Zeroville

Just too late for the various best of the year pieces I’ve contributed to, I discover Steve Erickson’s Zeroville which is one of his best, and certainly the funniest thing he’s written. Of course it’s not really science fiction or fantasy but, as with everything he’s written, there is an element of the fantastic that runs through it. One of the central plot elements, for example, concerns a single frame inserted into every film ever made which, when extracted, create a new film. It is also, though this is something no review so far seems to have picked up, a novel that overlaps with his first book, Days Between Stations: our hero, Vikar, lives on the same secret street in Los Angeles that migrated between San Francisco and LA in the earlier novel; among the movies he watches is The Death of Marat by Adolphe Sarre; and when he starts to make his own film (another in the list of great unfinished movies in Erickson’s work) his scriptwriter is Michel Sarre, who still wears his eyepatch over one eye or the other apparently at random. In Days Between Stations this trick of Michel’s allowed him to see the world very differently, and this double view finds its echo in Zeroville when Vikar becomes aware that one profile reveals (in crude terms) the good side of a character and the other profile the bad side.

Astonishing Stories

Let us assume, just for a moment, that ‘genre’ delineates a mode of story rather than a mode of telling, in other words that it refers to science fiction and romance and crime and the like rather than to prose and poetry and drama. With me so far? Let us, then, also imagine that there are two approaches to genre. For the sake of argument I shall call them the ‘resident’ and the ‘visitor’ approaches. Those of us who are ‘resident’ in a genre, its habituees, its authors and critics and devoted readers, want the genre to grow and live and change. Thus, although we delight in familiar landmarks, we also like exploring new neighbourhoods, new ways of doing the genre, because that is what keeps it fresh. Those who are visitors to the genre, however, here to see the sights, want it to stay the same because they are here only to see the familiar landmarks, indeed they define the genre in terms of those landmarks, they orient themselves on those landmarks (TM Maureen). Anything that does not conform to the pattern set by those landmarks is not noticed by the visitor because, by definition, it is not what drew them to the genre in the first place. The residents are happy to see change, the visitors are in search of the static.