Review: Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

SF Done Right.

I think “Lenin and Mao Zedong” is my new favorite curse.

I should’ve been reading A Dance With Dragons and The Black Dahlia, but after finishing the insipid horror that is Dark Edge of Honor, I was in desperate need of a chaser.

I stumbled upon China Mountain Zhang a little late– nearly twenty years late, if I want to be more accurate. It was published in 1992, several years after the end of the Cold War. There’s little doubt why I ordered the novel immediately after reading the back cover blurb:

With this groundbreaking novel, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade’s best science fiction writers. In its pages, we enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars. The overlapping lives of cyberkite fliers, lonely colonists, illicit neural-pressball players, and organic engineers blend into a powerful, taut story of a young man’s journey of discovery. This is a macroscopic world of microscopic intensity, one of the most brilliant visions of modern SF.

I’m still baffled over why I’d never heard of it before. Here’s fiction featuring a gay protagonist that isn’t about the titillation. Here’s thoughtful, creative world-building where it is evident that the author has an idea how politics and people work. The characters and the setting feel real– all within the space of a few pages. Unlike Dark Edge of Honor, the humor isn’t forced and trite:

Foreman Qian is there at seven-thirty. I do not know what I will say to him. I will tell him that there is really a girl. I will tell him that I am involved in the sale and transfer of illegal goods and not a suitable choice. I will tell him I am against feudal arrangements like this. I will tell him I have an incurable disease and only have six months to live. (pg. 10)

Zhang’s cowardice and development throughout the story feels natural. He’s a sympathetic character, particularly during his bouts of depression and nihilism:

All of that work to make a little more money. But I will still be Zhang. I carry myself wherever I go, and it is myself I want to escape from. I hate myself. I hate this place. And I find it is very tiring to carry hate all the time. So I sit and listen to the night on the Arctic tundra, defeated before I start. And sick to death of all of it. (pg. 87)

and

“It’s all shit!” I shout at Maggie. “This base, the polar bears and whales! None of it matters! We don’t frigging well belong here! We are nothing! Nada!”

…

I am talking to the ice, and I am saying over and over, “I have lost my frigging mind, do you understand? I have lost my frigging mind. I have lost my frigging mind.” (pg. 88)

I feel you, bro.

There is a comparative lack of cliches, and in the course of reading I found myself sporadically turning back to the copyright page and squinting: 1992, really? It feels like it could’ve been published today.

Well, perhaps not. The narrative is alternating first person present tense. That takes cojones, and real skill to pull off. The plot is also incredibly subdued (I’ve heard this is a characteristic of McHugh’s work), and, for the first fifty pages, nearly nonexistent. I’m not sure that such a novel would be published in today’s market. I don’t consider the lack of plot and PoV drawbacks, and I found the novel a quick, satisfying read.

I will point out that there were flaws in the editing– tense slips, for instance. Clumsy sentences. McHugh also has a love for the comma splice, which quickly gets irritating. I also have to mention that there is a scene with a belligerent “nice guy” that leads to the rape of a female character. It isn’t terribly done (it’s heartbreaking, tragic), but because McHugh isn’t big on plot, I find myself wondering why it was included in the narrative.

Knowing that McHugh is a white woman, I did read this with a critical eye, searching for hints of Red Menace, exoticizing the Chinese, and xenophobia. There were certainly moments where I felt flashes of discomfort, but I don’t have enough confidence in my knowledge of China and Chinese culture to make a determination one way or another. The only Chinese word I recognized was guanxi, so I’m hardly an expert. On Amazon, I found a review complaining about the Chinese culture being superficial and simplistic, but considering this person is American-raised Chinese and also whined about the protagonist being gay, I’m taking it with a heavy degree of skepticism.

To me, it felt more reminiscent of the Japanese backdrop in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy.

I also just realized that McHugh participated in an alternate reality game for Year Zero, so my love for her is on its way to being solidified. I’ll be checking out the rest of her work in the future.

Rant: The Concept of “Dubious Consent.”

This is a story, told in the form of comments as someone struggles, and fails, to explain why she calls rape “dub-con.” I’m going to do a cut because this is long, image-heavy, and discusses rape.

Review: Voinov and Etzweiler’s Dark Edge of Honor

Gay military SF, still offensive.

Dark-skinned, black-haired and whipcord lean, Herschel melded into the native populace like hundred-proof alcohol in orange juice.

And with that confusing analogy, I bring you Dark Edge of Honor. More analogies follow.

Acrackedmoon has already done a thorough job of dissecting the rape, misogyny, racism, and general awfulness found in this novel. I suggest reading her review first.

Starting off, I’ll point out that I’m in this novel’s target demographic: straight women. Nothing hotter than a couple of manly dudes rolling around together. DEoH tries to bill itself as both military SF and smut, but instead manages to be the worst of each.

First: the military SF. Anyone familiar with the genre knows that it’s a cesspool full of misogyny, racism, xenophobia, heterosexism, and chest thumping jarheads. DEoH overturns one and upholds the rest. There’s one woman; she shows up late in the story and does little. The planet Cirokko is an Afghanistan analogue and it quickly becomes clear that you’d have better luck getting a US-educated teenager to correctly find Afghanistan on a world map that getting some decent world-building out of our beloved authors.

Etzweiler and Voinov likely pulled their knowledge of Afghanistan from a couple of CNN articles. Cirokko is hot. There’s little infrastructure. There’s mountains. It’s dusty. They grow a generic drug crop (lol opium) that is only referenced once. That’s about the sum of it. Then there are the “natives.” Oh, god, the constant references to “natives.” Not once do the Cirokkans get a chance to speak or do anything except be victimized and vaguely referenced by the two main forces. Not once do the authors attempt to humanize them or give them a voice. Not once do we catch a glimpse of a leader or anyone important. Fail.

The two main forces battling for supremacy over Cirokko are the creatively named Alliance and Doctrine. Can you tell which ones are the good guys? Thing is, anyone who knows anything about modern Afghanistan will notice one glaring omission. Remember those guys…those radical, fundamentalist Islamist dudes? What were they called? Tal–Talbots? Tali–Oh, right, the motherfucking Taliban.

You can’t have an analogue to the modern wars in Afghanistan without the Taliban. No way. You could read the Alliance CovOps (stupidest name ever) as being the American CIA, the Doctrine being the Soviets, and the rebel Cirokkans as the Taliban, but this really fails because the authors never bother to characterize the difference between the ideology of the Cirokkans as a whole and the Cirokkon rebels. That would take research, a knowledge of history, or at least maybe a book.

Of course, if the authors intended this to be an analogue to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, this novel makes even less sense.

I expect better, more insightful world-building from a novel of 96,000 words.

These authors are the kind of writers who would create an analogue to the genocide in Rwanda and spend the entire novel focused on how it affected the white people. With explicit sex, of course. There’s something particularly insensitive and jarring about the attempt to meld political events affecting a real, failing state and its people…with porn. I suspect the authors thought it would give their smut added respectability to say the story is an analogue to Afghanistan. Instead the tone is dismissive of the Cirokkans, and thus, by extension, the people of Afghanistan.

Next time, when writing your smut, don’t try to write about what you don’t understand and clearly don’t care to.

Moving on.

The plot itself is simplistic, ham-fisted, and dull. The idea of using Mike as a honeypot is ridiculous, cliched, and formulaic. The technology and tactics vacillate between uninspired and bewildering (there’s the dust thing; the inconsistent technology; and the idiotic anachronisms like “boo-yah” and cornflakes and palmpads and hollow-point bullets that don’t make sense in the far future). The two instances of torture are full of Jack Bauer wannabes.

The novel tries hard to say something new about war. It tries to convince the reader that it’s nuanced and edgy. But like a stoned hippie attempting to impress you with his poetry, the end result is pathetic and embarrassing. DEoH is full of gems like:

“Maybe all politics are wrong.”

and

“That’s war. People die. Animals die. A hundred years from now, nobody will remember. It won’t matter.”

Kierkegaard you are not, Sergei.

The writing itself is well-edited and unassuming, but every so often the authors fumble their figurative language:

The landcar was rugged, heavy, and probably guzzled gas like a camel on crack at a watering hole.

And during a sex scene:

the sounds those of exertion, as silent as a kid jerking off under the covers.

The less said about that, the better.

Which leaves me with the smut itself. I didn’t care about any of these characters. They were uninteresting and one-dimensional paladins, which made the sex boring. The smut, intended to be hot and steamy, was instead dull and repetitive. It dragged like a cat with diarrhea wiping its ass across the carpet.

Considering that most m/m romance out there is total tripe, I should grade this on a curve. If I did that, it deserves a C. There’s nothing new. Nothing original. Nothing to mark it as different in my mind. I should be happy because, hey, at least it’s not full of male pregnancy, tentacle rape and self-lubricating anuses, right? No. I like my SF smart and engaging and my smut actually hot, so I give this an F.

Rant: SWTOR Continues to Disappoint

By now, it’s relatively old and well-documented news that BioWare has locked out discussions of gay characters on SWTOR forums in the past. Therefore, it comes as little surprise that Star Wars: The Old Republic will not be allowing same-sex romantic relationships in its upcoming title. The developers have been quick to squash any criticism of this move or supply good explanations. What’s particularly irritating, however, is the dismissive attitude of the SWTOW community as a whole; many claim that it “doesn’t affect them,” so who cares?

Review: Haldeman’s The Forever War

(Also titled: In the future, everyone is gay!)

Homophobia and sexism in my military SF? No way!

I had high hopes for this one. It was praised left and right, and I was excited to finally, perhaps, find an example of military SF that isn’t sexist, boring, homophobic, xenophobic, overly simplistic, childish–

Let’s just skip to the excerpts. No spoilers follow.

Early on, we discover that women fight in the military alongside men. Don’t rejoice for our future equality, though; women are there to shack up with the men.

The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hall: they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.

The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that’s the right word. (pg. 45-46)

That’s right, ladies. Want to join the military? Hope you like being treated like a blow-up doll. Apparently all the men have vasectomies, so that takes care of one obvious problem, but then there’s the whole venereal disease thing, and what about jealousy? Wait, how was this supposed to increase morale and discipline within the armed forces?

Also, there are women all over the place, but almost all the officers– the top brass– are men.

You’re still thinking about that orgy, huh? If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering about those people who, like, aren’t heterosexual or interested in fucking the entire platoon. Well, they must not exist because they aren’t mentioned.

So after the mission, our narrator returns to Earth, where around twenty years of relative time have passed. Of course, in that time, society has gone completely bonkers as if centuries have elapsed. A famine causes the world population to drop to four billion, then it doubles to nine billion in the course of a few years because “subsistence farming seems to encourage large families.” There are so many things wrong with that (where is all the land coming from? why aren’t machines doing the labor? how the hell does the population explode if it can’t sustain itself?). Is this the stupidest idea ever, or is there possibly something dumber lurking somewhere? Oh, hold on, I found the dumber thing:

It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds. (pg. 117-118)

At this point, I think, “Has UV radiation or another environmental factor caused the future Earth people to use powder? Is the lipstick a way to counterbalance the effects of some kind of skin–

“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph . . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course.” (pg. 118)

Oh. He’s wearing powder and lipstick. Because he’s gay? A few pages later it’s revealed that “his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish.” (pg. 120) Right. Of course, there’s this: “He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little.” (pg. 119) Substitute one stereotype for another.

Take a breath, because it gets worse.

“I guess about a third of everybody in Europe or America is.

“Most governments encourage homosexuality–the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries–they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”

That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy. (pg. 118)

All right, apparently the government “encouraging” homosexuality (tax breaks? suck ten cocks and get a Best Buy gift card?) is enough to make the populace accept “homolife.” You may ask, “Wouldn’t abstinence be just as effective?” No, idiot, that’s silly! We all know people have a biological need to fuck, but sexual orientation, now that’s learned! And people will do whatever the government says, so long as they’re properly encouraged! And forced sterilization? That’s impractical and inhumane.

Immediately Haldeman hangs a lampshade on the issue by having the narrator notice how fucking stupid this sounds. I waited for a better explanation (are they dumping InstaHomo fluoride into the water?), but it never came.

He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them. (pg. 120)

Ugh.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

Ugh. So the prettiest men are the ones who are most susceptible to the government “encouragement”?

Later on, everyone is gay, and people reproduce through artificial wombs. Anyone who has heterosexual “leanings” is “cured.” Also, asexuality fail:

“Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”

Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called out to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only normal person on the whole goddamn planet. (pg. 189-190)

The narrator’s homophobia gets very tiring. But I don’t want to ramble on about the subject; suffice it to say, the subplot ruined the story for me. And it was mentioned over, and over, and over. Haldeman’s motivation– whether he hates women, believes that homosexuality is a disease or a choice or part of who you are– is unclear. He has a livejournal; perhaps I should ask him. Regardless of his beliefs, the execution didn’t work for me.

In short, I wish he had stuck to military tactics and physics.

I also could not get myself to give a damn about the narrator. He’s dull, and for the life of me I can’t think of a way to even describe him (he’s heterosexual and hates cats?). He’s that generic. The novel is full of fascinating ideas (particularly the technological ones, and the notion of time dilation itself), but because the characters are so flat and I didn’t care, I was left underwhelmed.

Anyone know of any good military SF, or should I just give up on this genre?