Gwyneth Jones's Blog, page 2

Small, Ugly Utopias: The Grasshopper’s Child, by Gwyneth Jones reviewed by Joel A.Nichols



Gwyneth’s Jones’s strange novel The Grasshopper’s Child is series of against-the-grain juxtapositions: a teenager of color from the city sent to care for two “Elderly Wrecks” whose great house and gardens are rotting around them, a near-future England so grim and violent that only the Chinese Empire’s invasion can stop the genocide and cannibalism, gardens that seem to teem with magic but instead let Jones show how internet-native teenagers can get down and dirty with Victorian plumbing technology. There are many more examples of points where the author has reached for the most disparate comparison in any given case and confidently pulled it into this novel in a realistic, ho-hum way. . . The overall effect is disjointed: is this an updated Nancy Drew, a satire of late technology (complete with holographic social workers and virtual popstar com-petitions), a refreshing teen friendship and love story that avoids romantic clichés in its desire to do the right thing by these teens, or something else altogether? There are many layers of mystery in this book, whether the reader is questioning the tragic murder that left Heidi’s father dead and her mother imprisoned; the shady conspiracies that infuse every part of life in this too-good-to-be-true rural idyll; or the much smaller scale but no less emotional mystery of what, exactly, the evil Crace is doing to Mrs. Scott-Ambrose, an elderly person being cared for by another teen.Indeed, Clancy, this other teen, is a shadowy question himself in the guise of a hooded rebel avoiding authorities and living rough, but possessing a tender heart . . . All you as a reader can trust is that Heidi’s gut will figure out (mostly) who is good and who is bad, what is safe and what isn’t. She isn’t the narrator. But if she were, I’d describe this book as having a reliable narrator and a completely unreliable plot in which fantasy-seeming reality . . . meets speculative social and political fiction of the grittiest order.



This near-future England on the mend from neo-Anglo-Saxon butchery and organized blood rites is fascinating, and so lightly drawn by Jones that details come only thread by thread, and still don’t add up to a very complete picture. The few details do leave the reader with unmistakable and terrible knowledge about how it must have been. Because Grasshopper’s Child is set in the world of Jones’s Bold as Love Cycle, simply sketching its outlines is sufficient for those familiar with that work. It’s effective for the rest of us, too: the light touch of her world-building pays off in massive impacts and is not to be ignored: “No-body had talked about it, it was never on the news, but everyone had known street kids were disappearing; and the homeless; anyone vulnerable, and anyone who tried to defend them.” Jones flicks a pebble down the hill in the first chapter, and by the end of the book, our very earth is shaking with the boulders crashing around us.



For the complete review see The Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) back issues at: http://www.thecsz.com/past-issues/csz-v5-n2-2015.pdf

On Monday I sent a Whatsapp photo of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain festooned with rebels (this isn't it, this is a better one),to Gabriel, in Leeds. Later I recalled that I knew that winged archer statue as "Eros", but I didn't know why, so I looked it up. The whole fountain is a memorial to Lord Shaftesbury, a Victorian parlimentarian, good guy who "replaced child labour with school education" (see wikipedia). But that's not Eros! It's not the divine bad boy of careless love, having naughty fun, fooling around and making a mess. It's his twin brother Anteros, the Greek god of selfless love.



I could tell you more, but anyway, just another sidelight on Extinction Rebellion. Speed the plough.

Off We Go!







Stanhope Gate (this one's for Gabriel and Noemie!)







How pretty the trees are!







Mime Artists Against Brexit







Onwards to Pall Mall (quote is from the RevokeA50 petition instigator)







Into the home straight







The message . . .







Delivered.







All Done!







At the Greencoat Boy, (A lot busier than we usually find it at the end of one of these strolls)



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I've seen the cover (not for sharing, as yet). I've responded to the last few page proof queries . . . There may be more stages that need my input, further down the line, but for now, Joanna Russ (Masters of Science Fiction Series) is off my desk. This seems an appropriate moment to celebrate, anyway. It's been a long haul, and a fascinating, absorbing task, taking in not only the writing life of one iconic female sf writer of the "Feminist Seventies", but also the story of Gernsback and the Female Utopians in the Twenties; the Cold War and domestic revival politics of the Fifties, the Cultural Revolutions of the Sixties; the Feminist Sex Wars of the Eighties . . . You can't separate Joanna Russ's fiction from her life and times. No more than you can separate her from Modernism, Erwin Schrodinger's Cat, or the United States of America (with special reference to NY state, the Great Plains, and the Pacific North West, but most of all New York city).



Never heard of Joanna Russ?

Or you read The Female Man and thought that was it?

Try her story collections, The Zanzibar Cat and The Hidden Side Of The Moon. ("out of print" but easy to find, at any online bookseller of your choice). Or may I recommend How To Suppress Women's Writing; "A provocative survey of the forces that work against women who dare to write". Not so easy to find secondhand, but readily available in the new, 2018 edition, prepared & curated by Louann Atkins. Knowledgeable, very funny, and not at all out of date.



https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/russ-how-to-suppress-womens-writing



Many thanks to all the kind, helpful people at the University of Illinois Press; to my utterly essential Indexer, and to the many others, in and out of genre, who answered my questions, lent me books, and cheered me on my way.



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ps. The photo of Joanna (above) featured in an issue of "Galileo" magazine in 1978, which is where I found it. I believe it was taken much earlier, maybe as early as 1966. Many have tried, but nobody can trace the photographer.

An Oak Tree

Of course we'll be there on the 23rd, with our sandwiches, and our Green Party placards. Meet up on Park Lane, probably outside the Army and Navy Club, as before. Wend our way to Parliament Square, mill around a bit, take in a bit of the speeches; retire to The Greencoat Boy. I wouldn't dream of missing out. But why the hell are we still doing this? Why can't we just revoke Article 50 and have done with the whole shameless, tragic charade?



The Brexit Circus rumbles on, and on, and on, and on, yet another dreadful pantomime every evening on the Channel 4 News; yet another twist to the plot, which is exactly the same as the last "twist", but nobody seems to care, or even notice the repetition, except for a few swivel-eyed Tory/Labour rebels, who have tried to escape the toils of nightmare and only succeeded in driving themselves right over the edge. We went up to Westminster in February, for a minor #PutItToThe People/#People'sVote photo opportunity ("No To BlindFold Brexit!") and wandered about for a while; despairing among the fans; trapped in one of those long ago Michael Moorcock type, Blitz Spirit, rubble and surreality scenarios (I think I'm thinking of The Bed Sitting Room? ). It was the placid cheerfulness that got me down.





lairs of the media folk



The media folk only come out after dark. The niches in hell for commoners are politely undisputed: Brexiteers cluster along the kerb-sides, shouting HOOT! and jerking their very simple placards. Les Autres, those circus fans capable of grasping that 2+2=4, favour the green retreat of Parliament Square, wear blue berets with gold stars; trail the EU flag casually over one shoulder, and their placards are full of puns, wit and wordplay. The groups don't mix (obviously). But "It's all very amicable", one of the berets told me, happily, & for a moment I was consumed with fury, because he wasn't. He really seemed to be enjoying himself.



BREXIT was brought to you by vile Tory "Austerity". By children going hungry, by failing schools, the ransacked NHS, cruelty and spying and routine humiliation; the punitive and vicious Universal Credit. By the famous "hostile environment" for migrants which was and is the special pet of our own, home grown q.fabius maximus cunctator.



It isn't a picnic! How dare you trot along here making a hobby of this atrocious debacle!







It's All Very Amicable



Indoors, of course, it's different. Especially after dark. The Speaker throws a spanner in the works (he's good for a laugh, at least); q.fabius fishes it out again . . .The Brexiteer head boys smirk and preen. Q.fabius and the smug and useless Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition exchange grimaces, across the narrow way; but you don't see a genuine smile from any of these souls in torment, only bared-teeth grimaces as the tv journalists stick those forked barbs in. Except maybe from Arlene, and that's not a thing you'd want to see twice, that smile . . .



Oh well. There's no guns involved, so far. And though the knife crime slaughter (that comes from the same, filthy, greed-is-good politics as Brexit) is piling up in our poverty-poisoned cities, we should still thank all the powers for that.



& I'll see you all on the 23rd March. Happy Days!







my sweet violets are wonderful this year



Used to be, one would say, to hell with politics, what do I care. Oak trees and violets will endure.

Not any more.



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My Movies



Leave No Trace



A present from Gabriel and Noémie for my birthday. About a Vet father with PTSD, managing pretty well by living in total hiding in the green forests of Oregon, with his motherless child. How they get spotted, and how their relationship survives a tender (horrible intrusion to the Vet, but really tender, and respectful) attempt to rehabilitate them. Very touching, sad, and reminding me v. much of camping out in those same Oregon forests, long ago, with the most makeshift kit, on the way home from Singapore; and on a cold beach in Mexico, in an outcast camp, later on. I'll watch out for Thomasin Mackenzie.



Capernaum



Why does Capernaum mean "chaos"? I don't know. Harrowing, beautiful tale of Les Miserables of Beirut. Very French, very legalistic and rigidly decent at the top level, hell down in the gutters: starring a rascally little boy, his eleven year old sister, their hapless but dreadful parents, and a decent citizen of a young refugee woman from Eritrea who loses her (absolutely astounding) tiny boy, and then the two children . . . But I won't spoil it. Gripping stuff. Certainly made the Victor Hugo version (in print or on the telly) look pretty stupid.



My Light Reading



The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli



A beautiful little object, purple and gold, made to look like it was printed in the Renaissance. "The world is made of events, not things". . . (I liked that chapter, it reminded me a lot of my story "The Flame Is Roses", and the idea (definitely not a new idea!) that on some deep, essential level, time does not pass) . . . Time seems so obvious, and then unravels badly under the cumulative pressure of hard and harder science. But all is not lost because we can call upon Marcel Proust to ravel things up again. What exactly is entropy . . .? (I've always wondered). Is this study a little too poetic? Maybe so.



Timefulness Marcia Bjornerud



All about geology, less abstruse and closer to the bone of the here and now. Only just started it, but so far this one promises less and delivers more.

Just finished reading Truth and The War, E.D.Morel, the book that inspired my last two posts, a collection of articles published in 1916, about the atrocious lies, damn lies and secret politics that led to the catastrophe of World War I, and fueled the unstoppable surge of public support for the completely pointless, irrational, slaughter in France and Belgium.



E.D.Morel was the journalist who blew the whistle on King Leopold of Belgium's hideous regime in what's now Congo. In this foray, he's a bit too keen to insist that Germany was the innocent, peacable party, forced into conflict by the Triple Entente (or was it the Triple Alliance?) all pinned to a bizarre incident in Sarajevo* . . . But by 1916 it was blatantly Germany vs Britain, and all about global markets . . .



(I knew all this when I was seventeen, it comes back to me vaguely, mostly in the form of satirical cartoons. . .)



But could exposing the truth stop that war ? I don't think so! As Morel and others had spotted, we weren't just stuck with the meaningless slaughter, we were already in for the devastating second round.



I wear a white poppy, and strictly on 11th November. I hated that centenary celebration



Naturally, this week and last, I drew parallels. Couldn't help it.



It's heartbreaking to see what's happening to the far-from United Kingdom right now, but the trouble is, same as in 1916, fraud is a crime without redress. The money's gone. Your house has been sold from under you, old lady, and you signed the papers yourself . . . And anyway, you're too proud, too timid, and too inflexible with age, to admit that you were fooled. The irrefutable fact that the people were lied to in 2016. That murderous fascism was recklessly incited and promoted by the Leave campaign, in 2016, is no use to anyone now. We're here because we're here.



*See also Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Rebecca West. A massive, wonderful book about "The Balkans", which includes a blow by blow account of that day in Sarajevo. You really, truly, couldn't have made it up.

Further to my last . . . Maybe there's always been no future in utopian revolution, before our day. Pol Pot didn't achieve much, beyond those fields of skulls. Mao was a monster. It didn't take long to get from the storming of the Bastille to the Terror (a nightmare in which (check it out if you like) the majority of those guillotined were not aristocrats, fat cats, or even the losers in the swift reverses of revolutionary power. They were far more likely to be hapless, lower middle class citizens, denounced by the citizen next door, for no particular reason except personal gain. But the odds are different now.



The plumb pudding in the cartoon above is clearly, as you can see, planet earth ----in danger of being carved-up by someone called "William Pitt", Prime Minister of what was soon to become the greatest super power the world had ever known; representing wealth creation. Who is dining out with someone you should easily recognise as Napoleon Bonaparte, the top war-monger of the period. (in our modest, domestic peril, I suppose that would be Theresa May across the table from Nigel Farage).



I've labelled them Economic Growth and War, and these are the existential bad guys attacked by the Countercultural Revolution, in the Bold as Love stories. Both of them are monsters; or have become monsters. Both of them have to go. Of course I realise Economic Growth is our society's devoutly unquestioned religion, on every scale from the sublime to the ridiculous, and so do you (you can't have missed the sausage roll in the manger?*), so maybe this is the shocking part, rather than the savage attacks perpetrated on the sinews of war, by oil-field torchers and others, all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, in Castles Made Of Sand. But shocking or not, denouncing them is not fiction, it's what I truly believe.



We don't need more money. Nobody could possibly need more money than "we" already have. We just need to spread it out more. We don't need more War. Nobody could possibly need more war . . .



What we really, seriously need is more time. We need to scratch up another hundred years from somewhere, or fifty, or even twenty, and then we might just get through this part. But without the rough magic, and the fairytale assistance of a Hard Green Countercultural revolution, the future of this living world, the only one we have, does not look good.



Remember that Third World War? The one fought with sticks and stones?



Climate change was already a wolf at the door twenty years ago for us black gold addicts. It's coming on much faster now. It's real as real. But still nobody seems to care! What's wrong with us all?



(The EU by the way, does not play a glorious role in Bold As Love. It's the government, everybody blames it for everything. That's what governments are for. But European identity is vital, Europe is where we all live. In times of trouble, the people of Europe cling together. Nobody questions that.)



The Plumb Pudding in danger: from HYPERALLERGIC



Castles Made Of Sand, first edition with the stunning Anne Sudworth cover, is still readily available.





*Okay, the outrage over equating Jesus, saviour of the world, with with a non-kosher pork snack was hysterically funny (now if only it had been a vegan sausage roll!) But what I see is the mass-market apotheosis of "greed is good"

In 1999 I set the date for the Dissolution of the United Kingdom. Scotland, Wales and the newly United Ireland went their separate ways calmly, (Wales Inc. happy to be wholely or partly owned by the Japanese*). The fourth nation state went straight to hell, via a bloody coup engineered by a back-stabbing Home Secretary (who got his head blown off the same night); a brutal, populist, rock-star "Head of State", a devastating epidemic of illiterate, starving, homeless wanderers, an army of righteous Rock Festival "staybehinds", and a rampage of Hard Green violence up and down the country. Not to mention Union Jack Loyalists mining the beaches of the North East against desperate migrants, and a small war in Islamic Yorkshire.



It was a fairytale. Not a fantasy, not even in 1999, you may be surprised to learn, but I never imagined things could get so scarily, idiotically awful in the real UK, so fast, with or without Dissolution. I never thought I'd live to see poverty and starvation return here, or illiteracy swiftly rising, or so many homeless, or, or . . . (More on that rising tide in my next post). But given my early-adopter behaviours, my tree-hugging, anti-fracking and so on, why did I make the Bold As Love Hard Greens into feared, ruthless terrorists?



Because that's what happens to utopian revolutions? Because the desperate straits that create these explosions always lead swiftly and dreadfully to a Terror? It's a fair point.** But I wouldn't do that. Not my style at all. I wanted to tell the story of a passionate, no-surrender, love is all there is, total revolution, with guitar, that would find a way to stay sane. I think the music helps . . .



Bold As Love



But please do, make up your own minds.





*better than being governed from Cardiff, see?

**Clement Attlee's government and the Welfare State, the utopian world where I was born, had admittedly paid a steep price in global war and genocide, in advance.

It can't be the People's Vote March time again, can it? Surely we just had one . . . I distinctly remember. It was sunny, we took a sandwich, we spent ages kettled (not in an aggressive way, all very friendly) outside the Army and Navy club . . . Oh, so it isn't going to be an annual event? It just feels that way? It just feels as if the awful BREXIT ROULETTE wheel can keep on rolling and the ball rattling around and around, up she goes, down they go, up they go, down she goes, and never come to rest on the red or the black, while Labour keeps on hoping for the worst (because the worst coming to the worst will be Jeremy's opportunity, he's convinced of that) while the Greens and the Lib Dems and the Good Tories jump up and down gamely on the sidelines, repeating You're all mad! Completely vicious, selfish, reckless and mad! (true, but is it useful?).



And hardly anyone in parliament seems to even know where the Northern Irish Border actually is, let alone that it was a bloody battlefield, town by town, street by street, house by house, before the GFA . . . . And this staggering, blind-drunk squabble between Tory and Tory will just go on. Forever. Because not even the best of them has the courage to remember the oath (I think it's an oath) they took (which I phone-snapped on somebody's placard): and put country before Party . . .









But anyway . . . We were there, and I can tell you two things about this event. First, there really were A LOT of people. If there were 100,000 the first time, I think 700,000 is a conservative (sorry . . . ) estimate for Saturday 20th. Where's it all going to end? Second is that nobody we talked to (and we were volunteering, so we talked to a lot of people) believed the march, whether seven hundred thousand or seven million strong, would make any difference. Not a hope. Not the slightest bit of difference!, they all said, grimly cheerful. The health service will collapse, the lorries will be backed up in squalid holding pens to the Midlands. Stockpiles of food and essential medicines must be gathered for this disaster, but it's "the will of the people", and though we ARE the people, and we strongly suspect ruthless personal profiteering (and also cowardice), is what's really keeping BREXIT on its rattling track, we're here without any hope. Because we had to be able to say we tried.



The sky was an eerie cobalt blue, the October sunlight was glaring. The march was just as good-humoured but more gruelling, from the sheer press of bodies; the police were wonderful. We shared a tortilla sandwich as before, on a different kerbstone, and we had early satsumas this time, not late Valencias, but still Spanish; not so sweet, but juicy, with a lovely mellow yellow coloured skin . . . (old soldiers march on their stomachs). Parliament Square was impossible, so we abandoned the speeches, cut our losses and had a pint at the Greencoat Boy.



very nice pint, but pricely.









Mixed Media



Killing Eve? Blood-soaked bit of fluff. Oh, did I just liken that that cool, kinky "Look! Female Leads!" thriller to a used tampon? Shame on me, because I certainly watched it, and enjoyed it, and was charmed by both the leads, and besides I thought it was (also) totally inane, & tampons (though they may not be the greatest solution to monthly bleeds), are not.



The Wire Just as gripping, & more amazing visually second time round. Better with the English subtitles on, because then you can (if you are English, that is), look around you and stuff. Entirely male viewpoint, w. good female police and legal characters, who don't get the awful, awful Jane Tennison/Helen Mirren treatment (and therefore not true to life, of course!). Getting near the end now, and the darkness deepens. There's no such thing as "special dead". Last time Omar was my favourite (isn't he everyone's?) Like the coolest of the 7 Samurai, Omar don't scare. This time I'm in love with Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn).



Black Honey/PINS At the Concorde, on Dinah's birthday. Down on Brighton seafront, in spectacular black torrential rain, was a good place to be last Sunday week, for old sake's sake. I was feeling like death, bad cold or flu, but even so. However I liked the support best. I thought PINS http://www.wearepins.co.uk/ were great. Black Honey a bit ordinary, but competent. Pins means legs, I should explain.



Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossom. Mhani Alaoui I don't really like magical realism. It's Mystification: it's decorative, but it changes nothing, and in fact ends up reinforcing the status quo (as indeed happens here), despite its "literary radicals" rep. But Dreams of Maryam Tair is pretty hard to resist. All about Morocco, ancient and modern, both at the same time: set mainly in Casablanca, and curated by and ageless but certainly ancient Scherazade herself, the story of a young girl, child of rape (her mother got raped a lot, reading between the stuff about demons, when she and her young husband were picked up for being generally "progressive" in the early eighties), who grows up to be, with her beloved bicycle . . . well, say no more, it's just an enchanting read.



Oh No!, Roland Barthes has been murdered by a laundry van! And he was carrying on his person the dreadful secret of The Seventh Function Of Language. Mon Dieu!, if that awful formula were to get into the wrong hands!!!! Hilarious. Sexy, The name dropping is relentless, everybody and everything involved, however tangentially, in the soi-disant "linguistic turn" gets dragged into the plot, (including the Bologna station bombing, but who cares about good taste). The feminists are there, of course, as Bitch Goddesses; of course (there is no other role a woman can play in the power games of academia). Fear not. You don't have to know a single thing about semiotics, or post-structuralism, or anything. Just relax and enjoy the caper.

The Traveller's Joy (a rescue plant from the pavement cracks outside our front door, two years ago) that tangles all over the holly and the Bonsai Pine, has flowered for the first time, and is already fading. The scaffolding has finally gone . . . just when I was getting used to haveing a climbing gym outside my high window, and a (fragmentary) sea view from the top of it. We are solar-paneled, we are double-glazed, the garden is restored to its usual level of untidiness, thank god. (In theory I love the summer, but this theory is based on the romance of childhood, the big break at the end of the educational year, when you down-tools, pack up, abandon your desk for weeks, which I never lost (until Peter retired). Not so keen on the programme of works idea.



The Consultations



To business. There are two UKGov "Consultations" you need to respond to, before 25 October, if you are at all interested in stopping the Tory Party sponsored fracking industry's assault on democracy, and poisonous industrialization of the countryside.



One of them asks you to agree that the construction, drilling and operation of a fracking well, (or any number of fracking wells) for exploration and production should be treated as a "permitted development" (like a small garden shed, for instance) that doesn't require planning permission, so that local government and local communities will have no say in the decision.



https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/permitted-development-for-shale-gas-exploration



The other asks you to agree that the construction, drilling and operation of a fracking well, (or any number of fracking wells) should be treated as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project, (like a new railway or motorway network; or a nuclear power station).



https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/inclusion-of-shale-gas-production-projects-in-the-nationally-significant-infrastructure-project-nsip-regime



This Alice In Wonderland maze of leading questions, confusing statements and tick-box options that don't offer you even a Yes or No, needs guidance, but once you get the hang of it you won't get lost, you might even be entertained; though you might fume a bit. Unfortunately the gov doesn't offer any hand-holding, but Frack Free United has useful walkthroughs here:





https://www.frackfreeunited.co.uk/permitted-development-and-nsip/permitted-development-consultation-guidelines/