The Selected Stories of H.G. Wells

 I sought out this specific collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories because they were gathered, ordered, and edited by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I had read a few of Wells’s longer stories (War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine), but I read them as entertainment, not as literature.  I don’t mean that with any kind of judgment. Wells writes entertainingly and to entertain, and to read a story to hear a good yarn is a perfectly legitimate enterprise.  I just mean that I hadn’t paid any attention to Wells as an artist, making artistic decisions.  Coming to these stories in this collection through the eyes of Le Guin is like taking a small course on Wells as a writer, or seeing his works through the eyes of friend.  It shaped the way I see and understand Wells’s writing.

 

Instead of presenting the 26 short stories, spanning 40 years of Wells’s life, in chronological order, from the first written to the last, Le Guin has grouped the stories by genre: “Because almost all Wells’s stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them, not chronologically, but in sections by kind.  Each section has a brief introduction, discussing what kind of stories they are, where this kind of story came from and what it may have led to” (xii).  It is a clever way to group an artist’s work, and it makes you conscious of how each story relates to the other stories within its grouping, and of course, how blurry and artificial those lines are in the end.  Her first grouping is not by any larger-recognized genre that I’m familiar with: “In one way or another all the stories in this section have to do with what somebody sees” (italics in original, 3).  And while these first 7 stories are built around gifted vision, Le Guin uses the category to set the larger theme that she sees running through all of Wells’s work: his incredible ability to bring a scene, a landscape, a person, a world to life.  It was a joy to slow down and see how effectively and efficiently Wells could describe a thing, especially in a world that predates big cinema.  So often when I read 21^st century novels, I can feel the writer writing for the big screen, or even for the prestigious small screen.  Wells had no such experience with cinematic scenes of war or romantic lighting or catastrophic destruction, and yet his descriptions bring those very things to life.  Here’s a small taste, from “A Dream of Armageddon” (grouped by Le Guin in “Technological and Predictive Science Fiction”). In it, a man and woman are feeling a war-torn part of the world. They are resting for a moment when war planes fly over-head, firing indiscriminately (and this was written before World War I, even before the Wright Brothers had been to Kitty Hawk): “Overhead in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us I heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from the bricks and passed . . .” (194).  You can hear and see it like it were on a screen before you, and yet it is all a part of his finely-tuned imagination.

 

I was struck by how modern Wells’s language felt, especially given that some pieces were nearly 125 years old.  Both the general sentences and the dialogue are vibrant and present, alive and human.  I realized that one of the reasons he reads so quickly and easily is that his language is unobtrusive.  His words give you the image, create the feeling, propel you forward, and then disappear.  The world is alive and the people understandable and the situations both human and intriguing.

 

There are a few stories that I found hard to stomach for their racism.  Le Guin tries to smooth over the issue by noting that “the writer’s sympathy is with the black man,” but that is an unfortunately facile way to apologize for the problems at its root.  She suggests that the problem with “The Lord of the Dynamos” is essentially the use of the N-word, but the problems are much deeper.  Even if Wells expresses sympathy for Azuma-zi, there is a world of racist assumptions and stereotypes propping Azuma-zi up.

 

I found “The Country of the Blind,” the story that concludes the collection, to be fascinating in that it seems to make an argument unintended by the author and unrecognized by the editor.  The story involves an isolated people in a small valley of the Ecuadorean Andes.  For whatever reason, the environment his led to all the inhabitants, for generation after generation, to become or be born blind.  One day, a mountain climber from Bogota accidentally finds himself stranded in the valley.  He initially thinks his gift of sight will make his superior to, and a natural leader of, the blind people, but he finds that the world and life they have built favors blindness and he is outmatched by them.  Because he talks of things they cannot comprehend, they consider him a lunatic, heretical, and an idiot.  He is dependent on them for survival, living entirely in their world, and he submits himself to their ways.  The story is supposed to be about how a visionary is stifled and dismissed among the ignorance of the masses who are unable to even understand the language of the visionary.  And to that end, the story is effective.  But Wells undercuts this idea by having the seeing man be such an arrogant fool.  First, Bogota (the name the blind people give him) is a rich mountain climber, indulging in his own abilities, not trying to improve the world in any way. Second, the near-immediate thought that Bogota has once he discovers where he is, is the refrain “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  And his expectation is not to serve or help anybody, but the rule over them.  He comes into the village like an empirical force, learning nothing of the local culture or their ways and assumes they are childish and ignorant and in need of his wisdom and experience.  My sympathies were entirely with the blind folk.  Wells showed that if the world were set up with differing abilities in mind, that there is no actual handicap to blindness, that in fact there are advantages and special gifts that come with it.  It is living in a seeing world that refuses to accommodate blindness that disadvantages the blind person.

 

Like all of us, Wells is blind to his own assumptions, and when they stick out so apparently to me as they do in these last two stories I describe, it is a little painful. But I have discussed only the two stories that are problematic, so please don’t let those two stories dissuade you from reading the other 24 presented in this collection.  In fact, I would definitely recommend “The Country of the Blind” because there is a lot of thought in it, and even when it has sour tastes, there is a lot to relish.

 

Wells has a lot of interesting approaches to interesting topics.  Some tales are like Twilight Zone episodes, and some are unlike anything I’ve read before, artful and contemplative and unexpected.  “Under the Knife” and “The Star” are two that come to mind.  H.G. Wells touches upon nearly everything that will be the stuff of science fiction throughout the 20^th century. Strange magic shops (“The Magic Shop”), body switching (“The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”), seeing through time and space (“The Crystal Eggs”), new technology making war more horrifying still (“The Land Ironclads”), oversized beasts (“The Valley of the Spiders”), underwater discoveries (“In the Abyss”), the nature of the soul and out of body experiences (“The Stolen Body”), and so much more.  All told from interesting, human perspective with thoughtful explorations of what these things mean for the world.

 

This collection is a delight, and having Le Guin’s guiding voice to move through them is a treat.

W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks

I don’t believe I have read any of DuBois writings before this one, except possibly as excerpts in literature classes in the first year or two of college.  I decided I needed to read this seminal work somewhere in the midst of reading The 1619 Project.

 

I expected something very different from what this book is.  I expected a high-level, argumentative, sustained philosophical piece about America’s “problem of the color-line,” something full of footnotes and citations to sociological works.  The book does indeed reach high-level considerations. But it also grounds itself in specific people and stories.  It is certainly argumentative.  But it is interested in painting a broad picture beyond the borders of those specific arguments. It is definitely philosophical.  But it is every bit as humanistic, concerned with the flesh and lived lives, not just matters of philosophical concern.

 

Published in 1903, the book comprises a collection of essays that DuBois had previously published in magazines and journals, such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial.  Together, essays look back at the preceding 40 years and ahead to the whole of the century stretching before him, noting that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (16).  He begins by looking back at the American government’s responses at the end of the Civil War, where it tried to do right, where it maliciously did wrong, and where it gave up altogether.  He then takes a prolonged look at the education of previously enslaved people and their children, taking up argument with Booker T. Washington’s position and looking at his own experience as a school teacher in rural Tennessee.  This latter essay, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” is the first of his personal essays in the collection.  By looking at the political issue of education through the lens of his own lived experience, DuBois is able to include all the factors that play into the continued disadvantaging of Black Americans.  The poverty, the geography, the social barriers, the cultural history—it’s all there in the telling of the lives of his former students and their families.  It’s very much in the vein of what is now common modern journalism, and it’s powerful stuff in literary and mental talents of DuBois.  He then looks at the larger issues of freedom and power, specifically in Georgia and Atlanta, though those specifics are clearly meant to point to the larger national condition.  He observes how the laws and racist customs are designed to hem in and limit Black folks economic futures, and how those limitations affect family relations and individual behaviors.  DuBois then offers a few especially personal pieces, about the loss of his first born still in his infancy, the biography of Alexander Crummel, and a (presumably fictional) short story about two Johns in a small southern town, one Black, one white. He concludes his book with a short essay on the musical and cultural contributions Black people have given to America through their music: “[T]he Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (180-181).

 

DuBois writing is eloquent and powerful, and just formal enough that it requires attention and a slowed-pace to absorb it all.  He opens the book with the statement, “Herein lies buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.”  I discovered that indeed patience was needed, and warranted.  I’m not a fast reader, naturally, but the slower I went, the more I enjoyed and got out of this book.  One chapter I read to myself entirely out loud to feel the rhythm and music of DuBois’s language.  I admired his clarity of thought, his thoroughness of vision, and his literary power to bring it all to the page.

 

There were a few things that troubled me while I read the book.  There were veins of anti-semitism that were difficult to travel past.  The assumed patriarchal stance needled me regularly as DuBois made it clear that he was interested entirely in the matters of men.  Finally, there are several points where, to make his larger argument, DuBois accepts the characterization of many Black people as lazy and shiftless.  Of course, he seeks to explain culturally and economically how that laziness and shiftlessness are created and encouraged, but even accepting such things made me wince.

 

This is the kind of book that will bear rereading and re-engagement.  I will undoubtedly be picking it up again down the road.

 

As a mere side-thought, it occurs to me that The 1619 Project is in some ways a reimagining of The Souls of Black Folks, borrowing its structure, its focus, and its methods to start out the 21^st century as DuBois kicked of the 20^th.

The Princess and the Goblin

I learned of this book when reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter, which is in part a collection of her writings about other people’s writings. I trust Le Guin not only as a writer but as a reader, and I decided to make a list of the works she chose to write about and decided to work my way through them over the next couple of years.  George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published serially in 1870 and 1871, and published as a novel in 1872, is the oldest book she wrote about, so I decided to start with it.

 

First thing I did, after re-reading Le Guin’s Introduction, was Google George MacDonald. He’s not an author I ever remember hearing of, so I was surprised to find that he had inspired so many writers that I had heard of.  C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Richard Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle—what?!  It’s an all-star list of authors of the best children’s and young adult fiction we have.  And once I began reading, I saw it immediately.  There’s so much about MacDonald’s voice that you can see picked up and carried forward by the author’s mentioned above, and that has become a mainstay in the category of literature that MacDonald himself practically created.  As a result, very little about the book feels 150 years old, even though the story is unabridged, changed, likely, in spelling only.

 

The narrator adopts moments of uncertainty and familiarity.  In spite of the fact that the narrator is clearly omniscient in the classic narrator sense, he speaks as one telling a story of which he has imperfect knowledge.  For example, he notes in the opening chapter, “The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast.”  That little “I think” appears in touches throughout the novel.  The effect is to make the narrator a character, with a specific voice, and to align that character with you, the reader, very much from the same world with the same expectations and sense of wonder.  But the narrator is in a position of privilege, both in the sense that they know more than you, but also in the sense that they are parental or avuncular.  When the princess meets a magical old woman seemingly living in the attic of the princess’s grand home, the narrator says,

 

That the princess was a real princess you might see now quite plainly; for she didn’t hang on to the handle of the door, and stare without moving, as I have known some do who ought to have been princesses but were only rather vulgar little girls. She did as she was told, stepped inside the door at once, and shut it gently behind her. (12)

 

It is hard to read that without feeling the nod and wink to the audience.  At the end of that same chapter, the narrator promises to tell us more in some following chapter about what the magical old woman was spinning at her spinner, and he concludes the chapter with, “Guess what she was spinning” (18).  Again, this breaks down that fourth wall between the narrator and their audience.  In fact, the title of that same chapter is “The Princess and – We shall see who.”  Above that title is an image, included in the original publication, of a woman at a spinner.  The reason I know this is that once or twice the narrator refers to one of the accompanying pictures to report on its accuracy and reliability.  Pulled altogether, these techniques create a playful and friendly tone that is immediately familiar to anyone who has read Alice in Wonderland; The Hobbit; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Black Cauldron; etc.

 

One of the effects of this tone is to make the reader always feel safe, assured that no matter what horrors or brushes with the grotesque lie before us, there is nothing to be afraid of.  Everything will work out alright in the end.  This allows the author to put Curdie, the little mining boy who is our model of heroism in the story, in deep danger in the tunnels of the Goblins without ever making us or our young charges sweat.

 

The writing itself is warm and easy, aiming for clarity first, but taking occasional dips into the poetic.  To take an example again from early in the book, I’ll quote from the narrator’s first description of the princess: “Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.  Those eyes you would have thought must have known they came from there, so often were they turned up in that direction” (2).

 

The characters are every bit as warm and lovely as the narrator and the writing.  Except for Lootie—the princess’s nursemaid, who loves the princess deeply but lacks the maturity and self-awareness to govern her feelings and fears—every grownup in the book is an impressive person.  They treat the children like people with respect and understanding, and they model behaviors of love and trust.  While the story has a princess and her father the King, Curdie and his parents are every bit as regal and admirable.  The Goblins are fun foils, treated with the same playfulness and affection, even though they are clearly the antagonists of the story.  Although they are set up as the unnatural and twisted versions of humans after living generations below ground (a nod to the popularity of Darwin’s evolutionary theories), they are not presented as the inversion of all that is good and human.  They live in families and have pride in themselves.  They are certainly not always nice to each other, but they are not reduced to caricature as Roald Dahl tends to do with his comical villains.  A full and proper analysis could be made to look at what the Goblin’s represent to the author.  They have notions of conquest, an ability to long nurse a grude—one that goes back so far the narrator is uncertain of its origins, proposing legendary theories instead of offering us anything concrete--, a sense of righteousness in their own actions in violating another’s autonomy, prejudices, and ambitions.  But they want their children to thrive, they care for their families, and they have a government that parallels the kingship above ground.  When the queen is revealed to have toes (Goblins in this world do not have toes), the Goblin King uses that information as leverage against her, but he is not appalled and certainly doesn’t subject her to torments or even demotion because of it.  I’ll be tinkering around with ideas, but I haven’t developed any solid thoughts yet.  If and when someone does that analysis, I’d love to see it. 

 

Instead, I’ve been thinking about that magical old woman in the attic.  She might look initially like a fairy godmother, and she certainly has those trappings.  The princess even calls her grandmother.  But the old woman doesn’t just show up for a deus ex machina or two; she saves the day many times.  She leads the princess home when she is lost at night.  She leads the princess to Curdie to save him from the Goblins. She leads the princess out of the house when the Goblins attack, and then again she leads Curdie to the princess when he thinks she might have been kidnapped by the Goblins.  Nothing happens without grandmother’s knowledge or approval.  The issue, narratively speaking, surrounding the grandmother is faith and belief, who can see her and who can’t, and who having seen her can believe in her.  It seems pretty clear that grandmother is a stand in for God.  I remember reading in an article about MacDonald that he was a pastor for some time, but that his parishioners booted him because of his unusual teachings.  I wonder if his understanding of God was a little to maternal and not enough Angry Father to make his fellow Scotsmen happy.  Grandmother definitely likes people to behave properly and with good manners, but she is loving and comforting and understanding.  She prepares the princess for her adventure, but doesn’t stop it from happening.  She is proud of the princess. Supportive. Nurturing.  She lets the princess learn for herself that not everyone will believe in grandmother, and then comforts her with the knowledge that that’s okay.  Believing must come before seeing for grandmother, and God.  Interestingly, grandmother is associated with the Moon—which the lamp in her room emulates.  It seems odd that she is not associated with the sun, but of course that is for the masculine he-God.  But then the moon is a much more fitting image for this deity, the light that guides you when the world is dark, the sliver of thread that leads you through the darkness if you have faith that it is taking you where you should go, the little snippet of daylight when the easy comfort of the sun is gone.

 

There is generally a rejection of masculine solutions throughout the book.  Yes, the princess’s father is a manly, armored king, and the queen is absent entirely, but we never see that king as anything other than her King-Papa.  His guards are humbled by the strange creatures, the Goblin’s pets who slip past them and frighten them.  Martial solution is limited.  Even in the battle with the Goblins, the main power Curdie wields is song and poetry, not a stick.  He stomps on soft feet, but he mostly wins by avoiding battle, singing his rhymes and not taking the Goblins especially seriously.  And while Curdie needs rescuing by the princess, the princess never needs rescuing by Curdie, which narrative expectations set us up for and then deny us.  Grandmother has already taken the princess, not to the protection of armed men, but to the protection of a loving mother who can hold her.  The traditionally feminine arts of spinning and homemaking are the heroes of the story.  Even the Goblin Queen is protected not by armor, but by cobbling.

 

This was a delightful book to read, and an important one.  MacDonald has been called the father of modern fantasy, which is a well-deserved title in his influence of J.R.R. Tolkien and others.  I am only surprised that it took me so long to discover this treasure.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

I usually reserve this blog for posting reviews and thoughts about works of fiction. I make an exception in this case.

We Americans surround ourselves with myths about our country, myths that we learn early on from family, school, and our institutions.  Myths can be wonderful, unifying banners to gather and work under, but they can also serve the purpose of hiding shame and obscuring responsibility.  Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project takes the singular institution of chattel slavery and holds it up to the light of the sun, like a glass gathering and concentrating its rays to burn away the mists of myth we have collectively been hiding in for over 400 years.  The 19 historical essays, along with the works of poetry and fiction interspersed between those essays, delineate the ways that chattel slavery, present from the very origins of our national identity, has shaped our founding documents, institutional structures, and social policies.  More importantly, the essays make clear that our national desire to hide our shame, to “get over” it, to dismiss and disown it, has denied us the ability to rectify the past wrongs and forced us to compound error and mistreatment upon error and mistreatment.

 

Each essay, written by a different historian or cultural critic, looks at one facet of America and examines the way our slavery has shaped and continues to shape our country.  The essays follow a chronological arc from 1619, when, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the first slave trade ship docked at Jamestown, to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  They bear single-word titles, showing both the broad scope of that influence into every corner of American life. 

 

Even if you are familiar with a lot of the history present in these essays, there will still be a lot to learn, both in terms of facts and in terms of the connective tissue that links everything together.  While I found every essay worth reading, there were certain essays that punched me harder than others.  Matthew Desmond’s essay on “Capitalism” made America’s version of capitalism make sense in a horrifying, eye-opening way.  I sat with that essay for a long time, and read it to my wife immediately upon completing it.  Likewise, Carol Anderson’s essay on “Self-Defense,” and its look at the history of the 2^nd Amendment is a powerful look at history that my extensive education has never afforded me.  Wesley Morris’s “Music” is artful and accomplished, making connections and a cultural argument is hard to deny.  Ibram X. Kendi’s “Progress,” the penultimate essay in the collection, looks at how America has been using the idea that we are making progress in overcoming our past to excuse great horrors for as long as we have been a nation.

 

When I first flipped through the book and saw the timeline and fictional passages and poems between essays, my original plan was to skip past them and just stick to the essays.  But once I got to them I appreciated what they were doing, and how they interacted with the essays. They provide historical anchors and poetic, human voices that bring the larger issues and events through another vein into pumping heart of the book and the its readers. Instead of skipping over those sections, I slowed down and took them in, reading many of the poems and passages aloud to myself.

 

I imagine many will argue that this collection of essays should be required reading for the American people, and I agree with them fully.  In fact, I think it is a civic duty, an important way to become a fully informed citizen.  Hannah-Jones has given us all a gift to collect all of this knowledge into one book.  What Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States did for understanding labor in America, The 1619 Project does for understanding racism.  Don’t let the size of the book dissuade you from picking it up. The essays range from 10 to 30 pages, and they are written in compelling, straightforward language that easily carries you through the arguments. The last 100 pages of the book are acknowledgments, endnotes, and index, so there are only about 480 pages of essays and poems and timeline.

Super Sad True Love Story Is Super Okay

I have had a complicated reaction to this 2010 novel, the first of Shteyngart’s that I have read.  The writing is solid and dependable, but seldom surprising, beautiful, or striking. The comic elements are usually clever, seldom funny, and sometimes merely painful.  The social commentary is insightful but simple.  Through all of these reactions, I was never sure how much was coming from me and how much was coming from the novel itself.  Absurdist fiction can be hit or miss with me, and I haven’t figured out what makes a work fall into either category.  Whatever the reason, this book landed on the side of miss, but while it irritated me at times in the reading, I was always interested and hopeful that it might have more flashes of brilliance than potholes that make me grumble about the narrative trip.

The thing that I keep coming back to in analyzing my feelings are the main characters, Lenny and Eunice. Let’s start with Lenny.  Shteyngart seems to want Lenny to carry more weight than he can.  Or perhaps he wants to have a character we both like and dislike.  Or perhaps it’s something else altogether that I can’t sense because our aesthetic tastes are too different.  On the one hand, Lenny is eminently human. He’s insecure, scared of dying, scared of growing old, scared of becoming irrelevant, and scared of being alone.  He seeks the approval of everyone, whether he respects them or not.  But for all that, he’s also pathetic, ludicrous, and kind of gross.  He latches on the Eunice for every wrong reason, and it’s never clear what he’s attracted to in her, other than her looks. And of course, Eunice gets the same treatment, the same mix of humanity and absurdism.  And similarly, it’s never any clearer what Eunice sees in Lenny.  For a love story to work, we have to be invested in the lovers and their love.  While I was sometimes fascinated by them, I was never invested in them and never felt like I understood them.  They always felt like characters in a play, half real and half fake, held up by strings and wire, going through the motions as the storyteller dictated.

Part of the distance between me, the reader, and the characters might be the form the novel takes.  It’s an interesting idea to make an epistolary novel in which the two main characters seldom write to each other.  As a diary, Lenny’s chapters are unbelievable, especially in a world that doesn’t value writing.  That goes doubly for Eunice’s writings to her friends and families.  We are constantly told that Eunice doesn’t value the written word and then we see her embracing it fully as her medium of communication.  It seems to undermine the characterization of the world, unless of course the intention is to say that even as people reject the written word and alienate themselves from it they actually love and embrace it, that Eunice and Lenny are not exceptions, but what’s actually going on beneath the surface of America.  But that’s hard to believe, and it would take a lot of mental gymnastics to create a reading that would support that idea.

The epilogue is another odd choice. As with the traditional epistolary novel, this book attempts to present the collected writings of our main characters as put together, edited, and presented to the public in the form in which we just read them.  But to do so here is to take away any political punch the novel may have had.  The wrap up makes everything about Lenny.  Part of the charm of the novel in the context of the love story, the dystopic nightmare America that is just around the corner.  As I read the novel, I kept thinking that perhaps instead of the politics being a backdrop, the love story is a mere foreground detail to frame the political happenings.  But the epilogue mostly kills that idea, and it adds nothing but some semi-clever additional framing and a reason for the title of the book.  And if you ever thought that Eunice and Lenny were equal main characters in the narrative, the epilogue will set you straight.  This was always Lenny’s story first.  I find everything the epilogue brings to the book disappointing.

So Super Sad True Love Story is an awkward mix of a failed love story and a failed political parable.  I would say that I feel like it’s trying to do too many things at once, but I can’t even say that, because I believe that Shteyngart wrote exactly the novel he wanted to write.  These characters are presented exactly the way he wants to present them, and the political background is exactly as he wants it to be, making the stabs he wants to make and withholding the conclusions he doesn’t want to draw.  So I can’t fault the book for being exactly what it is, but I can say that it isn’t exactly for me.  I don’t feel the need to explore more of Shteyngart’s writing because I suspect we will continue to miss each other.  And that’s fine for both of us.

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

I found this book in my library catalog.  It’s a 1989 edition of and 1979 publication that first collected Le Guin’s essays, talks, and non-fiction works about Science Fiction and Fantasy.  The book is now out of print, and I understand why.  The introductions to Le Guin’s first five novels are all available in their most recent printings, and Le Guin updated those introductions in 2012, I believe.  The essays that cannot be found today are either tied to the specific state of Science Fiction in the ‘70s and ‘80s, or take positions that Le Guin has further refined and stated better at some point in the 21^st century, or both.

In other words, what we have here is hardly necessary reading, even for a general fan of Le Guin’s thoughts and writing.  That said, it is a wonderful and interesting read, both for the essays themselves, which are as insightful, critical, and humorous as Le Guin’s writing always is, and for the look at Le Guin at this other time period.

In the 1970s, Le Guin was in her 40s and at what she must have thought were the heights of her creative and cultural abilities.  She could not have known then that she would only continue to grown in her power, skill, and perspective.  There is a lot of youth and vigor in these essays, which are a joy to encounter, and I loved getting to see this younger version of her critical self.  She has all the wit and fire that she will possess throughout her career, but there is something of the hot shot in her writing, like she’s spoiling for a fight, confident in her ability to take all on comers, but with some nervous energy.  Over the years, this tone will mellow, never losing the certainty, but no longer concerned about any return punches, and a complete readiness to be wrong if she is proven so.  The gloves are laid down as the opinions stand for themselves.

Susan Wood selected and ordered the essays.  She also writes short introductions for each of the five sections she creates, and headnotes that pull quotes from essays and talks that are not included in the collection.  This was clearly the work of someone who loved and admired Le Guin’s writing, and she did a wonderful job.

If you are a fan of Le Guin’s writing on writing, and you want to see some early works of hers, this is a wonderful collection.  I hope your library has a copy, because they are rather expensive on ebay.  Too expensive for me to add to my collection for the mere sake of collecting.

Words Are My Matter: Le Guin on Books and Writing

 

Le Guin is a rare artist.  Her fierce intelligent is guided by her unerring instincts, so that she works through her stories both intellectually and emotionally, by thought and by feel.  As I read my way through her novels, I took special pleasure in reading her own forwards (which I often read as afterwards, instead) because she had the additional gift of being able to evaluate her own work from a loving distance, crediting and admiring what deserved credit and admiration, and criticizing what she saw falling short.  Better still, her non-fictional essays were written with the same grace and energy as her works of fiction.

When I was contemplating writing a collection of critical essays, I knew I wanted to peel myself away from my own academic style of writing.  So I picked up this copy of Le Guin’s essays on writing. About half of the book is comprised of book reviews and introductions that she has written for the works of other authors, and the other half consists of essays and talks about the art and field.  I had originally intended to pick and choose the essays for inspiration and study, but instead I found myself reading the collection in its entirety.

I find the way Le Guin looks at and considers the world to be both comforting and inspiring, although I can’t put my finger on what it is.  There is a determined optimism combined with a certain crankiness.  A loving gentleness and a sharp critical eye.  A large sense of understanding and a demand that things get done right.  I don’t agree with everything she says, but nor do I dismiss anything she says, because I know each position is considered, both in its content and in its presentation.

I was so moved by one of her introductory essays, that I immediately got a copy of the book and read it before finishing Le Guin’s.  That book was Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, and I loved it.  By the time I finished this collection, I had created a reading list of some 20 books that I have every intention of working my way through: the Books Le Guin Admired.  I have a few things to read before beginning the list in earnest, but I’ve very excited about it.  When I find someone I admire and trust, I like to look at who they admire and trust in turn.  Because her essays are earnest and don’t hold back on criticism any more than they do praise, I fully trust her evaluations.

I am impressed that this book has sold well and is still in print, because I imagine that the audience for it is rather small: those of us who enjoy Le Guin’s writing and person enough to want to hear what she has to say about dozens of other authors.  But if that sounds like an enjoyable trip by the premise, you will find a lot here to enjoy, and just as much to inspire you onward.

Dreamsnake

 I came to Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake via a review of the book written by Ursula K. Le Guin and collected in her collection of essays called Words Are My Matter.  In that lovingly written review, Le Guin bemoaned the fact that the book was out of print, and concluded, “Dreamsnake is a classic, and should be cherished as such.”  So I went looking for a copy, and finding that our library system only carried a e-print of the book, I found one used on Ebay.

 What a wonderful book! Le Guin sites it as an influence on her, and I can see that immediately, although, I would have said that the influence worked the other way, given what Le Guin had already written by 1978 when the book was published, or even 1973 when McIntyre published the short story “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” which would become the first chapter of the novel.  There is a sincerity and warmth to the characters and the world, an open honesty that never falls into tweeness or cloying sweetness. Such a stance is all the more surprising when we consider that the novel is a kind of post-apocalyptic work, set in a world devastated a long time ago by nuclear war, though by this point recovering from that damage.  It is a hard world full of thoughtful people who are well-conceived.

 One of the things I loved about the book, and noticed immediately, was the way that the conflicts originated from the dramatic situations rather than from quarreling between characters.  Can Snake save young Stavin dying from a tumor?  Can Jesse, paralyzed by a spinal injury, make it to Center?  The characters are dealing with life and death and love, and emotions run high, but everyone treats everyone else with respect and integrity.  There are a few notable and necessary exceptions, of course. I say necessary because cruelty and selfishness exist in the world, and it would feel unreal to have it absent from this one.  McIntyre keeps those traits limited to a few individuals, and gives them their own set of reasons and motivations, understandable even if detestable. You don’t have characters using their emotional duress to attack and misunderstand each other.  The emotional duress is instead socially navigated and embraced and encountered head on. It was too me, utterly refreshing, and beautifully moving.

 The other thing that I loved and admired was McIntyre’s ease in envisioning and presenting a social world so much more functional than ours in many ways.  The triadic relationships are presented with ease and without explanation.  Merideth’s genderless identity is handled so deftly that I don’t know if I would have recognized it were it not for Le Guin’s review. Sex and childbirth are decoupled effortlessly in a way that makes sex this easy and beautiful act, a chance to connect and find comfort.

 In her review, Le Guin made an observation that I think captures the spirit of the book so well that it is better to quote her than to steal her sentiment:

The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: ‘Subversion Through Friendliness.’ It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were. Subversion through friendliness is paradoxical, slow-acting, and durable. And sneaky. A moral revolutionary, rewriting rules the rest of us were still following, McIntyre subverted us so skillfully and with such lack of self-promoting hoo-ha that we scarcely noticed. And thus she has seldom if ever received the feminist honors she is due, the credit owed her by writers to whom she showed the way.

 I am not the kind of reader that always hopes for sequels. I like a book to give me everything it has to give and then end beautifully.  But I found myself wishing there was a whole slew of books set in this world with these characters. I can’t think of higher praise.

The Bloated Blade Itself

 

I had hopes for The Blade Itself. Not overly high hopes, but solid, and I thought well-founded, hopes.  In the space of two weeks, two entirely different people had recommended the entire trilogy to me, one comparing it to Game of Thrones and the other noting that it is possibly his favorite fantasy series, ever.  Then, for the holidays, a friend gave me the entire trilogy as a gift.  I had been hungering for a dose of good fiction.  I didn’t need this to be magical or monumental, just good and compelling.

 The Blade Itself is neither good nor compelling.  Had I picked the book up of my own volition, I would have put it down before I hit page 50, but as it was a gift from a friend, and moreover a gift he was excited to give, I felt the need to see it all the way through, hoping that I would find hidden strengths in its length and scope that overshadowed its weaknesses in writing and character.  Sadly, I have finished the book, and whatever strengths it possesses remain hidden from me.  But while I didn’t find the reading enjoyable, I found a way to make it educational.  I have been reading talented authors for so long that their art and skill had become like the air that I was breathing.  Walking into the smoke-filled air of this literary wreck gave me the opportunity to examine what I was choking on, what was clogging my passageways and irritating my nasal passages.

 The writing in The Blade Itself is terrible.  It’s not that Abercrombie doesn’t know how to put together a sentence, but that he doesn’t know how to say something meaningful.  He knows that he needs to fill pages with words and scenes with actions, but he doesn’t know how to do that so that the words give us more than description and the actions give us more than happenings.  We are forever skating along the surface of events, people and places.  Abercrombie describes the physicality of these things in the emptiest terms, giving us nothing of their importance, imbuing none of it with context and meaning. In this way, description becomes merely description, and there’s no guiding principle to help Abercrombie decide what should be described and what should be left vague or hinted at.  It all becomes filler to pass the time. There is nothing you can point to and say, “My god, that is a powerful sentence!”  Or well-written sentence. Or beautiful sentence.  Or meaningful sentence.

 The result is that you could effectively summarize each chapter into a paragraph noting how the plot progresses and you would get every bit of enjoyment out of reading the novel, losing nothing in the translation.  Take for example the chapter titled “The Theatrical Outfitters,” on pages 238-246 of my edition, just shy of the halfway point.  Logen, Bayaz, and Quai (consider this your warning and spoilers are coming, and they’ll keep coming, so if you are worried about spoilers, this is probably not the read for you) have come to Adua and are about to enter into the Agriont.  To get through the gate, Bayaz has decided that they will need to change clothes to look more like the Aduans expect them to look.  So they go into a theatrical outfitters shop and buy garish clothes that Aduans will read as Great Wizards, Studious Apprentice, and Fierce Northerner.  That’s it.  That’s all you need to know about the chapter.  Everything else, all 8 pages are just filler, empty dialogue and meaningless exchanges.  We don’t learn anything about the world, about the characters, or about the culture that isn’t already contained in the summary I have given you.  There are no twists or surprises or unexpected discoveries.

 The characters of The Blade Itself are shells. You get the measure of each character in the chapter of their respective introductions and there is nothing left to surprise you later.  Jezal is a shallow and pompous ass.  Glotka is a bitter and observant ass.  Logen is simple and skilled.  Then in each succeeding scene, these characterizations are driven home again and again without variation or interest.  Prose has the unique opportunity to explore the complexity of the inner life of human beings, but Abercrombie eschews such opportunities.  That’s fine.  Authors sometimes prefer to reveal characters through interaction with other characters, showing how each side of a person is affected by whom they are in community with at that moment.  But Abercrombie cares not for this approach either.  Logen is Logen whether he is talking to the Spirits, Bayaz, Ferro, or anyone else.  Ferro treats Yulwei and Logen the same.  Glotka talks the same to Severard and Jezal.  And don’t look for subtlety in these characterizations.  We literally have people tearing at their hair, frothing at the mouth, and it seems like everyone at one point or another has their mouth hanging open, for that seems to be a favorite of Abercrombie’s.  Characters within the novel are at best functional plot devices and at worst cartoon representations.

 Unfortunately, when Abercrombie does try to add depth or dimensionality to his characters it is still more painful.  In the last fifth of the book, we get two attempts to deepen characters, and I winced at both.  In the first, we learn that West and Ardee had an abusive father and that West has it in him to lose his tempter and hurt those he loves, just like his father.  Trauma is a classic way to try to make characters sympathetic and complex, but this revelation was there to do nothing more than that.  Ardee’s explanation to West is just pure exposition with no bite and no indication of the real human feelings that are born from such a past.  There is no conversation, no meaningful fallout, and no follow up.  Even worse is when West goes to Glotka in a following chapter, “Old Friends” (in the last tenth of the book, pages 444-449 in my edition).  Glotka, angry that West didn’t prove to be a good friend to him years ago when he was first returned home after being tortured, yells at West and sends him away.  West explains that he did try to see Glotka but that Glotka’s mother turned him away.  Here’s what follows:

It took a while for the words to sink in, and by the time they had, Glotka realized that his mouth was hanging open. So simple. No conspiracy. No web of betrayal. He almost wanted to laugh at the stupidity of it. My mother turned him away at the gate, and I never thought to doubt that no one came. She always hated West. A most unsuitable friend, far beneath her precious son. No doubt she blamed him for what happened to me. I should have guessed, but I was too busy wallowing in pain and bitterness. Too busy being tragic. He swallowed. ‘You came?’

 West shrugged. “For what it’s worth.”

 Well. What can we do, except try to do better?  Glotka blinked, and took a deep breath. “I’m, er . . . I’m sorry. Forget what I said, if you can. Please. Sit down. You were saying something about your sister.”

 “Yes. Yes. My sister.” West fumbled his way back into his seat, looking down at the floor, his face taking on that worried, guilty look again.

That’s it. There was tragedy and pain between us, but we have a plot to get to, and I need you to go see my sister!  What can we do, except try to do better?  This monumental sense of injustice and guilt sits between these two like the carcass of a dead animal, and they both just peer around it to talk about the matter at hand.  It’s a half-hearted attempt to make the characters and world richer, and it only shows that Abercrombie has no ability to handle such a scene.

 The plotting of The Blade Itself is clumsy. Abercrombie tries to pace his revelations, but they all fall flatly before the reader.  Abercrombie show’s no ability to build tension, seed mystery, or connect to the richness of humanity in his characters and his world.  One reading could be that he is afraid of showing his hand early, so he keeps everything tight-lipped until he can drop some interesting information, but it feels more to me like he has these parceled bits of information, knows they should only come occasionally, and just kills time between delivering them.  In the penultimate chapter, we learn that Logen’s moniker The Bloody-Nine is not just a nickname but a separate personality, and one that has a different relationship with his body.  I suspect this is supposed to be quite the revelation, but there was nothing that built up to it, so it registers simply as a fact, not as a bomb to the reader.  We haven’t spent any quality time inside Logen’s head to even be interested in what he might be hiding in there.  When I picture the origins of this book, I imagine Abercrombie creating an outline of each chapter, how it forwards the plot, and what it reveals about characters and situations.  Then the writing of the book is simply taking that paragraph of summary material and stretching it out to fit the proper length, the same material, dense in its initial form, diluted and thinned in the telling.  I was told many things I didn’t know while reading the book, but I was never once surprised or delighted.

 The world of The Blade Itself is uninteresting.  The setting is one of the least imaginative settings I have encountered in a work of fiction, let alone in a work of fantasy.  The patriarchal backbone that holds this world up, and I mean it is present in every civilization discussed, is tired and offputting.  Men insult each other and feel shame themselves by comparing them to women and girls.  We don’t even get a named female character until 60 pages into the book, when Ardee is introduced as the sister of one man and the future love interest of another.  We then get two more named women who are dismissed as vacuous and tedious before meeting Ferro, 200 pages into the book, who is little more than a fighting, swearing, angry, vengeful, woman.  The woman engaged to the prince of Adua gets a name, and only one other female character gets a name.  That’s it. Six total named women.  Who writes a novel in the 21^st century that can’t pass the Bechdel test?

 But patriarchy is only one of Abercrombie’s problems.  You will not be surprised to learn (or at least I wasn’t) that the center of this world is white people.  Black people exist way to the south, and Brown people hover at some of the edges, but there are about the same number of named non-white characters as there are women characters.  And then there is classic structure of nobility and commoners, with a rising merchant class threatening nobility with their newly-made money.  The Aduans think of everyone else as savages.  There’s slavery in the south.  The northerners are tough and without niceties of manner or goods.  It’s everything we have seen a hundred times before in fiction and reality, and it is all present here without question or examination.  Abercrombie has nothing to say about these structures, just accepts them as the easy framework on which to hang his story. 

 In the most uncharitable light, one could easily accuse Abercrombie of ripping off the general structure of George R. R. Martin’s world in Game of Thrones, just draining it of everything that made it interesting.   There’s a center of civilization and nobility in the hot climate of the middle regions.  Up north, there are rough northerners who have a new King of the Northmen, where there are also a breed of giants.  Down South (as opposed to Martin’s East), there are deserts and Black people with their desert and Black ways.  All the world is heading toward war, and unbeknownst to all but a few, a supernatural and deadly creature is forming to the north of the North and coming down to wreak havoc on the humans.  Only Abercrombie has no gift for understanding or discussing politics and intrigue.  Instead, he yoked on a Tolkeinesque fellowship led by a powerful wizard to somehow save the world.

 On top of all these other complaints, I place this last one.  The Blade Itself doesn’t even seek to be a satisfying standalone book.  It is merely an introduction to the characters and the world, a look at how the machine got moving.  Five hundred pages of empty actions and flat character introductions to set you up for the second and third books of the trilogy.  This entire book could have been an interesting 100 pages or a book that actually went somewhere.  Instead, we get a bloated balloon that takes up space and gives little in return.