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Ted Chiang is being mentioned in the same breath as Jemisin, Cixin Liu and Leckie without ever having written a novel and having been far less prolific. His debut collection was award winning and the novella, ‘Story Of Your Life’ was adapted into the critically lauded film ‘Arrival’. Exhalation, his new collection of stories (some of which have been published previously in journals and the like), continues to explore themes of consciousness, physics, free will and language.
In the title story an artificial being ponders the source and meaning of its life and draws the reader into examining systems of belief.
Chiang has the ability to weave scientific principles, many of which I would generally struggle to comprehend, into charming speculative narratives that explore the consequences of advancing technologies. This skill, I imagine, makes him appealing to a very broad readership.
In ‘Lifecycle of Software Objects’ Chiang presents a story that examines how we might mature with AI technology. Success will not come solely through programming but through personal interaction and experience, a form of ‘parenting’. ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ examines the way in which damaged human relationships might be healed through the ‘accurate’ recording of our memories. The story imagines a software that operates in tandem with our physiology to provide a form of digital memory; a precise, rational recording that might iron out the misunderstandings and misinterpretation caused by inaccurate, emotive driven memories.
While the stories are layered and often inspired by complex theories — Chiang cites Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose and the Copernican principle of cosmology theory (no less) as some of the inspirations in the book — the stories always contain an emotional core. Wonderful stuff! Love it.
There is always a little controversy surrounding novels that are essentially fictionalised biographies. ‘…let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story’. ‘Outside Looking In’ by T.C. Boyle and ‘Life of David Hockney A Novel’ by Catherine Cusset , just released, very different in tone, both take up the challenge.
LSD and all that! T.C. Boyle’s ‘Outside Looking In’ revisits the sixties through the prism of the Harvard drug scandal and draws on the utopian experiments, instigated by Timothy Leary and associates, in Zihuatanejo, Mexico and the founding of the Millbrook living experiment — projects that centred on Communal living, psychedelic experimentation and free love. There must be a bookstore like that somewhere! Ha!
Boyle takes us inside via a fictional couple, a graduate psychology student and his wife, who are initiated into Leary’s inner circle. There first trip results in transcendent sex and the promise of LSD induced enlightenment. Boyle’s reflection on, and concern with, the implications of ‘the unhinging effect’ of LSD amongst other psychedelics (for some a positive and for others a disturbing journey), soon comes into play, but the style and tone refrain from being judgmental. Boyle presents rich characters that must discover things for themselves. Boyle’s characters experience the joys of expanded consciousness but also suffer from attacks of insecurity, jealousy and the quandary of the temporary nature of bliss. It hits home when we see where everyone ends up. The quest for internal freedom invariably collides with the persistence of external realities.
Ultimately an ‘affectionate satire of the utopian impulse’. Early on in the book Boyle talks about the discovery of LSD. I hope it’s a true story.
In ‘Life of David Hockney: a Novel’, Catherine Cusset romances the working class lad all the way from Bradford to his status as a national treasure.
‘Mum, I just sold dad.’ Hockney tells his mother on the telephone after selling his first work, a ‘muddy’ portrait of his father. Cusset’s expose pieces together Hockney’s life from a range of biographies, interviews, essays, films and articles — from the earliest memories of his father painting and repairing bicycles and prams for resale, his time in art school and his love affair with California to his experience with the AIDS epidemic decades later. Cusset is a fan and obviously sees Hockney as an art hero. In the early sixties when he was producing paintings like ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging and ‘Man in Shower in Beverly Hills’ homosexuality was still a criminal offence. Through the omniscient narrator we learn not only about Hockney’s art and life but about his understanding of the art world. ‘There isn’t a cosmopolitan city his work hasn’t touched’.
‘Never be too precious’, Hockney apparently burnt all his second rate art once a year. His first rate set a record price for a work by a living artist $90.3 million, Christie’s 2018.
Is Winterson too late to a crowded field? Chiang, Exhalation. McEwan, Machines Like Me. James Smythe’s, Still Dream. Will Eave’s, Murmur.
Not according to Sam Byers. Winterson’s novel ‘makes space for itself…thanks to a deeply pertinent engagement with hybridity’.
Jeanette Winterson’s reboot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Frankissstein, has just landed. Some reviewers have commented on Winterson’s tendency at moments to use characters to mouth clumsy, possibly contentious takes on controversial topics. Brave or misguided? Audacious?
Winterson begins with an insightful history lesson into the origins of the original Frankenstein before launching into a playful rewrite set in modern times and immersed in smart technology and artificial intelligence.
The author utilises her characters, Ry, a male-presenting transgender doctor, and Victor, a charming AI professor who is drawn to Ry while doing pioneering work on uploading the brain. A manufacturer of sex-bots and an evangelical Christian, look at what the implications are of creating new consciousness.
Byers sees it as a ‘dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of AI and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism’. Winterson also ponders whether or not it’s necessary that we be so selfish - I think…
‘The Overstory’, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Powers. An epic reflection on ecology and nature entwined within a narrative of American migration.
‘Room For a Stranger’ the new novel by award winning ‘Australia Day’ writer Melanie Cheng, examines issues such as racism and isolation. It looks at the way the elderly are both valued and perceived. An elderly Australian Woman takes in a Chinese student, Cheng deftly alternates between the perspectives of each character and we bear witness to their alienation, confusion, intimacy and loneliness. A beautifully conceived contemporary Australian novel.
‘Milkman’ by Anna Burns, in a smaller paperback format. Great modernist fiction that the Washington Post suggests holds its own along with Faulkner, Woolf and Joyce. A book that ‘vibrates with the anxieties of our own era’ – terrorism, sexual harassment, irreconcilable social division. Burns states she was inspired by her own experience, ‘I grew up in a place that was rife with violence, distrust and paranoia, and peopled by individuals trying to navigate and survive…’
‘Normal People’ by Booker winner Sally Rooney. A novel that Rooney suggests is about, ‘two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone.’ Of course in conjunction there is also the examination of an undercurrent within their community of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Rooney is the real deal.
A Latin Scholar with attitude, Madeline Miller’s, ‘Circe’ is back on the shelf. A stunning, intelligent reimagining of ‘The Odyssey’.
Quality Literature
Preorder: Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh
Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta's world upside down.
A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.
Quality Crime
Preorder: This Storm by James Ellroy.
The second novel in Ellroy's second 'L.A. Quartet', which began with the publication of Perfidia in 2014.
January, 42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early-warning signal of Chaos.
