Tag Archives: Gwyneth Jones

The Best Music You’ve Never Heard

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This is a sideways introduction to our roundtable on The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of, which will begin next week. An index to the roundtable is here.
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The Hunger Games is a best-selling book that pretty clearly always intended, or at least wanted, to be a best-selling book. Katniss has become a recognizable one-word brand, like Beyoncé or Rihanna — and that iconic fame in our world simply mirrors her celebrity status in the world of the book. The Hunger Games can be seen in some ways as a satire of reality TV and the rapacious culture of fame, but the emphasis on viewing and spectacle also seems like a kind of dream, or wish — Suzanne Collins imagines everyone watching Katniss as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone will watch Katniss; she is, and was always meant to be, a rock star.

“Dr. Franklin’s Island,” by Ann Halam (Gwyneth Jones) on the other hand, is an unknown YA book that seems like it always intended to be unknown. The novel is told from the point of view of Semi, a shy science nerd who’s won a trip to a research facility accompanied by other science nerds and a couple of television personalities. Semi finds the pospect of interacting with all the other kids, much less being televised, terrifying — and in response to her wish, the plane crashes in the middle of the sea, and everyone dies except her, a cool girl named Miranda, and a cranky, unpleasant boy named Arnie.

The three have some amazing adventures; the island is controlled by mad scientist Dr. Franklin, who injects them with animal DNA and transforms them into superhero animal people. But this isn’t a superhero story where the hero saves the world and everyone cheers. Instead, the action of the story is all almost completely private. One of the loveliest passages in the book, and in some sense the most spectacular, occurs after Semi is transformed into a manta ray.

I was floating in water. It was over me, under me, all around me. It was the air that I breahted. I wasn’t frightened. I still felt good, and delighted with my new body. Sunlight was warming my back, and that felt very nice. I glided up toward the shimmering liquid light, until I was breaking the surface and looked around.

Katniss’ big moment is triumphing on TV; Semi’s is just the sensation of being in her body; of swimming within the prose, quiet, unobserved, inward turned.

Shortly after this, Semi sees her friend Miranda, transformed into a bird, and then realizes that the two can’t speak to each other. The isolation is terrifying…but

Next thing I knew, everything was white. It was like being inside a cloud: like being surrounded by the dazzling, soft, white cloud-country you sometimes see from a plane window. I saw Miranda, standing with her back to me. I knew it was Miranda at once, Miranda the way I remembered her from the beach.

From the isolation of the water, Semi goes to a no-space. This turns out to be a kind of imaginary meeting place enabled by telepathy — but it also could be read as reading; the white cloud-country is the blank of the page, and the connection between Semi and Miranda is the private, quite connection you have when you have with Semi when you read the book. Rather than a hero who competes and wins and gains the adoration and pity of crowds, Halam’s book leads her shy character through a series of escalating isolations — from island, to manta ray, to cloud telepathy. There are adventures and dangers and friendship, but none of it is acted out in public; it’s all a secret. The world never finds out what happens to Dr. Franklin, or hears about his experiments; the kids manage to change back to human, and have the ability to resume their animal forms, but they’re (understandably) afraid of being experimented on, and never tell anyone. This is the last passage in the book.

I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, withno bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there….

An uninhabited island isn’t enough; Semi wants to go away to a whole different planet, where she and Miranda can change and be together, alone. In part, this seems like a gracefully hyperbolic extension of the closet; a gay utopia of sensuous transformation where the atmosphere is different enough that unnameable love is possible. But it’s also a dream of invisibility — to be lost, in a different form. It’s even a kind of invisibility within invisibility; this isn’t something that “really happens” in the novel — it’s a wish, a coda, outside the narrative, a fantasy within the science-fiction, imagined within imagination, both buried under and outside the story. It is displaced; a vision without a viewer.

The pleasure of The Hunger Games seems like it is in large part, and is meant to be in large part, the pleasure of participating in a pop culture phenomena; it’s about watching with everyone, and being part of the everyone through watching. Dr. Franklin’s Island instead enjoys being somewhere, and something, unseen. While everyone else is talking about Katniss, Semi swims on her own page, through music no one has heard.

Most Underrated/Overrated SF

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We’ve done music and film in these posts before; thought I’d see if anyone read books.

So in terms of the most overrated sci-fi author, I’d go with Isaac Asimov. He’s hugely famous, but his books are really mediocre nothings (at least as I remember them; it’s been a while.) Gimmicky, outlandish plot, paper-thin characters, serviceable prose; just not a whole lot there. Heinlein is at least genuinely weird; the only thing to say for Asimov’s books really is that they thump along and are for the most part inoffensive.

For underrated — hardly anyone knows about John Christopher or Gwyneth Jones, both of whom I think are fantastic writers. (I’ve written quite a bit about both at the links.) (Oh…and one more piece about John Christopher here.
 

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Can a Coke Bottle Be an Indie Comic?

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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they smiled at ancient products, foregrounded in vain, and admired the display comparing a wasp-waisted cola bottle — so modestly pleased with itself — to a Flemish burgher kneeling before the Madonna, some centuries before Coca-Cola was invented.

That’s a passage from Gwyneth Jones’ Phoenix Cafe. The novel is set in the far future, after the alien Aleutians have arrived on earth. In this scene, an alien in a human body is touring the Tate with a human companion/lover, Misha. Mostly they look at old advertisements from our era, which were long ago admitted into museums as high art. Misha is himself an artist — and what he makes are a kind of marketing holograph; indie viral ads.

Visual art has embraced this to a large extent — which is why it’s funny and not implausible that at some point in the near future the Tate will have a television advertising collection. Catherine and Misha even have a fanciful conversation about the possibility of shit as an aesthetic experience. “That’s one of the least celebrated pleasures in life if you ask me, the feel of a lovely big fat turd plopping out of you. What’s art if it doesn’t venerate pleasure?” And yes, I’m sure Jones is familiar with Freudian discussions linking art and poop.

But while shit is art, novels for Catherine aren’t. For Aleutians, she explains,

The only use we have for printed words…is in instruction manuals. Art made in that medium would be like—um, asking your average human audience to admire a page of mathematical symbols. People do it from time to time, it’s done. Not by me.

I like the grammatical ambiguity at the end there. The “it” in “People do it” may refer to the way Aleutians viewing reading as art. Or it could refer to humans looking at mathematical symbols as art. Do humans ever look at mathematical symbols as art? Either way, enjoying the way that that question is or is not being asked is an aesthetic response. If this were to be read the way the Aleutians read, as an instruction manual, then the confusion of the antecedents is merely an error. Context determines art — not in the sense that you need context to understand art, but in the sense that you need context for there to be art at all.

In other words, any art can’t be art unless we say it is — and in large part it is art simply because we say it is, just as Catherine herself, born human, is an alien basically because everyone around her has decided that she is an alien. In this context, indie comics can’t be studied in anything other than context, because indie comics only exist, not just as a genre but as an aesthetic object, because context makes them so. Comics could be instructional manuals or science journal articles or advertisements — and indeed, you could see instruction manuals (with their diagrams) or science journal articles (with all those interesting visual notations) or print advertisements (image and text) as comics — perhaps even as indie comics given the right set of circumstances. There isn’t any outside to context; no way you can shrink down and look a the work in itself separate from your assumptions about the work, because the work as something to have assumptions about is made up of context.

And, for that matter, even your self speaking is a context, made up in part by the work you’re reading. Catherine is an Aleutian, she is part of that “we”, because of how she wouldn’t read the novel she is in. The art she looks at makes her who she is, and who she is makes the art she looks at. When Heidi says, “And yet, it does seem that indie comics and cartoonists are rarely examined in a larger contextual way. This is possibly because the content involves a lot of what some call introspection,” she is ignoring the fact that introspection is a context — and even a larger cultural one. Kailyn gets at this when she talks about how fandom is a context, but I think Jones goes even further, suggesting that even the recognition of context is linked to context — which perhaps explains why comics fandom and comics are so intertwined, depending on each other for the context that keeps them from disappearing.

If advertising and shit can be art and aliens can be human, it seems like a relatively minor act of perspective to see Phoenix Cafe itself as a comic; the text juxtaposed with coca-cola bottles and old advertisements, speaking to them in sequence. That comic is independent; it’s one you make in your head, the way that art for the Aleutians make poems which are actually pictures.

When another Aleutian comes along, maybe generations later, and ‘looks at my picture,’ the meaning of that moment to me is shed from the picture and enters the viewer. The poem is a communication-loop. Captured: and released again, not the same but evolved by everything that’s happened since, brought into being by my poems’ meeting with the new gaze.

Is this a poem? A comic? An information-loop? And what’s the antecedent of “this” anyway? The alien makes art, and the art makes an alien, in some confused future Tate, which is where we live.
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This may or may not be the last post in the roundtable, depending on who else sends me things in the next 24 hours or so. Either way, HU covers indie comics in context with some frequency, so we’ll revisit these issues again. This is a good point, though, to say thanks to all those who read, commented, and contributed. It’s been a really fun discussion.
 

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Alien Narratives

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139906In Gwyneth Jones’ White Queen, a near future earth is invaded by a handful of aliens, called Aleutians. The Aleutians look almost exactly like humans. This results in confusion. On the one hand, the Aleutians themselves — who all share a kind of genetic consciousness with each other and their ancestors and their tools — assume that humans, too, are part of the one collective, and so are beings exactly themselves. On the other hand, the humans assume that the Aleutians are radically different from themselves — super-powered conqueror-saviors.

In Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Brian Attebery argues that this split is indicative of, and thematizes, two of science-fictions strongest tendencies. On the one hand, science-fiction projects the self onto the cosmos — it turns space and time, future and past, into human metaphor. At the same time, science-fiction is built out of separating the self and the other, human and alien. The genre is therefore both obsessively totalizing and obsessively binary.

What Attebery does not say, but which seems clear upon reading White Queen, is that the misunderstanding between Aleutian and humans is deliberately replicated in the experience of reader and text. Attebery’s description of the book, his isolating of its metaphors and themes, is very lucid — but reading the book is anything but. Rather, both Aleutians and humans remain, throughout the course of the novel, a mystery, or a riddle, or often a joke. Both Aleutian and human society come into focus to some extent — you realize that Agnes, the first alien we see, is not actually a girl, for example; you learn more or less the nature of Johnny Guglioli’s disease. But is the Aleutian homeworld a ship behind the moon? Does that question even make any sense? Why in the last pages of the book does the human diplomat Ellen but on fake breasts and buttocks when she last meets with Agnes (now named Clavel) and why does he take that as a reprimand? What does happen to Braemar and Johnny after their first faster than light trip? Did they even go on a faster than light trip? What is the deal with the alien’s sanitary pads? And so on and on; like the aliens, or the humans, the book seems to tell you things only to emphasize its unknowability.

Eve Sedgwick argues that realist novels function as a kind of bargain of knowledge and power. The author reveals the world to the reader; in exchange for the reader’s belief in the authors knowledge, the reader is granted the same omniscience, the same sense of knowing. If that’s the case in realist fiction, it seems even more the case in sci-fi. You enter Jones’ novel knowing nothing; your map of the world is useless and even, in terms of the aliens, worse than useless. But as you read you know…and even the not-knowing is a kind of guarantor of knowing, the way that the photograph cut off by the frame is a guarantor or earnest that the rest of the world must be there. The Aleutians are more real because they are strange and you can’t know them; which is to say your not-knowing ensures the worth of what you know. The totalizing experience of the fiction is made more total because of the bifurcated strangeness; or, if you prefer, the bifurcated strangeness is enabled by the illusion of totality.

You can see this mechanism at work, too, in stories with what you might call meta-frames. The film John Carter is one; the hero flies across the cosmos to another body and another world of adventure, leaving behind only a diary to be read by his mousy relation. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is another; a black woman in the 1970s inexplicably finds herself falling backwards in time to the early 1800s, called back to involuntarily help her white slave-owning ancestor. In both these cases, the protagonist’s journey enacts both the immersive experience and the alienating strangeness of narrative; the sense of exhilarating, horrified disconnection (as when John Carter discovers his jumping ability on Mars), and the sense of exhilarated, horrified belonging. (as when Dana realizes she is beginning to think of the slave plantation as home.)

It’s perhaps telling that one of the last things Jones tells us about the aliens in White Queen is that we don’t know how they read.

Whatever the Aleutian did to serve as “reading,” it didn’t work like the human version. Perhaps his eyes sent out little mote to reconstruct, chemically, the ur-hieroglyphics behind the letters: something mind-boggling like that. Their physiology, especially the neurological part, was a bizarre mystery.

The joke (and Jones is almost always joking) perhaps being that human neurology is, also, pretty much a bizarre mystery — in describing their unlikeness to us, she is describing their likeness — and doing it even as we, Aleutians and non, read and understand, and don’t understand our understanding (or, for that matter, our not understanding.)

Not understanding the Aleutians reading is very similar to the way that the humans do not understand the Aleutian telepathy — a telepathy which Jones suggests may be more like non-verbal cues, or plot devices, or watching a silent movie, than like actually reading thoughts. Perhaps, too, as I’ve suggested, telepathy might be like reading, or any other entertainment delivery system, where another’s thoughts become your thoughts in a sharing of the minds. Such sharing can be a radical, totalizing sameness, or a radical recognition of difference and alienation. The two consciousnesses become one, or the unified one recognizes its own internal difference. The alien is recognized as the self, and/or the self is recognized as alienated. Every fiction is an Aleutian, the us that is and isn’t.