectrum that makes us so unpredictable. They are efficient, but they are also beyond petty prejudice. They aren't, in short, prudes. But what is even more interesting is the structural role both parties play in the story. If Clement's story had a physical phenomenon that was the problem, here it is the problem of loneliness. Loneliness is that grand theme in SF, whose greatest chords were struck by Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick and of course, James Tiptree Jr., but a good point could be made for every SF writer at some point of his or her life. Almost all SF protagonists are in some way estranged. They are what they elicit in the reader. In this, SF is the most metafictional genre imaginable.
It's an interesting fact that if we consider this latter story more literary, it is because we have defined literature to mean psychological realism, over anything else. But if we are to ask ourselves what psychological realism is, we'll come away with half baked justifications amounting to an admittance that only society sculpted by those in power will decide what is psychologically real at some point, and what isn't. At the end of the day, the 'literary' is what we can still relate to with the most urgency and the most transparently. But that's the ideal, generalized reader. What about those who choose to specialize? What about those who make a living out of knowing how to 'do' things? Are their view of reality any less potent? Is it escapist? If we label it escapist, are we not taking away the democratic freedom of the arts?
What I arrive at then, is the tragic. SF that is considered literary is almost always tragic, or has that hint of loneliness in it. It's not a foolproof theory, but I'm sure there is some truth in it. Look at what are considered the greatest SF tales ever conceived, by popular opinion: Nine Billion Names of God? check. Nightfall? check. Flowers for Algernon? double check. A Rose for Eclesiastes? check. Mars is Heaven? yes. The detractors to this rule are those who are read by the select crowd: Blish, Schmitz, Smith come to mind. But there is, almost always, something very elegaic about the most affect riddled SF. Or any fiction, for that matter.
SF, in that sense, stripped of everything, is a literature of change, a literature of phenomena, a literature of loneliness. When it hits all three notes at one and the same time, you get a masterpiece like Le Guin's Nine Lives.
Rating: *****/5 stars
Year: 1968
Bears comparison to: Hot Planet, by Hal Clement is the 'hard SF' spiritual sister story. Can't think of another similar clones story. Mieville's massively flawed but intriguing Embassytown must obviously have been inspired by this one.
Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell
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