Stephen King, Vladmir Sorokin

Sci fi and the problem of names

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

I read this book because it was on the shelf of an Airbnb where I was staying in Vermont. Also on the shelf were The Shining (the cover missing), the first book of The Lord of the Rings, a guide to local tree identification, and many other appealing paperbacks. I decided to read this classic fantasy novel to do justice to this good bookshelf, which reminded me of ideal reading experiences on childhood vacations, total idleness, and complete absorption in fantastic worlds.

The Dark Tower starts like this:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.           

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.

It's terrific. I didn't think I liked fantasy writing, but what I actually don't like is the wizards and trolls stuff. But The Dark Tower is its own original fantasy world, composed of some familiar and some unfamiliar elements and no wizards. It's really pretty good. I've written elsewhere about Stephen King, how he's not the world's greatest writer but he has talent, and The Dark Tower reminded me of this vividly. It's hard to know what to say about talent. The easier thing to talk about is prose. Some of it in The Dark Tower is actually not bad:

“Brown woke him up five hours later. It was dark. The only light was the dull cherry glare of the banked embers.

“Your mule has passed on,” Brown said. “Dinner’s ready.”

“How?” Brown shrugged.

“Roasted and boiled, how else? You picky?”

“No, the mule.”

“It just laid over, that’s all. It looked like an old mule.”

Some is:

He watched the boy as he smoked, and his mind turned back on Cuthbert, who had always laughed — to his death he had gone laughing — and Cort, who never laughed, and on Marten, who sometimes smiled — a thin, silent smile that had its own disquieting gleam... like an eye that slips open in the dark and discloses blood.

It's not hard to find clumsy writing in the book. What's harder is to say exactly how it is that all the characters feel alive and aren't just placeholders and how King manages to tell every episode, including the very silly ones, with such verve. In the epilogue to the edition I read (which itself is lively and full of energy) King reveals that he has no idea what will happen in the rest of the series. "Except," he goes on, "somewhere inside, I do."

Somewhere inside I know all of these things, and there is no need of an argument, or a synopsis, or an outline… When it's time, these things – and their relevance to the gunslinger's quest – will roll out as naturally as tears or laughter.

My response to this, when I read it, was not to scoff that it was glib and corny but to shake my head and mutter, "You son of a bitch..." at his well-deserved self-confidence. King writes with the inspiration of someone telling a ghost story at summer camp. The feeling the reader gets is that every episode in this book just came to him. "That's great," you can imagine him saying, typing away, "That's terrific..." He makes other genre writers look inhibited and unimaginative. In my post about Houellebecq, I mentioned King's memorable sex scenes. The Dark Tower has plenty of these, featuring the gunslinger in combination with various female inhabitants of this dying world, including an obese preacher who's been enchanted somehow by the Man in Black.

Her skin was creamy, unmarked, lovely. He thought that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a sudden red lust for her that made him feel shaky, and he turned his head and looked away.

Hardly the reason to read the book – but to me stuff like this stands for King's willingness to just go there, to include everything. I was going to say King makes me think about the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction, but actually he doesn't, because he never crosses the territory into literary fiction, and it doesn't matter. Really it's hard to know how to praise The Dark Tower, and King, without sounding patronizing. I guess I both envy and look down on his writing. I liked The Gunslinger a lot. But I mean no insult to its author when I say I regret that I missed the chance to read it when I was eleven.

*

Ice Trilogy, by Vladimir Sorokin

Sci-fi has to be a little insane to work, or at least a little silly. It’s usually very badly written, but this doesn't mean literary writers can decide to take a crack at it and turn out a potboiler whenever they want to. There are real writers who do this with detective novels, but I don't think there are any dabblers in the sci-fi genre. You have to be all-in. Crime is cool, but you have to be willing to make yourself ridiculous to write about space aliens and future worlds. You have to be willing to make yourself ridiculous even to write literary fiction, which has greater prestige than sci-fi, so the number of literary writers willing to take this plunge for the lesser genre is basically zero. Soviet sci-fi is good: Zamyatin, Bulgakov. Karel Capek, who was Czech. But real sci-fi is post-WWII, and pretty much none of this is good. Philip K. Dick may have been an interesting guy, but he couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag.

But the Ice Trilogy is sci-fi, and literature. Of course it's set in the present and the past, not the future, and on earth, not alien planets. But it certainly has aliens, along with alien technology and customs and in general a wide-eyed and unself-conscious depiction of impossible events. What's surprising is that Sorokin can write about non-alien life well too. In fact, like other Russian writers, he seems to excel at writing about the most earthy subjects: cold weather, food, children, little moments of city life.

This down-to-earth instinct serves him well when it comes to tackling the problem of names. Names are always tough for science fiction. What do you call a person living, say, 31,000 years in the future? What do you call an alien being? The names of the most important aliens in Ice are: Khram, Ep, Bro, Fer, Ig, and Kra. Perhaps these syllables have some significance in Russian, but they work just as well as nonsense, and nonsense seems the tasteful way to do this, rather than trying to borrow glamour by adapting names from mythology or history (the always disappointing Paul Atreides, for example).

No book report is possible for Ice, but the premise is that all life was a mistake. The creators and real inhabitants of the universe are beings of light who through an error ended up trapped inside certain human beings. The ice of the title is a fragment of the cosmic ur-substance that crash-landed on earth in the Tunguska Event of 1905 and which, properly used, can free the beings from their meat prisons and let them come to consciousness as their true selves. These pure beings, once liberated, commune with each other in rituals of transcendant love but show fascistic indifference to the billions of human beings who do not contain a fragment of the light, whom they refer to as "empty shells" and "meat machines."

The trilogy is very long and contains some boring and redundant sections. I think it could have used some editing, but then again, how do you edit good science fiction, which is so rare that it's almost one of a kind? The excess and the eccentricity are such a part of it that maybe to cut any of it out would be disfiguring. The novels get tedious at times, but all in all it's wonderful how Sorokin takes this premise and develops it so fully, creating a kind of secret history of the terrible Russian 20th century. I think about this book a few months later and find myself asking that square's question: "Where does he get his ideas?"