Sunday Reading
Posted by Niall Harrison
23 October 2011
A slim volume this week: The Silver Wind by Nina Allan, which collects five stories, two previously unpublished, into something less straightforward than a normal fix-up, but something more than a normal collection. I've written a little about Allan's work before, and interviewed her, and exchanged a few emails; and I should disclose that the acknowledgments thank me (among many other people) for my support, before telling you that I think this is a very fine little book.
Partly I simply like its orneriness. The Silver Wind is quite determinedly idiosyncratic by the standards of contemporary sf, with a cast of tricky, often distant characters and a carefully engineered refusal of coherence. In each story, the same names recur, but the relationships between them are different -- the same characters turn up as relatives, friends, lovers -- and while these alternate universes build a shared context, they don't build a straightforward narrative. Rather, as Tricia Sullivan puts it in her introduction, the stories haunt one another. The only one of the five that I'd previously read was "The Silver Wind" -- the most overtly and conventionally fantastic, in that it starts in an alternate universe and features a protagonist who learns to cross to another timestream, and published in Interzone earlier this year -- and it gains immensely from its context in this book. Names mean more, there's a hovering awareness of potentialities that the story on its own can't possibly generate. (Equally "The Silver Wind" provides a science-fictional explanation for what had appeared to be a purely fantastical intrusion in an earlier story.) All of which means that this is a book that makes you do some work. But I don't want to imply that it's only a literary puzzle; there are some fine character portraits here, and a restrained observational Englishness that reminded me of some of Ian R MacLeod's work. It's more a prompt for exploration than anything to be solved.
The final story, "Timelines: An Afterword", didn't work for me as well as the others. In "The Silver Wind", when one of the characters explicates the theory of time and dimension travel that we are to presume underlies the book, he says: "I was familiar with some of the new physics, the theory that all points in time exist simultaneously and that rather than being divided into past and future time could more usefully be described as an infinite and continuous arc of the present tense." Reality is a big ball of timey-wimey stuff, then, but also something that can be meaningfully described in terms of grammar, bringing to mind Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe, which pushes the concept of time travel as fictive strategy about as far as it can go. In "The Silver Wind", it's a passing reference, another way of understanding events; in "Timelines" it seems to become literal, that fictive universes are themselves a level of reality, that writers and readers traverse as some of the other characters in the book have traversed. I can't quite put my finger on why this new angle of attack disappointed me; I think it feels too explicit for the sort of fiction the other stories seemed to be, and somehow imaginatively limiting. A shame. But not enough of one to stop me recommending The Silver Wind to you.
