My portion of this blog could so easily turn into 'Jodie takes in the media Ana and Renay tell her to and loves everything'. Ana kindly gave me 'To Say Nothing of the Dog’ when we first met offline last year. It's the second book, recommended to me by Ana to get its own post on lady business ('The Dispossessed was the first). I'm already planning to talk about a couple of others.

Renay is going to have to plot pretty hard to come up with a rec that can challenge the awesomeness of 'To Say Nothing of the Dog'* because it’s like this novel was written specifically for me to squee over. There’s an inexhaustible list of things what I like contained in this novel including:

sci-fi comedy involving miscommunication and time travel
a male/female detective partnership
romance
harried employees
a Victorian setting
a loveable fop and...
a comic dog (bonus points)

and I could go off on a fannish trip about any one of those elements, but today I'm focusing on the deliciously morish science fiction logic that is woven into this fun, literary romp.

In 2057 Oxford university agrees to help Lady Shrapnell, a rich, rather demanding American woman, rebuild an exact replica of Coventry cathedral before it was bombed in WWII. In exchange she agrees to provide funding for Oxford’s research into time travel. Unfortunately, Lady Shrapnell is rather exacting about the minor details of the replica and the history department finds itself bullied into arranging hundreds of time drops to check the tiniest of details.

After being forced to investigate many, many 1950s jumble sales for a particularly ugly piece of Coventry ironwork called The Bishop’s bird stump, Ned Henry, time travelling employee of Oxford history department, is beginning to lose his composure. On a tip that The Stump can be found somewhere in Coventry cathedral, just after the air raid that destroyed it, Ned and his time travelling partner Carruthers undertake one time drop too many in a desperate bid to make. the jumble sales. STOP.

The problem is the stump isn't in the cathedral and both men return to 2057 exhibiting all the symptoms of excessive time travel (including 'maudlin sentimentality' and a tendency to mishear words). Ned is ordered to rest and recuperate, but Lady Shrapnell is determined to send him back in time until he finds The Bishop’s bird stump, so he can describe it to the recreation team. Ned’s desperate attempt to escape Lady Shrapnell's uncomprehending demands and the co-operation of his superiors result in funny, sometimes almost slapstick sequences of misdirection and panic:

‘ “...Finch, where is she?”

“In London. She just phoned from the Royal Free.”

I started up out of the chair.

“I told her there’d been a mistake in communications,” Finch said, “that Mr. Henry’d been taken to the Royal Masonic.”

“Good. Ring up the Royal Masonic and tell them to keep her there.” '

When Ned says ‘Lady Shrapnell didn’t believe in slippage. Or time-lag.’
it reminded me of harassed wizards trying to keep one step ahead of Terry Pratchett's Ridcully as he wilfully misunderstands the full significance of what he's asking people to do.

To keep Ned from being sent to yet another 1950s jumble sale in search of the Bishop’s bird stump, his superior Professor James Dunworthy launches him into the Victorian era for two weeks of calm and rest. As the team furiously prepare Ned so that he’ll blend into Victorian society, Professor Dunworthy asks him to do one small time travel related task. It should be simple he's assured. The problem is, Ned can’t make any sense of his instructions through the fog of time lag. I’ve consumed enough time travel narratives to know that doing anything to history is a sensitive business. Ned is poorly prepared, quite ill and trying to follow instructions he doesn’t understand. His attempt at carrying out the task set does not go well.

Here's the science part. The characters in ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’ take the view that history is based on the ‘for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost’ theory. Everything is connected. Small personal events influence the lives of those directly involved, but they may also influence the wider scope of history. If a time traveller interferes with history and say, a meeting doesn’t take place, causing a woman to marry a different man, that time traveller will have changed both their lives. By preventing the meeting this time traveller could also potentially change the lives of any number of other people. People don't get born, or end up being born in a different place and important historical events lack the people they need to make them happen. In the world of 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' history can be dramatically changed by one missed meeting.

Too late, Ned and his colleague Verity realise that they may have broken the historical continuum by changing certain small events in Victorian England. An important WWII event might now disappear from history, changing the course of the war for the worse. Horrified, they set about trying to correct the historical timeline, but the study of how time travel effects history, is still in its infancy and they have little real idea of what they’ve done, or how history will react to their actions. Here Verity and Ned’s story becomes a detective narrative**. They use their little grey cells, to work out just how history might be influenced back into its correct shape and follow the often unclear clues as to just what that original shape might have been. Their attempts to fix what they’ve (maybe) done often appear to make things (hilariously) worse.

As the narrative progresses Ned and Verity learn more about how changes to history can affect the future. They also discover that the rules of time travel, which Oxford university has identified so far, may not be as fixed as they had though. New rules emerge for time travel, which lead them down new paths of confusion. I have to admit that in the beginning, when the rules for the operation of time travel changed, I thought Willis’ was pulling a Dr Who stunt. You know the kind of thing. The Dr waves his sonic screw driver, garbles some sciency sounding stuff that doesn’t hold up to logic and everything works because that’s the way the Dr says it works. I assumed I was catching Willis readjusting the sci-fi workings of her novel to facilitate plot developments that wouldn’t have been possible under the original sci-fi rules.

And then, about half way through the novel, I had a totally obvious realisation. 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' goes meta on the reader. One of the many fictional pairings that Ned and Verity keep referencing in this novel is Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, hero and heroine of Dorothy L Sayers' detective novels. All the false leads, all the corrections to the ways in which the rules of historical interference worked are Willis replicating the structure found in an old school detective narrative. The structure of Verity and Ned's investigation into how the historical timeline operates, mirrors Verity and Ned’s surface detective efforts as they try to work out the identity of a mysterious man and find The Bishop's bird stump.

'To Say Nothing of the Dog' isn't just a detective story taking place under a set of science fiction circumstances; it's a novel of sci-fi detection, where the reader is led through an investigation of the fictional logic*** of time travellers. By interrogating her initial depiction of time travelling intervention in historical events, through the realisations her characters have along the way, Willis creates an internally logical version of how the main sci-fi conceit works in ‘To Say Nothing of the Dog’. Her characters test and reassess the logic of her ideas on time travel, just as someone might test the logic of a scientific theory, or a detectives analysis, so that by the end of the book all the holes in her original theory have been addressed (if not conclusively solved, as I said, time travel study is still new).

And the reader is lead through all of this logic step by well explained step. By showing readers red herrings, or incorrect lines of investigation detective novels explain the process that leads a detective to uncover the solution to a crime. This allows the reader to feel engaged and part of the story, as they follow the detective’s reasoning and test their logic. The reader also arrives at a greater understanding of the crime, which adds to the reality of a story. By setting up and knocking down initial ideas about how time travel interference might affect history Willis is leading her readers through the process of elimination and investigation that detectives go through to identify the correct solution to their mystery.

I like a bit of Dr Who (alright I lurve it) and a bit of the deliberately unguessable end of the detective fiction spectrum. I'm not about to reject every piece of science fiction that can have holes punched in its logic. Still, there's something so satisfying in a piece of fiction that hands you a selection of cleverly fitting puzzle pieces, so you can track the logic of a mystery back through a film, or book.

I often find myself saying that sometimes you need to trust your author to get you somewhere good? Readers need to trust Willis to get you to a logical final solution, otherwise they’re going to spend most of the book with rebellious thoughts, sure that Willis’ sci-fi doesn’t make any sense. Whether they’re prepared to give Willis’ that kind of unconditional trust is up to each individual reader. I say do it, I wish I’d done it sooner when I was reading.

* I'm a little afraid I'm going to start some kind of epic rec battle now, but that's all good for me so I don't care!

**Ana you're going to think me terribly stupid, but I didn't fully appreciate the connection between the characters references to Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey and this sci-fi detective element until I'd read 'Strong Poison', even though I knew they were referencing a detective novel.

*** I'm not suggesting that 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' explains how time travel might work in the real world. Willis doesn’t even include much fictional explanation of the science behind Oxford university's discovery of time travel. She creates a theoretical idea, of how time travel works and can impact history, that makes sense in the world of 'To Say Nothing of the Dog'.

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Ana said she’d like to hear what I thought of ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula K Le Guin (I suspect she is looking forward to hearing about how I have come to my senses on the Le Guin matter – alright you were right :P). I want to put together something, especially as Le Guin is a woman writing sci-fi and right now certain parts of the UK sci-fi community are looking around, wondering where all the women are*, but I’ve read quite a few books since I finished ‘The Dispossessed’ and it is a complex book to review even when all the pieces are spinning vibrantly in your mind. So, my thoughts here are going to be focused on providing a broad outline of the main chain of ideas that I noticed when I read ‘The Dispossessed’, rather than an in depth analysis of the human relationships, the writing, or more specific components of those ideas. Let’s see how this goes shall we?

‘The Dispossessed’ follows a gifted physicist named Shevek, as he travels from his home planet Urras to a planet called Anarres. Annarres is Urras’ moon and was settled by colonists when anarchists on Urras decided they needed to follow the path of their leader Odo by creating a new, fairer society. Shevek believes he is returning to Urras to encourage the sharing of scientific knowledge between the two planets, as Anarres culture (which initially sounds much like an ideal vision of a communist society) has imbued him with the idea that sharing resources freely is fundamental to a healthy society. However, as the reader learns more about Shevek’s life on Anarres and his time on Urras, it becomes apparent that Shevek’s motivations and his current work are more subtle than this idea of sharing might imply.

Shevek has come to Urras to forge a General Temporal Theory, ‘the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity ’. Shevek is responsible for creating the Simultaneity Principle and explains the idea behind his earlier breakthrough best when he uses a metaphor about books and pages, so here are his articulate words:

‘Well we think that time ‘passes’, flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little, like reading a book you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.’

Shevek’s Simultaneity Theory is a perceptive metaphor for how people experience life. Each new person arrives into a fixed world, but as they grow each person feels they are discovering new things. A teenager suddenly discovers anti-capitalist theories and they think they’re discovering something new. ‘Why has no one ever thought like this?’ they wonder. Of course, as they grow they realise their brave new ideas have been well established for decades, it’s just that world economics continue to operate on a capitalist model. That doesn’t stop them from getting to their twenties, generating another idea and seeing it as revolutionary, even if again it’s been long understood. Shevek’s own life story, from his early childhood on Anarres to his decision to go to Urras, is told in chapters that alternate with chapters about his experience on Urrass. As he grows his understanding of how Anarres society operates develops. Anarres societal structures stay the same way they have been since Shevek was a child, with all their problems, but he discovers these flaws almost as if they were new. Shevek’s life story is, in its simplest interpretation, an example of the Simultaneity Principle at work in everyone’s lives.

Le Guin offers her reader a science fiction metaphor that proposes an explanation for how people experience life and presents a detailed study of one life that illustrates and humanises that metaphor. Just looking at this one strand of exploration shows that ‘The Dispossessed’ contains some thinky thoughts. If the patterns of personal development was the only idea this novel dug into it would be a satisfying novel to engage with, especially as the novel focuses on Shevek who is a strangely like able character to follow despite his remoteness and his idealism. Still, it’s fun to read a science fiction novel that contains multiple ideas, which turn up in every part of of the novels workings. ‘The Dispossessed’ is getting its intellect on and it wants readers to KEEP UP!

Shevek’s scientific principle doubles as a metaphor for Marxist theories of history. Wikipedia will now explain Marx’s theory of historical materialism to you in full. In brief, he felt that history was made up of a number of identifiable economic stages, each one characterised by particular material conditions. Each set of conditions led to circumstances that caused the destruction of each economic model and encouraged the growth of a nw economic model. Marx believed that circumstances would eventually create a dominant communist economic model. The pages that the reader keeps turning represent different stages of material circumstances. The book represents an over arching historical time line and the future time line, which Shevek’s metaphor suggests is fixed with a predetermined ending. Readers move through the book, just as society moves through history, discovering more as they go along, but the book has already been written and it has a set end point. Marx thought that he had identified all the stages that had already taken place and that he could predict which stages would follow. In his theory of material circumstances, he predicted that the state of material conditions would cease to change once a communist model of circumstances dominated the world. In Shevek’s metaphor communism would be the end of the story.

Le Guin uses her fictional societies on Urras and Anarres to set up a Marxist commentary on systems of society. First a very important caveat: I have to admit that when we ran through introductory modules to schools of historical study and literary criticism at uni, Marxist theories of analysis were the ones I paid the least attention to. I did read some of The Communist manifesto, I did study Marx’s theories on stages of history, but I did so with little joy. To eighteen year old me, The Industrial Revolution (which our introductory module focused on) seemed like a snooze fest, full of problems that my set texts were reluctant to criticise. So, when I talk about how Le Guin’s anarchist utopian society on Anarras represents Marxist theories I do so from a very shallow knowledge base. Robin Edman on the Dreams and Speculation ‘Women of Sci-fi’ discussion thread said that the anarchist society on Anarras ‘degrades into communism’, implying a separation between schools of anarchist thought and communism, or Marxism and I think I’m going to try to keep the idea that there is some distinction in mind as I write my thoughts. Otherwise I guess I’ll just hold up my hands and say ‘there may be some glaring inaccuracies here, please correct them as you find them’.

Urras contains a system of nationalist societies that in some ways represent those found on Earth. It also operates a capitalist system of trade, which influences all other areas of life. Racial, gender and class inequalities are common. In contrast Anarres operates an anarchist society where everything is shared. People generally live in dormitories, eat communally and only take as much as they need. Everyone takes part in work rotations, so that they all share in the upkeep of society. That all sounds like the standard trappings of a communist society and it’s a little complicated to explain how Urras’ system of society differs from traditional conceptions of communist societies, without going into the details of how every aspect of Anarres society is set up. The key difference between Anarres’ anarchy and a communist society from history, like 1930s communist Russia is that on Anarres people only share voluntarily.

So, women choose to share themselves with a variety of sexual partners. Parents choose to send their children to live in collective places, instead of keeping them at home. everyone shares the hard times, as well as the good. When a prolonged drought decimates crops everyone in Anarres society shares the discomfort equally. Those who don’t participate are not reprimanded, shunned, or shamed. Although Anarres society will necessarily display displeasure, this displeasure is a manifestation of how citizen’s are free to act as they wish (although culture regulates citizens from behaving in physically harmful ways, without impinging on their freedom) not an attempt to bring those who won’t share back in line. The idea of sharing freely was one of the ideas behind Russia’s communist society, but during Stalin’s rule the governing forces relied on enforcement of those ideas, while in Anarres these choices are supposed to be made voluntarily with co-operation from citizens. That’s the theory anyway, although as the book goes on the reader sees how this theory has been quietly breaking away from the early ideals.

Shevek’s science fiction theories are the centre of the novel and encourage the reader to discover the ideas I’ve outlined. However, the intellectual appeal of ‘The Dispossessed' doesn’t end with Shevek’s ideas. I mentioned the narrative of Shevek’s life seems to provide evidence for his Simultaneity Principle. As the book progresses the narrative structure is revealed as Le Guin’s attempt to plot out of the pattern of the Simultaneity Principle in her chapters, narrative lines of investigation, tense and story choices. There are two linear narrative lines. The first narrative line is set in the present, where Shevek works on Urras, which progresses in a linear manner. The second narrative line is set in the past, following Shevek on Anarres and again moves in a linear fashion. The narratives are told in alternating chapters. So, we’ve got two narratives one present, one past that through their intermingling alternate chapters come close to existing at the same time, like the present and the past do according to Shevek’s principle. The present narrative moves in a constantly linear direction, as a person traveling through the present does according to the principle. The past narrative continues to reassert its existence even as the present narrative keeps going, just like the principle.

Connecting narrative structure to ideas within the novel, transforms the structure into an active part of the novel. The revelation that the structure is connected to the science fiction ideas is surprising, as all the best meta should be, delighting the reader with a sense of cleverness and wonder at trickery concealed until the appropriate point. Once the reader notices that Le Guin has taken to connect structure and rhetoric, the crafting of ‘The Dispossessed’ takes on a newly rigorous appearance. It becomes clear how deliberate each writing decision must have been to create a structure that reflects the novel’s ideas, instead of wandering off where ever it fancies.

As ‘The Dispossessed’ comes to a close Shevek is running from the people of Urras, desperate to return to Anarres, yet through the chapters set in the past the reader has seen that Anarres utopian ideals have been gently twisted. Corruption would be too strong a word, but the society no longer operates in the pure way Odo wanted it to and Shevek is too much of an idealist (and I mean that kindly, with approval even if I never could be an idealist of Shevek’s kind) to be satisfied with a mildly flawed society. At this point he meets an Ambassador Keng from Terra, who provides some clarity on his dislike of Urras:

‘ “Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as Hell, will you ask what my world must be like?”
Sheveck was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.
“My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves.” '

There’s a clear didactic message for the reader in Keng’s comments about Terra’s fate, identified by Keng as the direct substitute for the Earth we all know by her use of Earth as a name and by the use of Terra as the Urras name for the planet. Much like Charlton Heston’s ‘You maniacs! You blew it up!’ speech at the end of Planet of the Apes, Earth was destroyed by its own people’s appetites. However, the fate of Terra is a minor note, not a major plot point. The didactic commentary that relates to the novel’s sustained metaphorical plot ideas is Shevek’s rebuttal to Keng’s idea that Urras is like paradise.

Each planet Terra, Urras, Anarres represents a stage in the development of history and how society works. Terra is an old stage collapsed, Urras is the capitalist present and Anarres the anarchist/communist future, representing Marx’s idea that collapsing stages of economic circumstances lead to the creation of new economic epochs. Shevek alludes to the importance of past and future stages in Marx’s theory in this passage:

‘ ”You can’t understand what time is,” he said. “You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich real stable present, the moment now. And you think that it is something that can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid – nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything.... ’

Then he reinforces that each stage is dependent on and leads to the next when he says later that ‘least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future.’ and he reminds the reader that each stage collapses when he says ‘it’s not stable, not solid’. Through the device of placing different stages of development on different planets that remain in the same universe Le Guin reminds readers that each stage continues to exist as parts of the same grand progressive narrative, as pages do in a book even after a reader has moved to new pages. Shevek’s Simultaneity Principle is in operation and nothing can be achieved without an appreciation and acknowledgment of the wider narrative.

By Shevek’s logic nothing can be created in the present without a proper understanding of the past and the future; nothing can be maintained in the present. He provides a damning savaging that could easily be seen as an argument against the sense of security and finality that capitalist systems promise to provide. Although it seems weird to talk about that sense of security during a recession I’m not sure recession has really rocked the majority’s ideas about capitalism and the end of this speech by Sheveck seems to agree that people may not really want change from this system:

‘You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you didn’t really believe it. You don’t believe in Anarres. You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you in this room, this moment...’

None of the ‘stage planets’ matches the ideal in this book and Shevek vows to build a new society that works based on Odo’s pure ideas. As Robin Edman put forward the idea that Anarres degrades into communism, I would suggest that the reader is being shown that communism could never be the end of history’s development as Marx predicted. Instead Le Guin proposes a continuum of development that never ends, unlike the book that Shevek used to illustrate his Simultaneity Principle. A sci-fi author, with a continued interest in how the future might develop – all is right with the world then!

* just to note that there were many cool for cats women who had already noticed this and have been doing work in the sci-fi arena for a long time

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