Valente, Catherynne M. (2021), The Past Is Red, Tor
ISBN 978-1-250-30113-0
I have complained on this blog about the disrespect shown to genre writers who are regarded a notch below mainstream fiction writers, despite often being just as good – or better- stylists. M. John Harrison is often a standard example, as he is clearly one of the best living British novelists, maybe the single best male one, and yet his work does not receive the plaudits that the boring mealy assemblages of platitudes by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes often do. There’s a curious justice to the fact that he is currently on the jury giving out the Booker Prize, when almost every book of his had deserved at minimum shortlist consideration in previous years. But despite Harrison being the go-to answer (there’s a famous Miéville note on the subject), the same complaint should apply to his fellow “genre” writers Gwyneth Jones and Catherynne Valente. I have reviewed Gwyneth Jones here (a better writer than Harrison), and I am a great admirer of Catherynne M. Valente – she has been consistently producing imaginative fiction that’s complex, well written and unusual. Her most famous book is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, the first in a series of YA novels about a young girl named September who gets drawn into the faery world. My favorite Valente novel is Palimpsest, a novel in the style of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and the best recommendation to give out to anyone who has read early Gaiman and who would like something similar but better. I feel like Valente has recently been given more of a spotlight and she has made the absolute most of it, with 2021 seeing the publication of two short novels and 2022 another, heftier YA novel in the style of the Girl series of books, all three of them excellent.
The first of the two 2021 books is The Past Is Red, and it is a combination of two related novellettes, one of which had already been published in 2017. It is also an absolute masterpiece. The first half, “The Future is Blue”, won a Theodore Sturgeon award in 2017, and in 2021, Valente added the second half and published the whole thing as a novel(la?). Despite being the best book on the shortlist, the book was merely shortlisted for the best novella Hugo. It is easy to see why Becky Chambers’ book won the award though. Chambers’ work, as a signature book in the solarpunk genre, is a much more open and positive view of the post apocalypse. In fact, it is one of three novellas on the 2021 Hugo shortlist that share the theme of technological collapse in a way. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, which inverts the usual narratives of both fantasy and first-contact science fiction, draws on similar ideas. Where Becky Chambers has her protagonist, who lives in a post-technology world, encounter and befriend a robot, Tchaikovsky’s protagonist is a scientist who is watching over a post-technological human colony, giving a new gloss on the old magic/sufficiently advanced technology chestnut. Both books draw from a contrast between technology and an Edenic technology- free world, where the contrast is used for color and fun, but there is no urgency, no threat, no real problem here. Surely, I’m not the only one thinking about books like Canticle – where technology has been wedded to a certain permanent menace.
This is why Valente’s novella is such a gift to contemporary science fiction. The Past Is Red sits in an interesting spot in this technology vs fantasy divide. The question for post-technology science fiction is always – what do you do with the existing technology? What happens to the existing things? We have all learned, when urged to recycle, how long it takes for things to go away. The usual way texts deal with this is what Tchaikovsky’s book does: the hub, the spaceship, observatory station etc., is now seen as a tower. The main character’s life, by constantly going into stasis, exceeds the lifespan of the colony humans, and technology turns into myth. A house is a house is a house, I suppose. But in order for there to be an Edenic green post-apocalypse, with overgrown electrical equipment, a lot of things have to go right – these are not real dystopias. Valente understands this and updates the fear permeating books like Canticle for our modern age. The apocalypse in her book comes from a surfeit of events that have destroyed earth. Climate change, certainly, but the destruction is so complete that a series of other problems have been added to the list. It is hard to describe this without spoiling a central revelation of the second half of the novel, but before things went to shit, humanity was more advanced than we are now, but even ideas of off-world colonies end up beset by threats and problems. This information is given to us here and there, in drips and drops. “The Future is Blue,” the book’s first half, is particularly impressive at avoiding info dumps. The two halves are tonally different, there is a sad, elegiac sense to the second half of the book, which accommodates the occasional offer of complete pieces of information more smoothly.
“The Future is Blue” on the other hand moves quickly – there is a quirkiness to the narration of events which are objectively less than ideal. Much of Humanity lives on a floating enormous garbage patch called Garbagetown. Garbagetown consists of – well, garbage, and generations of living in these conditions have led to the restructuring of the garbage. People are just as unaware of technology from before the apocalypse as in Chambers’ and Tchaikovsky’s books, but they are not untouched by it. Valente does not reject technology to build a world – instead she recognizes just how much of our world consists of varying levels of technology. People living in Garbagetown can barely use some of the technology they have, they can certainly not understand it. The use of technology has devolved into rituals and magic, and those parts of Garbagetown that run on technology that is still working (there are some functioning machines and there is electricity) are naturally the richest. “The Future is Blue” is one long flashback, narrated by Tetley, the most hated girl in Garbagetown. From her we learn that naming, one of the most common mechanisms in fantasy fiction, is not automatic – parents don’t name you; you go out into the world and the world names you, often through the interaction with objects in the world. And as all objects in that world are our garbage, there’s complex relationship between the traditions and narratives of the world of Garbagetown and our own world and narratives. This is a clever spin on the way traditions work in many indigenous cultures, where maturity is connected to an epiphany, encounter, or act in your teenage-age life. Insults have become a central element of discourse on Garbagetown, and many names derive from insults received on that fateful outing.
Names from our world – brand names, descriptive names, things, in other words that are carried by objects permanently in the form of trash with labels and text and messages – become words in the world of Garbagetown. The original meaning is completely lost and all we are left with are new sources for words in a world with rapidly diminishing stimuli. There is a connection to Waterworld, as the inhabitants of Garbagetown are permanently living in hope of finding terra firma somewhere. People have noted this with regards to Costner’s box office bomb, but the combination of in-narrative utopian ideas within a dystopian setting really underlines and contextualizes the way prophecies and utopias rely on a trace of meaning, an unrecoverable place that suggests a meaningful path but can never entirely be reached. Tetley in the end removes a real-world connection to this permanent hope, which makes her the most hated girl in the world. There are so many more ideas Valente uses – for example: Tetley becomes, as punishment, a homo sacer, a person outside of the law who can be beaten or killed without consequences. That said, there is no such thing as law in the post code civil sense of the word in Garbagetown. It is all ritual and violence. Gifts, threats and other primal elements rule the world of Garbagetown. Fittingly, the writing is sometimes downright rhythmic, dense, some of the most concise prose published in all of 2021.
In the “The Past Is Red”, Tetley flees Garbagetown on a boat – and encounters a piece of technology that still works, but unlike the simple electricity in Garbagetown requires knowledge in order to get it to work. It is an artificial intelligence which has to be activated. During the course of the book, this AI will connect Tetley to a girl named Olivia who lives off-world, but at no point does Tetley entirely understand what is happening on a technological level. This second half of the book is much less dense, softer and more emotional. It exists primarily to close the story of “The Future is Blue,” which gives very little context and information. Olivia and the AI are talking equal parts to Tetley and to us, as ambassadors of this world to us, who share more with us than Tetley does. There is no additional reasons for hope in that new narrative, Valente does not soften the brutality of this post-apocalyptic world, but she does give us something: hope as a function of our humanity, and community as a fundamental element of how we as humans work and survive. I cannot tell you how tired I am of the “lone man on the moon” science fiction stories, written by men, who have wives and mothers cleaning after them. In The Past Is Red, even on the boat in the middle of the ocean, far away from Garbagetown and with no destination, Tetley looks for – and finds – connection. To the AI, to the mysterious girl Olivia, her partner Goodnight Moon, and, ultimately, in the flawed, cruel, brutal humans in Garbagetown. Sometimes that is all we have – and much of the best contemporary fiction is recognizing this. There is no escapism in this book, but it is still not “bleak” – hopelessness, apathy and self-isolation are ultimately luxuries, often requiring the care-work of others who are relegated to the background of the texts.
That makes it a bit of a disappointment that her next novel, Available Dark, does not rise to the same heights. We appear to meet another art obsessive, we appear to be drawn into another maze of the arduous space between art and life, as Cass Neary is flown to Helsinki to help assess the value of a set of photographs. Instead, in this book, photography and the art and technique of it is incidental. Available Dark sidles up even closer to noir conventions, with Neary sometimes merely following the winds that blow her across the icy Scandinavian plains of a baroque plot. As the resolution presents itself I was more irritated than anything. A lot of stupid people doing stupid things and killing other people for even more generic, stupid reasons. I know that a lot of crime novels are centered around the stupid things that stupid people do (and the half-clever ways they try to cover it up), but that’s not what I find interesting. There’s a disturbing thing that happens at the end of Generation Loss that I am unwilling to spoil, but it is entirely in line with that book’s general theme, but it expands it, and opens up Cass Neary’s world into another direction – it’s tough to see it fall by the wayside within the first couple of pages of Available Dark, serving merely as motivation for Cass to take that Helsinki job. However, whatever misgivings I may have about Available Dark, they don’t tarnish Generation Loss, which is fantastic. Read it if you like that sort of thing. It’s good.
So I have a lot of books in this apartment of mine, 
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Honestly, if this wasn’t partially science fiction, I wouldn’t have reacted negatively to its 1950s view of gender roles at all – if you are in the habit of reading fantasy novels, particularly epic fantasy, you know that this kind of thing is to be expected. Fantasy doesn’t usually, in my reading experience, enlarge the pool of possibilities in quite the same way as science fiction does. And All the Birds in the Sky downright teases us with its allusions to Donna Haraway, Deleuze and other theories of change, dissolution and new formations. There are so many possibilities, so much potential – the same thing that bothered me about the Luc Besson movie – and Charlie Jane Anders picks the most boring one, boring, that is, from a SciFi point of view. As fantasy, it mines a trope that works extremely well. Fantasy and romance are a great combination – with a lot of room to maneuver, too. Even in mainstream fantasy, one sometimes gets something not as GOP-approved straight as this one (Jen Williams, in her fantasy novels, has a remarkable hand at sketching gay attraction, for example), but let’s be fair – this is the norm. And it’s so well executed by Anders. Trust me, if you’re looking for romance, this is right up your alley. Not to mention that Anders is extremely skilled at writing erotic scenes. The whole package is wildly engaging. I have a weak spot for romance in fiction and on screen and boy did this novel deliver. Anders manages to pace her two storylines, one of the war between science and magic and the other one of the love story between her protagonists, extremely well, so that as one comes together slowly, haltingly, so does the other, and each story’s ebb and flow is mirrored on the other level, until the dramatic conclusion, which feels extraordinarily satisfying.
But to get back to why this book doesn’t use Haraway in the way you’d expect – it’s not just the technological parts that are augmenting. The natural – regrettably gendered female, as technology was gendered male – part of the equation is also about augmentation, and about becoming more, doing more, understanding more. The initial augmentation, the mirror of the tiny time jump I mentioned, is the ability to talk to animals, but not fluently, at will and at all times, but a stubborn, halting, difficult ability that could, in some ways, be seen as an augmentation of human empathy, human abilities to understand animals through gestures, tone etc. Making this ability this inaccessible, and hard to use, was an extraordinary authorial decision, that doesn’t fit the usual smooth discoveries of magic. Often, while actually using magic skill is shown to be hard, fantasy novels treat the discovery of mere magical ability like the discovery of someone, thrown into water, that they can, indeed, breathe under water. This decision, and several others, show us a writer who has done some careful thinking about genre and how it works and how it is usually presented. It is such a shame, and such a bummer that Charlie Jane Anders decided to stop there, and thus meshed this intelligent careful use of tropes with this medieval view of gender roles, not to mention class or race. Maybe she kept to 1950s attitudes because of the enormous colorful way the whole book works. I mean it’s so much fun, even in the dramatic parts.
One odd result is the way that Ebershoff uses the gaze. Greta, as he writes her, is imbued with a sometimes close to predatory gaze, an adjective I use because in some scenes, her erotically charged gaze appears to frighten or intimidate Lili, especially at the time when she presented exclusively as Einar. As a portrait artist, of course, the novel assigns the gaze as an uncomplicated, successful act, to her, but it does some odd things in order to achieve this. One is the fact that Ebershoff turns Greta from a Danish woman, which she was historically, to an American woman with an outsider’s fascination for Denmark. And not just any American woman: a rich heiress from California. Instead of offering us a psychologically plausible portrait of a Danish artist who falls in love with a wisp of a man who ends up transitioning to a woman, Ebershoff appears to have constructed his Greta from literary readymades. Henry James’ Isabel Archer probably looming largest, Greta, as we meet her in the novel, owes less to the historical character and more to the trope of the wild American woman who goes to Europe and gets into some kind of trouble there. It’s as if all the work and empathy that went into Lili meant that Ebershoff had to cut corners when it came to writing Greta. What’s more, the fact that Greta’s gaze is so strong, and so supported by wealth and social status, is balanced by a lack of confidence when it comes to Lili’s gaze. Not only is she the object of Greta’s sometimes irritatingly sexual regard (irritating because it plays on a long exploitative tradition), but she consistently fails to be able to establish one of her own. Mirrors are difficult, and even a mid-novel expedition to a real peep show ends in disgrace and expulsion. Now, this difference could be used productively, one remembers, for example, Heiner Müller’s remarks on the way the peep show is a trope for the way capitalist society functions. But Ebershoff never really does anything with this. These things happen almost in the background. Ebershoff deals with his material and, really, with his own novel, as if it was a translation of sorts and he was just trying to get the basic beats right. Honestly, that would explain the prose, as well. There is so much potential in the material that Ebershoff’s quick treatment of it is sometimes genuinely upsetting. The book is both bloated and oddly bare bones.
