No Woman Born, by C. L. Moore (1944)

This might be one of the first, if not the first, examination of the posthuman woman, as it were, and this precedes Donna Haraway by at least 40 years. How about that!

This is an important novella because it treats the question of woman/machine hybrid with a sober headed delicacy not usually found in cyberpunk. Indeed, one of the reasons why much of cyberpunk fails to live up to its potential is a refusal on the part of the authors to look beyond the surface, (ironically something considered to be one of its defining features, if postmodern theory is to be believed). But that might just be a difference in ethos than anything else really: the stance of the cyberpunks towards technology was not simply neutral, but one that considered it to be a seamless part of who we are as human beings. Therefore, it didn't, for the most part, bother with why need technology at all, and went straight ahead with the 'how does it change the way we see the world'. Which is okay, really, but the lens of Golden Age SF does wonders for a sub-genre that hadn't even seen the light of day when this was written.

Some of the things this does not address, however, is how the experience of being a woman changes when your body becomes mechanical. How much of gender is predicated on our bodies, as opposed to our minds? Or is the story suggesting that the experience does not change at all, only heightens human curiosity? A curiosity that is usually attributed in such texts to the male counterparts. Curious. For at the very end, it is strongly suggested that she would go on to test her new body, and see where it can take her.

The last sentence is, however, chilling, and emphasizes the machine over woman all over again.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Read in: The Best of C. L. Moore

The Naturalist, by Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh is quite simply one of the finest SF writers around. And with her story, The Naturalist, she is catapulted into the ranks of the really memorable. Not that I haven't enjoyed her stories before: Frankenstein's Daughter took me by surprise with its offhand punch in the gut denouement, which more or less recontextualizes the entire story, and Useless Things, like The Fifth Head of Cerberus, defies analysis because there is simply too much of it that you can do. But with The Naturalist, McHugh has hit a nerve.

At the very end of the story, Cahill, our protagonist, is sad at the prospect of leaving the zombie settlement. He had started understanding them, for once. With that understanding had come an affection. It is quite simply the opposite of an instrumental interest in another species. He is no scientist, or at least, not a rigorous one at that, but his steady observations, his total surrender to the ways of the zombies without having them adhere to a reading, frees him of the human fallacy of control and the pleasure in control.

This is a complicated sentiment, but one McHugh navigates with preternatural ease. I urge everyone to read this story. It is one of the unsung masterpieces.

Rating: *****/5 stars

Read in: After the Apocalypse (anthology)

Bears comparison to: Stylistically, and intent wise, very similar to Karen Joy Fowler's oeuvre. But, interestingly enough, Molly Gloss's The Grinnell Method comes starkly to mind. 

The Watched, by Christopher Priest

All the usual preoccupations of Priest on display: surveillance, obsessive behaviour, doppelgangers. But this is an exquisite novella.What happens when the Gaze is turned back on you?

I read about the gaze in my last semester during pursuing a Masters degree in English. It's not as if I hadn't known about it before; it's just that knowing about something and understanding all the little intricate details that surround its logistics is quite another. Personally, I've been shy all my life. Questions concerning gazes and voyeurism were understated but present, throughout my childhood, existing in the borderlands between maturity and adolescent curiosity. The thrill, and the guilt associated with the Gaze is not something that adolescents need to be told of, unless your parents have been unusually open with you about these things,

In Priest's novella, the gaze starts off as a sexual one, but is soon revealed to be something more. One can sense a love for isolation in the protagonist, a love that finds an empathetic resonance in the natives that he is studying. Slowly, the need to study them himself takes over, and the study becomes a microcosm of everything around him.

We are in a sense veering close to that age old SF motif of the folly of finding oneself in everything you choose to study. Heidegger had some interesting things to say about the nature of technology, not the least of which is how it helps him attain a false sense of grandeur by considering himself in control, and by consequence, separate. Our protagonist suffers from that same folly. He mistakes control for omniscience.

The almost Derridean inversion that takes place by the end of the story cannot simply be reduced to a pat explanation of 'the watcher becomes the watched'. On the contrary, there is little in the story to suggest that what does happen by the end is not entirely due to the protagonist's own volition. The supreme fact that story seems to be suggesting is that Reason seems unable to extract itself from its own framework even when it cannot explain anything with any amount of certitude. If the rational man gives in to the gaze of the other, he has it in himself to rationalize even that surrender, thus completely missing the point.

Rating: 5/5 stars

Read in: The Dream Archipelago

Bears comparison to: Snow, by John Crowley, and perhaps, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, by Ted Chiang, (in the sense of gauging man's relationship with technology that aids and accentuates, rather than the kind that helps transcend)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe (1972)

I remember the first time reading Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It was a revelation. Someone wrote of alien worlds and alien cultures with as much seriousness as a Melville, or a Proust. This was something I could only have dreamt of, once, and not something I realized I had needed before I actually read an instance of such a writing.

Reading Gene Wolfe's novella had had a similar impact, but it also left me puzzled, as it has several readers for almost four decades now. I went back to it yesterday, and finished it today morning, and it is every bit of a masterpiece as my young mind had suspected it to be five years ago, but didn't have the necessary wherewithal to fathom.

Two alien planets, shape shifting natives, and a singularly unpleasant but intriguing villain with a Frankenstein complex comprise this marvelous tale. The language is what hits you first, though, and not the conventions. The language is one that belies the fact that it is a story of pure invention and imagination. It is intimate, memorable and respectful of the nature of memory.

I have simply one question I still haven't figured out: in the original novella, what is the role of the 'abos' and their knowledge to the central plot of the story? Is it merely a substrate in which the more pressing questions of identity and oedipal patricide are lodged, or was it always planned as an aspect needing to be fleshed out further? From what I'd read, Wolfe was asked to write two novellas as companion pieces to this one. If that is so, then one would think all the answers would lie there.

Who knows?

Rating: *****/5 stars

Bears comparison to: Proust, Dickens, Shelley's Frankenstein. But almost sui generis in conception.

Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell

The Asian Shore, by Thomas M. Disch (1970)

This story calls for a redefinition of SF, and is a textbook example of what I have been trying to spell out over the last three years but have been unable to: SF as mode, as an attitude. I would not be as trite as to say that if SF is to survive as a respectable literary genre, that's how it should be remembered. But the richness and potential of SF as simultaneously genre and mode is perhaps nowhere better represented than in this story.

The Asian Shore poses questions about the nature of self and identity. The core of the story is a theory proposed by the protagonist, one John Benedict Harris, about the essential arbitrariness of constructs, physical, biological and social. It might be, according to John, something we do not perceive because of our conditioning, but it is there, embedded as pervasively in our theories as our buildings, our jewelry, our food, what have you. It might not be a difficult notion to grasp intellectually, but to understand this intuitively is to give in to chaos, to a kind of madness.

Throughout the course of the story, it is made clear that our protagonist has begun applying his theory to himself. This is made complicated by the fact that he deliberately chose to move to an alien city to better equip himself to test his theory out. There is very little comparable to the deeply unsettling nature of a foreign land with an alien tongue. Anyone who's ever traveled extensively, and alone, knows this. Some would label this a culture shock, while others would know that it is fundamentally an unwillingness to shed one's prejudices, to discard an identity that is ultimately arbitrary, and held together with those tremendous fallacies: history, culture, society, and memory.

By the end of the story, John emerges triumphant, but in a disorienting and ambiguous manner I will not ruin here. The resolution took me by surprise, but this is not a story with easy answers. The key to understanding it lies in its texture, in its language, its descriptions of an alien culture.

What is dread, after all (the story seems to ask) but an unwillingness to part with convenient fictions as a way of seeing ourselves? It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Disch was such a harsh critic of escapist SF. His work always strained at its boundaries, and SF is all the better for it.

Year published: 1970

Rating: *****/5 stars

Bears comparison to: Interestingly enough, this story has several thematic, and stylistic equivalents. The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tourists, by Lisa Goldstein, and The Overloaded Man, by J. G. Ballard. 

Nine Lives, by Ursula Le Guin (1968)

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

The Golem, by Avram Davidson (1955)

While The Golem is a masterpiece of satirical science fiction, and has the taste of allegory, a science fictional reading of it shows it to be more akin to Ballard's The Drowned Giant than, say, a O. Henry short. This is the curious bit about the science fiction 'megatext' that has always astounded me: not only are new science fiction stories written in tension with the older established classics, the latter ones go back to shed new light on the old. So, for instance, while The Golem could be read as a criticism of the short sightedness of rigid tradition in the face of change, in the light of Ballard's Kafkaesque story, it could also be read as proof that the death of affect that the 20th century was lauded for is not a very modern sensibility at all. Death of affect is just another way of saying that some sensation trumps what is usually considered to generate affect. In case of Ballard, it's the alienation of modern man from his environment thanks to technological distraction. In case of Davidson, it manifests in the age old struggle between myth and the so called clear eyed scientific temperament. A classic, through and through.

Bears comparison to: Nothing per se, but as I said, thematically similar to Ballard's The Drowned Giant.

Rating: *****/5 stars

Year: 1955

Read in: The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David Hartwell

Daddy's World, by Walter Jon Williams (2001)

Daddy's World reminded me of Philip K. Dick's Ubik, in a very good way. It does nothing new, and there is almost no jargon that can distinguish it from the kind of pre-cyberpunk SF being written in the 70s, which is probably for the best, and adds to the immediacy of the story. The story is narrated from the perspective of a child, and as it is with such things, Jamie, our protagonist, falls squarely within a larger, time tested tradition of using child narrators and protagonists in SF. This has several advantages, since the kind of pure wonder you'd expect a certain kind of SF to exude is best experienced through the eyes of someone who is most vulnerable to it. Jamie is stuck in a wonderland of his father's making, but everything goes downhill when he is made aware that the wonderland isn't real. Which begs that age old question: if you were happy before, and won't ever be as happy later in the knowledge of a greater truth, is that greater truth worth knowing in exchange for that happiness? Not an easy theme, and far greater writers than Williams have tackled this theme and come away ambiguously, but Williams himself does a brilliant job, and it's as good a fictional meditation on death, virtuality and childhood that I have read.

Bears comparison to: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Rating: ****/5 stars

Year: 2001