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The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season
A fable-like tale of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague
Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars is a novel that has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dreamlike logic.
At the novel’s heart are the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community dealing with a mystery disease. Routinely citizens are quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. The infected and the healthy alike are quarantined. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into a more pastoral society, the woman who nurtures spiders and the man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual promiscuity. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, and post–late capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical.
Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars is a novel that has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dreamlike logic.
At the novel’s heart are the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community dealing with a mystery disease. Routinely citizens are quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. The infected and the healthy alike are quarantined. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into a more pastoral society, the woman who nurtures spiders and the man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual promiscuity. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, and post–late capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical.
- GenresFictionScience Fiction
312 pages, Paperback
First published March 16, 2010
About the author
Brian Conn
17 books1 followerBrian Conn's work has appeared in Sybil's Garage and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. He is a graduate of the 2004 Clarion West Writers Workshop and is currently a student in the MFA program at Brown University. He lives in Providence.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 7, 2011
This is a truly stunning debut. It's an hallucinogenic head/road trip through a 'post-capitalism' future, a world where new industries have grown such as breeding spiders for their specific threads. It's tragic and funny and at times utterly repugnant and ghastly and not a word is out of place. It sits somewhere strange between Delaney's Dhalgren, Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String and a Grimm's fairy tale after they'd eaten faaaar too many magic mushrooms. But what is particularly stunning, given it's Conn's first book, is the sheer mastery of language. It is perhaps not for the squemish. At one point a malevolent doctor files a women's toe-nails and the collects the dust. Soon after we encounter this:
"In the afternoon she observed the doctor to sprinkle the dust from the cotton envelope onto his snails before he ate them. He stared across the river as he munched, bearded in snail slime: sprinkled and munched, sprinkled and munched.
"The snails alone are not sufficient nutrition, she thought."
Just when you thought post-apocalyptic books couldn't push the boundaries much further, along comes Brian Conn to calmly eviscerate the competition. I shudder, and wait desperately, to see what he does next. For more, see my interview with Conn at 21C magazine.
"In the afternoon she observed the doctor to sprinkle the dust from the cotton envelope onto his snails before he ate them. He stared across the river as he munched, bearded in snail slime: sprinkled and munched, sprinkled and munched.
"The snails alone are not sufficient nutrition, she thought."
Just when you thought post-apocalyptic books couldn't push the boundaries much further, along comes Brian Conn to calmly eviscerate the competition. I shudder, and wait desperately, to see what he does next. For more, see my interview with Conn at 21C magazine.
October 6, 2014
Beautiful writing. Fantastically innovative. I love the world that is created and all the allegorical resonances. Don't read this expecting an overarching narrative; it's definitely more of a collage. I think the book could have held up a bit more narrative and character development because the world-building was so strong and because the moments of emotional resonance were strong. I found myself wanting a little more of these traditional elements as I read, while simultaneously being drawn in and feeling satisfied by the ending. The last chapter was particularly beautiful and brought closure to the book. Unusual and lovely. I'm excited to see what the author does next!
May 11, 2011
On the jacket notes of this book it states that the author Brian Conn studies mathematics at Rhode Island. Conn has mentioned elsewhere that he ceased studying mathematics just after this was written, but the connection puts me in mind of another mathematician known for a convoluted and surreal fantasy, Lewis Carroll.
Conn's "wonderland" draws its inspiration from the tradition of pastoral post-apocalyptic worlds and other trappings of science fiction, but he is anything but content to rest with world-creation. Instead he takes the tropes and characterisations of genre and transforms them wondrous strange, through a lens, or a series of fragmented lenses (37 to be precise), into meditations on community, sexuality, transformation, technology, ritual, myth and story. There are echoes of works as diverse as Le Guin's Always Coming Home, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Delaney's Dahlgren, and Camus' The Plague.
Adults in this world are ciphers, defined only by their professions, while children are the one's with names, systems and a habit of rational enquiry. The vaguely interlinked "emblems" deal with contagion, ambiguity and blood. There is a strange fatalism to the characters. If someone is in trouble they assist, but if their efforts fail they seem to accept the outcome with immediate equanimity and carry on unmoved. In the centre of the book we are treated to a performance of a play which consists of a kind of mash-up of Shakespeare and Star Trek.
The book is ultimately baffling and frustrating, but also incredibly powerful and beautiful. The gorgeous poetry of the writing almost hides in plain site the grotesquery and violence that pervades it. Here's a random selection from the text.
'The sweet plum woman says, "I'm tired now and so are you, but let's spurn each other's love and be bound together, only for a short time." The builder puts his arm around her, careful of her wings. They mount a single barrel together and declare that they spurn each other's love. The avocado man binds their wrists with blue and green thread. They climb down from the barrel. The sun is two suns above the horizon. The children are bringing out the bell.'
This is a book that might leave many readers scratching their heads, but if you are willing to flow with the ambiguities and revel in the lyricism, it could be very rewarding.
Conn's "wonderland" draws its inspiration from the tradition of pastoral post-apocalyptic worlds and other trappings of science fiction, but he is anything but content to rest with world-creation. Instead he takes the tropes and characterisations of genre and transforms them wondrous strange, through a lens, or a series of fragmented lenses (37 to be precise), into meditations on community, sexuality, transformation, technology, ritual, myth and story. There are echoes of works as diverse as Le Guin's Always Coming Home, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Delaney's Dahlgren, and Camus' The Plague.
Adults in this world are ciphers, defined only by their professions, while children are the one's with names, systems and a habit of rational enquiry. The vaguely interlinked "emblems" deal with contagion, ambiguity and blood. There is a strange fatalism to the characters. If someone is in trouble they assist, but if their efforts fail they seem to accept the outcome with immediate equanimity and carry on unmoved. In the centre of the book we are treated to a performance of a play which consists of a kind of mash-up of Shakespeare and Star Trek.
The book is ultimately baffling and frustrating, but also incredibly powerful and beautiful. The gorgeous poetry of the writing almost hides in plain site the grotesquery and violence that pervades it. Here's a random selection from the text.
'The sweet plum woman says, "I'm tired now and so are you, but let's spurn each other's love and be bound together, only for a short time." The builder puts his arm around her, careful of her wings. They mount a single barrel together and declare that they spurn each other's love. The avocado man binds their wrists with blue and green thread. They climb down from the barrel. The sun is two suns above the horizon. The children are bringing out the bell.'
This is a book that might leave many readers scratching their heads, but if you are willing to flow with the ambiguities and revel in the lyricism, it could be very rewarding.
May 10, 2011
In an obscure future, cataclysm and plague has forced the society to retreat into the past. Now, on the eve of John's Day, a rambling cast tell their various stories. I would call The Fixed Stars a fever-dream, but that there's no fever in it--;indeed, no heat at all. Composed of loosely-connected scifi-/fantasy-slanted vignettes in varying styles (including an inset play) and formats, it's a boldy strange book. Some of the individual vignettes are promising, even meaningful, but the book as a whole feels more like experiment than product: there's a vague setting and hints of a plot to tie the pieces together, but not enough; lots goes on without making sense or, more importantly, having any sense of purpose. The strongest uniting factor is unfortunately Conn's distant, indefinite writing style: a fetish for ambiguity initially gives his work depth, but ultimately strips it of any meaning or movement, and leaves The Fixed Stars lying lifeless on the page. (For the record I also find no humor in it, although other readers apparently do.)
I don't begrudge difficult or strange books--indeed I adore them, but I think that they need to be more than just an experiment in style: there should be something that rewards the effort of reading them. The Fixed Stars has promise, but it's ultimately a disappointment. Despite some strong moments (and to be fair, some of them have stuck with me--there are parts of this book that I like, and I wanted badly to like the whole thing), the book comes to nothing. It rewards the reader with nothing more than the joy of the rare remarkable vignette, and certainly with nothing that justifies 300 pages of them. Experimental literature has produced some fantastic books, but this is not one of them. Spend your time elsewhere: I can't in the least recommend The Fixed Stars.
I don't begrudge difficult or strange books--indeed I adore them, but I think that they need to be more than just an experiment in style: there should be something that rewards the effort of reading them. The Fixed Stars has promise, but it's ultimately a disappointment. Despite some strong moments (and to be fair, some of them have stuck with me--there are parts of this book that I like, and I wanted badly to like the whole thing), the book comes to nothing. It rewards the reader with nothing more than the joy of the rare remarkable vignette, and certainly with nothing that justifies 300 pages of them. Experimental literature has produced some fantastic books, but this is not one of them. Spend your time elsewhere: I can't in the least recommend The Fixed Stars.
October 16, 2011
review forthcoming at The Nervous Breakdown
April 11, 2012
I'm surprised more people haven't read this book, it's a good one. I talk more about it here:
http://www.5cense.com/12/re-conn-ponz...
http://www.5cense.com/12/re-conn-ponz...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews