Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (44 page)

The novel is written mostly from the first person points of view of Ruth and Lucy, two roommates who are academics at Columbia University in Morningside Heights on Manhattan's Upper West Side, as is the author. There are also short asides entitled "Anna's Aphorisms," Anna being another Columbia academic living in the same apartment building and hailing from Sweden; various short takes written as blogging or Facebook conversations; and toward the end some play dialog among the main characters.

The three female academics are involved in the teaching, creating, playing, and theoretical, cultural, and psychological analysis of games, mostly role-playing games. The story line is centered on these games, real life role-playing games played out not in indoor rooms but out in the environs of Morningside Heights by players recruited from Columbia University students and personnel, and from internet social networks by the protagonists.

The novel begins very slowly and boringly, at least for a readership other than people already deeply interested in the subculture of female academics, or, more narrowly, female academics on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or, more narrowly still, female Columbia University academics on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This is the setting for the whole novel, focusing in rather numbing detail on their psychological tics, constricted unromantic sex lives, mediocre academic careers, food, drink, and clothing preferences, and so forth.

It starts to become a story of some more general interest when the three women begin prowling around Morningside Heights, mostly at night, where there was a mental asylum on what is now part of the Columbia University grounds back in the day, in the service of location scouting for a role-playing game called
Trapped in the Asylum.

It gets more interesting and begins to develop actual dramatic tension when the role-playing gets shifted by the enigmatic Anna from
Trapped In the Asylum
to
The Bacchae on Morningside Heights
(based on
The Bacchae,
a Greek tragedy by Euripides), about the time that Anders, Anna's even more enigmatic and sexually charismatic brother, arrives on the scene and gets involved.

Euripides' play is a parable centered on the conflict, or, if you prefer, dialectic, between passion and reason, libido and the intellect, chaos and order. This conflict is personified by Dionysus, the god of the bacchanalia and party animals, and the mortal Pentheus, who opposes him as the avatar of intellect and order, and comes to a bad end for championing such upright but uptight virtue.

The
Bacchae of Morningside Heights
game consists of recruiting more and more players night by night and dividing them into two opposing teams, the team of Dionysus and the team of Pentheus, playing against each other for points. The former scores points by engaging in various sexual activities out in semipublic while under the influence of what they can guzzle and/or snort, and the latter by stopping them, interrupting them, punishing them, being general spoilsports in the supposed service of order and rational virtue.

Well, as you might expect, the game gets more and more wild, perverse, and out of control, full-born orgies transmogrifying into stoned and drunken sex magic ceremonies on the side of Dionysus, and the Pentheus patrol degenerating into something like the Nazi SA and dressing the part down to the ass-kicking jackboots applied to winos and the homeless.

Perhaps not needless to say, the climax of the novel is not exactly wine and roses—no latter day Woodstock, but more like Altamont on Spanish Fly and crystal meth.

Into what genre or subgenre of fiction does
The Magic Circle
fit? Which is to say, what perceived readership demographic is Amazon targeting with its New Harvest imprint? From the above plot summary, it could have conceivably been published in 47 North, the Amazon SF line, or even in its vague general fiction line. But instead it's published in what the cover copy and promotional material somewhat subtly but clearly proclaims is its "literary fiction" line.

But chez Amazon, what does "literary fiction" actually mean in marketing terms?

Well, the writing itself is rather stiff, formal, anti-dramatic, and colorless, even when what it is describing would be X-rated, violent, erotic, and exciting, were this a movie. As are Ruth and Lucy, and even Anna and Anders, who are described as being dangerously charismatic and do things that would require them to be so. They never become emotionally involving and neither does the action, really.

It's all, well, somehow
academic.

Of course, the first person characters through whom Jenny Davidson does most of the narrating
are
academics, and Upper West Side New York metrosexuals, obsessed with the cuisine, mores, clothing, housing, and so forth of this very inbred and narrowly specific subculture, members of which would seem to be the main and perhaps only enthusiastic readership for a novel like this.

The
story
could work as urban fantasy, or more specifically feminist urban fantasy, "general fiction," or even soft porn, but the characters and the writing style would probably cause it to bomb commercially if any of these were chosen as the targeted genre demographics.

It's hard to say whether Jenny Davidson, herself an Upper West Side Columbia University academic, simply couldn't write it any other way, or whether the choice of this style was quite deliberate, being an all-too-accurate means of describing and conveying the specific cramped, over-intellectual and rather vapid consciousness styles of the first person narrators. Pushed a bit further, it could be satire. As it is, it may be a successful portrayal of the species of characters that Davidson seeks to portray rather than a stylistic failure.

And, perhaps, it would seem, a portrayal of what Amazon perceives, correctly or not, as the target demographic readership for the genre it perceives and markets as "literary fiction."

But is this sort of "literary fiction" actually
literature?

Or is it just another genre?

Tears in Rain
by Rosa Montero, another Amazon publication, is unequivocally science fiction, and successful science fiction of a high order. But it was published neither in the 47 North line nor in New Harvest, but in AmazonCrossing, because it is translated from the Spanish original.

Amazon must be applauded for launching a line of fiction translated into English from other languages, since so little non-Anglophone fiction gets published in the United States at all, and there is plenty of worthy fiction written in other languages out there.

But I wonder if it makes any commercial sense to shoehorn all translated fiction into an imprint of its own, a kind of pseudo-genre, which makes no sense at all in terms of readership demographics, market targeting, content, or level of literary intent.

I speak from long experience with how the translations of my own novels have been published in French. When my novels first began to be published in France, and indeed up until something like a decade or two ago, they were published in science fiction lines, for in those days translations from American and British science fiction dominated almost all of the French SF lines, and French writers had trouble having their SF novels published in them at all. Later, when my output broadened, my novels were still originated in speculative fiction lines, but the mass market reprints appeared in SF lines, mystery lines, and general fiction lines depending on their actual content, not on the writer's genrefied identity.

More recently, Fayard, a generally "literary" house, has been originating them as general fiction, neither with genre identification nor in a line of translated work. That is how they basically publish everything, though the mass market imprints have been published as SF, perhaps to hedge their bets, or perhaps because an SF line has been the most eager to acquire the rights.

The point being that this is more or less how novels are published in France, and in other European countries, too—either as general fiction or within genre imprints according to the perceived readership demographics. But not in lines dedicated to translations per se, the reasonable reasoning being that prospective readers are going to read the books in French translation, after all, so it doesn't really matter if the originals were written in English, Russian, or Swahili.

So while I say
bravo!
to Amazon for launching AmazonCrossing to fill the gaping void in American publishing with a line consisting entirely of translated fiction, and passionately wish it well; alas, I just don't think it's going to work very well no matter the quality of what it publishes.

I hope not, but I think
Tears in Rain
could end up an unfortunate example. The author, Rosa Montero, has published a considerable oeuvre of fiction in Spanish, and has a formidable literary reputation in Spain, where she has won the top literary award twice.

I haven't read anything she's written in Spanish, my lousy Spanish being what it is. But were this novel actually written directly in English by the translator, Lilit Zekulin Thwaites, I would say it is a very well written full-bore science fiction novel and succeeds equally well as a crossover detective novel, fulfilling the genre requirements of both, while rising above any genre limitations.

Tears in Rain
is science fiction, detective fiction, and even a species of adult romance fiction, if you
must
try to squeeze it into genre pigeonholes, and whether it was written in Spanish or Finnish or English will mean nothing at all to the Anglophone reader.

The year is 2109. The place is Madrid. The main protagonist is Bruna Husky, a female military combat "replicant"—an android, that is—revamped for civilian detective work. And that is not the only reference and homage to
Blade Runner
and
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
in
Tears in Rain.

Like the androids of Philip K. Dick's novel and Ridley Scott's film, Montero's androids have been genetically engineered with limited lifespans—ten years. Indeed, the title of her novel is a candid reference to the climactic replicant death scene in the rain in
Blade Runner.

But that's more or less where the acknowledged similarities end. Bruna and all of these replicants know when they are going to die, within a few months' leeway at most, and they know how, and it's going to be ugly. So from the git-go, they live in a state of tragic existential dread. They are fashioned as adults, but with false childhood memories, which they
know
are false, the product of artists who create them. And anyone, replicant or not, can buy false memories on the legal, black, or gray market.

And these replicants are not exiled from the Earth. They are a kind of artificial feared and loathed ethnic minority, having risen up in a failed revolution, and have limited legal rights, with political groups and lobbies out to reduce them even more.

When replicants start committing violent murders, some seemingly random, others with Machiavellian political intent, Bruna is put on the case, along with others, and it is discovered that their minds have been implanted with memories that include programmed compulsions. Homicides become political strife between humans and replicants, become riots, become all out civil war...

While pursuing the discovery of the perpetrators, Bruna is herself a suspect, at least at first, interrogated and tailed by Inspector Lizard, who initially mistrusts this converted combat replicant, who in turn first fears and despises him, but who she slowly begins to admire. Eventually, they grudgingly develop a mutual trust that tentatively and slowly morphs into a kind of complex and mature love affair....

So
Tears in Rain,
I would contend, is not a "literary novel" in the genre sense of belonging in Amazon's New Harvest "literary genre" imprint, or a "detective novel" belonging in Thomas and Mercer, or a "science fiction novel" belonging in 47 North, though it could be commercially published in any one of these genre lines depending on the targeted readership demographics. Rosa Montero has written a novel that transcends genrefication, aspires to the status of true literature and achieves it.

Okay, so what do I mean by the novel as true literature?

A novel that enlightens the mind, touches the heart, explores the feedback relationship between consciousness and the cultural and physical surround, raises and/or answers moral questions, and does so with a dramatic, entertaining and apropos story that climaxes in a satisfying epiphany.

That's too much to ask, is it?

That's what all literarily sincere and ambitious novelists aspire to, and, to the extent that they achieve it, what makes good novels literature and great novelists, or anyway some of their novels, great. Tolstoi. Hemingway. Mailer. Dostoevsky. Dickens. Hugo.

That's true literature. That's good literature. And genre has nothing to do with it. It transcends genre by ignoring its requirements or fulfilling the requirements of as many genres as it pleases and ignoring all genre restrictions. At its best that's great literature.

In literary terms, it can arise through any mere genre and/or be published within it, emphatically including "science fiction," and indeed that's the meaningful distinction between "sci-fi" and speculative fiction. Because while genre SF is defined by restrictive genre parameters, speculative fiction is defined by its prescriptive requirement of speculative content, nothing more, nothing less, even when it's published in an "SF" line.

Take something like
The Best of All Possible Worlds
by Karen Lord, a science fiction novel by the literary definition thereof, and published by Del Rey, a dedicated SF line within Ballantine Books, in turn another Random House imprint. This may not be great literature, but it is a novel written with literary ambition that achieves what it set out to do.

It is science fiction. It is speculative fiction. It is good literature.

The Best of All Possible Worlds
is traditional anthropological science fiction of an unusually sophisticated and psychologically deep sort—and a peculiar subspecies of romance novel as well, if you want to stretch that genre definition to a really silly extent.