Brian Conn: A Grimm Future
by Ashley Crawford 2010
Brian Conn
In the tone of language, The Fixed Stars – Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season reads like something that has dropped out of the 19th or maybe even 17th Century. In content it is anything but. It’s an hallucinogenic head/road trip through a ‘post-capitalism’ future, a world where new industries have grown to include breeding spiders for their specific threads. It’s tragic and funny and at times utterly repugnant and ghastly and not a word is out of place. It sits somewhere strange between Delaney’s Dhalgren, Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String and a Grimm’s fairy tale after they’d eaten far too many magic mushrooms. But what is particularly stunning, given it is Conn’s first book, is the sheer mastery of language. It is perhaps not for the squeamish. At one point a malevolent doctor files a women’s toe-nails and the collects the dust. Soon after we encounter this:
“In the afternoon she observed the doctor to sprinkle the dust from the cotton envelope onto his snails before he ate them. He stared across the river as he munched, bearded in snail slime: sprinkled and munched, sprinkled and munched.
“The snails alone are not sufficient nutrition, she thought.”
It is essentially a book of dystopic science fiction. Despite the somewhat retarded, semi-rural community, when their eyes fail they can be replaced. But, apart from a strange segue into a Space Opera performance in the centre of the book, Conn’s world is one of herb farmers and weavers of reeds, a world where children are mysteriously delivered by messengers carrying boxes on wagons drawn by oxen. It is a world where only the mildest hints of post-capitalist architecture remain, the denizens having fled the cities for reasons that are only darkly hinted at. It is a world rife with contagions – Conn hints at zombies and a werewolf-like creature with inhuman strength called “the boar-bristle woman” and what could be radioactive or chemical fallout. It is also very much a world of violence and when blood spills, Conn, to chilling effect, makes a point of counting each drop.
I was made aware of The Fixed Stars by Brian Evenson, a man who seems to have a satellite dish directed to detect new talent. He also blurbed the book, stating that: “Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut.”
Author Jedediah Berry also weighed in, commenting that: “With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.”
In some ways Conn’s world is not unlike the post-apocalyptic pastoral depicted in Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney. Until the contagions really start to take over there seems a potentially more-or-less idyllic aspect to the weird world he portrays.
Conn’s brief biography on the book stated that, along with being co-editor of the on-line and hard-copy literary journal Birkensnake, he studied mathematics in southern Rhode Island. “The bio actually became incorrect a few weeks after I sent it to the publisher,” he admits. “I no longer study mathematics, at least formally. Long story. I do still roam country lanes thinking up new ways to doubt various notions of infinity, but that’s on my own time. I am likely to study mathematics again someday.”
Literary/mathematical crossover has bred some strange offspring over the years, most recently including David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More, a factual history of Infinity and Neal Stephenson’s handling of the mathematician Alan Turing in Cryptonomicon.
“I love David Foster Wallace, but I’m not convinced by his math,” Conn says. “I think he doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. I once brought this up with a professor whose abstract algebra class I was auditing, and he said, ‘Yeah – that guy...’ and then got a troubled look and sort of trailed off. The same professor said that the most mathematically inclined writer he knew was Borges, which I think was astute.”
“You mentioned ‘less practical’ mathematics. At heart math is just a method of radical abstraction. What quality does a line of iambic pentameter have in common with the constellation Cassiopeia? Answer: they are sets of five things (feet, stars). A lot of math deals with numbers because numbers are easy to abstract from many different situations. But non-numerical qualities can also sometimes be abstracted. Math is just the impulse to abstract whatever qualities you can and manipulate those abstractions. If you think of it that way you can see why Borges makes sense as a mathematical writer.”
But if his musical tastes are anything to go by, Conn is far from your straight-laced professorial type. When Conn was asked by the editor of Sybil’s Garage to attach a piece of music to the short story ‘Six Questions about the Sun,’ Conn cited the German Industrial-Punk band Einstürzende Neubauten.
“[That] story prefigures The Fixed Stars in many ways,” Conn says. “The editor of Sybil’s Garage, where that appeared, asked me what music I associated with the story, and it happened that there was something that I had been listening to and that seemed to have influenced my writing. This is sometimes the case for me, but not often.
"When I was finishing up The Fixed Stars I did for some reason listen several times a day to the Stone Roses’ first album, which might seem like a strange choice, but somehow it always brought me back to the state in which I’d left off writing the day before."
“I don’t like to have a writing ritual. I start to feel like it is the ritual doing the writing instead of me, which would be okay except that I can’t imagine a ritual writing anything interesting.”
The Fixed Stars is, strictly speaking, a ‘post apocalyptic’ novel and while such a mode is far from new, has become increasingly common in recent years.
“Maybe it is necessary to prepare for the approaching apocalypse?” Conn suggests. “Maybe it is necessary to reconcile ourselves to the apocalypse that is even now occurring? Hard to say…. It could also be that ‘post-apocalyptic’ is a way to frame a certain kind of fantastical material so that it becomes acceptable in mainstream literary discourse. Things that happen to fairies and things that happen on Mars are hard to sneak out of the genre section, but the same things can often happen in a post-apocalyptic setting and qualify as real literature.”
Indeed, the apocalyptic library grows apace. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Brian Evenson’s Dark Property, not to mention Ballard’s Hello America, Delaney’s Dhalgren, Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, to mention just a few, suggest that Conn could well have been lumbering into well-tread regions.
“I think of The Fixed Stars as post-apocalyptic only by accident. I didn’t set out to write a post-apocalyptic novel. I had an old man who didn’t like to talk about cities or fire, and I set out to learn what was up with him. As I went on it became clear that some kind of dramatic event must have intervened between the world we live in and the world this man lived in, and so then the book was post-apocalyptic. But I actually find the old man’s world quite pleasant, barring certain features of course.”
Despite its futuristic time-set, there is also something distinctly timeless about The fixed Stars, something it shares most clearly with Dhalgren.
“Dhalgren was definitely on my mind. Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics was on my mind. Ballard was not on my mind but probably should have been. Gene Wolfe’s book The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the whole book is worth reading; do not stop with the title novella) also should have been on my mind, but unfortunately I only read it last week and discovered it included most of the interesting features of The Fixed Stars."
“Maybe The Prisoner also was on my mind. I mean the Patrick McGoohan TV show from the ’60s. Idyllic but somehow off. I confess I always thought I’d be pretty content in that village Patrick McGoohan wanted so much to get out of.”
“I find it very hard to know what really inspires anything I think, do, or write. There are certain obscure or unexpected books that I read a long time ago that somehow became so deeply rooted in my mind that I can no longer tell where their influence begins and ends. For example, The Glass Harmonica, by Barbara Ninde Byfield (republished, stupidly and unattractively, under the title The Book of Weird) – I think of that book at least 300 times a day, and when an idea comes into my head I don’t know whether it is mine or Barbara Byfield’s.”
Conn begins his book with a strange, slightly rambling, monologue from an old man to his daughter and his apocalyptic scenario is laid out as though it is an ancient fire-side story. “I think it just emerged in the process of unpacking the voices of various characters, primarily the first old man,” Conn says.
But halfway through the book there is a strange shift, a theatrical play dubbed the “John’s Day Drama” – a move into space operatics that seems overwrought to some extent, almost as though the author were poking fun at himself for writing a ‘science fiction’ novel.
“I’m glad that you mentioned that. I’ve had relatively little feedback thus far from readers, so I still don’t know what likes, dislikes, and interpretations will emerge. Several other readers have singled out the John’s Day Drama as their favorite part, which worried me slightly: I would like the book to be like a tarot deck, with different sections that speak like different cards, some to some people and others to others. Of course everyone is sort of interested in Death and few people spend much time thinking about the Emperor (right?), but I hope the book will to a certain extent act as a mirror, or maybe a Rorschach blot.
“I think of the John’s Day Drama as the result of future historians’ conflating of largely unrelated discourses. Shakespeare and Star Trek (more or less) – in these people’s eyes they were contemporaneous. I guess in a way it does poke fun at science fiction, but no more than it pokes fun at Shakespeare.”
In his blurb, Jedediah Berry refers to “machinery” culled from Sci Fi and Gothic Horror, however The Fixed Stars is, in many ways, unclassifiable. “I spend a lot of time wondering what is going on with genre,” Conn admits. “Fantastical content does not seem to be the primarily determinant of whether a work is considered SF or not. Nor does language. SF does sometimes seem less tolerant of a certain kind of ambiguity than does conventional literature. For example, Dhalgren is experimental in form and language, but in the end I think its experimental features are subsumed in a relatively coherent authorial statement – and it’s SF. Contrast to, say, The Age of Wire and String, where even articulating what the book is ‘about’ is perhaps more a creative than an interpretive act – and it’s not SF. I don’t think this is a universal test for distinguishing SF from non-SF; it’s just a very general and oversimplified observation, or maybe proto-hypothesis.
“I also notice that genre fiction tends to be more exciting than other fiction and less like school. So maybe the difference lies there somewhere.”
“Genre is ghettoized by the kind of people who ghettoize genre. In my world John Steinbeck is ghettoized. I think genre is a primitive way of bringing readers together with the books they might like to read, flawed but not entirely useless. Goodreads and Amazon and the like seem to fill the same role more effectively, and may eventually kill genre.”
Conn utilizes a strange lilting language in both his short stories and his first novel. There’s a strong touch of the Brother’s Grimm (there’s a quote from The Six Servants prefacing the book), the Shakesperian and even potentially Biblical or religious language embraced.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘religious,’” Conn says. “I’ve actually read very little of the Christian bible in any version, although I agree that the language in The Fixed Stars often seems biblical. It’s secondhand biblical. My mother, with whom I lived until I was 11 (I think?), is a California New Ager who is into the Church of Religious Science. My father and my stepmother, with whom I lived after I was eleven, were Scientologists. Note that Scientology and the Church of Religious Science are not the same thing, and neither one is the same thing as Christian Science. Each has its own language.
“I was reading a great deal of both Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm as I wrote. The Grimm’s book actually has some very strange linguistic features. Their goal was not only to collect German folktales, but also to present them as the basis for a German national character, and so the tales are heavily and often clumsily redacted as a means of dictating that character. A typical example: in most versions of Rapunzel, the witch finds out about the prince when Rapunzel becomes visibly pregnant; the Grimms instead have Rapunzel make a bizarre and implausible slip of the tongue that tips the witch off, in order to avoid mention of pregnancy. Once you know that this kind of thing is going on, the language, and the way it’s particular about certain things but glosses over other things, begins to seem like an elaborate apparatus for concealing what the characters are actually doing.”
Towards the end of Fixed Stars, Conn makes the reader clearly complicit. The children speaking seem to be afraid of us, the reader; the pre-post-capitalist. In this regard The Fixed Stars can be read as a warning to the contemporary world.
“If it’s a warning, it seems to warn us against things that would be difficult to abandon: our acceptance of hierarchies, our notions of success and comfort, our attachment to personal identity. I don’t see those going away any time soon. We used the term ‘post-apocalyptic’ before, and that implies a disaster, but a disaster is only a disaster when you’re on the wrong end of it. The people in The Fixed Stars seem to see the event not as a disaster but as a change. The thing to remember about a change, even a big change, is that something does come afterwards.”
With this, his first published novel, Conn clearly remains a fairly humble writer: “I read a lot of books when I was a kid,” he says. “Thought I could write some pretty easily, and was stubborn enough to continue trying even when the truth became evident.”
But Conn is decidedly off the mark there. The truth is that his first book is something of an instant – albeit decidedly odd – classic.