Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 45

April 28, 2018

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Margaret Atwood)

This offering from CanLit icon Margaret Atwood is a provocative but sometimes frustrating collection that gathers lectures, reviews, and other writings (including short stories and a novel excerpt, but mostly non-fiction) that relate, in some fashion, to the genre of “science fiction.”

“Science Fiction” in scare quotes because what the Toronto-based Atwood calls SF and what everybody else calls SF have few similarities.

Most people use “SF” to refer to a genre of literature that concerns itself with the possible impact of scientific endeavor, whereas Atwood uses SF to refer, essentially, to any non-realist or speculative fiction she wants to call SF.

In her introduction, Atwood acknowledges this disparity. “In short, what [SF author Ursula K.] Le Guin means by ‘science fiction' is what I mean by ‘speculative fiction,' and what she means by ‘fantasy' would include some of what I mean by ‘science fiction.'”

Le Guin's definition, of course, would be the common one. Although Atwood correctly notes that “When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance,” her definition of SF has no real function.

Atwood's writings on “SF” accomplish little in terms of offering new arguments or insights regarding science fiction, but trace with intelligence and passion her lifelong connection to her “science fiction” and present a compelling look at her own literary fascinations.

Her most famous novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and her more recent novels Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), are speculative fictions that most consider SF.

Atwood's literary criticism swoops broadly. As in her other critical writings, she sees myth and archetypes everywhere, which sometimes results in vague, repetitive interpretations. When she dives down to snare particular books from the waters she presents more careful close readings and displays deeper erudition.

The highlights of the collection are two essays, “Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells” and “Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift's Grand Academy,” that display Atwood's critical range.

The Wells essay offers just what its title promises, compressed treatises on the novel that impress with their tight-wound insight. The Swift essay, by contrast, sprawls and spins to connect schlocky B-movie scientists, Plato's Atlanteans, The Hulk, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and lab-grown leather to humanity's mythic desire to become as gods.

Atwood's at her best when she offers either these short, sharp shocks of literary insight or freewheeling thoughts with tangential but intriguing connections. She's at her worst, whether in non-fiction or fiction, when she trots out the tired technophobia that plagues lamer efforts in the SF genre.

The problem here, as with Atwood's own SF, is that she reproduces the genre's tired clichés, such as technophobic finger-waggling. Although known for her LongPen invention (which allows authors to transmit signatures from afar) and her Twitter presence, Atwood maintains a relatively consistent technophobia in her writings, especially those selected here.

Despite the existence of serious, real concerns with genetic manipulation and nanotechnology, citing Prince Charles's opinions rather than those of a scientific authority reveals Atwood's reactionary attitude toward technology, a disapproval she regards as commonsensical. Atwood summarizes this pessimistic outlook: “Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.”

No doubt she will be lauded as a forward-thinker even while reproducing arguments as old as Frankenstein (in fact, older: Atwood would draw our attention to Shelley's subtitle, which invokes the mythic Prometheus). An argument's age is not its refutation, but SF authors have produced varied and complex responses to questions of our technological future.

As a collection, In Other Worlds cannot be faulted for its lack of focus, but it's disheartening how disengaged it seems from modern SF. As always, Atwood's protean skill and intelligence is apparent on every page of the book, but would be better put to more imaginative use.

Support authors (and this site) by buying books! (If you buy this book through that link, this site will receive a portion of the sale to support its operations, but it won't cost you anything extra.)

You an also support Jonathan Ball, this site's author, directly, and thus help fund his many projects, including this one (and help put his daughter through university)!

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Sign up for a FREE ebook of reading tips — “YOU CAN READ #95BOOKS THIS YEAR” — plus news & reviews in your email!
Email Address
First Name

View more on Jonathan Ball's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 28, 2018 17:02

April 25, 2018

Harmonics (Jesse Patrick Ferguson)

Harmonics surprised me. I thought I knew Ferguson’s work, from my time editing dandelion, where I published his visual poetry, some of which I used for one of the journal’s more eye-catching covers. When a friend at Freehand said she had acquired his first book of poetry, I assumed too much. I assumed that the book would contain a sizeable amount of visual poetry, alongside unconventional poetry that would bear the influence of experimentalist work. As I say, I assumed too much. The book is quite conventional. It consists of typical lyrical poems, notable not for any formal innovation but for the assurance with which Ferguson writes.

At his best, Ferguson offers up odd, complicated images in stanzas that seem like they were started by Don McKay and finished by David McGimpsey (or vice versa). In “Dirge,” an elegy in which the speaker mourns the death of his dog Bear, Ferguson writes:

O alacritous cruncher of spare pigeon heads

tireless yapper of backyard hours,

O nimble-toothed and debonair bane of bumblebees,

O Bear, unhibernating trumper of your namesake,

O why can’t a poet instead make a Frisbee

of his self-indulgent O’s: something into which

the dearly departed could sink teeth?

The move from a heightened, almost parodic poetic language (the elegiac tone in full combat dress) into a self-aware, almost silly wish is clever and playful: playful like ol’ Bear used to be (thus we remain in an elegy, rather than packing up and moving into some less earnest form). The second stanza is typical fare, but then Ferguson ends with another image that flirts with both fancy and sentimentality. Remembering how in summers he would use a wire-brush to remove the dog’s shedding hair, the speaker marvels at pulling off

[… e]nough clumps

to form another dog who would bay at the rising wind

and take off after something I couldn’t see

but which was no doubt terrified.

Although the image of a dog “bay[ing] at the rising wind” is dull and worn, there is something wonderful about the thought of the speaker looking at the brushed-out hair and thinking about how he might construct another dog (it’s a quasi-surreal, almost Pythonesque image) even as this thought is suffused with melancholy. It’s almost a wish, that Bear might be returned to life in such a dreamlike manner. The poem ends with a strange, rich ambivalence (the dread of a thing tracked down by its death, here personified in the dog even as it is the dog’s death that is mourned).

Constructing these dense, braided images is Ferguson’s speciality. When he succeeds, he soars. When he fails, Ferguson just seems awkward and pretentious, like he’s trying too hard to impress somebody, as in the poem “Hex”:

To the youth blaring

chest thumping beats

from a big subwoofer

in his insolent trunk:

May a separate plague descend

upon each of your deafened ears,

may your underused cerebrum rattle

like the loose license plate

of your worse-for-wear ’97 Geo.

Ho-hum. It’s a one-note joke, this poem, and the shifts in diction and tone just don’t delight as they do in other poems, where the “patches of scrub” in a landscape seem placed by “some god” not in the painterly manner of a thousand landscape poems but “strategically to tweak / the feng shui” (66). Ferguson’s dexterity transforms even this poem — “Eastern Ontario Pastoral” — into a worthwhile read, despite its otherwise overwrought approach to a worn-out subject.

Don McKay edited this book, and it shows. There’s a lot of McKay here, when sometimes there should be more Ferguson. In “Cappuccinos for the Planet” Ferguson writes:

The prophet’s DVD has sold out,

and his tour tickets are prohibitively dear.

In Kensington market you score a bootleg,

watch it in the living room with the lights out.

And in an archway across the street

a pair of pretty red lips insinuates smoke rings

into the closing dusk. […]

The first two lines of this excerpt are fresh, funny, and the beginning of a smart comment on the absurdity of cheap religious affirmation in the face of the environmental and consumerist nightmares evoked in the poem’s earlier passages. But then the poet introduces “you” — scourge of so many poems — to no plain purpose, and segues into a normative, “poetic” image, and the speaker ends by joining a throng in “thinking very hard about snow.”

There’s an echo of the poem’s early lines here (it opens with “round-the-clock coverage / of a gaunt polar bear swimming / for an ice shelf”) but the external, outward-looking drive of the poem is arrested and turned inward for a pseudo-epiphanic effect. When McKay tries this trick, he makes it work, more often than not, because his poems always wanted to go inside, whereas Ferguson’s poems set outwards but then retreat.

On the whole, the poems succeed more often than not, and are tight and well-crafted. They’re strong poems, and this is a strong debut. Against my expectations, the book’s single visual poem — “Mama” — is its weakest. An “e” rises and elongates over a cluster of smaller “e’s” like Giger’s Alien might hover over an egg sac. Perhaps because there are no other visual poems, it just seems out of place, even more so because of its macabre tone.

My complaints are minor, in the end: Jesse Patrick Ferguson has written a strong, compelling debut. His poems surprise and delight even though they might fall flat on occasion.

The post Harmonics (Jesse Patrick Ferguson) appeared first on Jonathan Ball, PhD.

View more on Jonathan Ball's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on April 25, 2018 07:07