Russell Letson Reviews Ragged Maps by Ian R. MacLeod
Ragged Maps, Ian R. MacLeod (Subterranean 978-1-64524-093-8, $45.00, 454 pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Dominic Harman.
Ian R. MacLeod has produced (depending on how one counts them) a half-dozen or so volumes of short fiction since 1996, and his newest, Ragged Maps, collects thirteen stories from 2016-2022, plus an outlier from back in 1997 and one original to this volume. MacLeod’s range is impressive, and he is especially adept at exploring the places where SF intersects with other strands of the fantastic, especially 20th-century-modernist/fabulation – I kept thinking of John Kessel and the Robert Silverberg of the 1970s. Which is not to say that it’s not sure-enough SF, and the pleasures of MacLeod’s work are specifically science-fictional and fantastical, rooted in the adroit deployment, assembly, and variation of tropes, images, and devices from SF’s gadget-bags and story-spaces: far futures, alternate timelines, multiverses, non- or post-human minds.
The collection starts with a motif family that MacLeod will return to throughout: alternate histories and examinations of various kinds of historical-metaphysical what-iffery. “The Mrs Innocents” drops an early clue that it isn’t set in our timeline: it’s 1940 and “dear old King Will” is raising geraniums in Berlin, and later there are references to Daisy Ellington’s “Take the A Train”, President Gandhi of India, “voltaic tape” and “reckoning engines,” and (most intriguingly) the “concrete folly of the Tesla Tower” overlooking the River Clyde. Pregnant journalist Sarah Turnbull wangles a trip to Berlin in hopes of snagging an interview with the aging founder of the international obstetrical-services organization Birthplace, nicknamed “Mrs Innocent’s” for Queen Victoria’s midwife. Sarah’s pursuit of the story takes us on an engaging tour through a world kinder than ours in many ways, much of it seen through her personal domestic and family history and built on quotidian details that gradually accumulate toward a dramatic and satisfying reveal.
“Lamagica” is a more extravagant alternate history, at least on its surface: one that combines a what-if-magic-were-real metaphysics with a portrait of commodified magical stuff and an extractive economic system in the New World. The framework is a travelogue, a Heart of Darkness-like trip upriver through a colonized and exploited landscape in search of the magical El Dorado of the title. The two central characters have painful backstories that have brought them to New Spain. The guide, Dampier, is a figure out of Joseph Conrad and pulp fiction: shabby, displaced, and haunted. His client, Clemency Arbuthnot, has her own demons, and a ferocious determination to discover the fate of a brother who vanished in the jungle, where prospectors search for lodes of aether, the raw material that drives the economy and industry of magic. The novelette is as much about what brought this odd couple to New Spain as it is about its own deeply evocative metaphysics, and the convergence of their stories closes the tale with a snap that could take your fingers off.
“Selkie”, like Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early”, tracks the fate of a soldier who falls out of the future, ironically from one vast, world-engulfing conflict right into the run-up to another: Scotland in 1914. As in the Anderson story, his future-conditioned skills are not well suited to a Great Britain preparing for what would become the Great War. This, however, is less his story than that of the working-class girl who finds and shelters him and has read enough library books (including H. G. Wells) to form an idea of his world and the power of the weapons that came with him. The story examines the push-pull of large historical forces and the limitations on what individuals can do in the face of them.
The narrator of “The Chronologist” is more profoundly displaced. In his world, time itself is local and variable, and timepieces are not so much measurers as regulators that require maintenance and repair if they are to protect humankind from the chaos of the time-winds. The narrator’s father has the duty of looking after their town’s tower clock, “from which all the hours of all our days were set.” But precision work is performed by the Chronologist, a mysterious itinerant specialist who makes irregular visits to fine-tune the tower clock and the rest of the local timepieces. When the curious boy tries to follow the Chronologist out of town and through the surrounding “time-haze,” he enters a landscape increasingly uncomfortable, disorienting, and hostile – a time wilderness. His desire to escape from the safe but constricted town drives him to the study of timepieces and timekeeping and then to unexpected places and an unexpected fate.
“The Memory Artist” offers an equally fantastical but more genre-familiar, far-future landscape and a differently displaced protagonist. The Breakers is the junkyard precinct of a miraculous “gravity-chained island,” part of a Dyson ring circling a far star (though “who or what Dyson was… has been lost in the impenetrable mists of humanity’s past”), home to all manner of human, nonhuman, posthuman, and cybernetic beings. The unnamed Memory Artist is also lost, fuzzy about the details of her own life, despite her certainty that she once made art out of memories. Fragments do come back to her as she makes her way from her trashyard home and through a series of marvelous precincts, accompanied by another fragmented personality, a discarded AI virtual assistant (“I reckon I probably started out as no more than the tap of someone’s personal server”) who manifests in the form of a “feral street kid.” Once again, the story simultaneously unwraps its character’s backstory and the shape and nature of her world and delivers an unexpected reveal.
Memory also plays a central role in “Downtime,” in which prison is made nasty not with beatings but by the removal of personal memories – inmates have no recollection of their crimes or any other details of their pre-incarceration lives. At first the narrator, CT (from the first letters of the ID on his plastic wristband), just needs to puzzle out the nature, routines, and culture of the private prison where he awakens, but eventually he devotes his energies to discovering his crime via lucid dreaming. He does, to his sorrow.
MacLeod’s far futures are often mixtures of marvel and crepuscular melancholy, a mood that I think of as “Silverbergian”: times in which our familiar world has been forgotten, destroyed, or merely decayed, where human sensibilities might be housed in minds not quite like ours, where even artificial intelligences can be at the ends of their tethers, or at least their design parameters. In “Sin Eater,” what might be the last robotic “transfer assistant” is called on to send the last corporeal, human Pope into the immortality of virtuality. It is the end of both their eras. In “Ephemera,” KAT is the robotic/AI caretaker of the orbital repository of all of vanished human kind’s cultural treasures, a kind of omnivorous appreciator of everything from Jane Austen to the Star Trek franchise to Beowulf (all of which get significant allusions). The significance and fate of what KAT has been caretaking, though, turns out to be not what her creators had envisioned. In “The Fall of the House of Kepler,” another AI seeks out a deep-space observatory (which is also a library of cultural data), now a shadow of its original self, “a mumbling and diseased machine” that has outlived its function and the species that created it.
MacLeod also has a gift for the kind of story that would have fitted right into one of the Alfred Hitchcock Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV anthologies I devoured in high school. “The Wisdom of the Group” marries a nice SF Idea (a merging of Wild Talent and wisdom-of-the-crowd prediction) to a dark drama: an unpleasant central character whose unpleasantness increases as the story heads for its unpleasant ending, which he didn’t see coming. Similarly, “Stuff” combines the resentments fueled by dealing with an aging parent in a cluttered house, long-strained familial relations, and the snares and deadfalls of old age with an ambiguous haunting – simultaneously evoking Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Avram Davidson’s “Or All the Seas with Oysters”, and a dash of Roald Dahl. Hitch would have loved it. “The Roads” is a gentler, more conventional, almost M. R. Jamesian ghost story – and a very different take on parenthood than “Stuff”. It’s the earliest story in the collection, from 1997, and in its evocation of memory and the image of roads that might be “ways to the future,” it is a preview of work MacLeod would produce two decades later.
It’s not only SF motifs that are braided through these stories but other concerns, distributed and recombined and re-examined – the product of an imagination that returns to genre motifs and story-spaces and opportunities. Here are fragile or dysfunctional families, memory, loss, displacement, characters who are isolated, disconnected, orphaned, out of their times, the last of their kinds.
“The Visitor from Taured” strikes me as a notably telling item, and not just because MacLeod writes in its Afterword that he is “particularly proud” of it. Lisa Ortiz looks back to her wildly impractical undergraduate major, Analogue Literature, which in a world of virtualities and nonlinear, interactive entertainments, “already belonged with Alchemy and Marxism in the dustbin of history.” But she really does love “two-dee fiction [and] flat narrative,” in the same way her longtime friend, science nerd and peripatetic, perpetual postdoc Rob, is fascinated by and dedicated to the possibility of many (real) worlds as a way of reconciling the inconsistencies in cosmological theories. Here I see MacLeod’s engagement with both sides of the “science fiction” label, especially a clear affection for literature in general.
Speaking of writing – MacLeod reports on the genesis of the stories and reflects on his own thinking about writing in the Afterwords. His comments after “The Mrs Innocents” include as sensible a defense of fiction as could be asked for and a take on why “write about what you know” is inadequate: “To my mind, real experience and what we think we actually know about reality is all too often vague and contradictory. This being one of the main reasons we have fiction, which generally makes more sense.”
I hesitate to describe MacLeod as “writerly,” since that might suggest a producer of merely pretty or sensitive meditations. He’s anything but, though his work is filled with the pleasures of supple, evocative prose and striking images – the “hunched buttress” of the church in “The Chronologist,” or the mysteriously named trash and creatures of the Breakers in “The Memory Artist” – serraplate, swarf, seep-oil, dumpdragons, rustfleas, ouroboroi, tatterers. In MacLeod’s work, these become as vivid and real as ambition, amnesia, bibliophilia, motherhood, or murderous rage.
Russell Letson, Contributing Editor, is a not-quite-retired freelance writer living in St. Cloud MN. He has been loitering around the SF world since childhood and been writing about it since his long-ago grad school days. In between, he published a good bit of business-technology and music journalism. He is still working on a book about Hawaiian slack key guitar.
This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.
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