Rocannon’s World (Ursula le Guin)

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well finish reading the sci-fi classics of le Guin now that I’ve started.

This one dates from the mid-sixties. Rocannon is another exiled alien, stuck this time on a low-gravity planet populated by a group of divergent humanoid species that end up kind of suspiciously like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. There are the dwarf-like Claymen, the elf-like Gdemiar and a bunch of others who are a bit like leprechauns and goblins. This allows le Guin to tell what is essentially a tale of heroic odessey set in a fantasy world, but have a scientific basis for everything. Nice.

Rocannon himself is an anthropologist who has arrived to study the various intelligent life forms. The ship that holds his team is unexpectedly blown up and he realises the planet is the base for a hostile war with the League of worlds for which Rocannon works. He loses all his weapons and his communication devices. That leaves him, without any of his usual techologies or tools, to undertake a dangerous mission to find the aliens and steal their intergalactic fax machine in order to warn the League of what is going on before the danger spreads.

This book has quite a charming feel for colonisation from the aboriginal peoples’ point of view. The dismay and incomprehension of the feudal, elf-like Gdemiar as their castles and keeps are blown up must be something like the feelings of nineteenth century Afghan tribesmen as the colonial powers played their Great Game across the Panshijr valley.

The book is exciting and fairly short, although in places it strayed a bit too much into the ‘fantasy’ genre for my taste. It was a reasonably fast paced read though, and well worth the four or five hours I put into it.


If this book was a person, it would be Charles Darwin dressed in a wizard costume.

In a nutshell: An alien is trapped on a fantastic world of dwarf- and elf-like species – but a sinister presence from beyond the galaxy is invading.

Rocannon’s World scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, mostly M & Ms which I gulped down all at once.

Psychogeography (Will Self)

jejune
brio
arete
palisade

These are some words you need to know if you’re going to read Will Self. Nothing wrong with that. When it comes to vocabulary, size does matter.

This collection of essays has a great premise. Self intends to do some serious cityside walking, setting off on insane treks (from his home in London all the way to Heathrow Airport, for example) to discover how humans and their landscapes intersect. And indeed things start off very well. Who would have thought you could even walk from central London to Heathrow? Fascinating.

But like the long, long trek from JFK to Manhattan he also undertakes, the journey palls somewhat toward the end. The first few essays are great, alive with Self’s unrivalled knowledge of London’s layout and history. Many others have their moments. But towards the end of the book the essays got shorter and more offhand, until like the hard shoulders or traffic islands with which Self is so fascinated, they started to seem a bit, well, slapdash. A little grey and alienating.

The form, too, moves from a promising city central grandeur like rows of stately Georgian terraces (impressive headings like Walk One and Walk Two suggest that the book is going to be entirely composed of walks), to the haphazard juxtaposition of industrial estate carparks with weedy stretches of wasteland and discount shopping hangars. By the end of the book he is tossing off inconsequential little morsels about taxi rides in Singapore and drinking tea in Turkey and it all gets a bit half arsed.

The Ralph Steadman illustrations are great, though. Their dystonpian visions kept me pleasantly horrified, and the bright colours kept my baby entertained, making this a great book to read while combining musings on the future of civilisation with breastfeeding.

If this book was a person, it would be a scrabble champion with a rucksack and mild Asperger’s.

In a nutshell: Will Self walks through cities (mostly London) while Ralph Steadman illustrates.

Psychogeography scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including some, like the hard toffee, that you really have to suck.

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K le Guin)

Well, I am on an Ursual le Guin binge. Like my friend who was never allowed to watch TV as a child and now spends evenings staring slack-jowled at So You Think You Can Dance, I’m making up for lost time. I really should have read her sci-fi when I was about twelve, at the same time as I was charmed by the Wizard of Earthsea series, but better late than never.

Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world that has two chief weirdnesses. First, it’s freezing cold. That’s why the world is nicknamed ‘Winter’ by the aliens sent to persuade it to join the alien equivalent of the United Nations. Second, the people are neuters, neither male nor female, except for one week or so each month when they go into heat and mate with another neuter in a bizarre hermaphroditic frenzy.

Narrated from the perspective of Genly, a lone alien emissary sent to get the planet to join up with the intergalactic civilisation, there is a lot of snow and ice in this book. Which is great – only last year I had my obsessive ‘snow and ice challenge’ phase when I was gripped by any and all stories of survival on high mountains or down icy ravines (Touching the Void, Edmund Hillary’s autobiography View from the Summit, etc). And this book has a huge ice plain endurance test! Where the alien and a neuter local spend weeks battling across a blizzard swept glacier! Running low on alien food supplies! Occasionally having odd cross-species sexually charged ‘moments’! Awesome.

According to the introductory bios, le Guin’s parents were big on the 1950’s anthropological scene. And it shows, with delightfully subtle imaginings of alien ways and culture. Half of the book seems to be taken up with Genly’s cultural problems. His misunderstandings and confusion could be those of any alien anywhere in space-time – like my husband’s British inability to comprehend the Australian phrase ‘Ya right?’

I really enjoyed this book. The characters still have silly names that you suspect are anagrams, like Genly and Slose and Estraven. But this annoyed me less than before. Maybe, like Genly the alien on the weird ice-world, I am becoming acclimatised…

If this book was a person, it would be Gandalf the wizard, wearing a space suit. Actually, a space dress.

In a nutshell: An alien ambassador is trapped on an icy planet inhabited by stoic Scandanavian type hermaphrodites who wear a LOT of fur.

The Left Hand of Darkness scores eight and a half chocolates out of a possible ten, all of them slightly chilled chewy caramels, requiring a lot of chewing over and giving a corresponding amount of sweet satisfaction.

The Dispossessed (Ursula le Guin)

I don’t normally read sci-fi. It’s the names. In this novel everyone is called Shevek and Rulag and Bedap and god-knows-what...

These weird little non-words irritate me. Why can’t anyone conceive of a distant future full of space travel in which people are called Brayden and Maddison? That’s what primary school rolls tell us the near future, at least, has in store.

At least le Guin explains the funny names – in her utopian society, everyone gets assigned their names at birth by a computer, instead of an ID number.

At first the book seemed a bit ponderous. In a galaxy far far away, a planet and its moon circle one another. The planet is full of nations at war and nice shopping strips. The moon is full of thorny bushes and dust storms and a bunch of exiled idealists who went there 150 years before to build their utopian anarchist society. There’s been no official contact between the two societies ever since.

An alien physicist lives in the utopian society on the moon. He does a weird kind of alien physics that might lead to a sought-after instanteous interstellar vehicle. Everyone is keen for a piece of this action.

This is where things changed from ponderous to irritating – or even a bit spooky. Surely sci-fi’s main promise is a complete escape from real life? But instead I found the alien sitting around with his wife – his pregnant wife - whinging that some journal had rejected his paper. His pregnant wife made sympathetic noises but secretly just felt tired and hot. Yeah, yeah. Then the alien’s wife had the baby and the alien decided to leave the utopian society and go live in the capitalist society on the main planet. Leaving the alien’s wife at home, alone, with the baby.

Things were so exactly like my actual life at this point that I expected the alien to ring up the moon and announce he had lost his wallet and could his wife Western Union him some cash ASAP…which fortunately didn’t happen. For a start, there is no money on Annares, the moon. Utopians, like royalty, don’t carry cash.

Reading this book, I was charmed by the way the future dates so quickly, that in this distant solar system where you can scoot between planets on a big spaceship, you also can send a Telex or buy a postcard, using coins of course, because who’s ever heard of a credit card? And I was eventually seduced by the believableness of the relationship between the alien and his wife, the little personal tensions that impeded his life’s work. Despite the ever-so-seventies concerns of capitalism versus a kind of communism (except not, it is more like very organised anarchism), I got very into The Dispossessed.

Now that I’ve finished it, I miss it. I may dig out some more sci-fi – particularly if I can find any in which the protagonist is called Steven.

If this book was a person, it would be my husband, Will, wearing long alien robes and calling himself Willek.

In a nutshell: a brilliant physicist is forced to choose between his dusty, utopian home and the riches of a capitalist planet.

The Dispossessed scores six chocolates out of a possible ten.

Little Wilson & Big God/You’ve had your time (Anthony Burgess)

In Laos in a wet winter, as I sat planter-style in a wicker chair on the verandah of an ecotourism resort taking a holiday from my holiday, I fell vehemently in love with Anthony Burgess. I’d discovered a battered copy of his 70’s novel Earthly Powers among the limited selection in a Vientienne bookshop. It had everything: big words, gentle syntax. Catholicism. The end of empire. Planters sitting in wicker chairs on verandahs. Evil. The pope. The pope, evil.

I knew I loved him and needed to read more, but I never found anything in second hand shops other than A Clockwork Orange, which I’ve known only from the Kubrick film and which has always struck me as a rather adolescent work, the kind of thing you stick in your duffel coat pocket on your way to the first lecture of your Film Studies degree.

When I mentioned my love for Burgess over tea to some friends they pressed me to take the autobiography, the first portly volume (Little Wilson & Big God) and the second more emaciated one (You’ve Had Your Time).

I knew his life was grim, but wow! Holey jumpers and socks, Batman, this was emotional and financial poverty indeed – mother and sister dead of the flu when he was an infant, father spitefully washing his talent away in a torrent of booze, left after his father’s death with only the begrudging lodgings of a dutiful stepmother to see him through his Catholic education. The war brings more grimness as he is exiled on Gibraltar with only Barbary apes and their more Simian cousins in the British Army for company. After that he fails as a grammar school teacher and ends up in another kind of exile in colonial Malaya, boozing his way through hot evenings, slapping mosquitoes with one hand and the backsides of gap-toothed Malay prostitutes with the other.

The character of Burgess himself is strangely unsympathetic. He’s always winding people up and getting into fights. When late in the second book he realises that he and his second wife have no friends, you’re not surprised. The books are terribly clever-clever. He must have been an interesting dinner party guest, but you wouldn’t have wanted him lingering after coffee, ogling your boobs as he declined Latin verbs and bitched about how much more for real he was than Somerset Maughm.

He was more for real, learning Malay, Chinese and Arabic, teaching in grim schools out in postwar Malaya as the British Empire sighed into its final Singapore Sling. And his concern with making a buck is refreshing, showing how much of his art has its genesis in urgent rates payments and rental arrears; the boring things in life.

He harps on about being born to Catholicism, unlike Graham Greene who converted to it. But he himself was born to music, and converted to writing only when it became clear he wouldn’t be a composer. His passion for music, clearly central to his life, left me weirdly unmoved. It is a formal kind of passion, all quavers and symphonies in four movements.

I was relieved to discover that A Clockwork Orange has been falsely shoved into all those duffel coats all these years – there is a final, grown-up chapter, removed by the book’s American publisher, in which Alex becomes an adult, gets some perspective and renounces violence forever. Burgess bitches on about how annoyed he was that this was deleted.

There is something slightly disingenuous about Burgess’s account of himself. It sounds too much like a man trying to convince you a series of mistakes and accidents were all the result of some very grand and clever scheme that you were just too stupid to perceive. He definitely doth protest too much, perhaps trying to prove that all his best work was achieved without really trying, without really caring.

He’s the same about his wives – both formiddable characters who drive a lot of what happens in the narrative, although he doesn’t speak much about the emotional power they clearly wield over him. It’s unsatisfying - you know there must be more to the story, but he won’t – or can’t - tell you. You’ll have to turn to his novels to find out the truth about his emotional drivers.

But for all that, like Burgess himself, sticking by his alcoholic first wife as she descended into cyrrohis and death, I still love him.

If these books were people, they would be a workplace crush for whose email account you had found the password. As you obsessively hack into emails about budget reports and three o’clock meetings, you know you’re not really getting to the soul of the matter, but that doesn’t stop you.

In a nutshell: Poverty stricken would-be musician is forced by circumstance to become a best selling genius of a writer.

Little Wilson & Big God and You’ve Had Your Time score seven chocolates out of a possible ten, including the popular chewy caramel.