The All-Time Top 40: The Hole Man, Larry Niven (#41)

And so to the mid-70s. The New Wave had well and truly hit the beach by the time Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man" appeared in Analog. Dangerous Visions ⁽¹⁾ and Again, Dangerous Visions had been published, Tiptree's career was at it's height, and Le Guin, Wolfe and entire generation of writers who had been young turks in the late '60s were producing major works that stand today as some of the finest and most important in the history of the field.

Looking back, it seems like Larry Niven's cutting edge hard science fiction should have been perfect for John W. Campbell at Astounding, so I was surprised to find that most of his early major stories were published by Frederik Pohl at Worlds of If or Horace L. Gold at Galaxy, and that he only made his first appearance in Analog in 1972 with 'Known Space' story "Cloak of Anarchy" by which time he'd already won the Nebula award once and the Hugo Award three times.

"The Hole Man" was the second story that Niven sold to Ben Bova and it appeared in the January 1974 issue of Analog. The following year the members of the 1975 WorldCon in Melbourne, Australia voted it the best short story of the year over Nebula winner "The Day Before the Revolution" by Ursula Le Guin and stories by Michael Bishop, Alfred Bester, and Robert Silverberg. Niven himself is on record as saying of the win that "Out of five Hugo Awards, this is the only one that surprised me." Reading it today, it's not entirely surprising that he was surprised to find himself the winner that year.

The story opens onboard the Percival Lowell, an exploration craft orbiting Mars. We are quickly introduced to a crew of professional astronauts and scientists. During a final orbit of the red planet, one of the scientists notices a gravitic anomaly. Although he's known for eccentric theories, the captain agrees to an additional orbit so that the readings can be checked. The anomaly is confirmed and plans are changed. The Lowell sets down near the source of the anomaly, which quickly proves to be a long abandoned alien base. Niven keeps the focus of his story firmly on events in the base, ignoring any impact that this discovery may have had on the wider world, where it quickly becomes clear that the source of the gravitic anomaly is a communicator that may be powered by a quantum black hole. The relationship between the scientist investigating the communicator and the expedition's commander, which was antagonist from the start, quickly deteriorates to a murderous conclusion involving the scientist making a very definite point about the existence of his theoretical quantum black hole.

Hard science fiction is, in theory, about sticking closely to known science. In 1973 Niven met and interviewed Stephen Hawking, who outlined his theory of quantum black holes. Within a year or so Hawking has revised his theories, but Niven had used them for the basis for this short and rather direct crime story. It's something that does nothing to undercut the story, but does point to something that seems to be a problem with this and some other of Niven's stories. Reading "The Hole Man" you get the feeling that Niven created a puzzle - in this case how extremely small black holes might be used to dramatic ends - and then worked out a plot to hang on the puzzle.⁽²⁾ It was only having done so that he turned to character. The effect that this sometimes had was that it didn't seem that the story grew out of character and situation, but rather that character and situation were incidental. It may simply be a modern reader's complaint, but I felt that the same idea fully furnished with character and such could have been much more effective.

That said, "The Hole Man" is good, solid SF. It hasn't dated much since publication (other than Hawking's amendment to its underpinning theories), and reads fairly well. Interestly, it was published almost ten years after "The Coldest Place", and those two stories roughly bookend the most exciting part of Niven's career, when he burst out of the pages of Worlds of If, creating an incredible body of work that helped to reinvigorate hard SF. Those stories, which were collected in Neutron Star, A Hole In Space, and Convergent Series remain important and essential, even if this one seems a little less exciting thirty five years later.

Next: R.A. Lafferty's "Narrow Valley", one of my favorite short stories. I'll be checking back here every day for comments, but till then, see you next next time!

1. Niven's story "The Jigsaw Man" appeared in Dangerous Visions.
2. Honesty compels me to acknowledge that this observation came from conversations with Charles Brown.

The All-Time Top 40: The Pusher, John Varley (#42)

There are many writers who owe a debt to the late Robert A. Heinlein, and many who could legitimately be described as having been greatly influenced by his work. John Varley, who spent the '60s in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, is one of them.

Varley published his first short story in 1974, and then proceeded to unleash a string of stories through the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s that stand as one of the most consistently impressive bodies of short fiction ever published in the science fiction field. Those stories, which explore similar sexual and social themes to those that Heinlein had touched on his novels of the 1960s and 1970s, are collected in the collections In the Hall of the Martian Kings, The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, and Blue Champagne.

Varley won his first Hugo in 1979, and his most recent in 1985. The story I'm discussing this week, though, is his 1982 Hugo winner, "The Pusher". Published in the October 1981 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, "The Pusher" explores the social ramifications of a reasonably straight forward piece of science, wrapping it up in a story that is a study in how to write a disturbing piece of fiction.

Ian Haise is a 'pusher'. He works cleaning the stardrive compartments of a faster-than-light starship that makes regular runs from Earth to nearby trading posts. While each trip only takes several months for those on board, much more time passes at home because of time dilation. With each trip the impact of time passing becomes increasingly devastating, divorcing crew members (who spend their time 'pushing C') from people living on Earth (who are 'pulling gee').

The story opens with Haise searching for a playground. Immediately Varley has us on edge. When he writes that "Ian liked children", it suggests something unwholesome. And when he says "Ian concentrated on the girls. He'd tried boys with boys before, long ago, but it had not worked out" alarms bells are going off. He does nothing to silence those bells through the first several pages of the story as he shows Haise's search for a suitable young girl, his approach to her, and his attempts to win her confidence. Cleverly, Varley addresses the very concerns he raises when Haise considers the safety of the playground and the responsibility of the parents who let them play there. And bit by bit the story dances around the edge of the fear that it introduces - that Haise is in some sense a sexual predator - by showing us first that he has seemingly disturbing intentions, then that he is a likable and normal seeming character, before touching however briefly on the predator angle to make sure we remain on guard. It's only in the concluding part of the story, when the science fictional aspect of the story has been laid out fully, that he shows us the innocent, if odd, nature of Haise's motivation.

I first read "The Pusher" when it was collected in Blue Champagne in 1985, and to be honest I didn't really remember it. I think what impressed me the most, re-reading the story now, was how fresh it seemed. Varley cleverly avoids any real description of the technology in the story, focusing instead on its human aspects. This in essence future-proofs the story - something that sadly isn't true of a story like "Press Enter" which has dated less well. I don't know if it's the fact that I'm now a parent of young girls, but "The Pusher" got my hackles up very quickly and they stayed up through much of the story. It's a tribute to how well Varley handles the story that those concerns are effectively laid to rest by the time the story is done (in, if I'm right, a fairly brief seven thousand words).

Having now read it several times, I don't think "The Pusher" is one of Varley's very best stories, but I do think it deserved its Hugo Award and I am glad I re-read it for this project. Anyone who hasn't read it should grab a copy of The John Varley Reader and check it out.

Astute readers will note, by the way, that I'm late with this short review. My apologies for that. I'll try to be on time next week with Larry Niven's "The Hole Man". See you next week!

Any human heart

I'm at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, in Orlando, where Guy Gavriel Kay delivered yesterday a very interesting Guest of Honor speech. I'm going to try to try to paraphrase it from memory and sketchy notes, but please bear in mind that he spoke for half an hour, and I'm not going to get nearly that much text down here. Moreover, it was a speech carefully couched not as absolute rules or prescriptions but as questions to be thought about: I'm concerned that a summary will sound more categorical than the author intended. With those provisos, read on...

Kay began by talking about the notion of privacy in the abstract, particularly referring to the Talmudic condemnation of invasions of privacy as “the unwanted gaze”. Even, he argued, in our internet age, we should regard privacy as a right, to be given away only by an individual's choice. However, he suggested, recent trends in culture (and in particular celebrity culture) have introduced a “toxic” element into how we treat privacy. We feel a sense of entitlement – a word he returned to again and again – to knowledge (sometimes the most intimate knowledge) of public or historical figures. This, he suggested, was corrupting for us (would we want our own lives exposed in the same way?) and intrusive for the person concerned.

The core of the speech was a discussion of the use of real people as characters in fiction: a trend that he regarded as different in extent and depth now to, say, Shakespeare's depiction of then-recent events in his history plays. He specifically cited E L Doctorow's Ragtime as a turning-point in fictionalising real people, and also mentioned Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and Michael Cunningham's The Hours, with its astonishingly intimate depiction of Virginia Woolf's suicide. Without issuing an outright condemnation, Kay made it very clear that he regarded such use of historical figures as morally and ethically dubious, by the most basic standard: would we, as readers, want the same done to ourselves? He also dispensed with the argument that, just because the law says the dead can't sue for libel, such depictions are exempted from censure. Legal standards are not moral ones, and we should be guided by the moral before the legal.

Kay concluded by talking about ways in which the fantastic allows a way out of this trap. Far from being “escapist”, that old shibboleth, the fantastic can allow description of the issues at play in history without claiming to know the inner workings of real lives. Thus, in The Lions of Al-Rassan, his fantasy novel based on medieval Spain, Kay features a character based on El Cid. Even when he was writing the book, El Cid was a figure hugely contested by historians in Spain and elsewhere, partly for political and nationalistic reasons. So creating a character based on him rather than a direct portrayal allowed Kay a way out of the moral quagmire described above, but also made a statement about how he viewed history: it never allows us final answers, and fictionalisations of real people claim, in their literalness, an authority, a definitive perception of truth, which is simply not attainable.

End paraphrase. Several things to say. Firstly, Kay's concerns with privacy here are obviously cognate with those he expressed in his recent Globe and Mail article on fantasy fans demanding their sequels NOW! . Second, the opposition he set up between the fantastic and the mimetic doesn't quite pan out: if we were to take his strictures to heart, we'd have to dispense with almost all of the work of, say, Neal Stephenson, Howard Waldrop and Tim Powers. (That's leaving alone the entire genres that would have to go – all of “literal” historical fiction featuring real characters, and I'm passing over [because I don't want to take another thousand words] the use of real people in fan-fiction.) Third, I'm sympathetic to the axiom Kay is starting from – basically Henry James's line that you should “never say you know the whole truth about any human heart.” I share his disquiet at the entitlement with which we sometimes feel we have a right to the private lives of public figures. That said, I think even the qualified way in which he made his case has some problems with it. There is, surely, a moral difference between writing about the living and the dead, and not just because the dead can't sue. The dead are, in a sense, beyond being hurt by our words – though, as someone pointed out yesterday, plenty of living relatives of dead Titanic officers were offended by James Cameron's 1997 film. What's needed, with writing about the dead, is not abstinence but respect. (It will, of course, be to the individual's own taste what “respect” entails – hypothesizing about someone's sex life, or the reasons for their suicide? I'd say probably not, though that puts me in a bind since unlike John C Wright I do think sex and sexuality are central subjects for fiction.) One also has to recognise that history – real history, not history refracted – is an increasingly important subject for literature, presumably because writers and readers feel it's something they need art to make sense of. Of course, “importance” doesn't outweigh morality, but nor can it be ignored: why does our culture need to understand itself this way? Lastly – and I want to use Kayesque care in saying this – if one is a public figure, one has to accept that the public's scrutiny may not always be something one's happy with. You can't opt out of that, any more than a politician can ask the people only for praise. The question of what we, as readers, are content with in depictions of the historical is, I suspect, quite closely related to what we'd be happy to see in our journalism. I'm putting words into Kay's mouth now, but I think he was saying that we should draw a line between the National Enquirer approach and the New York Times approach in our fiction choices as much as our non-fiction ones. The catch, of course, is that a book isn't branded by its approach in the same way as a newspaper: you have to read it to know what you're reading.

Clarke Award shortlist

From a press release sent by the administrator of the Arthur C Clarke Award, Tom Hunter (links added by me):

Ian R. MacLeod, Paul McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson, Sheri S. Tepper and Mark Wernham are the six authors shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2009, the UK’s premier prize for science fiction literature.

The six shortlisted books are:

Song of Time: Ian R. MacLeod - PS Publishing (Amazon UK)
The Quiet War: Paul McAuley – Gollancz (Amazon UK)
House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds – Gollancz (Amazon UK)
Anathem: Neal Stephenson – Atlantic (Amazon UK / US)
The Margarets: Sheri S. Tepper – Gollancz (Amazon UK)
Martin Martin’s on the Other Side: Mark Wernham – Jonathan Cape (Amazon UK)

[…]

The annual award is presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a list of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.

The winner will be announced on Wednesday 29th April at an award ceremony held on the opening night of the SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival: www.sci-fi-london.com

[...]

The judging panel for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award are Chris Hill and Ruth O’Reilly for the British Science Fiction Association, Robert Hanks and Rhiannon Lassiter for the Science Fiction Foundation and Pauline Morgan for the science fiction news website SF Crowsnest.com. Paul Billinger represents the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the Chair of Judges.

There's a complete list of the books submitted at Torque Control here. Now, following just-the-facts, some opinions...

Books I've read that I'd have been happy to have seen on the shortlist: Will Ashon, The Heritage (free PDF!) ; Iain M Banks, Matter (my review); Stephen Baxter, Flood (a discussion); Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World; Richard Morgan, The Steel Remains (my review); Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go; Charles Stross, Halting State.

Books others may feel belong on the shortlist: Greg Bear, City at the End of Time; Andrew Crumey, Sputnik Caledonia; Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (free download); Ken Macleod, The Night Sessions; Charles Stross, Saturn's Children; Liz Williams, Winterstrike.

[Edited to add: as I've not read all 46 submitted books, or indeed reviews of all of them, no-one should take these lists as comprehensive; as noted in my comment to Adam Roberts here, his Swiftly could certainly be seen as a contender. Feel free to tell me in the comments of other good stuff I've missed.]

The Clarke has a reputation for a) crossing over into “the literary” for its own sake more than other sf awards, and b) annoying the sf community because of a). (And I certainly got very grumpy at last year's list excluding Ian McDonald's superb Brasyl and including of a couple of novels published outside the genre whose merits I thought were relatively low.) However, this year's jury seem to have avoided those pitfalls; although you could argue with some of the exclusions, I think all the shortlisted books have something to commend them, and a couple are really exceptional.

The wildcard is probably Martin Martin's on the Other Side, a book not much noticed by the sf community so far - an exception being Jonathan McAlmont's review. I may wind up writing about it myself, so won't give too many spoilers here; suffice it to say that it's a fizzing near-future novel with plenty to say about contemporary media culture. I don't quite agree with Jonathan's argument that it sits in his new subgenre of Barleypunk (defined here, with some NSFW language) - I think the near-future elements have more in common with something like A Clockwork Orange.

Predictions? I'm rubbish at them, and in any case they depend so much on the personalities and tastes of the jury, and the dynamic between them. From my own tastes, there are two or three books on the list I'd be very happy to see win, but your mileage may vary. Emergent themes? Well, it may be just coincidence, but there are several books on the list about selfhood, and what happens to it when split or cloned. (So there's a lot about memory too.) The state of sf? From this showing, very healthy.

The All-Time Top 40: That Only a Mother, Judith Merril (#43)

When Judith Merril’s "That Only a Mother" appeared in the pages of the June 1948 issue of John W. Campbell’s Astounding it must have stood out like nothing else. The issue contained an editorial on nuclear power from Campbell and stories from Eric Frank Russell, Asimov, and others. I’ve not read the issue in full, but I’ll bet nothing else in that issue, or most likely any other issue that year, put a story told from a women’s perspective addressing issues like childbirth, motherhood, and parenthood in front of Astounding readers.

If for no other reason, then, "That Only a Mother" is an important story. It places women and women’s issues in a science fictional perspective, and vitally makes them part of science fiction’s story. I suspect that’s at least part of the reason that the Science Fiction Writer’s of America voted to make the story part of the SFWA Hall of Fame, and why it appears in Bob Silverberg’s great anthology of the same name.

While Merrill's first published science fiction story undoubtedly deserves its place in science fiction’s history books, how does it stand up as a piece of fiction in 2009, sixty-one years after its original publication? It seems to this hardened reader that the answer to that question is that it doesn’t stand up too well. Set against the backdrop of a major war possibly reaching its closing stages, "That Only a Mother" tells of a pregnant woman preparing for the arrival of her first child. The war has clearly exacted a heavy price, with radiation exposure a common fear and newspapers reporting that fathers are returning from the front to find children born with awful mutations. There are rising numbers of reported infanticides, and the fathers are always to blame.

Merril sets her stage quickly and well. It takes her two pages to set out the basic scenario for the story. We have, in horror story terms, entered a corridor down which we must walk, knowing that a monster lies behind the door at corridor’s end. We are supposed to be properly terrified of what we will find when we finally open the door, and much of the story’s suspense comes from how the walk down the corridor is structured and how the opening of the door is foreshadowed. The problem with the remainder of "That Only a Mother" is that it’s too easy to guess what’s behind the door. We can tell from the story’s foregrounding and title that certain events will inevitably take place. Merril tries to combat that by keeping her descriptions of events and the story’s closing stages as vague as possible. We never really find out precisely what’s wrong with the woman’s child, or exactly what happens at the story’s end. And yet, we know all we need to. In fact, we knew all we needed to at page two. The remainder of the story is the simple unfolding of what must be.

I don’t think a reader today can know at a gut level how a story like "That Only a Mother" read in 1948, but in 2009 what was once probably a chilling science fiction story reads more like a not very effective horror tale. Which begs the question: should it be read in 2009? I think "That Only a Mother" deserves to be studied and discussed by scholars and historians of the field, and its place in the history of the field should be acknowledged. It is unquestionably important. But, were I putting together an anthology of the best science fiction stories of the 1940s for modern readers I’d skip it. What was once a chilling and timely piece of science fiction has become, with time, an important but not particularly moving historical footnote.

Next time, John Varley's "The Pusher". For those reading along, try The John Varley Reader for a copy.

The All-Time Top 40 (-ish) - A Quixotic Endeavor

There's something just a little bit ADD about the age we're living in: everything goes by quickly and we seldom seem to take the time to absorb something and consider it. That's true of the music I fill my iPod with, the television that flickers across my television screen, and the fiction I read for my various endeavors.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but I find it's completely focused me upon the new, upon what's next, things that I feel I have to consume quickly. That may explain why I've developed an affection for lists of late, and for pursuits that make me slow down, look back at things, and think.

It's almost certainly what attracted me to the blog of a young barista who, working at a cafe in West Perth near my office, decided to make a list of the 52 most important albums of each decade (starting with the '60s), listen to each a minimum of five times in a week, and then review one each week on her blog. It seemed interesting, worthwhile, and when I read her blog, kind of fun. I decided to play along, listening to Cream's rather flabby Disraeli Gears and Creedence Clearwater Revival's joyous Willie and the Poor Boys over the past week.

And as I listened I thought what a pity it was that it wasn't possible to do this for science fiction. These albums were less than forty minutes long. To take a novel and read it multiple times so that it could be properly absorbed and considered just wasn't practical. But, then I thought some more. While novels wouldn't work, short fiction might. Especially short stories. But where would I find a list of stories? I'm inherently lazy and almost gave up on this gossamer notion, until I suddenly recalled that Locus had run an All-Time Readers Poll back in 1999. And it had featured a list of short stories!

I went to the website and found a copy of the full list. It rambled from 1940 or so up to the 1990s. All of the stories were short (i.e. under 7,500 wds). They were mostly famous. I'd not read ALL of them. It suddenly seemed this might be doable: each week I could read one short story at least twice and write a short review of it. It would give me a chance to revisit some classics and read ones I'd missed. And it might also lead up to an even grander project. If I could cover this list of 43 stories in 43 weeks (or less), maybe I could follow it with a Best Short Stories of the 2000s. That seemed worthwhile, something for 2010, when this would be done.

And so that's what I'm going to do, right here. Each week I will read a story from the 1999 All-Time Readers Poll Short Story List at least twice, starting at the bottom of the list and working my way up. I'll then discuss the story with Locus's publisher, Charles Brown, so I can get some context on how the story was received at the time, and then I'll write about it right here. Posts, my schedule permitting, will be every Monday or Tuesday. I'd also encourage you to play along. Read the story too. Post your thoughts. Argue with me and tell me how I'm dumb as post and missed the whole point of the story. It should be fun.

Before I start, though, two things I'd point out. First, these comments are just my point of view. Yes, I'll discuss them with Charles , yes they're published on the Locus blog, and yes, it's based on a Locus list, but still. I'm deliberately keeping this a personal project. It's not an official opinion, it's a set of thoughts in progress, a response to something of interest. Second, I'm calling this the All-Time Top 40 (-ish). There are 43 stories on the list. I know.

Anyhow, here's the list. We start in a couple days with Judith Merrill's first published SF story, "That Only A Mother":

1. "Jeffty Is Five", Harlan Ellison (1977)


2. "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", Harlan Ellison (1965)


3. "The Star", Arthur C. Clarke (1955)


4. "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", Harlan Ellison (1967)


5. "'All You Zombies—'", Robert A. Heinlein (1959)


6. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)


7. "The Game of Rat and Dragon", Cordwainer Smith (1955)


8. "The Nine Billion Names of God", Arthur C. Clarke (1953)


9. "A Sound of Thunder", Ray Bradbury (1952)


10. "The Green Hills of Earth", Robert A. Heinlein (1947)


11. "Day Million", Frederik Pohl (1966)


12. "It's a Good Life", Jerome Bixby (1953)


13. "Aye, and Gomorrah…", Samuel R. Delany (1967)


14. "Light of Other Days", Bob Shaw (1966)


15. "The Last Question", Isaac Asimov (1956)


16. "There Will Come Soft Rains", Ray Bradbury (1950)


17. "Or All the Seas with Oysters", Avram Davidson (1958)


18. "Requiem", Robert A. Heinlein (1940)


19. "Air Raid", Herb Boehm (1977)


20. "That Hell-Bound Train", Robert Bloch (1958)


21. "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson (1948)


22. "The Country of the Kind", Damon Knight (1956)


23. "The Liberation of Earth", William Tenn (1953)


24. "Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)


25. "Sundance", Robert Silverberg (1969)


26. "When It Changed", Joanna Russ (1972)


27. "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death", James Tiptree, Jr. (1973)


28. "The Third Expedition" ("Mars Is Heaven!"), Ray Bradbury (1948)


29. "Passengers", Robert Silverberg (1968)


30. "Cassandra", C. J. Cherryh (1978)


31. "Helen O'Loy", Lester del Rey (1938)


32. "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", Gene Wolfe (1970)


33. "The Long Watch", Robert A. Heinlein (1949)


34. "Space-Time for Springers", Fritz Leiber (1958)


35. Speech Sounds", Octavia E. Butler (1983)


36. "The Way of Cross and Dragon", George R. R. Martin (1979)


37. "Corridors", Barry N. Malzberg (1982)


38. "Out of All Them Bright Stars", Nancy Kress (1985)


39. "Robbie", Isaac Asimov (1940)


40. "Narrow Valley", R. A. Lafferty (1966)


41. "The Hole Man", Larry Niven (1974)


42. "The Pusher", John Varley (1981)


43. "That Only a Mother", Judith Merril (1948)

"The New Mother" and Coraline

Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" (1882) is—I'm sure unintentionally—one of the weirdest and most unpleasant stories I've ever encountered. When I linked to it, and a bunch of other horror stories, a few weeks ago, I was intending to do a post on things unsaid in horror stories—the effect of not describing something. However, I soon realised that a) that's an impossibly vast topic; b) it might be better to try to address it when I have my hands on the forthcoming Best of Gene Wolfe; c) the Clifford was interesting enough to merit a post on its own. Spoilers for the Clifford follow, and also for Neil Gaiman's Coraline. (And, parenthetically, there's an interesting debate on spoiler statutes of limitations, at John Scalzi's.)

A brief synopsis first, if you've not read the story—though it's short enough that it'll scarcely take a quarter of an hour of your time. Two children, called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey, live with their mother in a house on the edge of the woods. Their father is away overseas, and so their poor dutiful mother has to raise them on her own. On an errand for their mother, the two children notice an urchin girl sitting by the side of the road. The girl tempts them with the promise of gifts, but says that in order to earn these they must be naughty—they must upset their mother and break the crockery. When they return home and explain to their mother how they wish to be naughty, she says that they mustn't do this, or she'll have to go away and leave them in the care of a "new mother" with glass eyes and a wooden tail. When, later, they encounter the urchin girl again, she tells them that of course the new mother is a fiction: "Of course really there are no mothers with glass eyes and wooden tails; they would be much too expensive to make." So the children do indeed return home and break the crockery and throw food on the floor; despite repeated warnings from their mother, they persist in this. So the mother leaves with tears in her eyes; the new mother arrives, although she's only partly glimpsed. She breaks down the door of their little house with her wooden tail, and the children flee in terror. They are reduced to living alone in the woods, while occasionally catching a glint of the new mother's glass eye through the window of their old home.

The obvious thing to say is that it's a product of its time—even the word "naughty", repeated throughout the story, has a prim, Victorian feel to it. And it's hugely manipulative, of course: as a cautionary story for children, it plays on the most basic fears of abandonment by parents and uses them to extort the good behaviour it wants. The vastly disproportionate punishment for "naughtiness" is another way in which the story puts a thumb on the scales, and so is assigning the "realistic" point of view—that the New Mother doesn't exist—to the tempter, the urchin, who's eventually proved wrong. And further: the New Mother is terrifying because she's inexplicable. (Why, for instance, does she have or need a wooden tail?) The author could choose to tell us something about her backstory, but again—it fits with the child's-eye viewpoint Clifford chooses—she instead decides to tell us that the world is vaster and more baffling than children can comprehend. Her last turn of the knife is to reveal that the village urchin does indeed know about the New Mother, and to hint that she may have induced the children to their naughtiness with this outcome in mind.

"The New Mother" is an acknowledged influence on Neil Gaiman's Coraline though Gaiman, as you'd expect, presents both a subtler and a more palatable tale. I've not yet seen the movie (it's not out here in the UK till May), but one of the things I most liked about the book was that it took similar horrors as Clifford but wrote against the grain of her story. Coraline falls through into another world where soulless substitute parents ("the other mother") want to make her like them by sewing buttons to her eyes. (Like the wooden tail, an inexplicable grafting of the inorganic to the organic.) But Coraline is smart enough to be able to figure out the rules of this world, to gather some agency for herself and so escape - a possibility alien to Blue-Eyes and the Turkey. Unlike "The New Mother", Coraline also works as a tale for adults: I read the fake parents as dire warnings to parents who might be reading the book. The fake parents seem initially to be open and caring, but Coraline can see through them, can distinguish fake love and real love. If you're a parent (it says), make sure you're for real in how you treat your children, because they can tell the difference, and it matters. In short, that's the difference between the Clifford and the Gaiman. In the Clifford, the only decision that gets made is the childrens' choosing to be naughty. Everything else is just playing out of consequences: the mother has no choice but to leave and to send in the New Mother—whereas Coraline says that there are always choices to be made, by everyone.

Clarion South Fundraising Appeal

Clarion South is looking for donations from the SF community to help refill the coffers that were wiped out this year. The 2009 workshop faced "a few challenges," including the last-minute cancellation by Griffith University of their original venue and three of the tutors dropping out. The venue change cost more than Clarion South had budgeted for, and though they were able to meet the various challenges, it broke the bank.

Quoted from their e-mail...

"Ways that people can help:

1. Donate to the Fundraising Appeal
Simply go to http://www.clarionsouth.org/donate.htm to make a PayPal
donation directly to Clarion South. We know it's not the best time be
launching an appeal, just after Christmas, during a global financial
meltdown, and during some very real human crises such as the Victorian
Bushfires. You have our heartfelt appreciation for even very small
donations, and if you are not in a position to give, that is perfectly
okay.

2. Spread the word
Even if you can't donate to the Appeal we would love your support to
spread the word about our fundraising drive. By the end of March we are
hoping to raise $4,000 for Clarion South. If you know any friends who
are sympathetic to the aims and activities of Clarion South, please let
them know—via Facebook, MySpace, your blog or any other means.

We'll have a Facebook group up shortly, but in the meantime, please feel
free to direct people to our website.

Thank you in advance for your love and support. We're incredibly
passionate about Clarion South and would like to see it thrive and
continue into the future.

Best wishes,
Kate Eltham, Robert Hoge, Robert Dobson and Heather Gammage"

Tracking Phil Farmer's Influence—and Others

Thanks to a generous invitation from his grandson Tom Josephsohn, I said a few words at Philip Jose Farmer’s memorial service in Peoria Sunday. There were four speakers in addition to the pastor of the First Federated Church: Tom, who spoke on behalf of the family; Mike Croteau and Paul Spiteri, who have been centrally involved in bringing Phil back into print through Mike’s Farmerphile fanzine and several recent Subterranean Press volumes; and me. Predictably and unavoidably, we all mentioned his generosity, warmth, and wit, and Tom in particular presented a moving portrait of a playful grandfather—perhaps not quite what many of his readers would expect, but not at all surprising to anyone who knew him.

Even though we’d been friends for a quarter of a century, I think my role was more or less to talk about Phil’s importance to the SF world. What I said might have been a bit different had I been talking to an SF audience rather than a gathering of friends and family members from Peoria, and I’ll recapitulate a bit of it in the April issue of Locus, but there was one observation I wanted to test-drive here (and it comes partly from some conversations I had with Jonathan Strahan and Charles Brown long before Phil’s death).

The observation is this: there are some SF writers who seem to have an immediate and dramatic impact on other writers, and younger writers in particular. The early '50s saw a fair number of imitation Bradbury stories, and the '80s a fair number of imitation Gibson stories, for two examples.

But there are other writers who seem so idiosyncratic that it takes some time for their real influence to become apparent, as though their ideas and techniques have to seep into the groundwater of the field, or as though the field itself has to gradually mutate to accommodate them. Phil Farmer, I think, was one of these. His notion that you could take whatever you wanted from any genre in order to make the story work, that you could draw equally on James Joyce and L. Frank Baum, on William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs, is almost familiar to us now that genre barriers have grown permeable, but when Phil started doing it, even from the beginning of his career, it must have seemed completely off the wall.

I can think of a few other writers whose influence seems to have grown more profound over the years—Jack Vance and Avram Davidson come to mind—but I wonder if there might be others. And I wonder if others see Farmer’s influence bubbling to the surface now in a far more visible way than it ever did during the '70s and '80s.