Silica based lifeforms

[dolorosa_12]

After yesterday's exhausting conferencing, I collapsed into bed around 8.30pm and slept for close to eleven hours. With that sleep debt repaid, today has been a lot less tiring, and in between work, I managed to finish another book in my lunch break: Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, edited by Carolyne Larrington. This anthology brings together various women writers from the UK and Ireland to retell folktales from around these island with an intersectional feminist twist. The stories have been compared in reviews to things like Carter's The Bloody Chamber, although for me they lacked the requisite bite and sharpness — they were well told, but had a kind of studied cautiousness about them. I found the 'forgotten' descriptor in the title something of a misnomer, given that I recognised most of the original tales from the folklore anthologies I used to read as a teenager — but maybe that's just my own weirdness!

Onwards to today's book meme prompt:

20. A frigid ice bath of a book




There can be no answer here but The Beast of Heaven, one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors — the brilliant Victor Kelleher. Kelleher is mostly known in Australia as a writer of science fiction and fantasy stories for a YA readership (and as far as I can tell is entirely unknown outside Australia), but The Beast of Heaven is one of his few works for adults. I first read it for English class when I was fourteen, and it absolutely shattered my brain, and devastasted me.

The book imagines what I now recognise to be a fairly typical 1980s far-future dystopian scenario: a world so ruined by nuclear disasters that it is reduced to a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape, where nothing lives or grows other than a very hardy breed of fungi. The world is inhabited by tiny communities of people, who eke out an existence in the wasteland, illiterate, itinerant, creating nothing, led by a shamanic figure who is the sole guardian of their history and memories. This fearful community is hunted at times by violent, shambling beasts.

Set against this (and here the very 1980s aspect comes into play) is an ongoing dialogue between two sentient computer programs, which were programmed in the past to participate in an endless debate about whether humanity is worth saving from destruction. If one program wins the debate (which necessitates convincing its interlocutor of the veracity of its argument), it will trigger a set of nuclear weapons to wipe out all sentient life on Earth, and if the other wins the debate the weapons will be deactivated.

Midway through the book, there is a huge plot twist/reveal which causes the two computers to abandon their respective arguments and start arguing from the opposite position, and this reveal is so bleak, and so shocking (although I suspect that its effect was thus in part because I first read the book as a teenager with less experience of the SFF canon) that it left me feeling genuinely horrified and despairing.

I love the book, and I've reread it several times, but unlike Kelleher's dystopian fiction for teenagers (which is still pretty pessimistic — he's not a cheerful writer and his books don't have a good opinion of humanity) there is nothing kind or redemptive about it. Some of his work has a kind of 'hope in the ruins' tone, but The Beast of Heaven is chilling, icily bleak, and as utterly devoid of hope as the dead sands and bleached skies under which its plot unfolds.



21. A book written into your psyche

22. A warm blanket of a book

23. A book that made you bleed

24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

26. A book you recommend but cannot love

27. A book you love but cannot recommend

28. A book you adore that people are surprised by

29. A book that led you home

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by

Comments

[lirazel]

Wow! That does sound intense! I'm also really fascinated by how much of late 20th century Australian fiction sounds dystopian/post-apocalyptic. Do you think there was more of that in Australia than elsewhere and, if so, why? Or were you just really drawn to that genre?

[dolorosa_12]

That's a really interesting question. I think in part it was due to my own tastes (or at least my loyalty as a child to certain authors, who kept coming back to postapocalyptic or dystopian settings).

However, I do also think it was a really popular genre in Australian fiction in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century. Now, bear in mind, I have never studied children's literature or Australian literature (except insofar as I studied individual Australian novels at various points during primary or secondary school English classes), so my answer is based solely on my own observations, rather than any formal study of the field.

I think in part there was a lot of post-apocalyticism going on in relation to the Cold War, and specifically the threat of nuclear war, and that saw expression in fiction. But this aspect isn't unique to Australia.

I also think that Australia had a particularly acute fear of climate change, far earlier than other Anglophone countries, and so a lot of Australian literature imagines a harsh climate which has been ruined by climate change. This thread is clear as early as the 1970s or 1980s, and you even get it in works of children's fiction — the anxiety about the effects of climate change was clearly in the popular consciousness from an early stage, I suspect due to the fact that Australia already has a pretty extreme climate (compared to e.g. Western Europe).

However, I also think that the popularity of post-apoccalytic and dystopian fiction in Australia is a reflection of the country grappling with its original sin of colonisation and the genocide of the region's original inhabitants. There is a theme in even the earliest of Australian literature of unease in the land, and the idea that people are living in a harsh, scary environment, where the very land itself is hostile, just waiting to violently punish them for the injustice of their presence, and the wrongs of their ancestors. (Obviously, this kind of literature is written by white authors, and assumes a non-Indigenous readership.) The landscape itself is depicted as alive and angry, and its vastness creates a kind of unsettling vertigo and unreality. (Picnic At Hanging Rock, Walkabout, and the Mad Max films all draw from this same wellspring, as do the myriad dystopian and postapocalyptic children's and YA novels I read as a child.)

In my opinion, all these three strands (Cold War political context, fears about climate change, and guilt about colonialism) fed into the popularity of post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction in Australia, but the third strand is what gives Australian fiction of this kind its most devastating power.

[lirazel]

This was so interesting! I did not expect such a wonderful, long answer, but I really appreciate it.

[dolorosa_12]

Haha, you may not have realised, but post-apocalyptic Australian fiction is one of my pet obsessions — so when you ask a question about it, I (unfortunately) give you an essay!

[lirazel]

No, I loved it! And honestly, you should turn it into a post for everyone else to read too, because it's so interesting!

[dolorosa_12]

I wrote a long post about it, years ago, on my longform reviews blog. I should probably write an update at some point, though, since that post is now nearly ten years old!

[lirazel]

Oh fun! I'll read that one too!

[naye]

Eleven hours of sleep sounds lovely! I'm glad you're less exhausted now, and hope this week treats you well.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you! I clearly really needed the extra sleep — I could barely keep my eyes open on Monday afternoon! I feel a lot fresher now, and I think the rest of the week will be good.

[nerakrose]

I found the 'forgotten' descriptor in the title something of a misnomer, given that I recognised most of the original tales from the folklore anthologies I used to read as a teenager

that's how I felt about it too! There was one story where the original was even exactly the same as some stories we have in Icelandic folklore (possibly through cultural exchange in the time of the Vikings since a good number of the settlers were celtic) and a few others were very familiar as well. But I also read volumes upon volume of (mainly Icelandic) folklore collections when I was a child...

[dolorosa_12]

That doesn't surprise me — also there was a lot of settlement of Scandinavian peoples in Scotland, and along the coasts of Britain and Ireland, so a lot of chances for the exchange of ideas and the development of common folk stories.

I think I knew every single story in the collection except for 'The Brothers,' and the one about the person going to Norfolk to work in that creepy farm.

[rachelmanija]

I'm not going to read it so please spoil me: what's the reveal? The remaining humans are all cannibals?

[dolorosa_12]

I'll put the spoiler in rot13. You should be able to translate it by copy-pasting it into this site.

Gur tebhc juvpu V'ir qrfpevorq nf 'crbcyr' ner erirnyrq abg gb or uhzna orvatf, ohg vafgrnq fbzr bgure xvaq bs navzny juvpu unf tnvarq fragvrapr. Vafgrnq, gur funzoyvat, ivbyrag 'ornfgf' juvpu uhag gurz ner gur erznvavat uhzna orvatf. Gur pbzchgre juvpu jnf nethvat sbe gur cerfreingvba bs uhzna yvsr (naq unq orra vzcerffrq ol gur pbzcnffvba naq pbzzhavgl fcvevg bs gur fragvrag aba-uhzna navznyf) punatrf vgf zvaq orpnhfr vgf cebtenzzvat vf irel fcrpvsvp: gubfr perngherf ner abg uhzna, fb gurl'er bhgfvqr gur fpbcr bs vgf nethzragf, naq gur npghny uhzna orvatf ner erchyfvir jvgu ab erqrrzvat dhnyvgvrf, fb qba'g qrfreir gb fheivir. Gur pbzchgre juvpu unq orra nethvat sbe qrfgehpgvba vf fb vzcerffrq gb frr vgf nethzragf pbasvezrq (gung uhznaf ner ivbyrag, ubeevoyr, frys-pragerq zbafgref) gung vg jnagf uhznaf gb pbagvahr fheivivat nf gurl jvyy shysvy vgf zvffvba bs qrfgehpgvba naljnl.

Xryyrure'f obbxf nyy unir gur zrffntr gung nyy uhznaf ner ornfgf, ohg gurl'er hfhnyyl n ovg zber fhogyr guna guvf, naq gurl nyfb graq gb unir n pbeerfcbaqvat gurzr gung gur jbeyq jbhyq or orggre bss vs jr rkcnaqrq bhe qrsvavgvba bs uhznavgl.

[chestnut_pod]

Sleep hurrah! Here's to more of that moving forward.

I just put in a request for Hag at my library -- if it involves a selkie, I am in all the way. Would you mind elaborating a bit on what you mean by "studied cautiousness?" With adaptation, with the feminism, with…?

[dolorosa_12]

There is not one, but two selkie stories in the book, so you're definitely in luck in that regard!

When I say studied cautiousness, it's nothing to do with the feminism in the stories — they're all resolutely feminist in their approach (and from a pretty intersectional set of perspectives: there are stories by and about queer women, women of colour, disabled women and so on). It's more that I feel if you're going to invite comparisons with Angela Carter, the work in qustion needs to be a bit less simplistic, a bit messier, and a bit less black and white in its outlook (i.e. stories with clear and obvious villains, and unproblematic heroines). Not all the stories in the book are like this, but the majority of them are: they're perfectly serviceable and coherent stories (and make sense as adaptations of the original tales), but there's no complexity there, and very little darkness.

[chestnut_pod]

Ah, I see. Well, good to know; thank you!