NOTE: This was originally my preamble to my review of The Algebraist, but it went off the rails enough to be in blog territory.
My patience for reading things that start a bit of a slog but pay off ‘in the end’ is high. I admire any artist or writer who in this day of dopamine hyper-addiction and micro entertainments is willing to ask the reader to have faith and take the long slog, as it will pay off in the end. (Or, probably more to the point, the publishing house willing to publish it.) This wasn’t as much of an Ask in 2004, when The Algebraist was published, but in 2024, when Orbit started republishing Banks’ works with a new minimalist Windows screen saver aesthetic cover design, it was.
This is a constant of Banks’ works—hyper-detailed, unexplained jargon, blow-by-blow decontextualized action that only on looking back completely makes sense. Use of Weapons is possibly most exemplary of this of his works, with the most famous payoff. Tor is putting out new versions of The Book of the New Sun, which asks faith that moves mountains–in the face of four books of what might as well be post-apocalypse Jabberwocky for all the sense it makes in the first read-through—that it all ties together, eventually, so perhaps there is an appetite for this sort of slow investment again. I wonder how much of that ‘demand’ is fueled by self-disgust in people whose attention spans are utterly shot, who want to force themselves to appreciate something ‘slow’—the anxiety of intellectuals who are, unfortunately, caught in the same damn trap as the rest of society, but have the burden of being aware and ashamed of it. I cheer on anybody who is trying to undo the dopamine addiction, the scattershot three-screens-at-once attention span. I’ve fallen into it myself and had to claw myself back out of it.
Well, Banks and Wolfe are both decorated authors, multiple-winners of prestigious awards, the favorite-author-of-your-favorite-author as I once heard it put, and that reputation itself does a lot of lifting of the marketing. A “classic”—an accomplishment to have read, a victory for the struggling dopamine addict intellectual. Perhaps that designation is carrying a lot of the decision to re-print. Kind of a moot point, perhaps, to ask if these books ‘could have been published today’ because the weight of the designation of “classic” and the endorsement of popular contemporary authors primes the reader with far more fortitude and patience than they would bring to opening a new book from an unknown author. I admit I am no different—I trust Banks, so I give him more grace when I’m not jiving with the work immediately, and the payoff comes in the last twenty or so pages.
The ones who tell our stories
The old advice to ‘grab the reader immediately’ only seems more urgent, now—the adage that you have a page to grab the reader/editor seems almost quaint and naively generous. You have a catchphrase, a list of tropes. What works are we losing because publishers are too aware of this taste of the market? And what brilliant writers with asocial souls are not getting published? Leaning into questions of identity-as-shaping-narrative, what narratives do we necessarily lose when that sort of person is locked out of publishing? Does the soul of the BookTokker have within it The Brothers Karamazov or Always Coming Home? That aspect of the human experience simply is not being printed. It is not ‘better’ or more ‘valid’ than the modern social media socialite soul, but I lament that there is no place for it.
This begs questions about the emperor’s new clothes, and our ability to accurately evaluate a work ‘of its own merits’ (implied: decontextualized, which is impossible). I’ve thought a great deal about meta-narratives readers impose upon authors’ works, something that seems only to have gotten more prevalent with hyperfocus on identity in interpreting one’s words. Indeed, to do this—to ‘think about who is saying this, and why’—is now a stated imperative in leftish circles, and while it does have a materialist bent (we are shaped by our circumstances) it is the sort of belief that leads to the Isabell Fall tragedy: the “attack helicopter” story in Clarkesworld that was condemned as ‘dangerous’ outright and the only possible mitigation being Fall’s identity: that only a trans voice could be trusted to parody anti-trans speech in good faith. She was pushed to out herself as a trans woman. She did not want to out herself, originally; she just wanted to publish a story and have it stand of its own merits, for the tongue-in-cheek to be evident to any reader with a brain. Anonymity as condemnation—part of a larger trend online of finding pseudonyms suspect because they might obscure that a person is out of their lane, so to speak.