April-June 2019: Speculative Fiction from around the World

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April-June 2019: Speculative Fiction from around the World

1Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 29, 2019, 2:32 pm

Speculative Fiction from around the World

Hello and welcome! This quarter is dedicated to speculative fiction in all its forms, written in languages other than English.

To get us started, here’s a list of books that fit the theme. I’ve based it on the tag "SF in languages other than English", then manually added other titles. If you’d like to volunteer titles to it, all ideas are welcome. I opted for a broad definition of what constitutes speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, magical realism, horror, ghost stories, fairytales, proto-science fiction, alternate history, weird fiction, gothic, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, surreal, conceptual, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, supernatural fiction, etc. Basically, anything that isn’t mainstream "realistic" fiction. For me, the idea is first and foremost to read books that were not crafted for an English-speaking audience. To that end, widening the scope - and including magical realism in particular - helps to compensate for the lack of translated fiction published via the usual English-language SF and fantasy channels. Of course, everyone is free to interpret the theme as they wish...

Other relevant lists (created by Her_Royal_Orangeness, DorsVenabili and spiphany):
SF & Fantasy in Translation
Best Fantasy Originally Published in a Language Other Than English
SF and Fantasy in Translation
Best Science Fiction Originally Published in a language Other than English
French SF / SF française

Threads of interest:
Fantasy books in other languages than English
Non-European SF

External links of interest:
https://worldsf.wordpress.com/ (not updated in the past five years); https://www.sfintranslation.com/?p=648; https://www.tor.com/2014/11/10/favorite-science-fiction-a-fantasy-in-translation...
A French academic’s blog on Chinese and Asian SF, in French and English: https://sinosf.hypotheses.org/
Link to the short-lived Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards Wikipedia page
If you like YA and don't mind ebooks and amateur translations, there’s webnovels.com. Check out here for SF and here for "Eastern fantasy" (I’ve been told good things about True Martial World.)

2Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Apr. 7, 2019, 8:26 am

To get the ball rolling, I’ll start with my own goals for this quarter:
- I’d like to read some of the classics that are precursors to the genre and that I haven’t read yet.
- I’ll be trying to get to the end of Fictions at last.
- I’d like to make a dent in my TBR pile. I have been keeping a few books aside especially for this quarter.
- I'd like to read some new books by non-Western authors.

Here are my titles (from my own shelves and to be borrowed from the library) so far – there’s no guarantee I’ll have read them all in three months’ time…

Originally in Swedish: Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (This is borderline cheating: the English version is by the author.)

Originally in Spanish: Le regard des furies (La Mirada de Las Furias) by Javier Negrete, Fictions by Borges

Originally in Portuguese: Le peuple de la brume (A Vida no Céu) by José Eduardo Agualusa

Originally in Flemish: Un été sans dormir (Een zomer zonder slaap) by Bram Dehouck (not applicable)

Originally in French : Micromégas by Voltaire, Voyages to the Moon and the Sun by Cyrano de Bergerac, La saison des singes by Sylvie Denis, Le jardin des silences by Mélanie Fazi, Susto by Luvan (who is also Karin Tidbeck’s French translator), Cyberland by Li-Cam, Les jardins statuaires by Jacques Abeille, Et qu'advienne le chaos by Hadrien Klent

Originally in Italian: Le cinquième principe (Il quinto principio) by Vittorio Catani

Originally in Dari : Une petite vie by Khosraw Mani

Originally in Serbian : L’égout by Andrija Matic

Originally in Latin : The Golden Ass by Apuleius

Originally in Russian: Le Dernier Rêve de la raison by Dmitri Lipskerov, La tête légère (Light-headed) by Olga Slavnikova

What about you?

3raton-liseur
Apr. 1, 2019, 4:01 pm

>2 Dilara86: That's an impressive list. Nothing I have read, except Micromégas, and lots of titles and authors I have never heard of.
I don't think I will be joining you for this quarter read, as I am more on a realistic reading spree at the moment, but I will follow with interest, as I usually do in this group.

Happy reading to all!

4Dilara86
Apr. 2, 2019, 6:13 am

>3 raton-liseur: Fair enough! If you change your mind, you know where we are...

Since my previous post, I bought Mère-vieille racontait by Radu Țuculescu, Va au Golgotha (Go to Golgotha) by Alexander Zinoviev and Le jardinier d'Otchakov (The Gardener from Ochakov) by Andrey Kurkov at the charity shop's spring clearance sale. And I wasn't supposed to bring any more books back... I haven't started on any of them yet. As luck would have it, things are hectic at work and I haven't been able to finish my non-spec-fic book yet, which is The River Ki. Has anyone started a book of interest?

5BLBera
Apr. 4, 2019, 5:00 pm

I'd like to read The Slynx and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Those have been on my list for a while.

6rocketjk
Apr. 5, 2019, 3:36 pm

>5 BLBera: I read We a few years back. Quite interesting.

7Dilara86
Apr. 6, 2019, 10:30 am

>5 BLBera: I'll be curious to know what you think of them. I have mixed feelings about The Slynx: it was a pleasant read, but the central conceit felt a bit smug, like Idiocracy in a fantasy setting. I read We ages ago and can't remember anything about it. It might be time for a reread!

I've just finished Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (whose birthday is apparently today!) and liked it, although it gave me insomnia, as I kept thinking about the ending. It takes place in a cold, grey dystopic world where things are made of amorphous "stuff" that needs to be regularly reminded to keep its shape and purpose. People have to mark their possessions and name them aloud frequently, using the correct word and pronunciation, or they'll turn back into goo. The question is, should they keep on doing this, and fight an endless fight against entropy, or give in to the unknown and formless?

8BLBera
Apr. 6, 2019, 10:49 am

Before I get to The Slynx, I have to finish The Unit, which is chilling.

9streamsong
Apr. 6, 2019, 2:37 pm

>1 Dilara86: Wow, great lists! Thank you!

I think I'll start with the classic and readily available Solaris which is also on my 1001 challenge.

10Dilara86
Apr. 7, 2019, 5:54 am

I finished Un été sans dormir (Een zomer zonder slaap) by Bram Dehouck. It wasn't speculative fiction. I was fooled by the nebulous blurb on the back cover and the fact that the book's publishers do a lot of weird/speculative/dystopic novels. I'll edit my post so as not to mislead people.

Do any of you have favourites that they'd like to share with us?
I really liked Kallocain by Karin Boye and The Forest of Hours by Kerstin Ekman, both Swedish novels.
For those of you who can read French or Chinese, there's Membrane by Ta-Wei Chi. I don't think it's been translated into English yet, and I really don't know why! Maybe when Ken Liu's finished translating Cixin Liu's back catalogue...

11spiphany
Bearbeitet: Apr. 7, 2019, 3:45 pm

I haven't been doing very well with reading lately (or reporting on it), but maybe I can manage this quarter to work through a few applicable titles from my filled-to-overflowing TBR shelf, in particular: Dubravka Ugresic, Der goldene Finger and Isabel Allende, Das Geisterhaus, and also an anthology of stories from the Russian Romantic period which likely feature fantastic elements to some degree or another. I also have a couple of older titles from the publisher Heyne's SF series from the 1980s, but I suspect there may be a reason I haven't gotten around to reading them -- SF doesn't always age terribly well!

My own preferences tend towards speculative fiction of a more literary vein and I've found that Suhrkamp's Phantastische Bibliothek is often a good bet. The series does include the usual line-up of titles translated from English, but also features a lot of German/Austrian writers and a fair amount of other European fiction (albeit not much from Africa/Asia/South America).

For getting a taste of new authors, I also recommend the anthologies published by Dedalus Press, which specializes in dark/fantastic/decadent writing; they have a number of anthologies of featuring science fiction and fantasy from specific countries.

Favorites and recommendations, let's see...I suspect I've recommended Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) before, but I really do have a soft spot for his Fantastic Stories.
I'm a fan of Aichinger, too, but the stories in Der Gefesselte (The Bound Man) appealed to me more than Die größere Hoffnung.
Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (The Last World) is an incredible, atmospheric novel that is difficult to categorize. Gorgeous writing.

Dilara, you might find Erckmann-Chatrian interesting -- this nineteenth-century author duo from the Alsace region wrote in French but seem to have modelled their fantasy stories on E.T.A. Hoffmann (in any case, in the collection I read, nearly all the stories are set in Germany...France was felt to be too prosaic, perhaps?).

12BLBera
Bearbeitet: Apr. 7, 2019, 9:13 pm

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist is all the more chilling because the story is so credible. In the world of the Unit, people who have never had children are "dispensable." Dorrit, the narrator, is a writer, and on her fiftieth birthday, she is taken to the Unit -- a place where she'll live in comfort until her organs are required by someone who is indispensable. As one of the directors of the Unit points out about the recipient of a pancreas: "...she will probably have time to fulfill her role as a parent. And that is thanks to the pancreas from a person who had no one to live for."

While, I felt revolted by the idea that one's worth is determined by the number of children one has, this is not an unrealistic portrayal of society. I think of how single friends who have never married are treated in today's world, how invisible they often are, and this story seems very believable.

It's also frightening that so many of the dispensable are artists and writers. As the librarian of the Unit tells Dorrit, "People who read books...tend to be dispensable. Extremely." That seems about right.

13Dilara86
Apr. 12, 2019, 10:42 am

>11 spiphany: Thanks for all the recs, and Erckmann-Chatrian especially. Some of their works are even available in English or in French on Project Gutenberg!

The Unit, Amatka, plus my two recommendations Kallocain and The Forest of Hours... It's all been very Swedish so far!

14Dilara86
Apr. 15, 2019, 11:23 am

L'égout (Šaht – Manhole) by Andrija Matić, translated by Alain Cappon





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Serbian
Original language: Serbian
Translated into: French
Location: Belgrade, Serbia
First published in 2009



The story takes place in a dystopic near future, in 2024. Serbians live under a totalitarian régime that upholds Christian Orthodox and nationalist values, and rejects anything Western. It is a harsh world where people go to public executions of gay men and drug addicts (they spread AIDS, which was scarier when the novel was first published back in 2009 than it is now) for entertainment. The English language has been banned in Serbia because it is the medium of Western propaganda and decadence. Teachers, translators and students of English live on the edge of society, despised by all and unable to find any kind of job. Of course there’s one rule for the people and another for top officials, which is why our main character, a former English teacher called Bojan Radić, is asked by the head of secret service to teach English to his children. Relieved that he is able at last to earn a living, and taken in by crowd-manipulation techniques, he turns into a believer. Obviously, this does not last. He meets a HIV-positive woman and things take a dark turn.
This is a pretty run-of-the-mill dystopia in the style of 1984, but the Serbian angle was interesting. The French translation was overly formal and felt a bit off, but it was perfectly readable. I don’t think that this novel has been translated into English, despite the fact that the author’s website has an English title for it – Manhole. This is slightly surprising, given the themes and the fact that Andrija Matić teaches English literature. It has however been translated into Macedonian…

15alvaret
Apr. 17, 2019, 5:15 am

I have been looking forward to this theme, I used to read a lot of speculative fiction, mostly Fantasy, but not so much recently. This theme sounds like a good opportunity to read some of the things that are new and to explore the speculative fiction from outside the UK and US.

The three-body problem by Cixin Liu was recommended to me a while ago and this theme motivated me to finally read it. It is in many way a rather classical SF novel, although better than most. It is largely set in Chine, in the period from the Cultural Revolution and until today, but I didn't notice anything in the way it is written that is alienating to me who are used to SF from the US. That in itself was a bit weird, usually I feel at least a bit of resistance when I'm reading novels from literary traditions I don't know so well. In the afterword the author mentions reading a lot of American SF and I think that is the reason why it all feels so familiar, it may be set in China but it follows a tradition familiar to western SF readers.

I don't want to say too much about the plot but it was fast-paced and interesting, I read the 400+ pages in two days. It takes its science seriously, which is something I always appreciate, in this case I think some science background makes it the most enjoyable. As it is set in the present and recent past it also gave some interesting glimpses into Chinese recent history.

16Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Apr. 18, 2019, 11:57 am

>15 alvaret: Welcome! Will you be reading the other novels in the trilogy? Personnally, I liked The three-body problem well enough, but I can't quite bring myself to read the others...

-----------

On another note, if after the recent fire, some of you would like to read a book that features Notre Dame and isn't The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard might appeal to you. It's a fantasy novel set in the middle of a devastated Paris (mostly around the Ile de la Cité / Notre Dame) written directly in English by a French author.

----------

I've started Micromégas by Voltaire, an eighteenth-century classic I'd never got round to reading. An English version is actually available on Project Gutenberg.

17alvaret
Apr. 17, 2019, 11:07 am

>16 Dilara86: Thank you! I expect I will read the other two eventually but I quite liked the ending I got in the first one so I'm not in a hurry to do so. Probably save them for a time when I need a long but relatively easy to read novel for a longer journey.

Now for some short stories from Andrzej Sapkowski. I've tried one of his novels before without being convinced but the library had one of them as ebook so I think I'll give him another chance.

18Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Apr. 18, 2019, 11:58 am

Micromégas by Voltaire





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Sirius, Saturn, Earth
First published in 1752
Genre: proto-SF, philosophical tale
English version on Project Gutenberg.


Micromégas is a 120,000-feet-tall space traveller from Sirius. He and his somewhat smaller Saturnian colleague discover the Earth and the strange, tiny creatures that people it. With the help of a giant hearing-trumpet and ad-hoc microscopes made of diamonds, they start to communicate with philosophers on board a ship* sailing on the Baltic. It’s all very Swiftian. Their encounters give rise to various philosophical exchanges. How do we know that a living being is intelligent? What is a soul? There are humorous digs at contemporary society, as well as the scientific or philosophical questions of his time. The take-away being that it is wise to revisit what we think we know, and to look at things from the outside and through a relativist lense. Men are not at the centre of the universe. This is the Enlightenment distilled in twenty pages.

* Probably Maupertuis’s expedition to Lapland.

19Dilara86
Apr. 22, 2019, 4:22 am

Cyberland by Li-Cam





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Cyberland (Cyberspace), mostly
First published in 2017


This novel is pretty hard to summarise. The first three-quarters describe a straightforward YA RPG adventure in a virtual reality universe called Cyberland. The heroes are a diverse (ethnically and skills-wise) bunch of teenagers. There’s Louise, a German “humod”, Saïd a Moroccan maths genius (except he’s not really Moroccan – he’s a stereotypical French banlieusard of North-African origins), Lu-Pan, a Chinese boy/girl who’s good at healing (another stereotype!), iNNoKeNTi, a child cyborg, Alyson the American zealot, and ever present in the background, Ierophan.th, Cyberland’s virtual “puppeteer”. The last quarter is more philosophical (although there is some philosophy in the first part) and takes place “IRL”. It is a different beast altogether. The dialogues were great and true-to-life; the premises were interesting. The writing was natural and flowed seamlessly, with no clunkiness anywhere. I wasn’t taken by the RPG exploration gimmick, and more generally, I thought the whole concept could have been better handled. The novel would have benefitted from an experienced editor helping with its construction and execution. There were a lot of attributed quotes (Deleuze, de Gaulle (!), Mary Shelley…) and spoonfeeding of philosophical concepts. Another novel that I feel should have been marketed to older, brighter teenagers rather than adults. It wasn’t for me, but I can recognise its worth.

20thorold
Apr. 22, 2019, 10:58 am

I haven't got very far with this topic yet - science-fiction is something I've rarely got much out of. I have read quite a bit of other kinds of non-realistic writing, I suppose, although I'm not really used to treating it as a separate category.

I did read one book in Q1 that would fit in here - Alles außer irdisch, which was a Douglas-Adamsish comic science-fiction novel by the Berlin cabaretier Horst Evers. The premise was that it is about as likely that the new Berlin-Brandenburg airport will ever be finished as it is that an alien spaceship would land there on opening day, but that was about as funny as it got.

I am picking up a few ideas from the posts here: Dubravka Ugrešić is someone I need to read more of, so she's on the list for sure. E.T.A. Hoffmann would be fun to go back to - I don't think I ever read anything else of his besides Kater Murr. >11 spiphany: mentions Ilse Aichinger as well - I like her writing very much, it wouldn't hurt me to read some more. And I was reading Ovid last year, so maybe I should give Die letzte Welt a try...

21thorold
Bearbeitet: Apr. 27, 2019, 5:23 am

>20 thorold: On checking the TBR shelf I found a Hoffmann that (more-or-less) fits into this category, since it relies on phantastic plot-elements. I bought it in March 2014, after reading Kater Murr.

Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815; The Devil's elixirs) by E.T.A. Hoffmann (Germany, 1776-1822)

  

Hoffmann is best known nowadays for his fantastic tales, which inspired a string of operas and ballets. He grew up in East Prussia (in what's now the Kaliningrad Oblast), studied law, and had an astonishing number of careers in his short life: composer, music critic, illustrator, theatre director, civil servant in both Berlin and Warsaw, etc. He died in his forties from the consequences of a syphilis infection.

Die Elixiere des Teufels was Hoffmann's first go at writing a novel. He was inspired to write it by a visit to a Capuchin monastery in Bamberg (although it obviously also owes a lot to Matthew Lewis's famous gothic novel The Monk). It has just about everything you would look for in a gothic novel - monks pious, depraved, inspired and just plain mad; beautiful women scheming, virtuous, or vulnerable; more Doppelgänger than a season of Shakespeare comedies; a family curse; incest; murder; dreams and visions; guilt and repentance; several Mysterious Strangers; a comic dwarf; castles, prisons, monasteries, hunting-lodges, forests (complete with ravines and magic bullets). And of course the famous magic potion, said to have been confiscated from the Devil himself by St Anthony.

Hoffmann obviously wrote it in a continuously highly-excited state, which can become a little tiring at times for the reader. There is also that feeling you get in some of Sir Walter Scott's novels, that it was all written far too fast, leading to a lot of tangling-up of the narrators' (because, yes, there have to be multiple nested narratives, don't there?) arms and legs as the plot desperately attempts to brake to a safe speed before crashing through the last page into oblivion. We all think we've got to the end, and then the author suddenly remembers a dangling plot thread from 200 pages back and has to do a handbrake-turn to dash back and pick it up...

The setting is also a little odd: at the start there are clear signs that we are meant to be in a generic, unspoilt and pious pre-reformation Germany of the Narziss und Goldmund type, but then Hoffmann seems to forget himself and bring in all kinds of modern stuff like pianos, post-chaises, confessionals, gothick architecture, and Enlightenment rationalism, so that by the end of the book we're firmly in the late 18th century, and it's all getting a bit closer to Le rouge et le noir.

As a novel I felt it takes its own gothic nonsense a bit too seriously to be really enjoyable for the modern reader - the subversively eccentric Kater Murr is much more fun - but an interesting read anyway.

22Dilara86
Apr. 27, 2019, 9:31 am

>21 thorold: I really enjoyed your review. It made me less inclined to read the book, but it certainly cheered me up!



Une petite vie (A small life) by Khosraw Mani, translated by Khojesta Ebrahimi and Marie Vrinat-Nikolov





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Afghan
Original language: Dari (Afghan Persian)
Translated into: French
Location: Unspecified
First published in 2014 (2018 for the French translation)



Une petite vie is a slim novel originally written in Dari, the version of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, by journalist and writer in exile Khosraw Mani. He is a major name in Afghanistan’s contemporary cultural landscape, and this book is his third novel. His is working on his first English novel, which if it comes to fruition, might improve his notoriety in the Western world.

Une petite vie’s enigmatic, surreal story is slowly given shape, short chapter after short chapter (from 5 lines to a couple of pages long), glimpse after glimpse, tableau after tableau (it is a very visual novel). The first character we meet is called Alef, which is surely a nod to The Aleph, although I read it so long ago I certainly can’t go into specifics. In their very informative postface, the translators tell us that the text is full of references to Persian literature and myths, including the Conference of the Birds. They went over my head, unfortunately. I enjoyed the poetic writing very much, but this is a book that would definitely benefit from a second reading. My plan is to buff up on Persian and Afghan culture - Attar has been on my To-Read list for a long time, and I’d read anything else translated by Khojesta Ebrahimi and Marie Vrinat-Nikolov with pleasure – then read Une petite vie again.

23Dilara86
Apr. 27, 2019, 10:57 am

Des mille et une façons de quitter la Moldavie (The Good Life Elsewhere) by Vladimir Lortchenkov, translated by Raphaëlle Pache





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Moldovan
Original language: Russian
Translated into: French
Location: Moldova
First published in 2008


The Good Life Elsewhere (it is available in English!) is a satirical and slightly surreal look at Moldova, and at the efforts expanded by the inhabitants of one village to get to their new Promised Land: Italy.

24thorold
Apr. 29, 2019, 3:33 pm

So, here I am, trying to be as open-minded about space-fiction as possible, and well-aware that I'm liable to be jumped on by people who have read all the books that this draws on and all the books that draw on it, my thoughts on what seems to be one of the most famous of all non-English science-fiction novels:

Solaris (1961) by Stanisław Lem (Poland, 1921-2006), translated from Polish to German by Irmtraud Zimmermann-Göllheim

  

Stanisław Lem has some claim to be the most internationally-successful Polish author ever: his books have been translated into many languages and frequently made into films. He came from a Jewish background in Lwów (now Lviv, in Ukraine), survived the German occupation by working (with false papers) as a mechanic, and later studied medicine but never went into medical practice. He started writing (mostly) science-fiction novels in the 1950s.

In Solaris, Lem builds a complicated philosophical novel around one of the hoariest chestnuts in science-fiction, the "first contact" between humans and an alien life-form. What happens, Lem asks himself, if the alien life-form is so different from us in every possible way that we find we have nothing meaningful to say to each other, and no way to express it even if we had something to say?

Astrophysicists and planetary scientists have been studying the planet Solaris for decades, having first noticed it because it is in a stable three-body orbit that appears to contravene the laws of physics. It seems that the planet's "ocean" is actively correcting the orbit to optimise conditions for itself, and scientists are eventually forced to the conclusion that the ocean itself is a planet-sized organism. Through a new arrival on the planet, the psychologist Dr Kelvin, Lem takes us through the development of human ideas about Solaris. Which parallel, in curious ways, the history of human ideas about ourselves and our own world...

This wasn't really what I was expecting from a novel about an alien planet: the foreground story about the research station and the strange events that Kelvin encounters there is really only a skeleton, and the bulk of the book turns out to be a sophisticated, ironic meditation on the history of ideas (and the follies of science) that wouldn't have been out of place in Swift. And some unexpectedly poetic language when describing the strange and beautiful world of Solaris and the human attempts to impose meaning on it. Very interesting.

In passing, but of course quite irrelevant, it was fun to find a lot of very 1960s peculiarities in Lem's description of the "future" - the research station's library is full of paper books and microfilms, the electronics they use has to warm up its tubes before it does anything, they record electronic signals on photographic film, and the researchers obtain privacy by hanging a cloth in front of the screens of their video-phones...

(I read this in German because that was what happened to come to hand first; after reading it, I found out that there is an ongoing controversy about the 1970 English translation, which was based on a French version and is said to be of inferior quality.)

25spiphany
Apr. 30, 2019, 11:20 am

>20 thorold: Ursula Le Guin is American, so not really "global", but she wrote a couple of wonderful essays in defense of fantastic literature which might be useful if you're looking for insight into why writers choose non-realistic modes and what possibilities are opened up by it. (I imagine there are some European writers -- possibly Calvino or Eco -- who have also written about this, but nothing specific springs to mind at the moment.)

In any case, I think it's also fine to simply conclude that certain types of writing aren't to one's taste. My own position is that I read speculative fiction for much the same reason I enjoy historical fiction, or fiction set in foreign-to-me countries: because it is a door into a world where different rules apply than in mundane everyday life. Even so, a lot that is written in the genre doesn't appeal to me at all (I'm not especially a fan of most space opera, or of most sword-and-sorcery).

Where speculative fiction speaks to me is when it uses the non-realistic mode to explore questions of human experience and existence in ways that aren't possible if we stick to the known world and its rules. There should be a level in which it invites reflection on the problems and challenges we face today -- much the way good historical fiction tells us something about the present as well as about the past.

I tend to see surrealism as somewhat different than other forms of speculative fiction, although I must also confess that surreal writing is something I find difficult in the first place, so I may be biased and completely misunderstanding the intents of those who write this way. In any case, whereas I feel like science fiction and fantasy follow the principle of "basically our world, but with different rules", surrealism seems to be pursuing a different goal, perhaps one more akin to poetry or experimental forms of writing, i.e., it challenges the nature of perception/experience and how this can be expressed in verbal form.

Re: stories with an Ovid connection and since you read German, there's a lovely little volume by Katharina Hacker called Morpheus oder der Schnabelschuh that is based on Ovidian themes. I hadn't mentioned it because it hasn't been translated and I doubt it is likely to be anytime soon (I mean, I would happily attempt a translation, but it's not the sort of thing that publishers are likely to see much of a market for). Yoko Tawada's Opium für Ovid (available in French translation, but not English) is also very loosely inspired by Ovid. (It was rather too odd for me, but note my disclaimer above about being something of a formalist and having trouble with fiction that imitates dream states.)

26thorold
Bearbeitet: Apr. 30, 2019, 3:20 pm

>25 spiphany: why writers choose non-realistic modes and what possibilities are opened up by it - Yes, I understand all that, and I don't have a problem with it. And I do read quite a lot of books written in non-realistic ways. Some work for me, some don't. If I have a niggle, it's with what happens when things move from experimentation with the boundaries of reality to following the rules of a genre. Which I think is the same thing you're saying about space opera and sword-and-sorcery.

Doris Lessing (can we count her as African?) is another writer who has written extensively in defence of science-fiction.

Thanks for the Ovid tips! I read Yoko Tawada's polar bear book, I'd certainly be open to trying some more of her stuff.

27alvaret
Apr. 30, 2019, 4:17 pm

>26 thorold: That's my greatest complaint too. While I do enjoy relaxing with a good space opera or sword-and-sorcry novel (especially if they are written by Elizabeth Moon) it is a pity that two genres that ought to have every opportunity to experiment is so often rather conservative and that not more authors do like Le Guin in The left hand of darkness and really use the freedom offered in these genres.

28Dilara86
Mai 1, 2019, 3:47 am

>25 spiphany: I've added Opium für Ovid (or rather, the French version - Opium pour Ovide) to my wishlist and should be able to read it soon: my library has it. Does it reference one of Ovid's works in particular? Metamorphoses? Heroides? I'd really like to read The Emissary by the same author, but it'll have to wait until I can get my hands on it.

29thorold
Mai 1, 2019, 4:13 am

>28 Dilara86: It seems to be Metamorphoses, transposed to modern Germany and set up as a Japanese pillow-book, whatever that means in practice - see here for reviews (in German): https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/yoko-tawada/opium-fuer-ovid.html

30spiphany
Mai 1, 2019, 4:49 am

>28 Dilara86: Yes, the inspiration is Metamorphoses, but the connection is often very minimal; the guiding principle is more the general idea of transformation (identity, shifts in emotional states/experiences, etc.). It's been several years, but from what I recall the book is structured as a series of dreamlike, sensual portraits or scenes featuring various modern women with Ovidian names, and sometimes also accompanied by imagery from the specific myths (feathers and swans in connection with Leda, for example).

31Dilara86
Mai 1, 2019, 3:56 pm

>29 thorold: >30 spiphany: Thanks! It sounds really interesting...

Hayy bin Yaqzân (Philosophus Autodidactus – The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn YokdhanIbn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale: there are so many alternate titles!) by Ibn Tufayl, translated by Léon Gauthier





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Al-Andalus, 12th century
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: an equatorial island off the Indian coast
Written in the 12th century.


I was reading La bibliothèque enchantée (The enchanted library) by Mohammad Rabie last Saturday. Hayy bin Yaqzân is mentioned and seems to have a central symbolic place in this novel. It became obvious that to get more than a surface understanding of the text, I would have to read Hayy bin Yaqzân. Fortunately, my local library has it! I walked over, found it without too much difficulty (It wasn’t in the Fiction section or on the Arabic shelf, but on the General Philosophy shelf. Third time lucky!), and started reading. I’m glad that I did.

It is the first philosophical novel in Arabic (or first ever in all languages according to some sources, but I’ve seen so many different contenders for the first novel accolade I tend to take them with a pinch of salt). In any case, it was first translated into Latin and English in the early 18th century and inspired Daniel Defoe and Voltaire, among others. After the rather dry and formal introduction, the story proper starts with two parallel first chapters. The first possible start to the story is that as a newborn, the main protagonist, called Hayy bin Yaqzân, was placed in a box that was left to drift on the sea until it came ashore a desert island. Or alternately, he is the result of spontaneous generation on the very same island, through the action of heat and gases on clay. The reader is free to go for the origin story that suits them. This postmodern “choose your own adventure” start made me extraordinarily happy.
The first part of the book describes Hayy bin Yaqzân’s intellectual growth and his efforts at making sense of the world around him all by himself, after the gazelle who raises him dies (he then dissects her, of course!) Think Greek/medieval science mini-treatises about the physical world (the human body, plants, animals, the sky, etc.), culminating with his discovery of the Divine. The second part focuses on how to be a good person and how to feel close to the Divine. Towards the end, another person, would-be mystic and hermit Açal, arrives on the island. Their interractions and their attempts at guiding others onto the right path are described. The mystical side of the book is similar to other mystical works. It’s not a million miles from Saint Theresa’s The Interior Castle, for example.
I thought the novel had a lot in common with Enlightenment era works, especially Voltaires’s tales and Rousseau’s natural religion concept. Academics have also pointed out platonic and aristotelian themes. These went over my head because I have next to no classical culture, but of course Ibn Tufayl, as a medieval man of science living in Al-Andalus, would have been familiar with both Plato and Aristotle.

This is one of those books that I should have known about because it’s a classic, but somehow didn’t. The 19th century French translation was very readable – simple, straightforward and not too dated. I feel lucky that I found out about it and that I was able to borrow it from my small, local library.

32thorold
Mai 1, 2019, 4:45 pm

>31 Dilara86: Hmmm. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan gets a couple of paragraphs in Albert Hourani, and I remember vaguely thinking when I read that (about 20 years ago) that I ought to follow it up, but never did... The thing about it Hourani finds interesting is the idea that some people can get to enlightenment through pure reason, as Hayy does, but most others can’t, and are better off simply following the law.

33Dilara86
Mai 2, 2019, 3:35 am

>32 thorold: He certainly says that, but I think it sits oddly with all of his previous arguments: natural religion and morality as internally motivated and extrapolated or revealed from within oneself, the pointlessness of laws imposed from the top... I feel he probably had to add a disclaimer about following the law to get the thought police off his back. That and the fact that he knew that you can't get everyone to meditate in a cave for years to get at the Truth. But yes, this part did feel like a disclaimer rather than the culmination of his thesis.

34Dilara86
Mai 3, 2019, 5:44 am

La bibliothèque enchantée (Kawkab ‘Anbar – The enchanted library) by Mohammad Rabie, translated by Stéphanie Dujols





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Egyptian
Original language: Arabic
Translated into: French
Location: Cairo (Egypt)
First published in 2010 (French translation: 2019)


Chaher is a passionate reader who works as a pen-pusher for the Egyptian civil service. He is sent to assess the Kawkab Ambar library and write a report whose conclusion is foregone: it has to go to make place for the metro. Sayyid is an academic and man of leisure who spends all his time in the library and acts as its self-appointed guardian. The novel alternates between their two points of view, as Sayyid takes Chaher under his wing and fancies himself the Hayy ibn Yaqzan to Chaher’s Açar.
The library was built by a rich Cairene for his wife, former corn hawker Kawkab Ambar, who did not care for money, fashion or other earthly interests, but loved books, poetry and the pursuit of knowledge (a woman after my own heart!) It is out of the beaten path and visited by a small group of middle-aged or elderly regulars. The old-fashioned building is a labyrinth, with several four-appartment floors filled with shelves crammed with books. They are not catalogued and cannot be borrowed: they have to be read on-site. The reader is trusted to put the book back where they (or he – no female patrons are mentioned) found it: the titles of the books placed before and after it on the shelf are written on its inner covers, which is far from foolproof (or thiefproof!), but there you are... Oh, and authors used to bring their new books to the library and place it on a shelf themselves, as it was rumoured to bring it “baraka” (good luck in Arabic – the word is used informally in French and was kept in the French translation, which makes me happy). Book translations for every language – known and unknown - seem to appear magically, and they are always perfect. Surely, such a place cannot be razed to the ground?
I loved this novel. I found it playful, erudite and moving. The translation flowed perfectly. And it prompted me to read Hayy ibn Yaqzan, for which I’m grateful.

35streamsong
Bearbeitet: Mai 3, 2019, 12:59 pm

I also read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris - my summary is below. I haven't read a lot of SF, but it is interesting to read SF from 60 years ago and to see how the genre has changed.

This is a science fiction classic written in 1962.

Solaris is a small planet orbiting a double star system. Physics predict that its orbit should be unstable, but it’s not. Something prevents it from plunging into one star or the other. The only thing to be observed on the planet, however, is an ocean with highly unusual properties. Despite decades of research comprising thousands of volumes, it still begs the question of sentience.

Until an ethically questionable experiment using high powered x-ray begins to change events. The astronauts inhabiting a small space station above Solaris, start seeing humanoid figures from the deepest part of their subconscious.

What happens when humans encounter a life form so different that there is no way to communicate, even with mathematical equations or energy beams? And how would such an entity feel about the presence of humans?

36Dilara86
Mai 4, 2019, 2:53 pm

This might not be for everyone, as this is on French radio, but tonight is the "Nuit du merveilleux scientifique" over at France Culture. You can access a dozen new and old programmes of varying lengths from the page I've linked to: Quand Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac décidait de construire une machine pour se rendre sur le soleil...; D'où venons-nous ? Qui sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ? - Une fiction scientifique sur l'astronomie; Les voyages imaginaires de Gustave Le Rouge; Le savant fou, archétype de la littérature populaire; De la Terre à la Lune - adaptation radiophonique du roman de Jules Verne... For all intents and purposes, "merveilleux scientifique" means proto-science-fiction.

37thorold
Mai 12, 2019, 4:53 am

This one was suggested in >11 spiphany: - thanks!

I've been reading it on and off over the last week or so, but various other books overtook it, mostly because the format in which it happened to be available was a nice hardback that I didn't really want to maul in my backpack...

Die ‰letzte Welt: Roman: mit einem Ovidischen Repertoire (1988; The last world) by Christoph Ransmayr (Austria, 1954- )

  

A traveller from Rome arrives in a small port on the Black Sea coast, in search of the great poet Naso, who has been exiled there by the Emperor, and is now rumoured to have died. But this isn't Augustan Rome as we know it - or at least not unless Roman historians were keeping very quiet about things like bus stops, P.A. systems and cinema projectors. And there seems to be something oddly familiar about the names and stories of the butcher Tereus and his wife Procne, the carpet-weaver Arachne, the shopkeeper Fama, the ropemaker Lycaon, and the rest of the local inhabitants. Could it be that Naso's great lost book has embedded itself into the structure of the world itself?

A clever, interesting, and rather strange book, but a satisfying and thought-provoking (even prescient) one as well. Lots to reflect on about the power of great narrative and the problems of climate-change, populism, authoritarian government, anarchy, refugees, etc. And a very useful reference section at the back for those who can't keep track of every single character in Ovid and what happened to them.

38spiphany
Mai 13, 2019, 3:39 pm

I've finished Ahasver by Stefan Heym. The novel is a rather surprising treatment of the legend of the Wandering Jew, a man cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming because he had pushed away Christ seeking to rest on his way to Crucifixion. I say "surprising" because Heym is not particularly interested in what would seem to be the obvious themes of what it means not to be able to die, or the weight of past wrongdoing that cannot be atoned.

There's also very little of the supernatural in the book; apart from a few mentions of magical happenings -- most of which could easily be dismissed as slight-of-hand -- Heym doesn't pursue the "what if" questions and the basic premise of "reality but with slightly different rules" that is a key part of most speculative fiction. Heym is more interested in Ahasver as a symbol of something that is not limited to time or place, a destabilizing figure who challenges the might of would-be authoritarians. Before his Ahasver encountered Christ, he was an angel thrown from Heaven alongside Lucifer, not due to any desire to stir up trouble, but because he questioned the perfection of God's creation.

Heym is always a political writer, and this novel is no exception. He was both a committed supporter of communism and a critic of its real-life manifestation, a trait which put him at odds with several governments (Nazi Germany; the US, where he served as a soldier and later became a citizen, before attracting suspicion during the McCarthy era; East Germany, where he had an uneasy relationship with the authories). And this tension that characterized his life also imbues the novel: the intense idealism, but also the pain and frustration of seeing that utopian moment be destroyed by zealotry and blind adherence to authority.

The novel consists of three intertwined narratives: the mythological story of the fallen angel and his encounters with God and with Christ, from creation through the Apocalypse; a historical narrative about a student of Luther, Paul von Eitzen, who, with a certain Herr Leuchtentrager ("Lightbearer") at his side, preaches hatred of the Jews and encourages the priests under his supervision to swear loyalty to Lutheranism and inform on anyone suspected of deviant beliefs, all the while being thwarted in his efforts by the recurring appearance of Ahasver in various guises; a present-day (1981) correspondence between a scholar at the East German "Institute for Scientific Atheism" and an Israeli Professor Leuchtentrager on the existence or non-existence of Ahasver. The writing is stylistically rich -- Heym imitates, sometimes parodically, the language of religious chronicles, as well as the propaganda-tinged phrases of the East German bureaucrats. There are a few bits that feel somewhat dated (the vision of the Apocalypse is connected with the Cold War arms race and mutually assured destruction) and a few places where the message feels a bit heavy-handed, but overall it offers a lot to reflect upon, both theologically and politically, and it avoids, I think, sacrificing nuance for the sake of clear and simple answers.

39Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Mai 29, 2019, 2:06 pm

Just a quick update...

I haven't had a lot of free time lately. I did manage to read selected tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. I enjoyed the language - there's something to latin translations, with their unique tone and idiosyncratic mixing of past and present tenses, that works almost like a Pavlovian cue, transporting me to some kind of "mythological land". I feel slightly ashamed that I didn't read the complete tales, not least because none of the stories in the selection were new to me, but I couldn't face a doorstop at the time. I just wanted a bit of background before reading Yōko Tawada's Opium pour Ovide (Opium für Ovid - Opium for Ovid), which was slightly surreal and lovely.

Next was Ces femmes-là (Those women) by Gérard Mordillat: not terrible but not a keeper. I might elaborate later when I have more time.

Au-delà des frontières (Beyond borders) by Andreï Makine was a confused dystopic, near-future novel centered around an incel-type, far-right young writer who commits suicide.

Le cinquième principe (Il quinto principio - The 5th law - of thermodynamics, of all things!) by Vittorio Catani is good old-fashioned SF of the kind I hate. For a novel first published in 2009, its sexual politics are awful. This is what reading Heinlein must feel like. I gave up on page 100.

I'm now starting Les jardins statuaires (Statue Gardens) by Jacques Abeille. I'm hopeful.

What about you all?

40Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Mai 30, 2019, 11:10 am

When researching Vittorio Catani*, I found an article about "fantafascismo" (ie, Italian facist/far-right fantasy/SF) that might be of interest to some of you: in French and in the original Italian

* Who is not fascist - he just happens to be quoted in the article.

41thorold
Bearbeitet: Jun. 5, 2019, 11:28 am

Das Erlkönig-Manöver (2007) by Robert Löhr (Germany, 1973- )

  

Robert Löhr is a Berlin-based journalist, dramatist, puppeteer and TV scriptwriter, who seems to specialise in making fun of the idols of German cultural history. I've previously read his 2012 novel Krieg der Sänger, which re-imagines the singing competition at the Wartburg (cf. Tannhäuser) as a murder-mystery weekend.

It's 1805, and Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach commissions his privy councillor and theatre director, Goethe, to go on a secret mission into French-held territory for him. Goethe recruits Schiller, Alexander von Humboldt and Bettina Brentano to assist him, and they are also joined by Bettina's fiancé Achim von Arnim and the young Kleist, in what soon turns out to be an epic and very funny adventure.

I wasn't really thinking about this theme when I read this book, but on reflection it probably does count as non-realistic fiction, even though it's presented as though it were a "straight" historical novel. The idea is to put a group of very well-known real intellectuals into the totally incongruous situation of a costume-drama thriller plot, something that not only creates great opportunities for comedy in itself but also allows the author to put them into situations that challenge the weaknesses in the social, political and aesthetic opinions they normally only have to argue in the safe, controlled surroundings of their own writings. A bit like what Laurent Binet did to French intellectuals of the 1980s in La septième fonction du langage.

42Dilara86
Jun. 10, 2019, 10:32 am

>41 thorold: This sounds fun! Hoping for a French or English translation soon... So far only The Chess Machine has been translated into a language I can read.

43streamsong
Jun. 10, 2019, 11:35 am

When this challenge started, I decided to read three classics from varied genres and countries.

The first was Solaris which I commented on above - (also watched the 1970's made in Russia movie).

I've started the second on audio, Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

The third will be Jorge Louis Borges's Labyrinths. I probably won't get to this one before next month due to the extreme number of library books sitting on the table before me.

44jnwelch
Jun. 10, 2019, 1:14 pm

^Great picks, Janet. I enjoyed all three, the last two more than Solaris.

45Dilara86
Jun. 11, 2019, 12:20 pm

Le mangeur de livres (The book-eater) by Stéphane Malandrin





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Lisbon (Portugal)
First published in 2019


Adar and Faustino are two street urchins living in fifteenth-century Lisbon. Mad with hunger, Adar eats the pages of a very old and very cursed codex. From that point on, he becomes obsessed with finding and eating every book he can find, and starts to turn into a bovine monster. There are more than a few nods to Rabelais in this novel, and the language is accordingly rich and pungent. Ultimately, the story left me cold – it was too flamboyant for my taste - but someone else would no doubt find it a lot of fun.

46spiphany
Bearbeitet: Jun. 18, 2019, 3:54 pm

>41 thorold: I loved Das Erlkönig-Manöver; it is basically fan fiction for German literature nerds and a lot of fun! You can also play "spot the quotation", as Löhr manages to work in a fair number of famous lines from Goethe, Schiller et al. There's also a sequel of sorts -- Das Hamlet-Komplott -- based on the same premise but featuring a slightly different cast of characters. I didn't find it quite as entertaining as the original, the usual problem, I guess, when an author attempts to repeat a success: it usually isn't quite as fresh the second time around. I think I also missed the fiery Kleist and Humboldt; instead he has some of the early romantics, who at times came across as rather petulant.

I'm not sure it would occur to me to consider the novel to be speculative/non-realistic fiction, in spite of the clear impossibility of the conceit of the novel (obviously the main characters could never actually have embarked on such an adventure...). It still assumes that the rules of the fictional world are basically our own and proposes at most an alternative version of the actions of real historical characters, which do not, however, have far-reaching consequences for the world-building. My issue is that, if this makes it speculative fiction, then just about any fiction set in a place that doesn't exist (Faulkner's stories of Yoknapatawpha County, Mann's Royal Highness) or involving verifiably implausible or impossible events would also count as "speculative fiction" -- and that could include just about everything written! Even the most plausible "realistic" fiction always involves certain conventions that don't actually correspond to how reality actually works, we're just willing to overlook them. That said, there isn't necessarily a clear line between "realistic" and "non-realistic"; sometimes it ultimately comes down to genre expectations and marketing (i.e., how readers choose to read the story).

---

I've been struggling through The Gaze by Elif Shafak, a Turkish writer who has settled in the UK and now writes in English. The Gaze was written in Turkish. It's a magical-realist novel with several interwoven storylines, all based around the idea of seeing and being seen, particularly if one does not fit expectations of "normal" bodies. Unfortunately, although the premise of the novel is something I normally would love, the book simply never quite "clicked" for me and I've decided to move on. I'm not quite sure why it isn't working for me; I think part of it is that the various images and details feel superficial -- flourishes that create a dazzling visual display but don't really serve any function.

---

At present I'm working on Flammenwüste ("Desert of Flame") by Akram El-Bahay, a German author with Egyptian roots. My expectations were low going into it: I've found very little non-literary German-language fantasy that actually appeals to me, and the clearly Arabian-inspired setting of the fantasy world has potential to go very very wrong and turn into stereotyped exoticism. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised: it is pure escapist secondary-world fantasy, but of exactly the type I enjoy. There are whispers that legendary dragons have reappeared in the desert kingdom of Nabija, and a young story teller almost by accident finds himself involved in events far greater than he imagined. I suspect an influence of The Hobbit here, and there are a lot of the standard tropes of quest fantasy (prophecies, mysterious helpers, magical objects gifted to the adventurer and his companions, discovery of hidden powers, etc.), but they come together naturally and don't feel slavishly derivative.

47Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Jun. 22, 2019, 5:46 am

Les jardins statuaires by Jacques Abeille





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: An unnamed fantasy country
First published in: This one is tricky. It was written in the seventies. The initial publisher folded before publication. Then, Julien Gracq (Abeille’s mentor) was going to submit the manuscript to famous publisher to the surrealists José Corti – or maybe he did submit it – but it got lost and Corti claims they never had it. It was eventually published in 1982, but with a series of snafus, the worst of which being the disappearance of the whole stock in a fire. All of this meant the novel flew under the radar for about twenty years. There were a number of reissues in the 2000s. It at last gained some recognition and a readership, culminating in its publication in Folio SF, a mass-paperback collection of standard SF/fantasy that skews towards big names. Its inclusion in Folio SF is slightly surprising: it is very much written outside of the fantasy genre, and more closely related to surrealism and magical realism literary fiction.


An unnamed, undescribed traveller explores a strange, dream-like country where people live in walled properties that look very much like Roman villas. Men cultivate statues in special gardens. They grow them from seed, and nurture them until they’re ripe and can be finished and sold. Women work in vegetable gardens, hidden behind mazes from the men working in the statue gardens. Adult males and females live segregated lives, and only see their closest relatives of the opposite sex in the evenings. At first, our traveller is charmed by the gardeners’ purposeful and peaceful life, but soon realises that things are not as idyllic as they first seemed. The lot of women and non-gardening men is rather cruel and unfair, for a start. And there is a mysterious and ominous threat coming from the steppes in the North. Think Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe mixed with A Stranger in Olondria.

This novel is written in seamless literary, almost classical, French, with old-fashioned turns of phrase and imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive clauses (imparfait and plus que parfait du subjonctif). The tone is poetic; the writing is reflective and slow-paced. If it was a song, it would be from Gérard Manset. In fact, I think it would be Filles des jardins.
There were so many occasions where a lesser writer could have handled the material insensitively. I admit my heart sank a number of times, as I feared the story might be going in an unpleasant direction. Obviously, different readers have different thresholds, but I think Abeille stayed on the right side, for me. It would have been a terrible novel in the hands of a less reflective and less literary novelist. It could have been a seventies pulp full of reactionary yellow peril, white male leaders, half-naked women as sex objects and men doing the important, creative work. His novel is the exact opposite of this. For example, we’re well into the second half of the book before we get any kind of physical description, and then it becomes clear that the country is home to all kinds of skin colours and hair types. He was also able to write sex scenes sensitively and describe naked women in a way that feels non-voyeuristic. In a lot of ways, he did what modern, progressive SFF writers strive to do. There is something else that struck me and that I enjoyed in this book, and that is the way the narrator describes his inner thoughts and doubts as he is trying to communicate with others. Our minds seem to work in similar ways, and I felt a kind of kinship with him. I also realised as I was reading that I seldom see the way I and others around me interact with each other (manners, what’s said and unsaid, how we interpret the unsaid, how we express our discomfort and sense it in others…) described in fiction, and especially SFF. The sense of familiarity was refreshing and comforting. It might feel quite foreign to someone else, but that would also be a very good reason for reading this novel (not that this need explaining to Reading Globally members).

48thorold
Jun. 22, 2019, 5:18 pm

>46 spiphany: Yes, it was probably stretching the "speculative" idea a bit too far to include Das Erlkönig-Manöver here. And I did play "spot the quotation" and didn't get anything like as many points as I should have. But I have been reading Bettina von Arnim since then and enjoyed seeing how often she quotes Löhr :-)

I had trouble with The Gaze as well, I think I only really started to enjoy it a week or two after I finished it, when we talked it through in the book-club.

I'm now experimenting with a bit of DDR-Science-fiction, Unheimliche Erscheinungsformen auf Omega XI, which looks fun so far.

49thorold
Jun. 24, 2019, 5:09 am

One of the claims that's often made for speculative fiction is that it allows writers living in repressive societies covertly to explore topics that they otherwise wouldn't be able to touch on - I've always wondered how true that really is, given that it relies on the assumption that the average reader is more perceptive than the censor. But anyway, this might be an example:

Unheimliche Erscheinungsformen auf Omega XI (1974) by Johanna Braun (Germany, DDR, 1929-2008) and Günter Braun (Germany, DDR, 1928-2008)

   

(Latest entry for the "Horrifying author photos" competition - if these links are broken, be grateful...)

Johanna and Günter Braun were a husband-and-wife writing team, originally from Magdeburg, later Schwerin. Their first collaborations were on children's books, and they later shifted to science fiction for adults; the quietly subversive, anti-establishment tone of their books and their willingness to challenge received ideas on issues like gender and sexuality made them a minor cult success with young people in both East and West Germany in the 70s, and eventually led to them being unable to go on publishing their work in the DDR. (It doesn't look as though any of their books have been translated into English)

This was the Brauns' second science-fiction novel, an ironic space-travel epic that reminds us that there's nothing very new about climate emergencies, pollution, and genetic manipulation - some of us were already panicking about such things fifty years ago...

Some centuries ago, a dissident group calling themselves the Lumens left the Earth to carry on with their banned experiments into modifying the human genome on the world Omega XI. There has been no contact with them in the meantime, but recently Earth has received messages from Omega XI in which the Lumens report that their continued existence is threatened by "sinister manifestations" and ask for help. The authorities on Earth are worried enough to send a fact-finding mission to Omega XI: aboard the capsule for its journey of several years are our narrator, Merkur Erdenson, a young cosmonaut famous for his improvisational problem-solving skills, and his commander, Elektra, a woman who is notorious for doing everything by the book (the Brauns obviously had a passion for classical character names). Naturally, they start bickering the moment they meet, and of course we all know what has got to happen in any comedy when a man and a woman who dislike each other are forced to co-exist in close proximity...

On the face of it, the situation they find on Omega XI when they eventually get there is a textbook Marxist parable: the small Lumen community of dominant, unproductive consumers is supported by a large subject class of productive slave-workers, and the problem that is threatening the Lumens' existence is a climate catastrophe brought on by a ludicrous overproduction of consumer goods. Everything, down to items like furniture and bathroom fittings, is treated as disposable and replaced daily for reasons of "hygiene". But there's more to it than that - what the Brauns really want to explore is the way rigid, authoritarian and humourless patterns of thinking allow problems like this to multiply and inhibit our ability to solve them. It wouldn't have taken a huge stretch of the imagination for their readers to compare Omega XI with a planned economy where rigid norms lead to pointless waste and a ludicrous underproduction of consumer goods...

The authors' background in writing for children has given them a deceptively simple, very clear style, where they like to say exactly what they mean at exactly the moment when you're not expecting them to (the same trick that makes Roald Dahl and Erich Kästner, for instance, so much fun to read). The action passages sometimes come over as slightly-too-crude slapstick, but the more analytical parts of the book, where Merkur is reflecting on his experiences, work very well.

The handling of gender in the book is a bit mixed - on the plus side, Merkur never shows any sign of having a problem with working for a female boss - not at all a foregone conclusion in 1974, even in the DDR - and her role as commander is always carefully separated from her gender-identity in the narrative. But on the minus side, the part of the plot where Elektra's systematic analytical skills come into play is less convincing than the parts where Merkur playfully comes up with the unexpected solution. And he's the one who gets to tumble into bed with several different women, whilst she (as far as Merkur knows, anyway) has a rather less exciting time sexually.

Fun, and a lot less dated than I was expecting.

50thorold
Jun. 24, 2019, 7:52 am

>50 thorold: PS - on the subject of non-realistic fiction from East Germany, one I enjoyed very much a few years ago was Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura by Irmtraud Morgner. A glorious feminist fantasy in which an unruly medieval poet from Provence, disappointed with the macho culture of the soixante-huitards, moves to East Berlin where she’s heard that women really have equal rights with men...

51thorold
Jun. 26, 2019, 5:17 am

And the Godfather of non-realistic writing himself:

El Aleph (1949, 1952) by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986)

  

This was Borges's third major collection of short stories, and like all the others has appeared in several different versions with different contents - the one I read was based on the 1952 edition, containing seventeen stories and a short Epilogue.

The stories pick up a good range of the famous Borges themes: there are three labyrinth-stories (one Cretan, one Arab/Persian, one a Conan Doyle parody), a couple of gaucho stories riffing off the Argentinian epic Martín Fierro, several paradoxes in which death doesn't work the way we expect it to, a couple of stories about medieval thinkers (Islamic in one case, Christian in the other), a couple of Buenos Aires crime stories with odd twists, and a monologue by a condemned Nazi war criminal that forces us to look again at any comfortable assumption that we can cut 1933-1945 out of our picture of German culture and carry on with the rest. And of course there is the eponymous Aleph - a point in which we can see all the points in the universe from all directions - and its counterpart, the Zahir - a trivial thing that we can't stop thinking about. Just about all the stories address the limitations of the narrator's - and even more the reader's - knowledge of events. Frequently, the narrator tells us that the text is incomplete and must be revised, or adds material that has come to light subsequently.

Women, as usual in Borges, are mostly absent or in the background. Only the story "Emma Zunz" has a female protagonist. Borges makes a point of telling us that its plot was suggested to him by his friend, the dancer Cecilia Ingenieros, but once he's taken the step of letting a woman into one of his stories he seems to be quite happy to let her act with the same kind of limitations and autonomy he gives to his male characters. "El Aleph" and "El Zahir" both have dead, offstage women who act only as romantic love-interest for the narrator; a couple of women sneak into the end of "Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva" but we only get to see them at second-hand. Other than that, it might as well be "Billy Budd"...

Coming back to these stories after many years, I was impressed again by the clarity and conciseness of Borges's writing. However complicated the mathematical, historical, philosophical or theological issues he's dealing with, his sentences never get tangled up in them - on the face of it, everything looks clear, bright and logical. It's only when we step back for a moment that we realise what an astonishing paradox we've just been tricked into accepting.

Overrated or not, Borges is simply someone you have to re-read from time to time: there's no way around it!

52spiphany
Jun. 26, 2019, 11:53 am

>48 thorold: What didn't you like about The Gaze and what changed your mind during the book group discussion? I find it very hard to pinpoint what bothers me about it, but somehow it simply never gelled for me.

---
After finishing Flammenwüste, I moved on from the desert to far less dusty climes in the water-filled world of The City of Woven Streets by Emmi Itäranta (Finland/UK; the novel was apparently written in both Finnish and English, or written in Finnish and self-translated)

This is a beautifully atmospheric novel (I would classify it as "dystopian fantasy") set in an island city with a guild-like system run by a poweful council, where dreaming is forbidden and those who experience night-maeres are considered "tainted" and said to transmit the dream plague. The story is narrated by a weaver -- much of the city seems to be constructed of woven pathways and walls -- who struggles to conceal her dreaming ability. When a girl badly injured by a vicious attack finds her way into the House of Weaving, the narrator finds herself involved in events she doesn't fully understand, for the mysterious girl has the narrator's name tattooed in invisible ink on her hand.

This novel is all about the world-building. The entire society is built around a handful of products from the sea -- sea silk, coral, healing medusas, light-bearing algae -- and everyday life is strictly regulated by rituals that are overseen by the council. Some of the reviewers on LT have criticized the plotting of the novel, and the end does feel a bit rushed and somewhat inorganic, but for me the pleasure of the novel is in gradually discovering how this world works, for not all is as it seems on the surface. It is also a moving meditation on life in a system dominated by propaganda where those in charge are determined to control and suppress even our sleeping minds. And it also effectively portrays how a quiet, non-violent resistance movement can emerge even in such a society. Although the novel's strength is the world-building, I initially struggled a bit with the descriptions -- it felt just a little like the author was trying too hard to create atmosphere. I think this was partly to do with the first-person present tense narration, which is hard to make work without it sounding artificial. However, by the end of the novel, the choice made more sense, as a form that recalls the timelessness of the dream state.

---
I am currently working on The Slynx (original Russian title: Kys) by Tatyana Tolstaya, which I am enjoying, but glad I didn't try to read in Russian! One thing that jumped out at me almost immediately is that Tolstaya is using a technique known as skaz. The word comes from the verb skazat' ("to tell"; fairy tales, for example, are skazki) and it refers to the adoption of a distinctive, stylized narrative persona, as though the story were being told aloud by a slightly eccentric and/or uneducated relative or neighbor. It's not simply use of dialect; the closest example I can think of in English-language literature would be something like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. In Russian literature, the technique is associated with authors like Nikolai Gogol or Nikolai Leskov (both of whom draw on the world of folklore and legend in their writing and would fit well with this quarter's theme: Gogol's Overcoat is classic, and Leskov's Steel Flea is a delightful yarn which I recommend to anyone not already familiar with it).

Anyway, I mention the use of skaz because suspect it might contribute to the feeling mentioned in >7 Dilara86: about the story coming across as rather smug. Skaz often has a parodic effect because the author isn't speaking in their own voice, and it isn't always easy to draw the line where this turns into mockery of whatever is being imitated.

So far The Slynx strongly reminds me of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, another story set in a post-apocalyptic society that draws on oral narratives (and "distorted" language to reflect the strangeness of this future society) and on figures and images from local folklore and folk culture. (The German translation I am reading keeps the Russian words for a number of distinctive everyday objects -- i.e., "isba" instead of "hut", "valenki" instead of "felt boots" -- which emphasizes the connections to traditional folk culture.)

53thorold
Jun. 26, 2019, 3:42 pm

>52 spiphany: Interesting about skaz - I didn’t know that was so important in Russian lit. I suppose that’s why Burgess used so many Russian elements in the language of A clockwork orange.

Not sure precisely what it was about The gaze any more, but I think the problem I had with it when I was reading it at first was that it felt like all style but no real anger (much like your reaction) but then when we were all sitting around talking about the book we kept finding more and more depth to it as people came up with bits they remembered and we saw how they fitted with other parts. So perhaps it is just a bit too subtle, at least in English, one of those books you have to read twice to see all the links.

Our Turkish member was quite persuasive in support of it as well, which may have influenced us just a bit... :-)

(BTW: there was something in the papers a week or two ago about Şafak being in trouble with the Turkish government again - I don’t know whether that’s still going on. Even if the anger’s hard to spot on the page, it’s obviously there in real life.)

54Petroglyph
Bearbeitet: Jun. 27, 2019, 1:38 pm

On a red station, drifting by Aliette de Bodard



Why did I choose to read this?
I’ve read and enjoyed several of de Bodard’s shorter work, and this novella was nominated for a Hugo. She is French-Vietnamese and grew up in the US.

Review (Also posted here.)
This was entertaining: a power struggle in a Chinese/Vietnamese-style clan, but set on a creaking space station. Lady Linh, former High Magistrate now reduced to the status of penniless war refugee, seeks sanctuary with distant relatives on Prosper Station. Said relatives are in charge of running the station under leadership of lady Quyen, who is capable but has never had the chance to realise her extra-familial potential. Linh and Quyen have, of course, very different ideas of how to run things.

Simple, but ably written. Neat!

55Petroglyph
Bearbeitet: Jun. 27, 2019, 1:39 pm

The flying saucer by Kamkondo Dede.



Why did I choose to read this?
This is a short story by a Malawi author, ya as well as Speculative Fiction.

Review (Also posted here.)
This short story was recommended to me as Science Fiction (see cover image), but it really should be marketed as some sort of mythological fantasy. The cover has nothing at all to do with the actual story, which is about twins trying to prevent their elder sister from marrying a cannibal with magical powers; there’s a spirit world at the bottom of the river, and quite a few people have cause to change into animals. This author is apparently fondly remembered by many in Malawi, but his works are very hard to get a hold of (I borrowed this from a literary scholar writing about African SF).

I’m not sure what to think of this: on the one hand, the story was too moralistic and authority-affirming for me; on the other hand, it’s written as a fairy tale, so those features are really part of the basic makeup of that genre. And it was a fun fairy tale that skipped from one crazy plot development to the next.

It was interesting to read something this nostalgic and rare. If I ever come across more by Kamkondo I won’t hesitate to pick it up!

56Petroglyph
Jun. 27, 2019, 1:46 pm

>52 spiphany:
The slynx is on my TBR list for this year as well (in the NYRB translation), so I'll keep the skaz thing in mind. Thanks for pointing that out!

57Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Jun. 29, 2019, 5:32 am

>54 Petroglyph: I really enjoyed On a Red Station, Drifting and the next novella in the series, The Citadel of Weeping Pearls. Aliette de Bodard is a very interesting person. I went to a Meet the author talk where she was interviewed by veteran SF author and publisher Gérard Klein, and she came across very well. And Klein, who's generally a bit too grumpy and self-centered for my liking, behaved himself! Her mother is originally from Vietnam, her father is French. She was born in the US, lived most of her life in France, but went to the French/English bilingual Lycée français in London. She's a polytechnician. I'm sure she used to do podcasts, but I can't find them anymore... She has an official website, though: https://aliettedebodard.com/ and you can download her story Children of Thorns, Children of Water for free when you sign up to her newsletter.

>55 Petroglyph: The Flying Saucer went into my wishlist, even though it's unlikely I'll be able to get hold of a copy, unless someone shares a free (but legal!) version online...

58Petroglyph
Bearbeitet: Jun. 29, 2019, 11:26 am

>57 Dilara86:
I like de Bodard's stories. I'll keep reading them!

Re: The flying saucer. Worldcat lists these libraries as owning a copy. Perhaps via interlibrary loan?

59Dilara86
Jul. 1, 2019, 3:32 am

>58 Petroglyph: None of those libraries are in my country, so I don't think it'll work... It's interesting to know which library owns a copy, and in which country, though. I feel like I could waste hours looking up obscure titles, just to see how far and wide they spread!

This quarter is officially over. How did you feel it went for you? Please don't hesitate to add future reads to this thread, so that people looking for recommendations can refer to it.

I still have a couple of reviews to write. I'll get to them enventually. I did not read everything I had in mind, but I did not expect to. I did read less than I thought I would because I'm having a busy time at work and I don't have a lot of free time at the moment.

Reading recap coming soon (hopefully!)

60Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Jul. 1, 2019, 2:53 pm

Le jardinier d'Otchakov (The Gardener from Ochakov) by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Paul Lequesne





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: Ukrainian
Original language: Russian
Translated into: French
Location: Otchakov and a village just outside Kiev, Ukraine
First published in 2012


Igor lives with his mother in a village outside Kiev. He doesn’t do much with his life and lives off his mother’s modest life savings. One day, their nosy neighbour introduces them to Stepan, a vagrant looking for some manual work in exchange for a place to stay. The mother accepts, and Igor and Stepan strike a tentative friendship. Through a series of events I won’t go into, they “liberate” some old suitcases full of USSR artifacts, including a militian’s uniform. When Igor wears it and drinks too much vodka, cognac, hazelnut liqueur, beer and wine, he is transported to the seaside town of Otchakov in 1957 for capers and adventures. This is an easy, entertaining read.

61thorold
Bearbeitet: Aug. 17, 2019, 4:05 pm

A late entry - I kept meaning to read some Calvino for this theme, but somehow never got around to it until Q2 was long gone...

Il cavaliere inesistente (1959; The nonexistent knight) by Italo Calvino (Italy, 1923-1985)

  

Calvino is one of those authors I always come to slightly nervously, knowing he's going to be difficult and experimental, but then have to laugh at myself because I should have remembered from the last five or six times how much fun "difficult and experimental" becomes when he's in charge of it. This particular one is, as we should all know, the missing link between Orlando furioso and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Agilulfo is the most perfect knight in Charlemagne's army. Brave, reliable, immaculately clean, a model of efficiency and a walking encyclopaedia of the rules of chivalry, the only knight in the army who finds inspecting regimental kitchens as interesting and rewarding as smiting the infidel. Oddly enough, he doesn't seem to have many friends... And even more oddly, he doesn't appear to exist. When he lifts the visor of his spotless white suit of armour, it turns out that there's no-one inside it.

But then there's the irrepressibly keen young Rambaldo, raised on tales of chivalry (which did not have anything to say about the administration of regimental kitchens and the proper way to make cabbage soup) and out to avenge his father's death at the hands of the Moors; the enigmatic amazon-warrior Bradamante (with the messiest tent in the army) who lusts after the efficient Agilulfo from inside her suit of armour; young Torrismondo who isn't quite who he says he is; and Agilulfo's unusual squire Gurdulú, who isn't quite sure what species he belongs to. And finally, there's Sister Theodora who is writing all this down for us as a penance imposed by the Abbess, and who for all we know may be making some or all of it up. Particularly the bit where she herself is carried off into the action...

Calvino is obviously playing around with ideas of identity and how we define it to ourselves, as well as doing his usual thing of undermining our trust in the narrator, but he's also having fun with our perception of what the Age of Chivalry was like, by reminding us that Charlemagne's army must have been an actual army, with all the practical needs and administrative headaches that armies have in the real world. Roland and the rest wouldn't have been able to do glorious battle without all the farriers and saddlers and armourers and makers of cabbage soup, and somewhere or other there must have been room for boring staff officers with rulebooks to make sure that everyone was in the right place at the right time. Which is probably an insight that has something to do with Calvino's own experience as a communist partisan during the war. His rather less-than-Wagnerian view of the Knights of the Grail also has a distinctly World War II flavour to it...

62MissWatson
Aug. 19, 2019, 6:28 am

>61 thorold: Delurking

I've spent some time watching the group, because I got interested by the titles suggested for the post-colonial theme. But your review here intrigues me, so I have to ask: do you need to have read Orlando furioso to fully appreciate the book?

63thorold
Bearbeitet: Aug. 19, 2019, 7:50 am

>62 MissWatson: Full disclosure: I’m sure it would help to have read Orlando furioso, but I haven’t!

I think it’s more a matter of starting out with a certain set of expectations about the way stories are meant to deal with chivalry so that Calvino can undermine them (even further than Ariosto already did). You don’t really need to know anything specific about Charlemagne and his knights, it is all quite self-contained.

64MissWatson
Aug. 19, 2019, 11:39 am

>63 thorold: Thank you! I know the basic plot from operas like Rinaldo and Alcina, but sometimes a more intimate knowledge of a work enhances the experience. I am definitely looking forward to this.

65Dilara86
Jan. 5, 2020, 10:23 am

I thought this book would fit in here as well...

Les furtifs by Alain Damasio





Writer’s gender: Male
Writer’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: The city of Orange and other places in the South of France (Porquerolles, Gorges du Verdon, Marseille…)
First published in 2019


Cult SF writer Alain Damasio’s long-awaited last novel, Les furtifs was published last March, fifteen years after La Horde du Contrevent. It takes place in a near-future where cities have been bought and are run by multinational companies: Paris is Paris-LVMH, Orange is… Orange (as in the French Telecom corporation), Lyon is Nestlyon, etc. Society is divided in tiers according to the level of service individuals can afford: Standard, Premium, Privilège. Some people survive off-grid on the margins, out of choice, to avoid constant surveillance, or because they are too poor or without legal existence. So far so dystopic.

The novel is centered on Lorca Varèse, a sociologist who has been recruited by the Récif, a military research unit specialising in hunting “furtifs”, stealthy mythical beings whose existence has been hidden from the general public. His move from the counterculture to the army was motivated by the disappearance of his 4-year-old daughter and his fascination with furtifs, who he thinks might have something to do with it. The narration alternates between different points of view (his, his ex-wife Sahar Varèse, his colleagues/friends Saskia Larsen, Hernán Aguëro and Nèr Arfet, and graph artist Toni Tout-fou), indicated by diacritic signs at the start of each part and inside the text (good luck to the translators whose languages actually need those signs). There is no doubt that Lorca is the main and most fleshed-out character however, and that Damasio has put a lot of himself in him. Perhaps too much and in a way that feels at times self-indulgent and conceited, and at others extremely personal and moving. It describes paternal love, the loss of loved ones and how it feels to grieve for your child, with a rawness and honesty that I haven’t encountered often. That is especially the case for paternal love, which in literature, tends to be hinted at indirectly, through characters’ actions, rather than through the direct description of feelings that Damasio had the courage to write.
I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that it is at heart an introspective novel, however. It still is science-fiction written by someone who no doubt watched a lot of superhero movies, played a lot of video games and RPGs, and knows how to build suspense.
And it’s not just action and feelings. You can tell Damasio has read Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guy Debord. There’s a lot of sociological and philosophical theory hidden in plain sight. Not to mention Balinese religious practices. It’s very creative stylistically: there’s a lot of work on typography, on language and communication in general, on the nuts and bolts of the French language in particular (verbal moods and tenses…), and on idiolects (it helps to know English and Spanish as well as French and each character has a distinctive voice – which I think is overdone, but YMMV). That’s not even touching the work on sound which is central to the writing and to the novel’s premise (no spoiler!)

In its themes and general feel, Les furtifs is, I think, closer to La zone du dehors (not my favourite book), even though the use of symbols to tell narrators apart will remind readers of La horde du Contrevent (which I loved). In any case, it is a 700 page experimental novel, and therefore not for everyone. Personnally, I’m torn. Reading it was a rollercoaster of emotion, from total suspension of disbelief to the hardest of eye-roll. I definitely don’t regret reading it, and it is giving me a lot of food for thought, but some of Damasio’s stylistic and narrative choices work better than others.

66rocketjk
Mrz. 19, 2020, 2:28 pm

Adding in late, here, but I just found a book not mentioned here that intrigued me. As my late father-in-law would say, first some background. I like to read through old magazines and I have a stack of same in my home office closet that I'm going through gradually. I'm just getting ready to start a new one: the March 1936 edition of Scribner's Magazine. Browsing through just the first couple of pages, I came upon an advertisement from The Macmillan Company listing 8 new releases. One of them is In the Second Year by Storm Jameson. This caught by eye because years ago I read a novel by Jameson I thought was quite good: Company Parade. The short description of In the Second Year in the ad is, "A novel depicting in vivid detail what would ensue if England or America should follow Germany's example." Again, this is in 1936.

The short description on the book's LT page is, "Originally published in 1936, this novel offers a vivid premonition of a British fascist regime only five years in the future, modelling its narrative on the events of Hitler's second year in power and his Night of the Long Knives. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the interwar years, it is also, in the sheer power of its story-telling, an enthralling novel in the vein of such dystopian fictions as 1984 and Brave New World."

The book has only eight LT members listing it and no reviews.

67Dilara86
Bearbeitet: Mai 1, 2020, 5:39 am

French publisher Au diable vauvert has a selection of e-books here that you can download for free until May, 3rd. On the SF side, I can recommend Pollen by Joëlle Wintrebert. Ayerdhal is also a good bet, although I haven't read the novel featured in this selection, which is Le chant du drille.

68Petroglyph
Mai 1, 2020, 7:35 am

>67 Dilara86:
Thanks for the tip!

69Dilara86
Mai 1, 2020, 1:48 pm

>68 Petroglyph: You're welcome!

I should maybe expand on my earlier post. Pollen is SF with a feminist slant and a biological/sociological outlook (rather than based on technology or physics). I read it years ago and can't recall the plot, but I remember that it was quite sensuous. It took place on a planet where women were in the majority and where you needed three people to make a baby. Anyway, I liked it a lot at the time.
I forgot to mention that Le feu de Dieu, a post-apocalyptic novel by Pierre Bordage - a big name in French SF - is also available.

70Dilara86
Mai 3, 2020, 10:57 am

The offer ends in seven hours (midnight GMT+2)

I've started Le Dernier Rêve de la raison (capitalisation as per book cover) by Dmitri Lipskerov, a Russian author. I'm in two minds about it. It's poetic and there's a bit of social commentary, which I like, but I wish Lipskerov would stop reflexively mentioning the main character's yellow skin and slanty eyes all the time.

71swynn
Dez. 27, 2020, 10:38 pm

I'm new to this thread, stopping by because Dilara invited me to cross-post a review here. Interesting reads here, so I'm dropping a star and hope to be back.

Die Frau der Zukunft vor 100 Jahren (= The Woman of the Future 100 Years Ago) / edited by Detlef Münch
Date: 2018 (4th ed.; 1st ed. published 2017; Selections originally published 1899-1914)

This is a collection of 8 German-language early science fiction stories, originally published 1899-1914, imagining the future of women, all written by women. I don't think any of the stories are available in English, so I'll make comments a little more detailed than usual in case anyone's interested. From the mile-high view, it's about what you'd expect: visions of expanded opportunities and rights for women, but also antifeminist satire pokes fun at the idea of women and men exchanging roles. From a genre standpoint, they have more in common with utopian works than with Verne's technological adventures. Münch includes a bibliographical essay on gender roles and relations in late 19th- and early 20th-century science fiction; and a collection of caricatures ridiculing the goals of the women's movement.

Die Frau nach fünfhundert Jahren
"The Woman After Five Hundred Years" by Therese Haupt (1899)

This is antifeminist satire, but an ambiguous one -- or at least I find it so. Marga Ebner, an upper-class leader of the women's movement neglects her household work while she prepares a lecture for the next meeting of the Women's Union. Marga's husband admonishes her for her disordered priorities; besides, he says, why prepare a lecture when she can visit the future in person via the science of mesmerism? Having first hand knowledge, she can address the Women's Union ex tempore (so to speak) and avoid timewasting preparation. Marga agrees, and via hypnosis visits the home of a famous physician and surgeon, also named Marga Ebner, in the year 2499. In the wake of a war in the year 2000 that devastated the male population, women of 2499 have taken over most occupations. Men have adopted domestic roles and are responsible for households, raising children, and decorating themselves for their wives' enjoyment. Future-Marga's husband Darling has become curious about pre-war times when men ruled the world. To learn more about those ancient days he uses a device that allows him to converse with a ghost from the twentieth century - a conversation on which Marga can eavesdrop. Darling has also grown dissatisfied with his marriage and infatuated with another woman. Near the end of Marga's visit, Darling announces that he is leaving his union with Future-Marga to start a new life with his new love. His leaving means that Future-Marga's children will have to go to boarding school -- a prospect devastating to Future-Marga, but time-traveling Marga is also horrified by a world in which a mother can be separated from her children. So horrified is she, that upon waking from her trance, Marga renounces feminism forever.

Haupt's satirical future pokes fun at assertive women and domesticated men; but I find it telling that in Haupt's 2499 women haven't done such a bad job really: notably, the world is at peace, a Mars colony has been founded, and technology has advanced to the point that Future-Marga can take a "traveling chair" (Fahrstuhl) through the center of the Earth when she needs to perform an emergency artificial heart transplant in New Zealand. Not all is rosy: nonhuman animals are extinct, citizens are identified by numbers rather than names, and sentiments like patriotism, idealism, and piety are forgotten, but the world led by women is not a monochrome dystopia, and I think Haupt intended the comparison to be not black and white. Consider the story Darling hears from the twentieth-century ghost: this would have been an opportunity for Haupt to give an apologia for the men's world, but she doesn't. Instead, the ghost tells a story of forced marriage, financial loss, and institutionalized greed and dishonesty. Marga may be naive, but the men's world is not clearly preferable to the women's. Haupt may tell an antifeminist story, but it's a nuanced one, and Marga's climactic renouncement of the women's movement feels more like a generic trope than well-motivated action.

Weibliche Zukunftsmusik
"Feminine Future Music" by Franziska Wolff (1902)

In contrast to Haupt's story, Wolff's is an unsubtle antifeminist nightmare. In 1950, due to a high proportion of female births, Europe has become majority-female: four women to every man. Women dominate every profession, including heavy labor. (Men have only themselves to blame for this situation, because they kept inventing machines that reduced work to button-pushing.) Men are enslaved. But then the European women import workers from China, which wakes the racial conscience of European men. A messiah arises, who preaches mass suicide to women: the very best of the women and the very worst follow the messiah's teachings and kill themselves on land and sea, leaving only poor-to-average women, who are exactly what Europeans need to re-establish a great race.

It is exactly as "WTF did I just read?" as it sounds, so I want to add that I am not making this up:

So starben sieben Zehntel der Frauen, unter ihnen die Edelsten und die Schlechtesten ihres Geschlechtes.
Was übrig blieb, war ziemlich minderwertiges Mittelgut.
Das hatte der Priester gewollt. Er wußte, das gab für die Züchtung eines neuen und kraftvollen Geschlechtes das beste Material.
Nachdem er sein Werk vollendet, gab er sich selbst den Tod. Er hatte Europa gerettet - für mehrere Jahrzehnte.


"So seven tenths of the women died, among them the noblest and the worst of their sex.
What was left over was pretty inferior middlings.
That was what the Priest wanted. He knew, that was the best material for the breeding of a new and powerful race.
When his work was complete, he gave himself to death. He had saved Europe - for a few decades."

Das Ewig-Weibliche im Jahre 2500
"The Eternal Feminine in the Year 2500" by H.W. (1908)

A (male) engineer falls in love with a (female) chemist. Bureaucratically, she is his superior and therefore it is her place to make the first move, but alas she is shy. Finally, the engineer can stand it no longer so he signs up to join a Mars colony. When she hears the news, the chemist begs him not to go and to stay with her instead. Of course he will stay, and he promises eternal love -- but what changed her mind? Was it the thought of being parted from him? No, she says, it was the Martian women.

Die Frauenwelt auf dem Mars
"The Women's World on Mars" by E. Tanne (1910)

After hearing a lecture about life on Mars, the narrator takes an astral journey, climbing the branches of the tree outside her bedroom window, until she reaches the interplanetary realm and then Mars itself. The Martians immediately recognize that the narrator is ill, with disruptions in her magnetic and electrical something, probably irritated by her wearing clothing (on her astral body?), but the diagnosis is something I can't quite make out. Homes are solar powered: every house is equipped with a "sun-magnet" on its east side, which collects sunbeams and redirects them to the "sun-chamber," where they are used for "cooking, heating and power for industry." Much attention is paid to health: the Martians exercise frequently, in the fresh air when possible, drink only filtered water, and have hospitals for the body, mind, and soul. Men and women have separate newspapers, hospitals, schools, and even governments, with men ruled by men and women by women:

Nur Frauen können Frauen erziehen, unterrichten, richten, und regieren.

"Only women can raise, teach, judge, and rule women."

To be married, both husband and wife must establish proof of financial stability. A marriage contract is not binding, and divorce carries no stigma: on the contrary, divorced women are considered to have valued experience that young idealists lack.

The narrator's journey is only possible by the light of the full moon. As the moon wanes, so does her ability to remain on Mars. When she returns to Earth, she despairs on revisiting the egoism and greed of men, and longs for a time when Earth will be more like Mars.

Die Frau in hundert Jahren
"The Woman in One Hundred Years" by Ellen Key (1910)

By the 21st century, children are produced in factories and raised by the state. A serum has been invented to suppress the will for individualism and originality. Days are divided equally into six-hour blocks for sleep, work (at electrical push-buttons), parliament, and socializing. Criminals are exiled to Mars, and loners are regarded as anarchistic assassins. School is compulsory until age 30, but universities are closed in order to avoid free inquiry. Nobody opens a book after graduation. In 2009, a revolution began among the schoolchildren: journalists were sent to Mars, parliaments were outlawed, and children were returned to their mothers. Violence and chaos reigned for a little while until 2100, when humanity regained a sort of balance and was wiser for the experiences of earlier generations.

Die Frau und die Liebe in 100 Jahren
"The Woman and Love in 100 Years" by Dora Dyx (1910)

Not so much a story as a manifesto for free love. Dyx categorizes "love" into three sorts: marriage, prostitution, and free love. Too much talk of "love" is really about the first two parts, but a time is coming soon when love for its own sake will reign -- then mothers will be valued as the highest of loves, and these mothers will give birth to a new generation, which will be terrific. Or something like that: it's a lot of blah blah blah.

Vor der Gründung des Frauenstaates
"Before the Founding of the Women's State" by Magda Trott (1914)

After a devastating world war, which Germany won, women stepped into many professions that had been dominated by men. As women became more self-determining, they formed their own banks, and now are on the brink of founding a women's state in the Lüneberger Heide. The piece takes the form of an announcement of the state's founding.

Verehrte Anwesende! Seit Jahrhunderte ringt die deutsche Frau nach Selbständigkeit, nach Anerkennung ihrer Individualität, nach wirtschaftlicher Macht. Allmälich hat sich im deutschen Staate die Erkenntnis von der Berechtigung unserer Forderungen Bahn gebrochen. Man gab uns das Recht, wir gaben uns die Macht.

"Honored attendees! For centuries, German women have struggled for independence, for recognition of our individuality, for economic power. The realization has gradually emerged in the German state that our demands are justified. They gave us the right, we gave ourselves the power."

According to the bibliographic essay, this story reflects an actual movement for women's banking that some hoped would culminate in an actual women's state. The movement died with WWI.

Die Frau der Zukunft
"The Woman of the Future" by Luise Schulze-Brück (1914)

This is another piece that is not so much a story as a manifesto for the future status of women. Schulze-Brück takes as her launching point a folk saying, Seefahren ist nötig, Leben aber nicht. ("Seafaring is important, life is not." According to Google, this derives from a Latin saying posthumously attributed to Pompey.) Schulze Brück argues that both life and seafaring -- i.e., both self-sufficiency and participation in struggles of the social body -- are important, and are the dual goals of the women's movement.

72Dilara86
Dez. 28, 2020, 10:25 am

I'm very happy you crossposted your review to this thread. Hopefully, there will be many more interesting reviews in the coming year!

73LolaWalser
Dez. 28, 2020, 10:56 am

>71 swynn:, >72 Dilara86:

Very interesting, thanks to both.

Side note: it's good to be reminded that the ferment of the futuristic/utopian (or dystopian)/revolutionary etc. ideas existed for a long time before the revolutions of the 20th century.

74LolaWalser
Bearbeitet: Dez. 28, 2020, 10:57 am

double post

75Dilara86
Jan. 6, 2021, 2:04 pm

L’Homme truqué by Maurice Renard


(illustration from the 1924 French edition)


Writer’s gender: male
Writer’s nationality: France
Original language: French
Translated into: N/A
Location: Belvoux, a fictional village in France
First published in 1921 in Je sais tout, a popular science monthly.
Available online here: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Homme_truqu%C3%A9/Texte_entier


A few lines from the book

» J’ai remplacé vos yeux par des façons d’électroscopes très perfectionnés. Ils perçoivent du monde l’aspect électrique ; ils n’en perçoivent pas d’autre ; et, naturellement, votre nerf optique vous traduit cet aspect sous forme de luminosités.
» Remarquez-le : au lieu de mettre l’électroscope à la place de l’œil, on pourrait parfaitement le substituer (mettons) à l’oreille. On pourrait le relier au nerf auditif plutôt qu’au nerf optique ; et alors l’opéré entendrait les phénomènes électromagnétiques, au lieu de les voir. Pour comprendre à quel point le nerf optique était indiqué entre tous autres, il suffit de songer un instant ; il suffit de se rappeler que la vue est notre sens principal, et que l’électricité offre avec la lumière bien plus d’analogie qu’avec le son, l’odeur ou la saveur.
» C’est pourquoi nous avons demandé à nos amis du front de nous envoyer des blessés aveugles, pour nos expériences. Vous n’en êtes pas moins le premier, Lebris ! le premier homme qui ait soulevé le sixième voile de la Nature ! »
« Le Dr Prosope se tut, après avoir prononcé d’un ton orgueilleux cette phrase emphatique. Sa victoire le transportait ; je voyais son système nerveux se moirer de luminescences.

{…}

Un jour, peut-être nos successeurs parviendront-ils à créer l’œil complet, l’œil que les vibrations les plus lentes et les plus précipitées pourront impressionner, l’œil qui verra les rayons infra-rouges comme les rayons ultra-violets, la chaleur comme l’électricité, — l’œil enfin qui donnera du monde la vision intégrale. Et alors il n’y aura plus lieu de distinguer la lumière visible et la lumière invisible. Il n’y aura plus que la lumière. Quelle beauté ! Quand je vous aurai dit que, grâce à vous, le premier pas vient d’être fait dans cette voie éblouissante, — quand j’aurai ajouté que la Science actuelle tend à considérer l’électricité comme étant la matière même, le principe de tout, — Lebris, ne serez-vous pas fier de votre mission ? »
« — Vous auriez dû me prévenir, bougonnai-je. Je suis un soldat prisonnier ; vous m’avez traité comme un esclave. D’ailleurs, je ne vois presque rien. »





L’Homme truqué is an early SF novella, first published in a magazine, then as a book. It sold very well and was translated in various languages in the Interwar period. More recently, it inspired a comic book, L'homme truqué by Gess.
It starts off in typical murder mystery fashion, with the local doctor dead in the middle of the road. In his pocket, the gendarmes find the confessions he wrote about his friend, Jean Lebris, a French World War I soldier whose eyes were injured at war, and who was subsequently made prisoner and experimented on by Axis scientists. Cue terrible German accents and uncomfortable mentions of a strange Balkanic idiom. His eyes were replaced with “electroscopes” - he is blind but can now “see“ electricity. He manages to escape with the help of a Chinese man from an unknown country (I’m not making this up).
It’s typical potboiler fare, with a bit of science, a bit of adventure, and some sleuthing. A short, reasonably pleasant read.



76Dilara86
Feb. 23, 2021, 4:14 am

Le Reich de la Lune (Renaten tarina, no English translation yet, but there is a German translation – Iron Sky: Renate und die Mondnazis) by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Anne Colin du Terrail





Writer’s gender: female
Writer’s nationality: Finland
Original language: Finnish
Translated into: French
Location: the moon, New York (USA)
First published in 2018


A few lines from page 100

"Renatchen, c’est une belle lettre – respectueuse, sans bavardages inutiles, franche et sincère. Elle te fait honneur en tant que femme et en tant que nazie. Je te félicite. Tu es maintenant officiellement fiancée à Klaus Adler."
J’ai été prise de vertige.
J’ai regardé, incrédule, les feuilles de papier étalées devant moi. J’ai pris l’une d’elles.




This novel is based on Iron Sky, a Finnish film co-written by Johanna Sinisalo. It is set in an alternate reality, where Nazis escaped to the moon when they lost the Second World War and created a separate state and culture, successfully hidden from Earth for 70 years, until a US spaceship lands on the moon, and an African-American celebrity called James Washington is taken prisoner. It sets in motion a series of catastrophic events, and so many misunderstandings.
I was rather disappointed by this novel as I was reading it. I really liked Troll: A Love Story and The Blood of Angels by the same author, and this felt inferior. It was too unbelievable and with too many plot holes. I know many of you will now roll their eyes, because surely, I shouldn’t be expecting an SF novel to be believable, but there you are… I had almost finished to book when I realised it is actually a comic novel, and not to be taken literally. Then, the plot holes and silliness made a lot more sense, and I started appreciating the book for what it was.