Proximal Eye – Page 12 – Mark W Tiedemann

2016

January 11, 2017 No Comments

Tardiness comes in direct proportion to chaos. The year ended and all was in flux. However, reading goes on. I did not finish nearly as many books in 2016 as I tried to. At least, not other people’s books. I did finish drafts of two of my own. My desk, at the moment, is clear, and maybe I can do a better job in 2017 of keeping abreast here. A good deal of my science fiction reading was pretty much for the reading group I host at Left Bank Books. That group affords me opportunity and motivation to read novels I might not otherwise get to. So I reread Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination for the first time in three decades, but I also read The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time ever. I do not regret the delay. It is a mature novel, with a great deal my younger self may well have missed. As to

Feeling His Mind Going

October 30, 2016 No Comments

Robert Silverberg is, on occasion, a deceptive writer. He exhibits a style and approach which seem almost basic. Clear, almost bare-bones sentences, conveying their cargo of information efficiently in service to plots that move along at a steady pace, gradually building to a point that, once made, is obvious. You set the book (or short story or, his preferred form, novella) aside with a satisfied sense of having enjoyed a work of unpretentious refinement, but not entirely sure why. Later the full impact hits you, like a waterfall in a low-g environment. You find yourself awash in the world he showed you. Walking down the street in the aftermath can seem disorienting because— Well, that’s what good science fiction does, causes your perspective to shift. Silverberg’s work provides that shift very reliably, but instead of a slambang grandiloquent epiphany he does it gradually, slowly, almost geologically over the course of a story that in many respects is quite ordinary. Take

Urban Character

October 5, 2016 No Comments

After a number of extraordinary novels, one thing is clear about China Mieville’s work: he loves cities. New Crobuzon, Embassytown, London, Beszel/Ul Qoma—each distinctive, layered, multifaceted, richly alive, and impossible to map as any living being’s soul, these remarkable urban spaces center, anchor, and frame the human (and not human) people who inhabit them. Consequently, the revelations of their interactions acquire architectonic depth fully evocative of the qualities of amazement, wonder, and dismay good science fiction should produce. But each is unique, a character unto itself. Likewise in his new novel, The Last Days of New Paris, which gives us a Nazi occupied Paris that has swallowed its conquerors in the very decadence their ideology sought to suppress by supplanting it with their own. In the early days of the occupation, a young American schooled the occult symbolist morphologies of Crowley and company infiltrates to find the enclave of French Surrealists holed up in city center. He finds them ensconced

Cannibale Verité

July 3, 2016 4 Comments

Stories live inside stories. Like Matryoshki dolls, they nest inside each other. The walls are permeable, the delineations indistinct, and viscera moves from one to another to another, and so, osmotically, verisimilitude emerges with reference and resonance. We recognize the truth of stories because they remind. Even when we’ve never heard that particular story before, the lexical and symbolic soup, sometimes called culture, we swim in makes certain elements part and parcel of what we recognize as truth. Fiction depends on this mantle of story sediment. The better a writer understands the essential reality of the material, the more potent the experience is for the reader. The more we identify with character, connect with setting, and surrender to the flow of the narrative, the more substantive is the story and the truer it feels. It’s a risky thing for a writer to make the nesting itself part of the story, to show the workings of narrative baldly, like pulling away

Defending Angels

May 21, 2016 No Comments

It is arguable that we live in a post-colonial age. We no longer see major powers moving into previously independent places and usurping the land and the people and declaring them to now be part of some empire. Not the way we did in the 18th and 19th centuries. (We wink at smaller-scale examples of roughly the same thing, but while Ukraine may be prey to Russia, we don’t see Russia trying to occupy New Zealand.) The scramble for Africa was the last eruption of such hubris. And there are now plenty of studies indicating that it was never a profitable enterprise anyway, that every power that indulged its imperialist urge did so at great expense that was never recouped, not in the long run. At best, such endeavors paid for the re-formation of both the imperial power and its colonies into more modern forms independent of each other. At worst, it was pillage that benefited a few individuals and

The Bang That Whimpers

May 17, 2016 No Comments

After eight years, the ABC show Castle has ended. Despite a strong premise and a superb cast and excellent presentation, the show exemplified dramatic entropy of the most annoying kind and after an earlier announcement that one of its two main stars would not be returning for a ninth season, the decision was taken to kill it. I watched all eight seasons. Initially, I loved it. How could I not? The title character was a writer—true, every wanna-be writer’s wet dream of a writer: successful, rich, sexually active, and cool—who manages to fall into a plum opportunity “riding along” with one of the best detective squads in the NYPD. Richard Castle, because of his social status (privilege) can manipulate his way via the mayor into this spot, despite Detective Kate Beckett’s strong and perfectly reasonable protests. So far so good. He’s the loose cannon, the out-of-box thinker, she’s by-the-book and wicked smart. They combine into an ideal team. There was

Sleeping Dragons

May 8, 2016 1 Comment

Kazuo Ishiguro works a consistent theme. Even in his earliest novels, he explores the manner in which people refuse to acknowledge the reality through which they move. Many of his characters display a kind of aphasia, an inability to grasp the issues surrounding them, the motives of people, even those they are close to, or what is unfolding before their eyes. In a way, they are peculiarly narcissistic. I say peculiar because quite often their sense of themselves is the last thing they seem concerned with, even when others are. At times this has led him to experiment with tactics of evasion that result in novels that resist our attempts to connect, even to access what is going on, but we read them anyway because he cloaks the experiments with plots and devices that hold our interest, but which we suspect are little more than extensions of the evasions at the core of his characters’ lives. In a few instances,

Smartness

March 28, 2016 No Comments

James Gleick’s biography of physicist Richard Feynman ought to be part of all high school science classes. Not only does he chronicle the life of one of the preeminent scientists of the 20th Century, not only does he portray the chief puzzle of physics in that century clearly, he manages to convey the substance of the work in enviably accessible prose without once “dumbing down” any of it. All this while using remarkably few equations and those usually only in description of what they do, not in the numbers and symbols themselves. One comes away from the book—Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman—feeling that this would not be such a difficult subject, or at least feeling that it would be as much a human endeavor as art or music or engineering or accounting. Science is encased in an opaque mythography that seems designed to make people feel inferior. In the main, this is a consequence of language. At

Mark W. Tiedemann

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The Proximal Eye