weird capsule reviews

george stewart, samuel delany

Unrelated to the capsule reviews, but I was honored to see Rich Horton nominate some of my ghost stories for “Best Short Story” in the Hugos. I actually did not know they were eligible.¹ Anyway I was very touched.

The Good Stuff: 2025

Also, I don’t have enough to say about this for a capsule review, but I finished Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry recently and find myself surprised nobody has adapted it for the screen. There’s a whole story about a vampire going to therapy in there! What gives? (There is a play.)

---

Earth Abides (George R. Stewart, 1949)

Suppose a third of mankind got wiped out by a plague. Suppose you survived. Suppose there was nothing very interesting or important or even especially talented about you. You just lived, unlike everybody else you ever knew, and you don’t even know why. That is the situation of Isherwood Williams, otherwise known as “Ish.”² Isherwood goes on a road trip across America, finds love, and tries to re-found civilization. In this last task, he mostly fails. Ish succeeds at preserving a relatively sane, free, and democratically-minded part of humanity, but he can’t transmit culture. He can’t even really make anybody understand why they should try to teach their children to read.

I didn’t love this book.³ The argument as presented throughout Earth Abides is that Ish cannot transmit culture to the next generation because their needs are too primitive and the development of the arts or of planning in the long term must come later. (For instance, the children cannot enjoy jazz, because it is too complicated.) It really is an argument because Stewart has blocks of italicized text that present a commentary on events that stands slightly outside them, and through these italicized blocks he presents the case that if reduced in circumstances people will cease to perceive differences between “work” and “play.” So they will not have culture:

When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats, or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay—that was not work, though often the breath came hard and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or tended the fire at the entrance to the rock-shelter—that was not work either.…

But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking…. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

Thus all of Ish’s children are dumb (except for one), they can’t really work at things or think far ahead, and so on. With the exception of Em, Ish’s wife, the women in the book exist only in terms of getting pregnant. The only person interested in raising the children or educating them is Ish. And he just can’t teach them.⁴ But like… lots of not particularly smart people have taught their not particularly smart children how to read and do mathematics. One of the adults is a carpenter and after he dies it’s just like well I guess there aren’t carpenters anymore. Why wouldn’t he have an apprentice?

There was a realism to the book that I appreciated about how little average people would be equipped to try to maintain the world they live in and would instead be reduced to scavenging if nobody in your area happened to have special knowledge—as with, for instance, cars, which are basically picked up and abandoned when they break down because people don’t know how to fix or maintain them. I didn’t expect Ish to go forth and maintain California’s hydroelectric power plants after reading how in a book, as a Heinlein hero would. But when it came to the children, I felt as if I had to believe that I was reading about a group of survivors who were not as capable as the average person but in fact less capable. Ish’s “Tribe” lives in peace and without fear of hunger or (for much of the book) disease; they raid grocery stores and live in abandoned suburban homes. There is no reason for them to neglect passing on skills to the degree that they do. I finished the book feeling I’d been lectured by somebody who never quite convinced me and whose point was additionally never very clear.

---

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany, 1984)

Some writers you love naturally and some you love unnaturally. I have found that with Samuel Delany I usually end up starting a book, putting it down, and starting it again a few times before I find a way into his writing. The funny thing about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is that I did not have to do this, even though it’s much more abstract than Nova (a book which took me a few attempts to get started reading).

I think my experience was helped along by two things: one, I was warned by a reader of this newsletter that Stars largely consists of people explaining things to each other. Two, I was also reading M. John Harrison’s Light, a book where I gave up “trying to follow what was happening” by at least the halfway mark.⁵ Harrison’s approach of extreme disorientation rhymes with Delany’s, but in Light disorientation feels like an end in itself, and in Stars it’s a means to an end. One of the primary cast members of Stars, Rat Korga, is pretty literally deprived of the ability to understand his circumstances. His ability is sporadically restored to him, but we begin the book from his perspective and his experience as what might as well be the least important and least enlightened member of the human race.

In the future of Stars, knowledge is easily acquired, but understanding and wisdom are not. It is a trivial thing to read a book in seconds or learn another language. For those who can travel between planets, the easy acquisition of knowledge and language place them in a state of permanent cultural relativism.⁶ Korga briefly attains a sort of hyperliteracy and masters a canon of texts within three minutes, only to discover that they are a bunch of women writers nobody really reads (and which the person who has given him literacy didn’t really intend for him to read):

“What a strange view of world culture you must have!” She leaned forward and shook her head. “When I was packing those, I called myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could—nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to rifle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them—though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. Anyway.” She pressed another pedal again. Outside, headlights brightened. “I decided I might as well take those too, as a lark, and loaded the box up with cubes from her special shelf. I’m afraid they were the top three inches in the carton. From the titles, it sounds to me like that’s what you got stuck in!”

“But …” he began.

She pushed the thrust bar. The transport lurched on into desert night. “But Horeb—Saya Artif—” he said, “was the most famous writer … in the world.” He added: “For almost thirty years,” and felt odd making a contestatory statement about his world; till now it had never occurred to him he’d had one.

But then, in a moment that had me almost shouting “no,” Korga loses that literacy, and in so doing loses what he’s learned, this canon that only he and this absent librarian care about, and even the ability to express what he’s lost.

This gaining and losing of literacy is not the story of the book, but it is the motion of the book, in which things are gained and lost over and over. Things are explained, things are learned, things are unlearned. Around this story of individual gains and losses, bigger events in world (galactic?) history are taking place. There are gigantic conflicts going on in the larger universe of Stars. Maybe we should care about them, but we don’t. What we care about are these moments in which somebody briefly sees a kind of wholeness of the world and then loses it and now can only see absence. A truly beautiful book, if hard to describe. I will probably try to write about it again, as I don’t feel satisfied with this attempt.…

1. I am not able to nominate anything for the Hugos because I am not a Worldcon member. Thus I cannot execute what now seems to me to be an ingenious plan:

• Get on Hugo ballot (two nominations ought to do it, right?).

• Lose.

• Go to loser’s party.

• Interview George R.R. Martin for book.

2. The resonance with “Ishi,” the last surviving Yahi, is surely on purpose.

3. Inevitably, it raises comparisons with Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, in which a group of tourists crash-lands on a habitable planet and ends up divided over whether or not to try to restart civilization. The blunt and pragmatic point raised by Russ’s narrator in that book is simply that, even if the male survivors institute their planned system of raping and impregnating the female passengers, they can’t restart civilization because there are not enough people. (She ultimately carries the day because she kills everybody else.)

While Russ probably read Stewart’s book, We Who Are About To… is a response to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover Landfall, not Earth Abides (you can read about the context for that here, or you can wait for me to write this book, or you can both). The circumstances are somewhat different, in that Ish knows his group are not the only survivors. He is not trying to restart humanity from a gene pool of fewer than ten adults.

4. In the end he settles for “inventing” the bow and arrow so that he will have ensured his descendants that much of an edge.

5. For that reason, it’s not getting a capsule review. Light did leave me with a question: there are multiple science fiction stories about girls turning into computers.… Do boys ever turn into computers? I don’t mean that “the computer is voiced by a man” or whatever but that a one hundred percent not computer human boy becomes a computer.

I will say the ending of Light had me like: I think I’d be really moved and even crying a bit if I had grasped anything happening up until this point. Like I can sense the version of myself that is moved and crying but she is not actualizing because I did not do the things necessary for her to exist.

6. A favorite moment for me along these lines:

“Was she a major or minor writer?”

I smiled. “Personally, among poets, she’s my favorite. There’re a good number of study-groups devoted to her work, here and on many other worlds. But there are many thousands of poets neither of us will ever hear of with greater followings among people who, themselves, have never heard of her.”