Sagramanda

Norman Spinrad’s latest On Books column, this one titled “Buried Treasures,” is par for the course for his usual cogent discussion of the state of modern publishing. He looks at five books, one from a major house, three from the “small press”, and the fifth one from Pyr, whom he describes as a publisher that “seems to straddle, or perhaps in the end will erase, the distinction between such lists and the so-called major SF lines.”

Spinrad’s column begins with the assertion that “Whether you call it evolution or devolution, SF publishing has changed rather radically from what it was, say, a decade ago. Most of the changes have been negative in terms of accessibility to potential readers and income to writers. However, perhaps there will turn out to be a small improvement or two in terms of literary freedom as the center of gravity, to coin an entirely paradoxical metaphor, moves to the fringes.”

He then uses the five books in his review – The Good Fairies of New York, The Demon and the City, No Dominion, The Secret City, and our own Alan Dean Foster title, Sagramanda (A Novel of Near-Future India),as a penetrating look at the way books are bought (or not bought), packaged, and marketed. He also has some harsh words for media novelizations and warnings for writers of same, including an admission that Foster’s own work in media tie-ins prejudiced him against Sagramanda going in. I’m still digesting his column (though Louise Marley’s already up with some thoughts on it), and I’m not sure it’s my place to say anything here anyway. Though I would agree with Louise’s assessment that “If you love the genre, this article is worth ten minutes of your time.”

Meanwhile, Alan and I are certainly happy with this view of Sagramanda: “…by far the best thing he?s written thus far, a chef d?oeuvre for sure, and what?s more, colorful, exotic, and reasonably action-packed, too…. a very detailed, sensorily vivid, culturally and technologically convincing, portrait of his extrapolated India via characters who come alive with psychological depth. What more can you ask of a science fiction novel?”

Phantastik-couch.de, a German language online magazine of fantatic literature, has just posted a review by Frank A. Dudley of Alan Dean Foster’s Sagramanda.

I don’t speak German – I dropped out of German 101 in college in frustration – but Frank very kindly summarized his main points for us:

• Alan Dean Foster is the genre’s globetrotting chameleon.
• Foster takes the Indian society with its castes as a backdrop and charges it with a techno plot reminiscent of William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy.
• His protagonists are dazzling, and Foster manages to maintain this strength of the novel until the end. He follows their thoughts and motivations with subtle irony while elegantly proceeding the parallel story lines.
• The finale appears to be a bit constructed.

Which sounds like a pretty good review to me. And even without running it through Babel Fish to make sure, I think I agree with this: “Was Japan in den 1980ern Japan für Cyberpunk war, das sind Indien und China für die SciFi-Techno-Thriller des noch jungen 21.”

Tom Easton of Analog‘s Reference Library column is frustrated that Alan Dean Foster doesn’t reveal the maguffin of Sagramanda until the very end, but concludes that, “No, I won’t tell you what the macguffin is. But I will say it is indeed one that would be valuable to society and to certain businesses, while other businesses might want to suppress it. And despite Foster’s coyness, he is such a deft and evocative writer that Sagramanda is a good read anyway. Enjoy it.”

Easton’s solution – to skip ahead to the end of the book. My mother does this – and sometimes my wife – but it drives me nuts. My own advice: read faster! The end will come sooner that way.

Meanwhile, for those not-in-the-know, a macguffin is a plot device that is used in film and other narrative (particularly mysteries and thrillers) to advance a story but whose nature doesn’t really matter. The term is usually credited to director Alfred Hitchcock, though it may have been coinced by his friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail.

In a 1966 interview, Hitchcock described the macguffin’s purpose thusly (via Wikipedia):

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.”

Update: Neth Space also weighs in with a review of Sagramanda: “Sagramanda becomes a character all its own as we see a microcosm of India – the poor, desperately poor, the rich, the tourist, the huge population, the filth, the decadence, and the contrast of old and new – through the eyes the hunters and hunted. The portrayal of India is fascinating – especially for someone like me who has never been there. As I said about John Burdett in relation to Bangkok 8, I don’t know if Foster gets it right, but it feels like he does…. It’s a fascinating portrayal of near-future India with an average techno-thriller plot holding it together.”

John DeNardo has posted a review of Alan Dean Fosters’ Sagramanda over on SFSignal. He gives the book four out of five stars, and praises it for its characters and action, though feels that it has too many plot threads running in parallel for too long. Overall, though, DeNardo seems to have liked it, as he proclaims Sagramanda a “wonderful depiction of Indian culture; fast-paced; entertaining characters and back stories; excellent finish.”

But what catches my eye is his concluding remarks that “the detached threads unite into a nail-biting, Tarantino-like finale.”

There is definitely a Pulp Fiction / Jackie Brown vibe to this techno-thriller. Talking about the amorality of the characters in Sagramanda, DeNardo says, “even though most of the characters were not quite likable, their stories were consistently and thoroughly entertaining.” Yes, exactly. And it occurs to me: could it be that mystery readers and the audiences for mystery/thriller/crime films are sometimes more comfortable with morally-ambiguous protagonists than science fiction and fantasy readers? The crime genre is full of bad people fighting worse people, and Sagramanda certainly shares attributes with the many Elmore Leonard novels and their ilk, where we root for the losers going for their one big score.