Essay: The Speculative War on Terror in All Post-Colonial Universes

 

 The Speculative War on Terror in All Post-Colonial Universes

by David Agranoff

 The ghosts of post-colonial conquest of the Middle East have never stopping haunting the region.  In 1916, a meeting held at Downing Street in London between Mark Sykes, representing the British government, and Francois Georges-Picot, from the French government, set national boundaries and handed out regional control over large parts of the Arab world and the Middle East. (1) They made these decisions with little knowledge of the local culture or the impact that putting different sects and tribes together under national borders would bring. After Germany pushed Britain to the brink in World War II the colonial era in the Middle East ended, but the divisions created by the maps drawn in an office far away in England still persist more than a century later.

The conflict between the nation of Israel and the people of Palestine still dominates the regional climate.  When discussing violence in the Middle East, one must acknowledge that it is a symptom of post-colonialism in the twenty-first century. The empires are gone but corporations and oil money led America to build bases and invade multiple countries.  According to a Congressional report between 2007 and 2018, fifty-seven percent of military contractors working anywhere supported the western national agendas in Iraq and Afghanistan. (2,3)

It was impossible for most Americans to question the righteous presentation of The War on Terror given the tragic events of the 9/11 attacks.  When G.W. Bush climbed the rubble of the World Trade Center and promised revenge, even many so-called progressives pumped their fists. It was like American foreign policy and a century of exploitation had never occurred to most Americans. The sanctions in Iraq had punished the general population. According to UNICEF, the death toll was as high as three-hundred-thousand before the invasion, but the exact number is unknown; All this while leaving Saddam personally untouched. (4)   

For progressives at the time, it was frustrating to hear even journalists posing the question “Why do they hate us?”.  In Iraq alone there was a death toll tied to American policy many thousands higher than that of 9/11. The U.S. funding of Iraq in the war against Iran, and the support of The Shah’s 1953 coup are still fresh in the minds of people of the Middle East.

The wave of post 9/11 patriotism saw political figures on both the right and left trying to outdo the other, to the point that no one would be seen in public without a flag pinned on their suit. This became policy in the form of the Patriot Act, which challenged the constitution and has curtailed activists’ rights to this day. (5)

The phenomenon of science fiction and genre’s presentation of radical political concepts has its impetus in the sixties New Wave, most famously ushered into the field by Harlan Ellison’s ground-breaking anthology Dangerous Visions. In the genre mainstream this was done by Gene Roddenberry and Rod Serling, who tricked the network sponsors into paying them to make progressive statements via The Twilight Zone and Star Trek.

In a strange way, ISIS has turned to speculative fiction in the form of short utopian films that imagine the world after their victory. Simon Spiegel wrote about this in his fantastic essay The Utopia of the Caliphate.

     “In the Islamic State, religious promise and political project merge; a combination that is ultimately alien to both utopias and traditional Islam. But according to {Charlie} Winter, who speaks of an ‘apocalyptic utopianism’, it is exactly this fusion of two apparently incompatible concepts that sets ISIS apart from other Islamist groups: ‘Unlike its predecessors, ISIS did not seek a far-off dream of the caliphate. The caliphate was here and now.’ As a consequence, ISIS constantly emphasizes that the militia is serious about establishing a proper Islamic state. They do not merely talk about it, but get down to business and build it.” (6)

 

In the years just after the events of 9/11, the war on terrorism had become a third rail subject. Even veteran writers with decades-long track records and a handful of meaningful nominations could not get published. In an interview I conducted for the Dickheads (PKD) podcast, Norman Spinrad explained the struggles he had publishing his novel Osama The Gun. “One editor told me not only would he not buy it, but no editor would touch it with a fork.” (7)

Spinrad gave up on American publishers, and in 2011, published the book in a French edition.  It wasn’t until mainstream sources had published speculative novels on the topic that an independent press, Wildside, gave Osama the Gun an American edition in 2016 - almost a decade after the manuscript first made the rounds in New York.

During that period, the genre began to deal with The U.S. War on Terror. Many novels were published, AND receiving award consideration. An examination of the titles reveals an obvious trend - the writers’ first-hand knowledge. The author of The American War, Omar El Akkad, covered the war as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper. Weston Ochse, the author of Burning Sky, was a military contractor in conflict zones. Lavie Tidhar, who wrote Osama, was witness to terror attacks in Dar-es-Salaam in Nairobi. Frankenstein in Baghdad author Ahmed Saadawi lived through the U.S. occupation.

It took moxie for an American ex-pat author like Norman Spinrad to tackle The War on Terror during the patriotic aftermath of 9/11 events. He said in my interview, “It was about Sympathy for the Devil and had to be done.” (6) No stranger to jaw dropping acts of publishing, Spinrad had experienced the banning of his early novel, Bug Jack Barron, by W. H. Smith, a major British chain of bookstores. And in the late seventies, he wrote and published a satirical sword and sorcery novel, as if Hitler himself had written it, called The Iron Dream.

Osama the Gun is light on speculative elements, but is set in a future where Osama Bin Laden has been killed, something that had not yet happened when the book was written. The symbolism of Bin Laden, more so than the actual human being, is what this novel explores. A character points to the Zapatistas, with their own masked leader, who represented the ideals of the movement, rather than a face or personality. The character “Osama the Gun” serves as a beacon to radical Islam, but unlike the real-life Bid Laden, no one is sure who he is.

“I can be killed, I almost was; it was this close,” I told him, holding up my right hand with the thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart, “but had I been killed, Osama the Gun would have lived on.” (8)

The Patriot Act and the conforming call for revenge by some on the left was a strange study for political radicals who watched the political climate following 9/11 unfold. America in the wake of the attacks is off-camera for this novel, but the push and pull between two cultures worlds apart is well represented.

This is expressed early in the novel.

     "The famous victory of 9/11. A few Jihadis transformed the most admired nation in the world into the most hated, most dangerous model of democracy, arch-enemy of Koranic Islam rule, into what is considered by the world a paranoiac police state, the face of the so-called City on the Hill into that of the Great Satan. Not bad for a single Thunderbolt from the holy warriors of Allah, Osama" (7)

This novel is clearly a reaction to the media’s hysteria around Bin Laden. Spinrad imagines a more successful Al- Qaeda, which manages to use Pakistan's nuclear weapons to create a caliphate that stretches across a large swath of the Middle East and Asia. Our point-of-view character is Osama, one of many young boys in the new caliphate named for the infamous terrorist. This Osama is sent to France as an agent of his government, and becomes famous for a series of attacks around Paris.

Osama the Gun is an important novel, and in that sense underrated. I would even declare it a masterpiece, as there are plenty of points which lurk ingeniously just beyond the text. While I think the intended message is clear, this novel is dated in the sense that it was written before the rise of ISIS. Spinrad’s work on the topic also may have appeared too early. It was around 2012 that the first major releases exploring this world tension began to appear.

In the small press The Bangladeshi author Saad Hossain released a magic realism adventure called Escape from Baghdad!, which garnered critical praise. It is the story of local Dagr and Kinza, doing what they can to survive the U.S. occupation, and in the process, they discover in hiding, a man who is wanted by both sides. They see the wanted man as a means to get out of the city ravaged by the war. The mystery man has emerged from ancient history and once they make their way across the city things get fantastical. Crazed Alchemists, immortals, and magical time pieces are all involved.  (9)

 

This is an interesting and fun read, but it is clear that the book comes from research and not first-hand experience, as with Hossein’s writer predecessors. One of the most important anti-war novels to come directly out of the Middle East is Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. (10) The novel won The International Prize for Arab Fiction, and is at once an anti-war satire, and work of speculative horror.

The U.S. invasion kicked up a hornet's nest of violence that became a part of daily life in the city of Baghdad. Ahmed Saadawi is using a surreal fantasy to highlight the very nightmare of military occupation. The story follows a variety of characters around the city. The person who really drives the early moments of the story is Hadi, a junk dealer known for his wild stories. In protest, he collects the body parts of victims of violence, and with each, we get the person’s story. Magically, those collected body parts return to life and become a creature called “Whatsitsname”.

     “Because I'm made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds - ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes - I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I'm the first true Iraqi citizen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.” (10)

Despite the title, there is not much in common with the similarly-themed Mary Shelly classic, but that is not the point. The novel highlights elements of the occupation overlooked beyond borders of Iraq. It takes the reader into those hidden places.  Internationally, the need for a spotlight on the history and lasting impact of the U.S. invasion is important. It is more than just a resurgent ISIS; it is the generation left scared, and the first-hand account which makes this an extraordinary work of speculative fiction.

Another example of first-hand account is American War by Omar El Akkad. This novel takes place towards the end of this century and is focused on a second American civil war. (11) In this novel, the climate crisis creates a backdrop for American socio-political strife, similar to what Middle Eastern nations experienced during The War on Terror.  I can see why some American readers would miss this. This novel explores the experiences of the Iraqi people by flipping the setting for the stresses of conflict to American soil.

 

 The author had covered the conflict zones as a reporter for The Toronto Globe and Mail, with experience on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. “I don’t think of American War as an American book. It is concerned with things America has done; it is not concerned with telling an American story. This isn’t how I think a second civil war would go down. None of the book is a literal attempt at prophecy. It is concerned with things America has done in the world.” (12)

American War is speculative fiction at its best. It presents an alternate history – another possible future -to comment on recent global events. There is an aspect of the novel which makes it more surreal than most dystopias. Certain other aspects are ignored in favor of a focus on the analogy at the heart of the novel. The technology of this future is largely ignored; with the exception of drones, there is no mention of use of the internet, social media, or future tech. There is also no mention of southern culture within the U.S., or religion, which are important facets of life in the American south.

 Generations have passed since Americans have experienced war on their own soil. Speculative elements in fiction are used to bring the struggles of war back to the minds of citizens. “What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?” (11) American War works to highlight the misery of endless conflict experienced within a region that cannot break the cycle of violence. “The misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language.” (11) El Akkad wanted the reader to understand the feeling of living in constant danger and fear. Reports in newspaper articles were not sinking in, and telling a speculative tale of reversal gave him license to channel his frustrations. 

American War is not alone in presenting a reversal of The War on Terror. Two other writers have accomplished this literary task. Author Matt Ruff, in his novel The Mirage, and Lavie Tidahr in the World Fantasy award-winning novel, Osama, which explored the reversal through means of alternate reality have done so. Both books are often compared to Philip K Dick’s classic Hugo award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle. (13)

 

The above-mentioned books were published a year apart; but let’s first talk about Matt Ruff’s The Mirage, released in 2012. (14) This is an alternate history farce of The War on Terror and the foreign policy of the G.W. Bush years. Within a science fiction universe, Ruff sets his story in the United Arab States, formed after World War II, out of the ashes of colonialism. This UAS comprises democratic states similar to contemporary Middle Eastern nations.  The country has governors like Baathist gangster Saddam Hussein and Senator Osama Bin Laden, the son of an oil tycoon. The story takes place a decade after fundamentalist Christian hijackers sent planes crashing into Baghdad's Tigris & Euphrates towers on November 9, 2001.

The main point-of-view character is Mustafa A Baghdadi, a Homeland Security agent. While many of the well-known characters are cartoonish, satirical versions, I thought Mustafa was a solid, believable anchor for the story. The third-person narrative is interspersed with fake Wikipedia-like entries from this world's equivalent – the online library of Alexandria. This is cleaver avenue for world-building, eliminating a need for characters’ exposition.
 
 In the second half, when Mustafa travels to the fractured North American countries, we find that the elderly LBJ has been an autocratic dictator since the killing of Kennedy, that he signed a worthless civil rights act. The U.S. is composed mostly of the eastern states and the country has broken apart. Texas is an evangelical nation. Several brief military conflicts occur in North America, but not much is said about Mexico and Canada. Some of the obvious characters from those years, like Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld, play roles in the story. Knowledge of the era and the players in American political life would aid the reader with understanding some of the plot twists, including a reveal of who is running ops for the C.I.A.
 
Comparisons to Man in The High Castle are obvious, and at the same time, missing the point of both books. In High Castle, Philip K. Dick made a point that historical narrative is not always to be trusted. There is no binary right and wrong history in High Castle. The world where the allies won in the novel inside of the novel is not OUR world, the history is still different from the one we know. The Mirage does set up this binary reality. There is a diagnosable psychological condition where people believe in our world, Mustafa finds a copy of the New York Times from September 12th that appears to be from the reality we have experienced.

The biggest weakness of The Mirage is found within the final twist, which I found to be problematic.  The Truthers conspiracy theorists in that alternate world, who think Bin Laden engineered the 9/11 attacks, are proven correct. Any daring attempts at a thoughtful hard look in the societal mirror are undermined by the story’s evil-Muslims-behind-the-whole-thing trope.   

When it comes to The Mirage, I think the comparison to Man in the High Castle is unavoidable, and reviews from Locus magazine (15) and Los Angeles Times (16) made the suggestion.  I am not sure that Ruff intended this comparison.  It appears to be a happy accident.  That is not the case with the book that won the World Fantasy award the same year. 

 

Osama by Lavie Tidhar (17) might be the high-water mark in the emerging sub-genre of War on Terror speculative fiction.  Lavie Tidhar upset the World Fantasy awards by beating a couple of titans in the field, Stephen King and George RR Martin. The remarkable thing is that his novel is an alternate history of this topic.  I can imagine Norman Spinrad, who published his novel the year before, after years of rejection based solely on the subject matter, raising his eyebrow in disbelief.  He couldn’t get anyone to touch his Osama novel, while Tidhar’s won a major award.

Unlike The Mirage, this novel is not just similar to Man in the High Castle, but riffing on, and in conversation with the classic novel. It is hard to not compare these two books, but I am going to do my best. One underrated aspect of PKD’s alternate worlds is that they are not opposite of ours.the reality where the allies won in the Grasshopper Lies Heavy the fictional novel inside Philip K Dick’s novel is not ours. The history is different.

Through-out the events of Osama, there is a blending of the fiction of the novel we are reading, the fictional pulpy action of other Osama Bin Laden novels, and details from our actual history. In real life, Tidhar has had several near misses with infamous terrorist attacks. This motivates the story, and standing in for Tidhar is the protagonist, Joe.  We know Joe is a detective, and that he lives in a French Indochina that never saw the conflict and war that Southeast Asia did in reality.  We don’t know much else, not even his last name.

Joe’s mission in the book is to find Michael Longshott, a pulp novelist who writes a popular series of Osama Bin Laden novels about a terrorist vigilante who has become a sort of folk hero. While some of the events seem historical, they are slightly off.  The variation provides Tidhar a stage upon which to explore the root causes of the regional conflict.

     “What if the Cairo Conference of 1921 went ahead as planned, with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dividing up the Middle East for the British? What if they chose a Hashemite king to rule Iraq, and would that have led to a revolution in the nineteen fifties? Or, what if the French war in Indochina somehow led to American involvement in Vietnam? Or if the British held on to their colonies in Africa after the Second World War? You see – " he was in full steam now, his eyes shining like the headlamps of a speeding engine – "the Vigilante series is full of this sort of thing. A series of simple decisions made in hotel rooms and offices that led to a completely different world.”

 This is not exactly a subtle answer to that often-asked question of the era, “Why do they hate us?”  This question is marinated in controversy, and thus requires a blending of reality and fiction to process. Osama Bin Laden became an international bogeyman; he became a living alternate history depending on which world and reality one chooses to inhabit. In one reality, he is a mythic figure with conventions and a fan following. In another, he is the most hated and hunted man, by the most powerful nation on the planet.

     “It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling.”

The conflict has always been about narratives, from attacks meant to inspire fear, to Bin Laden’s being buried at sea to reduce the idea of an honorable funeral.  A story about false histories and blending realities is a good way to comment on this conflict. Terror at the end of the day is an emotion and a War on Terror will always, in the end, be about who controls the narrative.

Joe spends most of the story trying to find Mike Longshott, and what started as a job becomes an obsession. If there is a weakness to this book, in my opinion, it is that the search takes a bit too long. As Joe gets closer to finding his charge, his grip on reality begins to melt away. It is at this point that the story goes from being influenced by Philip K Dick and his classic High Castle, to being in conversation with it.

Is Joe being affected by drugs?  Is he a victim of terrorism reliving trauma?  By the time he gets to the heart of the mystery, he could be in a hidden pocket between universes. The speculative elements at this point go beyond the alt-history themes, and are delightfully weird.   

     “Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was – there could be – nothing real about such things.”

This novel is beautifully written with artful prose. Tidhar has command of the concept and the message and translates it through a noir detective spectrum. It is influenced by classics and the conversational presentation of ideas and ideals makes this book a profound piece of science fiction. It deserves the awards it has won, and in fact, I am surprised that it didn’t win more. As a commentary on The War on Terror, it is spot-on and an excellent example of what vocal role science fiction can fulfill.

 

Conclusion:

Science fiction is thought of as a genre of the future. That is not necessarily always the case; there is a reason why Harlan Ellison fought for the name “speculative fiction”. No matter what name we give this style of writing, realistic genre fiction has naturally leaned into political commentary, dealing with the conflict which has helped to define the first decade of this young century. Increasingly within the works of popular old guard authors, such as Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future, Carrie Vaughn in Bannerless and new voices like Sam J. Miller in Black Fish City, or, readers are finding more commentary on climate change. So much so that cli-fi, a term coined by English teacher Dan Bloom in 2007, as a genre, has become quite marketable. (18)

I don’t suggest any snappy, marketable new names for War on Terror sci-fi, but it is time that the genre start to explore this conflict even more deeply.  Certainly, we can’t decolonize our thinking on the conflict if we blindly accept the western way of defining who are terrorists, or eastern ideas of who are freedom fighters.  We must explore and question the conflict honestly, on a social and political level.

Straight forward fiction can and has explored these issues, but science fiction gives us an excellent method of exploring the issues through alternate histories, realities, and futures, both dystopic and utopian.

 

 

1)    1  BBC news Why border lines drawn with a ruler in WW1 still rock the Middle East by Tarek Osman https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25299553

2)     2 Congressional report https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44116

3)      3“Department of Defense contractor Levels 2007-2018” Written by Jon Robinson, May 26, 2019,https://strongpointlaw.com/5710/contractor-and-troop-levels-in-afghanistan-and-iraq-2007-2018/

4)    4  “Hard Look at Iraqi Sanctions by David Cortright” November 15, 2001  https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/hard-look-iraq-sanctions/

5)      5 ACLU report https://www.aclu.org/other/how-usa-patriot-act-redefines-domestic-terrorism

6)     6  Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds Edited by Simon Spiegel Andrea Reiter, and Marcy Goldberg page 90 Utopia and the Caliphate by Simon Spiegal

7)      7 Interview with Norman Spinrad. https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodcast/interview-13-norman-spinrad-spinrad-spectacular-part-1

8)    8  Osama the Gun by Norman Spinrad Wildside press 2016

9)     9  Escape from Baghdad! By Saad Hossain Published 2015 by The Unnamed Press (first published 2012)

10   Frankentein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi Published 2018 by Penguin Books (first published 2013)

1  11 American War by Omar El Akkad  Published 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group 

12 Interview with Omar El Akkad https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pfdw-23-interview-with-omar-el-akkad-author-of-american-war/id1524359471?i=1000498179366

13  The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

14  The Mirage by Matt Ruff published in 2012 by Harper Collins.

15  February 2012 issue of Locus Magazine

16  LA Times February 12, 2012

17  Osama by Lavie Tidhar 2012 My interview with Lavie Tidhar on the dickheads podcast. 

https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodcast/interview-24-lavie-tidhar-osama-10th-anniversary

 

18  Merriam Webster dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cli-fi-clifi-climate-fiction-genre-words-were-watching

 

Book Review: The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis

 

 

The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis

Mass Market Paperback, 259 pages

Published April 1st 1985 by Berkley 

 

The May 2022 Tevis-a-thon ends as it did for him. This morning I listened to an interview Tevis did with Don Swain for his radio show Book Beat from January 1984. It was about seven months before his death from lung cancer. There are painful moments when he talks about going back to smoking every once in and awhile. He also speculates about what he wants to do with the books that we the listener now know he will never write. When I was reading this I was not aware that this was the final novel Tevis wrote, assuming that The Color of Money the last released would be the one he wrote before he died.

“But having done two novels in a row in which people smoke Marlboros and drive Buicks and turn on the Sonys and they inhabit the world, the real world that we all know and aren't slightly bored with, it's--it would be fun, I think, to do another fantasy novel, another speculative fiction novel in which I can invent my world. You know, when I invent a future as I did in The Steps of the Sun, which takes place around in the 2060s, I'm not interested in predicting the future. I don't know what the future is going to be like. And, I'm not arrogant enough to pretend to be a futurologist. Most of which, I think, futurology, I think, its largely nonsense, anyway--extrapolating from curves. But, so, I don't know what the future will be like. But I like to invent my own version of the future for the fun, for the play.”

Tevis also called the novel a serial comic novel. The Steps of the Sun is in many ways the black sheep of the small Tevis catalog. There is a reason for that. There is no getting around the reality that it is the weakest of his work. That is not to say there is not value in this book, the reality is when every other book you’ve written is a masterpiece it is a bit unfair to judge against them. We have six Tevis novels and they are rare gemstones compared to the over forty by Philip K. Dick or a dozen Kurt Vonnegut novels.  Some writers I like have entire lost decades of writing nothing great.

The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird are science fiction masterworks and that is undeniable, so one of the things that really interested me in my second time reading The Steps of The Sun is why is this third SF novel not as good?  Don Swain asked Tevis about the term speculative fiction is on the cover ofhis collection  Far from Home and I think his answer is important.

“The term speculative fiction is used by editors in a desperate attempt to let the public know that this is not "Star Wars" or "Buck Rogers" or whatever. Unfortunately, science fiction is a very big term. We don't have in our critical vocabulary a term to describe exactly what it is I do. I'm not trying to say I'm unique. I think other people have worked somewhat in similar genres, but I like to play games with time and space. I like to imagine what the world might be a hundred years from now, that sort of thing. But, I am not interested in writing about menaces, giant the giant cockroach eating New York, or something like that. I'm not it, which is what some people think of when they think of science fiction. I'm not interested in writing about nuclear catastrophe, devastation, interplanetary war, you know, and that sort of thing. So, in an attempt to find some way of describing what I do, editors come up with terms like speculative fiction.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird are bookends of Tevis's bouts with drinking and getting sober. Mockingbird plays with grand themes but is a book about getting sober at the heart of it. Mockingbird follows a character who saves the human race by learning to read a skill we lost when Robots took over most tasks for us. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a very deep novel inspired by Tevis feeling like an alien growing up in Kentucky after being transplanted at 10 years old from a very different San Francisco.

I think the heart of the difference is at the end of the quote above.  “For the play.” Tevis was coming off the mainstream hit of The Hustler when he wrote his first SF masterpiece, he had a lot to prove. When he wrote Mockingbird he had been away from publishing for almost 20 years he had a lot to prove. The Steps of the Sun is not as tight and coiled as the other Tevis books. He is playing around a bit more. As such the first half that takes place in space is more focused.
 
TSOS is like all Tevis works slightly autobiographical, this time about a middle-age crisis. Ben Belson the point of view character is impotent, something Tevis admits to experiencing at the time. He was recently re-married at the time. The amount of time spent talking in this novel about a reluctant penis is reason enough to take away a star in the rating. Honestly, that is the reason this book is not the classic the others are because many, many words are wasted on Belson’s flaccid member. There is also a scene when Belson towards the end of the novel argues with a computer therapy simulation (very PKD) and asks it to imitate his mother so he can tell it off. (anyone reading his collection knows Tevis had serious issues with his parents)

Okay moving on…

 It is also a novel of the late 70s and 80s that despite Tevis downplaying his predictions of the future makes serious statements about what he thought the future might be. It is important to remember this is coming after the energy crisis of the late 70s. At the very beginning of the talk about the climate crisis. Sad enough we have not solved these things. In the 50s Tevis wrote about the 1980s as an age of enlightenment, now that he was writing in it he saw it as the beginning of the end.

If my quotes from the book focus on World-building it is because Tevis was very interested in the details. The story is about Ben Belson a sort of pre-Elon-Musk type who creates a warp ship and takes off from the grim and dying earth to find a new source of energy. “Clean” burning uranium anyone?  That is why he traveled to Fomalhaut 25 light-years away. “I was born in 2012 when the population in the industrial societies was plummeting. It was a wonder I was born at all.”

This is an interesting notion because in our real-world despite the climate crisis, pandemics, and epidemics of school shootings we have never had decreased birth rates, most people still want to have children no matter how bad it gets, but in this future child rates are dropping. After fossil fuels go bust uranium becomes popular and society bounces back.

That is when Ben Belson got rich in real estate… “It was the 2040s, the time of the uranium bust. Nobody was having babies; the military had its crude hands on all the crude oil; whole industries were reeling; just taking away the Mercedes limousines away from all those grey-templed hustlers who sat on their boards had thrown most U.S. corporations into tailspins.”

Belson got rich selling short and while the rest of the world fell apart he became rich. Lost in most reviews of the book is how it spoofs capitalism. “Anna and Myra and I lived in that mansion for eight months toward the end the student riots began. Things were bad all over and the student riots began. Things were bad all over and the students had decided capitalism was to blame. I had no real quarrel with that, although I felt the scarcity of fuels deserved equal billing. For a few days of it a lot of the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class decided I was the enemy, and I got edgy when they started chanting things like “Belson go home.” Hell, I was home. They hanged me in effigy, and it was a damned good effigy too.”

Belson gets rich exploits the failing system, tries to save by going to another world, and ends up declared a pirate. Tevis appears to be commenting on the suicidal nature of capitalism and human civilization. In many ways, the earth and its ecological problems are a mirror to Tevis and his feelings of midlife crisis. Much as his return to writing brought him back to production Belson takes a dying New York/ Earth and brings it the fuel to re-open the skyscrapers and get the elevators running again. (That is the examples the novel uses as silly as it might sound to us.

Uncharacteristic of Tevis this novel is full of asides and commentary that strays from the narrative. Nothing like modern novels, but enough that I noticed the difference having just read The Hustler. Some of the best writing and storytelling in the novel involve the fun Tevis was clearly having writing Belson’s time on the planet he named after himself. Important stuff happens when Ben returns to earth but the best moments are on the planet that has an obsidian surface for huge amounts of land. Singing grass reminded me of PKD’s Three Stigmata. My favorite moment in the book…

“I looked up. Two suns shone pleasantly down on my body. At night there were half a dozen moons. Everything about this place was generous, replete, fulfilling, I breathed as deeply as my lungs would allow, exhaled, and walked slowly down the rest of the hill, into the valley.”

This is a beautiful highlight of what Science Fiction and only Science Fiction can do. A character sitting on a hill looking at another world. Wonderful moment. Once we get back to earth Tevis has his tongue firmly in cheek when he writes about Macy’s being a coal storage or that the air force base is named after Kissensinger. There is more. All funny but might be lost on readers not alive in the 80s.

The Steps of the Sun in the worst moments is a story about a mid-life crisis. In the best moments, it is an ecological warning. At times the goofy stuff overwhelms the good stuff for stretches that other Tevis books never did. That is one reason this book is not remembered like The Man Who Fell to Earth Mockingbird or The Hustler. It is not fair as it is a good book, and a sad last statement. Tevis probably would have been happy to know That The Color of Money was the last novel that entered the world. There are rumors of two kids' books that never got released. I am interested in seeing that. I hope the family finds a deal that works.

The Steps of the Sun is the worst Tevis novel, but it still is pretty great. One nice thing about his short career is there are not entire periods of bad novels like some writers. John Brunner for example is one of my favorite writers but there are a double-digit number of novels he wrote for money.  That is not a Tevis problem. I also respect a novel that will come out and say what it means as clearly as possible.

“You Americans did not create that oil you used for your cars, your air conditioners, your lawnmowers, or for the plastic films you wrapped toys and pens and vegetables in. The oil was made by the world itself when great ferns covered Texas and the Persian Gulf. It took millions of years to make it. You and the Arabs threw it away in a century.”

The Steps of the Sun is not a masterpiece but an important piece of the Tevis canon and like it or not it was his final work.
 

(first published 1983) 

 

Full review on the way... 

Book Review: The Hustler by Walter Tevis

 

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

Paperback, 224 pages

Published  2002 by Da Capo Press (first published 1959)

Some writers get very annoyed when a book early in their career remains the one everyone seems to talk about and still view as their best work. Walter Tevis didn’t suffer from that pre-se. He wrote a genre classic in The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hustler before the years of teaching and drinking took over. Until 1976 when David Bowie starred in the TMWFTE movie the Hustler was the one major success in his career. A classic novel and film starring Paul Newman is not bad for an autobiographical novel.

As a Philip K Dick devotee, the most interesting thing about Tevis for me is he did the thing PKD chased his whole life. Mainstream success. I have not yet read all of PKD’s main street novels but as I read The Hustler I thought a lot about why Tevis who grew up reading the same pulps, first published in the same pulps broke out with a mainstream book. Why?

The first thing you notice as a reader of Tevis is precision. Probably the reason I connect with him is he doesn’t mess around. Every single word is there for an exact reason. No fluff, no messing around. The Hustler has more atmosphere, and character, and looks at the human condition in 220 pages than most literary novels written by MFA grads with four times the length.

Tevis was an English professor and during the nearly 20-year period when he was too drunk and frustrated to write he kept teaching. I imagine as an editor or teacher that he had a brutal red pen. All of his novels are inspired by his life.  I reviewed his genre debut earlier in the month and found it to be inspired by his drinking and feeling of being an outsider in Kentucky where he spent his teenage years. A subject he returned to in Queen’s Gambit. The competitive and outsider nature weaved together in that novel something most of you will know as that novel became a hit Netflix series.  

The Hustler is the most autobiographical novel Walter Tevis wrote. He has said in interviews that before he settled down to go to college he tried He got wrapped up in the life in poolhalls. How good he was at Hustling and how much is made up is hard to tell, but one of the things that makes the Hustler a great novel is Tevis's training and skill as a Sci-fi writer that really helped to make the world of the late 50s poolhalls feel real to this reader 70 or so years later.

“The heavy undercurrent of voices, the clicking of many balls, the soft cursing and the dry laughter, the banging of cue sticks on the floor.”

The story Of Fast Eddie Felson a pool hall hustler from the west coast who just showed up in Chicago with the goal of playing Minnesota Fats (played by Jackie Gleason in the movie) the greatest hustler of all time. Eddie is a stand-in for Tevis who grew up until he was 10 years old in San Francisco. He dealt with a serious culture shock when he his family moved to Lexington Kentucky. There he became an outsider a theme he dealt with more directly in his novel The Man Who Fell to Earth. He had a summer where he was sick and spent a year pouring himself into pulp science fiction.

As he got older he discovered the poolhalls. If it is The Hustler or Queen’s Gambit you can tell Tevis is a competitive guy. He also writes very effectively about the competitive spirit. The winning and losing, the competitive spirit is one of the things that drives the narrative.  Once Eddie locks into a battle Tevis doesn’t waste time on each move but sweeps you along with the sweaty desperate feel of 48 hours in a row of battle at the pool table.  He makes it feel important or cosmic like the nature of the universe hinges on that table.

“To beat the other man. To beat him as utterly, as completely as possible: This was the deep and abiding meaning of the game of pool. And, it seemed to Eddie in that minute of thought, it was the meaning of more than the game of pool, more than the five-by-ten-foot microcosm of ambition and desire. It seemed to him as if all men must know this because it is in every meeting and every act.”

The first time Eddie matches up with Minnesota Fats they both win and lose, but Fats is cool, and effortless. Eddie is a tired hungry, sweaty mess. The feeling of this is something Tevis makes so real you can smell the room.

“When the bottles hit they tinkled and jangled noisily; but Eddie did not hear them because of the overriding - yet distant, detached, far-off - the sound of his own screaming.”

Fast Eddie wants to win so bad that during that forty-eight-hour marathon he forgets to drink, eat or sleep. The worst thing is he loses Charlie, the buddy he came to Chicago with. It is interesting how Charlie drops out of the novel. In an excellent moment of character writing, Eddie has a moment when Charlie occurs to him. Eddie is left to wonder what happened to his old friend. He and the reader have to wonder at that moment. I don’t want to spoil that aspect but I found that moment to be quietly heartbreaking.

Fast Eddie is driven to win at pool but he is a loser in life. Another great moment happens after he is recruited by a bank-roller Bert who takes him on the road to Hustle. He has to leave Sarah the woman he was shacking up with in Chicago. Eddie took her out to dinner before telling her he was leaving, he thinks he’ll come back but Sarah knows it is probably over. Eddie wasn’t sure, he gets to Lexington and gets involved with a prostitute, although he didn’t realize this was happening at first. It is the next morning that the thought of Sarah and settling down goes through his mind.

“He looked at his watch. A quarter of twelve. He would probably be having coffee with her now if he were home. Home? What in the hell did that mean- He didn’t have any home. But the idea stayed with him for several minutes, the idea of a house somewhere and Sarah, doing whatever women are supposed to do in houses.”

This is the moment when I realized Fast Eddie Felson was just as much an outsider as Thomas Netwon in TMWFTE. The very idea that he could settle down and have a normal life was laughable to him. He had not defeated Minnesota Fats after all. His ticket is the relationship that is most important to him Bert. The bank-roller, the man who used to own a restaurant with Minnesota Fats. The guy who would fork over the cash win or lose. Bert is his guru even though he can’t teach Eddie anything about playing pool. He teaches Eddie to win.

“You drop that load too when you find yourself an excuse. Then, afterward, all you got to do is learn to feel sorry for yourself—and lots of people learn to get their kicks that way. It’s one of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry.” Bert’s face broke into an active grin. “A sport enjoyed by all. Especially the born losers.”

The Hustler is a journey. It feels longer than it is. It feels more important than the events it is based on. It feels so many things you can’t help but realize why it is a classic. Masterpiece, sure. It is not timeless, it shows some warts of the era, but nothing that makes it unreadable. I was a big fan although I personally like his science fiction more. Mockingbird to me is still the Tevis masterwork.