Once it
became known that I was teaching Ursula le Guin’s wonderful, other-planetary
novel The Left Hand of Darkness, science-fiction
and fantasy buffs were so thin on the academic ground that ‘work’ on those
areas – thesis supervisions and examinations and article reviews – started
drifting my way.
I was
no buff, having read very little science-fiction at all. I do remember that, as
a kid, I enjoyed the ‘Trajan Empire’ comic-fantasy serial in my Look & Learn magazines – a sort of
offworld/hi-tech/Roman-Empire mixture. And at high school at one point we ‘did’
a volume of sci-fi stories called The
Stars & Under. This included a story about a time-travelling sport hunter
being taken back to the Jurassic to shoot a dinosaur, wandering off the
carefully non-intrusive pathway and trampling a butterfly – with all sorts of
subtle and unforeseeable consequences, including derailing the anticipated
landslide outcome of a US presidential election. (Obviously, something like
this happened in early 2017.)
But I
wasn’t attracted to fantasy particularly, though I read the obligatory Lord of the Rings. Many years later I
encountered a bookish little boy on the Montreal metro, and asked him what he was
reading. Harry Potter; it had just
come out. ‘Very good’, I said, ‘never stop reading, it will be the greatest
treasure of your life,’ and got off the train. I hadn’t a clue who Harry Potter
was. In time, I read the available volumes of the series, intrigued at the
condemnation by Christian friends of mine – Harry
Potter was Satanic, they alleged. I thought the books were good enough
tales for twelve year-olds, though rather obviously derivative of classical and
mediaeval models – and definitely not Satanic. Even later, ironically, I found
myself supervising an academic thesis on precisely those derivations, happily
proving my point.
By that
stage, of course, science-fiction and fantasy was being incorporated more readily
into academic programmes – indeed, was fast becoming the chosen reading field
of so many youngsters, intersecting with their more mind-numbing rage for epic film
and computer-games. I had myself rather accidentally incorporated a sci-fi
story into my PhD work on white myths of Shaka: I somehow discovered that the
doyen of science fiction, Arthur C Clarke, had written ‘The Light of Darkness’,
about a modern African dictator, also named Chaka, who ultimately gets his
eyeballs fried by his own hubristic satellite-dish observatory. It has to count
as the most badly written short story in the genre I had ever come across –
though there may well be worse out there.
As I
migrated from Shaka to ecological concerns in literature, sci-fi hove into view
more strongly, just because so many futuristic novels and stories are concerned
with where we as humans are headed on our present environmentally-destructive
trajectory. Ursula le Guin, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood were regularly
chosen for study by my eco-literature students; and I have found myself supervising
and examining theses on these and other speculative/fantasy writers, ranging
from brilliant (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Wahington series) to the awful (Game of Thrones). I read two volumes of Thrones, and there was not a single sentence
I wanted to go back and read again for its beauty or finesse – and many, many
sentences I wanted to feed immediately to that silly woman’s derivative
dragons. There is some serious infantilisation of our adult readership going on,
and by and large I prefer to consider the future through non-fictional works
such as climatologist James Hansen’s Storms
of my Grandchildren or Jacques Attali’s A Brief History of the Future. Attali considers scenarios involving banking,
international commerce, insurance, sanitation, and cultural nomadism – subjects largely
ignored by novelists who prefer the spectacles of high-tech warfare, the power
of surveillance, and the prurience of manipulating sexuality and reproduction.
The apocalypse may well be rather humdrum, and boringly lacking in zombies.
I also
became aware – though the field is expanding fast – that Southern African
speculative fiction is thin on the ground. There is J M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, which is
vaguely futuristic; and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir,
set mostly in the Karoo; Nancy Farmer’s Harare-set The Eye, the Ear & the Arm; an edgy story by Henrietta Rose-Innes,
‘Poison’, as well as her more recent novel, Green
Lion; Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City; Andrew
Miller’s Dub Steps; a scattering of
stories for younger readers... More is emerging, but we’re still in our infancy.
There was certainly nothing futuristic set in the Eastern Cape, so as usual
when confronted by such a gap, I sort of inwardly shrug and sigh, ‘Oh, well, I’ll
just have to do it myself...’
The
result was The Wisdom of Adders
(available from PrintonDemand, and electronically on Amazon/Kindle here). I had great fun playing with the landscape and a deeply-changed ecology
and climate, and with what might have evolved in language and place-names by
the year 2170. It’s not sci-fi in the sense of other-planetary influence, alien
visitors, time-travel or spectacular technology: it’s entirely grounded in
realism, and there is, in my envisaging of a kind of slow global apocalypse
over the previous century, not much high-tech left. Like Le Guin, I am really more
interested in a particular human situation – in this case the coming-of-age
journey of a feisty and impulsive young woman through a landscape partly
blighted, partly open to opportunity, a landscape I hope the reader can
imaginatively inhabit.
In that
respect, the novella is not utopian, but nor is it dystopian in the way of
Cormac McCarthy’s now legendarily bleak The
Road, with which we are also terrifying our first-year students. Adders
is perhaps more like Jim Crace’s lesser-known future-America journey novel, The Pesthouse, or Le Guin’s
anthropological ‘study’ of a future California, Always Coming Home. One gets the oddest questions, which make one
wonder if one has written it ‘right’. But
what exactly happened in Nummers? (Well, I don’t know, if it isn’t in the
novel, it doesn’t exist.) How does she
get batteries for her torch? (I don’t know that either; make something up!)
What does the jackal mean? (Sorry,
haven’t a clue; it’s just there.)
My
slightly crabby replies might conceal important questions – questions that
resurface as I contemplate writing a story parallel to Adders. (Neither a sequel nor a prequel, what is that – a paraquel?
And no, I do not intend to call it ‘The Foolishness of Subtractors’, as waggish
Reg Rumney suggested.) Those questions include: Just how much ‘back history’
can one incorporate without slowing up the narrative or sounding didactic? How
much ‘future technology’ has to be explained, given that the physics for it may
not even have a vocabulary yet? How much ‘meaning’ is best left to the reader’s
imagination, how much ‘misinterpretation’ risked? And which current
developments and trends does one choose to extrapolate into the future, and
why? Is it a matter of simple logical extension, or of one’s own psychological
disposition?
Nat
Segnit’s recent review article in the Times
Literary Supplement, ‘Dystopian’s Dilemma’, is sub-titled ‘Invention at the
expense of storytelling.’ He notes how one recent American dystopia overloads
the narrative with made-up words for new tech (though such must surely emerge,
and Adders is a bit guilty of that);
how another has a theory about the future driving it, but the novel attached to
it feels merely ‘dutiful’; how another ‘pours in a mass of contrivance and
alternative history ... having to explain the world at the cost of inhabiting
it.’ Many balances to be struck.
And
there are still deeper questions about extinction and hope. Many argue that we
humans are destined for extinction,
and maybe our extinction is the world’s best hope. But while writers are still
writing for readers, it’s a question of how one projects human hope despite everything. To write a dystopian novel utterly
without a future for humans would be to destroy the purpose of writing itself.
On the other hand a dystopian tale, leavened with hope, to that degree ceases to
be dystopian. So there may be no pure dystopia, only dystopic tendencies: in all
the stories I’ve now read (though I know I’m still far from buff-hood), there are
characters who embody some stubborn desire to go on, to rebel, to survive. This
is true even of The Road; of Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale, now screening on
TV; and of that very early story, still in my view as good as any for its
haunting vision of a yet-possible future, ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1924
by E M Forster (yes, he who wrote A
Passage to India). I’ll say no more
about it – just read it, while I see if I can rake up any reasons for hope on which to base the next
novel...
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