My life in books

All the short fiction mentioned here was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine March/April 2015


"A Residence for Friendless Ladies," Alice Sola Kim - In this atmospheric novelette, a young trans man is forced to live as a woman when he is sent to stay with his grandmother, who runs an eerie and forbidding home for women - part hostel, part finishing school, part prison - who don't quite fit into society's roles. An unflinching look at identity denied and the courage needed to open closed doors.

"The Mantis Tattoo," Paul M. Berger - A trickster story in an African-inspired setting. Mantis the trickster chooses a young man to serve him, and sends him on his first mission - to save his people from the return of their historical enemies.

"Things Worth Knowing," Jay O'Connell - A highly dystopic look at the direction of privatised education and corporate recruitment.

"La Héron," Charlotte Ashley - A mysterious swordswoman registers for the Black Bouts of Caen - a tournament of duellists that draws contestants from as distant a place as the lands of faerie.

"This Is the Way the Universe Ends: With a Bang," Brian Dolton - An interesting take on the death and rebirth of the universe, with a rather unusual and determined heroine.

"Last Transaction," Nik Constantine - structured as a sequence of computer communications to a future citizen of a highly automated society, you think you know where this will end up... But you'd be wrong.

"Little Girls in Bone Museums," Sadie Bruce - a disturbing piece about the ways that women have distorted and tortured their bodies to adhere to male standards of beauty, accepted objectification in the place of respect, and convinced themselves that this will make them happy.

"A Small Diversion on the Road to Hell," Jonathan L. Howard - Sooner or later, bartenders see everything. This is a delightfully whimsical story about a day in the life of bartender in a place called Helix, and the twisty temporal paradoxes his time-travelling customers have been getting into.

"How to Masquerade As a Human before the Invasion," Jenn Reese - a short short story about passing for human. Its advice will be shockingly familiar to those of us who never quite fit in

"A Users Guide to Increments of Time," Kat Howard - two sorcerers whose magic can steal time become lovers , but cannot help stealing time - first to have more time together, and later, once love has altered, to destroy each other.

"Bilingual," Henry Lien - a young girl sets out to find a way to communicate with dolphins in the wild about threats from human hunters. Told almost entirely via Tweets.

I seem to be on a bit of a short fiction binge. Trying to read some stories from 2015, recommended in various places, that interest me.



"The Missing Guest," Alice Sola Kim, December 22, 2015, Lenny
http://www.lennyletter.com/culture/a200/the-missing-guest/

An unsettling story about friendship circles and outsiders, about being both participant and observer, with distinct undertones of the weird. I'm still not sure who the missing guest is, nor am I certain that I'm supposed to be.


"Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight," Aliette de Bodard, January 2015, Clarkesworld
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/debodard_01_15/

A nuanced portrayal of the varied responses to grief, set in de Bodard's Xuya Empire universe. A scientist whose work is vital to the future of the Empire dies, and her children - one of whom is a Mindship - and the woman who must carry on her mentor's work follow different paths in grieving. Moving piece, well written, with strong characterisation.


"Variations on an Apple," Yoon Ha Lee, October 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/10/14/variations-on-an-apple-yoon-ha-lee/

A scintillating sciencefictional symphony of imaginings drawn upon the myths of the apple of discord and the siege of Troy. Lee does things with words and images and multi-layered references to music and mathematics that I can't even begin to describe. An ever-shifting but never-changing meditation on desire, choice and conflict.


"Adult Children of Alien Beings," Dennis Danvers, August 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/08/19/adult-children-of-alien-beings-dennis-danvers/

A somewhat pedestrian novelette that literalises the feelings of difference and - if you'll pardon the pun - alienation that most of us experience. A middle-aged man uncovers evidence suggesting that his parents may not have been who, or what, they seemed to be, and embarks on a search for the truth - but ultimately realises there is a better way to resolve his crisis of self.


"Pockets," Amal el-Mohtar, February 2015, Uncanny Magazine
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/pockets/

Nadia has a peculiar problem. She keeps finding things in her pockets. Things she's never seen before, things that make no sense and have no apparent relevance to her life. Things that could not possibly be in her pocket, that are larger than any pocket she owns. El-Mohtar treats this surreal premise with the greatest seriousness, and brings it to a profound conclusion that speaks both to the mystery of the connections between people and the power of the creative impulse.


"Cassandra," Ken Liu, March 2015, Clarkesworld
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/liu_03_15/

A meditation on the nature of causality, the meaning of free will, and the morality of interference wrapped up in a super-hero tale, in which the villain is a vigilante acting on pre-cognition in an attempt to save the innocent while the iconic defender of truth and justice focuses on protecting the proper unfolding of time, come what may.


"Eye," Wole Talabi, February, 2015, Liquid Imagination
http://liquidimagination.silverpen.org/article/eye-wole-talabi/

Powerful piece of flash fiction about impossible, abhorrent choices. How far will a mother go, what will she sacrifice, to save the life of one of her children?

More short stories and novelettes from around the net.


"The Shape of My Name," Nino Cipri, March 15, 2015, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/03/04/the-shape-of-my-name/

This was an amazing story about creating one's own identity. The narrator is part of a multi-generational time-travelling family whose members have access to gene-coded time capsules enabling them to travel into any time between 1905, the year that the mysterious Moses Stone built the machine for the family matriarch, and August 3, 2321 - the significance of that date is unknown to the characters, but my guess is that it's the date from which Moses travelled back in time to build the machine that would allow forward travel. But that's not part of the story, really. The story is about creating identity and finding freedom from ingrained expectations.


"When It Ends, He Catches Her," Eugie Foster, September 26, 2014, Daily Science Fiction
http://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/fairy-tales/eugie-foster/when-it-ends-he-catches-her

One of the short stories that would have been on the Hugo ballot this year had the Puppies not done their thing, and Foster's last story, published just before she died. A poignant and evocative story of love, art and death, two dancers rekindling the memories of their greatest achievement in the midst of the ruins of civilisation.


"Litany of Earth," Ruthanna Emrys, May 14, 2014, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/

Another piece that might have been nominated fir a Hugo if not for the puppies, Emrys' novelette is a majestic and powerful reworking of the Cthulhu mythos, ever mindful of the fact that the winners not only write the history books, they demonise the ones who lose. Emrys presents the people of Innsmouth and other such communities as a race of immortal others among us, with a faith and a knowledge no more evil than any other, persecuted, incarcerated, experimented on and killed for their difference. A must-read for those who once loved Lovecraft but lament his casual racism.


"Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land," by Ruthanna Emrys, August 20, 2014, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2014/08/20/seven-commentaries-on-an-imperfect-land-ruthanna-emrys/

I was sufficiently blown away by Emrys' "Litany of Earth" to want to read more. And I was not disappointed in doing so. "Seven Commentaries" is a perfect pearl. Told in seven vignettes filled with glorious detail, it is about communities of the heart and soul, the perseverance of imagination and hope, the healing and binding power of story, and seeing the spirit of your sister in a stranger's eyes.


"Kin, Painted," by Penny Stirling, July 29, 2015, Lackington's Magazine
http://lackingtons.com/2015/07/29/kin-painted-by-penny-stirling/

Lackington's specifies that they are specifically interested in publishing stylised speculative prose, and I must admit to enjoying stylised prose (when well-done, of course), but more than just being stylised, this piece by Penny Stirling was a beautiful thing to read. An extended metaphor on growing up and making personal choices, notable for its references to persons of many genders and preferences.

Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys is, to put it bluntly, a mindfuck, albeit an engaging and enjoyable one. Even when you've read the final sentence, you're still going to be wondering how much of what you've read was all in the minds of one or more of the characters.

It begins in a white room.

It's a room an uninspired playwright might conjure while staring at a blank page: White walls. White ceiling. White floor. Not featureless, but close enough to raise suspicion that its few contents are all crucial to the upcoming drama.

A woman sits in one of two chairs drawn up to a rectangular white table. Her hands are cuffed in front of her; she is dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit whose bright hue seems dull in the whiteness. A photograph of a smiling politician hangs on the wall above the table. Occasionally the woman glances up at the photo, or at the door that is the room’s only exit, but mostly she stares at her hands, and waits.

The door opens. A man in a white coat steps in, bringing more props: a file folder and a handheld tape recorder.

Thus the frame of the story is set. All that actually happens over the course of the novel happens in this room between these people. The woman, accused of murder and suspected of madness, is called Jane Charlotte; the man who is here to uncover her truths - if he can - is called Dr. Richard Vale. The woman will tell him an increasingly fantastic story about her childhood, her mother and brother, and her experiences as an assassin for an organisation dedicated to fighting evil. He will counter her story with information from public records that call what she recounts into question. She will discount some if what he says as misinformation planted by the organisation she works for, and acknowledge some of it as the stories she tells herself because the truth is too painful. In the end, it is possible that no one in this room and nothing that was said is what it appeared to be.

The process of getting to that end is fascinating.

Lately I've found myself drawn to anthologies of SFF by writers from a single country, ethnicity or geographical area. So far this year I've read three such books.


AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartmann (ed.)

In his introduction to the anthology, editor Ivor Hartmann says: "SciFi is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective. Moreover, it does this in a way that is not purely academic and so provides a vision that is readily understandable through a fictional context. The value of this envisioning for any third-world country, or in our case continent, cannot be overstated nor negated. If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Thus, Science Fiction by African writers is of paramount importance to the development and future of our continent."

It's just as important for those in the first-world countries from whence the co-opting generally comes to read these African futures. To read stories set in futuristic metropolises named Lagos and Tshwane, with characters named Wangari Maathai and Julius Masemola. Stories that come from other histories and perspectives than their own, stories in which white people from Europe or North America are barely present if at all, and have no role to play in the imagined futures. I can only say thank you to Ivor Hartmann for collecting these stories and making them available.



Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan (eds.)

A very interesting and valuable survey anthology of science fiction short stories by Hispanic and Latino authors from Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and South America, from the early days of science fiction writing to modern day. The collection includes some very powerful pieces, many of which have a much stronger element of political awareness, analysis and critique than one might expect to find in a representative sampling of North American science fiction writing.



It Came from the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction, Desirina Boskovich (ed.)

An interesting collection of SFF stories from Finnish authors. After having recently read Johanna Sinisalo's Birdbrain (and before that After Sundown, published in English as Troll: A Love Story) I was perhaps primed to notice how strong a role that nature plays in many of these stories. Landscapes, geology, animals, organic growth, ecology - use of these elements seemed to be more prevalent than in collections that tend to be more focused on American and occasionally British writers.

Very much worth reading.

My Death, Lisa Tuttle.

Lately I seem to have been reading, by happenstance I presume, books that in one way or another make me think about what I can only describe as the secret history of women, and the ways in which women as whole, real individuals are erased in our culture and its products. Sometimes it’s been an obvious theme, the writer’s intent being to examine either the reality of women’s lives, or some aspect of how women are disappeared and what they may have been doing that no one wanted to, or was able to, record. Sometimes – as in some of the classic SFF (written by men) that I’ve been re-reading of late - it has been about the total absence of women, or the absence of independence and agency in the women who are represented. Sometimes, it’s just been about a sense that there are untold women’s stories behind a narrative that’s focused more on the stories of men – something that would be less problematic if only there were as many narratives where men’s stories were left in the background in order to tell the stories of women.

Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is very much a story about ways in which women’s stories are erased – and reclaimed. It is also at some levels a vast metaphor for the act of creation when artist and subject merge in order to create a new vision.

In this novella, an unnamed narrator, an author still working through her grief at the death of her husband, is led by a series of apparent coincidences to embark upon writing a biography of an earlier novelist (supposedly a contemporary of Virginia Woolf et.al.) who influenced her when she was younger and which whom she has always felt a strange sense of connection. This novelist – Helen Ralston – had served as model and muse for her older lover and former teacher Willy Logan, whose paintings and novels became well-known, while Ralston’s slipped into obscurity. Ralston, thus, is simultaneously the women whose work is overshadowed by the man she is associated with, and the woman whose individuality is erased by her assigned function as inspiration.

The narrator’s quest to discover what happened to the real woman behind the muse leads her to the discovery of a painting by Ralston, titled “My Death,” which is a visual paradox, simultaneously picturing an island that she and her lover visit; and a woman’s body with the focus on her exposed vulva – yet another form of disappearing of the real woman, this time through the classic tropes of woman as the earth/the land/the soil and woman as sex.

There is much more to this novel, including a profound shift in perspective near the end that cannot be logically reconciled yet illuminates the core truths that Tuttle has to offer about the distinction between Woman as muse and women who themselves create art, between women who are observed, submerged, erased, and women who are seen, known, remembered for who they are as individuals and what they do for themselves.

It is only after this shift takes place that the speculative elements of this work emerge, but once they do, it becomes apparent that this novella – one of the Conversation Pieces series published by Aqueduct Press – lies securely within the scope of literary speculative fiction.

This not a book that can be understood wholly from a rational perspective, for like the painting that give the book its name, the story itself is more than one thing at once, and at the same time symbolic of other things entirely. But it works, and powerfully so, as a an exploration of women and their relations, historically and potentially, to art.

Blue Light, by Walter Mosley

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. Mosley’s prose is beautifully evocative, his characters are well-realised, and there is something about the way this novel is written that pulls the reader along, eagerly, anxiously, almost breathlessly, to the final pages… and yet I’m left feeling unfulfilled. And more than a little confused.

Blue Light is set in the 1960s, a time of breaking down of all kinds of barriers. People were questioning the accepted standards of social behaviour – rethinking sexual mores, challenging received “wisdom” in all manner of intellectual disciplines, questioning social conventions, exploring consciousness with meditation, drugs, spiritual and philosophical concepts from outside of the mainstream European tradition. It was the decade of the civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism, the beginning of gay liberation, the counter-culture, ecological consciousness, protest movements and revolutionary cadres, cults and communes, going back to the land and listening to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

The novel, which has been variously classed as science fiction, fantasy and horror, could just as well be an account of the rise and fall of one of that chaotic decade’s more bizarre and violent religious cults-gone-wrong, if one dismisses the narrator’s recounting of unearthly sensations and experiences as the product of drugs or madness. And the matter of the reliability of the narrator is one of the key issues in my attempt to understand this book – because it seems to me that Mosley has written something that he wants people to think about, to try to understand.

The conceit of the book is that an ancient people or some other kind of consciousness from not of Earth has sent something, or perhaps simply released something without real intention – consciousness, a message, a mission, an infection, a collection of memories – into the vastness of space, where it has travelled for perhaps millions of years, and has perhaps encountered many planets, before some portion of it arrives on Earth, in 1965, in California. Perceived and later described by those who experience it as beams or shards or pieces or packets of “blue light,” this alien energy has diverse and unique affects on whatever life it touches – plant, animal, and human. Many of the creatures touched don’t survive the transformations, but among those that do are 16 humans, a pregnant coyote, a dog and a giant redwood tree. While we never are really certain what the blue light is or what it does, or was intended to do [1], the general effect on the human “Blues”[2] is to transform them from ordinary human beings into personifications or avatars of whatever kind of human experience they were most caught up in at the time of their transformation. A woman engaged in sex becomes an avatar of lust. A dying man becomes the personification of death, the enemy of all life. A murderer becomes an exemplar of mindless violence and destruction. A young woman with a curious mind becomes a seeker and eventual repository of human knowledge. And so on.[3]

The narrator is a mixed race former grad student named Lester Foote, who has taken the name of Chance. Not a Blue himself, he is rescued by the Blue “teacher” Ordé from a state of psychological collapse and suicidal despair brought about by his marginalised racial status and lack of a community of identity: “I spoke the white man's language. I dreamed his dreams. But when I woke up, no one recognized me.” Later, through a ritual involving sharing of blood with Ordé, a white ex-hippie turned leader of the Close Congregation, a cult-like community to which several of the Blues have been drawn, Chance becomes “half-blue,” and gains some powers of unusual perception. Still neither wholly of one people or another, Chance appoints himself the historian of the Blue Light.

The novel is organised into three sections. The first part introduces the situation and many of the key characters. One of its focuses is on Ordé, his mystical teachings based on his understanding of what has happened to him, the community of Blues and humans that gathers around him, his attempts to reproduce the blue light in human form – with lethal consequences – and the police who have begun to be suspicious of what they perceive as another hippie sex and drug cult. The other is on Grey Redstar, the name adopted by the energy/entity that animates the body of Horace LaFontaine as he lies dying in the path of the blue light. This section culminates in a confrontation between Redstar and the Close Congregation in which many of the Blues are killed, one of the police investigators is severely injured and some of the surviving Blues flee for safety in the company of Chance.

The second part focuses on the investigation of Greystar’s attack – as later told to Chance by the characters involved. In the course of the investigation, several more “half-blues” are formed as investigators and Blue witnesses/suspects/persons of interest interact.

The final part of the novel brings together the Blues who fled with Chance, the “half-blue” investigators, and a previously unseen Blue, Juan Thrombone [4], who has created a new Eden somewhere in the depths of a national redwood forest where he tends the seedlings of the blue redwood tree, yet another casualty of Grey Redstar. Thrombone hopes to preserve and foster the blues in this secret, safe space, but instead it becomes the site of the final confrontation between Grey Redstar and the surviving Blues.

The outcome is… inconclusive, and we are left at the end of the book not knowing if the influence of the blue light will continue in the Earth or not, and indeed, whether we really would have wanted it to survive. We never really learn where the transformation might have led humanity; there are enough acts of selfishness, carelessness and violence from all of the Blues, not just those who personify Violence and Death, to suggest that becoming blue may bring new powers and abilities and a new perspective, but not necessarily a better or more principled one, wise enough to use its gifts well.

Whatever might have been, the clear suggestion at the end is that the chance has come and gone. It’s the 1980s, Chance himself has been in a mental institution for a very long time, and he has no idea if any of the Blues are still alive. The book begins and ends with Chance’s madness, which is the result of Chance’s perpetual state of being neither one thing nor the other, neither black nor white, neither human nor blue.

The blue light – which could simply be a symbol for the phenomenon of the 60s and its various and often contradictory transformations – may be the topic of the novel but Chance is its protagonist. Is Mosley trying to say that our chance to unravel the weight of the past and try something new has also passed, leaving us with a lot of strange memories, but essentially unchanged? Or is there some other message in the fact that Chance has survived at all, and in the possibility that there may be some Blues who escaped the final confrontation between – not Good and Evil, but Life and Death?

Damned if I know.



[1] I’m reminded of H.P.Lovecraft’s short story, “The Colour out of Space” in which something, characterised as a colour, quite indescribable and incomprehensible, affects life in a relatively small geographic area for reasons that are never understood by the characters and never revealed to the reader.

[2] There's a lot of emphasis on how the blue light seems, to some, to be like music, or the how the inexplicable sense that draws the Blues to each other is a sound, a form of music. Are the Blues (regardless of race, as we see white, black, Asian and Hispanic Blues) somehow a personification of the blues, the musical art form that was developed by Blacks to express their own experiences?

[3] I’m not by any means an expert on the topic of the spirits of African and Caribbean tradition known as loas or orishas, but it seemed to me that at least some of the Blues can be linked to some of the more well-known loas, such as Papa Legba, Erzulie and Baron Samedi, and the way in which they seem to be possessed and altered may in some respects resemble the phenomenon of being possessed or “ridden” by a loa. I’ve looked at various reviews to see if anyone else has commented on these apparent similarities, and so far I haven’t found anyone else who sees this, so maybe I’m completely out to lunch.

[4] Juan Thrombone is a trickster/magician character; his human body is that of a Hispanic or Latino man, and while some reviewers have tried to identify him with characters from Tolkien’s created Anglo-Saxon mythology such as Gandalf or Tom Bombadil, I can’t help but associate him with Carlos Casaneda’s Yanqui sorcerer, Don Juan Matus.

Filter House, Nisi Shawl

Filter House is Nisi Shawl’s first book, a collection of short stories that all fit under the broad umbrella of speculative fiction, some leaning more toward science fiction, some toward fantasy, some toward magic realism, some toward the supernatural, all drawing on African/African-American experience and story. Shawl tends toward a literary voice, but I found all the stories in this collection accessible and immensely readable. Shawl looks fearlessly at the intersection of race, class and gender, and speaks from a post-colonial perspective that makes her work thought-provoking as well as entertaining.

I’m very much anticipating Shawl’s next published fiction, no matter what it is or when it arrives on the bookstore shelves.

Unwelcome Bodies, Jennifer Pelland

I thought this was a great first-time collection of short stories from an up-and-coming writer of speculative fiction who has a truly unique way of looking at the world as it is and as it could be.

It’s also the first published book from a friend whose evolution as a writer I’ve been privileged to follow almost from the beginning. So yeah, I’m biased.

It’s also true that I have an abiding fondness for reading about the darkness in the human mind and soul, which explains a lot of things, including my interest in dystopic fiction and narratives about serial killers, and this is a collection representative of Pelland’s darker writing.

Because she’s good*, and she hits a lot of my buttons, I would have enjoyed these stories even if someone else had written them. They are for the most part dark, often uncomfortably so, and whether they are horror with an SFnal base or science fiction with a serious dose of what human beings find horrifying, they are original and thought-provoking, each and every one of them.

I can’t really pick out a couple of favourites to talk about. Many of the stories in this collection place the protagonist in a profoundly difficult, even nightmarish situation and then follow the story through to what H. P. Lovecraft might have called unspeakable ends – except that Pelland dares to speak them. Among the purist examples of this are the stories “Big Sister/Little Sister” and “The Call.”

There are dystopic visions galore, from the despair of “For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great”, a story about a future in which a new air-borne variety of AIDS comes to be seen as a gift that frees people from devastating isolation to the ecologically-based nightmares of “Flood” and “Songs of Lament” – visions given a profound reality by Pelland’s ability to distil all the horror of these damaged worlds into their singular expression in the lives of her protagonists. I’ll give a very special nod in this general category to the previously unpublished story “Brushstrokes,” dealing with forbidden love, forbidden thoughts and forbidden knowledge in a society that enforces its rigid class and caste laws with police state methods.

Then there are the – for me, at least – profoundly moving explorations of disability, both as a lived and as an observed state of existence in “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man” and “Captive Girl.”

There are stories that explore the ways in which even the highest and purest of ideals and philosophies can, under the right combination of pressures and personalities, drive the descent into terrible acts – “Immortal Sin” and “Firebird.”

I feel that I must point out that Pelland’s work is not all dark – in fact, one of the stories in this collection, “Last Bus,” is to my mind a very optimistic story in its own poignant way – although it’s also true that even her funniest work can contain some elements that some might consider disturbing (you’ll definitely know what I mean if you’ve read “Clone Barbecue” or “The Burning Bush”**). This collection was published by Apex, a publisher that specialises in dark speculative fiction, so naturally the short stories selected for this volume showcase that side of her writing. I hope her next collection will have some room for all the other shades of Pelland’s distinct vision.


*She’s already been a Nebula Award nominee for her short story “Captive Girl,” and I see many more nominations and awards in her future.

**Links to a number of stories available online can be found at the author’s website.

The Cleft, Doris Lessing


Cleft, n.
1. A crack, crevice, or split.
2. A split or indentation between two parts, as of the chin.
Cleft, v.
A past tense and a past participle of cleave

Cleave, v.tr.
1. To split with or as if with a sharp instrument. See Synonyms at tear1.
2. To make or accomplish by or as if by cutting: cleave a path through the ice.
3. To pierce or penetrate: The wings cleaved the foggy air.
Cleave, v.intr.
1. Mineralogy: To split or separate, especially along a natural line of division.
2. To penetrate or pass through something, such as water or air.

One cannot accuse Lessing of an excess of subtlety in selecting the name of her latest novel, which is also the name of the people in the novel who live by the sea and live playfully edenic lives, reproducing casually through some parthenogenic process until the time of change when the strangely deformed children called Monsters, and later Squirts, start being born.

The Clefts live near a giant crack, crevice, or split in the rocks, which blooms read with algae once a month (just in case you didn't understand the image the first time you read it), they have a split or indentation between two parts in their bodies, from which issue more Clefts, and the mutated Squirts who change everything, and through this peculiar mutation, they are split or separated into two peoples (along a natural line of division, perhaps), and learn a new method of procreation, in which they are pierced or penetrated by the strange, new, and somewhat monstrous squirting organs of the Squirts, who do the kinds of things that no Cleft has ever done, such as making weapons that pierce or penetrate other animals to kill for eating, boats that pass through water as if by cutting... Eh, I could go on, but there's enough cleavage here already.

AS you may have gathered, I am not impressed.This was not a book I had intended to read, not after coming across Ursula K. Le Guin's review of the book. But my partner's mother gave it to me, and I thought to myself, Doris Lessing is, after all, the author of The Golden Notebook, can this really be as bad on so many levels as Le Guin suggests? As it happens, it is.

It's a misbegotten origin fable, bred in some overheated fumbling together of Desmond Morris' Naked Ape and Elaine Morgan's aquatic Eve, that proposes a misogynist essentialism in which women are sluggish, mindless, purposeless, timeless bearers of young and men are the bold, the daring, the innovators, the adventurers, the improvers, the creators of science and engineering and civilisation. In short, it's sexist crap. There is a framing story, that of a rather self-satisfied retired Roman gentleman historian who has gathered together the accounts of this origin tale, and presents it to the reader, complete with observations of his own. Is Lessing trying to tell us in some oblique fashion that it's only due to the male voice of history that we see this fall from shore-mammal grace as a bad thing? Are the Romans - the parents of western civilization - the children only of the Squirts, with anything that might have been good about the way of life of the Clefts lost in the prelapsarian mists? That's the best interpretation I can find to put on this, and it's a stretch.

My advice - don't bother with The Cleft, especially if you have any respect for Doris Lessing and her work.