Endings

A couple of days ago, I read this article by Peter Damien on the importance of endings in fiction. I agree with a lot of what he says there. In many ways, a story can be defined by its ending – a well-planned ending can shape the entire whole that precedes it, or provide context that makes the whole more than it was (the book I just finished, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, accomplishes the latter).

In a stand alone novel, an ending is something you can be well-assured of, but less so for a novel series, a television show, or, especially, comics. Keeping with some of the examples Damien used: you can have series’ where fans are eager for resolution, the creators say “we know where it all goes, trust us”, but in fact things are changed on the fly and/or never resolved (Lost). You have ones where a creator says they have the whole story planned across x installments, who then keep expanding that “x” until it seems interminable (The Wheel of Time). And then there are the stories that have no ending, the ongoing serials.

It’s that last group that I have issues with – specifically, with comic serials. I have no problem starting an unfinished book series, because usually there’s an expectation of an eventual ending. But in comics, there’s a whole big section of the market where that’s not the case.

I started out reading comics that were most like books: stand alone graphic novels, in single volumes. It made the most sense to me – and still does. I like a complete story, a rounded whole. The ongoing comics – the ones you’re most likely to have heard of: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, countless more – felt inaccessible, because they had no end, their beginnings were in the distant past, and there was this huge amount of complicated, interconnected story surrounding them.

So I stuck with graphic novels, for years, and only started to move away from that recently. I got a hold of the Sandman series – a safe choice, as it was already finished. There, again, I found that as the story approached its definite end, it began to draw together everything that had come before into something bigger than what was. The final four volumes are masterful storytelling.

The Sandman series is one made up of several smaller stories, rather than a single ongoing story split into parts. That’s what opened me up to other comics than the completed, fully self-contained ones. It’s a compromise: the collected volumes of self-contained storylines, comics that cohere into something of a whole while still being part of the bigger series. Despite the missing context of the comic’s history, there’s something that makes these volumes work: the story arc has an ending.

Finally, I have recently begun reading a few comics that are part of ongoing series. New ones, mostly, so I don’t have a lot of catching up, but ones with an undefined ending. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, yet.

I think I’ll always continue to favour the ones I know have a limited lifespan. I enjoy the comfort of knowing that something has an end in sight.

Finally, I have to say that Damien is right about one more thing: Locke & Key is a brilliant series, and I very much look forward to its own ending.

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[On another subject entirely, my Book-A-Week posts will resume soon. I've spent much of the past couple of weeks re-reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels, and haven't cared to say much on them - they're deserving classics: read them.]

Thought for the Day

Epiphanies are easy. Realisation can come to anyone at any time. It’s following through on them that’s the hard part.

It’s surprisingly simple to realise that something isn’t right and then… carry on anyway, look past it, do nothing. To act, though, to make changes, to improve something – that takes effort.

An epiphany is worthless if it doesn’t result in a change.

Unread Statistics 2

It’s a little over a year since I did a post detailing some statistics about my to-read pile, so I figured I’d take another look.

To be honest, very little has changed.

I currently own 60 books I have not yet read. This is 12 less than last year. 48 of my currently unread books are the same as the ones on last year’s list.

Type of Book

This year sees new categories, in Comic and Graphic Novel, which I maybe should have combined. There has been a large increase in the amount of comics and such that I read in the last year, but I tend to read them much sooner after purchase than I do books, so only a couple are currently in the pile.

Once again, the pile is mostly novels.

Year of Publication

Once again all collections/anthologies were listed by publication date regardless of the age of the content.

The distribution is very much the same as last year, with some predictable shift toward the current decade. The list is still dominated by books from 2006 and 2007 – when I was in Uni and buying books much faster than I read them – but there has been some progress made on that part.

Author Nationality

Still dominated by American and British authors. Proportionally, there has been a slight increase in the ratios of non-Americans and non-Brits.

Author Gender

And finally:

Once again, my list skews heavily toward male authors. 42 books by male authors to 11 by female authors. This ratio is actually slightly worse than last year. Removing multiples once again changes little, the numbers are 36 male authors and 10 female authors.

The one Unknown is the same author from last time who keeps their identity a closely guarded secret.

Addendum: Read in 2012

After seeing the statistic above on the gender (im)balance in my to-read pile, I felt like I should take a look at what I read in 2012 and see if it follows a similar pattern – because I felt like the female representation since last year should have improved. For this, I counted everything on the Read in 2012 post. These are the results:

It’s just as bad as the to-read pile. But this had a lot of repeat names from comic series, so, reducing down to the individual writers involved:

Still pretty far skewed. One particular issue is that I’ve read very few (print) comics with female writers. In fact, to date there have been only two: Alison Bechdel, and Marjane Satrapi, and those with mainly autobiographical material.

Almost all of my comics reading to date has been from male writers. This is something I feel I need to address going forward – as well as continuing to read more great female novelists.

Black Sheep by Ben Peek

In Black Sheep, the world is segregated, with cities divided into Asian, Caucasian, and African people. In response to the “Racial Wars” some time in the story’s past, the UN has banned multiculturalism. Within the cities, everything is controlled: culture and history are tailored to suit the group you belong to, and no contact with the other cities is ever allowed.

Isao Dazai moves with his wife and young daughter from Asian-Tokyo to his wife’s home city of Asian-Sydney, but he is dissatisfied with his life there. After speaking too freely about how he feels, he finds himself falling foul of the city’s Segregators, black-masked policemen who enforce the UN’s laws, and is convicted of being Japanese. The punishment is Assimilation, a process which removes the victim’s pigmentation, leaving them completely white from head to toe, and turns them into mindless drones used for the city’s manual labour.

In this story we see the events that led up to Isao’s arrest, the process of Assimilation itself, and what happens to him afterward, in a book that at times brings to mind both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Of course few books would come out ahead in such comparisons, and Peek’s novel is not trying to. Rather, it uses some of the same elements of familiar dystopias – the environment of constant surveillance, the inability to trust anyone you might speak to, the farce of bureaucracy and justice designed to reach a predetermined verdict – to tell its own story.

In some ways Peek’s dystopia is closer to reality than Orwell’s classic. There is more of a human element – it is easier to understand how the people who perpetuate this regime could have come to do so. There are clever moments in the world-building, too, like this one when Isao is on the plane to Asian-Sydney, and his daughter Kyoto is given a pill to calm her down for the flight:

I said quietly, “How come you don’t give them the pill in the airport?”
“Segregator Law prohibits it,” he replied. “They say that if medication is given out at the airport, then they would have to perform surveillance there, which they say is against the United Nations Freedom Laws. It is violating our rights if they are watching all of us all the time, even though airport security does that…”

Ultimately, however, Asian-Sydney and Asian-Tokyo are too perfectly dystopian to really ring true as a potential future; what they can do is serve as an extreme example, a model of a world where issues of race are handled with the ultimate form of segregation – a strange kind of equality, with the three major race groups kept equally under the heel of a faceless – and thus raceless – regime.

The story of Isao Dazai has two main strands – the first is the exploration of the cities and how they function; the second, Isao’s need to confront his wife, who was responsible for reporting him to the Segregators. While a lot of story time is devoted to the former, with much being revealed – including some tantalising hints toward what the UN’s ultimate goal with the cities might be – that side of the story doesn’t really receive a resolution. We end with an understanding of the status quo; what moments in the story that seem to suggest something bigger for Isao prove illusory. It is Isao’s wife, Kimiko, who comes to dominate the final parts of the story, as Isao sets out to find and confront her. What results is a tense exchange that reveals two people who have never and will never understand each other. It’s a moment that seems more true and right than other possible endings would have, but an ending like that is not one that can really leave you feeling satisfied.

For me, the highlight of the novel is not the world Peek creates, or the story Isao follows outside, but the depiction of Isao’s Assimilation. These are strange, sometimes surreal scenes of a manipulated virtual reality seen from inside Isao’s perspective, and what really gives it kick is the knowledge that what you are witnessing is the deliberate, calculated destruction of a man’s mind, a process deeper and more harmful than ordinary brainwashing, one designed to ruin the victim so thoroughly that he rejects his own identity. It was quite disturbing to read these scenes and begin to understand just what was being done to Isao and what purpose each element served.

Black Sheep is a book I do think people should seek out. It’s a well-crafted dystopian novel that, though it doesn’t really offer a satisfying resolution (does a dystopian novel need to?), is still overall a satisfying read. It makes me wonder why Peek is not better known.

Misc. Points

Various things both mine and others’, in an assorted jumble that probably doesn’t work as one post.

1.

Foz Meadows talks On Grittiness & Grimdark. Her argument in an oversimplified nutshell: Works that claim to be “more realistic” because they are gritty and dark are implicitly putting forward the idea that the other elements of the story are also realistic, when often they’re anything but. Read the full post, she says it better than I could.

2.

Everyone is already talking about Amanda Palmer’s TED speech, The Art of Asking. Here are some posts that muse on what her talk means to book-business folk:
- Chuck Wendig on The Art of Asking: For Writers and Storytellers
- Andrew Losowsky at Huffington Post Books, Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk Contains Important Lessons For Publishers

3.

Fireside Magazine is by all accounts an excellent venue for short fiction. They’re currently running a Kickstarter to fund a full year of publication, and the end date is closing in fast. If you’re interested in seeing more decent short fiction – and in a venue that pays writers better than the low standard rates – consider backing.

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And now, back to me.

4.

Writing:

- I wrote fiction this weekend. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t good, but I haven’t done it in quite some time, and lately I’ve been getting hit with the story bug. I might try to take Chuck Wendig’s writing advice, and aim for just a little each day until suddenly I’ve written a lot.

- I’ve also hit this odd point where I feel wrong and unproductive when I go a while without writing something – fiction, a review, a longer blog or forum post, anything. I haven’t got past my procrastination yet, unfortunately: this post is procrastination for writing my thoughts on Ben Peek’s Black Sheep.

5.

Reading:

- I’m falling back into my old bad habit of buying books much faster than I read them.

- I’m getting very slack on Book-A-Week, as you can tell by my blog posting lately. I want to be more relaxed about it, but not also keep falling behind.

- I am thinking of clearing a few books out of my collection that I don’t think I’ll reread. I don’t know what to do with them, however. Preferably they’d go somewhere they’d be read and enjoyed… Last time I cleared out books was the first time, and I did the wrong thing: I just allowed my sister to take away a lot of them and sell them off to some cashback website. Ugh.

6.

I’m sure I have forgotten something worth posting.

Some Lists Apropos of Nothing

Related to book discovery and social media.

Authors Whose Work I Read Because I’d Followed Their Blogs

Elizabeth Bear
Jeffrey Ford
Jay Lake
Nick Mamatas
Ben Peek
John Scalzi

Most of these are blogs I have kept up with regularly for the best part of a decade. A couple I followed for a year or two then stopped when I tried to cut down on time spent reading blogs.

Authors Whose Blogs or Twitter Accounts I Follow Whose Work I Will Definately Read in Future Because Of It

Lauren Beukes
The Bloggess
Warren Ellis
Jim C Hines
Maureen Johnson
Mary Robinette Kowal
Seanan Maguire
Chuck Wendig

Every one of these I have only started following in the past year, most since joining Twitter. Two I have bought books by – one before I followed the author online. All but two I had heard of before encountering their online presence.

What Does This All Mean?

Social media including blogs has been an important part of how I discover authors for a long time. There are much longer lists I could make of authors and books I have read or intend to read because they were mentioned by a writer I follow.

If an author is interesting/entertaining in their online presence, I will almost certainly check out their books at some point. And I’ll also check out the books by other authors they mention (Jeff VanderMeer has been responsible for a large portion of what I’ve read).

I almost never buy a book just because I came across it in a bookstore.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

When Ensign Andrew Dahl begins his first posting on the United Union Capital Ship Intrepid, it doesn’t take long to notice that people behave strangely around the ship’s commanding officers. It doesn’t take him long to realise that they’re all terrified of being selected to go on away missions – because when crewmen go on away missions, one of them always gets killed. Dahl and his friends find they need to work out what is going on and why before their own turn as victim comes around.

Redshirts is, as the title hints, a homage to Star Trek and similar science fiction television, turning around the idea of “redshirt” characters – disposable extras routinely killed off to increase the dramatic stakes of an episode. In this novel, the redshirts are centre stage, and the would-be heroes – the Captain, the Science Officer, the Doctor – are side characters. It exists in part as a commentary on the tropes of those science fiction shows, and particularly the lazy narrative devices they sometimes resort to.

(Early on, after being given a seemingly impossible task by Science Officer Q’eeng, Dahl is introduced to The Box. No one knows how The Box works, but when they are given a job to do by the officers, especially one with a time limit, they put it in the Box, and it spits out the answer at exactly the right moment for maximum drama.)

Scalzi’s narrative becomes increasingly metatextual as the book goes on, and we delve into the how and why of these characters’ circumstances. I’m loath to spoil too much of this one (which is unusual for me), but suffice to say that the premise of the book allows him to cleverly both make use of and subvert those science fiction tropes, with a level of ironic self-awareness that makes for some quite funny moments. If anything, it’s clear that Scalzi has a strong hold of his narrative, and many times when something stood out as being too obvious or not making sense, it turned out to be a deliberate move on his part.

Considering that, and the way he keeps the story moving along at a decent pace, it’s easy to forgive him the one big plot hole that doesn’t get explained away.

Redshirts is clever, funny, and engaging – which is pretty much what I’d expect from John Scalzi anyway.