A Future of Blood, Fire, and Monsters

John Christopher, whose work I’ve blogged about here before, achieved his fame as a writer of dystopian fiction for young adults, several decades before it became cool. His most famous books, the Tripods novels, have been translated into eight languages and adapted into a BBC series. His best works, however, are almost certainly the three volumes of the Sword of the Spirits trilogy (1970-72), which while written for teenagers have enough plot-layering and thematic sophistication to appeal to the most literate adults. I am pleased to see that Simon and Schuster has recently brought the series back into print.

Like the Tripods books, the Sword trilogy (The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands, and Sword of the Spirits) offers the reader a world where all is not as it seems. Luke Perry*, the trilogy’s viewpoint character, lives in what resembles a medieval fantasy kingdom, a cold and violent land of warring walled cities, of brave knights and dwarf craftsmen and deformed mutant servants, and of mysterious Seers with arcane powers. At the edges of this barbarous civilization prowl horrible monsters and tribesmen with savage customs. To the north, fearsome volcanoes light the skies and block explorers from the southern cities.

It all sounds rather like a Robert Howard novel, but gradually Christopher reveals that he is telling not a fantasy story but a post-apocalyptic one. Two centuries before Luke’s time, a global natural disaster destroyed the industrial civilization of our own era, and solar flares flooded the world with radiation, producing the dwarves, mutants, and monstrous animals that make the new world a fantastic distortion of the old. The survivors of the disaster, believing it the result of nuclear war, turned against the machine civilization they blamed for producing it. One group, however, retained knowledge of the age of machines, which it kept hidden in hopes of one day reintroducing science and industry to a more stable society. Savvier SF fans will have already figured out that this group was the Seers, ostensibly the defenders of the new era’s religious faith and of its people’s animus against technology. Like the rest of Luke’s world, they have a double identity; they also have a secret plan.

Luke, who at the start of the trilogy is mainly interested in ice-skating and in winning his home city’s annual tournament, learns only gradually that the Seers intend to use him and his father to advance their agenda.With their help, the elder Perry mounts a coup that puts him on the throne of Winchester, with Luke his Spirit-nominated successor. Later, Perry Sr. turns his attention to conquering neighboring cities, with the goal of creating a unified kingdom - one into which the Seers can reintroduce the old civilization. The new order, however, is jealous of its privileges and customs, and it has strong defenders, including the princes of other cities and Luke's amiable but ambitious half-brother Peter. When the ensuing storm of fire, blood, and treachery subsides, much of the Perry family lies dead and Luke finds himself in exile, hiding with the Seers in their Wiltshire sanctuary.

By the end of Prince in Waiting, more perceptive or mature readers will have noticed that there is something seriously wrong with Luke. He is short-tempered, prone to deep depression, and terrified of humiliation, which drives him to stupid risk-taking and stupider fights. One could lay some of the blame for this on Luke's parents, on his self-destructive father and his vapid, narcissistic mother. However, the violent social environment in which Luke matures gives him little opportunity for self-reflection, and rewards some of his dumber risk-taking, like his near-suicidal fight with the flesh-dissolving bayemot in Beyond the Burning Lands. 

If that second novel of the trilogy is less engaging than the first, it probably stems from Christopher's turn away from Luke's inner life and struggle with his personal demons. The author instead uses the middle novel of the trilogy to advance the series's plot and enlarge its setting. Luke reconciles himself with Winchester's new ruler, accompanies a diplomatic party across the volcanic Burning Lands, and visits the city of Klan Gothlan in the land of the Wilsh. He and his southern companions express their wonder at and disgust with these odd people who prefer good food and art to fighting, who use simple machines and accept polymufs as equals. Dumb luck allows Luke to defeat the bayemot, and the Wilsh king, Cymru, takes a liking to this strange little wolverine in human form, and even offers him the hand of his daughter Blodwen. (Blodwen, one of Christopher's few decent female characters, expresses an ambivalent opinion of the match.) At the book's end, pressed to the wall by a treason conviction, Luke wins the crown of Winchester by combat, and reaches the peak of his fortunes.

And then everything goes to hell.

(To Be Continued...) 

* No relation to the actor, as far as we know.

One Step Forward, Twenty Steps Back: The 2015 Hugo Ballot

A couple of years ago I relayed several reports that the World Science Fiction convention, where one might expect to find a degree of forward-looking progressivism, had become instead a bastion of white male conservatives, adherents of a vision of sci-fi one might call Rockets and Reactionaries. Last year, SF fans and authors had a welcome conversation about the prospects for women and minorities within the field, and that summer a first-time author’s novel about artificial intelligence and gender identity (among other things) won the Hugo, Nebula, and John Campbell Awards. 

This year, the political wheel has turned again, and in the reactionaries’ favor.
 

A group of conservative sci-fi and fantasy fans, calling themselves “The Sad Puppies” (a dreary in-joke), have for several years sought to pack the ballots for the fan-selected Hugo Award with works by fellow travelers. This spring they finally put together enough votes to achieve this goal. A quick look at the top of the 2015 Hugo ballot reveals that nearly all of the nominees in the five main print categories - novel, novella, novelette, short story, and related work - match the conservatives' slate (or one of those slates). One of the nominated titles comes from an obscure fanzine named for our old right-wing friend, Orson Scott Card. Another appeared in the conservative journal Sci Phi. Nine of the twenty-five nominees were published by an outfit called Castalia House. Charles Stross has tracked down the details on this press: founded by Theodore Beale, a game designer and author who writes under the modest sobriquet Vox Day, Castalia publishes mil-SF anthologies, Day’s own work, and a few non-fiction titles, including a Home-Schooling course in astrophysics.

It is fair to call Mssr. Beale, who more-or-less drafted the winning ballot in this year's Hugo-grabbing campaign, an ultraconservative. It is fairer to call him a white supremacist, a deep-dyed misogynist, a religious zealot, an isolationist, and a supporter of nationalist extremist parties like the True Finns. Beale’s fondness for this Finnish party may explain why he established Castalia in Finland. That he and his followers have incorporated their political alignment into their fan-dom is clear from the list of heroes Beale includes on the press’s front page: J.R.R. Tolkien (Catholic conservative), Gilbert K. Chesterton (Catholic reactionary), C.S. Lewis (patriarchal Christian reactionary), Robert Howard (racist scumbag), John W. Campbell (racist, overbearing, Scientology-supporting weirdo), and Herman Hesse. Actually, Hesse might seem a bizarre addition to the list, but I imagine his dystopian fiction The Glass Bead Game appeals to Mr. Beale’s quasi-medievalist mind, and his press takes its name from that novel's setting.

I mention all of this because I think outsiders and casual fans don’t often realize how politicized SF is and always has been. Modern fantasy was, until recently, a reactionary genre, and science fiction's “Golden-Age” authors were predominantly white male technocrats whose geekiness and cultural disaffection allowed them to ignore their other privileges. This only began to change in the late 1960s and ‘70s, concurrently with the civil rights movements, the return of American women to the workplace, and the migration of the counterculture into the mainstream. These social changes made it easier for female authors to enter the field, and let authors and fans discuss issues that made previous generations uncomfortable, like gender politics, sexuality, and alternative social and political systems.

The men (they are almost all men) threatened by female and minority authors, or by novels and stories that challenge social norms, usually also feel threatened by changes in the larger world. I suspect many believe that if they can "reclaim" their fan community and authorial genre for conservatives, they can use that beachhead to resist, or perhaps partially to reverse, the unpleasant changes occurring in the larger society. I suppose I should be heartened by their affirmation of my own belief that SF and fantasy stories can make an impact on mainstream thought and politics. Marxists, of course, have long understood that stories and other cultural institutions determine the desirability and limits of change within a society, and thus the extent to which people can redistribute power. Conservative authors like C.S. Lewis and Orson Scott Card learned this lesson some time ago, and they and their latter-day followers are playing the Gramscian culture game to win. Those who enjoy science fiction and fantasy stories, or whose loved ones enjoy them, ought to bear in mind that these have never been apolitical genres, and that today there are well-organized people who want them all to serve a retrograde political agenda.

C.S. Lewis Redux: On Your Knees and Forget the Fees

In her ongoing takedown of C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, Ana Mardoll noted a peculiar declaration made by Lewis's co-protagonist Eustace Scrubb. Eustace had been a liberal atheist in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but during and after that story he became an "Aslanite," and decided to regard his involuntary voyage with King Caspian as an ennobling religious adventure. Early in Silver Chair, meeting with a potentially helpful "Parliament of [Talking] Owls," Eustace felt obliged to tell the conclave that he was "the King's man" and suspected them of conspiring against the king. Mardoll interpreted this as an assertion of privilege - male, human, and class privilege (trifecta!) - and I think that's an insightful finding. I would like to add, though, that Lewis was also weighing in against deliberative, representative bodies, against parliaments of all kinds, and in favor of kings and royalists.

Lewis had been increasingly willing to display his royalism in the Narnia novels. He had inserted a billet-doux to monarchy into Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remarking that the Pevensie children's return to Narnia "was as if King Arthur came back to Britain...And I say the sooner the better." The rest of that novel's plot, as Mardoll observed, Lewis predicated on the right of kings to place their personal whims above the needs and safety of their own people. Well before writing the Narnia novels, though, Lewis had matured in a Britain whose elite viewed democratic government with suspicion and the monarchy as, if not irreproachable, then at least an exalted estate unjustly threatened by Parliament. England's Parliament had fought two civil wars with kings in the 17th century, toppling one and beheading another, and had subsequently taken control of the royal purse, the armed forces, and even the terms of the royal succession. Meanwhile, Liberal and Tory politicians took turns crafting the myth of a patriot king, a monarch who stood above politics and truly represented the national spirit. This image, as Walter Bagehot and Douglas Adams observed, helped distract the public from the colorless men who actually held power, but it also slowly undermined the respectability of Parliament. Small wonder that an elitist like Lewis, or one of his mouthpiece characters, would consider a parliament grubby, furtive, and disreputable, little more than a band of (WAIT FOR IT) Owl-iver Cromwells.

In his earlier work, Lewis made an even more explicit case for monarchy than he did in the Narnia novels. In his 1943 essay on "Equality," Lewis described monarchy as part of God's plan for the world, a plan based on the due subordination of all lesser mortals to their superiors: of men to kings, women to men, students to teachers, and animals to humans. What made this plan unworkable, the amateur theologian argued, was the Fall: after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge, corruption entered the world, power decoupled from divine right, and one could no longer safely grant unrestrained authority to anyone. Rights, whether or subjects or women or animals, came to replace divine right. But both civil rights and liberal participatory government were, to borrow Paine's phrase, "the badges of lost innocence." Both were necessary, but only in the sense that clothing or medicine were necessary; neither nourished the spirit or contributed to individual happiness. Personal and spiritual fulfillment, Lewis argued, could only come from private subordination: the self-abasement of worshipers before their gods, the admiration of commoners for royalty, the submission of women to their husbands. No-one can know true happiness unless he, or especially she, learns to grovel.

This last point helps illustrate why Mardoll and other readers have found the Chronicles of Narnia so problematic. Lewis's medievalism, his monarchism, his love of irresponsible privilege and an authoritarian God, and his contempt for women (like Susan Pevensie or the Head of Eustace's school), are of a piece. Equality and democracy are, he feels, ugly necessities, and those whom Lewis considers inferiors should acquire the habit of subordination, learn to kiss their chains in private even if they don't display them in public. It is not enough that subject peoples obey their betters - they must also learn to love them. The two are, indeed, one and the same thing, even in the realm of physical love: in that 1943 essay, Lewis argues that women cannot find sexual fulfillment unless they are dominated by their husbands.

Far be it from me to offer marital and relational advice to half the world's population, beyond acknowledging that that there is a fetish for just about everyone, and that there is almost certainly a constituency, though probably not a large one, for Fifty-Shades-of-C.S.-Lewis cosplay. The difference between me and Lewis is that he knows, absolutely, what will appeal to all women in the bedroom, what the best way is to manage all children's schools, what form of government will make everyone happy, and what kind of deity is the best and only one. Such moral self-confidence may make one a productive writer or preacher, but it makes for a lousy teacher and adviser. It probably also makes one a lousy human being.

**

Above right: King George, C.S. Lewis's secret boyfriend.

Above left: C.S. Lewis gets the knout out of the bedroom cupboard.

Good News from Narnia

I am pleased to report, belatedly, that Ana Mardoll has resumed her extended critique of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia with a chapter-by-chapter commentary, already well advanced, of The Silver Chair. This is exciting news to Your Humble Narrator, as this fourth volume of the Chronicles was my favorite of the series. As Mardoll explains, it's the one that most closely resembles a "Tolkienesque" adventure story, with fell wildernesses, fearsome giants, a mysterious underground city, and unlikely heroes seeking a lost prince. It is one of the few C.S. Lewis novels whose heroes I like, probably because Eustace and Jill were raised as liberal atheists and Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle is reliably gloomy and curmudgeonly. It is also just as morally problematic as its predecessors: Lewis remains monstrously unkind to his heroes, and his Christ-analogue Aslan is even more of an authoritarian, unhelpful As-hole (so to speak) than usual.

I am particularly glad to share this news because Mardoll had announced last fall that she was withdrawing from blogging, due to a spate of online bullying that had become intolerable. I am glad that she has bravely chosen to re-engage and apply her critical intelligence to the Narnia books, which we too often  recommend to children without understanding the many morally toxic lessons that Lewis wants them to learn. Personally, I can't wait for Mardoll's deconstruction of The Last Battle, the most blatantly racist and misogynist volume of the series.

Saga: Where Power Lies in Stories and Cats Won't Let You Lie

There are many ways to explain the appeal of Saga, the hit graphic-novel series by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples, which has sold over one million copies (by Your Humble Narrator's estimate) since its debut in 2012. Most explanations lead back to the authors' attempts to answer a central question of the sci-fi genre: what happens when ideas become real? And can one introduce a healthy dose of reality into idealized forms of fiction, like love stories and war stories and adventure stories? The answer to the last question is clearly “yes.” Twenty-five issues in, Vaughan and Staples's series remains as exciting as ever, while retaining its commitment to the authors' initial questions and principles.

What makes Saga unusual is the authors' refusal to bind themselves to a clichéd, shopworn definition of “realism.” The core human-interest story of the series is the relationship between Alana, ex-soldier from the high-tech world of Landfall, and Marko, ex-prisoner from the “magic” (or “exotic-matter”) -using people of Wreath, Landfall's moon. Vaughan and Staples clearly had Romeo & Juliet in mind when writing the series, but Alana and Marko are too busy running for their lives, and too busy raising their baby Hazel, to waste much time on moonlight and poetry. Theirs is an earthy relationship, defined by blood and dirty diapers and furtive sex and the all-too-occasional hot shower or peaceful meal with family members. On the other hand, both lovers recognize that romantic ideals are important, insofar as they first bond with one another over a romance novel, A Nighttime Smoke, that Alana reads to Marko while he is a POW. On the third hand, the novel's author, D. Oswald Heist, appears about midway through the series as a major character, equal parts genius and drunk. Heist indicates that there's both more and less to his novel than meets the eye; it's both a cheap potboiler and a veiled statement of Heist's philosophy of love and war. The core relationship of Saga, the story that created that relationship, and the author of the story, are all bundles of contradictions.

The series' setting, an interstellar civilization convulsed by the Landfall-Wreath war, reflects the tensions and contradictions within the authors' vision of reality. Terrible things happen on the worlds of Saga: world-spanning symbionts turn unwitting visitors into killers, children are sold into sexual slavery, animated skeletons attack those who disturb their boneyards, poison gas attacks blow up non-combatants' heads, landmines cut teenagers in half, and giant space babies (or “Timesucks”) destroy starships with black space goo. Vaughan and Staples could easily have turned this universe into a dystopia, but instead they infuse the grittier details of the milieu into a setting with many of the features of a children's book. Staples uses a bright, colorful palette, and paints worlds not merely wondrous but almost-unbelievable: thousand-faceted “Clockwork Stars,” pleasure-worlds with moon-sized spangles and signs, and moons that become giant eggs. Most of the universe's intelligent inhabitants, moreover, are humanoid-animal hybrids, mouse-headed medics and diminutive walrus-herding seal-men and the like. This makes them seem more childish and “cute” than humans; even a belligerent rhino-headed prisoner amuses us when he smilingly tells Prince Robot IV how many robots his men once buried. It's worth noting, too, that the more monstrous aspects of Saga's universe all have justification for their actions. The aforementioned giant space baby attacks our protagonists' spaceships because they set off a missile near its head. Planetary symbionts turn visitors against one another because they want to incorporate the survivors into their ecosystem. Skeletons attack intruders reflexively, without malice. There are no intrinsically evil races in Saga. Hazel's babysitter, Izabel, makes this point the first time she meets Alana and Marko and learns that they refers to her race of psychic ghosts as Horrors. “'Horrors,'” she replies, “ is that...what you guys call indigenous peoples? That's kind of racist.”

Why then do people do evil things? The greatest evil in Saga is the war between Wreath and Landfall, which is a very modern conflict: little chivalry, constant atrocities, and a huge accountability gap between home-world civilians' experience of the war and the pain and violence their soldiers inflict on others. Vaughan and Staples haven't told us much yet about the causes of the conflict, and their narrator, future-Hazel, tells us early on that “It was a time of war – isn't it always?” But we have a few clues. Vez, the woman who hires The Will to kill Alana and Marko, tells him that our heroes' relationship and child violate Wreath's “Narrative,” which suggests that Wreath is fighting the war for the sake of a story. Another mercenary, The Brand, tells two journalists that Wreath and Landfall both want the star-crossed lovers neutralized because they don't fit into the warring worlds' approved narrative - “It's the stories with no sides that worry them.” Stories, in the form of the virtual-reality costume dramas broadcast on the interstellar Open Circuit, anesthetize home-worlders and distract them from the battles fought and bodies broken on their behalf. Even the least human-seeming race in Saga, the television-headed robots whose prince numbers among Alana and Marko's pursuers, seem lost in their own fantasies, fragments of which periodically flicker across their face screens. Stories, Vaughan and Staples tell us, are both powerful and dangerous. They can make us love, like Heist's novel, or make us fight, and each of these leads to crude and permanent consequences. Hazel, of course, is one of those consequences, and since she's the narrator, she and the authors tend to favor the love-and-babies kind of stories. I'm not one to say that's a bad thing, particularly since there's hardly a shortage of guts-and-glory war stories in comic-book form.

**

P.S.: One can't finish an article about Saga without mentioning Lying Cat, the giant lie-detecting blue cat who accompanies The Will. Apart from occasionally advancing the plot, Lying Cat's main function is to help protect the main characters and please the audience.

(The first image above, the cover of Saga issue 1, is by Fiona Staples and is licensed under Fair Use via Wikipedia. The second, of authors Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples (New York, Oct. 2012) is licensed under Creative Commons by Luigi Novi.)