Book Notes: Beasts; Engine Summer; Little, Big (all John Crowley)

[rax]

So for a few years I've had a random three in one huge paperback thing including Beasts, Engine Summer, and Little, Big by John Crowley on the shelf, and I've always meant to read them (in my hilarious failure to read speculative fiction a few years back I went to find a book by him and ended up with The Translator [0]). The last couple of flights I brought the huge paperback with me so that I would read the novels contained therein, and I have thoughts about each of them, so I figured I would blog about it so y'all can read something that's not a tasklist. I'm not planning to reveal any endings or anything, but I will cut-tag for spoilers just in case.

Beasts (1976) presents a future in which human/lion hybrids fight for something approaching rights in an America where the accessible tech level has declined sharply for all but the most powerful. Themes of human/animal interaction and intertwining run throughout the novel, and there are some beautiful moments where similarities and differences that often go undernoticed are cast into light by the novel's plot. In addition, there is a Reynard, and he is a good Reynard, although not the best; I collect Reynards and I'm glad to add him to my list. On the whole, though, the book isn't very good. The beginning is really clumsily written, although it hits its stride later. It's not really clear what happened to fuck everything up techwise and politically. The lion-people are described with language I'm used to seeing racialized in the 1800s and it creeps me out kinda and while this may be the point I don't think it was managed super well. The female character who has Protected Her Precious Virginity In Slavery but then falls into bed with the lead lion within a day because he is soooooooo sexy grates and doesn't turn into what she could have. The gay character only having interest in boys, not men, is really itchy. Overall unless you're really looking for a good Reynard I'd pass on this one.

Engine Summer (1979) I'm not really sure how to write about. It was definitely my favorite of the three and the one I would recommend to others. It's a post-apocalyptic novel about the journey of a character who wishes to become a saint without quite understanding what a saint is. The world is much more fleshed out here than in Beasts; there are multiple believable societies who have picked bits and pieces of mythology out of what came before them, there's a better sense of how things got here without too much time being wasted on it, and while the characters are a bit ethereal they work and their interactions are interesting. The journeying is interesting and recognizing the husks of our civilization is always an apocalyptic treat. (Oh, that's a highway! I get it now.) The whole time I was reading it I wanted a machine that would let me distill books into themes so that I could use the machine on Engine Summer and Riddley Walker [1] and then take a diff of what came out. There's clearly something going on in Engine Summer that's not going on in other apocalyptic fiction but I'm not sure what it is, and I think if I could put my finger on it, I'd like the book more. Right now I can't help but think of it as "Riddley Walker, but with magic." Has anyone else read both of these books? Help?

Little, Big (1981) gives me such mixed feelings. It's a novel that spans generations about a family in upstate New York living in a house that gives them a connection to the world of the Fae, or maybe they have the connection and they imbue the house with its Fae-connectedness, or maybe something else, but the connection is definitely focused on their family and the house and the intersection. This is all well and good. The storytelling wanders between different characters and paints some members of the family in great detail and others in lesser; this is very well handled, I think, although occasionally I lost track of minor characters and just accepted them as "one of the ancillary people or maybe their kid, whichever." There are structural reasons there need to be many characters --- the structure of the book is frankly brilliant and folds on itself in fascinating ways and obviously involved something along the lines of a giant bulletin board with lots of index cards and thread. This book, too, extends into a near future where some sort of collapse is happening and people farm in New York City and the non-elite lose access to technological resources; it fits here better than in Beasts, but the causes for this are definitely abstracted away.

For all that the book is awesome, though, there are some things in it that gross me out. Some of the main characters are blatantly and awkwardly racist, in ways that are uncomfortable to read and not really undercut by the narrative. The narration itself is uncomfortable at times ("Negroes" in 1981? Really? Really?) and the fact that the character of color (a Puerto Rican woman who is a real developed character but whose family and background are kind of cardboard cutout, admittedly shown through the eyes of a racist white kid from upstate fairlyand) who also has the fairy magic is secretly part of the main family because of one-night stand shenanigans is kind of ick. Magic done by non-white actors is presented as dirtier or more dubious (although still effective) and the named black character speaks in awkward dialect, acts as a guide to white characters, and then when he's gotten the white characters into Fairyland, gets turned into a tree for his trouble. Ew. :( It's also kind of gross about queer stuff but I found that a lot more forgettable/ignorable.

Little, Big got me thinking about how fairyland-as-a-parallel-to-here-accessed-though-an-endless-forest functions as a trope, though, and what it depends on. I don't think it strictly requires that most or all of the characters involved be white, although I've always seen it done that way. (Were all of the characters in The Great Night white? I forget. ^^;;) The Fae can be written many different ways, or maybe not even be there. The forest, though, seems structural; what would it look like to go through desert to get to fairyland? Arctic tundra? Ocean between islands? I suspect that different places grow different kinds of myths but I also wonder about the transposition; I spend time wandering through what feels like endless desert, and I want to know, what sort of Fairlyand would I get to if I walked in one too many circles and didn't come back out at the trailhead? The couple of books I've read like this drew really heavily on First Nations mythology, and that's potentially really interesting (and potentially really exploitative!) but not what I'm thinking of here. Has anyone put the path to Fairyland not in the forest but in the desert, or somewhere else, and seriously explored what that shift would mean? I'm kind of tempted to try, but I'm woefully underread in this genre and don't even really know where to start research.

[0] Ruth has a reading of the book in which the main character is actually an angel and everything is taking place on a symbolic level, and while I find this reading really interesting, I don't personally find it compelling as the reality --- whatever that means --- of what's taking place in the novel. Your mileage may vary.

[1] Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, is a post-apocalyptic novel written in the first person in the pidgin language left over from English after what is presumed to be a nuclear war. It's frickin' brilliant, it takes a lot of effort but if you are up to learning almost a new language by reading a book written in it, go read it. 

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the path to fairlyland is through a closet? (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?) Maybe that's different, it just occurred to me and I didn't know if it really applied.

I guess that's not so much a 'fairyland' in the sense of 'inhabited by fairies/other fae creatures'.

To reach Neverland, I guess you fly (instead of going through a forest). Might also be slightly different.

I think this is probably evidence this isn't particularly my area of expertise and I should hush up :)

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

There's a Wood Between the Worlds, though (in The Magician's Nephew).

And Narnia is totally a fairyland in the sense Rachel means it.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Lev Grossman is topical in two ways. In his The Magicians and The Magician King he has a city between the worlds, obviously inspired by Lewis' Wood, but except for taking it physically as a place in a couple instances that doesn't seem to change so much the nature of the stories. (The characters do speculate about who built the city, and how, and why, but the plots don't really explore this yet.) He also, in The Magician King, writes a Reynard, so if you collect them there's one to add to your set, but his is really not one of the better ones.

Bear's Faerie in the Promethean Age books (Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) is the closest I've seen a Fairyland done with not-all-white characters. (Not without problems -- see RaceFail! -- but done, at all.)

There at least Bear's fairyland is explicitly tied to the mythology of the British Isles. I think that tie is usually present for American writers, implicitly or explicitly, and that is part of why their fairylands are often accessed via forests, and why the fairylands you see accessed via deserts are tied to First Nations mythology. (Or could be Arabic mythology, or Mongolian, to pick two other desert civilizations.)

Honestly I think being well-read in genre is overrated for writers of that genre -- not critically so, but some -- and I think you underestimate how much you've read, to say nothing of how much you've picked up by cultural osmosis. By which I mean, I wouldn't let it stop you if it's something you want to try. :-)

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

I extremely love the feel of Little, Big and its setting and its dizzying meta-ness. But problematic things are pretty problematic, and I definitely keep having "whoa, um?" moments during my reread.

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I totally went to a panel at, uh, either Wiscon or Readercon about the forest and fairyland and how they relate, but I didn't find the panel very well-done/satisfying.

[kelkyag]

More thoughts later, but a few immediate ones.

Oz is a magical land, if not strictly a fairy land, surrounded by a "impassable" desert that can only be crossed by magic (or possibly airflight in extreme weather -- not sure if magic is required in those cases, but there are a number of detailed magical crossings). I believe Ozma is actually a fairy, with a backstory something like "a/the fairy queen found this boring land surrounded by an impassable desert, thought that a terrible waste, and assigned someone from her court to take charge of the place".

The forest as a (wild) place of transformation is certainly a recurring theme in european fairy tales. One doesn't necessarily get to fairy lands via the woods, but one goes into the woods and learns or is changed before returning. (One of my books talks about this idea in a modern fairy tale context, need to find/review it.)

Getting to fairy land by way of an unremarkable garden gate is also a trope that leaps to mind -- there being places that exist both here and there where one can cross, some by accident and some only if one knows what one is doing.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I tried reading Little, Big a few times a while back and really just couldn't connect to it.

I'd be tempted to play with putting the path to Fairyland in the desert, but my upcoming story about fairies is quite resolutely set in New Orleans. Not much desert there.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have not read Riddley Walker, but I can go on and on and on about Engine Summer. (There are reasons my username is my username everywhere I can get it.) I don't have a favorite book, but if I do it's probably Engine Summer.

There's the meta-play of the book's structure, for one-- every time I reread the book I experience it as a different playthrough of the crystal, because inevitably, due to the nature of attention, I emphasize different details to myself with every rereading, am a slightly different person doing the rereading even if I literally close the book at the end and turn back to the first page. Rush is explicitly in-text in a position that many fictional characters are in implicitly simply by being fictional characters, living many lives between being born and dying, all of them the same life, sparked in the heads of the readers and contingent on those readers' own personalities and quirks. The in-text player of the crystal is in some ways the reification of a set of reader-reactions which John Crowley may or may not wish the actual reader to have; through that present but mostly de-emphasized mediation Crowley has a means of commenting on the gap between author and text, the gap between semiotic intent and produced meaning, and the processes in the readers' minds which make up the act of reading itself. I admire that so hard. And one thing Crowley says quite firmly is that every reader is valuable: this particular runthrough was the only one in which the fly in amber, an obvious but handy little piece of allegorical foreshadowing, was present. So Engine Summer is a book which has helped me look at my own internal processes of reading, and which helps me remember that reading is a valuable thing, both on an individual and a societal level. The actions which take place during reading are at one and the same time so societally normalized (in the social class I am part of) and so societally marginalized (in, annoyingly enough, the same social class) that I can only conclude that there is something going on there which is profoundly socially terrifying, and I find it useful to be reminded of that thing's value.

Then, of course, there's the question of genre. The broader genre is science fiction (I'm not sure where you're getting the magic? Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from, etc., but I think it's important to what Crowley's doing that he presents the elements of Engine Summer as advanced/alien technology). The slightly narrower genre is post-apocalyptic fiction. Now in my experience there are three general routes people go with post-apocalyptic novels, and they are: 1) utopian society; 2) dystopian society; 3) one of the first two leading to the other. The impulse to put a utopian society after an apocalypse comes about because the starting conditions for most utopian societies are so different from what we have now that you need an apocalypse to create those starting conditions. The impulse to put a dystopian society after an apocalypse comes about because of the obviously terrible conditions brought about by an apocalypse, such as shortages of basic necessities, and the historically visible trend of those who desire power profiting from times of privation and upheaval. And quite frequently a dystopian society is turned into a utopian one because the author has faith in a utopian element of human nature or at least in the badassery of a protagonist; while, and this is one of the things that makes Engine Summer so interesting, a utopia turns into a dystopia because the author can think of perfectly reasonable human beings who would just hate living in any proposed utopian society the author can come up with. Engine Summer-- the only book I have ever seen do this-- is a collection of tiny pocket utopias, each one suited very well to the people who live in them, and really not suited at all to a different kind of person. Which makes it a greatly successful utopian novel, to my mind, because in a world composed entirely of interdependent yet separate pocket utopias, there should at least theoretically be a society which will be a utopia for any given person, if that person just goes looking for it long enough.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

cont. in next comment for length issues

If you are psychologically suited to living in Little Belaire, you will probably not be happy in Dr. Boots' List, and vice versa. Nor would you be happy in the sky-platform of the angels, or in a single nuclear family unit, or as a hermit. But all of them are valid ways of living, different and equally interesting modes of human experience. Once a Day knew perfectly well where she did not belong, and very sensibly went to where she did. Rush's problem is that he was already living where he belonged. He left his utopia because of his infatuation, which was his mistake to make-- you will note nobody stops him from making it-- and significantly failed at making himself into a person who could fit in as well in other places as he had at his first home. This changes his existential status from that of a citizen of utopia, whose only goals are to exist and to be happy, into the more melancholy and yet more common goal of being historically remembered, of synthesizing something about the world around him, of putting the pieces of a plot-puzzle together, of becoming a saint.

That ambition, once achieved, is incompatible with the life of a citizen of utopia... which is why we do not know what happens to Rush after the impression of the crystal. But I have always hoped he went home and lived there happily, because Little Belaire does not seem to me to be the sort of place where knowing too much about the outer world would destroy your ability to be in it; rather the opposite, honestly.

I mentioned that I think it's important that the speculative elements of the book are presented as technology rather than as magic, and I think it is, because of the historical dimension. Dr. Boots, and the crystal, and the angel city, are all human far-futuretech; the Four Pots and the bubbles they smoke in Little Belaire are alien; truthful speaking seems to be a form of meditation or internal thought process raised to the level of technology via long practice and is understood by most of its practitioners on the level in which many people in our society understand the internal combustion engine, i.e., not very well but they use it every day. If any of these were magic, the question would arise as to why they are not usable now, in our society; the magic would set a barrier between that world and ours, since even in a 'return of magic' story one is aware that in our current universe we just do not think that is a thing that will ever happen. The bubbles are implausible, Dr. Boots is implausible, truthful speaking is implausible as all get out-- but none of them are things that are entirely known to be outside the realms of possibility. Crowley's utopias are founded on things which are very unlikely, but it is important, when one is trying to say something real about human nature via presenting a utopia, that they not be founded on genuine impossibility, or on a fundamental change to human nature itself. If I found my utopian society on the idea that there is magic which has made everybody nice, I may still be able to say things about what I think humans would do if our nature was changed so that everybody is nice, but I can't say that those people are still us. In fact the gulf between them and us is unbridgeable. Interesting, and possibly fictionally useful, but unbridgeable. Whereas, if there is alien tech which makes people nicer because everybody is slightly stoned all the time, well, people who are slightly stoned all the time quite often are nicer, if more likely to do stupid shit, and hey, alien drugs, maybe they all don't have that problem. Expose a person from here-and-now to similar stimuli, and you may well get a similar result. At any rate you can see how Crowley got to Little Belaire from here-and-now people. The SF nature is what makes a utopia psychologically convincing.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

and again, length issues

Anyhow. Ursula Le Guin, in an essay about utopias, discussed the concepts of yin and yang as she understood them in the process of translating Taoist texts, and said that most utopias she had encountered are yang: loud, bright, centralized, technologized, warm, outgoing, powerful, read-as-conventionally-masculine, strong. She wondered what a yin utopia would look like, quiet, weak, decentralized, not culturally focused on technology, cold, dark, inward-turning, read-as-conventionally-feminine. The world, for her, is not complete without both yin and yang. Her Always Coming Home is an attempt to write a yin utopia. Engine Summer is the other thing I've seen which comes the closest to it.

... I'll shut up now, because I really could keep going, and it's late and I am exhausted beyond measure from Readercon, which btw had gender-neutral bathrooms this year, and openly genderqueer people who aren't me, and though the work there is not done it has been definitely firmly started, so that was nice to see.

Should I read Riddley Walker? Do you think I'd like it?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Your comments are super helpful, thank you! I will say I did not parse the technology as technology; the reading of signs on the kaleidoscopey thing I parsed as more like Tarot than anything else, and a lot of what happened in Dr. Boots' List felt to me like ritualized magic rather than a relationship to technology. (Although if you parse the core artifact as technology rather than magic, I guess if anything it's sort of cargo culty?) I also didn't get that there was alien stuff at all; I figured that the Four Pots were, if anything, some sort of crazy post-nuclear thing. I'm not sure if this is genre illiteracy on my part or what. When you explain all these things as technology, it totally makes sense, but I think I could have read it four more times and not read it that way.

At the core, though, what I was doing was reading it like an apocalypse rather than reading it like a utopia; it's both, but looking at only the former misses a bunch of it, I think. You would like Riddley Walker or at least get a lot out of it, but it's very much not a utopia, and I think that's the core difference; Engine Summer shows the possibility for the future after disaster to give us something better than we have now, and Riddley Walker shows the something worse in between.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The reading of signs on the kaleidoscopey thing is a lot like Tarot, yes, but the thing that makes the inhabitants of Little Belaire genuinely psychologically different from here/now people even before one gets into the being stoned all the time is the truthful speaking. I think the phrase Rush uses is 'say what you really mean and mean what you really say'. Due to a combination of meditation, biofeedback, and we-don't-know-what-all, every person in Little Belaire is genuinely physically incapable of deliberately lying, or of not communicating what they are actually thinking in their body language. This is why it's so rare and difficult when they have communication difficulties, which they still do have-- Rush gets into one with his sort-of father, a 'knot', where the father is saying that he wants to go see the outside world and Rush isn't old enough to recognize that as bitter self-mockery so takes it literally. And Rush also never has enough context and awareness to understand Once a Day, although to be fair she doesn't help him-- she may be a truthful speaker but I am reasonably certain she never actually wanted to be and resents the lack of privacy it creates. I would call truthful speaking technology, I am not sure what else to call it as it has clearly been intentionally developed in a scientific fashion despite not being in a direction that here/now can do much in with science. It's the thing that made Belaire hold together as a commune before the apocalypse, they mention it in the history of their travels as the thing they hold onto.

There's actually a bit when Rush is going to harvest bubbles for smoke where he talks about how at some point before the apocalypse a lot of ships got sent into space looking for, well, whatever might be out there, and one came back a long time later and crashed and the bubble-plant grows out of it. If you look at the stories of the early saints of Little Belaire you can see that they were wandering around looking for a home and they found this alien bubble-plant thing and they did all sorts of tests on it and one of them (I think Saint Bea? it's been a while) ate some and completely lost her brain. But then they found out it could be smoked and the effects were nifty, so they settled there.

... Dr. Boots' List is absolutely not a cargo cult, if you're using the phrase in the way I'm used to it. It's one of the things I have always thought was most neat about this book, actually, it's a very real thing they have there. There's the mystery of the four dead men, right, that Rush hears about growing up for most of his life, and has no idea what anybody is talking about? He eventually pieces together that actually it was three men and a cat, and that they are dead and alive at the same time: they've been recorded in the way Rush is eventually recorded himself, so that you can put on the object they're in and experience being them, their entire lives. Dr. Boots' List has the recording of the cat. A letter from Dr. Boots is that you go and you be a cat for a while, you put on this object and you experience being a cat. Everything about their society is designed to facilitate, understand, adapt to, and work towards processing in human terms that nonhuman experience, which they all repeat at intervals over the course of their lives. And they know they aren't cats, but they know they aren't necessarily human anymore either. Once a Day finds, in being a cat, the experience she has always needed of having something which she cannot, no matter what, communicate to anyone else even though she is a truthful speaker. It is her only privacy, having something which it is impossible to say and which, even if she is saying it with her body language and so on, it is impossible for anyone to hear. Rush took the letter in order to understand her that way, but of course since he is a different person it did not work, and it sets up serious problems for him because it conflicts so much with his truthful speaking. He spends a lot of the rest of the book trying to psychologically reconcile the two things, and I think he does manage, mostly by going nuts for a while.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The single thing that is most different in reading protocols, as far as I can tell, between 'literary fiction' and SF/F, is that in the former genre a lot of language is metaphorical or symbolic which in SF/F is entirely literal. IIRC, there is one symbolic image in the entirety of Engine Summer, centered around an entirely ordinary object (the fly in amber). The rest is to be taken completely literally. SF/F protocols are the ones I grew up on, so it's hard for me to tell how much a person who is used to litfic would want to read the book as using symbolic or allegorical language. But basically there isn't any allegory or symbolism there. It's naturalistic writing about unusual signifiers, as opposed to rhetoric-filled writing about everyday signifiers.

I would love to throw somebody who is more used to litfic at, say, M. John Harrison, who pulls off the neat trick of having the things he writes about be their own literary symbols, so that a character of his can both literally be the Sophia, the incarnation of all wisdom in the universe, and the allegorical representation of that symbol in the thematic space of the novel. But with half of Harrison I don't even know whether he'd read as being in English to someone who hasn't read a whole lot of SF, because part of what he's doing is turning the literalized metaphors that have been the furnishings of the genre since its inception back into metaphors, and one might have to know the furnishings he's working with. Or might not, I don't know, I don't know anyone who's tried.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Wait you're supposed to take everything literally???????????????? what how do I books

The technology isn't symbolic? It's just... technology? I mean I get that it's meant to be real in the world of the text (at least usually --- I didn't think the kaleidoscope was meant to actually work in any scientific way), I've read that much science fiction. :P But I usually expect its role to me-the-reader to be symbolic, or if not symbolic, a sort of stand-in for something else I can imagine that isn't that technology. The smoking alien plant stuff, for example, I took as "okay sure we're post-scarcity here because of handwavey magical sustenance goop," as a tool for removing the need for food from the narrative, a way to imagine a society that didn't have to partake in complicated agriculture or hunting if it didn't want to. Some effort goes into the harvest, of course, but not nearly as much effort as I would expect a society with that level of tech to be spending on having food. That's interesting and useful in letting Crowley tell the story he wants to tell, but I didn't find it convincing as something that could happen from where we are now without magic, which I take it I was supposed to? I can accept that I didn't buy it and still interact with the text on the grounds you described. Is that just genre literacy?

I don't really like the idea that I could be "reading it wrong" but I know that some books rely on having read other books and having certain expectations in order to get the text as intended. (Would hypothetical only-literate-in-SF people read the Circe chapter of Ulysses and think it's happening literally?)

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I actually came back to this discussion to thank both of you for bringing it up, since I'm re-reading Engine Summer now and it's neat to have other perspectives on it.

It's possible that I'm only-literate-in-SF, or just mostly-literate-in-SF-with-a-smattering-of-other-stuff, but the way I took a lot of the not-presently-existant elements of Engine Summer was to some extent, as you say "just...technology".

I didn't really read the Four Pots as alien, though. They, and all the stuff that gets called "Medicine's Daughters" struck me as kind of like truthful speaking: something that was like what we have now (medicine, intentional open communication) "turned up to 11". Its narrative function would then be to highlight the differences in the way these different groups had adopted or not adopted the elements of the gone-away world of the angels, and what that made them, and through that, to say something about people, and different ways of being people.

It would be possible to write a story without them, but when the gradiations in what seperates Dr. Boots' List from Little Belaire are less steep than the difference between growing into truthful speaking and receiving a letter from Dr. Boots, it becomes less plausible that they would be two different groups who largely keep apart from each other. The difference wouldn't be big enough. Someone who smokes a little pot and doesn't lie much can still have a lot in common with someone who drops acid and watches their cat a lot. Someone who has St. Bea's Bread as half their diet and doesn't know how to hide anything is a very different creature from someone who needs a calendar to remember that time exists because they run "cat code" on their brain every spring.

That, also, is a point where I think I differ with RushThatSpeaks (the one in this thread, not the one in the book) on what the letter from Dr. Boots is. When it's activated, I don't think the person experiences being one of the three dead men or the cat. I got the impression that it shuts the I-that-experiences off and runs the I-that-got-recorded-in-the-bubble on their brain. So when someone gets their letter, their brain does cat things for a while, and when they come out of it, they can no more talk about it than I can usefully talk to a cat now.

I do get the impression that they don't really know how it works, which is a little cargo-cultish, but it does work, and they do know that it works, which isn't cultish at all. In fact, it strikes me as a lot like how people use computers, cars, etc. now.

I also, for some reason, see the fly as not being in amber, but in plastic. It's a joke item, a plastic ice cube with a fly in it, which you can stick in someone's drink to gross them out. Of course, I would see that: I had one of those ice cubes as a kid. That might change the interpretation of it as a metaphor, though.

Truthful Speaking struck me as a lot like the prana-bindu training of the Bene Gesseret in Dune, which I'd be inclined to call a practice rather than a technology, largely on account of it being a thing that a person learns to do, using themselves, rather than an object or external process that a person learns to use. Karate, meditation, that sort of thing are practices, swords are a technology. So truthful speaking would be a combination of the precise observation of expression and body language, self-awareness and awareness of ones own body language, and so on. I'm actually quite interested in what one would have to learn now to develop something like this. It seems useful.

That reading of it makes me less than convinced that Once A Day remained a Truthful Speaker. She may have been further into learning it than Rush That Speaks when she left, but it seems to me that the constant-present way that Dr. Boots' List thinks would interfere with it. Once A Day's seeming mystification that Rush That Speaks was capable of thinking of her in her absence makes it seem like members of Dr. Boots List have at best a lack of desire, and at worst an inability, to structure thoughts about anything other than the continuious present, and so they don't hold to any state of mind long enough for it to be a thing to communicate.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

...and the rest of my comment:

St. Bea was the one who ate the bubbles, and ended up losing everything except the presence of mind to eat more bubbles when she got hungry. Why anyone would smoke something that erased their friend is beyond me, but maybe she seemed to have enjoyed it? The bubbles were definitely alien, and the idea that there were a lot of the planters (effectively, AI-guided sample return missions) kind of hints to me that there are a lot of places, all over the world, where something may have gotten brought back, and maybe was as significant to whoever was around it as St. Bea's Bread was to Little Belaire.

The thing is, I've read a lot of SF, so I'm used to the idea of, say, a technology that overwrites people's minds for a little while, or a drug that extends life and expands consciousness, or a machine that's far more intelligent than a person being sent to operate in space, or a person who modifies themselves to shoot lasers from their fingers, or whatever, and that those things are not the point of the story, but how they change the experience of being a person in interaction with other people (at least for good SF. Bad SF, in my opinion, is all "Gee golly guys, laser guns!" (or worse, cowboys with laser guns) and nothing about being in a novel context).

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

... well, that is the role the tech is playing in the narrative, yes, partly, but we're also I think meant to assume that there's other agriculture and economic stuff going on that the narrative elides because the narrator isn't interested in that/doesn't know about it. We're getting Little Belaire from the POV of a child and adolescent, who has grown up in a post-scarcity society and so has never questioned where the food comes from. What you can generalize from what we are shown of them harvesting the bubble-plant and trading with Dr. Boots' List is the attitude they have about food and trading-- that they do do work to acquire food and smoking materials, that anyone who likes can participate in the work but that it isn't an urgent thing or a thing where people have to devote a lot of time and effort to it, that they do trade with outsiders in a laid-back and polite sort of way. So we are meant to understand that this is a society which doesn't need to do complicated agricultural and hunting stuff if it doesn't want to, but we are not meant to take the examples we see of trading etc. as being the only examples of that kind of thing which go on.

Like, in a novel set in NYC if the protagonist buys something at a bodega the reader, if they have never been in a bodega, takes the description of the bodega as a type of other possible NYC stores, on the assumption that there is more than one store in NYC. The reader is to understand that while the particular store the narrative is set in is both individual in its characteristics and possibly non-existent, there are definitely stores more or less similar to it which one can find in the real city. Of course, if our NYC protagonist goes into a store which is a really weird thing to have in NYC, then said protagonist or the text will flag that in some way, unless the point is for it to be an unflagged weirdness, in which case people who aren't familiar with NYC's real infrastructure are not going to get what is going on.

So what I mean by literalism here is that we are to take the portions we see of Little Belaire's culture as representative of a whole in the way that we would do for the NYC bodega. The harvesting and trading scenes indicate a post-scarcity society because of how we see everyone behaving in them, not because they themselves would fill all the economic needs of the culture. Since our narrator is native to the culture, he is not going to go around thinking to himself 'a harvesting trip similar to the following ones I've never been on in x ways and different from them in others', because that's not how people who are at home in a place think unless they're showing around a tourist-- and Rush isn't showing around tourists; the tourists are being him and sharing his assumptions about how things work, which is quite different.

We the readers are meant to construct, as we go along, a mental picture of how the society works, so that when we get to the things that happen in-text that are strange for that society, we register them as peculiar in the same way as we would register a really-weird-for-NYC shop as being different from our knowledge of New York. You're getting the same thing out of the harvesting trip that I do-- this is a post-scarcity society, these people are really laid back about agriculture-- but it sounds like for different reasons?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

*goes and gets copy of Ulysses* *skims Circe chapter* No, I think this is pretty clearly delineated as surrealism even if I try to use SF reading protocols on it, because there are no clear rules you can extrapolate as to how the apparitions work. The hallucinations are flagged as hallucinations because they produce alterations in the landscape and persons present at, apparently, whim. Even in the most fantastical of fantasy worlds, there must be a reason for things to happen as they do, or we the readers must be able to tell that the author has a reason, even if we do not know what it is. The reasons for things to happen in this chapter are 'because they come from Bloom's or Dedalus' subconscious thoughts', and if the things which come from their subconscious thoughts are actual physical happenings, one would expect that also to be true in the rest of the book (which is not the case) or for there to be a signal that the characters have entered a space where the physical laws of the world have changed (which is also not the case). It could be argued that the switch into stage directions format could signal the change into a fantastical world, except that Joyce has been switching modes in like fashion continuously in the earlier novel and it has never meant anything of the sort. If the rest of the earlier book were in one mode and then suddenly this were stage directions, I might well take that to mean that we are to read all of the events of this chapter as physically happening; but no.