One of the pleasures of the summer has always been having
the time and disposition to be able to read widely and deeply. There is
something about the bright sunlight and the vista of expanded time that invites
us to enter a recreational mode. Some
people bicycle, others hike, some people work on their cars in their garages,
others just settle down with a beer and watch a baseball game. There was always
the illusion that we have more time than we can dispose of, that we have a surplus,
so to speak, and so we are less harried than we normally are. For those with a
more practical bent, they might plan to undertake home improvement projects,
for this is undoubtedly the time, and the sunlight is enervating. I’ve always
been on the opposite scale, and have preferred to read, a taste that is shared
by others, since we have institutionalized what has come to be known as the summer
reading list.
There is more than we can possibly read, and during the
year, I accumulate far too many books. I stare at them guiltily, and try to at
least open up them and read a few pages before putting them down again, because
during the other seasons, I have far too much to do. Summer is different. This
is when many of us feel that we actually have the time and, indeed, almost
obligation to make a dent in the pile of projects we have been accumulating,
and our inventory of books certainly qualifies as a project. We can’t watch
television all the time, can we?
Whether it be mystery or crime novels, spy novels, the
latest Stephen King or Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum thrillers, or more
conventional fare that we would rather not confess to reading otherwise, there
is plenty from which to choose. I would like to think that this would be a good
time to read those earnest historical treatises we have always told ourselves
we would read, the biographies of Lyndon Baines Johnson, or maybe a more
polemical tract, such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, or Jorge Castañeda’s Mañana Forever?, a provocative title that hits a nerve for Latin Americans
and those of Latin American descent such as myself. But somehow, it isn’t the
season for it, and we settle into more well-worn tracks, which usually involve
escapist fare.
Rather than read the turgid prose of an Edward Gibbon
narrating the end of the Roman Empire, who wouldn’t want to put themselves into
the mindset of a hardboiled detective, or of a hallowed explorer such as Earnest
Shackleton? Of all the ways to while away the time, I return to favorite
characters and genres, and in this instance happen to prefer novels by Martin
Cruz Smith, whose stolid investigator, Arkady Renko, has been a favorite ever
since I read Gorky Park as a
teenager. There are other characters that I can return to again and again, even
if they aren’t part of a series, but the essence of them is that they are
always perhaps a little perplexed, never truly happy, and can be considered
outsiders in the true sense of the word.
Others prefer romance novels, those with the colorful book
covers and even more evocative titles, suggesting a perpetual dreamlike stoking
of erotic energies. There is twilight, there are dark and mysterious
characters, there are exotic locales, there are vines and lush tropical
verdure, and all of it seems to contour itself around the parameters of what we
can term “literary masturbation”. Am I being dismissive of this genre? I don’t
wish to be, because even if I don’t read romance novels, I recognize their
equivalent in other genre fiction I have read, most notably, the “Gor” novels
of John Norman, or recognize similarly how these elements (titillation,
fantasies of rescue and/or seduction, and rivalries and contests in which
sexual gratification in the form of a queen or princess or seductive other) is
evident in genre writers dating back to H. Rider Haggard and others. There is
an element of passivity in the object of sexual conquest, whether it take place
in a colonial realm (colonial eroticism) or in an imagined future scenario that
serves as the spice for action, without any need for a lurid Frank Frazetta
cover (he of the impossibly muscled warriors and the similarly exaggerated
female sex objects).
I have long come to understand that it is precisely the
formulaic aspect of these works that affords such pleasure to the reader. They
want familiar characters, memorable characters and familiar settings, a
contest, a quest, a romantic triangle, a puzzle waiting to be solved. They
appeal to the need for engagement that we all feel as readers, and as with all
genre fiction, it is we readers who project our own fantasies and desires and
mold them so that they are contained within the distinct form that is assumed
by this literature. We collaborate with the
author by faithfully anticipating the plot twists and the complications that
will arise, and by feeling satisfied that the correct sequences (the
complication, the climax, the denoument) are followed, as well as the devices,
for example, in the mystery or crime novel, take the form of the obligatory
summation of the parameters of the case that has just been solved. The
characters emerge as they always do, not much changed, and there is a certain
cognitive comfort in this as well, for we recognize a pattern that has once
again been upheld. When we speak of escapism, we do it on familiar grounds,
ironically.
In my case, I have always enjoyed reading science fiction.
This genre affords many familiar pleasures to me, ever since I was a boy and
picked up my first volume of Ray Bradbury short stories, R is for Rocket, S is for Space. I could always lose myself in
those stories, me being a kid from a working class immigrant background, and
who didn’t quite fit in with the other kids on my block. It always felt like
familiar territory to me, this feeling of instability that took place on
familiar ground, this feeling that there was a puzzle that had to be cracked,
as if it were the analogue to my own social situation. As I grew older, I
always reflected on the points of similarity between comic books, science
fiction, crime novels (especially Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels) and
other genre fiction that I always read, and could even recognize points of
similarity with works that explored the experiences of ethnic communities, from
Jewish to African-American or Mexican-American authors. The idea was that we had a set of
circumstances and we were carrying out, so to speak, a thought experiment, with
a familiar catalogue of crisis and conflict scenarios that we saw over and over
again. It was perhaps also comforting to see that there was always a point of
resolution, because literature relied on the grammar of storytelling, and there
was always a resolution, even if in life this tended to escape us, or at least,
me.
Science fiction is in reality a compendium of genres, and it
can conform or at least incorporate aspects of travel literature, potboilers,
crime fiction, Modernist analysis, psychological thriller, and other genres. When
I was young I remember reading the somewhat caustic travel narratives of Paul
Theroux, especially his The Old Patagonia
Express, and feeling as if the old colonialist view of Latin America was
still very much at play in his work. Fortunately, I was later able to read a
more sympathetic and enchanting book that detailed a sojourn to Ecuador, Tom
Miller’s The Panama Hat Trail, and
found myself entranced by the incorporation of folk lore and the ability of the
author to describe his encounters with people of all socioeconomic backgrounds,
whether or not these encounters were accurate and not romantic cuadros de costumbres (quaint character
sketches). There was also the lyrical account by a writer such as Bruce Chatwin
of the psychic landscape of Australia, The
Songlines, or Alex Shoumatoff’s evocation of Brasilia and the eternal
frontier, The Capital of Hope. These
books were powerful hallucinatives for a young man such as myself, and perhaps,
they could also be classified as a form of escapist literature.
This being the summer, I was desperate to read a good
science fiction novel, and after hearing a positive review on NPR, I decided to
pick up Jason Hough’s debut work, The
Darwin Elevator. This book presents another dystopian scenario, one set
approximately two hundred years in the future, in which humanity has been
struck by a plague, one that is somehow connected to the arrival of unseen aliens
who have built a giant structure (an elevator) that reaches into the sky. We
know little of the motives of these aliens, since there is no contact with
them, but in their wake we have a plague that arises and devastates humanity,
converting the majority into sub humans (or in the modern parlance so popular
nowadays, “zombies”). Humanity teeters on the brink of extinction as a consequence.
It is a shameless potboiler, a page-turner in the classic tradition of summer reading,
with a first time author who nonetheless manages to capture a sense of wonder.
This seemed like a promising scenario, and it couldn’t help
but bring back memories of so many other works I have read. While I tend to
prefer quieter and more introspective science fiction novels, especially those
of Ursula K. Le Guin, I was intrigued by the way in which this work promised to
incorporate several elements (and formulas) that are so common in science
fiction. One of these involves the idea of first contact, a trope that has
figured prominently from the very beginning, havng been used to satirical
effect in Voltaire’s Micromegas, and which was explored by H.G. Wells in his
early The War of the Worlds as a
critique of imperialism. Another involved the idea of dystopia, one that in
this case may simply have been catalyzed by alien intervention, for the
underlying circumstances of a humanity that was ever in crisis were ever
present (overpopulation, intractable political conflict, opposing cultural
spheres that seemed to echo the ideas of Samuel Huntington who had written in
past decades of a coming “clash of civilizations” where cultural blocks emerged
to subsume and replace nationalism, ecological devastation, etc.) The world is
ever coming to an end, and we as a culture are obsessed with these scenarios of
coming apocalypses, for don’t they tie in to the idea of human history as a
story, with a much needed conclusion about to be revealed?
Also, I find myself asking, what is this obsession that
popular culture seems to have with zombies? I don’t think it is entirely new,
and in the past, we used to express it in terms of becoming as it were
automatons, clogs in a vast and anonymous institutional apparatus. It was also
transmuted into ideas of transformation and the blurring of differences, in
ideologies that one can’t help but perceive as being based on racial
differences, a fear that I can’t help but see expressed in the fear that many
conservative sectors in this country have of a “One-World” scenario in which
everyone has blended in, and in the cry of the Tea Partiers that they look
around and they “can’t recognize this country anymore”. It is a fear, of
course, directed against people like me, mestizos to begin with, who have yet oppose
this ideology with visions that details a more optimistic and, quite frankly,
realistic outlook. (Tracts such as José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica are early works in this vein, utopian but not
grounded in real-life considerations the way, for example, Héctor Tobar’s much
more recent Translation Nation is.)
And is it not possible that there is another element at play as well, one that
has to do with the way our economic system has morphed to assume a much more
predatory and expansionistic guise, the Super-Capitalism of the 21st
century that it is said is elevating many from a life of poverty, but which
seems to have stumbled badly in the industrialized world, with the watchword
being that consumption is necessary to fuel our economies. Is that all we are?
Mindless consumers, stuck in a system that demands that we never have enough,
that we consume more and more in a compulsive fantasy that is quite frankly
ultimately unsustainable for the instabilities it implies? I can’t help but
think that these are part of the underlying elements that underscore the
fascination that zombies hold in our popular culture at this point.
In this novel we also have a mystery, for the have the
encounter with an alien culture. It isn’t first contact, not yet, for the
aliens don’t reveal themselves, but we have instead contact with their artifacts,
those that are stunning to behold and evoke the feeling of wonder. I couldn’t help but hark back to the classic
science fiction novel of the 1970s that I read as a child, Ringworld, written by Larry Niven, and which details the exploration of a massive engineering artifact left
behind by an advanced civilization. When it comes to these narratives, I can’t
help but view them also as imperialist fantasies, for they allude to
imperialism in all its facets, whether it be in the way one culture is reduced
to the status of scavengers who try to glean what they can from the objects, or
to the darker scenarios that involve conquest, the seeding, for example, of
blankets with smallpox and other germs, to be distributed to Native American
tribes in order to devastate them and make them easier to displace. In this
scenario, after all, we have the arrival of a plague that devastates humanity,
after all, even if it isn’t thoroughly established yet if this plague was
brought by the aliens who constructed the mysterious elevator.
I am reminded of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Steels and Germs, which attempts to offer an explanation for
the destructive nature of these contacts, signaling mechanisms and ideological
foundations that help to explain why one culture so dramatically changed and impacted
another one. These are, one would imagine, mechanisms that are in play on a
grander scale, and that is part of the fascination that I think we derive from
these types of works, the idea that powerful civilizations decline and, as with
our current obsession with zombies and our anxieties about the rise of China,
that the world order (or in this case, American predominance) is being
challenged, while another hidden order is yet to be established.
It was with these ideas in mind that I began to read The Darwin Elevator, hoping that these
issues would be explored. But perhaps I was expecting too much from this novel.
It is a classic summer read, in the fact that it is characterized by nonstop
action, and by somewhat one-dimensional characters who react in clumsy ways
that may be familiar, but that are nonetheless clumsy and lacking in the magic
of writers of more considerable literary skill, such as Robert Charles Wilson
or Olaf Stapledon. We have the pilot, Skylar Leukin, who gathers together a
crew of like-minded adventurers who are immunes, that is, part of the minority
of people who for some reason are immune to the plague and thus have more
leeway for movement in the wreck of a world that has been left behind. We have also
the eccentric but also visionary entrepreneur, Neil Platz, who has taken charge
of the space stations that are constructed as a last refuge for humanity, and
that gather together the remnants of the technological and scientific elite of
this culture. And we have villains, which it pains me to say, are portrayed in
heavy-handed fashion, almost in cartoon fashion, as is the case with the
governor of the last human outpost of Darwin, Australia, a character named Russell
Bleilock, who is singularly bloodthirsty.
The action is nonstop, and one is pressed to decide if the sub
humans who have taken control of the rest of the planet and who, amazingly, are
able to survive even as they are reduced to animal state, or if the
manipulative directors and actors in this drama pose the greater threat. I am
struck, over and over, by the mechanisms whereby these symbols of accentuated
appetite (call them “subs” as they are called in this novel, or “zombies”) are
able to survive in such numbers. To continue with the speculations above, are
they just symbols for the projections of the fears of a bourgeois culture that
sees in them the working classes of the present age, those that are supposedly destined
to be the unproductive “takers”, to use the jargon of presidential candidate
Mitt Romney? I wonder over and over about the layers of this obsession we seem
to have with zombies, and even if they do revert to the background as dangerous
“natives” that recall the nastier colonial narratives of our own past (they are
anonymous, they are incoherent, they have immense appetites, they are singular
physical specimens with little culture), they serve as a layer to the novel
that all-too-briefly offers a limited measure of social commentary. They are an
ideological construct that is used, over and over, to illustrate fears we share
as a culture, at least bourgeois fears, for I can’t help but see in them familiar
markers in the way ethnic and racial minorities are portrayed in this culture.
There is not enough exploration of these complexities in
this novel. Instead, we have a thriller that relies on action sequences, in
which the pilot Skyler always gains the upper hand, and we have a political
situation that become more and more unstable as the novel progresses. The haves
in the space station are in conflict with the have-nots on the ground, who are
increasingly besieged by the sub humans who are pressing in and who threaten to
overwhelm them. And, it turns out, the aura which the elevator had emitted, and
which seemed to confer protection from contamination, is failing, and now there
are outbreaks of the plague both within the city of Darwin as well as in the
space station, a situation which was unimaginable.
While this novel was an undeniable page turner, I found
myself ultimately unsatisfied with this novel. The dialogue was choppy, and the
interaction between the characters was rendered in a way that seemed clumsy.
Perhaps it was foolish to hope for anything like the lyricism of Ursula K. Le
Guin or Gene Wolfe, and it is certainly the case that the author did not
capture the psychological intensity of characters who seem too one-dimensional.
It is hard, in other words, to distinguish at times between the subs (the
zombies) and the normal humans, for what we have are characters who all seem to
be driven by basic impulses, by fear, by jealousy, by anger, by ambition, and
by the recourse to violence.
I look for more in the books that I read, but yet I was
seduced at certain moments by this novel. I found this in the evocation of the gritty
world of Darwin, the last human city, where an increasingly desperate human
population, shielded by the aura of the elevator, struggles to survive. It is
an underworld that reminds me in many ways of the movie Bladerunner. And, I found
it in the twists and turns of the characters, who form alliances as well as
betray each other, in ways that seem too melodramatic, but then, melodrama is a
pleasure that I’m not prepared to renounce yet. And ultimately, I found it in
the evocation of the aliens and their astounding technology. We may not
actually see an alien yet in this novel, but there is something of a lurking
presence that colors this novel. We may yet turn out to have merely another War
of the World scenario where these aliens are yet another example of a culture
bent on imperial expansion, but it may also be the case that the aliens are
indeed benevolent, or at least, not as easy to characterize.
I hope that is it the latter. Aliens as angels or demons,
yet another topic that I would like to explore in future posts concerning
science fiction, for ultimately they must be seen as mirrors for our deepest anxieties
as well as hopes. While Jason Hough doesn’t yet have the chops of the best
science fiction writers, and this novel isn’t Solaris (the classic by Stanislaw Lem), he draws on the rich
catalogue offered by this genre.
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