Rjurik Davidson's Blog, page 4
May 7, 2015
SFF World review of Unwrapped Sky
Review of Unwrapped Sky went up on SFFworld, which you can read here. Here’s how it opens:
I thought long and hard about whether I should make a comparison between Australian author Rjurik Davidson’s debut novel, Unwrapped Sky, and the Bas-Lag novels of China Mièville. It seems a reductive approach to reviewing this book, which is certainly the product of a fertile and ambitious imagination of all of its own. However, undeniably the many pleasures of Unwrapped Sky are reminiscent of those earlier Bas-Lag books. The lavishly constructed city setting patched together from a variety of technological and mythological elements; the wilful subversion of the tropes of epic fantasy; and the book’s conversation with the politics of revolution; all this makes the comparison hard to resist.
New Weird seems to be last season’s fashion in the world of speculative fiction (perhaps supplanted by Grimdark as the in vogue thing (and I suspect an interesting essay could be written on the relationship between the two “movements”)). However, Unwrapped Sky is a debut novel that spent almost a decade in gestation, with roots in a time period when the term was perhaps more relevant to the conversation in the field. The novel is set in the same fantastical milieu as several of Davidson’s earlier short stories (collected in The Library of Forgotten Things put out by PS Publishing in 2010). The first of these stories dates back to 2005, and that piece, titled ‘The Passing of the Minotaurs’, forms a large part of the opening chapters of this 2014 novel.
Those who have had the pleasure of reading the preceding short stories will be familiar the city of Caeli-Amur, where the entire plot of this novel takes place. Like New Crobuzon, this setting is intentionally anachronistic, with classical references butting up against elements from the post-industrial revolution era.
April 9, 2015
The Stars Askew: Opening Paragraph
At the end of the US mass marked edition of Unwrapped Sky, you can read the first chapter of The Stars Askew. Here’s the first paragraph:
A revolution, it is said, is a festival of the oppressed. In those early days, Caeli-Amur seemed at times to be one long public meeting. Between the whitewashed walls, the squares and plazas filled with citizens. In the criss-crossing alleyways, hardy washer-women and grim-faced tram drivers debated the new world; in the red-brick factories, committees discussed the running of affairs; avant-garde theatre acts performed bizarre agit-prop on street corners; at the university, students carried on neverending parties, breaking into orgies or fisticuffs before returning to their dwindling stocks of flower-liquors and their nasty yensa-fudge, to begin again. Love affairs were begun; hearts were broken; new ways of living invented. Life itself seemed to have taken on a new intensity and time itself expanded, so that each moment seemed to last forever. And yet, everything was moving at such a pace!
March 14, 2015
The Stars Askew
Though I haven’t seen it, I believe that the first chapter of my novel, The Stars Askew, is printed at the end of Unwrapped Sky. The title comes from a Victor Serge poem. Here’s the stanza which serves as an epigraph at the start of the book.
If we roused the peoples and made the continents quake,
…began to make everything anew with these dirty old stones,
these tired hands, and the meagre souls that were left us,
it was not in order to haggle with you now,
sad revolution, our mother, our child, our flesh,
our decapitated dawn, our night with its stars askew….
Victor Serge, 1890-1947
Unwrapped Sky Reviews
Want to read a few reviews of Unwrapped Sky? Here are a few. Check them out:
March 12, 2015
Daniel Polansky reviews Unwrapped Sky
There have been good reviews of Unwrapped Sky and bad ones. Ones which decried its over-seriousness, ones which feted its richness. Those who felt it moved too slowly, others that it was a gripping meditation on means and ends. Locus magazine put it on its recommended reading list for 2014. But only one person has truly understood my work. Only one has seen into its soul – and mine too. And that man is Daniel Polansky, author of Those Above. True, he hasn’t actually read the book, but then again, I haven’t read his book, Those Above, and yet I have written a review of it too, to be found over on his website. But there can be little doubt that we stand in light of a great critic, a master of prose, a giant among men. Without further ado, I offer you the most objective, straight-faced, clean-handed, review yet of Unwrapped Sky:
Daniel, you might say, assuming you had the audacity to address me by my forename—is it really fair to review a book which you have not read? To which I would respond sternly, I haven’t read Mein Kampf either, but I have strong feelings as to the content.
Unfair, unfair. Whatever one has to say about the Fuhrer, credit due, he had the aesthetic sense of an adolescent boy (lightning bolts, skulls) which put him a solid half-decade ahead of Rjurik Davidson, to judge by his debut novel, Unwrapped Sky. Or to judge by the cover of his debut novel at least, which has minotaurs and half-naked women on the front, but, I am reliably informed, no actual inter-species erotica. This sort of false advertising is par for the course with Rjurik, unfortunately—all talk, no follow-through. Or so I assume. Once again I haven’t actually read it. I’m a very busy person, what with measuring the growth of my toenails and sometimes going to the toilet.
The name Rjurik means ‘he who sweeps up corpses after battle’–an apt sobriquet, given Mr. Davidson’s collection and re-use of long dead fantasy tropes. Unwrapped Sky is the story of a bastard son of a king who spends his childhood being under appreciated by the children in his vilage until he finds a magic sword which allows him to beat up everyone who ever made fun of him for being pasty and looking like Stellan Skarsgard to a degree which I find, personally, quite offensive. It is based off of his Dungeons and Dragons alter ego. Perhaps this is the sort of book which appeals to you, in which case I respectfully request that you aim an X-ray machine at your genitalia for thirty or so consecutive hours. Thanks.
Otherwise, here are a short list of things you would be better off doing than spending your hard earned twenty-dollar bill on Unwrapped Sky;
1. Burning it; inhaling the smoke.
2. Holding it tightly between thumb and forefinger, bringing the edge swiftly down against your scrotum (or other sensitive area).
3. Have you ever heard that (possibly apocryphal) story that there is a particular chemical process the end result of which is you can get a couple of grains of cocaine off of any bill in circulation? That.
4. Stacking it in the company of a hundred or so other $20 bills, giving it to a thick-necked professional in exchange for some unfortunate mishap occurring to Mr. Davidson’s kneecaps.
Feel free to come up with others—we could start a Facebook group!
I would also like to point out that Rjurik Davidson is a sexist. Racist? We’ll say both just to cover our bases. Purchasing this book would be like canceling the nineteenth amendment. I can say with virtual certainty that Martin Luther King has never read it. Also, Gandhi. Elisabeth Cady Stanton gave up after twenty pages. Faced with such incontrovertible evidence as to his reactionary malfeasance, do you really want to take the risk of reading Unwrapped Sky? This is the 21st century, for Christ’s sake. What if someone saw you? What if that person took a picture, and posted that picture on the internet, and before your next job interview your prospective boss saw it and decided not to hire you? Is that really a chance you’re willing to take, just to read a book about minotaurs? Or something?
In closing, if you buy Unwrapped Sky, the world’s temperatures will skyrocket, glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, species will go extinct, life as we know it will be rendered impossible. Do the right thing; don’t read it, and if you have to read it, download it illegally.
March 5, 2015
Interview at Civilian Reader
I’ve done an interview with the kind folks at Civilian Reader here.
March 3, 2015
Once Again On Genre
It has popped up again, that infuriating discussion whereby genre writers have to defend themselves against the literati. It seems to happen everytime a famous so-called ‘literary’ writer tries their hand at genre. The latest is Ishiguro’s turn to fantasy, The Buried Giant. Across the Anglophone world, one senses the collective puzzlement of reviewers, used to spending their time with, Alice Munro and John Updike (the former a great writer, the later of more questionable value), as they wonder just how they can assess a book with ogres and dragons. It stains their reviews. It poisons their reviews. It turns their reviews into acts of contortion. Take Maria Arana’s insufferable paragraph from her review for the Washington Post:
It would be too easy to call what Ishiguro is undertaking “fantasy” or “magical realism.” Critics will summon such phrases to describe this book, but they would be wrong to do so. Such facile labels — suggesting that the author is relying on literary devices pulled from old bags of tricks — have no meaning here. Instead, what we are given in “The Buried Giant” has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as anything Ishiguro has written.
One doesn’t need to have a degree in literary criticism to detect the attempt to defend Ishiguro against the ‘taint’ of fantasy. With a wave of the great wand of ignorance, Arana manages to reconfirm every prejudice about genre there is. It relies on an ‘old bag of tricks’. One wonders, has she read Gene Wolfe or M John Harrison? Has she read Jeff Vandermeer or Ursula K. Le Guin? Le Guin herself recently took up this battle in relation to Ishiguro, who himself, it appears has tried to defend himself from the stain of genre (much as Margaret Atwood does). Le Guin’s piece, which is well worth reading, pointed out that it is Ishiguro’s distain for the genre that – in her opinion – actually poisons his own book (I haven’t read the book, so can’t comment, but I loved Ishiguro’s novel of science fiction, Never Let Me Go. In a devastating paragraph, she writes:
I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going say I’m a tight-rope walker?”
You must take the genre and its history seriously, or else you are doomed.
But it’s not all the fault of the mainstream literati. The truth is, also, that genre (and its fans) themselves reaffirm this division. It’s been forty years since Thomas Disch’s essential essay on ‘The Embarrassments of Science Fiction’, in which he claimed that SF was ‘a branch of children’s literature.’ I won’t rehearse Disch’s argument. Rather, his piece is essential reading, along with it’s sequel, ‘Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills: The Further Embarrassments of Science Fiction’. Disch himself gave up on his aim to transform the field into an ‘adult’ one (see his book The Dreams or Stuff is Made Of, and though I think there is a niche in the genre for the kind of work he was advocating, much of his argument stands. Too often, genre readers (and editors and awards givers and writers themselves) are happy to rely on the very ‘bag of old tricks’ that Maria Arana is bemoaning. The SF scene allows the snobbish to get away with their dismissals too easily because it often reaffirms them itself. It marginalises the best writers (Thomas Disch himself, for example) and lauds the ones which most obey the genre conventions. So someone who writes literary or – god help us – experimental SF is double marginalised: by the literati for writing genre, and then by the genre for being too ‘literary’ (as an aside: the real distinction is not literary v genre, but realist v speculative). We keep a space to one side for our Dischs and our M J. Harrisons, but it’s a grinding, marginal space, a niche within our niche.
That’s where distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘genre’ has led us. And that’s why we’re in this mess.
February 2, 2015
Unwrapped Sky on Locus Recommended Reading List
Yep, for ‘First Novel”. Also, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Time Traveler’s Almanac is there, and it features a favourite story of mine, ‘Domine’. Very pleased to see Ben Peek’s The Godless , Angela Slatter’s Bitterwood Bible, Jannen Webb’s Death and the Blue Elephant and Rosaleen Love’s Secret Lives of Books there too. A good day!
January 31, 2015
Review of Gibson’s ‘The Peripheral’
I’ve reviewed William Gibson’s new novel for the Age and the SHM. It’s available here.
January 5, 2015
Ben Peek’s ‘The Godless’ – a review
The Godless by Ben Peek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ben’s a friend of mine, but regardless, he’s produced a very fine book. Truth be told, I’m not a huge fantasy fan: it’s a genre plagued by cliché and loaded with genre conventions. Or perhaps I should rephrase this: fantasy too often doesn’t live up to its potential. I’m a fan of fantasy as it could be, rather than as it is. The thing I like about The Godless is that it breaks so many of those tedious conventions, most obviously in terms of race, but also in terms of narrative. His book is rich and multilayered, it isn’t strictly linear, and I didn’t ever think: “Oh, I know how this is going to end.” I suspect some fantasy fans might find it slow or perhaps too complex, but that says more about their reading habits than the book itself. If I were to have any gripes they would be minor ones: there are a few copy editing errors and at points I felt it might have been tighter. But as I say, these are minor compared with The Godless’s virtues. Give me original and ambitious over another rehearsal of narrative conventions any day.
View all my reviews
