THE MALACIA TAPESTRY, a late 1976 Club review

THE MALACIA TAPESTRY
BRIAN ALDISS
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand medieval city where all change has been outlawed, a roguish young actor tempts fate and dinosaurs, all in the name of love

By law, nothing can change in Malacia—a teeming, eternal city of dukes, players, wizards, merchants, beggars, ape-men, lizard-boys, and courtesans—but that is of no great consequence to Perian de Chirolo. An out-of-work actor and unabashed rogue, he is well satisfied with his lot as long as there’s coin, eager young women to bed, and the occasional adventure. Perhaps it is this thrill-seeking spirit—or simply the lure of noble beauty—that makes Perian imprudently agree to take part in a mad inventor’s illegal experiments, since such foolishness will never be tolerated in Malacia. But Perian’s rash actions will only lead him on to further indiscretions, winning him first fame and then notoriety, causing him to be hunted, hounded, martyred, and trapped in a fight to the death with a razor-toothed Ancestral Beast on the outskirts of the city. And perhaps most frightening of all, Perian de Chirolo will find himself in love.

Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss, one of science fiction’s most able and ingenious creative artists, performs a truly astonishing feat of alternate-world building, immersing the reader in an unforgettable Medieval fantasy realm rich in color, incident, invention, and peril—and of course, giant lizards. Welcome to Malacia.

I USED SWEETIENUBBINS' YULE GIFT CARD ON A SALE FOR THIS LOVELY TREAT. THANK YOU.

My Review: A hangover from The 1976 Club, I had this tee’d up on my Kindle to give myself a bit of backup in case I really hated my chosen title, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, and needed to abandon ship. I didn’t like that read too terribly much, but it wasn’t so awful I had to Pearl-Rule it. This book, as a back-up choice, would’ve fared about the same.

I don’t hate it; I’m as drawn to the fantasy of a medieval Balkan city trapped in Time by powerful forces that aren’t christian in the way of our world as I ever was. The existence of Ottomans (a very real branch of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Muslim…and I didn’t specifically notice but am pretty sure we’re not really made privy to their religious beliefs. (If no christians, then no Muslims.)

I’d forgotten a lot of my skills at navigating heteronormativity. Forty-five years on, living in a world where even the slow-moving laws of the land now recognize my right to marry anyone I choose to, I’d completely forgotten how it feels to have to insert myself into straight stories without recourse to my real home. There are oodles of SF/fantasy stories with men who love men in them now. I don’t *have* to come to the straight-people’s table to get a scrap grudgingly thrown!

And that was worth three stars to me. I’m clear now about how very, very much my world has changed. The flipside of that is I’m also clear on how awful it is for bigots and small-souled withholders to live in this more accepting and generous world…why they’re fighting so hard to close the floodgates that were opened very much against their wishes and desires. It is, after all, Author Aldiss’s primary thesis. The great and the good of Malacia have, in concert with the rest of this not-our-Earth, stopped Progress since they can’t stop Time. My half-formed hypothesis is that (fictional) Malacia and its Byzantium and Duchy of Tuscady and so on are in exact parallel with 1976…just on a different Earth in a Multiverse. Not being a Copenhagenist about matters quantum, I’m pretty sure that’s Reality.

If you need any further evidence for my hypothesis, there’s the continuing existence of dinosaurs aka “ancestral animals” and the presence of actual half-human, half-goat satyrs. But tech is stalled in the sixteenth-ish century, and has been for quite a long time if the internal chat is to be credited:

”Perian thinks the story banal, Papa, Armida said, “flashing me a glance I could not interpret. “He says it might as well have been written a million years ago.”

“An interesting remark. Surely one’s interest in the play is precisely that it might have been written a million years ago. Some things are eternal and must be eternally re-expressed. Those desperate straits of love…appeal to us because they apply as much today as yesterday.”

It is absolutely no surprise at all, having read that…peroration…to learn that Author Aldiss describes the speaker, a nobleman of Malacia, as speaking with “...words {of} a dry quality, as if his mouth had developed a prejudice against saliva.” Oh myyyy, as Takei would say.

The tale’s a solidly crafted one. It is, I confess, a bit of the read’s pleasure that it rides the rails already laid down by generations of tale-tellers gone before. What I enjoyed was the worldly setting, the worldbuilding that Author Aldiss chose. His zahnoscope, that not-quite-daguerreotype means of photography…do pardon, mercurization...described in it outlines so the reader can see in their own eye the end results. The careful and wordy descriptions of clothing…after all, a first-person story told by an actor would dwell on surfaces and details!...the same with the ceremonies, the hurly-burly of Malacian life, the small and immediate circle of roving player Perian de Chirolo’s eyesight. It also establishes reasons for Author Aldiss to make snide remarks like the director of the story being told in the new photographic process “moving us about like chairs” and Armida, his love-light, being snappish with his faithless self so he observes, “We bit our tongues—being unable to bite each other’s…”. That’s the fourth star right there.

Then the lumpen-ness endemic to Aldiss's expository writing obtrudes.

”Beware of all things fair, my son, whether a girl or a friend. What looks to be fair may be foul under the surface. The Devil needs his traps. You should regard also you own behaviour, lest it seem fair to you but is really an excuse for foulness.” And so on.

That last is Perian making it plain Author Aldiss knows he’s moralizing and in a tiresome way…a suitable ironic distancing from the fact that he means it. How can I say that with such certainty? Because this is merely the first iteration of the same “shiny surfaces do not cover great depths” message. The second, more beefily stodgy, is the plot of the play that Perian and his Armida are part of in this new mercurization zahnoscope technology: It is literally, beat for beat, the plot of the book we’re reading. You’d have to be insentient not to Get It.

Therein the lack of that fifth star. While I agree with the reviews of the time that this is a good entertaining story, I don’t think…and didn’t then, because of my lack of memory of anything except the broadest strokes of it…that this is a Great Work, a Classic of the Field.

Good read, though.

#The1976Club: WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy...well titled indeed ***SPOILERS***

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
MARGE PIERCY
Ballantine Books
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before.

Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.

THIS READ WAS PART OF A LOOSE BLOGGER READ-A-THON CALLED THE 1976 CLUB. THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING BELOW.

My Review: I began this read eager to know why I've owned several editions of this book over the decades...one from my bookstore-having sister in the Seventies, one from my Manhattan years in the later Eighties, a British one from the Aughties...but never remember reading it! And now that I've read it again, I remember why I don't remember.

What a disappointment.

The ending just...isn't. The sense of resolution, of the fit between story and ending, is unsatisfying to me. And it took over sixty pages to get there.

You know from the publisher's synopsis that Connie Ramos, our third-person-limited PoV character, is a mental patient. It's the 1970s and psychopharmacology wasn't as advanced as it is now (I'd argue it's still roughly where surgery was in the pre-Lister 1840s). Much that is wrong with Connie is situational, and it's utterly unsurprising. She's "treated" by the standards of the day, which is to say confined and contained and circumscribed so she can't act out her acute agony. She's in need of psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; she gets diagnosed as schizophrenic and the full machinery of experimental psychology gets to work on her.

But are they wrong? She claims she's been to the year 2137. And the world is....

Off we go! Luciente reaches her to show her a beautiful, granola-and-grown-out-hair Seventies egalitarian-hippie-commune future that I loved. "Gender" roles? Umm...what is per (their all-purpose pronoun, love that!) talking about, Luciente? Sex is biological...what is gender role? Part of the false dichotomies we've left behind.... What *wasn't* left behind was the of-the-time disrespect for sex work and workers, equating them to slaves. Reductive, shown to be inaccurate, but very feminist-70s. What isn't left behind is the disrespect of the future for the past. Luciente and all per people in Mattapoisett seem to know less than a US grade-school child about their own history. Connie says things that dumbfound these folk regularly...did all the books and digital records get destroyed? Then find a way to tell me so! (Goodness knows Author Piercy isn't afraid of infodumps.)

What I mostly didn't love was the way Connie, my PoV!, didn't look around and note things! But...well...this is a story about an abused and frankly impoverished and ethnically othered, therefore expendable, woman. All of those things are still stigmas, but they were a great deal moreso in the Seventies, and as Luciente's world (is Mattapoisett a Utopia, really, because war and societal conflict still exist there and then) bleeds into her own reality the Seventies Bellevue staff become less and less empathetic, more and more afraid of and for her, and act with more controlling behavior. It wasn't a joyride for Connie before but, as the life with Luciente recedes and Connie becomes mired in the mental hospital's horrors, the way she copes is...awful.

The aforementioned sixty-plus pages. I didn't like 'em. I did, however, recognize 'em. The months I spent in a locked ward in 2014 were a real eye-opener for me, and this might be why I didn't much enjoy the ending. My roommates were schizophrenic men. I had a really strong introduction to the hopelessness of schizophrenia and its utterly ineffective treatments. I think a big part of my getting my own brain back under my control was my sense of deep, abiding gratitude that I don't have *that* problem.

But does Connie? Is that really what's going on here? In her records, which we see, it says her intelligence is "Average" and is this detailed, consistent fantasy really something a person of average intelligence could come up with? It was here that I began to think the ending, besides just not being to my taste, actually missed a trick. What occurs isn't unrealistic. What it is, though, is without nuance. It asserts that Reality Is Reality. That's what we've just spent over three hundred pages interrogating! Taking that tack over quite an extended ending is...well...why not keep the interrogation, is Connie mad? is Connie telling us the truth? is Connie ever going "home"? going, that is, back to Mattapoisett. Instead the story ends with a THUD. And that wasn't at all on my Bingo card.

Author Piercy's prose is adequate.

“Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”
–and–
“Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.”
–and–
Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Never that I saw did it get better than that, and those are peaks that I've chosen. They're good, they're good, before someone says I'm saying otherwise. What they aren't is...tingly. That feeling you get when someone writes something that spears you with its sounds and feelings. I never got that in this read...and I'm pretty sure most others didn't either. What I saw praised, when I read the reviews others had written of the book after I finished my own read, was the ideas Author Piercy presented for the future, the cold analysis of the present...but not the prose. It's fine! It's not awkward, or lumpen; it's...fine.

But that's all it is. And that, I think, is my best summation of this read: It was fine, it had much to recommend it, but its heights weren't all that high and its lows weren't low.

It was fine.

THE 1976 CLUB...not a title, an Event

I periodically participate in the Internet-wide read-and-review year-based "Clubs" that some book bloggers do. This one coming up is The 1976 Club.

First Alfred A. Knopf edition, 1976
I decided to read Marge Piercy's feminist SF time-travel classic, Woman on the Edge of Time. It's been on my TBRadar since ~1977, has come so close to being read that I have purchased it at least twice, but somehow hasn't made it to the top of the pile...until now. If not for Neglected Books, Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, and Simon from Stuck in a Book (linked above), who knows when/if it'd ever have happened.

                                   My 2016 Del Rey Books edition
So, anyone else want to try something from 1976? Look at your library on your cataloging site (on LibraryThing, a free site, you can sort by copyright dates!). Wikipedia has a handy-dandy listicle of "notable" things published that year; the various awards given all have their honorees listed by date, eg the World Fantasy Award lists annual winners at this link and it includes multiple categories! There's no reason to limit yourselves...read a/some/all the novel(s)/story(s)/poem(s) on the Pulitzers list, or any other list of Awards/Prizes/Medals given in 1976 at the Awards Archive.

This is a chance to read something unexpected, read something new to you, read something exactly like/opposite to your usual preferred length, category, genre. Or embrace your guilt, choose something you already own that was published that year. Do it, in other words, however the heck you want...and still have a special time period to do it in (or by, if you read slowly)...with as many or as few others you'd like to tell about this fun Internet Event.

Sounds pretty much can't-lose-ish to me.