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krpalmerThe holidays seemed a good time to make a bit more use of the ebook-lending services offered through my municipal library. (Not only can I borrow books from them without heading out to a branch, I can do that beyond the city limits.) I’ve had a few titles recorded in an iPad application to get around to, but sometimes I’ll call up that list to start sort of blinking at a book or two that isn’t even “available after so many days on the hold list” but can only be “suggested,” and I’m left wondering if I missed that when adding the title or if that had actually changed. The thought of that made me jump at one particular novel, Famous Men Who Never Lived by the enigmatically named K Chess. (There was an author’s photo and biography at the back of the ebook, though.)
I have an unfortunate habit of lamenting I’m not connected to “recent respectable written science fiction” the way I once was. There are a few reasons for that, even if one of them was dropping away from the commentary that might make me aware of and nudge me towards more novels just because that would cut down on bumping into quite so many putdowns of my personal reactions to particular movies. Still, after I took notice of the cover thumbnail for Famous Men Who Never Lived (just about all of which was taken up by the title), the description one tap beyond it, of refugees from an impending apocalypse who fled into an unknown alternative universe that just happens to be pretty close to our own, got my attention. As I read through the ebook in chapter-long bursts, though, I did get to thinking I was distracting debating one particular of the “worldbuilding,” then telling myself the more important thing about the novel was discovering new awarenesses of and empathies for mundane refugee situations.
One of the novel’s main character Vikram escaped with a knapsack stuffed with paperbacks tragically sampling his divergent world’s literature (although some of them turned out to be from the common history before 1910 or so; there’s no obvious single political, military, or technological “Point of Divergence” the alternative histories I’ve noticed before can dwell on, and beyond the disquieting details of the apocalypse escaped things seem little worse or better than our own, just different in multiple details). Now trying to fit into his new world, he doesn’t look at the books much. A fellow refugee Hel who wound up in a relationship with him, though, started reading and dwelling on a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Pyronauts, only to lose track of the irreplaceable volume after trying to explain its symbolic importance to someone from our world, after which she starts really obsessing over it. All of that was understandable and compelling enough. However, I did get to wondering about comments here and there about the novel-within-the-novel and whether it really was “canonical” in its own world where it seemed “genre” enough to me. Sometimes science fiction seems ready to puff itself up. I wound up considering all the things that made “SF” what it is when we point at it that happened after 1910, including its specific name itself. It was possible to look back with the ebook search function to see if I’d stumbled into an unfair misrepresentation of my own making, but I did wonder if points could have been altered to avoid that, only to remember how when I see suggestions like that in the commentaries of others I can swing to supposing them self-satisfied or obnoxious. Perhaps what I should say about Famous Men Who Never Lived is that it felt much less smug about “genre self-references” than certain other recent works I’ve managed to read (including the one I first signed up for the ebook lending service to access).
That the book got me thinking about a number of things ought to count for something anyway; I can ponder getting beyond “empathy for refugees” itself to “the universality of loss.” I can also admit to spending a few moments surveying my own bookshelves and weighing what I might grab in a few moments to cram in a bag and carry into an alternative universe, a list that can expand volume by volume according to space. Still, I have to then admit there seem fewer works of undeniable “literature” ready to my hands, and so far as “trying to spread them in a new world” there’s a question of whether every work depends on backgrounds taken for granted. It was nice to have the chance to read the book this way, but in wondering whether it would be better to read it again I considered whether a paper copy would make a difference (even if in the novel electric plugs themselves diverged between universes to make digital records ephemeral, which only got me debating again the thought of “unconventional wiring hookups, however dangerous.”)
I have an unfortunate habit of lamenting I’m not connected to “recent respectable written science fiction” the way I once was. There are a few reasons for that, even if one of them was dropping away from the commentary that might make me aware of and nudge me towards more novels just because that would cut down on bumping into quite so many putdowns of my personal reactions to particular movies. Still, after I took notice of the cover thumbnail for Famous Men Who Never Lived (just about all of which was taken up by the title), the description one tap beyond it, of refugees from an impending apocalypse who fled into an unknown alternative universe that just happens to be pretty close to our own, got my attention. As I read through the ebook in chapter-long bursts, though, I did get to thinking I was distracting debating one particular of the “worldbuilding,” then telling myself the more important thing about the novel was discovering new awarenesses of and empathies for mundane refugee situations.
One of the novel’s main character Vikram escaped with a knapsack stuffed with paperbacks tragically sampling his divergent world’s literature (although some of them turned out to be from the common history before 1910 or so; there’s no obvious single political, military, or technological “Point of Divergence” the alternative histories I’ve noticed before can dwell on, and beyond the disquieting details of the apocalypse escaped things seem little worse or better than our own, just different in multiple details). Now trying to fit into his new world, he doesn’t look at the books much. A fellow refugee Hel who wound up in a relationship with him, though, started reading and dwelling on a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Pyronauts, only to lose track of the irreplaceable volume after trying to explain its symbolic importance to someone from our world, after which she starts really obsessing over it. All of that was understandable and compelling enough. However, I did get to wondering about comments here and there about the novel-within-the-novel and whether it really was “canonical” in its own world where it seemed “genre” enough to me. Sometimes science fiction seems ready to puff itself up. I wound up considering all the things that made “SF” what it is when we point at it that happened after 1910, including its specific name itself. It was possible to look back with the ebook search function to see if I’d stumbled into an unfair misrepresentation of my own making, but I did wonder if points could have been altered to avoid that, only to remember how when I see suggestions like that in the commentaries of others I can swing to supposing them self-satisfied or obnoxious. Perhaps what I should say about Famous Men Who Never Lived is that it felt much less smug about “genre self-references” than certain other recent works I’ve managed to read (including the one I first signed up for the ebook lending service to access).
That the book got me thinking about a number of things ought to count for something anyway; I can ponder getting beyond “empathy for refugees” itself to “the universality of loss.” I can also admit to spending a few moments surveying my own bookshelves and weighing what I might grab in a few moments to cram in a bag and carry into an alternative universe, a list that can expand volume by volume according to space. Still, I have to then admit there seem fewer works of undeniable “literature” ready to my hands, and so far as “trying to spread them in a new world” there’s a question of whether every work depends on backgrounds taken for granted. It was nice to have the chance to read the book this way, but in wondering whether it would be better to read it again I considered whether a paper copy would make a difference (even if in the novel electric plugs themselves diverged between universes to make digital records ephemeral, which only got me debating again the thought of “unconventional wiring hookups, however dangerous.”)