Also, I think this is where DJs have a distinct advantage. I was hoping for interesting covers and reinterpretations and stuff because I’m used to mashup type juxtapositions. The very first guy did a novel interpretation of that Chumbawumba song all slow and mournful with lots of distortion on the guitar. It’s too bad he was so terrible. But that’s why he was first, I guess.

The evening wasn’t a total loss. I read a great Samuel R. Delany story, Star Pit. It’s about freedom and being trapped and being able to leave and the psychopathy of those who get to see everything. I was happy to find a pillar with a light at the Biltmore so I didn’t have to stand around awkwardly listening to music I wasn’t that into.

I can’t zip through Delany’s books, no matter how much I enjoy them. I need space to let them decompress, to be wrestled with, because that’s how they’re written. Glossing through things to get to the action, the pathos or whatever basically avoids everything interesting. This book is about two people in a galaxy where travelling 60 thousand light years is expensive but possible. There are two main factions the Family and the Sygn who form the political backdrop to the galaxy. There are aliens and assassins and Industrial Diplomats and a very internet-like thing known as General Information (the book was written in the early 1980s). But the space opera things you might expect don’t happen.

Rat Korga is the lone survivor of a world where he was a slave. His story takes up the first sixth of the book and is called a prologue. Then we hit Marq Dyeth and her world-hopping ways. And already I’m mangling everything up. In this book sentient beings are referred to as women, regardless of gender (and there are several alien species too who obey this grammatical dictum). So the males and females thorughout the book are referred to as She unless they’re currently an object of sexual desire, in which case He. Since the story of Marq and Korga is told primarily through Marq’s voice she is always she even though she is male. Korga (a huge acne-scarred nail-biting male slave who’d had anxiety wiped out of his brain and now wears the rings of a long-dead poet which allow him to think) is Marq’s perfect erotic match (down to 6 or 7 decimal places) and as such vacillates between pronouns depending on how lust drives Marq. So that requires a lot of paying attention.

And then there are the Evelm, the aliens who get the most spotlight time. Marq is part of an Evelmi stream (not family as there’s no genetic correspondence between the generations; they’re Sygn-aligned) and we never get a clear “Here is what an Evelm looks like” kind of statement, which leaves you to put a lot of things together yourself. It works from Marq’s point of view as she grew up in such a household. As an example, in Pride and Prejudice you don’t get Mister Darcy described as a bipedal mammal with manipulating limbs, two eyes, a nose, ears and a mouth that does both ingestion and communication duties. It’s the same sort of thing, doing away with the clunky expositions that happen so often in science fiction. You have to go with it, be carried along.

Marq is an Industrial Diplomat and brings up the cultural differences in other ways constantly. One of the refrains in the book is that even a world is a huge place, let alone a galaxy with over 6000 of them. Cultural differences between the north and south on his world are always being brought up as Korga missteps or does exactly the right thing.

But yes, it’s a beautiful weird book.

Really, though, this cover was the worst yet for a Samuel R Delany book. There’s a huge dragon (dragons in the book are kind of small and pathetic, unable to take off if they aren’t on a precipice) attacking people whose faces are all hidden. A bow is awkwardly placed so you can’t tell if the guy with the sword is holding it or if it’s flying through the air. Ugh.

The book is about the birth of civilization, about living life in a world when all the stories are just being written. A girl sets out from her village to see the world and learn about power. She does. It’s pretty great. Not epic in sweep or anything, just character and setting studies of the places she goes. It’s basically a world-building book that delves into language, invention, design, mathematics, the whole shebang.

Then after the book is over there are appendices including a bit of the author’s ruminations on the nature of science fiction and that just floored me. I suppose I’m still subconsciously in the traditionally minded camp that tends to dismiss SF as less serious than Literature. In the last six months I’ve been reading more of the really great SF writers, the ones who’ve been doing things artistic and significant with the form instead of solely telling a good story. There’ve been a few I just hated (JG Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company was the main culprit here – there are only so many descriptions of the protagonist’s “semen-stained thighs” or the constantly remarked upon obliviousness to his nudity), but the Delany stuff has been great, as have the Philip K Dick stories and the rest of the Ballard.

Anyway, these ruminations at the end of Triton were talking about how the metatext of SF allows sentences that would have no meaning outside the genre to mean things. One example used was the Heinlein bit “The door dilated.” In regular fiction that can only be metaphorical and even then it would be hard to justify, but in genre that works because it describes doors that don’t work the way our doors do. And then you can push that further and further. The line between metaphor and actual denotation is blurred in SF because the subject matter is the stuff that does not exist. Really this is fiction in its most fictional form.

Which brings me back to a book on writing I read this weekend. It was an Anne Lamott book and while I’ve read some of her stuff China and been a bit annoyed by it, I hoped to get through it all right. The book was a present after all. Anne Lamott’s writing voice is something like a hangnail in my mind. I pick at it and it bleeds its “Look at me I’m so pathetic and funny about it that it makes it all right for you to love me and my sanctimony! Please love me! I suck so much! Just like you!” attitude all through my anger centres. But she’s all about writing from her life. Which is fine. I’ve got no problem with that. But I don’t want to do that. I want to make stuff up, to discover things as I write them. And I know that’s the same thing that she’s doing but her bullshit just puts me off and I have to spend that much more time making sure I’m not skipping over anything interesting/useful. But her writing style is so different from how mine works it’s good for me to grab bits out of, because they’re so far from my creative ruts.

And that’s probably enough for now.