Right now, I'm trying to finish a 'dissertation' on Postcolonialism, Science Fiction and Animal Rights. I'm doing it on Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, and in the process, reading up on a fascinating array of texts. Alongside writing the paper, I'm also watching Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, something I've followed on and off, but never regularly. It does live up to its hype: its well written, well animated, and the Elric brothers have a certain edge to them most anime protagonists lack.

In some ways, I'm at my happiest when I'm steeped in work. But not just any sort of work: stuff I think is worth doing. Whether it pays off or not is not in my control.

Note to self: Space Adventure Cobra looks to be another fun anime.

M John Harrison's Empty Space is a book I wish I understood more of. I am certain there is so much more going on beneath the beautiful exterior of Harrison's prose, but do not have the time to look into it now. But it was a beguiling read, and a very strange end to a very strange trilogy.

Empty Space
In the Company of Animals
Beast and Man
Postcolonial Ecocriticism
The Ecocriticism Reader
The Lives of Animals
Human, All Too Human
Six Moon Dance
The Word for World is Forest
Embassytown

The Carriage

The carriage with the striking man and the something inside turned up in our village one warm April afternoon. The man was in his thirties, and yet he looked dead. Like something was leeching off of him every day. The beast inside was a pathetic little thing, in one corner of a untidy cage, but one look at his eyes told you it was not only good at surviving, it enjoyed the squalor and the filth. It was happy, in other words, regardless of the messiness of it all.

I remember the night all of us sat around the carriage and the man began his show. He opened his mouth as if meaning to speak, but only ever let out a wail.

No tears fell from his eyes; his expression was unchanged. But the voice did something to all of us.

Some thought this was all part of the show. Some, that the man was dumb, and was obviously asking for money for a creature he loved, but could no longer take care of.

But none of us could get up, or move away, or ignore him. He had us rooted to the spot, not exactly in terror, but out of something that approached curiosity, but stopped just short of the kind of enthusiasm curiosity could engender.

Me and my older brother sneaked out to where they were camping out, in the last and only night of their stay. The cage, as we had suspected, had been unlocked all along. The creature was still in there, in the filth and rubbish. We felt we should clean it up, and we did too. It took us the better part of an hour, at the most. The man had been sitting outside, smoking. He didn't stop us, or say anything, and we'd suspected this as well.

My brother had fallen asleep inside the carriage with the creature. I'd gone back home a long time ago, since I'd be missed. At dawn, I sneaked out to find the man lying exactly where he was, dead. And the carriage nowhere in sight. My brother had left with it, and the creature inside.

We never did figure out what the man had tried to say. But we gave him a decent burial. As for my brother, he had never been the sort to stay put. If not for this, something would have drawn him away eventually.

The Third

Often, when I was small, me and a friend would run off to the extreme end of the playing field, between classes, and mull around a tomb.

Or, at least, we thought it was one. None of us ever really figured out. It was a block of concrete covering a rectangular hole in the ground, and with time, rumours had sprung up around it. For us, it was our very own secret: we pretended to know something about it, yet, strangely enough, it only ever formed a backdrop to our conversations. We rarely talked about the tomb, or what could be in it, or whether the rumours had any truth to them.

Quite frankly, it was the replacement for an absent third someone, the vital third presence every friendship needs. It was a silent spectator to conversations which found themselves desperately in need of an arbiter who would not judge.

Many, many years later, we would go in search of that arbiter, someone we had befriended, who had actually materialized out of nowhere in school, and then disappeared again one day. Much later, we would find him on an island very far away from where we used to stay, living by himself in a hut, leading a simple, if frugal, existence.

Surrounding his hut were two statues, green and mouldy, and they looked astonishingly old. Again, we weren't very surprised to find that not only had he not questioned their roots, he had no intention to. The two statues faced away from his hut, and stared into the sea.

The day we visited him, we found ourselves sitting together, him by himself, and the two of us on the laps of the two statues.

"To me, they served quite nicely...so nicely, I hardly found myself missing the two of you."

We weren't offended by his words in the least. That's how he was. But, at the same time, we remember never having gone back to the tomb, after we got to know him. Not when he'd arrived, not when he left, and never in between, or after.

Spider

I stay in a damp, one room apartment with a spider. The room, even a year back, was nothing to write home about: it has its usual drawbacks. Its too small, it doesn't receive enough light, there's a smell of something rotting coming from under somewhere but I never found the cause. All it has in it is a bed, and a table with a light on it. And my room mate.

I don't like my room mate. He drinks too much, he doesn't bathe nearly as often as he should, and on top of that, he reads four books at a time simultaneously. He has too much hair on his body. I don't mind the hair. I don't mind his eating habits either, for he cleans up after he's done and everything. I just don't like it that he can read so much, so quickly, so effortlessly, while I have so much trouble parsing words nowadays.

Yes, come to think of it, I don't mind him drinking or not taking baths either.

But time does things to a room. Maybe its not so much a room, as the people staying in it, but I'm convinced that what might start off as residing safely within someone's imagination, soon begins to manifest itself in actual physical reality.

I don't know what spiders think. One would assume its all flies, and webs and bloody instinct. But I'm not very sure at all. In fact, why simply spiders, and that too, ones that read? I don't think its possible to ever determine what anyone thinks, unless they make something out of it.

My roommate has been stringing books on the walls, of late, on webs. They hang ominously, carcasses of reads sucked dry in a matter of a few hours. They have been building up for a year, and that too, so very gradually that it was only yesterday that I realized that my dank room has changed, been given something of a make-over. This is what it looks like now, with us in it.

Spiders don't speak very well. They just tend to read...a lot. But my roommate told me yesterday that I can add to the decor if I like. Its the first thing he's said to me in ages. But I think I'll take his advice.

Another thing: it struck me all of a sudden how fun it used to be, back when calling up your friends to talk with wasn't quite as popular or widespread, to be able to hold onto a story, or an anecdote till the next day at school, when you could talk about it with the added pleasure of having anticipated your friends's reactions to your story, or joke, and seeing it actually come true.

Small things which change with time. But what a difference they make in the long run.

Only Forward

Reading Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward is like a revelation of sorts. And to think I didn't even know who this guy was in the first place! All hail the internet and the powers that be in the form of book review forums and websites.

Also, the book is reminding me strongly of a period in my school life when my primary obsessions were anime and reading. This was back in Class 9. And anime was probably my first proper introduction to all things cyberpunk. I got around to science fiction and Bill Gibson much, much later, and Neuromancer isn't exactly the most accessible read for someone who was a bit of a noob when it came to these things. Now I can appreciate what an impact that novel might have had, but not so much back then.

Well, the experience of reading Only Forward is akin to a sustained, happy surge of memory. It features a kind of energetic, entertaining writing I haven't come across in science fiction in forever. Cancel that: I haven't had this much fun reading a book since...since....

Shit. When's the last time I had fun reading?

Having typed this, I go over to my Goodreads account and find that, with a few exceptions, most of the stuff I've been reading of late have been very...heavy. Very very well written perhaps, not to mention disturbing. You could say I had fun with Stepan Chapman's The Troika, or Coetzee's Disgrace, or Kafka's The Castle, but it would call for an entire redefinition of 'fun'. Not one of them was as viscerally entertaining as Smith's novel. Its like PKD on steroids. Very reminiscent of Ubik, too, which can only be a good thing!

Okay, maybe Light by M John Harrison was the one exception. But Harrison's prose, while never measured enough to feel stilted or not smooth flowing, wasn't as consistently full of wit.

Its good to be a reader! Thank you Mr. Smith!

A pet bird died today, in my hands. I think I felt somewhat like a robot who hadn't been programmed to deal with something like Death. I think, at that instant, I had an expression on my face very similar to that of the robot's, in the second panel. 

The Troika

The Troika by Stepan Chapman will throw most science fiction fans for a loop. Its a prime example of that kind of science fiction, when you inherently know it to be so, without being able to pinpoint exactly why. For this novel is a virtual treasury of sf and fantasy conventions, flitting from one to the other seamlessly and frighteningly, without notice. Just when you think you've started figuring it all out, Chapman pulls the rug from beneath your feet and forces you to reconsider everything all over again. The fact that you can still label it SF draws attention to the fact that science fiction is less a genre than an attitude.

The author clearly does not want you to rest easy and enjoy the ride without requiring something of you first. That something is a kind of surrender that only the most fervent SF reader might be willing to undergo. Its difficult to appreciate this book otherwise, or even, for that matter, begin critiquing it. Its not the kind of blind faith that goes unrewarded, however: there is a major payoff in the end, but to what extent it is successful shall largely depend upon the reader's attitude towards not just the novel, but also the novel format.

Each chapter of The Troika begins with a quote from either Carroll's Alice in the Wonderland, or Edward Lear, or some other writer of surreal or nonsensical prose and poetry. And, indeed, Carroll is quite evidently a very large influence on Chapman. Carroll's skills lay in his being able to talk about a reality that, however chaotic and irrational, had a larger underlying truth which went beyond physics, or even semantic consistency. It is one of Language's eternal strengths and weaknesses that it can so accurately delineate an abstraction, while entirely missing the mark from a logical standpoint. This has been a topic of endless fascination for writers, and SF in particular has found ample opportunity to fictionally experiment with the impact language has, or can potentially have, on our lives, in books such as Babel-17 by Delany and, more recently, Embassytown by China Mieville. The Troika does not deal directly with the nature of language, for that is not one of its themes, but it exhibits a kind of exuberant recklessness, disregard and faith in Language's capabilities that lifts it much higher than an experimental novel done for experimentation's sake. The several intertwining stories in the novel (narrated by a jeep-that-was-once-a-man called Alex, an old mexican woman-who-was-once-fish-priestess called Eva, and the girl-who-is-also-an-apatosaur named Naomi) all contradict each other, and themselves. Contradiction is usually one of the first sure-shot signs of experimental fiction: just when the reader is getting comfortable, a plot point that has no bearing or relevance with what has gone on before throws him off balance, and reminds him blatantly that this is cutting-edge-edge -of-the-seat stuff. But these can get terribly self indulgent. Chapman, initially fits this category quite nicely. He is nothing if not self indulgent. He dips into familiar terrain for his imagery: dinosaurs, cybernetic prosthetics, genetically modified beastmen, and even Japanese horror. He is also quite fond of his Kafka and Beckett (but then again which writer worth his salt isn't?). But it is to Chapman's credit that in spite of not being able to introduce any startlingly new conceit to science fiction, his treatment of the imagery feels jarringly original. This is completely because of his fearlessness in jumping from one style of narrative to another, and his mastery of the three voices which feature so prominently in this tale. He proves, as has been proven time and time again by great SF authors, that characterization is still worth a lot in SF.

But character development, on the other hand, isn't his strong point. There is very little in the way of that here. That, one could argue, is kind of missing the point, but it'd have been nice to have seen some kind of progression, in spite of all the frenetic jumping about from one body to another, and the role reversals. Also underwhelming were the sections dealing with Mazer and his fellow Angels, humans (apparently) with supernatural abilities in charge of running the world our three protagonists find themselves stranded in without any warning. They seem strictly by the numbers and feel like an afterthought, added to serve as an armature for the story.

However, things do make sense in the end. Not completely, but enough to make you want to sit back and wonder if you'll ever want to reread this one again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SiiwEciFs

The Image

An image is a beautiful thing. Spare, solid, independent. The need to interpret gives way to the simple joy to be had in the primacy of the image itself.

This is why I like it when authors are spare with their prose. If the author writes science fiction, or fiction of the fantastic, then its absolutely incredible when he manages to pull the story off in spare, direct, imagistic prose.

I'm reading The Troika by Stepan Chapman. Not very long ago, I finished Nova Swing by M John Harrison. Both of these authors value the worth and the power of the image. They'll let the scenes linger on in your head, unimpeded by the narration. The previous book is about a brontosaurus, a jeep and a mexican woman crossing a desert. The latter, a homage to SF and noir thrillers in the form of a mystery with no solution.

These are not perfect books, by any means. Its very difficult to sustain the surreal. Which is probably why authors of the fantastic feel so much at home with the short story.

But some manage to almost pull it off, and then you forgive them the sections which don't seem to go anywhere.

Boredom is often a necessity when it comes to good literature.

Sketches old and...well, mostly old

If we only spoke when we had something to say, we could hear the glaciers melt.