I
took out a subscription to the New Yorker in 1999, the year after I came
back from my first trip to the United States. It was a way of keeping in touch
with my new discovery, America!, or at any rate, with a very particular part of
the US with which I’d fallen in love, New York, and, hindsight now tells me, a
New York that was either entirely inaccessible to me, no matter how much I
might want it, or which had vanished long before I arrived. But reading the New
Yorker was also about buying into a particular style. I discovered a lot of
new writers thanks to recommendations from my US friends. Many of those writers
were essayists rather than novelists, and many of them had contributed to the New
Yorker over the years: the late Joseph Mitchell was a prime example, but I became
particularly besotted with the writing of John McPhee. Possibly I subscribed to
the New Yorker just to read his infrequent essays though I also relish
the biographical essays; and when it’s in the mood, the New Yorker can
really crank out the investigative journalism. And then there are the cartoons
…
The
fiction? There is a distinctive New Yorker style, undoubtedly. The
magazine has its favourite authors, some of whom are authors I especially like,
such as Louise Erdrich and Chris Adrian; others, I’m less familiar with but I’m
happy to try them out. Sometimes this is successful, sometimes less so, but I
try to keep an open mind. The New Yorker would not be the first magazine
to spring to mind if I’m thinking about science fiction, the fantastic,
fantastika, whatever, but it has, in the time I’ve been reading it, flirted
with it in fiction and in its non-fiction. See Chris Adrian again for short
stories that remind me of Sylvia Townsend Warner, an excerpt from Karen Russell’s
Swamplandia springs to mind, and I recall essays by Michael Chabon,
about Neil Gaiman, to name but a few.
And
now we have the New Yorker’s first sci-fi issue. It is perhaps annoying
that the New Yorker doesn’t editorialise about its own content so we’ll
never know for sure what its intention was in creating this issue. One can only
speculate, and of course I am going to do that, as others have already done.
Let’s
start with the cover, the first thing that people are going to see. I’ve
already seen complaints that the magazine should have asked this artist or that
artist to do a special science-fiction cover. My immediate thought was ‘why
would they do that?’ This is the New Yorker after all, and the cover is
situated firmly within its customary cover aesthetic, and by a regular cover
artist, Daniel
Clowes. Looking through the slideshow of Clowes’ New Yorker covers,
he’s a good fit for this issue as he has incorporated sf tropes into previous
covers. He seems to have a taste for the gently ironic and is not adverse to
mocking those who make a big production number out of things that are really
straightforward. I particularly like the New Yorker cover where a young
gun is trying to design a flying car while a middle-aged man cruises past his
office window in a spacesuit rigged as a flying machine. Indeed, given he is a comics
artist and cartoonist with a retrospective currently on at the Oakland Museum
of California, he seems to me to be a more obvious choice as cover artist than,
say, Bob Eggeling, one name I saw put forward.
However,
the demand that the magazine should use a recognised sf artist already points
to an assumption in various quarters that the New Yorker should first of
all be embracing the genre as understood by hardcore sf fans, and various
subsets thereof, and that secondly, if it is going to embrace the genre, it
should make damn sure that everyone knows that from the outset. I’d hazard a
guess this was not quite what the New Yorker had in mind.
But
let’s go back to Clowes’ cover. What is going on here? At first glance we have
what looks like a fairly staid party in someone’s apartment. Little drinks,
canapés, people talking. Six people: middle-aged white woman, perhaps the
hostess; middle-aged white man, with beard and glasses, looks like he might be
an academic. Is it his apartment? Don’t think so, not least because the
bookshelves are artfully empty. I’ve never yet met a real academic whose
bookshelves aren’t stuffed solid. And anyway, to the far right of the picture
is another white man who, like the woman to the far left, is only partly in the
picture. As well as framing the scene, his expression mirrors hers; their
collective consternation seems as much directed to the damaged wall and books
as to the appearance of three gate-crashers at their party.
And
back again to the centre of the picture and to the male academic. He looks
startled, as indeed one might, but more taken aback than horrified. Next to him
is another middle-aged woman, this time a woman of colour; she is visibly
startled by these apparitions; is there a slight hint of revulsion in her
expression? In front of them is a young man, who might as well be a younger
version of the middle-aged academic: the dress sense is the same, although he
has different glasses, no beard as yet (but he carries the other badge of
office of the male academic, the book under the arm) and it is not difficult to
see what he is likely to become. This could so easily be a faculty party, with
the man on the far right as the administrative head of the department, the
woman on the left his anxious-to-please wife.
However,
there are four other figures present. Three of them are bursting through the
wall, but we’ll leave them aside for a moment. The figure I want to consider
now is the woman we can’t see. Right at the centre of the cover is a young
woman with her back to us. She is strikingly bright in comparison to the others
in the room, with her yellow hair, her black sleeveless top and a string of
white beads (pearls?) round her neck. Who is she? What is she doing there?
Critically, what is the expression on her face?
She
is the one figure in the room who appears to look directly at the spaceman who
has burst through the bookshelves; all the other figures look at him side-on,
although the perspective of the picture makes it difficult to tell how far into
the room he and his companions have actually intruded. Except, of course, that
he doesn’t seem to have stepped over the threshold of the hole in the wall at
all, and a closer look suggests that the young woman is looking straight past
him, to the green blob behind him. In fact, looking even more closely, the
spaceman – young, dark-haired, more forehead, chin and teeth than seems
feasible, plump-cheeked, redolent of apple pie and bubble-gum, the wholesome
all-American sports jock – isn’t so much gazing at her as past her, towards the
viewer outside the picture.
And
what of the spaceman himself? The epitome of science fiction, certainly 1950s
comic-book style yet he doesn’t quite ring true, either. He is a little too
young, perhaps? Not exactly craggy Dan-Dare style, more teenage boy living his
dream. And the blob-monster and the robot seem to be his companions rather than
his adversaries. One might initially read him as the space adventurer who gets
the girl, indeed who has come to rescue the girl from the dreariness of a
mundane faculty-party existence, although we might suspect that ‘rescue’ would involve
marriage and a Bradburyesque existence in astronaut-suburbia instead, but he is
obviously not interested in her at all. Perhaps he wants us to admire him in
his spacesuited glory with his whacking great raygun.
It is
at this point we might begin to wonder whether this is a literal portrayal of a
fantastical event or whether, within the terms of the picture, we should read
it in a more metaphorical way. There is something about the way that hole in
the wall seems to hang in space. Yes, it’s surrounded by damaged books but in
real terms, if that is a blaster, wouldn’t the books be burned rather than have
their corners blown off? Come to think of it, doesn’t that gun look rather
disproportionate? So, if this is not a real incursion into the ordered world of
the faculty party, what is it?
I’m very
tempted to interpret it as a thought bubble, the collective thought bubble of a
group to whom the young woman, the focus of this tableau, has just said that
she reads science fiction. The apparition, then, is their collective perception
of sf as being garish, filled with aliens and astronauts with jutting chins and
rayguns. This issue of the New Yorker then might be seen as offering a
corrective to that old-fashioned view, instead suggesting that there is more
than one way of looking at science fiction. The contents represent the young
woman’s view of sf. This is in turn problematic in that it might be interpreted
by hardcore sf fans as a rejection of their ways. And perhaps it is in that the
contents are, after all, a New Yorker take on sf. Then again, what might
have happened if they’d picked up a New Yorker with a Bob Eggeling cover
and found inside Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Sam Lipsyte and Jennifer Egan.
Just as much consternation as we see on this cover. Go figure.
In
which case, it is time to consider the contents. The first 57 pages consist of
the usual New Yorker diet of listings and short pieces, the editorial
being about Obama and Syria. There is a distinction made in the contents page
between ‘sci fi’, fiction and several non-fiction pieces, as well as two pieces
in the critical section; investigation reveals that the ‘sci fi’ section
comprises a series of very short memoirs by writers (Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le
Guin, China Miéville, Margaret Atwood, Karen Russell and William Gibson). There
is a certain flavour of ‘the usual suspects’ about the writers but they are for
the most part regular contributors to the magazine so it is not surprising they’ve
been called upon again.
Of
the four pieces of fiction, three, by Lipsyte, Lethem and Egan, are in my view
not exactly taxing pieces of contemporary sf. The Lipsyte and Egan fall into
that category of ‘experimental form’ which is too easily mistaken for sf. There
are hints in Lipsyte’s ‘The Republic of Empathy’ that one of his characters is
moving in and out of alternative versions of his life, but what is most
striking about the story, apart from that same character being wiped out by a
drone strike on his own front lawn, and not forgetting the interlocking
multi-viewpoint narrative, is the fact that Lipsyte’s characters are, for the
most part, aware of their own fictionality and deliberately foreground that
fact. Is it science-fictional? Probably not, and I doubt New Yorker
readers are unfamiliar with this as a narrative form away from science fiction.
For certain kinds of genre readers who prefer a straight linear narrative it
may well be more of a problem.
Jennifer
Egan’s story was famously produced in a series of instalments on Twitter, which
I suppose might be perceived as science-fictional in and of itself, though
equally it might be argued that it more than adequately demonstrates the
shortcomings of Twitter as a medium for fiction. The last piece of fiction I
read by Egan was in fact a list and one has a sense that she seems to enjoy
using this particular form. However, while some might see it as being achingly,
post-ironically postmodern or some such to me it feels more old hat than
anything, and not even having your second-person viewpoint character apparently
festooned with surveillance implants makes it any more science-fictional than
it already is … or indeed, isn’t. Though I concede it might have a certain
novelty value if one is unfamiliar with such tropes.
The
same might be said of Jonathan Lethem’s amusing squib about the Internet within
the Internet, though this is less about the internet itself, more about social
behaviour in groups. One has never needed the internet in order to form a
clique.
Which
leaves us with Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro’ which would not look out of place in any
one of half a dozen more obviously sf-oriented publishing venues. Set in Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, this is a story of a mysterious plague, La Negrura,
The Blackness, which begins to infect refugees in the relocation camps of
Haiti. Which particular relocation this might be, Díaz doesn’t say; one thinks
immediately of the camps created after the recent earthquake but Díaz offers sufficient
details to suggest that the story is a little further into the future though,
of course, it may be that those camps still exist. But the nature of the future
as such is not what interests Díaz; his focus is on what’s happening in it. Our
narrator is a young man, a university student, hanging out with a group of wealthy
young Dominicans, marking time while his mother dies, chasing girls, one in
particular, and the new disease doesn’t really impinge much on his life. He has
other things to do while, as he puts it, ‘watching the apocalypse creep in’.
We
might assume, and anyway he tells us, that he survives whatever the main
apocalyptic event is, whatever it is that turns him into a ‘time witness’; the
nature of the events remains unclear. The narrator describes what happens to
the sufferers of La Negrura but has little analysis to offer the reader. He is
trapped in the thick of it, particularly once the island comprising Haiti and
the Dominican Republic is cut off. Díaz is again using conventional sf tropes –
the mysterious plague, the odd behaviour of the infected, the mass killings by
the Possessed, the bombing of major population centres, the nebulous sightings
of ‘Them’ – but while this is not precisely a polite catastrophe in the Home
Counties, neither is it exoticised by its setting or its participants. The
tone of the story is perhaps best summed up in the narrator’s response to
stories about the nature of the mysterious attackers: ‘Forty-foot-tall cannibal
motherfuckers running loose on the Island? Negro, please’. The narrator, more
accustomed to Brooklyn though the DR is his family’s home, is simply incredulous.
Indeed,
there is a lot more to dig out of this story about othering, expectations of
settings and so on, but that was not the intention of this article. Instead, I’ll
leave it at saying that Díaz combines his Dominican roots and his long-standing
familiarity with science fiction to produce a good solid story told by a
relative outsider, trapped in an unfamiliar place. It is open to interpretation
and indeed I am most intrigued to see how non-sf readers would respond to it.
If
the New Yorker and I don’t see quite eye to eye over the fiction, though
I can see why such choices might be made, things get more interesting in the
non-fiction section. The memoirs that make up ‘Sci-fi’ are boxed out, almost
like advertorials, and perhaps in a way that is what they are: testimonies
about the life-affirming properties of science fiction and how it shaped the
lives of those writing, rather than people extolling the virtues of
prescription drugs and financial packages (oddly enough the New Yorker’s
actual financial page is always boxed out in the same way, as though money is
faintly vulgar and needs to be corralled). At the same time, I couldn’t quite
shake off the feeling that the boxes were also there to protect … well, what,
the rest of the magazine? The other thing that strikes me is how inevitably
they historicise sf, position it as a thing of the past, a thing of childhood,
even though all these writers, yes even Margaret Atwood, work with the material
now (though here I must excuse Ursula Le Guin, who writes instead of the
problems of trying to get an sf story into Playboy with a female byline).
Even Colson
Whitehead’s excellent ‘A Psychotronic Childhood’, detailing the genesis of his
love of horror films and incidentally showing how one acquires critical
judgement, has its face turned firmly to the past (and god forgive me, at one
point I did wonder whether I wasn’t in fact reading a real-life version of
Pinkwater’s Snarkout Boys stories. Indeed, while checking that I hadn’t muddled
them with Lizard Music, I learned that a third Snarkout Boys novel, I
Snarked With a Zombie, was planned but not written). At a critical level I
am, I admit, mostly blind to film so it is interesting to read about Whitehead’s
filmic education. At the same time I found myself wondering if a secondary
function of the article wasn’t to demonstrate to genre readers that Whitehead
was, so to speak, ‘one of ours’ while reassuring other readers that it was ok
to put Zone One down to a misspent childhood.
The
late Anthony Burgess’s article on the genesis of A Clockwork Orange
reaches even further into the past. Again, it’s well-written, a fascinating
meditation on what it means for society to intervene in the control of
behaviour, but other writers have written about their fiction since 1973. On
the one hand, it’s good to have this article back in circulation; on the other,
it seems to reinforce the notion of sf as an historic literary artefact.
The
two critical pieces focusing on sf take a similarly historical line. Laura
Miller’s ‘The Cosmic Menagerie’, on the physical appearance of early fictional
aliens is a good general historical overview for the uninitiated, referencing
the likes of Camille Flammarion (Lumen) and J.-H. Rosny ainé (‘Three
Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind (Wesleyan)) alongside
more familiar writers such as H.G. Wells, as well as mentioning a number of
critics such as Brian Stableford and George Slusser (consistently referred to
throughout as Slosser; so much for the much-vaunted fact-checkers of the New
Yorker). Emily Nussbaum’s ‘Fantastic Voyage’ tries, to some degree, to get
to grips with the idea of the ‘fan’ and the tv series, with particular
reference to Doctor Who and Community. There is no doubt that she
‘gets’ it in terms of discussing the intensity of that relationship, though one
might argue too that she indulges in ‘fan service’ in that she plays to the
geek mentality rather than considering it a little more rigorously. Are tv
shows and their fandoms always ‘so much larger when you’re on the inside’?
Possibly, but I wouldn’t have minded her thinking about the possibility of
there being edges. Overall, these articles offer history rather than context;
the memoirs, by contrast, offer context but the history is, inevitably,
sketchy.
So,
let us return to where we started, to that thought-bubble spaceman and his
intergalactic friends, messily intruding into an ordered world of panelled
rooms, just enough books, the polite canapés and the modest glass of fizz, and
to the girl who brought him into being when she cried sci-fi. If, as I suggest,
he is a composite of the preconceived ideas of five people in that room about
the nature of sf, do the contents of the New Yorker represent the sixth
person’s view of it? The contents present an alternative view,
certainly, but they seem to me to be working terribly hard, maybe a little too
hard, to establish a pedigree for sf beyond the standard genre sensibility.
Time and again, we are assured that sf has a history, a long history; that
well-known writers, even almost-Pulitzer-winning writers, care about sf. It is
as though the New Yorker is telling us that it is ok to like science
fiction, all sorts of science fiction, because it has made us what we are. Having
said that the New Yorker itself was never that likely to include overtly
genre stories; the Díaz comes closest but in such a way as to satisfy those who
think they don’t like genre as well as those who know they do. But mostly it
talks about genre without actually performing it.
As to
whether that is a good thing or a bad thing? In truth, I do not think for a
moment it matters. I no longer see any point in being an evangelist for the
healing properties of genre, not least because there are as many ways of
defining sf and fantasy as there are people queuing up to define it. To imagine
that the New Yorker should be out there attempting to convert its
readership to hardcore genre sf is both absurd and to make unwarranted
assumptions about New Yorker readers. It is safe to assume that many New
Yorker readers already know what sf looks like, thank you, and that they
have places to go to find it. It’s probably equally safe to assume that the
rest had little interest to begin with and stuffing it down their throats now
is unlikely to make most of them change their minds. At best, one might say
this issue presents an idea of what sf might look like for some readers, and
they can follow it up if they want. Of course, there is the risk that for some,
this is a diluted extract of sf, to be taken with pinched nose and a reassuring
‘there, that wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be, was it?’ Then again, so
be it. But equally, it perhaps wouldn’t hurt some genre readers to take a few
steps beyond their own preconceptions about sf
and take a look at this New Yorker.
