Symphony for the City of the Dead by M. T. Anderson

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
by M. T. Anderson

To be honest, there's very little chance I would normally pick up a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, even though such a topic does sound interesting in a hypothetical sense; I simply just don't read a ton of nonfiction. But tell me about a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich written by the best YA author currently working, M. T. Anderson, and of course I'm all over it.

Originally published: 2015
Acquired: April 2017
Read: August 2023

This takes in Shostakovich's whole life, but mostly focuses on the siege of Leningrad, when the Nazi army cut the city off from any supply lines; it chronicles Shostakovich's life up until that point but also provides a lot of historical information about the history of the Soviet Union for context. Even though it's for a YA audience, I found it totally successful for an adult audience, and even ended up recommending it to my father, a WWII buff but definitely not a YA reader, who enjoyed it so much that a couple months later he was citing facts he learned from it back to me, having forgotten I was the one who recommended it to him to begin with. Anderson even does some original research here; poking around on Google Scholar, it seems that academics are citing his work in peer-reviewed journals already.

The book is pretty horrifying. WWII-era Soviet Russia was a pretty awful place to live even before the Nazis showed up. Anderson does a great job exploring the intersection of politics and art, how art is shaped by politics and works to defy it. Anderson writes about music beautifully (no easy feat!) and really gets us into the head of Shostakovich in particular and the world of Russia in general; I learned a lot about Stalin from this, actually. Overall, excellent work, and a good example of why M. T. Anderson is one of my favorite authors full stop, not just one of my favorite YA authors.

Teaching Notes: Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

For the past couple years, I've based my AWR 101 class here at the University of Tampa around the "theme" of science fiction. That is to say, we practice our skills of analysis on some common science fiction text, and I also provide them with some "lens" essays about science fiction, before then opening it up so that they can select their own science fiction texts. But each semester, I adjust what texts I use in combination with what. I particularly struggled to pick good focal texts for my lens unit; I really wanted something that embodies China Miéville's idea of sf-as-metaphor-and-literal and also complicated Isaac Asimov's categories of science fiction, but over the years I tried various combinations of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," and Sarah Pinsker's "And Then There Were (N-One)," but for first-year non-majors they were too long or too confusing or too both. (One that did work reliably well was Fonda Lee's "I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we're getting married.")

Originally published: 2017
Acquired: September 2022
Reread: October 2022

Eventually, this popped into my head: M. T. Anderson's short YA novel Landscape with Invisible Hand. A few years ago, I presented about it at the Science Fiction Research Association conference, arguing that was like H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds: what if the aliens did to our country what we were doing to the rest of the world? It seemed a particularly apt example of sf-as-metaphor, because it is a very heavy-handed one. The rich live in floating houses, so the rich literally look down on regular people! It's also pretty short, and very accessible, as the world it depicts is just like our contemporary world, but with aliens. And I realized it would pair well with a podcast I was thinking of teaching, "The Science Fiction Origins of the Metaverse" from WNYC's On the Media. So I dropped two short stories from my syllabus and replaced them with Landscape, stretched out across three days of class.

It was a hit. Not in the sense that a parade of students came up to me and told me that they loved it (though a few of them seemed to like it, at least), but in that it did exactly what it needed to. I had many students pair it with Miéville and discuss its metaphorical depiction of things like class issues and social media influencers and healthcare. These are a bit obvious, to be honest, but the kind of obvious that works well for a college freshman. If you want to be able to say, "A key tool of analysis is pairing two texts together, and using one as a lens," obvious connections are often what you need.

But it made some unexpected good connections with my other lenses too. When I was teaching Asimov's introductions to Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction, it was a good example of his Stage Three-C story, the "if this goes on—" anti-utopia. Last semester I switched to a different Asimov essay, "Social Science Fiction," but it worked well with that too, being a good example of how Asimov argues social sf depicts futures to show the way things should or should not be. Some particularly strong papers argued it wasn't really like Asimov's definition of "social science fiction" but rather his definition of "social fiction" because it wasn't really interested in the future at all, just holding up a mirror to the present. Another student argued that the novel seems like it ought to be an example of Asimov's adventure science fiction, but it's actually social science fiction, which I thought was an insightful point.

It also paired well with the On the Media podcast; in some obvious ways (the podcast discusses how sf isn't really about the future, just commentary about the present) but also in ways where students surprised me. The podcast talks about how it's easy for sf to give us nothing but despair, but at its best, it gives us hope too, and that turned out to be a nice lens for discussing the end of the novel, which (I think) struggles to find grounds for hope in the face of despair at a social catastrophe. The novel spends its whole time demonstrating a widespread social problem, but then I think it wants you to be happy when the protagonist's immediate issues are resolved... even though the social inequalities that caused them remain in place. I think the best lens texts resolve something confusing or difficult about a text but also open up new possibilities, and I find the ending of Landscape particularly frustrating, and I got some good papers looking at that.

In the fall, I think I'll be switching "themes" again, so this will be my last time teaching Landscape with Invisible Hand for the foreseeable, but I think it allowed me to perfect my science fiction theme in its  last year.

Review: The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

A couple more audio drama reviews posted at Unreality SF the past couple of days: The Diary of River Song: Series Four, Bernice Summerfield: Escaping the Future, and Bernice Summerfield: Year Zero.

Hardcover, 525 pages
Published 2018
Acquired October 2018

Read November 2018

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

M. T. Anderson-- my favorite working YA writer-- has a new book out, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge. It gives equal billing to its illustrator, Eugene Yelchin, and this is because it's a story where words and images are of equal importance. Sometimes the images offer a different set of events than the words; at other times, the images convey events not directly indicated in the text at all. It's about two scholars from warring nations, a goblin and an elf. The text gives the goblin's perspective as he accommodates an elfin guest; the images show the spy reports the elf is sending back to HQ. (There's also occasional letters from an elfin spymaster to their king.)

It's clever, though given it's by M. T. Anderson, I kind of wanted it to be cleverer; by the book's end, it's clear that the text is usually accurate and the illustrations not, and I would have appreciated more ambiguity. It's also a bit lightweight. Which isn't a problem, I don't think Anderson was aiming for the kind of depth of character he went for in Feed or Octavian Nothing or even Landscape with Invisible Hand. It's a cute idea, well executed, with some decent jokes, and you do come to like this odd couple by the novel's end. (The way they achieve their joint comeuppance over the military through scholarly debate is quite nice.)

The art and book design are excellent. Yelchin's style makes me think of medieval art, it's all grotesque, and delightful in its grotesqueries. Really unique, and perfectly suited to the project, given it's an elf's understanding of a goblin civilization. Lots of imagination.

For any other write, this would probably be a high watermark; for Anderson, it's just another pretty good book.

Voice and Genre in Young Adult Literature: Feed (2002)

Trade paperback, 300 pages
Published 2004 (originally 2002)
Acquired September 2008
Previously read October 2008 and August 2011
Reread February 2017

Feed by M. T. Anderson

Joe Sutliff Sanders has a chapter called "Young Adult SF" in the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction where he looks at that overlapping Venn diagram of young adult literature and science fiction. Sanders says that YASF is a tricky business: "when weighing the importance of traditional traits of sf in YASF, fundamental differences, even incompatibilities, emerge between these perspectives" (448). Young adult fiction is all about relevance. He quotes two other critics on the problem: Farah Mendlesohn says that YASF "closes down the universe for children, reducing sf to either metaphor or to a means to resolve personal problems" (448), while Mike Cadden argues that "while science fiction tends to give us more or less complete characters reacting to a world or universe in dramatic flux, young adult literature gives us the constant in the form of the wide world and shows the dynamism in the developing character in response to that world" (448-49). Sanders concludes that YA scholarship has a "fascination with the relevance of the literature to young readers, a relevance often signaled by a text's attention to exactly the personal problems Mendlesohn mentions" (449).

Okay, okay, what about Feed? Now Feed is science fiction, but it's also dystopian fiction, which has some distinct purposes to other forms of sf, and it's also a satire, which again is its own genre. (And it's a love story, and probably some other genres too.) So where exactly does it fit within this (initialism-heavy) account of YA vs. sf vs. YASF? Interestingly, I think it kind of does both. If sf is outwardly focused and sf inwardly focused, there are ways in which Feed is very much inwardly focused: Titus and most of the other teens in Feed lead very limited lives, and do not think about the wider society in which they are embedded. And the story is extremely relevant, even moreso now in the smartphone era than it was on original publication in 2002; the behavior of the future teens is clearly modeled on the way actual teens behave. I've seen M. T. Anderson speak three times, and he mentioned that to write Feed and get the voice down, he read teen magazines for months, and I think it paid off.

But in Feed, there's a distinction between the characters and the reader. This is satire, after all: the reader is not meant to align with the viewpoint character in a way they are in a YA novel like The Outsiders or The Hero and the Crown or Holes. You're supposed to be turned off by the behavior of Titus and his friends. They may be inwardly focused, but the reader is encouraged to be outwardly focused. This differing orientation is aided by the snippets of feed that show us the wider political context for the novel's events, a context to which the characters pay little-to-no attention. These characters are, in Cadden's terms, "complete. Horrifyingly, terribly complete. Titus learns very little from his experiences (purposefully so, because it makes him uncomfortable), while the world he inhabits is indeed dynamic (in that it's decaying; dynamism doesn't have to be positive). So Feed manages to straddle both halves of the YASF divide, but this all could be because it's a dystopian satire and not some other form of YASF, which might struggle more with this.

I assigned Sanders's essay to my YA lit students alongside Feed, though I don't think it was the best: Sanders aims his article at sf scholars wanting to know more about YA, while I think my students would have benefited from one aimed at YA scholars wanting to know more about sf. Since teaching Feed I saw Farah Mendelsohn talk about science fiction at the Children's Literature Association conference, and she opined that YASF is often not very good in a way that is not true of YA fantasy. Which, anecdotally, feels true to me. It turns out that Mendlesohn actually has a book about YASF, The Inter-Galactic Playground; given how much I like her Rhetorics of Fantasy, I need to check it out to see if it has some good insights for next time I teach Feed.

Review: Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

Trade paperback, 149 pages
Published 2017
Acquired and read August 2017

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson

M. T. Anderson is a master of many genres: satire, romance, historical fiction. Here he returns to science fiction, the genre of his most popular novel, Feed, with Landscape with Invisible Hand. The bookmark that came with my review copy of Landscape with Invisible Hand includes this quotation from Anderson himself linking the two: "If Feed was about constantly being sold to, Landscape with Invisible Hand is about how we now have to constantly have to sell ourselves." An alien race called the vuvv has come to Earth, bringing their advanced technology-- which has completely wrecked the human economy. The 1% get richer through their investment in vuvv technology and manufacturing, but many humans are quickly put out of work by automation, and then things spiral out of control-- as people can't afford things, other jobs progressively collapse, leaving the majority of humanity unemployed.

The main character is Adam, who as Anderson's quote indicates, himself becomes a commodity: he and his girlfriend Chloe (whose family rents from Adam's because they can't afford their own home) livestream their relationship to vuvv observers, who fund them in a sort of Patreon- or Kickstarter-esque way because they find human coupling really fascinating. The vuvv especially like 1950s culture because that's when they first came to Earth, so Adam and Chloe try to emulate the period in their relationship. Even though they make good money, this lack of authenticity soon begins to wear on their relationship, but the worse it gets the more they need it.

The other quote Landscape with Invisible Hand brought to mind was this passage from the first chapter of The War of the Worlds: "And before we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" In its way, Landscape with Invisible Hand is much more of a The War of the Worlds update for the twenty-first century than the Steven Spielberg film or Independence Day. Like Wells's novel, it mirrors what our civilization does to other ones with aliens coming to ours. The way the vuvv economic needs cause the human economy to collapse, and the vuvv "help" humanity by doing occasional medical missionary work, or claim to enjoy human art, but have an out-of-date, ossified, condescending way of perceiving it, mirror the way America can treat countries outside of "the First World." Just as the Martians were us all along, so are the vuvv.

It's not a fun read; it's probably one of Anderson's darkest (not that he's consistently lighthearted or something). Even the jokes are typically dark and depressing, such as the ongoing development of how Chloe's brother is reacting to the vuvv invasion. It's very potent though, and well put together in the way that every M. T. Anderson novel is. Probably it's biggest crime is that it's short, with just 149 pages that aren't exactly packed with text. This prevents the characters from achieving the kind of depth necessary to really fell their tragedy, like you do in Feed even though the characters in that book are almost universally awful. On the other hand, its length makes it a compelling, quick read-- I zipped through the whole thing in two evenings and felt satisfied. I suspect Landscape with Invisible Hand will be a minor work from a major talent.

Review: Zombie Mommy by M. T. Anderson

Trade paperback, 220 pages
Published 2012 (originally 2011)
Acquired and read August 2013

Zombie Mommy: A Pals in Peril Tale
by M. T. Anderson

This is more like it-- Zombie Mommy is no Whales on Stilts or The Flame-Pits of Delaware, but it's a fun, rollicking satire of horror tropes, not to mention heists. I particularly loved it when Lily's mother determines that she's going to die because in YA novels, the mothers of the protagonists always die.

Review: Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger! by M. T. Anderson

Trade paperback, 294 pages
Published 2011 (originally 2010)
Acquired November 2011
Read July 2013

Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger!: A Pals in Peril Tale
by M. T. Anderson

Agent Q is probably my least favorite "Pals in Peril" tales thus far; it just takes too long to get started, and the target of the skewering is maybe a little too easy for Anderson's usual deftness. Once the eponymous Agent Q, with his over-the-top James Bond, Jr. flashiness, turns up, the book kicks into gear, though, and I enjoyed the climax a lot. Probably my favorite part is the teenage monk who is only allowed to speak sarcastically, so he can work sarcasm out of his system before adulthood.

M. T. Anderson and Reading Widely: Half of a Manifesto, Maybe

So last night, I saw one of my favorite authors, M. T. Anderson, speak at Eastern Connecticut State University here in Willimantic.  Anderson is a children's/YA writer, but he's absolutely one of my favorites, maybe in my top five ever.  (Who else is in that top five?  Good question.)  I saw him speak at UConn back in 2008, but I couldn't pass up another opportunity, and I convinced Hayley to go along with me.  (Hayley actually really likes him too, so I just needed to tip the scales against going to her Tuesday evening class.)

One of the things I like about him is his diversity of voice-- this is a guy who can write all sorts of things.  My introduction to him was Whales on Stilts, the first book in the Pals in Peril series, a satire on formula series fiction, aimed at 10-12 year olds.  But he's also written Feed, a gorgeous if slightly problematic dystopia aimed at teenagers, and the Octavian Nothing duology, set during the Revolutionary War and really capturing the prose style of the era (maybe too well) in what almost seems like a dark fantasy, but turns out to be something very different.  And he has other stuff I've yet to read, but even within the Pals in Peril books he shows a diversity of style.  But he's not just diverse-- he's very very good.  Feed is moving at the same time it satirizes contemporary consumer culture; it contains an extraordinary passage that recreates the drama, the facileness, and the beauty of teenage love.  (I actually taught Feed to my Freshman English class this summer, and some of them even liked it, but I completely forgot to pass on the announcement to them.  Whoops.)

He spoke for about 45 minutes and then took questions.  Some of what he said, I knew already, but that was fine.  Much of what he said was funny, and that was good.  He's also clearly very intelligent, and very imaginative, in the best of ways, able to take idle wonderings and transform them into universal sentiments.  Even Whales on Stilts, where mind-controlled whales on mechanical stilts with laser eyes invaded the continental United States, has one of my favorite statements on friendship.  He's had a good career, and he's one of those rare authors I just don't like or love; in some ways, I wish I could have written his books.  Hayley and I brought two books to be signed, and bought three more there.  While he signed all five to both of us (after a debate over whose books they were), Hayley talked with him about the beauty of Linnaeus's scientific writing while I tried to be cool and name-dropped Erasmus Darwin ineffectively.

One of the things he said that impressed me most, even though I've heard it elsewhere before, is that one of the best things an author can do is read widely.  I did like how he said it though, which was different: (paraphrasing from memory here) "Go into the bookstore and look.  Every book there is someone's favorite.  Read it and find out why.  If you don't like science fiction, read a science fiction book.  Read a romance novel.  If there's How to Play the Tuba, that's someone's favorite book.  Why is that?  What speaks to them?"

I think this is what irks me about some of the genre and tie-in fiction I read-- it reads like it's written by someone who only reads other genre and/or tie-in fiction.  (And one Shakespeare play, a Dan Brown novel, and a book of profound quotations.)  M. T. Anderson's work doesn't.  It's enmeshes in a large, complicated world, and this is shown in overt and subtle ways.  The third thrilling Pals in Peril tale, Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, is not just a send-up of children's books about people on adventures in dinosaur-infested "exotic" lands in Africa/South America, but it also exposes (subtly but very effectively) the way that European travel fiction can render the "other" and make a "foreign" landscape into something to be dominated by a colonial observer.  And then it makes fun of people who know about all these problems and try to seek an "authentic" experience in foreign countries!  He's not only read his Richard Burton, Frank Reade Jr., and Edward Said, he's read his Stuff White People Like, and he's engaged with all of the above in interesting ways.  Even if you don't recognize the references, I think you still absorb something.  And even if you don't, there's still a fight scene where pacifist monks defeat an army of gangsters with haikus.

I try to read widely myself, as best I can.  I can't say I read How to Play the Tuba or Harlequin romances, but this month I read:
- a cultural criticism Doctor Who episode guide
- two YA Spider-Man novels
- two Victorian writers, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins
- a Doctor Who tie-in based in part on Beowulf (someone else has read widely)
- a 1988 sf anthology
- a critical analysis of the philosophy of a Victorian scientist
- a Rudyard Kipling collection
- a graphic novel adaptation of The Canterbury Tales

Obviously some of this reading is more wide than others, and the requirements of coursework and my fetish for Doctor Who and serialized comic books conspire to constrain me somewhat, but I try pretty hard.  When I was writing the acknowledgements page for A Choice of Catastrophes, I briefly considered listing every author whose book I had read while working on it (I thought better fairly rapidly) because I knew and could point to ways in which David N. Wilson, Barry Unsworth, Jim Starlin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Wander Bonanno, Paul Cornell, and Geoff Ryman had all influenced what I had come up, large and small, positive and negative.  (Of course, it's a book in which Captain Kirk gets into a fist fight with an octopus, and a continuity conundrum about Mister Leslie's name is resolved by referencing a 1975 Peter Pan record, so let's not get too grandiose.)

One of my friends got to chat with M. T. Anderson for ten minutes about Cotton Mather and was invited to e-mail him, of which I suspect I will be eternally jealous.  But I forgot my copies of Burger Wuss and Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, so I will be seeking him down again for sure.  And you know, he might read Edward Said, but he's also the man who the Governor of Delaware called "buster" in formal correspondence.