INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (17 page)

THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING

Erika Johansen

Bantam hb, 433pp, £12.99

reviewed by Jim Steel

Johansen’s reported seven-figure advance is an impressive calling card for someone who is so new to publishing that, at the time of writing, she doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia entry. However, Google informs us that “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe”. Intriguing. Are there skeletons? Of course, there might well be other Erika Johansens out there. So much for the basic research.

What we do know is that her trilogy is already being made into a major Hollywood franchise starring Emma Watson. We could well be looking at the next
Hunger Games
/
Twilight
series. All this has the effect of almost reducing books themselves to the state of spin-off products before they even hit the shelves. The films will no doubt keep the bones of the plot, but the flesh will be rendered anew. People will come to picture Watson and the multi-million-dollar production when they read the trilogy. This might be no bad thing. The first novel,
The Queen of the Tearling
, is seriously lacking in quality at the start, although it soon grows into itself. And, at the very least, readers of the future will come to the books knowing whether Tear is pronounced “rip” or “drop”, thus avoiding any sense of dislocation.

So we begin. Nineteen-year-old Princess Kelsea Raleigh (can we have a princess called Kelsea? Like, totally!) is in safe hiding in the Reddick Forest when she is summoned to the throne of the Regent upon reaching her majority. (Through no fault of the author, Reddick is first mentioned in one of the most unlucky line-break splits it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.) It soon becomes apparent that the Regent has no intention of giving up power and Kelsea is rapidly involved in a kidnapping/rescue adventure on the way.

This is no run-of-the-mill secondary world, something which goes a little way to mitigating the lack of any serious attempt at feudal nomenclature or characterisation. There are places named New London and New Europe, and it is swiftly revealed that this world was long ago discovered and colonised by the British and the Americans. Contact has, of course, been lost. It’s a land where people are equally happy to talk of magic and antihistamines. Medicine, or the lack thereof, is a big thing in this world, since the ship containing the medical staff sank. So far, so fuzzy. The Tearling portion of this New World was founded by William Tear, a William Penn utopian, although in recent years the Tearling has had to send an annual human tribute to the rival kingdom of Mortmesne which is ruled by the Red Queen and is very much in the ascendant. The pre-Crossing land of America, already many centuries in the past, is a place of myth. The obvious analogies with the European settlement of North America are there, of course. There is also a disturbing hint that this is a whites-only world for reasons that are not yet revealed, and Christianity, although banned by Penn, has re-established itself, although Kelsea herself is ambivalent about it at this stage. If some, or all, of these themes are developed in the remainder of the trilogy then we might have an impressive work on our hands, regardless of how clunky the dialogue sometimes is. In its defence, Kelsea’s library cheekily contains copies of Tolkien, a writer famously cloth-eared when it came to reported speech.

Kelsea is refreshingly plain for a princess, although that won’t survive Hollywoodisation – phrases such as ‘far too plain for my tastes’ will bounce off when flung at Watson. She is also surrounded by strong male characters, which had the potential to undermine any empowerment. There is the mysterious masked folk hero know as the Fetch – responsible for the earlier kidnapping – and Lazarus, nicknamed the Mace, who is a fierce and loyal, if taciturn, warrior. Not the deepest of characters, but both could have drowned her out on the page if used carelessly. However, she is very much her own person. She is naive, naturally, to begin with, but she is someone possessed of great inner strength. The early graphic violence that surrounded her in the countryside progresses into scenes of urban intrigue as she starts to establish her own grip on power. And plenty of other female characters from all classes step up to the mark. This is not a book that betrays its own potential.

Plot-wise, this volume resolves itself satisfactorily while setting up the next instalment. Judgement is conditionally suspended.

FUTURE INTERRUPTED

JONATHAN McCALMONT

8. Rest in Peace, Uncle Bob

I remember Robert A. Heinlein being dead, which is not the same thing as remembering when he died. Back in the 1990s when I was first getting into science fiction, Heinlein was almost out of print in the UK. Contemporaries such as Asimov and Clarke still enjoyed vigorous sales and a reassuring amount of shelf space but Heinlein himself was disappearing beneath the historical waves with only the spires of
Starship Troopers
still visible. In fact, Heinlein’s legacy was far more obvious in the works that reacted against his style and values, from the stripped-back futurism of cyberpunk to the progressive politics of the so-called Radical Hard SF. I remember Uncle Bob being dead but something seems to have disturbed his well-earned rest.

After decades of being an American phenomenon, Heinlein’s works are back on the shelves of Britain’s remaining bookshops. Gollancz’s prestigious Masterwork series has expanded to include
Double Star
and
The Door into Summer
alongside its existing editions of
Starship Troopers
and
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
. Meanwhile, non-fiction presses have been doing their part to stimulate academic interest with the publication of not only a two-volume hagiography by William J. Patterson but also a series of critical volumes that acknowledge the problematic aspects of Heinlein’s patriarchal individualism and sex-positive incest advocacy but try to present them as evidence of a complex and progressive sensibility. Even the storm-tossed seas of online fandom are helping to wash Heinlein back into the limelight as certain corners of American genre culture have taken to using his position and popularity as indicators of the moral and aesthetic health of science fiction as a whole. What is going on here? Why are we seeing a concerted effort to repair the reputation and standing of a man who died over twenty-five years ago? There are a number of answers and most of them are partially true.

One explanation is that Heinlein’s back catalogue represents a substantial financial interest for the copyright holders. Time, fashion and the collapse of the mid-list are unkind to long-dead authors and while Uncle Bob’s books might well have leapt off the shelves in 1988, the current beneficiaries of Heinlein’s estate must now work harder to keep his books in the public eye. Sometimes this work might involve working with tame biographers, other times it will involve cutting deals that make little money for the estate but do at least keep Heinlein’s books in print. Clareson and Sanders’ book
The Heritage of Heinlein
includes anecdotes about Heinlein’s widow trying to block re-publication of work that she deemed ‘vulgar’ but the concerted effort to get Heinlein back into print suggests that such prissiness has now been replaced by steel-eyed pragmatism and the realisation that the dead no longer look after themselves.

Another thing to bear in mind is that while Heinlein’s reputation has been declining in the UK for decades, American genre culture still considers him to be a central figure in the history of science fiction. One of the more regrettable aspects of the online marketplace of ideas is that sharing a language with Americans and Australians means that it is proving difficult to maintain the distinctively British genre culture that once flowed from British magazines, conventions and publishers. Like every other product of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, the Internet provides a level playing field on which local concerns and sensibilities are dismembered and devoured by their much larger and better-resourced competition. Don’t get me wrong… American genre culture features an over-abundance of great stories, books, writers and ideas but the price of gaining admission to that abundance includes having to pay attention to American issues, American histories and American ideas about what constitutes a canonical author.

Shifting realities of genre publishing aside, the campaign to restore Heinlein’s reputation and standing may also have something to do with the fact that a particular generation of science fiction readers are now reaching the end of their natural lives. The growing concern about Heinlein’s status and visibility are reminiscent of a similar concern regarding the status of the film producer and director Roger Corman.

One of the most intriguing books about American film that you are ever likely to read is Peter Biskind’s
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
. Drawing on extensive interviews and biographical research, Biskind describes how the post-war baby boomer generation came of age in the 1960s and set about changing the face of American film. The book’s opening chapters are upbeat and filled with anecdotes about the likes of Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper taking on the system and convincing the studios to give them enough freedom to reach a new generation of filmgoers. However, while this strategy did deliver huge successes such as
Bonnie and Clyde
and
The Godfather
, it also allowed for ruinous failures like William Friedkin’s
Sorcerer
and Michael Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
. According to Biskind, New Hollywood engineered the golden age of 1970s Hollywood but their excesses and individualism also paved the way for an backlash in which studios reasserted control and forced talent to cooperate with the blockbuster business model that endures to this day. The nuance of this historical account is entirely missing from a recent film made about the exact same time frame.

Alex Stapleton’s documentary
Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel
features many of the same names as
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
but rather than describing a period of boom and bust in which some directors were indulged at the cost of what turned out to be much less creative freedom for everyone else, Stapledon presents the ’50s and ’60s as the opening steps of a long triumphant march towards the era of the blockbuster that began with
Jaws
and
Star Wars
. The interesting thing about this film is that despite being an inexperienced director, Stapledon managed to secure interviews with a large chunk of Hollywood royalty who all turned out to praise the vision and independent spirit of the man who made terrible films like
Battle Beyond the Stars
and
Frankenstein Unbound
.

Much like Heinlein, Corman has become so closely associated with a particular moment in cultural history that it is almost impossible to pass judgement on the man’s work without also seeming to pass judgement on that moment in cultural history. Sure… Corman is an important historical figure whose strategy of targeting younger audiences with genre material laid the foundations of contemporary Hollywood, but the real reason Hollywood royalty lined up to praise Roger Corman is that he represents a spirit of independence and experimentation that is entirely at odds with the reality of today’s Hollywood machine. The re-invention of Corman as the
Man Who Built Hollywood
suggests that Hollywood baby boomers are trying to write their own epitaph and ensure that their generation is remembered for its experimentation and individuality rather than its complete capitulation to the forces of big business.

J.G. Ballard’s short work ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ makes the point that Ronald Reagan the person was an entirely different entity to Ronald Reagan the political figure and media construct. Similarly, the ideas and principles represented by the likes of Robert A. Heinlein and Roger Corman bear only a passing relation to the real people buried beneath the weight of those names. We fight over these names because of what they represent. We fight over these names because we want recognition for our values and concerns.

Some right-wing American fans want Heinlein to remain visible because they think that science fiction should continue to embody a blend of iconoclasm, rugged individualism and patriarchal power worship that is common to both Heinlein’s writing and the contemporary American right. Some progressive fans accept that Heinlein had a huge impact upon the development of science fiction but want to re-invent him as a progressive or even quasi-feminist figure because re-inventing Heinlein to fit your values is a means of ensuring that your values will be as much a part of the history of science fiction as Heinlein himself. Despite sharing the desire to emphasise science fiction’s history as a political literature, such revisionism strikes me as wrong-headed; why go to the trouble of papering over the cracks when we could instead re-plaster the ceiling? We do the future no favours by seeking to deceive the present about the past.