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So I've finished Black Star Rising. The title has nothing to do with the story. I guess it's just a "look at me! I'm an exciting book!" title.
I've figured out why I didn't get the politics of the book in the first half, though I could tell that there were poltiics in it. It's because he didn't want me to. He wanted to build his case as a brand-new one, without the interference of the readers' prior experiences and beliefs. Or as close to that as a real story can get with real people.
Graydon Saunders wrote about the difference between invoking and evoking in writing. When you rely on invoking, you place in your writing triggers to recognition of tropes, familiar symbols, cliches, historical events, legends, celebrities, all that kind of thing. Evoking uses sensations and experiences that are not branded in those ways to build from scratch the same kinds of associations that the invoked things reference. Pohl's all about the evoking here, not the invoking. And to that end, he starts off with a situation that plays on the fears and hopes of the early eighties (hopes as well as fears because a lot of leftists were still clinging to some shreds of hope for Maoism, even ones who had never been Maoists), using familiar images in ambiguous and unfamiliar ways, to undo the connections those images have had before one starts reading. For the first two-thirds of the book, he keeps pulling the rug out from under the reader, taking away every easy conclusion. The actual climax and conclusion of the book is not surprising, once you know what kind of story it is: he has each character play a very familiar role from that point on -- but the point where he lets you know you're reading that kind of story is very late in the book, after you've spent a long time exploring all these other corners. I don't mean he's pulling unfair tricks on the reader, because all the time up to then he's setting out fair questions and answering them in timely ways. And he lays in the threads of the climax one at a time so that when you do know what kind of story it is you're not very surprised.
When the story is revealed close to the end of the book, that's when the politics is revealed too. Only it's revealed in a distinctly non-partisan way. And the politics isn't surprising -- how can it be? There are only so many political positions to hold, though modulating one type of position with other tyoes produces a fair variety of shadings mostly subtle enough that people mostly ignore them. It's the shadings that are interesting, anyway. ANd that's the case here, as well as anywhere else.
The book is written with a breezy, deceptively simple style, but the worldview is subtle, and so is the story, which creates a series of pleasant surprises.
I have to read more Pohl.
I've figured out why I didn't get the politics of the book in the first half, though I could tell that there were poltiics in it. It's because he didn't want me to. He wanted to build his case as a brand-new one, without the interference of the readers' prior experiences and beliefs. Or as close to that as a real story can get with real people.
Graydon Saunders wrote about the difference between invoking and evoking in writing. When you rely on invoking, you place in your writing triggers to recognition of tropes, familiar symbols, cliches, historical events, legends, celebrities, all that kind of thing. Evoking uses sensations and experiences that are not branded in those ways to build from scratch the same kinds of associations that the invoked things reference. Pohl's all about the evoking here, not the invoking. And to that end, he starts off with a situation that plays on the fears and hopes of the early eighties (hopes as well as fears because a lot of leftists were still clinging to some shreds of hope for Maoism, even ones who had never been Maoists), using familiar images in ambiguous and unfamiliar ways, to undo the connections those images have had before one starts reading. For the first two-thirds of the book, he keeps pulling the rug out from under the reader, taking away every easy conclusion. The actual climax and conclusion of the book is not surprising, once you know what kind of story it is: he has each character play a very familiar role from that point on -- but the point where he lets you know you're reading that kind of story is very late in the book, after you've spent a long time exploring all these other corners. I don't mean he's pulling unfair tricks on the reader, because all the time up to then he's setting out fair questions and answering them in timely ways. And he lays in the threads of the climax one at a time so that when you do know what kind of story it is you're not very surprised.
When the story is revealed close to the end of the book, that's when the politics is revealed too. Only it's revealed in a distinctly non-partisan way. And the politics isn't surprising -- how can it be? There are only so many political positions to hold, though modulating one type of position with other tyoes produces a fair variety of shadings mostly subtle enough that people mostly ignore them. It's the shadings that are interesting, anyway. ANd that's the case here, as well as anywhere else.
The book is written with a breezy, deceptively simple style, but the worldview is subtle, and so is the story, which creates a series of pleasant surprises.
I have to read more Pohl.