Two of the best SF novels
I read in 2023 happened to revolve around the Orpheus myth.
In Temi Oh’s
More Perfect (her sophomore, after 2019’s nearly perfect
Do You Dream of Terra-Two?) a young man named Orpheus and a young woman named Moremi trade point of view chapters in a near future Britain where a semi-voluntary implant (the Pulse) allows users direct cortex access to the Internet (the Panopticon, in the novel’s language).
Born to an off the grid freedom fighter of a father, Orpheus has a decidedly ambivalent relation to the technology; Moremi’s lightly Luddite-leaning mother drives her to its wholehearted embrace. The two navigate their relationships—to the tech and the surveillance state it enables, to their families or lack thereof, to their labor, to their bodies and dependencies, to their traumas, and (this is a dual-POV novel, you have to see this coming) to each other—in ways that are often profound and always propulsive.
I read Oh’s debut three times in fewer years, the first time I’ve reread a book that avidly since (well, her work was bound to come up eventually; here’s to ripping the bandaid off) the first three novels in the school saga of The Boy Who Lived. The Potter septology’s influence is worn fairly openly, with both of Oh’s books referencing it explicitly. In
Terra-Two?, it is a dogeared Latin translation of the first book. In
More Perfect, Orpheus sees a “gorgeous Gothic revival hotel” that reminds him of it as he’s going through withdrawals in a post-Flood London, “across the road from St. Pancras station.”
This reference to “The Harry Potter Shop at Station 9 3/4s” (from
their website: “the first ever Harry Potter Shop to open anywhere in the world outside of a themed visitor attraction”) calls out the souvenir shop aspects of Rowling’s writing. Without attributing to Temi Oh any position whatsoever, this reference is, in my reading, clarifying. Specifically on the question of inheritance. Or, if you like, on the question of anxiety of influence, since I can’t imagine who would want to be in Rowling’s line of succession at this point. Without belaboring the point, Oh is the better worldbuilder, and that’s not her primary focus. As masterfully demonstrated in
Terra-Two?, and as repeated in
More Perfect, she writes primarily from and for character psychology.
Every character in her novels, from the point of view to the supporting cast down to one-scene plot movers, walks that fine line between being relatable and robust. None of them, not even the shitty ex-boyfriends who don’t show up once in a scene, feel like anything less than plausible people. But they also still function as characters in a story.
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Since Modernism, character and plot have been at war. And I think that war still wages.
But before we get to that war, a final note on succession. I joked earlier that I couldn’t imagine who would want to be Rowling’s inheritor. The joke is that there isn’t one. Like the demon, they are legion. Rowling’s inheritance is dead labor, witnessed in the style guides of every major publisher’s Young Adult imprint. Unlike her blockbuster forebear, Stephen King, who racked up so many hits so quickly (in a wildly different publishing landscape) that he famously became uneditable (see:
The Stand complete and uncut), Rowling became editing itself.
If you feel inclined to test this hypothesis, here is an experiment: grab any book by a competent author who has written fiction and Young Adult since, say, the turn of the millennium. I have a
couple authors in mind, and I suspect that
some others would
bear this out as well. Choose any chapter number. Read that same chapter in both of the books.
What you’ll find, I posit, is that the latter are never more “developmentally appropriate.” It will always express the same themes, or the ones on the authors mind. It will bear the same cultural and literary assumptions the author requires of any reader of their fiction, and will, though it may require squinting sometimes to blur the sanded-down edges, still be solidly-paced writing with some standout sentences. What you will also find, across the author function, is a thumb on the scale.
When I read Young Adult fiction, that thumb has a very defined affect. It is condescension. No matter the author, no matter the publisher (but mattering very much the genre), the Young Adult novel treats its reader as being as incapable of critical engagement with the text as JK Rowling proved herself to be when her biggest controversy was declaring that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay—despite negative textual evidence—in order to court those then-young millenials who would grow into the fearsome transgendereds she has since made it her mission to Just Ask Questions about.
The staggering closemindedness of the Potter series is old hat at this point, and its subsumption into industry has largely (of course not entirely) subsumed that as well. The style guides don’t demand goblins be anti-Semitic stereotypes or that you marry the man you once argued with about whether slaves were happy (or, y’know, the tokenized names straight out of
Breakfast At Tiffany's). They do, at least as far as I can tell from a good chunk of reading, demand a homogeneity of diction that reflects the lived experience/vocabulary of no teenager I’ve ever known, been, heard of, or considered plausible. They impose these things in pursuit of the runaway success of Rowling, whose playbook they extrapolated from and return to like gospel.
(A second hypothesis: pick any four books in the Young Adult genre (really a marketing term, but what genre isn’t?) from the decades since its coinage in the 60s to the 90s, and any four from the front and back half of the 2000s and the 2010s. Absenting author overlap, I would be surprised if the same experiment—pick a chapter and read it all the way through in all eight books—didn’t show that the first four books, despite having way more similarity in subject matter, weren’t way more differentiated. One from it’s closest neighbor in underlying tone, than all four of the latter combined.)
Harold Bloom was wrong and an asshole when he claimed that reading Rowling would not lead to reading real works of literature for two reasons, other than the third reason, which is that Harold Bloom was overwhelmingly wrong and always an asshole. The first is that the simple, multigenerational facts have panned out. Millenials and Zoomers have grown up, and it turns out that we can teach the Classics as well as anyone ever has (when the neoliberal university allows us the chance, of course, as it so rarely does). The second is that for 20 years, the mode of production, that structure that organizes social relations, took Thatcher’s big TINA and applied it more and more locally.
Capitalism said There Is No Alternative. Not just to this mode of production, but even to books for young readers that aren’t by JK Rowling. If not in signature, then certainly in the spirit of the style guide. And wouldn’t you know it, at the same time it swallowed up bookstores with venture capital, libraries with budget cuts that were diverted to militarization of the state and specifically police, and schools with Left Behind Acts and bloated administrations that turned them into landlords and businesses.
With
More Perfect, Temi Oh (and, to her absolute credit with the
Binti trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor) points to a future where the deadlock between Young Adult literature and its generic counterpart might break. Take, for instance, this passage from pages 211-212:
It’s 2am, as quiet as anywhere ever is at this hour in London. But then she turns and raises her hands to set a filter that he accepts. The cracked pavement becomes the black-ice surface of a stage. The streetlamps are spotlights and behind her are ghost dancers. The curtain is drawn. Orpheus watches as it rises, and an imaginary orchestra starts to play. Already captivated.
She is in the centre of the stage; she raises her arms and begins to dance.
Orpheus sits on the hot stone step in front of his apartment block as she dances a part from a ballet of The Bacchae. At the climax of the dance, she tears her son limb from limb. Her holographic corps members spin around her like shadow puppets. In the dance, she is a maenad, manic initiate of the cult of Dionysus, the god of the grape-harvest and winemaking, ritual madness and religious ecstasy. Orpheus is shocked by the sight of her. On the street a moment before, in her leopard-print leggings and crop-top, plain and strange, but now she is dazzling, now she is setting the imaginary stage on fire in a virtuosic pas de deux. God-crazed ballerina, given over to her wildest instincts. The translucent maenades riot across a moonlit glade, pulling bones from flesh, dressed in fox-skins and bull-helmets, mouths wet with blood in mad celebration. They are like witches, wild with delight: one breast-feeds a wolf cub, another sinks her fingernails into the mud and milk bubbles out.
Moremi is playing the role of Agave, the mother of the King of Thebes, driven mad by Dionysus when her son refuses to worship him. In the hologram Moremi is crowned with ivy vines, in a flesh-coloured dress, dancing the wild dance of maenads. Orpheus can barely watch the climax of the ballet when the women of Thebes descend on King Pentheus. In their madness they believe that he is a lion. He dances a frantic pas de deux with Moremi, his eyes pleading, hoping for her to see him. It’s the most tense moment. Is that a flicker of recognition in her eyes? No. She grabs his elbow, pushes her heel into his ribs and wrenches his arm from its socket. The orchestra swells, echoing the howls of his torment. Which is when the other maenads descend on him in fury, tearing at his flesh. They process into the city, his head on a thyrsus present him to her father Cadmus and it is only then that Agave’s eyes are unclouded. Only then that she sees, to her horror, what she’s done. Orpheus cries with her when he watches it. And when the curtain falls at the end he feels terrified and in love.
Moremi, whose acute loneliness (alongside her mother’s distaste) drove her to get a Pulse, is able to synthesize her two loves: being connected, and ballet. She dances with the maenads, further entwining the novel with Greek mythology. And she does it beneath the eyes of a man—this is a chapter from Orpheus’ point of view—who she already feels herself falling in love with.
Orpheus asks her to dance because she has come to him to ask for a followup on dream therapy he has designed that helps her forget her trauma. He has recently had to take a sabbatical to detox from the drug, Nox, that he uses in order to facilitate other people’s dreams; he is worried that helping her will cause him to relapse. His condition is that she dance for him. She does. He helps her regain access to the world in which she never had any trauma to begin with. There is a lot in this, but one of the things that is happening is that Orpheus is playing analyst to Moremi’s analysand; what we have here is a bit of upgraded talk therapy.
This science fictional psychoanalysis even has it’s own term for transference, the psychoanalytic concept of the person receiving therapy falling in love with their therapist when they displace onto the therapist feelings of growth that they themselves achieved (nb: transference is more complicated than this):
More Perfect calls it Inversion Syndrome (314).
This passage is full of allusion and action, tension and release. There is nothing in it that couldn’t be found in the prose of post-
Azkaban Potter, when the books seemed to fill themselves with nowhere-going incidental detail.
Earlier, I referenced Poppy’s well-loved Latin translation of
Sorcerer’s Stone, which functions as a symbol that must be embraced or overcome repeatedly over the course of her own journey. Does she return to the (dis)comforts of home, cradling the object she previously used to escape from there in her mind? Does she plunge forward, carrying the complicated past into the unknown? Poppy makes her choice.
More Perfect is Oh’s push toward the future, carrying the complicated past. Not just of Rowling herself, but of the style guides that subsumed and buoyed her to billions. In
Terra-Two?, she showed herself capable of miracles; with
More Perfect, she cements her style. It is post-young adult, having moved through it. Oh has developed a voice which takes what really worked in the septology and unchained it from the condescension that has plagued this particular industrialization.
There was a war to attend to, though.
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Despite being published a half century earlier, this is no return to the past. The other Orpheus myth I read this year shares almost nothing in common with Oh’s—both are propulsive, yes, but the earlier is as poetic as anything Woolf ever wrote, as deliberate as Proust, as unafraid to play with form as your favorite postmodernist. And, crucially, even in that barely post-pulp moment, it is as unabashedly critical of gender as (say goodbye, friends, as we welcome her for her last appearance) the author of the school saga of The Boy Who Lived and her reactionary friends claim to be.
In 1967, Samuel R. Delany published his 2nd Nebula Award-winning novel
The Einstein Intersection. The biggest page-turner of his I’ve personally encountered, it tells the story of Lo Lobey, a man with opposable feet and a flute machete, as he mourns the loss of a lover, fights a massive beast, and travels to confront Kid Death and bring her back. Lo Lobey as Orpheus is made very explicit early on, and it isn’t the only interpellation Delany engages in; the story is scaffolded with Greek myth, mortared by apparently-true diary entries from the “Writer’s Journal,” and painted in—of all things—thematic, structural Beatles references (eat your heart out Stephen King).
The Einstein Intersection juggles swashbuckling pulp adventure with deep meditations on the human in ways I don’t know that I’ve ever otherwise seen managed. The scene where Lo Lobey, having bested a factory-sized bull with human hands and confronted a computer that confirms that humans died out a million years ago and the people we are dealing with are something else,
I took up my machete and blew out the last of the blood. The tune now winding with me lay notes over the stone like mica flakes that would do till light came.
Stubbed my toe.
Hopped, cursed, then started walking again alone with the lonely, lovely sounds. (31)
is written with as much passion and literary flare as any of the more typically Delany moments where characters converse or fuck or think about how language bears down on and structures us, or what “us” even constitutes. He dives into the fundament with every sentence in his short novel, and communicates it with the reader in prose just slightly askew enough to catch the light and render that communication beautiful. A move that, one might argue, is the constitutive aesthetic maneuver of the literary Modernists.
By one might argue, I of course mean that many have—academically, colloquially, in praise, in dismissal, in disgust. Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time might structurally be about memory, but in any given moment the narrator is thinking about pink hawthorns, a leitmotif in a sonata, a painting of the sea (or the many beautiful women (wink) that he keeps falling in love with), and doing so in sentences so artfully, musically crafted that one still stands as a Linguists party game—pin the diagram on the Proust sentence, as it were.
Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway might be about a day in the life of an upper class Londoner, but it wouldn’t be hard to argue that it is about the abrupt, filmic cuts it makes between characters’ interior lives and, specifically, how language affords that kind of cut where film might not. Especially when the level of sentencecraft is as high as Woolf’s. And that’s just sticking to books I’ve also read this year.
Broadly speaking, the Modernists were so interested in people—in individuals, even, and their interiority—that you might say that they forgot about characters. The M.s de Norpois, the Doris Kilmans exist in these books, of course, those people who, incidentally, describe broadly a type, embodied; narrative drivers. But these are not books interested in plot, where events accrue over simulated time in order to reach a conclusion, and so their characters cannot fire shots or man drones or trenches in its service. The war, then, is between fiction with an end goal of a satisfying story, and fiction with an end goal of illuminating people.
These aren’t the only two possible end goals of fiction, of course. In the same interwar period where the bulk of Modernism flourished, Georg Lukács is arguing in
Das Wort that the claims of Expressionism and Surrealism being revolutionary are overstated. In Lukács case, the real goal of literature is to be found in works of Realists like Thomas Mann, and their ability to synthesize the social order: the goal, in a word, is neither plot nor person but reality. Other examples of end goals abound.
At the turn of the twentieth century, or, perhaps more precisely, in the interwar period from the late teens to the early 30s, literature bifurcated in a way no amount of coinages like “slipstream” have been able to resolve.
On the one hand, the Modernists (eventually absorbing and splitting off into other names) who became literary fiction, representatives of the side of the war dedicated to showcasing people. On the other hand, a weird old quasi-conman who wouldn’t shut up about his new coinage, “scientifiction.”
I’ll spare you my thoughts on Hugo Gernsback because (...but I really want to...) the point, I think, is clear enough: for the last century, literature has taken it as fact that it is about plumbing the depths of what it means to be Human; or that it is about telling a satisfying story, in genre. Other exigencies burble constantly, occasionally bursting. The pornographers and the didacts and the moralists and the minor literatures and the experimentalists and many more foment. But at the end of the day, you’re shelved in Fiction or Speculative Fiction, or you’re not shelved at all.
In some writers, this war reaches something of a détente, on occasion. Delany might be the foremost among them. When I point to the fact that Lo Lobey blowing blood from his flute is as beautifully described as any moment in which he contemplates, this is what I mean. It is of both camps. Since the dual blows of Gernsback and Freud, the writer has been forced to pick a side. And, it is I think safe to say, Delany ultimately did. But in
The Einstein Intersection, he sent his head singing down the river, unconcerned with the mortars screaming overhead.
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And so we have our interlocutors. Oh, transcending the Young Adult style guide; Oh, engaging (if only in shared referent) with a self-consciously critical moment in the history of speculative fiction. She sees, at least in my reading, eye to eye with neither.
Her deep and seemingly intuitive sense of character psychology clashes with the propulsive narrative movement demanded by the former, to the point where readers trained only to see plot movement might find stagnation in her books’ most dynamic moments. At the same time, her psychology never transcends character; the formal commitments to plot preclude that swerve into interiority.
To try to illustrate: every character Oh introduces evinces thought processes, desires and sensual commitments that are irreducible to other aspects of the text, whether formal, literary, or functional. Aria does not leap into the Thames early in
Terra-Two? In order to allow Jesse onto the ship, or to force Elliot to be an avatar of grief; she does it for her own reasons, clearly felt. Any reading of
More Perfect that simply enumerated the ways in which Orpheus was actually Orpheus might unveil some neat easter eggs, but it would also impoverish the novel. The wildly different twins in both books certainly have many things to say about twinness beyond who the characters are, but they never dissolve wholly into questions of the uncanny or doppelganger myths—and nor do they become single-note refutations thereof.
At the same time, we never quite experience that transition to full interiority. Oh does not try to convey to us the full internal lifeworld of her characters in the same way, for instance, Woolf describes Septimus’ discovery of ASMR:
“K...R...” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sand which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! (22)
The whole of Septimus in this moment is open to us; when we sit in the heads of Temi Oh’s characters, they retain autonomy. They have privacy.
It is fitting, I think, that the author who demonstrated this facility with character in
Terra-Two? would go on to write a novel that more perfectly dovetails with her fundamental concerns. That privacy, that autonomy explode out into the world with the Pulse, turning the social world into a literal referendum on those very concepts by putting them in tension with the technological overdetermination of the individual, simultaneously through surveillance, expression, state-sanctioned and funded trauma repression, consciousness-sharing, and basically any other consequence of plugging one’s brain into the Internet, good or bad, one can readily come up with.
Beyond fitting, even. What we have in this book might be a genuine magnum opus, that singular synthesis of an artist’s concerns, their preoccupations, the social moment, and their skill in delivering on their prose and chosen subject. What could be more apt than wondering what a world where the final privatization, with the commons long gone and the biopolitical hegemonic, when even private thoughts become private commodities? What could be a more apt mode than the only truly popular novel form, the Young Adult, but freed of the style guide? What writer could be more apt to tackle these things than Temi Oh, with her deep well of character psychology mixed with her remarkable talents for worldbuilding and plot development?
A magnum opus, then. It is declared. History can let the rest shake out.
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Despite the occasionally materialist method, this essay has largely stayed in the relatively limited discourse of aesthetic history. (And the even more limited discourse of my own preoccupations and reading history in 2023, mostly.) Which leads to a question: is the magnum opus enough?
One answer, self-evident: no. It never has been, so why would it be now, especially in the long tail of literature’s importance? The novel was, once, a critical component of bourgeois class formation and could therefore at least index what an ascendant class thought of itself. These days, when the biggest publishing house in the United States is
blocked from buying the second-biggest of its four rivals, said rival gets sold to
the private equity firm that saddled Toys’R’Us with billions in debt upon and acquisition and slowly squeezed the still-successful retailer to death for their own gain.
Which isn’t to say the entrenched bourgeoisie have abandoned the form entirely; we can all thank one of the scions of the Koch fortune for Catapult press, and Orrin Henry Ingram, whose “systematic deforestation” of Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin in the mid-19th century funded, through the generational wealth it generated, his great-great grandchildren’s ability to maintain their position as one of very few viable distributors for independent bookstores.
There’s a more generous answer, though. The magnum opus can matter, according to your frame. And they can matter greatly.
For the individual, obviously—whether author or reader, the joy of experiencing something indelibly its own can be a transformative experience.
For communities, as well. Though they’re largely a commodified joke now, book clubs help with the real work of reading together something that cannot have been produced except in this singular way. In doing so, the reading group can forge bonds, lead to clarifying arguments, open up new aesthetic in political avenues in ways that few other things can.
For platforms? Absolutely. The subsumption of a genuine magnum opus can lead to that most precious commodity of all: engagement, to be sold to advertisers and venture capitalists in that most delicious way of all: quantifiably.
But that brings us back to our initial answer, in some way. Is a magnum opus important to the world? To our collective struggle to move beyond capitalism and the ecological apocalypse it has revealed as its inevitable telos?
No. No, it isn’t.
Unless it helps.
