“The Rebel Worlds” by Poul Anderson (1969)

Poul Anderson’s The Rebel Worlds begins so promisingly:

Make oneness.

I/we: Feet belonging to Guardian of North Gate and others who can be, to Raft Farer and Woe who will no longer be, to Many Thoughts, Cave Discoverer, and Master of Songs who can no longer be…

And so on, for five hundred or so impenetrable, poetic, evocative words as Anderson takes us deep into the thoughts of the thoroughly alien race he’ll eventually (and all too briefly) introduce us to. Unfortunately, we’re cheated. The novel we’re actually given is a fairly standard, if entertaining, space opera enlivened by a chastely portrayed love triangle between doomed, heroic figures: Commander Flandry, the swashbuckling, womanising hero of a number of Anderson’s books, the rebel Admiral McCormac and his wife Kathryn, whom Anderson blesses with one of the more bizarrely rendered accents I’ve encountered in a major character. Possibly it’s meant to be Irish. It reads like the speech impediment I had as a child.

“Well, learnin’ does seem to go easier’n for our race, but ’tis not instantaneous…”

Overall, this is classicist stuff – readers of Heinlein and the ‘New SF’ of the late sixties will recognise the push and pull between reactionary libertarianism (men are men and women are…well, we’ll come to that) and counter-cultural mores (“We have the regular assortment of drink and drugs…and would you like a bite to eat?”).

The plot, hinging on the tension between rebellion for short-sighted but well-meanng motives versus long-sighted paternalistic imperialism, is well structured and pacey and the action sequences all you’d expect from the author of Broken Sword. Flandry is a surprisingly complex creation and the aforementioned aliens justify the entire book.

But seldom have I encountered a text so thoroughly (and, occasionally, comically) of its time – 1969.

“Because his object was not to enlighten but to simply to seduce her, he twirled his mustache and leered…”

Oh. My God. The lead character has a mustache. Which he twirls. The mission he’s sent on interrupts his birthday celebrations with “three gorgeous girls, ready and eager…” A page later, he meets another woman dressed in a ‘translucent wisp of rainbow.’ Fortunately, “she was constructed for it…”

Finally, however, Flannery meets his match in the formidable Kathryn. Astonishingly, she looks like his mother! And he promptly gets the hots for her like no other woman he’s ever encountered in his life. Perhaps its because she’s dressed in a “nacreous slip”?

What exactly is going on here? From ‘woman is the recreation of the warrior’ to Oedipus within a few hundred words? She is of course, a red-head. Every ‘strong woman’ in the whole history of 20^th century SF has red hair, from EE ‘Doc’ Smith and his Lensmen onwards. She’s also broad-shouldered, muscular, bronzed and did I mention that she looks like his mother? 

Enough already. The Rebel Worlds is a product of its time and no more or less sexist than most of the rock music or art produced in the late sixties. The question one has to ask is “Shouldn’t science fiction writers of the time have known a little better?” One can make excuses for Dickens – I’m not so sure that ‘it was the times’ holds completely true by the time we were putting a man on the Moon.

Still, there are at least those aliens which provide another Freudian twist to the text. They’re tri-partite beings consisting of a lumbering manual labourer, a flittering bird of prey type thing and a vaguely chimp-like creature. Together, they form a single sentient being. It’s hard not to speculate about ids, egos and superegos, though Anderson’s id seems to take charge of his typewriter every time a woman wanders (slinks, sashays, flirts…) onto the page. 

Overall? Read with gritted teeth or (better) seek out Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness, published in the same year. After that, things would change. Slowly.

Wrestling with the sacred

For quite a while now, I’ve been trying to embed a teeny-weensy sense of the sacred in the life of our family. Whilst she’d probably put it differently, supermum feels the same way. It comes from a sense of unease that we don’t properly appreciate the things we’ve been given and how fortunate we’ve been in life compared to other families.

On the other hand, I’m equally uneasy about the level of moral smugness and superiority that hovers just beyond any formal attempts to express ‘gratitude’. Also, I’m not talking about charity here. We have the direct debit with ‘Save The Children’, buy the Big Issue (which I feel guilty about not liking very much), recycle, sign petitions and go on the occasional protest march. I write to my MP about things that shock me and give money to beggars. All of this is perfectly Richard Dawkins friendly and doesn’t help. What I’m actually talking about is religion.

Now I’ve always seen my parent’s brand of Catholicism as something horrible and oppressive but as I’ve got older, I’ve begun to appreciate the stable centre it gave to lives which would otherwise have been very uncentred indeed. But returning to the church isn’t an option. For one thing, I don’t believe in an ‘interventionist God’ (I quote that line from Nick Cave an awful lot). For another, I don’t accept the bigotry, paedophilia and regressive politics that seems to go with mainstream Christianity. And I’ve zero interest in hair-shirted Presbyterianism. Quakers offer a reasonably attractive form of Christianity but there’s still that barrier of being personally redeemed by Christ. No thank you. Islam suffers from most of the issues that Christianity is dogged by (see bigotry, regressive politics etc) and I really would need a complete cultural refit to deal with Hinduism.

Meanwhile, full-on engagement with other religions that interest me has is complicated by the lack of any real scope for engaging with the family. Zen Buddhism isn’t really kid-focused and Richard and Linda Thomson have probably put me off Sufism for life. Also, supermum doesn’t do religion. It’s one of those blank spots in our relationship. Her family never had any religious involvement and she literally cannot comprehend an inner life as moulded by religion as mine has been. On the other hand, she gardens. She pays attention to the seasons. She wants to acknowledge that life is passing and things happen to us, good and bad.

This, then, leads us towards paganism. Being me, I’ve thrown myself headlong into exploring Anglo-Saxon heathenry. As a family, we’ve been poking gently at Goddess strands of paganism and encountered Starhawk, Diane Baker’s and Anne Hill’s source book for children and goddess traditions, Circle Round, which has many wonderful things in it but a fair leavening of material which makes me cringe. I’ve also been reading the rather more critical Ronald Hutton whose book Triumph of the Moon respectfully but thoroughly debunks much of the ‘ancient’ tradition surrounding Wicca and its ideologies (which has made trying to find anything we can do relating to Easter a bit of of trial, given the lack of substantial historical provenance of the goddess Eostre).

Now hang on a minute, you’re probably saying. If you’re so dead set against religion and don’t believe in God, how on earth can you so easily charge off into a world of irrational pantheism and animism?

Fair point. I suppose it comes down to seeing engaging with the sacred as a creative act. I don’t need the divine to have a concrete, verifiable existence to invite it into my life. As a writer, I do this every day with things that I evidently make up. Examining or reconstructing or recreating older/extinct/modern traditions provides a means of carving a space for stepping outside our everyday place in the world and thinking about it. Making sense of it. Or making sense of the lack of sense. We’re born, we live and we die, and the year round cycle paganism explores offers a way of creatively engaging with the mystery at the heart of this.

Hmm. That’s probably enough for now. Meanwhile, the Korean poet Ko Un notes:

Bitten by a mosquito

Thanks.

Wow, I’m still alive.

Scratch, scratch

Skullduggery Pleasant and the problem of violence

Dudelet (who’s nine) has recently got into Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant in a big way. He’s devoured the first one in about two days and is currently storming through the second. There are, of course, various things about the books I’ve forgotten. Like the swearing, for example.

“You know how I’m not supposed to swear?”

“Yes.”

“So how come this children’s book has so much swearing in it?”

“No it hasn’t.”

“This character says ‘Damned key!’”

“Ah. Well. That isn’t really swearing.”

“Can I say Damn? Damn!”

“No you can’t.”

“What about ‘bloody’?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“It’s not my fault – you gave me the book!”

“Yes – but…”

Yes, but what?

Actually, the swearing in the Skulduggery books doesn’t go any further than the occasional ‘bloody’ and only ever by the bad guys. Mostly. The violence, though, is another thing entirely. My God, but Skulduggery Pleasant and his friends are pretty bloody violent individuals. But according to the discreet little note on the back, the novels are suitable for children of “9+”.

One swipe of the sword took the fingers on his left hand and he howled in pain and staggered back and she jumped. She planted her feet on his chest and swung, the blade flashing in the bridge’s lights as it took his head.

Eek. Or is it different because it’s happening to a troll? And am I a hypocrite because I’ll let him watch this or Avengers Assemble but I won’t let him see Skyfall? Supermum’s puzzled about the last one. She thinks the Marvel films are too violent (but I’d argue her tolerance of little elf’s Barbie fixation ceded the moral high ground long ago) and she used to worry about Doctor Who. So what’s the difference? Why is Skullduggery acceptable? Why are The Hulk and Thor positive role models? And why does the idea of my nine year old watching James Bond make me queasy?

Supermum asked me this in the car once, with dudelet listening attentively (we’re pretty open about these discussions).

“It’s because it’s too sexy, isn’t it?” dudelet said.

“What’s ‘sexy’?” asked little elf.

As it happens, I do have an answer (though not about what sexy is) and it’s to do with that old fashioned fall guy, the Moral Compass. Skulduggery Pleasant has one. The Mighty Thor has one. Even Ironman has one.

James Bond doesn’t.

Bond might as well be Loki. He likes killing. He enjoys watching his enemies suffer. He treats women with contempt and uses them as toys. He stumbles through the kind of ambiguously grey moral universe that only adults should be asked to navigate. For all of the cartoon dismemberments, beheadings, eviscerations, zombifications and sundry other horrors, there is never any doubt about right and wrong in Skullduggery’s universe, even if the characters themselves struggle to orientate themselves along the compass points they know they ought to follow. And, compared to The Hunger Games or the horrors of Garner’s Red Shift, it’s fairly knockabout stuff.

Barbie, though. That’s plain unforgivable.

Do you draw the line at particular books or films? I suppose we all have a limit. What’s yours?

Shouting – an update of sorts

Warning: contains parenting and a degree of positivity or even optimism.

One of my more commented on posts (not that that this is saying much) is Eight is a difficult age, an agonised cri de couer about the whining (him) and yelling (us) that dudelet, then eight, was putting us through. He’s now nine. Time to check in.

Back in last February, we were experiencing meltdowns and tantrums that could go on for an hour then flare up again if you looked at him funny. Literally anything could be a trigger. We ultimately put it down to a long list of age related circumstances with ‘tiredness’ at the top of the list. A year later, Dudelet still gets up at 5:30 most days and reads then stomps downstairs to (clunk) unlock the downstairs rooms (and wake us all up) and get himself breakfast, watch television or otherwise amuse himself. By 7:30pm in the evening, only the matchsticks are keeping his eyes open.

His sleeping schedule dominates the whole household in that the rest of us stagger through the morning feeling grumpy, hard-done-by and liable to snap.

Not surprisingly, he sees this as grotesquely unfair – he can’t help waking up early, he says, and once he’s awake, he can’t get back to sleep.

“But you don’t even try? Look at you, you’ve got huge bags under your eyes!”

“STOP HAVING A GO AT ME!”

(Slams upstairs. Sound of sobs.)

And so on and on. 

He’s also hyper-aware of any distinction in the treatment that his little sister gets. She’s five so, as you can imagine, that happens a lot. It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have a mother who, pre-children, regarded getting up before 8:30am on a workday as an act of barbarism and getting up before noon at the weekends as something you after a really exceptionally long lie-in. Supermum isn’t just grumpy in the mornings – she’s the original Mamma Grizzly.

So mornings are all too often a perfect storm of bad temper. If we could only get him to sleep in even half an hour…

On the other hand, a screaming fit is ten times more likely to be followed by a teary apology and cuddle than a year ago and it’s even possible to send him up to his room to calm down (“This isn’t a punishment – you just need to take some quiet time then you can come down when you’re ready”). He’ll generally be up there for five minutes then will rejoin the rest of us in a reasonably civilized state of mind. 

My own shouting is more under control. I think this relates to dudelet and I at least trying to discuss issues reasonably, even when he’s utterly furious with me over some inadvertent slight. At nine, he’s much more capable of – eventually – taking on board the other person’s point of view.

And last week he made us all tea. By himself. He even let me help with the kettle without an outburst of “I can do it myself” moodiness. I suspect the last is a key milestone – he’s starting to learn to accept help and risk failure (that’s another post, I suspect – dealing with children who are afraid of failing).

Meanwhile, I’ve kept up Three Things (three things he’s done that day that I’ve appreciated, regardless of how small or trivial  night after night – no matter how difficult it is to remember at times. It still seems to matter to him. And it certainly matters to me.

Bad sentence of the week #1, from Matthew Paris

No, not the medieval monk and chronicler, I mean Matthew Paris the ex-Tory politician, columnist for the Times and former (junior) diplomat.

My step-mother-in-law, a wonderful if slightly unreconstructed ex-colonial and serial petitioner against cruelty to elephants, pointed me at his Parting Shots: Undiplomatic Diplomats – the ambassadors’ letters you were never meant to see (Matthew Parris, Andrew Bryson Penguin Books Ltd, 2010). It’s a book of ‘valedictory’ despatches from UK ambassadors and consuls stretching out over 50 years of de-colonialization. They range from the insightful to the out-and-out offensive. At their worst, one shudders at the thought of these racist, snobbish, chauvinistic people being sent out to represent us. On other occasions, one groans with despair at the extent to which some of the timely and insightful advice these (invariably) men set down was ignored by the governments of the time. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating and alternative ‘oral history’ of modern times and conflicts from a unique set of perspectives.

It isn’t the content of the book that really annoyed me, though. This sentence did.

Discussed briefly in the Introduction is the 2006 decision by the FCO so to curtail the impact within the Office of a valedictory despatch that (diplomats have told us) the whole tradition has effectively been ended.

I regard myself as a broadly literate person. But I’ve tried and tried in vain to parse this sentence. I’ve read it out loud, split it into individual and dependent clauses, translated it into Latin and back again in the hope that it was some strange echo of public school classical grammar (no, not really), but the sense of it continues to elude me. It’s ugly. Where was their editor? They did have an editor, right? I mean, this book was put together by a Times journalist and a radio 4 producer. How could they let this slip through?

Trivial, I know. But it’s Friday.

P.S. Fact of the week – did you know that one of the girls on the cover of Roxy Music’s country life was the sister of Can’s guitar player, Michael Karoli?