• About
  • Index
  • The Lost Domain

Through the dark labyrinth

Through the dark labyrinth

Tag Archives: John Crowley

Before and After

01 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in history of ideas, science fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Colin Burrow, Dave Hutchinson, Gene Wolfe, Henry James, John Banville, John Crowley, Michael Wood, Philip Pullman

There is a congruence in the latest issue of the London Review of Books (4 January 2018) that I find interesting and instructive.

In the final paragraph of his review of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, Colin Burrow remarks:

A great work of fantasy involves testing and advancing the physical and moral laws of a new world; and a great part of the pleasure of reading a book set in an alternative world lies in seeing an author discovering a possibility that stretches the boundaries of the imagined world without wrecking its internal coherence. Writing a prequel to that kind of elastic imagining is exceptionally hard, because so many of the rules have already been invented and cannot be subjected to creative strain, let alone broken. (8)

On the facing page, almost exactly parallel to this passage, in a review of Mrs Osmond, John Banville’s sort-of sequel to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Michael Wood says:

But the straightforward concept of a sequel tends to literalise the story that went before it, as if it were a solid historical structure rather than a fiction – that is, the reflection of a whole map of choices and inventions. (9)

And there you have it, as neat an encapsulation as you could wish of the fact that prequels and sequels are bound by the same iron chains. An original work of fiction is an “elastic imagining”, a “map of choices and inventions”. But once those inventions are set in stone, the sequel or prequel is restricted in what creativity it can bring to the fiction. The prequel has to work towards a known end-point, within circumstances already established by the fiction which it approaches. A sequel has to continue from a known starting point, within circumstances already established by the fiction it is building upon. To change what is known, to reinvent those circumstances, would not necessarily damage the particular prequel or sequel, but it risks irreparable damage to the original.

But if you are working within those strictures, then you are voluntarily abandoning much of the invention that made the original work worthy of a prequel or sequel.

There are other links in this imprisoning chain that neither Burrow nor Wood specifically reference (though they are, perhaps, implicit in the bodies of their reviews): that what prompts a prequel or sequel in the first place is often a strange love affair between the readers and the original book. I love such-and-such a character. I love such-and-such a world. This is both the major reason why sequels and prequels get written, and the thing that most encumbers the author. Because it is necessary to retain and often to repeat what is loved, otherwise the whole exercise is futile. This is why the later volumes in some long-standing series read as though they are simply checklists: this is the point where character A is loveable, this is where character B repeats her catchphrase, this is where character C repeats his catchphrase, this is where character D proves she is secretly a goody, this is where character E saves the day again.

There remains a market for such works, because there is clearly an enthusiastic readership who like to be reminded of what they loved in previous volumes. I am not part of that market. In the main I find prequels and sequels creatively stultifying.

I must be careful here: this is not intended as a blanket condemnation. Multi-volume works that were conceived and intended as a single work, such as Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun or, perhaps, John Crowley’s Aegypt (though I think here the original conception continued to change and grow over the 20 years of its execution), don’t fit the pattern. Here the invention of the first volume and the invention of the last volume are part of the same enterprise.

Nor am I saying that it is impossible to write a good sequel. The third volume of Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence, Europe in Winter, is, I think a better novel than the first volume, Europe in Autumn. Though at the same time I think Europe in Autumn, which was not intended to have any sequels when originally written, is the volume that contains the most invention, the most science-fictional creativity.

The trouble is that what I look for in science fiction is creativity, invention, novelty; what I see in the vast majority of sequels and prequels is the exact opposite of that, familiarity and repetition. What Colin Burrow and Michael Wood do, separately and in their congruence (which is, I’m sure, not entirely coincidental), is to point out that to take on a belated sequel or prequel is to voluntarily don a straightjacket, a set of limitations and restrictions laid out by the very cause of the sequel or prequel, the original work.

As it happens, both Burrow and Wood conclude that their respective subjects, Pullman and Banville, manage to avoid being entirely constricted by their chosen form. It can be done. But it is rare; rarer than the continuous churn of sequels and prequels might lead us to imagine. It is a hard thing to do successfully, it requires bravery, spirit, and probably more invention than the original. Which is why it should be the exception rather than the rule.

And that is why I look with jaundiced and dubious eye on anything that proclaims itself the new addition to the X universe, the further adventures of Y, a long-awaited return to Z …

Why should I want to go there again when there are always new places, unknown places, awaiting my attention?

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Reprint: Let’s Go to Golgotha

24 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Reprint: Let’s Go to Golgotha

Tags

Aldous Huxley, Ann Vandermeer, Chris Boyce, Chris Morgan, Daphne Castell, Garry Kilworth, Ian Watson, Isaac Asimov, Jeff Vandermeer, John Crowley, Karen Joy Fowler, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury

This column, on ‘Let’s Go to Golgotha’ by Garry Kilworth, was intended as a companion piece to the column on ‘Standing Room Only’ by Karen Joy Fowler that had appeared in the previous issue. This was first published in Vector 277, Autumn 2014: Continue reading →

Cognitive Mapping: Nature

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Edgar Pangborn, H.G. Wells, Ian McDonald, J.G. Ballard, Jack London, James Tiptree Jr, John Crowley, Joseph Conrad, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Mary Shelley, Richard Cowper, Richard Jefferies, Richard Kadrey, Robert Holdstock, Ronald Wright, S Fowler Wright, Steve Erickson, W.H. Hudson

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was written for Vector, as usual, sometime around 1998, but may never have actually appeared. Continue reading →

Reprint: Magic Realism

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adolpho Bioy Casares, Alejo Carpentier, Angela Carter, Carlos Fuentes, Franz Roh, Gabriel Garcia Marques, H.G. Wells, Isabel Allende, John Campbell, John Crowley, John M. Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Lucius Shepard, m john harrison, Mircea Eliade, Neil Gaiman, Peter Carey, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Salvadore Allende

The recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminded me of this Cognitive Mapping piece I wrote for Vector 191 (January-February 1997). I’d probably view magic realism somewhat differently if I were to write this column now. But then, I’d probably do all of these columns very differently. Continue reading →

Reprint: The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

John Crowley, Kelly Link, m john harrison, Steven Millhauser

I’m in the process of writing my next ‘In Short’ column for Vector, and looked back at this one for some reason. Which reminded me that I haven’t actually put it up here, even though Steven Millhauser is one of my all-time favourite writers. This column first appeared in Vector 270 (late-Spring 2012). Continue reading →

Reprint: Against a Definition of Science Fiction

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Farah Mendlesohn, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, John Crowley, Kelly Link, Ludwig Wittgenstein, m john harrison, Monty Python, Raymond Carver, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Steven Millhouser, T.S. Eliot

This is a revised version of a talk that I gave to a joint meeting of the Science Fiction Foundation and the British Science Fiction Association on 27 June 2009. This revised version was then published in World Literature Today, May-June 2010. Continue reading →

Expression, religion, want and fear

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

John Crowley

I returned from Montreal with three books, two pairs of earrings and a totem pole for MKS, but only one book for myself. However, that one book was what I had hoped to find, and proved to be every bit as good as I expected, Four Freedoms by John Crowley: Continue reading →

January reading

21 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cormac McCarthy, E.L. Doctorow, John Crowley, Mark Z. Danielewski, Peter Ackroyd

Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski. Okay, House of Leaves was brilliant, and this isn’t. But it gets better as you go on and learn the rhythm of the book – it might be better to read it as sub-epic verse rather than prose fiction. The main problem is the fiddly nature of the work. It starts in large print and the print gets smaller as the book progresses. But you don’t actually read all the way through, it is structured so you read eight pages then flip the book and read the next eight pages (a large drop capital signals the turn). What you get one way is the story of two perennial sixteen year olds on a rambunctious, sexually-charged journey through middle America between the 1860s and 1960s; what you get the other way is the story of two perennial sixteen year olds on a rambunctious, sexually-charged journey through middle America between the 1960s and 2060s. One journey is told by the boy, one by the girl, but incidents echo and duplicate between the two and each story ends in death and rebirth. And the hinge point (as we discover in the chronology that occupies the margin of every page) is inevitably the assassination of John F, Kennedy. Its hypnotic in its way, but the technical ambition isn’t matched by the literary achievement.

The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd. There was a time, probably between Hawksmoor and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (with the brilliant English Music as its high point) when Ackroyd was one of the most exciting novelists working in Britain. Then somehow the novels lost their edge, they became thinner (both in size and content), and often read more like adjuncts to his non-fiction than original works in their own right. And he was always a novelist of London, anything he wrote that drifted out of the city (First Light, Milton in America) lost any spirit or liveliness. So Fall of Troy is a novel you approach initially more out of duty than excitement – it’s a late, thin novel, and not only is it not set in London, it isn’t even set in Britain. And yet it is easily the best thing he has done in many years. It is a fictionalised version of Schliemann’s famous excavations at Troy. In this version Schliemann is Obermann, a bombastic fraud driven more by faith and enthusiasm than by any archaeological or scientific integrity. He interprets every find according to the story he wants to discover, and when inscriptions are discovered which suggest the Trojans are not the Indo-Europeans he so fondly imagines it leads to cataclysmic consequences. This is a book to restore your faith in Peter Ackroyd the novelist.

Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 by E.L. Doctorow. I can still recall the sheer invigorating shock I felt when I first encountered Ragtime, and I have read just about anything by Doctorow I’ve been able to get my hands on ever since. (I’d still love to find his science fiction novel, Big as Life, which he ritualistically lists among previous publications in every one of his books, but which has been so successfully withdrawn from public view that copies are valued in more hundreds of dollars than I could ever hope to afford.) His non-fiction (of which several collections have now appeared) tends to be short and accessible, they are mostly written as reviews rather than essays, but they are every bit as thoughtful as you would expect. These pieces deal with the act of creation – generally covering writers, mostly Americans such as Poe and Melville, though there is also one essay on Einstein and one on the bomb. They are not so much reviews of books but insightful and often imaginative engagement with how they wrote, what they were doing. It provides a surprisingly fresh perspective on writers who have already been the subject of a massive amount of analysis.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is one of those writers I’ve always meant to read but never got round to before. After reading The Road I will almost certainly come back to him. It is a bleak, unrelenting novel that is, I think, meant to ask what is the possibility of redemption when there is no possibility of hope. A man and his young boy walk through a post-apocalyptic America. We are never told anything about the apocalypse, but we see its aftermath: ash everywhere, no living birds or animals, a nuclear winter closing in with ash-blackened snow. The only food is what can be scavenged from the remnants of civilisation; mostly the pair go hungry. The man is sick, we know that right from the start; the boy has a Christ-like innocence; but everyone else they encounter along the way is a threat (we see often gruesome but also rather illogical signs of cannibalism). Much has been made of the spare nature of McCarthy’s prose, but it seems to me that there is a curiously gothic quality to his brevity, as if the more pared-down the prose the more baroque the image. Not an easy book to read, it is too despairing for that, but it is a haunting and powerful work.

Aegypt by John Crowley (or as I should perhaps more accurately call it, The Solitudes, since Aegypt is the title for the sequence as a whole). Since Endless Things is now on my shelf, I am setting out to read all four volumes ready for a review I’ll be writing for Strange Horizons. It’s the first time I’ve returned to the book in 20 years and I was delighted not by how well it held up (I expected that) but by how much more it seemed to contain, how it was a richer and more complex reading experience because of my residual memories of Love and Sleep and Daemonomania. Anyone who doesn’t immediately recognise this as one of the finest works of fantastic literature needs their head examining, as far as I am concerned.

First published at LiveJournal, 31 January 2007.

Good and Bad at Books

12 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Good and Bad at Books

Tags

Hal Duncan, John Crowley

Haven’t written too much about books here recently because I’ve been in the middle of a reviewing jag. In the course of this I’ve got through one 500-page novel that seemed to go on forever, and one novel not much shorter which was over in a flash. The longer novel is, I suspect, going to be a bestseller, because it flatters the reader into thinking it is a very clever book though it is far shallower than it pretends. The somewhat shorter novel is, undoubtedly, the best novel of the year so far, but it is probably not going to be a bestseller, indeed it is probably not even going to be published in the UK, because it genuinely is a clever book and is actually much deeper than it pretends. Continue reading →

Recent Comments

Keith Knight on Love and Death
Paul Kincaid on Love and Death
Paul Kincaid on Love and Death
Chris Priest on Love and Death
Keith Knight on Love and Death

Archives

Blogroll

  • Big Other
  • Paper Knife
  • Ruthless Culture

Adam Roberts Arthur C. Clarke Award Arthur C Clarke books of the year Brian Aldiss Christopher Priest David Mitchell E.L. Doctorow Frederik Pohl Gene Wolfe George Orwell H.G. Wells Harlan Ellison Helen MacInnes Henry James Iain Banks Ian McEwan Ian Watson Isaac Asimov J.G. Ballard James Tiptree Jr John Banville John Clute John Crowley John W. Campbell Kate Atkinson Keith Roberts Kim Stanley Robinson Lucius Shepard Martin Amis Mary Shelley Maureen Kincaid Speller m john harrison nina allan Patrick Leigh Fermor Philip K. Dick Robert Heinlein Robert Holdstock Robert Silverberg Russell Hoban Samuel R. Delany Stephen Baxter Steve Erickson Thomas M. Disch Thomas More Ursula K. Le Guin William Boyd William Gibson William Shakespeare Winston Churchill

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Join 171 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Through the dark labyrinth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar