Still very good revolver shot

[sovay]

I had never heard of Kyril Bonfiglioli before Monday, when I read two articles about the Charlie Mortdecai novels (which I had never heard of, either). I'm not surprised that the movie is being met with a mixed reception; they sound unadaptable. I will probably look for them in a local library to see whether their idea of pitch-black comedy matches mine. The New Yorker mentioned Bonfiglioli's editorship of "a couple of small science-fiction magazines." nineweaving asked which ones. I had no idea; it wasn't mentioned.

Two nights ago, I picked up Judith Merrill's England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (1968), one of the paperback anthologies from my parents' library that came home with me in the spring. Not only does it appear to be one of the seminal collections of New Wave science fiction, it includes—in a table of contents featuring Josephine Saxton, J.G. Ballard, Daphne Castell, Thomas M. Disch, Keith Roberts, Charles Platt, Christopher Priest, Barrington J. Bayley, Pamela Zoline, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, and other people who are probably also very talented—Kyril Bonfiglioli's "Blastoff" and a short bio written interleavingly by the author and Merrill. He edited Science Fantasy, later Impulse. The list of contributors overlaps notably with Merrill's anthology and the general New Wave. Thomas Burnett Swann's The Day of the Minotaur (1966) and Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966) were both serialized under Bonfiglioli, as was most of Keith Robert's Pavane (1968). He published Christopher Priest's first short story, which means I have him in some roundabout way to thank for The Prestige (2006). And then he seems to have moved away from science fiction and into his own outrageous deconstructions of genre, which look like they were cult items until someone made them into a big-budget comedy which I don't plan to see.

But it did bring the author to my attention, for which I guess I should thank its existence. In the meantime, I am enjoying England Swings SF and devouring Ali Smith's How to Be Both (2014), which has a fifteenth-century non-binary trans protagonist (I am informed by the jacket copy that it's a dual narrative and the co-protagonist is contemporary, but so far Francescho's story alone is worth it. If you like richly imagistic writing, genderqueerness, and Quattrocento painting, pick this book up immediately). Smith is the author of one of my favorite classical retellings; I was curious when I saw she had a new book out and within thirty pages I was taking it home. If it all falls apart in the second half, I suppose I will very sadly let people know. I don't expect it to.

(I am not writing about nearly as much of anything as I would like, right now. It's not that I've stopped thinking: I don't see how to find the time. Everything is exhausting. Everything takes too long. I saw Freaks (1932) with rushthatspeaks last Saturday and that deserved a post; didn't happen. I still haven't written about any of the pre-Code films I saw in December. At least I had an antidote to The Franchise Affair. At least we made French toast on a snow day. At least I'm still alive.)

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

a fifteenth-century non-binary trans protagonist

... I was thinking the other day about a non-singular protagonist, something like the ancillaries on Ann Leckie's ships--a colonial mind. And, in thinking of that, I was thinking of how difficult it is, for me at least, to escape the confines of binary thought when it comes to presentation: that describing someone as something other than something tending toward female or tending toward male requires lots of words.

[sovay]

... I was thinking the other day about a non-singular protagonist, something like the ancillaries on Ann Leckie's ships--a colonial mind.

I'd love for someone to look at how far back the trope of a communal or collective mind goes—I tend to think of it in terms of "hive mind," where it is presented as inhuman, usually inimical, identity-erasing and creepy, like the Borg assimilations. One of the neat tricks of the Radch books is that the ancillary-crewed AIs are all of these things, being the product of an impressive dystopia, but now that they exist they are also people; the reader has to reckon with that. Off the top of my head, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953) is one of the few unambiguously positive portrayals of a group mind I've read—they call themselves a gestalt. Hm. Let me think about this some more.

And, in thinking of that, I was thinking of how difficult it is, for me at least, to escape the confines of binary thought when it comes to presentation: that describing someone as something other than something tending toward female or tending toward male requires lots of words.

We live in a pretty heavily gendered language/culture; it's not the worst-case scenario, and it's not impossible to get around, but it builds in assumptions.