- A mindbending new story collection from the Pōneke writer, Lee Hana.
- Majestic postpunk sci-fi page turner, grounded in places throughout Asia Pacific.
- Perfect for readers of LeGuin, Ballard, Butler, Borges, Atwood, Frame, Chiang, Pip Adam.
It's difficult to know just how to approach the art of the blurb. If you take it too far, casual readers tend to dismiss it as hyperbole. But then, if you dial it back too much, nobody bothers to open the book - even after your carefully curated cover-image has encouraged them to pick it up in the first place!
I'm not sure if the word "majestic" is precisely the one I would have chosen: and that list of authors sounds a little scattershot, also, but that's not to say that I didn't enjoy reading Lee Hana's debut collection of stories, launched on the 9th of May this year at the PSY FI gig advertised below:
I'll be honest. At first I wasn't too sure about these "literary speculative" stories - as their author describes them. The opening piece, "Matsuri" - an account of a series of disturbances at a suburban shopping mall - seemed a bit inconclusive to me. It read more like notes towards a story than the story itself: "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction," as Wallace Stevens might have put it.
But there the book was, sitting on my bedside table, and I found myself picking it up from time to time to read further stories. Gradually I began to feel that odd sensation of learning how to read again. Sometimes things just click into place; other times you have to re-educate yourself in a more systematic way. John Ashbery, for me, was an example of the first experience; Lee Hana of the second.
I'm not sure if all these stories are of equal merit. It doesn't seem to me to be quite the right question. What I began to feel was that they added up to something: a certain way of perceiving things. Sure, I have my favourites. I empathise greatly with the hapless book collector in "Bushfire." I like "Queen," too - that fine last line: "This was an unimagined new century and the queen was not pleased with what she saw" seems, in a sense, to sum up the whole book.
Descendants, though - the title he's chosen: descendants of what, of whom? There was an interesting appendix to an email I received from Lee Hana early in the process of writing this blogpost:
Science fiction = surrealism + plausibilityI don't know if this is original or not, but - in either case - I like it. I like it a lot. It's an intriguing set of definitions, and betrays an author who's been thinking hard about the parameters of genre fiction: presumably with the intention of breaking, or at the very least trespassing across them.
Crime = sociology + sociopathy
Romance = blowing on dying embers
Fantasy = the opposite of your life
Horror = what you fear you might deserve
Literary = the white page wants to be invisible
It also confirms my suspicion that this is a book which is more than the sum of its parts. What may seem tentative and under-written at first turns out to mask a subtlety of indirection: a philosophy of things not just as they are, but as they soon might be, compiled in deadly earnest.
So, rather than simply listing the 14 stories Lee Hana has included in his book, with a metaphorical tick or cross against each one, I thought it might be more interesting to contrast it with another collection I've been reading recently, also for the first time, although it was published almost half a century ago.
It's not that I think Lee Hana has read it too, but rather that he is, in a sense, its descendant - in whatever sense you like to take that:
Back in the mid-1970s, SF maven Theodore Sturgeon edited a series called "The Best of Soviet Science Fiction". It included, inevitably, quite a few titles by the Strugatsky brothers, but there were a number of other authors involved as well.
I was fortunate enough to find a whole bunch of them on a remainders table some years ago. This was the result:
- Igor Vsevolodovich Mozheyko ['Kirill Bulychev'] (1934-2003)
Bulychev, Kirill. Half a Life and Other Stories. Trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.
- Viktor Dmitrievič Kolupaev (1936-2001)
Kolupaev, Victor. Hermit’s Swing. Trans. Helen Saltz Jacobson. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.
- Vladimir Ivanovich Savchenko (1933-2005)
Savchenko, Vladimir. Self-Discovery. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1979.
- Vadim Sergeevich Shefner (1915-2002)
Shefner, Vadim. The Unman / Kovrigin’s Chronicles. Trans. Alice Stone & Alexander Nakhimovsky, Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.
- Arkady Strugatsky (1925-1991) & Boris Strugatsky (1933-2012)
Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Noon: 22nd Century. 1962. Trans. Patrick L. MacGuire. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Far Rainbow / The Second Invasion from Mars. 1963 & 1967. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis & Gary Kern. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. 1979. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.
Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Roadside Picnic / Tale of the Troika. 1972 & 1968. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.
Strugatsky, Boris & Arkady. Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Unusual Circumstances. 1977. Trans. Antonina W. Bouis. Introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. Best of Soviet Science Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
The most obvious manifestation of these books - for me, at least - was Tarkovsky's strange, late movie Stalker, the last film he directed in the Soviet Union before leaving for the West.
Despite the fact that the film's screenplay was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, it bears little resemblance to their novel Roadside Picnic, one of the gems of the "Best of Soviet Science Fiction" series. The conceit of their original story is (as one of the characters describes it):
A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around ... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind ... And of course, the usual mess — apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.The book is about the "stalkers" who visit the site - known as the Zone - of this alien picnic, looking for scraps to pick up, at constant risk of their lives if it turns out to be toxic or deadly in some other way.
Out of this Tarkovsky wove a complex parable about the moral cost of achieving your heart's desire. It's probably my favourite among all of his films - much though I love Andrei Rublev and his other SF masterpiece Solaris - but there's a certain hard SF grittiness about the original story that I like nearly as much.
But it wasn't the Strugatsky brothers I was reading at the same time as Descendants. No, it was the collection above, by the less-well known Kirill (or "Kir") Bulychev, a Russian Orientalist who doubled as an immensely prolific science fiction writer. His work is not as philosophically testing as that of Stanislaw Lem or the Strugatskys - the most successful of the many SF writers behind the Iron Curtain - but it, too, has its appeal.
There are time-slip stories, alien abduction stories, and various other manifestations of "the whole threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel" (as Lem once characterised the commercial SF of his time). It is, however, the quotidian background of Soviet life - phones that don't work, compulsory group picnics by the river, shoddy city apartments - that lend Bulychev's work a curious patina of difference: for a Western reader, at any rate.
The alien backgrounds may be similar, but the everyday foreground was divergent enough to dislocate me significantly in time as well as space as I read. The sixties and seventies seem increasingly strange to us, in any case - even for those of us who lived through them. Recasting that strangeness to a threatening universe of (alleged) ideological constraint beyond the Iron Curtain can have the result of pushing you quite off balance.
It's not so much that life there does sound all that different. It's just that it is, still, unknown and unpredictable: far more so, paradoxically, than the stereotyped backdrops of the SF environments we've grown so used to over the years.
I imagine you can see the point I'm making. It's hard to "make it new" in so well-trodden a field as Fantasy/SF, but that doesn't mean that the effort's not worth it. I was a bit taken aback when I read that list of authors Lee Hana's work was, implicitly, being compared to:
Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Ted Chiang, Pip AdamThese are some pretty awe-inspiring names to invoke! But I think I can now see the point he was making. It's not so much the eminence as the divergence of these names that's significant. Some could be said to be writing New Wave Sci fi; others Metafictional puzzles of various kinds, but all of them inhabit the disturbing far ranges of the Fantastic: "Psy Fi" as the conference organisers call it. J. G. Ballard would have referred to it as exploration of inner space.
Having now read his book, I'm inclined to agree that this is the territory Lee Hana, too, is traversing. And I'm very impressed with this, his first concerted venture into unknown lands. I'd like to read more, and I'm confident that we'll be hearing more, much more from him in the future - whatever eldritch Lovecraftian future that might turn out to be ...
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