Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (45 page)

Neither character is graced with a name, and the author seems to maintain a psychic distance from them, alternating subtle omniscient author narration with a scattering of stream of the father's consciousness that seems rather coldly generic. He never enters the son's consciousness at all as they trudge along through Cormac McCarthy's bleak and pitiless post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering a rogue's gallery of human monsters straight out of The Worst of Mad Max toward inevitable entropic doom.

Th-th-th-that's all, folks, that's the whole sad content, except for a bathetic little bullshit ending that contradicts what theme
The Road
has had, which more or less amounts to “life's a bitch and then you die."

A nameless man and nameless son making their way south through the moribund landscape of a dying Earth; dying trees, dying foliage, ruined cities and towns, birds falling dead from the sky, the biosphere itself seemingly well on the road to extinction without a ray of hope.

McCarthy is very good at physical description, and would seem to have done his homework, because he's quite meticulous about getting the nuts and bolts of everything not only well-described, sometimes over-described, but correct in the manner of a conscientious hard science fiction writer. Indeed,
The Road
would be a successful little piece of hard science fiction, at least in technical terms, except for one not at all minor flaw.

Cormac McCarthy never enlightens the reader as to what has happened to create his post-apocalypse Hades. Nuclear war? Global warming? An asteroid strike? Escaped aliens from Hangar 51 taking vengeance on Gaia? Not only does McCarthy never tell you, he probably doesn't know himself—because the world he has created doesn't really jibe with being created by any or even all of the above. He probably didn't care either.

Talented writers who misunderstand science fiction have often fallen into this trap, supposing that writing in the SF mode allows you to invent whatever literary world suits your purpose without regard to suspension of disbelief or scientific knowledge, and sometimes it even works.

But you do have to havea purpose, a theme, a didactic ax to grind, a revelation to convey—something, anything, that pulls together your series of events, uniting character evolution with dramatic structure and with philosophical vector to reach a satisfying conclusion for the reader, an epiphany, if you're really on your game, even a satori.

There is a technical term for this.

It's called a story.

Because it doesn't have that sort of literary or transliterary purpose,
The Road
doesn't tell a story. Because it doesn't have a story to tell. And I suspect that Cormac McCarthy didn't care to write a novel that told a story, but wrote the novel as a literary exercise.

Stories arise somewhere below the intellectual surface of consciousness—the subconscious, the collective unconscious, the dreamtime, the zeitgeist—and you know when one arises from the vasty deeps because it grabs you with the grappling iron of emotion, and will do the same for the reader if you're up to the task of conveying it.

Stories call
you
. There's no guarantee they'll come when you call, and when they don't, the tendency is to try harder and harder against the zen of it, and when that doesn't work, to intellectualize a literary exercise like
The Road
.

To a certain extent this is as good a definition of Post Modernism as any, and not just in literature—and it turns off many readers, or, to put it the other way around, really turns on few. Such literary exercises, if well executed, are easy to admire, but not at all easy to love.

That something like
The Road
won the Pulitzer Prize when there were any number of much better novels published in the same year even from within the tent of science fiction is a sad and frightening commentary on the state of American serious literature—that is, of a literary culture that takes itself so seriously that it can't bother itself with true story telling, and looks down its patrician nose at writers who do. And therefore at any readership beyond its own circumscribed fan base.

Perhaps, in a way like science fiction writers turning to things like the speculative present to reach beyond their own circumscribed fan base, literary lions like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy have dabbled with much the same thing, or so least they imagine, in an effort to restore some culturally relevant grandeur or purpose to their work, to recapture the magic that seems to have gone away with Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Twain, Norman Mailer.

Perhaps they have noticed that members of the club who rarely wrote anything like science fiction are best known for the science fiction they did write. Aldous Huxley for
Brave New World,
George Orwell for
1984
, Anthony Burgess for
A Clockwork Orange
, for the most conspicuous examples.

Why can't we do likewise? they may tell themselves. Why can't we apply our more serious and sophisticated literary concerns and powers to this mother lode of thematic riches and colorful backgrounds and rescue it from the sci-fi hacks and ourselves from post-modern creative stagnation?

Well, they generally don't fare too well because they generally don't understand that science fiction as literary exercise without a meaningful story to tell is generally as flat as last week's tortillas.

But when this sort of attempt to meld the virtues of “serious literature” with those of science fiction is done right from both ends of the spectrum, the whole can transcend the sum of its parts, and you can get something like
Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart.

Shteyngart is the son of a Jewish Russian family who emigrated to the United States in his youth. This background is certainly relevant to not only his ability but perhaps his desire to write something like
Super Sad True Love Story
, and maybe even to what literary vector his career might take.

He grew up as a boy in the Soviet Union, in Russia, where, rather than twentieth-century science fiction evolving as a species of commercial low-brow schlock—since such a thing was not possible in the Soviet Union where—science fiction was ipso facto published by “official publishing houses” along with everything else (aside from underground samizdat).

But science fiction, being what it inherently was, also had a kind of sub-rosa function as political satire and/or protest screed. Because if you were careful, you could get away with encoding it in tales that after all are not set in the Soviet Union of today, Commissar, but on an alien planet in the future, far, far away.

If you were careful. If Soviet science fiction writers overstepped the bounds, it could become a seriously counterproductive career move, which it sometime did.

So Russian science fiction evolved in a rather surreal political context, and in a different tent a kind of Russian Magic Realism that was playing something of the same game with fantasy was long regarded as a cutting edge of “serious literature.” So when the commissars metamorphosed into acquisition editors, the boundaries between the two were a good deal more porous than in the US, and in the minds of a certain literate readership, too.

On the other side of the literary lineage, in the United States, the novel of urban Jewish sexual angst
a la
Philip Roth is very much in the mainstream of serious establishment literature, and Shteyngart, born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, has naturally embraced and been embraced by that tradition, too.

Lenny Abramov, the primary lead in
Super Sad True Love Story
, is himself the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York, with all that implies as rich material for a family side to the story, which Shteyngart portrays in full detail with characteristic sardonic but empathetic realistic humor.

Lenny's inamorata, obsession, non-jailbait Lolita, is Eunice Park, a Korean-American post-teen pop tart. Perhaps the most amazing feat in this novel is how deeply and intimately Shteyngart presents both first generation traditionalist Korean-American family culture and the electronically multiplexed super style and consumer-brand obsessed culture of their jacked-in mall rat daughter.

So where's the science fiction in this tale of two generations of two different and also somewhat amusingly similar immigrant families?

Well, this story—and true
story
it certainly is—takes place in a New York perhaps not as far in the future as we would like it to be, when the economically and financially collapsed United States, fighting a losing war in Venezuela, is deep into the process of being turned into a Third World banana republic by its Chinese creditors and Venezuelan and Norwegian gunboat diplomacy.

And no, this is not satire, this is all too credible on an extrapolation level, this is serious science fiction, well-thought-out and realistically rendered. Then, too, Lenny's job is that of a high-end salesman for a company promising eternally renewable life in the near future to the well-enough heeled and its own elite employees who keep enough clients forking over for expensive temporary measures in the indefinite meantime.

Something like Scientology rebooted as the Foundation For Human Immortality out of
Bug Jack Barron,
peddling not cryogenic freezing to get the wealthy there, but endless and endlessly expensive medical treatments and sophisticated genetically engineered snake-oil nostrums.

Gary Shteyngart not only brings all these threads together in the end, they reinforce each other, as they should, making
Super Sad True Love Story
a whole that is synergistically greater than the mere sum of its parts.

This is a novel infinitely more worthy of a Pulitzer than something like
The Road,
and probably more worthy of a Nebula than anything published in the relevant year, too. Written by a writer who seems by the text to see no more contradiction in this than I do.

Is this a one-shot by a writer whose main aspiration lies along a narrower vector toward being accepted as an establishment literary lion, or contrawise a nascent science fiction writer who seeks not to pass this synergetic way again?

One hopes not. One hopes neither. One hopes that such a complete and completely rounded novel is a harbinger of the future of American literature.

The future work of Gary Shteyngart, the direction his career will take, will surely be indicative of what that future will be.

Copyright © 2011 by Norman Spinrad

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Another WorldCon has come and gone, and the convention year starts over. My best bets in September are out west: CopperCon, ConJecture, Foolscap and VCon. In October, come east for CapClave and Albacon. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss

SEPTEMBER 2011

2-5—DragonCon. For info, write: Box 16459, Atlanta GA 30321. Or phone: (770) 909-0115 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) dragoncon.org. (E-mail) [email protected]. Con will be held in: Atlanta GA (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Hyatt. Guests will include: the usual media suspects (Shatner, Nimoy, Mulgrew, etc.), but also McCaffrey, Sawyer, Zahn, etc. Thousands expected.

2-5—CopperCon. casfs.org. Hilton, Avondale AZ. Carrie Vaughn, Janni Lee Simmer, Adam Niswander. General SF/fantasy convention.

9-11—ConJecture. 2011.conjecture.org. Hilton Inn, Mission Valley CA. Allen Steele. “SF and fantasy, with emphasis on literature."

15-18—BoucherCon. bouchercon2011.com. Renaissance Grand Hotel, St. Louis MO. The world convention for mystery-fiction fans.

16-18—ConStellation, Box 4857, Huntsville AL 35815. (256) 270-0092. con-stellation.org. Holiday Inn Express.

16-18—Foolscap, Box 2461, Seattle WA 98111. foolscapcon.org. Marriott, Redmond WA. Chiang, Woodring. SF/fantasy books/art.

16-18—Great New England Steampunk Exhibition, Box 362, Hampstead NH 03841. tgnese.com. Fitchburg MA. S. Lee & S. Miller.

16-18—MonsterMania. monstermania.net. Crowne Plaza, Timonium (Baltimore) MD. S. Cunningham, A. Lehman, more. Horror media.

16-18—Intervention. interventioncon.com. Hilton, Rockville MD (near DC). Webcomics, and other people who live on the Internet.

22-24—Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia, Box 52, Whiteford MD 21160. [email protected]. Hunt Valley MD. “Salute to Buck Rogers."

24—Roc-Con. rochesterscifianimecon.com. Main Street Armory, Rochester NY. J. G. Hertzler, Gresh, Skeates. Media SF and anime.

30-Oct. 2—VCon, Box 78069, Vancouver BC V5N 5W1. vcon.ca. Sheraton Airport. G. Benford, Jean-Pierre Normand, L. Lassek.

OCTOBER 2011

1—MonsterFest. monsterfestva.com. Central Library, Chesapeake VA. “A Celebration of Classic Horror in Films and Literature."

6-9—Sirens, Box 149, Sedalia CA 80135. sirensconference.org. Cascade Resort, Vail CO. Larbalestier. Women in fantasy literature.

7-9—AkiCon. akicon.org. [email protected]. Hilton, Bellevue WA. Kyle Herbert, Velocity Demos, NDP Comics. Anime.

14-16—CapClave, c/o Box 53, Ashton MD 20861. capclave.org. Hilton, Gaithersburg MD. Vaughn, Valente. Written SF/fantasy.

21-23—AlbaCon, Box 2085, Albany NY 12220. albacon.org. Best Western Sovereign. J. Kessler, S. Hickman, K. Decandido, Wombat.

21-23—Browncoat Ball. browncoatball.com. Providence RI. “A Mighty Fine Shindig.” For fans of Firefly and Serenity.

27-30—World Fantasy Con. wfc2011.org. Town & Country Resort, San Diego CA. Gaiman, Godwin. “Sailing the Sea of Imagination."

29—Goblins & Gears Masquerade Ball. teamwench.org. Michael's Eighth Avenue, Glen Burnie (Baltimore) MD. Horror and steampunk.