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I picked up two thin books this afternoon at the library that sat strangely with each other. First I read Connie Willis's novella "Inside Job". It was an elegant little story with that nice overlapping/accelerating pacing that Ms. Willis does so well. As I picked up the second, Ms. Suzette Haden Elgin's "Star-anchored, star-angered" (and I have no idea where that title came from, because as far as I can tell it references no concrete element of theme or plot in the book... maybe it references some quote I don't know whose surrounding context is plot relevant...) I assumed from the jacket copy that it might thematically mirror the first book interestingly, as the superficial plot of both books involves exposing spiritual frauds of one type or another.
The Elgin book is actually a bit closer to Sturgeon's "Godbody" in structure. Parts of it worked nicely for me and parts didn't. I'm still being amused - there was clearly something happening around for people alive in that time period that I (born in 1980) don't quite get. A feeling of immanence? There were those well, wars, basically, all over in the late 1960s, and then a feeling of failure and frustration that set in after. I mean, the student riots in France, and the student protest/riot things in the U.S. - it seems fair to call all that a war of sorts - the war referenced in the Leonard Cohen song, right?
Of course I've felt the tug of that moment of immanence - when you're walking between two trees and look up at a breath of sky and the air hits you and you just feel that the next step will take you to something new. It's not the immanence I'm amused by. It was thinking, as I finished the book, that we've pulled off the trick of making people think that science fiction (or fantasy) is a safe, mildly amusing thing. It isn't, at all. Ask all those authors of utopias, of social parodies like Gargantua and Pantagruel, like Gulliver's Travels. We need metaphor to speak clearly to each other about the big problems, and science fiction and fantasy are where we let those metaphors have free reign. And that makes them very dangerous.
Not that I'm always convinced by the argument presented, but that's not the point. The point is the kind of arguments you can get away with in science fiction and fantasy without coming across as full of creaky bombast. It's startling really, and realistic fiction hasn't got a candle on it.
The Elgin book is actually a bit closer to Sturgeon's "Godbody" in structure. Parts of it worked nicely for me and parts didn't. I'm still being amused - there was clearly something happening around for people alive in that time period that I (born in 1980) don't quite get. A feeling of immanence? There were those well, wars, basically, all over in the late 1960s, and then a feeling of failure and frustration that set in after. I mean, the student riots in France, and the student protest/riot things in the U.S. - it seems fair to call all that a war of sorts - the war referenced in the Leonard Cohen song, right?
Of course I've felt the tug of that moment of immanence - when you're walking between two trees and look up at a breath of sky and the air hits you and you just feel that the next step will take you to something new. It's not the immanence I'm amused by. It was thinking, as I finished the book, that we've pulled off the trick of making people think that science fiction (or fantasy) is a safe, mildly amusing thing. It isn't, at all. Ask all those authors of utopias, of social parodies like Gargantua and Pantagruel, like Gulliver's Travels. We need metaphor to speak clearly to each other about the big problems, and science fiction and fantasy are where we let those metaphors have free reign. And that makes them very dangerous.
Not that I'm always convinced by the argument presented, but that's not the point. The point is the kind of arguments you can get away with in science fiction and fantasy without coming across as full of creaky bombast. It's startling really, and realistic fiction hasn't got a candle on it.
