Review for the SFRA

During my summer independent study with Phil Wegner, I joined the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). Phil would probably have prefered that I join the Society for Utopian Studies, of which he is President, and I do intend at some point to learn more about the concept of utopia. However, SFRA seemed more within my intellectual strike zone, and I even managed to review a book for them before the start of the term. Here's what I submitted.

Fiction Review
In the Lion’s Mouth
Joseph Paul Weakland
Flynn, Michael. In the Lion’s Mouth. New York: Tor, 2012. 304 pages, cloth, $25.99. ISBN 978-0-765322-85-2.

In the Lion’s Mouth (2012) follows The January Dancer (2009) and Up Jim River (2010) as the third in the “Spiral Arm” series of space opera novels by Michael Flynn. In Flynn’s universe, two interstellar powers fight a cold war known as the “Long Game.” They wage this war primarily through the clandestine operations of highly trained saboteurs and assassins. The Commonwealth of Central Worlds deploys agents called “Shadows,” while the United League of the Periphery trains operatives known as “Hounds.” Much of the novel centers on the adventures of Donovan buigh, a former Shadow and leader of a failed revolution against the “Names,” the covert political entity behind the Confederacy and its Shadows.

The novel’s frame story begins on the planet Dangchao Waypoint, where Shadow agent Ravn Olafsdottr stealthily infiltrates a League base. Her mission is to give news of Donovan buigh to his former lover, Bridget ban, a Hound of the League of the Periphery. The mutual enemies establish a temporary truce, and over several hours, Olafsdottr narrates the tale of Donovan’s fate by reciting poetry. Flynn develops this illusion by starting each section of the main story with a brief poem, before switching back into prose. Olafsdottr’s poem forms the bulk of the narrative, but the novel periodically returns to Olafsdottr and Bridget during brief “interrogatories.” Ravn admits that she takes liberties with her tale, so the reader must judge whether she is a reliable narrator. Interested scholars may wish to consider further the novel’s unusual narrative structure and stylistic experimentation.

Flynn’s Spiral Arm contains two warring interstellar powers, but much of the novel appears to concern the Shadows’ own internal civil war. A “revolution” is brewing within the Confederacy, but because virtually all of the characters in the novel are socially elite, impossibly talented assassins, we gain little sense of what ordinary people think and feel in the Spiral Arm, much less what a revolution within the Confederacy would actually mean. No clear ideological differences exist between the Confederacy and the League, for that matter. Most of the conflicts between characters seem based on challenges to personal pride and honor, and few substantive political, ethical, or moral issues are at stake. Perhaps this is not surprising, as late in the novel, we learn that the second planned revolution was more of a “rebellion,” an effort to change leadership with the Names, rather than an attempt to transform any kind of political system.

Although the tangled skeins of personal intrigue among the agents are elaborate and at times interesting, scholars may find little else upon which to comment in the novel. A clue to Flynn’s project might be found in the epigraph he pulls from The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1924) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga: “Having dressed and painted their passionate dream of a beautiful life with all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and molded it into a plastic form, they then pondered and realized that life was really not so beautiful – and then laughed.” Flynn writes that his “Shadow culture is based loosely on the decadent Franco-Burgundian knighthood of the fifteenth century,” the main source for which is Huizinga. In short, then, the novel appears to be in part a futuristic reimagining of certain elements of medieval court society. In fact, two Shadows even fight a formal duel over a mutual love interest.

While In the Lion’s Mouth is stylistically interesting, it falls short in what Darko Suvin terms “cognitive estrangement.” In other words, it deploys scientific fictional elements primarily to equip its agents (or “knights”) with fancy equipment and gadgets; Flynn describes the science behind several of these in his postscript. This is not necessarily a criticism in and of itself, as the battle sequences are among the most memorable parts of the novel. However, as a sort of medieval-futurist space opera, the novel doesn’t yield the cognitive pleasures of more cerebral space operas such as Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and Dan Simmon’s Hyperion (1989), nor does it contain the character development and psychological sophistication of a novel like Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956). These novels also provide much more imaginative examples of what I take to be the hallmark of space opera, sublime speculation: sentient AIs, creatures that function as a “hive mind,” galaxy-wide communications networks, alternative laws of physics, and so on. These space operas might also offer more to scholarly inquiry. The galactic civilizations presented in Fire Upon the Deep are richly depicted – the sheer scale of Verne’s world and the varieties of life forms that inhabit it is a cognitive marvel. Likewise, Hyperion is remarkable for its stylistic virtuosity. Like Flynn’s novel, Simmons also employs a frame story. However, Simmons uses this technique to write a novel that is part space opera, part military science fiction, part planetary adventure, and part cyberpunk.

Beyond sublime speculation or stylistic experimentation, we might ask what Flynn’s cognitive estrangement reveals about our own world. It is here that the novel’s lack of political depth becomes particularly disappointing; a novel focusing so much on conflict might have gone deeper into the reasons for this conflict and the divergent worldviews that gave rise to the “Long Game.” In an era of clandestine interrogation, torture, and assassination, most of which occurs outside the public’s field of vision, we might question Flynn’s failure to throw a critical light on these practices within his novel. According to Huizinga, the Franco-Burgundian knighthood realized that “life was not really so beautiful” as it had imagined, “and then laughed.” In our own historical moment, facing as we do a series of interlocking social and ecological crises, we must do more than laugh. Perhaps here I reveal my own preference for politically conscious science fiction over stylized fantasy. Should Flynn write another novel in his Spiral Arm universe, perhaps he will speculate as to what a true “revolution” might look like.

Roadside Picnic

Strugatsky, Arkady, Boris N. Strugatsky, and Olena Bormashenko. Roadside Picnic. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012. Print.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is a first contact story with a crucial difference: the aliens never reveal themselves, nor do they give any hint of their purpose for visiting Earth. The only traces that remain of the encounter are several “Zones” of mysterious and dangerous debris left at seemingly random locations around the planet. The novel’s titular “picnic” is a metaphor for this; humans are insects that encounter an inscrutable array of artifacts leftover from an alien picnic; we are ants without the cognitive ability to understand the objects, their purpose, or their creator’s motivations. After finishing their “meal,” if you can call it a meal, the aliens simply disappear, leaving humans to sort through the aftermath. In this way, Roadside Picnic strongly parallels Lem’s Solaris, as both novels challenge the idea of human “cognitive universalism,” or the commonly-held notion that human ways of thinking about and being in the world could be mapped onto non-human entities.

The Zones containing the alien debris were evacuated, as many of the artifacts are dangerous to human life. Humans make periodic forays into the Zones to recover alien artifacts, but have had little success in reverse engineering alien technology or uncovering any clues as to the nature of the alien visit. So called “Stalkers,” criminals who enter the Zone illegally to treasure hunt, pass on birth defects to their children apparently caused by something in the Zone. Stalkers, when they move to other parts of the world after living and working near and in the Zone, also cause statistically-improbable disasters in the communities to which they relocate. The Zones themselves contain strange gravitational anomalies, corrosive sludge, and reanimate corpses that leave the Zone and continue, in a zombie-like way, their daily lives. Although humans have managed to appropriate some of the alien technology for their own use, such as small batteries with infinite life-spans, most of the phenomenon and objects remain inscrutable to science – much like the sentient ocean in Solaris.

The novel follows Red Schuhart, a stalker living near one of the Zones in what appears to be North America. While Schuhart works for a scientific institute that conducts official research in the Zone, he also conducts illegal treasure-hunting on the side, as many of the artifacts are highly-profitable on the black Market. The Zone is so dangerous that many die or suffer permanent damage navigating it, and skilled stalkers are highly-paid for their work. Schuhart also observes first-hand the corruption and greed surrounding the Zones; contact has not resulted in Enlightenment, but only confusion and moral decline.

In the novel’s conclusion, Schuhart finds a golden orb that is said to have the ability to grant a person’s innermost desire. This object raises a number of interesting philosophical and social questions. Does Schuhart, or anyone else, actually possess the language to articulate a desire that would be beneficial to humanity? In other words, what would his utopia look like? Schuhart detests the corruption that surrounds him, even while he participates in it. He seems to feel that the orb should be used for a higher purpose than simply manifesting one’s own idiosyncratic desires. However, while his purpose is noble, Schuhart sacrifices an apprentice stalker to gain access to the orb. He even borrows his words to the orb from the dead apprentice: “HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” (193). The words reveal that he does not have a concrete vocabulary for describing an ideal society, but instead asks the orb to “Look into my soul, I know – everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want – because I know it can’t be bad” (193).

Can we believe Schuhart? Doesn’t his ruthlessness in sacrificing the apprentice, and his history of crime, undermine his claim that his soul isn’t bad? Or is he redeemed by his utopian desire for universal happiness and peace, even if he is only able to voice this desire in a naïve way, in a plagiarized way? If we were granted the same opportunity, would our situation be any different? It’s here that the novel might be read as a political critique of the Soviet Union and its own ambiguous utopian aims. As Ursula K. Le Guin observes in her Foreword to the novel’s most recent edition, however, the story succeeds because it is as much about an individual as it is a political allegory.

Roadside Picnic was adapted by the authors into the film Stalker (1979) and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games.