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Locus
Looks at Non-Fiction: Graham Sleight
Soundings:
Reviews 1992-1996, Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon Publications
1-870824-50-4, £15.00, 415pp, pb) July 2005. Cover by
Judith Clute. [Order from
Beccon Publications, Roger Beccon,
75 Rosslyn Avenue
, Harold Wood,
Essex
RM3 0RG , UK
; beccon@dial.pipex.com
Sometimes, as a reviewer, you
get spared the exposition. Telling readers of Locus
why they ought to pay attention to Gary Wolfe would
be like going to St. Peter’s Square and explaining
to the throng why they ought to be listening to the
chap on the balcony in the robes. Soundings collects
most of Wolfe’s Locus reviews from 1992 until 1996,
plus his annual round-ups. It is the first time his
science fiction reviews have been collected, and
it stands as an obvious companion to John Clute’s
Scores (2003), which assembled a decade’s worth of
his reviews.
To get one gripe out of the way, unlike in Scores,
the index is less than exemplary. It’s ordered by
author, and then by title within each author; so
if you don’t know who wrote a given work, you’re
stuck. Moreover, entries are tied to the start of
each column – which may be 10 or 12 pages long –
rather than the review being indexed. Given that
the index also fails to record the mentions, often
substantive, of authors or works in Wolfe’s year-end
round-ups, it’s not helpful as a tool for finding
a way into the book, which is a shame.
Soundings isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a
comprehensive overview of SF and fantasy in the years
covered – assuming such a task were possible. To
take one prominent example, this is the period when
Gene Wolfe was publishing The Book of the Long Sun,
which Wolfe doesn’t review at all; by contrast, he
reviews five books by Robert Silverberg, for whom
this was as productive a time as ever, but hardly
one that produced his central works.
Of course, the underlying question here is why reviewers
choose the books they do. In his introduction, Wolfe
confesses that ‘‘mediocrity is not very interesting
to write about,’’ and also talks about ‘‘the
critic’s most unsavory temptations,’’ the dire
books that give the chance to do a bitchy cabaret act
instead of a review. He suggests that ‘‘if favorable
or mixed reviews outnumber bad reviews, it’s because
many of the bad reviews never get written, since
the book never gets completely read.’’ So this isn’t
quite the W.H. Auden position, that reviewing bad
books is bad for the soul, but something more inclusive:
you have to be engaged by a work, suggests Wolfe,
to respond to it.
Providing
the fullest possible a response to the book on the desk
is evidently what Wolfe sees as his central job.
Sometimes this goes too far; he has a tendency to go
through every story in an anthology and afford each a
phrase of judgment rather than picking out a few
emblematic items and talking about them in more detail.
But for the most part, his clear, insightful, patient
summaries of the books he examines provide the reader
with an ideal way into them. His wide historical
knowledge and sympathy with the aims of the field
are also evident, even if he’s reluctant to draw
large-scale conclusions from them. He asks in his
first annual overview here, ‘‘...is SF really going
anywhere, and has the past year brought us any closer
to wherever that may be? The answer, I think, is
that it’s a stupid question.’’
This flags one of Wolfe’s most
appealing characteristics as a reviewer: his reluctance
to build theoretical structures on insufficient evidence.
To coin a Rumsfeldish word, as a field we’re perhaps
too ready to movementise unrelated events, to declare
a swallow a summer. Wolfe is alive to, but not seduced
by, these possibilities: looking back on 1996 and
a set of books which rewrite the history of the space
program, he leaves open the question of ‘‘Whether
[this] represents a continuing trend or whether it’s
just another example of steam-engine time.’’ Which
is not to say that he’s above mocking the tendency
to movementise: reviewing Alexander Jablokov’s A
Deeper Sea (1992), one suspects he’s at least winking
when he notes that it ‘‘has much to recommend it,
especially for those interested in the growing subgenre
of dolphin stories.’’
That begs a question: if, unlike John Clute, Wolfe
isn’t particularly disposed to theorizing, what’s
the virtue of reading a book like this, collecting
reviews a decade or more old, of works which are
now largely out of print? When you read Clute’s reviews
chronologically, you can sum across the individual
pieces and get a meta-statement about what the genre
was doing. When you do the same with Wolfe, you get
– what? Well, firstly, you get a patchwork historical
picture of the period under consideration. Even if,
as I suggested earlier, it isn’t comprehensive, certain
themes do come out. This was the aftermath of what
seems to me the most significant period in recent
SF history, the comparably brief span of 1985-1992
when so many of the Golden Age authors died. You
could argue – indeed, Clute has argued – that this
ripped the heart out of the genre, deprived it of
a default story to tell. Wolfe’s work in this book,
and particularly a protracted engagement with hard
SF authors like Baxter, Bear, and Egan, could be
seen as an attempt to work out whether hard SF was
the center which might hold. In this context, Wolfe’s
rather grudging review of the Hartwell/Cramer anthology
The Ascent of Wonder is a central text here. He accuses
Hartwell and Cramer of fuzziness about the stories
they include and their reasons for doing so – of,
effectively, weakening the center by making excessively
generous claims for it. At the same time, though,
it’s clear that by contrast with today genre boundaries
were relatively clear. Science fiction was science
fiction, fantasy was fantasy, and genre-mixing books
are rarely discussed here.
There’s plenty of wit elsewhere in Soundings, but
always in service to Wolfe’s central critical gift:
to be able to stand back from the work under examination,
to assess its place in the tradition, and to talk
calmly and clearly about its worth. Wolfe is – to
use an unfashionable label which I mean as a high
compliment – from beginning to end a practical critic.
--Graham Sleight
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