The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Dr. Michael Ward, Anglican clergyman, writer, and speaker and, until recently, Chaplain of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge, will speak about his new book, Planet Narnia, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 13, at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.   Ward’s thesis, as described in the event announcement:

The Chronicles of Narnia are beloved the world over, making them perhaps C.S. Lewis’s best-known work. However, the Chronicles seem peculiarly disjointed in their mythology: each book differs from every other in apparently haphazard ways. This thematic tangle led some, like Lewis’s close friend J.R.R. Tolkein, to dismiss the series entirely. Given Lewis’s appreciation of craft and cohesion, many scholars have sensed that there must be a hidden thread binding the tales together, but their proposals have failed to be broadly persuasive- until now.

In his recent book, Planet Narnia, Dr. Michael Ward argues that the underlying unity between the seven Chronicles of Narnia comes from what many would consider an unlikely source: C.S. Lewis’s lifelong fascination with the “seven heavens” of medieval astrology.

Details on the event, sponsored by UCSD’s Graduate Christian Fellowship, can be found here.   A Facebook site for discussing the event (before and after) has been set up here.  The book’s website, including links to reviews and such, can be found here; the excessively detailed FAQs page makes for particularly interesting reading.

With thanks to the glorious Mr. Lewis Carroll, and in recognition perhaps of a renaissance in Carroll-ish strands within literary science fiction and fantasy, I point tonight to the marvelous blog post at the UK’s Guardian books site by 2008 Clarionite Damien G. Walter.  Damien, along with classmate Emily Jiang, is a respondent to this blog, something that the new blog etiquette requires me to disclose; their equally stunning classmates so far seem less forward (less interested perhaps?) as they prep for the crazed six-week phenomenon that is Clarion. 

Damien’s blog post heralds the excitement of the Mundane movement — a rather joyous dichotomy, this idea of a wondrous Mundane.  I won’t try to summarize the piece, because it makes its own case so well.  What strikes me as wondrous about the  post is the simple fact that the Mundane movement, for all its power, is but one of several tremendously important strands emerging from the literatures of science fiction and fantasy.  Whether you choose to focus on Geoff Ryman and the Mundane as Damien does, or Kelly Link and magical realism, or Jeff VanderMeer and the New Wierd, or Neil Gaiman and the intersticial storytelling that bridges between graphic novels, novels, young adult novels and film, and then back again, the world of science fiction and fantasy literatures is becoming as varied and exciting as the field of ‘Literatures in Spanish’ that replace the old Western-centric approach differentiating between Spanish literature and the novels of the so-called New World; or ‘Literatures in English’ that brings English (UK) Literature, American Literature and Caribbean literature in English together into a single topic. 

Damien’s piece announces the death of the starship and the birth of the mundane reality at the core of sf and fantasy.  (Okay, that’s a gross exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point here.)  I would argue that the starship, in partnership with the vampire and comic heroes such as Iron Man, live on and indeed reign supreme in the other media that reflect the sf and fantasy genres: film, television, the web.  They will continue to dominate in those genres well into the future, since the emerging ‘Literatures of SF/Fantasy’ have more power in the written word than in other media.

Meantime, where our past focus in the study of literature writ large was framed largely by the dichotomy between ‘High’ and ‘Low’ literatures, the emergence of so many powerful variants within sf and fantasy may herald a new age.  Where it goes, well, only time will tell.  Or time travel.

I don’t know about you, but the lines between science fiction and mainstream fiction get blurrier and blurrier for me.  A couple of examples:

• Karen Joy Fowler’s recently released Wit’s End, seen through the eyes of the interesting folks over at io9: “While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit’s End manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully, hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction without us noticing. “
• The “Battlestar Galactica” post over at Wired’s “Underwire” blog, discussing Galactica as “an allegory for the American Revolution.”  This just a few weeks after The Economist’s “Lexington” column addressed “The Cult of [John] Adams,” and the reason that David McCullough’s biography and the recent HBO miniseries adapting it are so popular: “Americans are drawn to these men not only for the obvious reason that they founded the country, but because they debated questions that still plague America — from the balance between the Executive and the legislature to the separation of church and state — and they often did so with more intellectual clarity and philosophical depth than today’s politicians.”  So, if I get this right, we love “Battlestar” not just because it’s great storytelling, but also because it provides thorough and thoughtful debate on the key issues facing society, the kind of debate that we’re not getting from our ‘mainstream’ politicians.

Makes sense to me. 

Long before biotech and wireless became the dominant industries in San Diego, defense spending was what drove the region’s technology industries.  A story in this week’s San Diego Reader details the kinds of flotsam and jetsam left behind when those companies left town, in an inland area near Scripps Ranch and Poway once home to Camp Elliott.  One example is the massive Atlas rocket test pads left behind by manufacturer Convair:

“…the pads weren’t flat circles at all but enormous concrete towers, at least 50 feet high, embedded into the canyon slopes, with curved walls extending from the front. During static testing, the Atlas missiles, sans warheads, would be secured within these grey straitjackets and the liquid fuel engines ignited; Atlas remained earthbound, but its flaming exhaust would blast through the front opening, the Venturi effect channeling the angry energy into the brush below. But that was many decades ago; by the time B.R. visited, the chaparral had long since reasserted its dominance. The edifices stood — but stood in mute repose, strangled by a thicket of riotous, unauthorized growth.

Granted, the “pads” were starkly picturesque. But, more challenging, and thus more rewarding — at least from the standpoint of the urban explorer — was the complex where Atlas’s masters held sway, the maze of underground bunkers and tunnels, five levels compressed like rebar layer-cake, sub-basement beneath sub-basement. There, B.R. and the others, who went by handles like “Bozo” and “Strontium,” descended by half-rotten rope ladders and vertical ventilation shafts into a vermin-infested time capsule, circa 1960. The place stank of mold, rat feces, and — so legend had it — the desperate sweat of a Vietnam-era Marine who’d flipped his lid and for years had carried out solitary recon missions for unknown armies. But the stench was worth it: Who else, at that moment, could say he’d wiped off 40-year-old dust from the faces of a dozen wall clocks, all stopped now, but each, in its youth, having displayed the time in every time zone that mattered in the nuclear world?

The story, like all Reader tales, is long and tedious — they so pay by the word, I’m thinking.  But the area that it maps sounds like a fascinating journey through time, a great opportunity for those researching stories dating back to the postwar and Cold War eras.