Proximal Eye – Page 15 – Mark W Tiedemann

Sword, Double-Edged, Metaphorical Steel

January 2, 2015 4 Comments

I finished reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword weeks ago and have been turning it over in my mind ever since trying to decide on the best way to talk about it. As sequel to her surprisingly popular Ancillary Justice, it is exceptional and unexpected. Yes, it carries forward the story of Breq, the lone surviving aspect of what was once a vast AI, a ship possessing a cadre of ancillaries which formed the extensible components of its intelligence. Yes, it continues on with an examination of the universe she established and the civil war that is in the process of breaking out. Yes, we find a continuation of many of the narrative devices and their concomitant concerns. No, it does not actually go where one might expect such a sequel to go. This begs the question of expectations, however, which also has to do with whether or not art is obligated to meet specific expectations. Surprise, after all, is supposed

Roundup 2014

December 30, 2014 No Comments

Time for a year in review. I am bound to say, though, that my reading once more has been disappointingly thin. When I am working on a novel, time for leisure reading necessarily goes down. Reading for research goes up, but that rarely requires me to finish an entire book. I look at my reading list for the year and the only titles I ever include are those I’ve completed, so on such years I appear to be under-achieving. That said, I completed 42 titles this year. (To be sure, I’ve probably read, by volume, closer to 90, but most of those I did not finish. For instance, I am still plodding my way through Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. I’ll likely have to start it over.) There were several that were rereads for me. Unusual in that I seldom if ever reread a book. I don’t read fast enough to feel good about covering old ground when

Time and Motion

December 16, 2014 2 Comments

William Gibson is, if nothing else, a careful writer. You can feel it in the progress of any one of his novels and in the short stories. Careful in his choice of topic, placement of characters, deployment of dialogue, style. He sets each sentence in place with a jeweler’s eye to best effect. The results often seem spare, even when they are not, and have invited comparisons to noir writers, minimalists, modernists. Entering upon a Gibson novel is a step across a deceptively simple threshold into a finely-detailed maze that suggests multiple paths but inevitably leads to a conclusion that, in hindsight, was already determined had we but noticed just how sophisticated a writer it is with whom we’re dealing. His last set of novels, the Bigend Trilogy, was not even science fiction, though they felt like it. The application of a science-fictional perception of how the world works produced a dazzling bit of dissonance in which the ground itself

Ends, Beginnings, Rebirths, Beliefs: Two Works of Science Fiction and a Fantasy

December 3, 2014 No Comments

In recent months I have read two classic novels which, curiously enough, deal with matters of a religious nature. I’ve decided to review them together for a number of reasons, one of which is both are part of the syllabus for my monthly reading group at Left Bank Books. Another reason for the review now is that I have finally, and not without some reluctance, seen one of the new generation of Biblical epics recently released, Noah, with Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. There are points of interest in this deeply flawed film which I will touch on after dealing with the novels. The first novel is James Blish’s superb A Case Of Conscience, published originally in 1953 as a novelette and later expanded to novel-length and published in 1958 (the same year, coincidentally, that Pope John XXIII was elected to his chair). The questions posed by the story are simple enough even if the answers are nearly impossible: what

On Enduring Interest

September 7, 2014 1 Comment

There’s a kind of novel that usually I avoid. You know the kind I mean—a miasmic dunking in the minutiae of neurotic characters who do very little out of the ordinary, suffer, come together, break apart, and end up in an ambiguous condition wherein presumably some sort of enlightenment has been achieved. Turgid not because the writing of such tomes is necessarily bad but, really, it’s just like real life only artistically rendered, and who wants to spend four or five hundred pages with people and their problems that in most respects seem just like ours? For similar reasons we do not seek to know everyone we could, because there are people we really would rather not. But then there are people we want to know, people we do know, people who are necessary and wonderful to our lives, people who have impacted us in ways that have made us who we are. No, we didn’t choose them, it doesn’t

On Heinlein and Expectations

July 10, 2014 10 Comments

William Patterson Jr. finished and delivered the second volume of his copious biography of Robert A. Heinlein not long before he passed away of a heart attack. He was too young. After reading his opus, he may well have had another book about Heinlein in him which we will now not see. I base that on the fact that while volume 2—The Man Who Learned Better: 1948 to 1988—is filled with the minutiae of a crowded life, there seems little in-depth analysis and assessment of Heinlein’s work. Given the few and scattered remarks about the shortcomings of other books of criticism published during Heinlein’s lifetime, one might reasonably expect such an assessment from a writer of evident skill and insight. It is not out of the realm of probability that he may have intended such analyses for a third volume devoted exclusively to such an assessment. To be sure, there are brief passages about several of the books of a

Music of the Fears

June 24, 2014 1 Comment

One of the most powerful yet ineffable experiences we are occasionally granted is the moment when music opens us up and sets our brains afire with the possible. Music, being abstract in the extreme, is difficult to slot into the kind of “safe” categories to which we relegate much else. Stories certainly have subtext and can expand our appreciation of the world, but they are still “just” stories and all that mind-altering power can be rendered ineffective by dint of the filters used to shunt it aside. Paintings and sculptures likewise can be “seen” as purely representational—or ignored when such designation is impossible. Even when we appreciate what we see or read, the power of taking the work in as merely a reflection of a reality we think we understand can have the result of diverting any real impact. Not so with music. Once we open ourselves to the emotional realities of the sounds and let them have their way

Role Inversions: Ancillary Justice

May 11, 2014 No Comments

Ann Leckie’s first novel, Ancillary Justice, has been garnering award nominations all year, and recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The book has been up for a Philip K. Dick Award, a Tiptree, it’s on the Nebula and Hugo ballots. With this much critical reception, it would be easy to default to hype in praising the novel as one of the best space operas in recent years, during a period when the form has experience a bit of a renaissance, with examples that have elevated it out of its own clichés and into a new level of æsthetic opulence promised by the masterpieces of the past and now achieved by contemporary craftsmen. Well, occasionally the hype is not misleading. Ancillary Justice is a fine piece of worldbuilding, as good as anything done by Asimov or Anderson, Banks or McLeod, Cherryh or Sargent. Set many millennia in the future, past a time when our present might have any relevance to

Mark W. Tiedemann

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The Proximal Eye