Writing Fiction

Some more thoughts on Brasyl

I finished Ian McDonald's novel Brasyl several days ago, but haven't had time to continue my orginal comments (see "Hope for Science Fiction," below). While it's certainly the best SF novel I've read in some time, this review in the Independent does a good job of summarizing what I liked and disliked about the book.

McDonald has extraordinary fecundity of detail in each of the three plot strands of the novel (one set in the 1730s, one in 2006, and one in the 2030s). So we're quite willing to dawdle, to enjoy the curios and knick-knacks that seem to fill the story without cluttering it. He's great at world creation.

He's also a good plotter, maybe even too good: We follow events with some bewilderment at first, distracted by the knick-knacks, but confident that the payoff will be a good one. But as Tim Martin points out in the Independent review, everything becomes a little too clear at the end: It's just a really flashy cops and robbers yarn, clearly offering opportunities for two or three sequels. (And I will certainly read those sequels.)

On balance, Brasyl has far more virtues than vices, and a great deal to teach other SF writers. I just stopped reading a space opera by some American writer: Yet another starfaring version of present-day America, in which essentially nothing has changed from today except the (very dull) characters get to go to other stars.

That kind of parochialism looks even worse next to a cosmopolitan writer like McDonald. Most American and Brit SF writers, bless them, can't seem to imagine a future that they're not running. Brasyl is great fun because all the characters are Brazilians (except for a couple of 18th-century Europeans). They're living in a Brazilian world, and the anglophone nations don't matter to their lives.

In fairness, a few classic SF authors have escaped parochialism: I'm thinking especially of L. Sprague deCamp, whose "Viagens Interplanetarias" stories and novels of a Brazil-dominated future were written in the 1940s and 50s. (And they were fun, too.)

But McDonald knows a lot more about Brazil than deCamp ever did, and he turns his knowledge into story. (I'm now scrambling around trying to find his River of Gods, set in India in 2047, and anything else McDonald has written.) He's not creating just an exotic backdrop, but a whole world that's exotic.

This looks like a very promising direction for new SF writers: To create new worlds out of future versions of today's nations. How about a novel dealing with Indonesian politics in the 2070s? The Russian shipping industry on an ice-free Arctic Sea? High-rolling Beijing financiers foreclosing on the US in 2030? Or the Maya of Guatemala launching an online coup against the ladinos in 2017?

The point—and the challenge—would be to learn so much about the culture of the country that you could extrapolate its future with some confidence. That would of course throw usefully satirical light on the anglophone cultures as well, just as Brasyl drops some deadpan jokes at our expense.

So read Brasyl by all means just for fun, but think also about the new terrain he's opened up for us all.

Le Guin on piracy, intended or otherwise

The following comments have recently appeared on Ursula K. Le Guin's website: SFWA, Piracy, and Serious Literature — An Open Letter.

I urge you to click through and read both her original statement and her followup, and to follow the links to Cory Doctorow's apology and to Le Guin's wonderful one-paragraph story on the fanzine Ansible. She deals brilliantly with issues of intellectual property, as well as with the tension between Serious Literature and Genre Crap.

Doris Lessing: "It's me? I've won after all these years?"

The best news of the day arrived early: Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for literature. As the Guardian headlined it: It's me? I've won after all these years? Excerpt:

Over the course of more than half a century, Lessing has used fiction to explore racial, sexual and social divides. She was born in 1919 to British parents in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran, but six years later, the family moved to farm in Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - an event that would inform much of her work.

Although she moved to England in 1949, her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published a year later, examined the relationship between a white Rhodesian farmer's wife and her black servant. Africa also formed the backdrop to her semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series of five books spanning 1952 to 1969.Her outspoken opposition to apartheid in South Africa made her persona non grata there and she was banned from the country between 1956 and 1995.

Never afraid to embrace politics, she became a member of the British Communist party in the 50s and campaigned against nuclear weapons.

Her breakthrough as a writer and as a pathfinder of feminism came in 1962 with the publication of The Golden Notebook. The complex, disjointed novel tells the story of Anna Wulf, a novelist suffering from writer's block who tries to make sense of her thoughts and feelings through five notebooks crammed with reflections on Africa, politics, sex, Jungian analysis and dreams.

Her later novels reveal what the academy called a preoccupation with "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life".

Lessing herself seems less dazzled by her work and the motivations for it. Asked in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year why she wrote, she gave a characteristic reply:

"For somebody like me it is something I have to do. I have to do it or I would go crazy. I think this is probably a very neurotic thing I am saying about myself. I cannot not write. That means that, well, something must be wrong with me."

Lessing is far from being one of my favourite writers, but I have immense admiration for her. I haven't read The Golden Notebook, and I found her science-fiction novels unreadable. But the Children of Violence series was brilliant, and shards of it still glitter in memory.

Every time I see one of my students tattooed and bristling with metal studs and rings, I recall a passage in which her fictional alter ego, a young mother in Africa, is appalled at her baby's first bruise.

As a brand-new father, I understood perfectly: A new baby is a perfect person, without blemish, untouched by the cruelty of the world. The perfection lasts despite the casual scratches and bruises of childhood. To punch holes at age 20 in that perfect body, whether to inject ink or to insert a stud, is worse than vandalizing a Monet.

Children of Violence shows us World War II as the British colonies experienced it, and Lessing has a marvellous, biting comment somewhere in one of the early books: The colonial government of "Zambesia" finds it hard to rally the natives in support of the war against the Nazis.

The Nazis, says the colonial government, believe in an evil doctrine of racial superiority that entitles superior races to invade the lands of inferior races, take them over, and impose their will on the inhabitants. Contemplating their British masters, the black Zambesians aren't sure they see a difference between the combatants.

Lessing has explored a lot of extreme ideas—not just communism, which in her youth was no more bizarre than today's environmentalism is to us—but also the half-forgotten theories of 1960s psychologists like R.D. Laing. She built those ideas into astoundingly powerful stories. I haven't read them since the 1970s, but I suspect they retain their power even though no one now credits the ideas that inspired her.

Quite apart from her themes and her politics, Doris Lessing deserves attention from young writers, male and female. She paid attention to her world, and to her own place in it. She took the events of her life, whether banal or amazing, and turned them into intense stories. The effect on the next generation of writers, especially women, was one of shock and exhilaration: "I can say that? And that? And that?"

So they did, because Doris Lessing had said it first. And went on saying it for more than half a century.

Congratulations, Doris. You are the Queen Mother of our tribe. May you rejoice as a Nobel laureate for another twenty years.

Hope for Science Fiction

I wandered into the local public library this afternoon and a book caught my eye: Brasyl. I didn't know the author, Ian McDonald, but I read less and less SF these days. The dust-jacket copy alone is enough to warn me off most of it.

But this novel's set partly in São Paulo, which I vividly recall from a brief visit in 2002. So I brought it home, and it threatens to engulf my Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend.

Forget the publisher's blurb, ""Think Bladerunner in the tropics"—McDonald has plenty of hommages and quotes, but they're from better stuff than Bladerunner. I keep seeing Gabriel García Márquez slipping around the corners, with Neal Stephenson and Bill Gibson looking out of upstairs windows. But those are inside jokes decorating a strikingly original story.

McDonald understands that something is going on in Brazil that most of us have no clue about. He shows us big trucks on São Paulo's 2032 highways, carrying quantumeiros who exploit the computing power of countless universes. I well recall the motoqueiros who shot through the congested traffic of those highways in 2002 on motorcycles...the price of delivering stuff was about one motoqueiro's life per day.

I'm not very far into it, and I'll report on Brasyl more fully when I've finished it. But I don't expect to be disappointed, and I commend Ian McDonald to anyone who wants to write SF that takes its readers in new directions.