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Soundings
By
Gary Wolfe (Beccon, 2005, 415 pp, £15.00)
reviewed
by Roz Kaveney
It is
an often-remarked fact that it seems possible, though
it is not nor has been for decades, to monitor the
totality of the fantastic genres. This is, however,
almost certainly the reason why some of the fields’
acknowledgedly pre-eminent figures have spent so
much energy and time engaged at the wave-front of
new books involved in serious regular reviewing.
It is also the reason why some of the most crucial
critical texts in the field are collections of reviews
- for a long time, indeed, collections like those
by James Blish and Damon Knight were the only such
crucial texts. John Clute’s reviews from Foundation,
Scifi.com and elsewhere have been regularly collected;
it is to be hoped that this will prove only the first
volume binding up Gary Wolfe’s reviews for Locus.
Following
the somewhat cutesy example of Clute, Wolfe has given
this book a richly ambiguous and polysemous title,
to unpack which is a handy key to understanding his
intentions and achievement. Soundings can
be read in a number of senses, all of which usefully
apply. First and foremost there is the sense of this
sort of roundup column as a process of navigation
through the shoals and reefs of trends that led nowhere
and promise that was unfulfilled and great work that
seemed uninteresting on first acquaintance - a monthly
column is a handy plumb line dropped into the depths
and testing the acumen of the reviewer as pilot.
Then, of course, there is the idea of the reviewer
as someone who tests the quality of work by rapping
his knuckles quickly across it, discovering what
is gloriously resonant and what merely hollow or rotted
out. Lastly, there is the process of polemic, of
sounding off about a set of views about what the genres
should be and what writers within them are actually
doing - the critic as reviewer is primarily describing,
but without an element of prescription or at least
expectation, we are lost.
If we
take Wolfe’s title in these senses, it is a manifesto
by which we can judge the collection as a whole.
By the criteria those interpretations suggest, Soundings
is quite admirable. It suggests some of the directions
that the sf and fantasy genres took in the middle
90s as the gloss of cyberpunk faded and the idealism
of new humanism grew a little jaded, as the preoccupations
of hard sf filtered through into the subject matter
of politicised sf and Mars became once more the site
for Utopia. His
judgement is excellent and his expression of it at once
effective and terse - his judgements stand and stand
all the more clearly for the pithiness with which
they are expressed. Intrinsic
to Wolfe’s reviewing is a plain-dealing avoidance
of artistic ideology that is itself an argumentative
stance - he is in favour of books being as good as
they can be. If this book is a manifesto, and I would
argue that in part it is, it is a manifesto against
schools and manifestos. These reviews were welcome
interventions in a period when there had been too
much fighting of particular corners.
There
remains, in reviewing such a book, a worrying difficulty.
Should the review itself look at the years covered,
and judge Wolfe’s success as reviewer by the accuracy
with which his views map over one’s own? Clearly
not, but to judge him by whether or not he agrees
with one’s own perception of which authors and trends
were important is hardly an improvement. This is
perhaps especially the case when, as here, the present
reviewer and Wolfe agree on almost every book we
have both reviewed. To record that we both sing from
the same sheet music is hardly criticism.
One of
Wolfe’s major strengths here is that, when he reviews
several books in an extended series, as Locus
has allowed him to do, he gets the chance to construct
an argument across time. Had he taken his reviews
of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and shuffled
them together with Robinson’s work as anthologist
of utopian fictions, his short story collections
and his occasional critical remarks, Wolfe could
hardly have come up with a better and more scholarly
consideration of Robinson than he does here. In particular,
he could hardly have done a better job of explaining
how, in the Mars trilogy, the
Orange
County
trilogy and the ecological trilogy Robinson was not to
write until a decade later, there is a consistent view
of the historical process as a subject that suits
the novel admirably. It is not only Robinson’s politics
that can be characterized as Tolstoyan; it is his
sense of the complicated interaction of the individual
and historical forces. Wolfe writes well about Robinson
because they are both intellectuals.
Yet, at
the same time, Wolfe has an almost fannish delight
in sheer glorious sensawundish stuff which means
that he can see the strengths of books he does not
entirely like. He can write judiciously negative
reviews of, say, Alfred Coppel’s Glory sequence which
spell out their faults in considerable detail and
yet leave one with a sneaking suspicion that at some
time one might read them and get from them the partly
guilty pleasure that Wolfe describes so well. It
is not his practice to review books he considers utterly
without interest or merit - even a mildly negative
review from Wolfe has significant areas of the positive
to it.
What,
then, is it possible to say of this excellent critic
that is in any way negative? It might be argued that
he has an insufficient sense of some writers’ whole
careers or of where they fit in to SF traditions
not in the American mainstream. ( It is also possible,
of course, that such a sense is an analytical technique
at odds with the necessary brevity of a Locus review
and that Wolfe is in this respect making a judgement
call on what is appropriate to his market.) He is
weak on the Britishness of British sf and the ways
in which, say, the editorial practices of a British
magazine like Interzone impact on the work of a quintessentially
Interzone writer like Richard
Calder. Calder would probably have written the same sort
of phantasmagoric, polysexually charged, darkly cynical
fiction whatever his circumstances; it did not, however,
harm his rapid discovery of his voice that David
Pringle of Interzone was somewhat more sympathetic
to such work than to work more concerned with emotional
analysis and personal politics.
This sense
of context is perhaps most crucially missing from
Wolfe’s otherwise insightful account of Geoff Ryman’s
Was which is perhaps the
middle 90s most important novel about the urge to
write and read fantasy, whether or not one considers,
as Wolfe does, that such metafictional concern with
genre places it outside genre. Wolfe is good on the
poise of Was between the polemical and the
ludic, on its finely tuned sense of period, on its
successfully achieved structure - he admires the
book hugely and conveys that sense of admiration. In all
but one area, this is an exemplary review, and remains
one even when that area is raised as a cavil.
What I
think is missing from his account is that sense of
exile which is crucial to Ryman as a Canadian who
grew up in California and settled in London, that
empathy for estrangement which Ryman has extrapolated
from his experience as a gay man. When he writes
about the brutalizing of an imagined historical Dorothy
and L.Frank Baum’s failure to do more to save her
than celebrate her existence, Ryman is talking about
his own bad conscience. Dystopian fictions like
Ryman’s The Child Garden and Oh Happy Day
are in large part his response to the HIV epidemic and
the institutional homophobia of the Thatcher/Reagan
years, and that response is a noble and elegant one. Yet
Baum is nonetheless a vehicle for Ryman’s self-doubts
and self- criticism. When Wolfe neglects context,
he neglects a sense of that argument with the self
from which, Yeat tells us, poetry is made.
To argue
this, though, in no serious way detracts from the
achievement of Wolfe’s reviewing; we are, none of
us, exempt from such considerations. There are missing from Soundings
things which we might have expected to find and whose
absence is clearly a considered choice. Wolfe is
of all important sf critics perhaps the one who has
drawn most on critical theory, and whose own work
has done most to create a particular theory of how
sf in particular is constructed - his work on the
crucial iconic sense of various genre givens, what
Brian Aldiss calls, for example, “the folk memory
of the first landing on another planet”, changed the
way we think about the subject. His reviewing almost
entirely omits such questions.
This is,
I would suggest, a choice which has almost entirely
to do with a sense of the decorum of reviewing. Soundings
is a book which takes pains to be accessible to the
casual and frivolous reader without in any way patronizing
her; it is a book whose virtues are all the more
remarkable when we remember that these pieces were
composed month by month rather than in a single creative
rush. Wolfe is an urbane and humane critic who avoids
the occasional sins to which the rest of us fall
prey - Blish’s curmudgeonly point-scoring, Clute’s
lexicomaniacal self-indulgences, my own ideological
spitefulnesses. He is one of the best of us, and
Soundings a quite excellent
book.
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