August 2010

The City and the City - China Mieville

Louis de Bernieres' 'Red Dog'. The dog, in 50s Australia, becomes a local character, hitches rides, lives its own life, becomes a metaphor for rugged independance among small outback communities, gets poisoned when newcomers start changing things. Reminds me of another metaphorical tale, 'The Tree' by Grey Owl, relating the passing of the American Indian way of life as seen by a tree over a couple of hundred years.

Canticle's quite funny, but it has a serious streak under its quirky humour. Written by Walter M. Miller Jnr in 1959, it starts long after repeated nuclear holocausts have wiped out C20th civilisation, and its successors. Culture is kept alive through the barren times between the rise and fall of cultures by monastic communities, as in Europe's Dark Ages. The monks find themselves not only custodians of philosphical thought, but of technological remains as well .. in the long ages before culture and understanding regrow, they copy out and illuminate circuit diagrams and blueprints..

This is classic Baxter. It spans millions of years, all the characters die, and by the end not only has everyone we know ceased to exist, the human race itself has de-evolved. No super-race of the future in Baxter's vision, humanity evolves eventually into little monkey like creatures that are symbiotic with trees.

Typical Stephen Baxter plotline:

author meets area of technology

author falls in love with technology

various characters appear and interact since publishers tend to want this

author kills off all people and goes into far future to be alone with technology (he doesn't actually dislike the people, so they all die quite happily, fascinated by the amazing walls of flame, vastnesses of space etc etc, and it hardly hurts at all)

author realises this is a bit boring for most readers, and resurrects some random people to admire mindboggling vastnesses of space and time

end