APRIL 14, 2010
107. Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, Jay Scheib’s play of Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren
When I posted on my LiveJournal that there was a play version of Dhalgren, one of my friends thought it was an April Fool. Dhalgren’s more than 800 pages long, a cult classic, it really doesn’t seem like something that could be adapted for a stage version. Since it had been, I felt I had to go—indeed, since it was there and I could, that it would be irresponsible not to. So I went to New York on the train, and last Saturday evening ten of us went to an avant-garde theatre called The Kitchen to see Bellona, Destroyer of Cities.
The first thing is that it was Dhalgren. It felt like Dhalgren. What it felt like was quite familiar to me—it was just like when you go to see a Shakespeare play where they’ve cut some scenes, set it in a different period, switched the gender of some characters and conflated others. You want to argue with their choices, but that argument doesn’t stop it being a legitimate version of the play. And that’s just how this was. There were things I liked and things I didn’t like, things that worked, odd choices, things that got left out or underplayed that I’d have kept, but it was inarguably Dhalgren, and that’s really quite an achievement.
The set was the skeleton of buildings, with some walls present, so you could partly see in. Things happening that you couldn’t see could sometimes be seen on a big screen, so your attention was constantly divided. I often don’t like this kind of technique, but it worked really well for this material. A couple of other effective theatrical things were a character in a spacesuit being carried by two other characters as if weightless and floating, and Eddy flinging himself around and slamming himself to the floor. Most of the sex happens in flashes in the back room and is incomprehensible and multiplex, just like in the book. I loved the way we kept seeing the original Dhalgren cover, first on the floor behind a sex scene on the screen, and then as the cover of the poetry book.
When you reverse genders, you learn an awful lot about gender expectations. Charm, which the Kid has, is an expected quality in women, less so in men. So making her a woman made her much more conventional. The same goes for sexual receptivity—the Kid doesn’t initiate but falls into what sex comes along. I think she’s a less interesting character as female. You also lose a lot of the queer stuff, especially as they chose to leave out the threesome and the whole dynamic of that. The thing I didn’t immediately notice is that the same goes for violence. In the book, Kid is beaten up, but later is violent himself, in the Scorpion runs, and mugging a guy. Here we see the beating, but not any of the performative violence. This changes the balance. I know why they did it. There’s a way in which the plot of Dhalgren wraps—not just the Joycean beginning with “to wound the autumnal city” and ending with “I have come” but the parallel scenes and dialogue with the people leaving/arriving as Kid arrives/leaves. Those people are women when Kid is a man, and so it must have seemed like a great idea to have a female Kid and another iteration. But Delany had already been reversing expectations. Taking a largely passive gentle poet and making him female plays into stereotypes and expectations, not against them, and they could have done with more awareness of that.
Most of the play is very close to the book, but with very different pacing. Much of the dialogue is straight off the page. Characters are conflated, huge chunks are left out, but I could always see why they’d done it—and with all that, it’s really surprisingly true to the original. Dhalgren’s a book with a lot in it, and because of its Moebius spiral structure it’s hard to say what’s essential. I have no idea how comprehensible the play would have been without the novel breathing down its shoulder. But they gave us the ruined city, the spiral, the whole thing with the poetry, the elevator shaft, George and June, and the vexed question of shots and the riot.
What we didn’t have was science fiction. All the things that make Dhalgren take place in the vague future—the holograms, the orchids, the chain with prisms and mirrors and lenses—were left out. Instead of science fiction’s promise of answers just out of sight, the play gave us magic realism, or maybe magic surrealism. I’d been wondering how they were going to do the holograms, which are very important to the novel, and had thought of several ways that would work. I was sorry but not distressed—what bothered me was replacing the orchid with a gun. Mind you, it bothers me when they replace swords with guns in Shakespeare plays, and for the same reason—it’s a different distance of violence. Delany deliberately gives the Scorpions claws, not guns, there’s a scene in the book where they explicitly repudiate a gun. It’s strange that they got some of the hardest stuff so right and then did this. Oh well.
The actors were all very good and the doubling was clear and effective. The run is over, or I’d recommend it. Perhaps it will be revived. It was Dhalgren, and I’m very glad I saw it.
JUNE 4, 2010
108. Not much changes on the street, only the faces: George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails
When Gravity Fails was published in 1987 and its future has dated astonishingly well. Indeed, it seems much more plausible as the future of 2010 than it did when I first read it in 1988—though it doesn’t seem as if it will take as long as 2172 to get there. The Soviet Union has disintegrated at some point in the past into numerous splinter successor states. The United States has done the same, and so has the European Union, mostly splintering down beyond the country level—but Germany has reunited. The Islamic world looks on with hungry eyes. Meanwhile, everyone has a mobile phone, direct neural interfacing using modular personalities (“moddys”) and add-ons (“daddies”) is common, and gender reassignment (male to female or female to male) is optional, effective, and easy, but expensive. Marid Audran, son of a Fellahin mother and a French father, is just trying to make a living as a private investigator in an unnamed North African city somewhere east of Algiers, when his life gets complicated by a series of murders. It has barely dated at all.
I originally picked it up back in 1988 because the notion of a noir detective in an Islamic future intrigued me, and I bought it because the first paragraph just totally hooked me.
Chiriga’s nightclub was right in the middle of the Budayeen, eight blocks from the Eastern gate, eight blocks from the cemetery. It was handy to have the graveyard so close-at-hand. The Budayeen was a dangerous place and everyone knew it. That’s why there was a wall around three sides. Travelers were warned away from the Budayeen, but they came anyway. They’d heard about it all their lives and they were damned if they were going home without seeing it for themselves. Most of them came in the Eastern gate and started up the Street curiously; they’d begin to get a little edgy after two or three blocks, and they’d find a place to sit and have a drink or eat a pill or two. After that they’d hurry back the way they’d come, and count themselves lucky to get back to the hotel. A few weren’t so lucky and stayed behind in the cemetery. Like I said, it was a very conveniently located cemetery and saved trouble all around.
Effinger’s writing on the word and sentence level is just beautiful, the voice is perfect, and remains so all the way through, and the way he wraps the theme around there is what he does in the whole book. This was a book that couldn’t have happened without cyberpunk, but that itself isn’t cyberpunk. There are no hackers here, and almost no computers—though it feels reasonable for the Budayeen that there wouldn’t be. Holoporn, yes, drugs to get you up or down, prostitutes of all genders and some in between, personality modules of anything from salesmen to serial killers via sex kittens, but no computers. The Street is what comes from cyberpunk, and perhaps the neural wiring, a little. But what Effinger does with it, making it a North African street that really feels like something out of the future of another culture, is entirely his own. Effinger said the Budayeen was based on the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he lived, as much as it was based on anywhere, but it has the feel of a real place, grimy and edgy and rundown and full of the wrong sort of bars.
The detective story is just the
plot that keeps everything moving. The real story is about Marid Audran’s orbit through the Budayeen and himself. He solves the mystery, both mysteries, but that’s not the most important thing. The book’s title, which sounds so solidly science-fictional, is from Dylan: “when gravity fails and negativity won’t pull you through.” This is the story of what happens to you when that happens to you. Effinger could really write and he doesn’t pull his punches—this can be disturbing, and it’s all first person and very close at hand. It’s also very clever and darkly funny.
There are two sequels, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss. They’re just as brilliantly written, but I seldom re-read them. There are two reasons for that. The first is that When Gravity Fails stands alone pretty well, there’s room for more, certainly, but it finishes a trajectory. The three books taken together set up a new trajectory that aches for a fourth volume, which will never be completed due to the US’s lack of a decent health care system and Effinger’s consequent early death in 2002. The other reason is that the second and third book get very bleak, and I don’t always have the fortitude for that.
JUNE 8, 2010
109. History inside out: Howard Waldrop’s Them Bones
Howard Waldrop is known for his imaginative and quirky short stories, Them Bones (1984) is his only solo novel. It’s also original and quirky and weird, and I love it to bits and always have. There’s an overall frame story about people in the dying post-nuclear horror of 2002 trying to go back in time to change the past that led to their future, but the real story is in three strands. There’s the story of Yazoo, the advance scout who winds up in an alternate world, and there’s the story of Bonnie and her group of soldiers who end up in the thirteenth century, and there’s the story of Bessie and the archaeologists in 1929 who find something quite impossible when excavating a Mound Builder mound. These three strands alternate and interweave, so by the end of the book the reader knows everything without necessarily having been told everything. What makes this book so great is Waldrop’s knowledge of history and masterful interweaving of stories to make them more than the sum of their parts.
This is a book I tend to remember as lighter than it is. Actually it’s full of whistling past the graveyard—all the worlds in it are ending. The future world is hardly sketched in, it’s assumed to be the default world the reader knows—in 1984 we were still regularly waking up from nightmares of nuclear destruction. Its future can go with Varley’s “Air Raid” which also uses time travel to try to save humanity.
The worlds of the past are seen in much greater detail, particularly the Mound Builder culture in the alternate world in which Yazoo finds a home. Waldrop makes the details of daily life in that world seem very real. It also does a lot with our assumptions about pre-Columbian America and timelessness—this is an alternate history that’s part of a complex changing dynamic culture that has traditions and innovations. It too is ending, with the introduction of plagues and wars—though why they have come now and not thirty years before when the traders first visited isn’t clear. There’s a lovely passage where the Greek-speaking Islamic traders give Yazoo an update on history on their side of the Atlantic—no Alexander, Carthage beat Rome, no Christianity, science has continued to advance slowly but surely. Waldrop’s well aware that his average reader will be far better historically educated about this kind of thing than about the American cultures Yazoo has found and he’s teasing us with this. It’s the Mound Builder culture we see in detail and that really comes to life here.
The world of 1929 archaeology is also seen in fascinating detail—shellacking the anomalous horse bones—Bessie the female archaeologist and her male colleagues are working against time as the rains come to flood their site and wash away all their evidence. The story of the excavation interlocks with Bonnie’s diary and the duty rosters of the camp—we’re hearing what happened to the Americans in the past both from their own notes and from Bessie’s excavations. What we don’t know is whether this 1929 is part of our world, or part of the world they came from, or whether these are the same. It reads like our 1929, and there’s nothing to indicate that their 2002 wasn’t supposed to be our 2002, but they could both be slightly different worlds. Certainly time travel doesn’t work the way they think it does—they were aiming for the 1940s. Maybe the future is easy to change, and maybe your own past is impossible to reach. The set of quotations used to start the book and as chapter headings strongly suggest the latter. Bonnie and her soldiers are lightly sketched, seen more in shadow than in substance, though the throwaway bit about the Book of Mormon is amazing.
A normal book about modern Americans thrown into the past would be like S. M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time or Eric Flint’s 1632, and comparing those to Them Bones really highlights some things. Firstly, those are books about success, about Americans winning, whereas this very much is about people setting off to change the past and finding themselves swallowed up in it. Secondly, they’re books about modern Americans interacting with Europeans in the past, while this really isn’t. There is an Aztec interlude in ISOT, but it’s an interlude to the main plot. In Them Bones, the Arab traders are an interlude in the important interactions with the Americans of the past.
Them Bones was published as one of Terry Carr’s Ace Science Fiction specials, and it starts with a heartening little introduction which says how science fiction is in the doldrums and needs originality and shaking up. It’s always cheering to read things like that from thirty years ago and note that the genre is still here.
JUNE 10, 2010
110. I’d love this book if I didn’t loathe the protagonist: Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s Household Gods
Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s Household Gods is a well-written book that always annoys the heck out of me. I thought about it after finishing Them Bones and wondering what other stories have time travel that doesn’t achieve anything.
Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a lawyer in Los Angeles, and she’s the most irritating person you could ever spend a whole book with. Usually when fans call people “mundanes” in a sneering way it makes me recoil, but in Nicole we have a character who truly is mundane, or even a caricature of a mundane. She has no curiosity, no education (about anything other than her specialty, law), no idea how anything works, and poor social skills. Worst of all she’s so self-centered, you can hardly escape her gravity well.
She needs to be like that for the plot to work—divorced with two little kids, passed over for promotion, she prays to the Roman gods Liber and Libera, about whom she knows essentially nothing beyond their names, for them to send her back to their time. They kindly do, sending her back to the body of an ancestress, Umma, in Carnuntum on the borders of the Roman Empire in the time of Marcus Aurelius. There, instead of behaving like any other protagonist of this kind of novel, she freaks out at the lice, disease, death, invasions, and sexism, and longs to be back in California. In some ways, yes, it’s refreshing to have a time travel book where the protagonist doesn’t know everything about history and technology and invent ninety-eight things and save the day, but did it have to be the one where the protagonist is a girl?
The good thing about this book is the background. Nicole finds herself in the body of Umma, a widowed tavern keeper in Roman Carnuntum. She’s given the ability to speak Latin, but nothing else. She has to cope with Umma’s life and responsibilities and problems. Carnuntum feels real in every detail, the baths, the tavern, the lives and relationships and attitudes of the other characters. As a story about how people lived at the edge of the Roman Empire, it’s brilliant. That’s why I kept reading it the first time and why I have re-read it since. (The rest of it is so good that I tend to forget between times just how annoying Nicole is.) T. Calidius Severus the dyer, his son Caius, Julia the slave who is afraid to be freed, Umma’s children, her brother, her neighbours, even Marcus Aurelius—they’re all wonderfully real, and especially nice to spend time with because they’re not Nicole.
The problem with it
is that ignorant selfish Nicole constantly gets in the way with her ridiculous attitudes. She sees a legionary soldier and thinks, “Didn’t Rome have a Vietnam to teach them about the horrors of war?” She has no idea that while in her own time there’s a glass ceiling, in the time she’s come to women are legally chattels of men. Her father was an alcoholic, so she’s horrified to see people drinking wine. I’d like the book more if I didn’t feel that the entire novel is setup for her to be as ignorant and annoying as possible and then Learn A Lesson. This is a personal fulfillment story, and indeed she learns a lesson and is personally fulfilled, but I still want to kick her. Some of the lessons she learns—about the army protecting the town, about wine being safer than water, about science and technology making the world safer and more equal—are obvious. Some others, such as the bit about the benefits of smacking children, are odder, by which I mean that I don’t agree.
Mild spoilers ahead. Though mostly they’re the kind of spoiler I got for Card’s Alvin Maker books when I discovered from external sources that William Henry Harrison was elected president and then died.…
The accounts of the pestilence and the invasion and the famine are vivid and individual. This is the kind of writing that’s very difficult to do well, and Tarr and Turtledove carry it off perfectly—these are the kind of close-up personal views of history happening that make it seem real. The same goes for the encounter with Marcus Aurelius, with his famous personal integrity. This is the kind of encounter with a “celebrity” that often weights a story in the wrong way, but here it’s excellent.