Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

1. To tackle the big one first, Leckie uses the personal pronoun “she” throughout to refer to everybody. This makes sense in context though, because the main character is mentally genderless and exists in a culture that is mentally genderless and uses a genderless language. The main character is a piece of a ship’s AI, an “ancillary”, so it is genderless. In the culture, gender roles and traits, such as long hair or makeup, are entirely mixed up and the language reflects this by being genderless. So, instead of using “it” and “they” throughout, Leckie uses “she”. I think this actually works: Leckie probably should use “she” or “he” in order to retain the personality and relatability of the characters, but she also uses it to communicate the humanity of the main character, who goes by Berq through the last two-thirds of the novel. However, if she is trying to make a point about gender identity in our culture, I think it’s slightly unsuccessful. Yes, it is jarring to hear a character use “he” in dialog, and I assume this is Leckie’s way to point out how jarring it is to read “she” in a novel of predominantly male characters. But those readers who would understand her gender-writing argument and give it a good thinking over, I think these readers are likely already there with her, and this novel probably won’t convince anybody new. This tactic is strange and unfamiliar, as a reader, but it works well to illuminate the unusual genderless nature of the culture. Without this, the strangeness of this specific genderless culture would've been much harder to communicate. So for me this tactic works, but not necessarily as a critique of our gendered language today.

2. Outside of this personal pronoun tactic, which helps build the world, the rest of the worldbuilding is strong. She introduces technology and organizational concepts through name-dropping, leaving specifics as mysteries, before explaining them later when it becomes beneficial to the story to do so. Rather than intro-info-dumping, she uses a noun to name a technology, than uses the explanation later to describe its effect on the story or characters. This is long-term world-building: it comes off like she has this planned out from the start. For instance: the title, Ancillary Justice. Both words in the title exhibit this tactic. The main character is an ancillary of a Justice, a troop-carrying class of starship. Within the first two chapters, these two words are fully explained, but not in an info-dump such as, “Ancillaries are physical representations, parts of a ship’s AI embodied in a human body that are capable of acting outside of the ship to great distances.” Rather, the first chapter explains this through showing instead of telling, and Leckie does it very well. She only shows how the technology affects the world, characters, and plot, keeping away from made up back story or discussing unimportant aspects of the technologies. She uses this noun-first, deferred explanation tactic throughout to explain most of the technologies and aspects of the world that contribute to building the reader’s conception of this culture and world. Her technique successfully illuminates the world, even though it doesn't give the reader all of the information about all of the technologies: certain things are left mysterious and not fully explained.

3. The writing itself is solid. There are some beautiful sounds in here, but it’s more her efficiency that astounds me. She manages to say so much through her evocative word choices. This isn’t an eight-grader’s vocabulary mated to standard sentence structures that repeat themselves. Various words and sentence structures keep the reading interesting. Here is a passage that I found beautiful:

“I had no information about her internal state. She seemed calm. Impassive, emotionless. I was sure that surface impression was a lie, though I didn’t understand why I thought that.”

This is efficient and beautiful prose that does well by being wrinkled with world-building import. For instance, the point-of-view character in the example above can read any internal physical data for some of the characters, but feels unsure of itself when this information is unavailable—like in the sentences quoted. The vocabulary is above an eight-grader, but not obscure, not too far into the thesaurus. It’s a quality, fun read.

4. The structure of the story effectively pulls the reader along while simultaneously communicating the backstory and history of the world. The structure starts at a point we’ll call now. The next chapter begins about twenty years in the past. The chapters then alternate from now to past to now to past for two-thirds of the book before the past storyline is completed and only continued through the now taking over the novel and driving towards the end of the story. This allows Leckie to focus on important moments of the past without needing to be linear in the past—it allows Leckie to skip large spans of time in order to focus on important points, allows her to bridge gaps in the past or now narratives where nothing important happens, keeps the novel from needing filler. She also skips a good eighteen years or so of the past narrative because it doesn’t matter to the story: we understand what happened between nineteen years ago and now because of what now is like. The chapter breaks effectively fracture the twin narratives, letting her focus on important parts instead of worrying about every scene change. It’s a good structure for this story and Leckie deals with it deftly. Outside of this, when the Justice's AI is whole, she shatters the narrative between different viewpoints of the Justice in a way that at least equals the skill of the third chapter of Alduous Huxley's Brave New World. Leckie jumps from point-of-view to point-of-view in an interesting, confident way that illuminates the character of the Justice's AI, all while retaining legibility well. She is a strong storyteller.

5. Leckie uses the structure described above to pace the story perfectly. Each chapter begins on a slower note and builds action through to the end—sort of. Chapters generally have two major action points, with two portions of rumination—sometimes taking place in the middle of an action phase. This allows each chapter to be fairly self-contained and Leckie rarely relies upon cliff-hanger chapter endings to drive the reader to keep reading. Instead, her chapter structures and consistent chapter length allow the story to be told in a slow, self-contained way that reflects the way the main character would think through the story, conscious of its mental limitations as an ancillary, a part of itself, not a whole being, but a mere single human, and not even that.

6. One fault is that the novel, like so many other speculative fiction novels, begins with an apparent murder. Yes, she subverts this typical tactic, but it’s still an annoyance in the first line:

“The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.”

So many speculative fiction stories do this—start with a murder or rely upon violence to change the characters or progress the plot—that it gets tiresome as a reader. A little more variety would be nice. Here though, like in China Mieville’s The City and the City, it works. It works here because it’s a familiar reference point to start the story at—something recognizable before the world building brings the strangeness in; because it’s used skillfully—even though I don’t yet care about the characters, world, or writing, this situation allows the main character to be introduced sympathetically; and because Berq’s response to this body is an important aspect of her character that continues to be important throughout the novel—like in Mieville’s novel, the body is not forgotten, it exists in a context, and it grows in importance and complexity throughout the novel. So this opening murder works because Leckie has thought through it and uses it in an interesting way rather than as a cheap writer's trick. But it’s still initially annoying.

7. Leckie has obviously thought deeply about this world. For instance, one of her ideas is that ship and station AIs are programmed with emotions in order to prioritize data, experiences, and commands. This allows negatives—there are legends of ships going insane with grief when their captain dies—but also positives in that the ships more inherently understand their human crews and captains because they can understand their emotions intuitively. This example shows that Leckie has thought deeply about the issues inherent in earlier AI stories within science fiction. She has realized that the emotionless AI is problematic through misunderstanding the humans who work with it—when working together, communication and understanding are key, and many tensions in earlier science fiction stories arise from this lack of basic understanding of emotional context. Here she takes science fiction forward. Like so many others, she's using AI characters as centers of tension in the novel. But Leckie's doing it in a way that is distinctly her own. And most of the ideas in the novel are deeply thought through like this.

8. Leckie’s deep thinking about what other authors have done in the field shows a characteristic of her writing that some readers appear to have disliked: this is space opera. Some people are annoyed with some of the tropes and tactics that space opera typically engages, and they were annoyed by this novel. I was not. My bias is that I think all genres of music are interesting and I’m happy to listen to “Little High Plains Town” by Ian Tyson right after “Alfadanz” by Burzum—because they are both quality songs despite their widely different genres. I'm the same with writing. So the fact that a novel is space opera doesn’t annoy me unless it’s bad space opera, unless it is being used by the tropes and characteristics as some sort of catharsis for the author’s personal wish fulfillment. To me, this novel is good space opera. Leckie isn’t indulging here. She’s thinking deeply and modifying characteristics and tropes to inform the reader about the characters and world. The example above about emotional AI proves that Leckie is using the tropes and traits, but she's expanding them, modifying them, not being used by them or using them thoughtlessly. She’s writing in a way that makes sense to her story and characters here, and some of it seems to fall near some tropes. And that’s fine by me because she’s doing her own thing with them, expanding and changing them, not re-doing what other authors have done. However, it could be a bit baffling to non-science fiction fans because it is drawing from other texts. But I don’t think it’s possible the novel is entirely baffling to a new science fiction fan. I think a new science fiction reader would need to put in more effort than an old-hand, but it’s still legible and effective.

9. If you can’t yet tell, I think this book successfully tells an interesting story. Leckie writes well, structures the story well, consistently paces the novel, and deeply thinks about interesting ideas. I really appreciate the craft and care and thought she put into writing and structuring the story and characters. I cannot overstate how refreshing it is to read a well-written speculative fiction novel. Her training and study at a writing school shows here. This would've been a New York Times best seller if it didn't draw so heavily from the history of science fiction. This is confident, good writing and storytelling. She knows what she’s doing. She focuses on the characters, yet the overarching plot and world lives up to the strength of characterization throughout. With my past university studies into literature, this good writing breathes freshness into speculative fiction, reinvigorates my love for what a well-done speculative fiction novel can do when it really is novel. This leaves me applauding the writer, appreciating her craft, and pondering the ideas she presents believably in the text. This debut novel strengthens science fiction.

[Added 10/26/15: 10. The theme here is "what is human?" At the end, an AI in a human body gains some of the trappings of humans by gaining a surname. But really, this questions is shot through the whole book.]

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

1. The writing here catches a sardonic, conversational tone fantastically.

I had forgotten all about Susan until a voice came from above. "You are getting wet, you silly. Why don't you kiss her in-doors?" it asked.

Though laughs populate the prose, this is a deeply dark and disturbing world, like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Here the laughs both lighten the depressing mood and assert man’s ability to survive the apocalypse with humor intact. Like a firefighter’s black sense of humor, which is an emotional survival method, Wyndham’s humor allows the reader places to catch their breath from the oppressing circumstances by losing it in laughter. Let me give an example from early in the book, on the day the whole world goes blind except for a very few, including Bill, who was a patient at the hospital:

But although there was no one in that part, there was certainly something going on in the saloon bar, round the corner. I heard heavy breathing. A cork left its bottle with a pop. A pause. Then a voice remarked: "Gin, blast it! T'hell with gin!" There followed a shattering crash. The voice gave a sozzled chuckle. "Thash th'mirror. Wash good of mirrors anyway?" Another cork popped. "S'darnned gin again," complained the voice, offended. "T'hell with gin." This time the bottle hit something soft, thudded to the floor, and lay there gurgling away its contents.
"Hey!" I called. "I want a drink." There was a silence.
Then: "Who're you?" the voice inquired cautiously.
"I'm from the hospital," I said. "I want a drink."
"Don' 'member y'r voice. Can you see?"
"Yes," I told him.
"Well, then, for God's sake get over the bar, Doc, and find me a bottle of whisky."
"I'm doctor enough for that," I said.

This sets up the dialog pattern that Wyndham uses throughout to keep the reader entertained and informed. His sense of timing keeps the humor feeling natural, unforced. And outside of the dialog, he captures a conversational tone through having quite a few mid-sentence asides. Here’s an example from the first chapter:

The temptation to take a peep—not more than a peep, of course; just enough to get some idea of what on earth could be happening—was immense.

This is a fun to read. A well-written book. The writing allows the characters to really have personalities and personality.

2. But not only is it a fun read, the writing is solid. Moments of beauty in description and emotional evocation litter the prose. The drunk's quick comment about mirrors foreshadows the fact that most cultural artifacts of humanity are inappropriate to a world gone blind, and through the uselessness of the artifacts, the book communicates how culture comes apart catastrophically. Nothing is dropped or ignored for too long to be a surprise when it comes back up. There is nothing overly breathtaking in the writing, except that the writing never disappoints. After reading this, I can remember no missteps in word choice or sentence structure. It communicates well and it’s a worthwhile read, while also being fun.

3. The structure starts in the middle of the action, then backtracks into Bill’s origins—keeping it all relevant to the character and topic at hand—before catching up and moving on with the story. The opening structure effectively sets up the story while the rest is a straight narrative. Wyndhan paces it well. He delves deeply into lengthy, interesting experiences, while pruning parts of the story that have less interest. For example, he won’t describe a commute in detail over pages, but he’ll give a single sentence or two through discussing how the length of the commute frustrates or frees Bill emotionally. This isn’t to say it’s all go-go-go action, come on let's get to a gun-fight, but everything that happens is important and influential to the narrative—whether it’s rumination or physical action, and this inherent importance adds to the writing being entirely readable.

4. However, I’m not sure why it ends where it does. My wife mentioned that a few of those last chapters could’ve been good endings as well, and I think I agree. But the ending itself draws back in one last thread of humanity and minor character in order to tie up that last loose end—if you can consider that minor character a loose end. I’m not sure he needed tied up, but the author chose to tie it up this way and it works. I was just hoping for one more chapter, a little more of an epilogue: a chapter of their last move to that new colony and describing the colony to some extent. It would’ve provided Wyndham the opportunity to end on a significantly hopeful note. As it is, it ends hopefully, but quickly. He doesn’t dwell too long on the hopefulness of the end, and I thought the ending could’ve benefited from a bit more of a discussion of the hope and path forward. He did such a wonderful job exploring the paths to failure in depth, but merely skims over the path to success so that it feels a little half-completed. It sticks out as inconsistent to me.

5. There are three themes here: first, he’s drawing philosophy, tensions, and situations from colonialism—to the extent of including a couple of extended discussions on "the other". Second, he’s discussing aspects of what became the Cold War: weapons proliferation, insular governments, breakdowns of communication, citizens living unaware but uneasy, and science perverted to only serve the use of militaries. Third, and I think this is the main theme here, he’s discussing a philosophy or logic for how humans should interact with each other: doing everything for others and respecting the strengths of another while compensating for their weaknesses as a group. Croker’s failed experiment was based on his self-deception about the situation and the possibilities of it. Wyndham encourages his readers to be adaptable and open-eyed, to think through issues realistically, and to rely upon each other in a symbiotic way. He pulls this off through keeping the story focused on the humans and the various ways they’re interacting, rather than focusing on the situation as a whole.

6. In short, this is a tight, well-written, funny, and interesting book. I was surprised by the quality of it and I enjoyed it immensely. I really only had a problem with one part: the slightly odd ending, but this didn’t ruin the book at all, it was merely a little different. At the end, due to the writing quality, I wonder what else John Wyndham has written?

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu.

1. I really appreciate the way Liu deals with video games. Instead of some starry-eyed, over-the-top, unnecessary and long description of the game-world as an unknowable pseudo-fantasy-land, he describes it the same way he describes spaces in the physical world: as a place the character is experiencing for the first time. It’s not this special, magical place whose description shows only that the author clearly doesn’t understand how humans interact with games; but an honest, down-to-earth portrayal of a video game. His descriptions are William Gibson-esque in approaching the game-world like the character approaches any other space. Instead of mysticism, Liu describes the video game world for why it’s interesting. For instance, the world is initially esoteric, so the descriptions are. But the character views video games as mundane, a known part of the world, so the descriptions of it are mundane. Also, the VR tech is just a matter of course, not a life-altering wonder-tech: it’s a mundane technology in a mundane world. You know, like the world Liu has created is actually real with real people in it: the technology is used, not revered. This is not some shiny new world, but it’s a world populated by real people and real objects and the relationships the character has to the world feel true and honest. This is refreshing and important to remember.

2. My biggest complaint is a tendency in the writing to ham-fist things, which feels insulting to the reader. For instance, when Wang talks to Shen, it’s clearly shown who she is through how she interacts with others. However, later he decides to describe these aspects of her character. He starts with the beautiful telling-phrase, “She spoke like a telegraph—”. This confirms what I already knew with a novel phrase—a great tactic. However, he goes on: “and gave him the impression that she was always extremely cold.” Okay, now that's just redundant. But he doesn’t end there: he keeps hammering the point home through four more long sentences that feel like he’s belaboring the point unnecessarily because he doesn’t believe the reader understands yet. Sure, the C-Prompt analogy is a beautiful one, but it’s too much. This tendency is annoying throughout. He tells well, he just tells too much. Other than this ham-fisting, the writing seems passable, but in translation it’s impossible to judge writing much beyond that.

3. Liu starts the story with one of my least-favorite moves: beginning with a murder before the reader has been given a chance to care about anything yet. I don’t yet care about the world, any characters, or the plot by the time the first murder has occurred. This is difficult for me because it’s such a cliche in speculative fiction right now. It seems like three-quarters of the novels I buy that are from the last five years start with a dead body. This one though, it starts with not just one death, but three! Is this a pun on the title, which is the famous physics-problem and what the plot of the book revolves around? Anyways, he later tries to tie in two of these murders to the life of Wenjie, one of the two main characters. I think these murders try to drive home his perspective on the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. But he does this much more effectively later through showing some specifics that relate to the characters and themes the reader already knows and cares about. These later instances of showing are more effective because the reader is invested, not because he shows better. However, he does show quite well.

4. Structurally, I’m confused. And I don’t know how much of my confusion is from translational ambiguity, unknown differences in narrative traditions between Western and Chinese stories, or this tale itself being told poorly. Primarily, I think I'm confused at the pace of information and the pauses between the first instance and the explanation:
—One example is the countdown, experienced in the first hundred pages, then explained in the last-hundred pages of this four-hundred page book. This is a long wait for what seems a minor plot point. It attempts to set up mystery, but missed that for me by being seemingly dropped and not mentioned again until the end. Only after I got to the second explanation did I realize that I should have been feeling mystery over this throughout. It initially felt like Liu didn't know where he was going.
—Another example is that the ETO is explained as a two-faction group throughout, until about the 300 page mark, when a third faction suddenly appears, and is promptly dropped in a way that billboards a sequel.
—My third example is that Liu often reveals something ambiguously, “Physics doesn’t exist,” then seemingly drops it until five to ten pages later when he gives some exposition, then again until a couple of hundred pages later when he reveals more about this concept. This adds confusion to the story. I’m already confused because the story is paced oddly, and this extra confusion doesn’t add any more mystery, but raises questions in my mind as to whether the author knows where he’s going. I assumed he did and read on, believing that by the end my understanding would come.
And it did satisfactorily. This shaped up by the end into a rather interesting tale. But those early struggles obscured important revelations and aspects of the world and plot for me. The translator, Ken Liu, states in his translator’s notes, “The Chinese literary tradition was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect. In some cases, I tried to adjust the narrative techniques to ones that American readers are more familiar with. In other cases, I’ve left them alone, believing that it’s better to retain the flavor of the original.” At the end, I can’t tell which portions of the novel are either of these techniques. Ken Liu is a good writer on his own, so I can’t blame all my struggles on his translation. I believe this question to be unanswerable by me. Perhaps what Kim Stanley Robinson says on the cover is most informative here: “familiar but strange all at the same time.” I can agree with that. But I still don’t know how much of my confusion is from which of these three issues.

5. The themes of the novel are human interactions and possible responses to the existence of aliens. This is explained fully and concisely in the author’s postscript, where he talks about how humans should be more friendly to each other and all life on their planet, and less optimistic about aliens. And I believe Liu nailed this theme. So, despite the structural confusions I experienced and annoyance I felt at the writing’s redundancy, this is a successful novel in that it communicates its point clearly and adequately, while telling an interesting and engaging story. But in this theme, he doesn’t ever lose sight of the human aspect and delve into what makes Wenjie, Wang, and Shi tick. He delves into their psychology effectively. This melding of alien and human interactions is well-done.

6. This novel is also hard science fiction, and Liu does a good job of explaining these physics concepts and what makes them interesting. I came away from this book with a deeper understanding of the three-body problem in physics. But the novel is wonderfully diverse in the number of science topics it discusses, giving them all an introductory treatment instead of a deep exploration of one theory. Liu does a good job of explaining these through focusing on the interesting aspects and using these properties in the story to show understandable examples of the physics theories discussed. This is effective and separates his writing from a textbook’s.

7. In all, this novel is well-written. Despite spending half the book or more telling people who asked, “I don’t yet know what it’s about, or who the main character is.” I eventually believed, “but I think he knows where he’s going and those last fifty pages are going to be super-important and dense.” And they were. I think almost everything tied back in by the end. It was done in an interesting way and it led to an interesting conclusion—it illuminated that wonderful theme through showing. In short, this strange novel all works out in the end, it makes sense by the end, but it requires a lot from the reader due to its strangeness. It ain’t a bad book, but I am still slightly bemused. And I'm not sure it's in the good way.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon — First Read

This book is available to read freely online here.

1. This is a strange book, but it's organized well so it holds together. It chronicles a fictional history for mankind up to a specific point in the future. It's a large span of time that Stapledon is dealing with, and he organizes the time periods into eighteen main parts: seventeen different evolutionary variations on our humanity coming after his predictions for what would happen next in our world, the world of the first men. This organization is successful at keeping the whole project legible and varied.

2. It's structurally a good tactic to start here with the familiar, you and me as first men, then continue carefully and slowly away from that point, noting the early differences in detail. Then, by the time the reader gets to the eighteenth men, all of these crazy differences between us and them are palatable to the reader because they've seen the slow change over time in stages. This is a crazy book dealing with some inconceivable topics and states of being. But by showing the slow evolution, Stapledon allows the reader to understand his conception—by taking us one step at a time, I can follow much more easily.

3. However, he spends too much time on the first men. Even the intro to the version I read advised the reader to skip the first four parts due to their repetitiveness and their placing the book so specifically in 1930—plus, Stapledon gets some of his early prophecy very wrong. I also think too much time is spent on the first men: 37.5% of the book tells the story of the first men and the Martians, though the Martians only have a couple pages at best. This is what HP Lovecraft believed was a "disproportianate acceleration of the tempo towards the end." More time is spent on the first, second, fifth, and eighteenth men, while some of the later variations only receive a couple of sentences of description. Let me break down the pacing:

• the first 6 chapters are given over to the first men;
• chapters 7-9 to the second;
• chapter 10 to the third;
• chapter 11 to the fourth and fifth;
• chapter 12 the fifth alone;
• chapter 13 to the sixth, seventh, and eighth;
• chapter 14 to the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth;
• and the final two chapters, 15-16, to the eighteenth men.

This pacing struck me two ways: either Stapledon is not being as fair and evenhanded with his philosophical opponents in the second half as he was in the first, or he ran out of steam as a writer. Like when you try and fit a word onto a note card and you kinda run out of room so you mash all the letters together there at the edge and it's pretty obvious that you ran out of room. That's almost what this "acceleration of tempo" feels like. This disproportion between how much time is spent on the first men, and how much time is spent on the tenth through seventeenth men was a little frustrating as a reader. It felt like a little more planning or editing could have helped. Like I said, some extra time with the first humans at the start is a positive—it allows human readers an empathetic avenue into this weird future evolutionary story—but Stapledon spent too much time on them. This is actually not a major detriment for me though, because his project doesn't seem to be future history or future prophecy on any level deeper than the surface.

4. The themes are evolution and genetic engineering, as well as man attempting to find man's place in the universe. And it's man's search that is Stapledon's project here. Through the 16 intervening species of men between the first and the last, each symbolizes characteristics of a philosophy that Stapledon is arguing against. Three examples:

• The fourth men are the most intelligent beings ever created. They think better than anybody, they govern with wisdom, and they are driven by objectivity. Empirical evidence is prime in their minds, and their thirst and passion for study is unrivaled. These are the smartest, wisest, brightest, and most objective beings that have ever been, and they're working together perfectly in a perfect commune. Yet, they have lost their humanity: love, sex, emotion, familial ties, competition, the easy ability to walk around. Through ignoring these basic human characteristics, they are wiped out. In other words, pure intellectualism uninformed by emotion is a philosophical dead end. As attractive as it seems from our perspective, Stapledon imagines that the true philosopher Kings would end up ruling the people through tyranny. And he makes a convincing argument.
• Even the Martians who invade earth are a metaphor for a philosophy: their group mind and body representin mindless communism.
• At the end, even the 18th men still have questions to be answered. I assume that the 18th men embody Stapledon's personal philosophy: they have done away with guilt, they are sexually highly diverse and liberal, they're all philosophers and artists, they have the ability to act and think together in groups of 96 or as an entire species, they are immortal, and they can re-experience the past at will. In other words, Stapledon wants us to get to a place where our morals are less limiting to our intellect, where we appreciate the well done good and evil act alike, and where the only things left unanswered are what the future holds and what happens after death.

Let me quote two paragraphs to give a specificity of how he's accomplishing his project:

The ether ship is in a manner symbolic of our whole community, so highly organized is it, and so minute in relation to the void which engulfs it. The ethereal navigators, because they spend so much of their time in the empty regions, beyond the range of "telepathic" communication and sometimes even of mechanical radio, form mentally a unique class among us. They are a hardy, simple, and modest folk. And though they embody man's proud mastery of the ether, they are never tired of reminding landlubbers, with dour jocularity, that the most daring voyages are confined within one drop of the boundless ocean of space.

Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased, and mentally unbalanced. To a race that thought itself so well established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets, and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that is not human. They dare not go out at night. They live in an extravagant passion for the presence of others. And since all others are astronomically minded, they cannot find real companionship. They insanely refuse to participate in the mental life of the race upon the plane where all things are seen in their just proportions. They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life; and so they are led to curse the immensities. They fill their minds with human conceits, and their houses with toys. By night they draw the curtains and drown the quiet voice of the stars in revelry. But it is a joyless and a haunted revelry, desired less for itself than as a defence against reality.

Here he's talking about a perfectly unified society that is able to handle anything through their perfect community. Yet, when taken outside of that community and faced with an actual unknown, even a minor unknown like "two comets, and an occasional meteor," these people who draw their strength from insularity are crazed, diseased, emaciated, and half of them die. They have no defence against reality outside that of their community. In Stapledon's mind, insularity leads to inflexibility which leads to mental instability when confronted with something outside of one's conception or experience. This philosophical project of lining up different philosophies then shooting them down works for Stapledon. I must mention that some seem a little straw-mannish: essentially saying that a group realizes a failure is coming from a long way out because they are so logical, so they gracefully step out of the way. But these examples don't really detract too much.

5. Part of the reason that it works is he never loses sight of wonder. In the descriptions of each of the stages of man's evolution, in the descriptions of geological and universal time, in the short episodes of specific situations that ended up being important—Stapledon suffuses this book with a sense of wonder that I think is necessary to the readability of the dryer philosophical theme. If it was just straight philosophy, this project would have been better suited to an essay. But he wants to write it in this narrative form, so he fills it with life, wonder, and beauty. The marriage of these two actually ends up working very well. It's a big risk, not having characters and relying upon descriptions, world-building, and philosophy alone to interest the reader and drive the book. But Stapledon's descriptions allow wonder to carry the whole thing:

The sky turned black. The Arctic summer became a weird and sultry night, torn by fantastic thunderstorms. Rain crashed on the ship's deck in a continuous waterfall. Clouds of pungent smoke and dust irritated the eyes and nose. Submarine earthquakes buckled the pack-ice.

A year after the explosion, the ship was labouring in tempestuous and berg-strewn water near the Pole. The bewildered little company now began to feel its way south; but, as they proceeded, the air became more fiercely hot and pungent, the storms more savage. Another twelve months were spent in beating about the Polar sea, ever and again retreating north from the impossible southern weather. But at length conditions improved slightly, and with great difficulty these few survivors of the human race approached their original objective in Norway, to find that the lowlands were a scorched and lifeless desert, while on the heights the valley vegetation was already struggling to establish itself, in patches of sickly green. Their base town had been flattened by a hurricane, and the skeletons of its population still lay in the streets. They coasted further south. Everywhere the same desolation. Hoping that the disturbance might be merely local, they headed round the British Isles and doubled back on France. But France turned out to be an appalling chaos of volcanoes. With a change of wind, the sea around them was infuriated with falling debris, often red hot. Miraculously they got away and fled north again. After creeping along the Siberian coast they were at last able to find a tolerable resting-place at the mouth of one of the great rivers. The ship was brought to anchor, and the crew rested. They were a diminished company, for six men and two women had been lost on the voyage.

I think the writing is good: it communicates well and has that perfect balance between specific detail and unstated mystery which allows wonder to seep into the text. It is evocative without being breathtakingly beautiful, but also without being ugly. As you can tell from the first paragraph quoted in point 4, there is a suspension of disbelief that the reader today must engage in order to fully enjoy this book. This was written in 1930 and some of the science shows it. But in all, the writing is solid.

6. In essence: the solid writing, the episodic storytelling structure, and Stapledon's philosophical project are so closely related in this text that the end result is staggering. It's a job well done and I can see its influence directly on Arthur Clarke, who also said: "Last and First Men: No other book had a greater influence on my life....(It) and its successor Star Maker (1937) are the twin summits of (Stapledon's) literary career." It also influenced CS Lewis's Space Trilogy: "I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow." Fritz Leiber suspected this book had the power of myth, to which HP Lovecraft responded: "Its scope is dizzying—and despite a somewhat disproportionate acceleration of the tempo toward the end, and a few scientific inferences which might legitimately be challenged, it remains a thing of unparalleled power. As you say, it has the truly basic quality of a myth, and some of the episodes are of matchless poignancy and dramatic intensity." I agree with Lewis and Lovecraft and Leiber here. The marriage of structure, writing, and subtext is superb.

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville

1. I certainly wanted more variety of structure. Short stories are where authors can try more with less risk of wasting a year on a crap novel: they can attempt new schemes and test sentence structures and throw it all away if it doesn't work, only having wasted a few hours of time rather than weeks or months. And Miéville does that here, somewhat. But at times he sticks rigidly to his familiar themes and styles: the unknown, barely glimpsed or heard horror understood by one character as necessitating flight, and by another as the other's irrational flight; the mid-story reveal of a deeper mystery that, though it's not what the story is about, subtly or wholly changes the setting or stakes; a discussion of how humans exist in a world where one significant thing is quite different and, to us, illogically so. These are good tactics and he writes them well. But this is a collection of 28 short stories mostly using these three tactics. I wanted more variety here, and didn't get it. For instance, the three italicized stories are transcriptions of video, and instead of trying this structure then moving on to trying other interesting new things, two more stories come along written as a video transcription. I wanted more variety, but the stores are mostly good: well-written and engaging, communicative of his subtext, and interesting.

2. What I like the most is that they remain focused on humanity. Mostly he examines the various ways we deal with the unknown and unknowable: our reactions, our reactions to our own reactions, others' reactions to our reactions, and how we react to their reaction to our reaction. This is what makes Miéville great: he goes that one layer deeper into what makes us who we are and how who we are reacts. With the fantastical, often unknowable setting or actions, this honesty about humanity grounds the stories and keeps them legible and applicable to human readers. No matter how weird, farfetched, or illogical it all gets, there are still humans and recognizable reactions. The themes here circle humans and the unknown, reaction chains and how we interface with the unknown and stay human with it. Like the three figured cast of "In the Slopes," which is probably a wonderful metaphor for the theme of the stories, the unknown comes and in their final act they pointlessly attempt protection, succeeding instead at love, trust, fear, panic, and acceptance of the fateful inevitability. The speculative aspects almost always affect the characters in interesting, recognizable ways. Miéville uses them as more than decoration throughout. But they are not the focus. Rather, they are a pivot point, or a metaphor, or a way to look at something in a new light initially undimmed by preconceptions. This is strong science fiction.

3. The other thing Miéville does well is allow readers to care before the plot really gets moving. We already care about Nick before we learn his condition. This effectively gives his illness import. This is rare: in The Caves of Steel, the initial murder is not inherently interesting or important or contextualized to the reader at all. So many speculative novels start with a murder that it's no longer gripping but cliché—like a D&D campaign beginning in an inn, or a film's external scene setting shot not informing the following scene at all. Miéville avoids this by beginning his stories before an important action, far enough back that the reader is able to guess at the importance when the action occurs, actually giving the action some import. This is both engaging and refreshing.

4. The writing is economical and unusual, prone to wonderfully surprising one-liners and immense pace changes. There are some strange sentences while Miéville pushes and stretches language, trimming and pruning—such as, "I said, he said, we must go"—but he's still usually making sense. There is beauty here:

"Couldn't arrange the sun," Anna called. The cloud cover was flat and unvarying gray. The yard was too enclosed to feel the wind.

But mostly, his wonderful wording leads to surprising one-liners:

I poured myself a glass of water. I didn't like how it looked at me.

They started to shed shadows.

God is a scrimshander.

There are many other examples. He uses words rather than being constrained by the ways they've been used in the past. He attaches new connotations, stretching their traditional meanings a bit. A typical author would have written, "They started to shadow whole swaths of London." He says, "shed shadows." It works. At least more often than it doesn't.

5. Miéville mostly shows. He does this well, using sentence structures and word choices to modify pace and show fractures in human logic and understanding and changing minds. But he also tells well:

I looked straight at Ian and willed myself not to show guilt.

I loved the London bergs.

I'm not thrilled by the prospect.

He does both well and uses both to influence the pace of the narrative, to breed mystery. For instance, why is he not thrilled to go back? Too much here would've piqued my interest less. But when an important crux is reached in "The Dusty Hat," the character's emotions are shown through the episode with the water glass looking at him funny, and his other actions, which slows down the narrative through needing more words to show emotion by action rather than telling, which allows the story to dwell for a space, which billboards the importance of that part of the story. Miéville shows and tells well, but also uses both to influence the story brilliantly.

6. I think at two or three points Miéville is a bit too preachy in the stories and it comes off egotistical.

7. "In the Slopes" is one of my favorite short stories. It uses one of his typical structures—surprise the reader 1/3 into the story—but Miéville writes this tactic so well that it's a delight to read. It's a 33 page story about "The Other Pompeii". It begins with 14 pages about two dig sites—one traditional, the other new and mysterious—and their two dig-crews—one traditional, the other experimenting with new techniques. Their professional rivalry plays out like a soap opera for the island's permanent inhabitants. This rivalry is the focus of the first 14 pages. Then Miéville nonchalantly drops a massive revelation about the artifacts themselves that completely changes the setting, recasting all the mundanity of island life and the professional rivalry in a strange new view that uses the mundane-fantastical contrast to show the human truth that time will make any atypical typical. He reveals this in a way wholly appropriate to the characters and the setting: this is a revelation to the reader, but it's obviously mundane to the islanders. Rather than blasting off with this new revelation in a new direction, like a pulp author would, he continues the human story from the first 14 pages within this newly shifted frame: the story's still about the professional rivalry and the digs. Miéville often uses this sort of bait-and-switch tactic, like a sonnet's volta, to recast a partially built world with a nonchalant detail drop that shifts the whole thing. These fantastic elements are part of the whole story and integral to the story, but they're never the point: something to do with humanity is always the point. It's a tactic he uses often—both in this collection and in his other works—but perhaps nowhere better than "In the Slopes". Although, The City and The City quite skillfully does this as well.

8. "Polynia" engages a different structure. Here, London is invaded by relics of the past. Illicit explorers of these relics send messages back to London while government expeditions livestream their explorations. But the whole is told by an adult looking back on his childhood obsession with these artifacts. The structure leaves the why until the end—examining the parts and plot before reflecting on why the adult is bringing these situations back up. Again, it's a mundane, human, coming-of-age story in a fantastical setting. Miéville uses the set pieces to ally the largely unlikable main character with the reader: I am as interested in the objects of his obsession as he is. And without these speculative artifacts, well, I would have been hard pressed to feel with this kid about Pokémon or Minecraft. But the strange, illogical artifacts, about which I have no preconceived notions, allow me to empathize with a character who is otherwise unlikable.

9. In "The Design", Miéville experiments with an interesting structure: the story ping-pongs back and forth in time, allowing the future narrator to reflect on the past and foreshadow the more future past. The mystery of the narrator's origin and interest in William ties it all together. He's not just a close school chum, that's apparent, but the specifics of what he is are hinted at throughout, not explicitly given. This effectively drives the story forward while the situation of the design itself is more the excuse for the subtextual story—the hook to draw the reader in while the relationship between William and the narrator takes its time building up enough detail to gain interest and import.

10. "Säcken" shows the physical monster, describes it, which is typically a no-no. I've been heard to say, "never show the monster," and I detest writing rules. But it works here, because the real monster is the humanity that created this, not the strange physical result. In this way, it's indebted to Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau and Shelly's Frankenstein, both of which fully show the physical monster because the humanity is the real monster. But of course, it's Miéville, so he has his own point and take on this plot element.

11. I did not like a few stories, or maybe I just didn't get them. "The Condition of New Death" lost sight of humanity in the window dressing. "The Crawl" failed to deal with the genre in an interesting way. "Rules" had a great premise and opening, but petered out in a lackluster mess. "The Rope is the World" is a fascinating idea that nothing is done with: this should probably be a novel to really get enough out of this rich concept.

12. In many ways, most of the stories are worthy of study by a writer: even the failures are still interesting enough to make engaging with them worthwhile and enjoyable. The stories are dense with techniques, confident wordplay, and appreciable pacing, world-building, and character creation. Maybe I read them too quickly—one and a half weeks—but I grew fatigued by the similarities of structures, themes, and the long story to short story to long story arrangement of the book. I think spacing the stories out in my own reading would have been a better method here: one that would have allowed more time to reflect on every story and draw conclusions from each.

13. I most liked "In the Slopes," "The Design," "Polynia," "Dreaded Outcome," "Watching God," "The Dowager of Bees," "Keep," "Covehithe," "A Second Slice Manifesto," and "Three Moments of an Explosion." However, "In the Slopes" and "The Design" seem to just blow everything else out of the water.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

1. The coolest thing Zelazny structurally does is to make Sam fail constantly. Sam shoots from the hip an awful lot, and mostly misses: he frees the demons and becomes possessed, he attempts to steal the thunder chariot and gets taken captive, he battles the gods and loses—there are more examples. Though Sam loses battles, he messes up in ways that he can turn to his benefit: by being possessed, he befriends the demon; by being captured, he has opportunity to proselytize the gods; by battling the gods, he sews doubt in their minds and in man's. He takes what comes to him and finds any advantage to draw from it. This isn't a pulp trick though: it's not John Carter falling while fighting, then sitting and stewing until some deus ex machina frees him, then going straight back to the fighting. Rather, Sam risks and loses, but makes the most of it, turns it to his advantage in a way that doesn't rely on hitherto unknowns or outside forces, but through the characters themselves in an honest way, not shying away from what would be a corner a lesser writer would've written themselves into. Something is lost and something is gained. Afterwards, instead of sticking to the same plan in the same way and trying again, that plot element is concluded and Sam moves on. This tactic of Zelazny's is subtle, but a big difference. This is not cheap storytelling. It comes off sophisticated and complex. Brilliant. (Though a counterpoint would be the mother of the glow, which is a deus ex machina)

2. The world building inspires awe. Zelazny starts right in with the characters in the world. He stays with them throughout. It's all the characters, and through them the world-building happens. For instance, in the opening of the book Yama operates a prayer-machine. The reader has no clue what a prayer-machine is other than the clue the name itself gives. This machine and the way the characters interact while using it gives a sense of the world. He doesn't stop the action to explain the technology, but he does give the basics: what a machine does, why the character is using it, and some context of whether the machine is for mortals or gods. These explanations arise naturally, are not overly wordy, and are not overly complex—they only give one more layer to the depth of the technology, keeping the focus on characters and plot and ideas while intruding as little as possible into the narrative. Some of these explanations arise in dialogue, as does much of the fictional history: two characters referencing a shared experience while introducing it to the reader. This is how the world-building is accomplished: the focus stays on the characters, goals, and actions rather than the technology or traditional world-building by narrator. With the prayer-machine, which is quickly explained, he builds trust in the reader, and I trust him to explain things as needed from there on. By not intro-info-dumping, he draws out the world building throughout the novel, which keeps the reader discovering new ideas. By the end I have a great sense of the world. Again it's not cheap or pulpy, but incredibly sophisticated: he focuses on the characters and uses them to build the world naturally and slowly. He doesn't use this tactic to excuse any deus ex machina later. (Except the mother of the glow)

3. But the structure isn't all perfect, unfortunately. That ending drags on in a way that feels like Zelazny lost his path. It's longwinded and introduces new characters and continents in a wild proliferation of plot threads spreading out and too heavily indicating a sequel, which was never written. Six and a half chapters of this novel are structured perfectly, while half a chapter drags.

4. The main structural risk is starting in the middle, then backtracking to another starting point in the past, then surpassing the original starting point to an ending point in the future. This works, but I think it could have been a bit more clear. I initially missed it and was quite confused for a couple of paragraphs.

5. I had a hard time keeping some of the minor characters straight. Because everything flows so well and keeps on moving without major pauses, some of the characters are not clear before the tale moves on, causing minor confusion. Plus, each character has so many names. Their myriad-names convey the serial nature of their mind transfers, sure, but also obfuscate who is who.

6. The novel happens in stages of action and reflection, attempting to meld the two and mostly succeeding. What I mean is that a lengthy action passage will be followed up by a lengthy passage where not much physically happens, but it reflects on the action that just occurred and the action that is about to occur. The novel is almost a 50-50 split of reflection and action, which fits the setting and themes well.

7. It's refreshing to have any author treat another culture this fairly: he is not stereotyping, he's writing complex and conflicted humans who happen to be Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian. Indian themes run through the novel, but never feel like cheap window dressing. Instead I came away with a sense that Zelazny embarked on a truly massive research project before writing this. He method-writes this, inhabiting parts of the culture to tell this tale.

8. The broad writing tactic mixes science fiction story with fantasy word choices, descriptions, and sentence structures. I wouldn't have thought this possible to this level of success. But Zelazny pulls it off, effectively embracing and illuminating the fantastic inherent in science fiction. He also allows that fantastic and utter incomprehensibility to cause the writing. All things are described as mythical, through deeply paradoxical, incantational, and mystical language. It's a gripping voice. Let me give four examples:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.

"I shall tear these stars from out the heavens, and hurl them in the faces of the gods, if this be necessary. I shall blaspheme in every Temple throughout the land. I shall take lives as a fisherman takes fish, by the net, if this be necessary. I shall mount me again up to the Celestial City, though every step be a flame or a naked sword and the way be guarded by tigers. One day will the gods look down from Heaven and see me upon the stair, bringing them the gift they fear most. That day will the new Yuga begin."

The day of the battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden. A small mist drifted in from the river. The Bridge of the Gods glistened all of gold in the east, reached back, darkening, into retreating night, divided the heavens like a burning equator. [...] There were no clouds in the heavens. The grasses of the plain were still moist and sparkling. The air was cool, the ground still soft enough to gather footprints readily.

This writing is simply fun to read. The names also contribute to this wonderful voice. Zelazny avoids overwhelming the readers with made up, pseudo-historical names by using familiars like Buddha and Shiva, but also by using explanatory names: Lord of Light, God of Fire, Garden of Joy, Purple Grove, etc. These explanatory names are perfect: they both explain and give a sense of the importance that calling a city Keenset doesn't have without the further explanation of Keenset's technological advance and the battle. For instance, Purple Grove implies that it's unique and tells what's unique about it in the same breath. Zelazny's voice here is stunning.

9. The theme is traditional versus advancement, old versus new, the powerful few versus the powerless many. From the very start, with the prayer machine, the reader begins to get a sense of this theme. And all throughout, this theme is drilled home by the plot, the dialog, the monologue, and the setting. The demons are a powerless many, yet they still threaten Sam. Sam fights the gods, not by brilliant battle, but rather by shifting the rules of the game to favor the many, the new, advancement. The theme runs through this entire novel, influencing every word. It's a fascinating look at a space colony gone native en masse, at how pinched resources can affect a whole planet of people and their social structures, at how adopting a pose eventually causes your face to stick that way. It's engaging and has a satisfying depth.

The Tower by WB Yeats

This collection is available to read freely online here.

For Garrett.

1. There are some astounding lines in here:

"Now I shall make my soul."
"What shall I do with this absurdity—"
"Strange, but the man who made the song was blind."
"He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro."
"The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,"
"Having inherited a vigorous mind"
"It is time that I wrote my will,"
"Life overflows without ambitious pains;"

Yeats is working with lines that, when taken out of context like this, appear to mean one thing but, when read in the poem, mean something different. This is interesting structurally, but I find the constant shift between what is implied and what is actually said to be fatiguing over the length of this whole collection.

2. In the first two poems I see a combination of The Wind Among the Reeds and Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The former plays with words and is easy to understand. The second constructs complex patterns and is wider ranging in thoughts and topics, circling and including and ruminating towards a conclusion. This collection draws from both, but might not do either as well as those earlier works.

3. The second poem, titular, is very tight. It is constructed like "A Prayer for My Daughter": it starts simply, confronting aging, then goes ranging wide before coming back to a concise close. At first it seems somewhat rambling, but each example, thought, and memory is called back in later to influence other thoughts. Every one. This is controlled, and tight. But, the seeming divergences risk sidetracking and losing me when they first appear. Yeats does not connect them clearly enough until later in the poem, and that's my biggest problem here.

4. Here, Yeats' long poems are not quite as good as his shorter ones. And with the dates they were written, I suspect these are B-sides interspersed with shorter poems. I know that's terrible, but the disparity of poetic quality in my perception is that great. I think the rhyme schemes often hurt the longer poems by forcing them into too patterned a cadence. In the first poem, the enjambment really works, and I wonder if the longer poems should have had more of it to break them from their overpowering pattern.

5. His repetition is often immediate and often exact:

"A faithful love, a faithful love."
"Are but loose thread, are but loose thread."

This pauses the poem, allowing the reader time to reflect. Yeats also uses some formulaic repetition: "self-sown, self-begotten." But I end up wishing there was more, and more varied, repetition and formulaic repetition. I've seen him use both so extensively and well in the past that I wonder why he sets them aside. They're scarce in this collection. Why? Is he trying to say something that he feels they will not help? Is he bored with them? Is he pushing himself away from them?

6. "Owen Aherne and His Dancers": what a great poem! Repetition here comes back in force, but it's not the formulaic, almost repetition of a phrase, rather it's repeated words that take the stage: wind and wild, heart and mad, cage and run. This poem discusses the poet's own thoughts and feelings and contrasts them with each other. These long lines are used to allow large words space to be couched in sense-making phrases. It worries at a sliver of thought, at the reaction to the aging, and approaches it from multiple sides at once: eventually putting the aging man in his place, and the young in theirs. But it's all set in longing—an old man for a young woman's beauty and activity. Through this specific situation, the people are all placed in their proper realms—and even the poet's heart and mind are situated.

7. I also liked "Meditations in Time of Civil War" with its uncomfortable honesty, shame, and look at how people exist during Civil War times: not extraordinarily, but mundanely. Just a bunch of glimpses of life during this time period, but together they're greater than the sum of their parts.

8. "The New Faces" complexly weaves a number of phrases in this mystic, paradoxical reflection on one lover dying before the other. The stilted, stopping, jagged, cut-up rhythm and cadence supports this theme and reflects the mental state of the partner left behind. Brilliant pairing of structure and theme.

9. Due to the rambling, wide ranging, sidetracking nature of these poems, they're often difficult at first read—and without relying upon repetition but being forced into a rhyme scheme, the sounds do more to confuse the reader than carry them through. These are not poems whose progression is standard logic or easy to follow at first. But once the logic is revealed at the end, the second read is more rewarding than the first. To restate this in gallery art terms, these look jumbled from 20 feet away, somewhat clearer from 10 feet, and still more clear from five. But these too often require deep study just to get the gist of it. And in this way I think these are mostly failed experiments. Fascinating and at times breathtaking, but failed.

10. The theme here is contradictions or contrasts and learning to appreciate both sides of them: old and young, love and loneliness, Civil War and the day-to-day mechanics of life, etc. These are sometimes a grass-is-greener longing, and sometimes a condemnation, but always appreciative of both sides and wishing for their combination. Like in "The Tower", where a song praising a country-maid's beauty leads to a drowning:

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
Oh may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.

Those two lines, "Oh may the moon and sunlight seem / One inextricable beam," are key to the whole collection, and stunningly beautiful. He longs for the binding of the paradox, the understanding of both moon and sun as one, the mystical. The place where the best of both sides of the contradiction come together and shed off their negatives: the vigor and beauty of youth with the imagination and experience of age; the triumph of silent solitude and the togetherness of love; the spirit that drives men towards freedom and that which drives them to a paycheck. And this theme of contrasts is supported by both word choices and sentence structures—long and short lines exist in the same poems, monosyllabic and multisyllabic words all have meaning and importance, poems of many parts and poems of one stanza share pages in the same collection, longer poems embrace multiple forms to make multiple points. This interaction of theme and mechanics shows how holistic Yeats' writing has become by this stage. It's a staggering display of skill.

11. My favorites are: "Owen Aherne and His Dancers", "Meditations in Time of Civil War", "The New Faces", "Youth and Age", and "Sailing to Byzantium", that classic mythical poem. I almost would put "The Tower" on this list, there're some incredible lines in there but I just can't.

Michael Robartes and the Dancer by WB Yeats

This collection is available to read freely online here.

For Garrett.

1. In this collection, Yates experiments structurally, often drawing out sentences. For instance, a line in "The Leaders of the Crowd" reads:

"How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone
and there alone, that have no solitude."

That final phrase, "that have no solitude", took me multiple reads to understand. I think it's because the phrase is so far separated from the "they" that it modifies. I find this often weak here: it breaks the flow of the poem with the complexity that requires figuring out before the poem is trackable. The modifier and the modified are just too far apart for first-read legibility.

2. This collection requires effort from the reader and multiple reads of each poem. The poems shift directions, topics, and locations. These shifts endanger reader engagement. Three other examples come to mind:

—The two stanzas in "The Second Coming" differ wildly: the first is a despondent diagnosis of the world and man's affect, while the second is a spiritual reflection on a possible future growing out of this.

—The second example is "A Prayer for my Daughter", where nearly every stanza is separated by topic, time, person, action, or location. Like in a sonnet with a distinct volta, both the point and counterpoint have space in the poem—room to breathe and infect the reader's imagination.

—For the third example, let me use a short poem to really drive home how much space he gives to point and counterpoint in this sixteen-line poem. In "Under Saturn", the first three lines are given over to pining for lost love, then two to the comfort of present love, then five reflect on aging, then four recollect a recent situation, and finally two sum up the poem in a rumination. These significant changes throughout the poem puzzle the first-time reader and take time to parse out.

These three examples explain why I had to read most of these poems multiple times to get a sense of what is said. This complexity is not inherently a negative though: I think it works well in "A Prayer for My Daughter" because it's all driven by the title—yes it's a rambling, jumping prayer, but it is still the poet praying for his daughter—and in "The Second Coming", where each stanza is given space enough, memorable lines enough, and distinction enough to really work as a whole. Though these are puzzling poems, they are not generally too puzzling to unpack for two reasons: first, the unpacking is a pleasurable exercise because it's rewarding—"The Leaders of the Crowd" became one of my favorites after not understanding it initially. Second, some of the beautiful lines are gripping and allow the poems to impart something memorable on first read:

"And of a red-haired Yates whose looks, although he died
before my time, seem like a vivid memory."

3. These complex poems and associations of ideas or thoughts start out focused before wandering off into a widening gyre of association, then closing with a newly focused perspective. This works, but often on second or third read—not first. He seems more interested in the construction of arguments and progression of ideas than sounds. For example, in "Under Saturn", he opens focused on a specific situation—the poet accused of wool-gathering lost loves—then he touches on three other events and ideas before he focuses in again at the end, stating the actual cause of his "saturnine" mood, a cause which reflects back on the rest of the poem to cast it all in a new light. These three other events are consecutive, connected thoughts and memories growing wider in scope before narrowing again to the end. I think length of both line and poem allows these complex constructions to work: "A Prayer for my Daughter" also follows this pattern, but was more quickly understood because its length gave me time to get comfortable with the shifts. He starts one place, wanders wide through myriad reflections, and ends up another place.

4. This collection is characterized by contrasts. Let me take one poem for an example: "A Prayer for my Daughter". Yeats contrasts her peaceful sleep inside and the raging storm outside, her infancy and her future, the storm and his prayerful walk, beauty and kindness, the poet himself and his daughter, his wishes for her and society's, public courtesy and private same, ceremony and custom—all this while contemplating virtuous life. But in the end he chooses one over the other and, through his wishes for his daughter, he reveals himself and his priorities. This is just one example, but the rest of the poems in the collection are also characterized by contrasts. These contrasts allow him witty, judgmental summations—notably the one about Helen of Troy:

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,

5. Here, some phrases pull double weight: in "The Second Coming", the line "what rough beast" can be read as interrogative or exclamatory and it works both ways. This is strong writing because Yeats does not do it too often. If he did, I would feel like the poem was meaningless. But by giving a rare single line here and there an available alternate meaning, it forces the reader to think about that option, and hence, the poem.

6. I had thought his incantatory voice was a byproduct of formulaic repetition. But here it comes from using exclamatory phrases followed by rolling stress patterns that come off ominously. He also uses some exact repetition—like in the second stanza of "The Second Coming", where the sentence structure and stress pattern changes to a more flowing, fast pace, punctuated by exact repetitions of phrase and word.

7. There is less formulaic end-rhyme here. Even in the mostly end-rhymed "The Leaders of the Crowd", the long lines and enjambment soften the impact of those end-rhymes: only four of the twelve lines are end-stopped. Often, end-stopped end-rhymes overwhelm a poem, but he does it well here through enjambment and long lines.

8. The theme here is revolution, war, daily life during both, and a contemplation of daily life in the future—which is the reason for both, the hope of both—and the past—which provides the reasons leading to both. This is a fairly focused collection and the first four poems contemplate the past, the next eight or so examine the present, while the last three focus on the future. This organizational structure helps the reader place poems that may at first appear ambiguous.

9. My favorites here are "A Prayer for my Daughter", "The Leaders of the Crowd", and "Under Saturn". I hated no poem, but found the first two off-putting in some way. I don't think I get them yet. I hope I do not have to read A Vision before understanding them.