Continuum

  

I’ve been watching the Canadian SF series Continuum, which is time travel/alternate history.  The Expanse it’s not.  I can’t quite explain my enthusiasm.  If you were to watch it, your immediate reaction might very well be, What in the name of God does he see in this?  It’s just too stupid. 

Here’s the premise.  A cop from 2077 is blown back in time fifty years, to the present day.  She’s trapped by a temporal vortex that’s also captured a gang of terrorists and sent them back.  The hook is that the time travelers know the future; the terrorists plan to change it, the cop is the only one who can stop them.  But the cop can’t explain any of this to the cops or the military in the present – they’d throw her in the booby hatch – so she’s on her own.  (Except for some convenient plot holes.) 

Now, first off, the cop from the future is adorably cute, so you forgive a lot.  And then, the dude cop she partners up with in the present is beyond hunk-a-licious, so equal time.  They even contrive a bit where he strips down and gets in the shower, and then the Ninja assassin sneaks into his apartment.  Naked fight scene, but a reversal of the convention where it’s the actress, usually, in her birthday suit.  It’s intentionally mischievous.

Now, it’s more than faintly ridiculous that nobody seriously questions the heroine’s bona fides, once she’s hacked their databases and given herself a fake ID; the police work is rudimentary and lazy; nor is there any real attempt to make the science particularly convincing.  The time paradoxes are handled without fuss, though.  You’re not brought up short by crippling doubts, everything is pretty brisk.  (The short version of a time paradox is this, that you can’t go back in time and murder your grandfather, because then you’d never be born, and you therefore wouldn’t exist to travel back in time and murder your grandfather, etc.)  The biggest dramatic irony is that the heroine wants to get back to her own time, but that time is brutally dystopian, the future ruled by corporate oligarchs, and the cop herself more thought police than criminal investigator – the crimes themselves political – and the “terrorists” an underground devoted to overthrowing that hegemony.  Why would you want such a future?  Your sympathy should be with the insurrection, if it weren’t for Liber8’s sociopathic violence, which toxifies them.

Generally speaking, the concept is better than the execution.  So we’re back to the first question, what’s holding my interest?  I think it’s notional.  I’m attracted to the framework.  I like the way they work out the difficulties.  The most obvious precursor is Terminator, but there are quite a few SF/alternate history models.  The Man in the High Castle, still startlingly original, China Miéville’s The City & the City, Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and, of course, Fatherland.  These last three, also, are police procedurals.  This makes for an interesting sub-genre.  Using the ordinary detail, not the alien, but the commonplace.  Gorky Park, and Martin Cruz Smith’s other Arkady Renko novels, use the same method, the accretion of specifics, the forensics, and the lab work, pounding the pavement, looking at surveillance video, the institutional rivalries and the office politics: this is what makes it credible, when the environment is itself foreign, and speaks a different language.  This is very much evident in The City & the City, which presents a deeply imagined but enormously slippery idea as settled reality, shape-shifting as a metaphor, but all too complete in its physicality, and our psychological  accommodation.

Science fiction, as my pal John Crowley points out, is usually at right angles to the present, shown on the oblique.  It’s no secret that Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry were using Twilight Zone and Star Trek to bring social commentary to a mass audience.  A novel like The City & the City, or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, are clearly speaking to violence, and authority, and the coping mechanisms we adapt, individually and as herd protection.

It’s interesting to me, too, that the books have more room to breathe than their movie or TV versions.  This isn’t about the literary vs. mass market, I don’t mean the movies or the TV series are dumbed down, that’s a contrived distinction, and it’s condescending.  My point here is that film or video, as a medium, is very literal: you see something in front of you, even if it’s hallucinatory.  But it’s hard to convey possibility, or adaptive psychological structures.  You can show the fact, for example, of Fascist authority; the inner effect, the self-policing, is out of visual reach.  The Lives of Others comes close.  I think also De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  In both cases, the claustrophobic framing squeezes perspective, and smothers you with a sense of airlessness. 

In the novels, The Man in the High Castle a good example, your POV expands and contracts.  But in the recent TV adaption, for all its strengths, you can only see what you’re shown, you don’t have a sense (or at least I didn’t) of a world outside the frame of the camera.  In this context, the specificity narrows your engagement.  The material surfaces are hard, and cold, and reflective.  They have no depth.  Metaphorically, we bounce off. 

I’m probably reading more into Continuum than it plausibly merits, but then again, it was the catalyst that sent me off along this line of inquiry.  I think it’s entertaining, although I don’t think it’s terribly deep, but I think that’s in the eye of the beholder.  I think the people who put the show together take it seriously, which is in itself a good thing.  Credit where credit is due.

"Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery"

By Art Taylor

As you might be able to tell from this post and my previous ones here, my teaching at George Mason University is dominating my mind these days—and lately it's not only the semester I'm enmeshed in but next semester as well that's occupying a lot of my mental energy.

In the spring 2016 semester, I'll be teaching a graduate-level course for the first time: "Crossing Genres: The Literary Mystery." That's not my title, I should stress, and I have some issues with the idea of what's meant by the "the literary mystery"—a phrase that could go in a number of directions: mysteries that have books or bookish folks at the core of them maybe? But as intended primarily for aspiring writers in the MFA program here at Mason, I think the goals of the course are potentially a good one: an exploration of genre fiction, a look at the places where these persistent classifications of genre fiction and literary fiction blur, and a study of what so-called "literary writers" can learn from genre writers. To put all this in context, back when I was in the MFA program at Mason myself, I had a fellow writer tell me he'd finally read a Stephen King book and was surprised that it was actually good!

Stephen King

More context: I remember at panel on genre fiction at an AWP conference several years ago, where a writer/professor in another MFA program talked about the difference between his students interested in writing genre fiction and his students interested in writing literary fiction: If a he told students writing fantasy that they might want to read Gilgamesh or The Aeneid or any of a number of "high literary" works, they'd have it read by the next week, whereas if he suggested to literary-minded students that they should read a thriller or a sci-fi novel, they'd drag their heels.

There's lots of room to learn, clearly, from lots of different writers and lots of different kinds of writing—and I've often been fascinated, often written myself about, these delineations between kinds of books, the prejudices and biases at the core of such attitudes, and the continuing evolution of writers attitudes toward genre, how those writers might be informed by formal traditions on the one hand and how they might challenge them on another.

Much more to say on all this, but I mostly wanted to share some of the books I'm considering teaching—and invite others to chime in with books I might add to the reading list, whether one for the syllabus itself or a supplemental list for students to explore on their own.

The course will start out with a selection of short stories surveying both the foundational history of the genre (Poe and Conan Doyle there, among others) and also various subgenres within the larger world of crime fiction: the traditional mystery, the hard-boiled tale, the noir story, domestic suspense, the police procedural, true crime writing, etc. etc. But once that foundation is laid in the first few weeks, here's the list of full novels—and one feature film!—that have risen to the top so far (in no particular order yet but all, purposefully, pointedly, from 2000 onward):

• A Rule Against Murder, Louise Penny
• Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley
• In the Woods, Tana French
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
• The End of Everything, Megan Abbott
• Country Hardball, Steve Weddle
• Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan 
• The City & the City, China Miéville
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

Thoughts? Additions?

I have a second list of strong contenders too that will be on a growing supplemental list, so.... Thanks in advance for suggestions and additions!