VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
July 20, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE CARPATHIANS | JANET FRAME | 1988
Few people see Janet Frame (1924-2004) as a writer of science fiction or fantasy. People outside Aotearoa New Zealand who know her work at all encounter her as a writer of autofiction and autobiography, a memoirist of mental illness, as the subject of Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table, and as a great prose stylist on par with (and sometimes a bit like) Virginia Woolf.
Those people are right! But Frame’s last novel is also science fiction, or at least (as we now say) slipstream. Its narrator Mattina has relocated from New York to Kowhai Street, Puamahara (a realistic but made-up small town on New Zealand’s North Island). She’s curious about life there, and about the legendary Memory Flower, but she’s also in search of… something else, something that comes at the end of the world, in “the brief time that may be left for all the old written and spoken languages.”
Mattina gets to know the people on her street, their families and their habits: one child spends too much time on a PC, one old man devotes himself to the radio. Mundane stuff, transformed by Mattina’s (and Frame’s) attention. And then the people start to disappear. After “the falling of the midnight rain,” after “the discovery of the Gravity Star” coming closer and closer to us, Mattina sees what an SFF-friendly reader might call a reality warp, enticing the Kowhai Street people to go… elsewhere. Then she returns to New York (via “helioport”), and passes away, and her widower returns to New Zealand to track “the rumours that have been circulating about Kowhai Street,” as if there could be a realistic explanation for the passage of time, the decay of memory, and the feeling that some people simply don’t fit in this life.
It’s all very James Tiptree, Jr. — if only James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) could have read it! — and beautifully sad, and it’s one of the few examples I know of SFF by a writer working wholly outside the genre that holds up beautifully for readers raised within it.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!