Bridging Distance

Distances, Vananda Singh

There’s an image that’s not all that uncommon in science fiction, that of the being who physically and mentally connects with, inhabits or is inhabited by, perceives and encompasses, some aspect of space-time that other beings cannot access or comprehend. Often this ability gives these special being abilities to make otherwise impossible connections, bridge gaps between representation and understanding, navigate sapcewarps, see theoretical relationships, patterns, causalities,totalities, because of this multi-faceted kind of synesthesia.

Anasuya, the protagonist of Distances, has such a gift. When she is submerged certain fluids, she can perceive and explore complex mathematical formulae when expressed in chemical solutions, aided by tiny symbiont organisms in her body, transforming the chemical notations into transcendent vistas that she can somehow travel inside of – and then record her perceptions in holographic form via nanites for others to analyse.

This gift is one of many abilities shared by her people, who live a semi-aquatic existence on the shores and in the coastal waters of one region of her world. Unlike most of her people, she has left the sea and travelled to a stone city in the desert where people not her own have built, among others, a temple to mathematics. It is here that the technology that permits her unique way of seeing mathematically-described spaces and relationships to be recorded and used by others was developed.

It is also to this stone city that a team of mathematicians from the planet Tirana have travelled in search of help in solving an immeasurably complex mathematical problem that describes a previously unknown geometric space. Anasuya is asked to help them, but in the process, she discovers a secret that will change life on both their planets.

Distances, physical, emotional, and conceptual, how they are perceived, how they wound, and how they can sometimes be bridged, play a large part in the themes and imagery of the book. Both Anasuya and the Tirani delegation have travelled far to meet in this city that is alien to them both. Woven into the story are various accounts of myths and events that are centred on creating and covering distances. And Anasuya’s work leads directly to a change in the understanding of distances itself, and in the distances she has kept between herself, her creativity, her past and the people around her.

It’s a profoundly poetic work, and one that continues to resonate at levels that I don’t know how to express in words.

Looking Backward: More Classic SFF

Not too long ago I bought a book bundle offer at an online auction to help Vera Nazarian, and received a generous stack of classic (and not so classic) science fiction from the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. Some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, and some, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I read when I was a kid or not. Here's my thoughts on some of them.


Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer.

A fast-paced parallel universe caper, in which the protagonist is kidnapped from an Earth that appears to be our own by agents from a universe where science has found a way to navigate the various world-lines in order to assassinate a dangerous warlord from yet another world-line. It’s a fairly straight forward spy caper, and a very quick read. Like so many genre novels of the era, the only woman character is a “love interest” for the hero – she’s portrayed as intelligent, brave and beautiful, but does little of substance beyond serving as a compensatory “reward” for the hero, torn from his own world to save another.


Phase IV, Barry N Malzberg.

An alien influence provokes accelerated evolution among a colony of ants somewhere in Arizona. Soon the ants are on the move, destroying homes in a “planned community” being built in the region. The area is evacuated, scientists arrive to investigate.

Much of the novel is a science fictional reworking of Carl Stephenson's famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" – only the ants have developed a form of intelligence and the ability to adapt rapidly to threats, and they have a purpose, not just a blind instinct to follow. And that changes the ending completely.


Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein juveniles. It’s a classic reversal of fortune story, complete with an ironic justice payoff – the victim of interstellar slave traders turns out to be one person most suited to track interstellar slavery to its very roots and eradicate it.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding in the section that’s set among the Free Traders, to say nothing of a consciousness of power relations between the sexes that to some extent belies the accusations of sexism that are frequently levelled against Heinlein. In Free Trader society, the conscious separation of a person’s roles within the Family and the Ship produces a culture in which each person’s abilities are acknowledged and used – meaning that men and women work together at the jobs they do best – but at the same time, everyone follows strict gender roles as members of the Ship’s Family – roles that are obviously constructed as a response to the social needs of a people divided into small clans that must practice exogamy to avoid the risks of inbreeding.

My main quibble with the book is that it ends far too quickly – just as the protagonist Thorby has just begun the task that all of his history has prepared him for.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein

The first Heinlein juvenile, this reads more like a “boy’s own” adventure than just happens to involve rockets than a science fiction novel. The plot is simple – a group of boy scientists find a mentor, decide to build a rocket that will take them to the moon, and in the process, foil the evil intentions of Nazi space pirates (this are not nearly as cool as it sounds).

What bothers me is the basic set-up of the story. From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK. This rather spoiled my appreciation of what is a slender and formulaic tale to begin with.

However, one nice touch is the inclusion of a Jewish boy as one of the junior scientists, and he turns out to be the one most suited to be the co-pilot (creepy scientist is of course Captain and pilot), which gives him at times some opportunities to be heroic.


Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein

I liked this when I first read it, and I still like it. Sure, it’s basically a very thin adventure fantasy/RPG/arcade game plot, namely, the Quest for the McGuffin. Hero and party overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty on the path to the McGuffin, overcome the Big Boss who guards the McGuffin, take the McGuffin back to its proper place, then hero marries princess.

And it features three of Heinlein’s favourite characters: the super competent, super beautiful woman; the curmudgeonly old geezer who’s been there and back and knows it all; and the straight-as-an-arrow young man who is about to learn what the world is really all about.

But as one of Heinlein’s rare forays into fantasy, it’s interesting, and it does answer the one question that not too many writers of standard adventure fantasy ever get around to answering – what happens after the plough-boy cum hero settles down with the princess? And at least the princess in this case isn’t just the bait, er, reward for the successful hero, she’s part and parcel of the mission, from planning to execution and she decides whether she’s also part of the hero’s reward.

In that sense, it’s a lot better than a fair number of others of its ilk.


Earth Unaware, Mack Reynolds

If ever a cover was not just totally disconnected from the actual contents, setting and plot of a book, but wrong in every respect, it would have to be the cover of Belmont Books’ May 1968 edition of Mack Reynolds’ Earth Unaware (originally titled Of Godlike Power).

The cover features a muscled, nearly nude barbarian warrior with flowing blond locks and a fluffy loincloth. Clinging to his arm is a red-haired woman with ample breasts, hips and thighs, wearing something dark and vaguely furry that covers her torso and nothing else. They seem to be standing in a cloud of low-lying yellow fog against a dark, featureless background. At their feet is something vaguely mechanical, somewhat suggestive of an abandoned futuristic oversized grenade launcher. It’s all done in an impressionistic, soft focus, pseudo-Franzetta style.

The book itself is a modern speculative fantasy set in a North America not too far advance from the date of writing, in which increasing capacity for the mass production of consumer goods has led to the (once expected and highly anticipated) leisure society, where material abundance and technological advances have resulted in increasingly shorter work-weeks and a massive demand for popular entertainment. The protagonist is Ed Wonder, the host of a radio show that features interviews with people who claim to be reincarnations of Alexander the Great, or to have been taught a new philosophy of life by aliens from Jupiter.

Then Ed and his friends, socialite Helen Fontaine and newspaper columnist Buzz De Kemp find the real deal among all the stories of somewhat questionable veracity – a travelling preacher who advocates an end to consumerism and profligate wasting of natural resources, calling for a return to a simpler way of life, who has the power to change the world with the over-heated Biblical style curses he utters in the heat of anger or passion for his view of how people should live.

The first major manifestation of this comes when Ed and Helen visit one of the preacher’s tent-revival-like meetings. Helen interrupts his sermon on the wastefulness of modern society, provoking his anger – which results in a curse on the vanity of women. Ed and Helen leave the meeting, but before the evening is out, Helen finds herself driven to wash off her makeup and comb out her high-society hairstyle. The next morning, Ed (and the world) discovers that women everywhere are avoiding cosmetics and anything else that might enhance their appearance, choosing functional clothing and wearing their hair au naturel. And only Ed and Helen can even being to figure out why.

So, no, no barbarians, blond or babe-like, but an interesting satire-cum-thought experiment. I’d read some of Reynolds’ other books when I was younger, and I found this as enjoyable in its own way as my memories of his other books.

Mercedes Lackey takes on the Snow Queen

The Snow Queen, Mercedes Lackey

The fourth volume of Lackey’s delightful Five Hundred Kingdoms stories, all of which draw on fairy tale traditions from around the world and feature competent and powerful female protagonists – often “Fairy Godmothers” – whose job it is to mitigate the harmful effects of “The Tradition” – the magical force that acts on the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, pushing them into fairy tale roles which can be potentially disastrous, even deadly (just think about all the grue and gore in traditional fairy tales, and this will make sense).

Aleksia, the protagonist of this instalment of the series, is a Fairy Godmother who lives in a northern kingdom. Much of her public persona is drawn from the fairytale of the Snow Queen, the heartless fairy who steals young men and holds them until they are saved by the courageous young women who love them. The reality, of course, is that the young men she steals away with are arrogant assholes who take their lovers for granted, and it's is all about making them realise just how much of an asshole they've been. Of course, she does all the usual Fairy Godmother work as well, nudging the lives of people all over the kingdom away from fairytale patterns that end badly.

Then Aleksia starts hearing rumours about a nearby kingdom where there is no Fairy Godmother, about an impostor who has taken on the role of the Snow Queen – only this Snow Queen is killing whole villages, and the young men she lures away are not returned to their brave lovers, a littler wiser and more aware of just how strong a force love can be. This Snow Queen’s victims are never seen again. And it’s up to Aleksia to stop her.

The folklore traditions at the heart of this novel are taken from the culture and mythology of the people of Finland, and particularly the indigenous peoples. Some of the characters Aleksia encounters are drawn from the Kalevala, an epic compilation of folk poetry from across Finland (and parts of the Baltic states, particularly Estonia), and the culture of the people she meets in her search for the impostor is clearly based on elements of Sami culture.

I enjoyed this, not just as another of Lackey’s reliably pleasant fantasy offerings, but also as an exploration of a European tradition that is not found all that often in SFF. It also reminded me of a series of novels that I’d read many years ago in my youth, but long since forgotten – the four Kalevala-inspired novels of Emil Petaja: Saga of Lost Earths, Star Mill, The Stolen Sun and Tramontane. I imagine they're long out of print, but now I have a hankering to re-read them. And of course, to re-read the Kalevala itself.

The many faces of Edward Said

Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan

This is a fascinating collection of 19 interviews with Edward W Said, conducted between 1976 and 2000 and published in a variety of scholarly and other venues. Through these interviews, it is possible to follow the development of Said’s scholarship and his political activism, as they illuminate the range, penetration and passions in Said’s intellectual and public life.

Editor Gavri Viswanathan puts it best in her introduction:

The interviews Said gave over the past three decades boldly announce that neither his own books and essays nor those written about him have the last word. The first thing to note is not only th number of interviews Said has given, both to print and broadcast media, but also the number of locations in which they took place, spanning Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe and the United States. They confirm his presence on the world stage as one of the most forceful public intellectuals of our time, a man who evokes interest in the general public for his passionate humanism, his cultivation and erudition, his provocative views and his unswerving commitment to the cause of Palestinian self-determination... Together, [these interviews] reveal a ceaselessly roving mind returning to earlier ideas in his books and novels and engaging with them anew. One measure of the fluidity and range of Said’s thought is his ability to revisit arguments made in his books and essays, not merely to defend and elaborate on them but, more important, both to mark their limits and probe their extended possibilities, especially in contexts other than those which first gave rise to them.

Said’s topics range from discourses on the development of his own work, particularly on Orientalism and post-colonial theory, to ruminations on his childhood and how it affects his sense of self in the world, to his political activism and evolving relationship with the PLO, to reflections on other authors and areas from Austen, Conrad, Naipaul and Rushdie to Derrida and Foucault.

There’s a wealth of thought in these interviews, well worth savouring.