Who Said That?

While I was in London, the Financial Times ran Anna Metcalfe's interview with Philip Reeve, author of the highly enjoyable Hungry City and Larklight series.

I was a little surprised that a business newspaper would interview a children's fantasy author not named Rowling, even if (a) he just won the Carnegie Medal, and (b) he gives good interview.

But when I looked for this page on the web to make the link above, I was more surprised by the formating. Folks at FT, let's be more consistent about typographically setting off the questions from the answers! The HTML's not that hard. Italics, boldface--the choice is up to you. But choose something.

Mining for Metaphors in Predator's Gold

It took me about halfway through Predator's Gold, the second in Philip Reeve's Hungry City Chronicles books, before I realized what a dab hand he is with a metaphor. He's got some similes that P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler would be proud of. And they work thematically, both in individual moments and with the watery setting of the book (on ice, undersea, on a remote island). Some samples:

"The explorer's face had turned the color of expensive cheese..."

"A few hundred feet below the Jenny Haniver's gondola, vast rough pans of sea ice were sliding by. . . . Tom and Hester, looking down from the flight-deck windows at the never-ending whiteness, felt as if they had been flying forever over this armored ocean."

"Not that there was anything there to see. Only a broad circle of open water, and the waves slapping and clopping at its edges with a sound like sarcastic applause."

"The pain came in like the long, gray breakers at Rogues' Roost, steady and slow, each wave fading into the next."

"She saw pine trees on the heights, and birches holding up handfuls of last summer's leaves like pale gold coins."

Still a Few Bugs in the System

This morning I received the following alert from Amazon, from which I've ordered Starcross, Philip Reeve's sequel to Larklight:

As someone who has purchased or rated books by Philip Reeve, you might like to know that Aircraft Communications and Navigation Systems: Principles, Maintenance and Operation for Aircraft Engineers and Technicians will be released on September 24, 2007. . . .

This book provides an introduction to the principles of communications and navigation systems. It is written for anyone pursuing a career in aircraft maintenance engineering or a related aerospace engineering discipline, and in particular will be suitable for those studying for licensed aircraft maintenance engineer status.

But will it teach me how to pilot a spaceship in the shape of a Victorian mansion through the aether?

The British Empires' Rebellious Colonies

Earlier this week I wrote about the rebirth of the British Empire in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series and Philip Reeve’s Larklight (which will officially become a series in October). I harped on how both authors seem to shy away from awkward elements of the real UK’s imperial history: oppression of peoples in south Asia and Africa, border-drawing in the Mideast, trade wars in China, etc.

But there’s one region of the old British Empire that Stroud and Reeve have no problem depicting under the control of their fantastic Londons. And what part would that be? America!

The mere mention of American colonies signals that each book occurs in a fantasy world, of course. Nevertheless, America remains a source of rebellion and trouble for Britain. In the Cybils-winning Ptolemy’s Gate, a North American war for independence is draining the resources of the magicians’ regime in London, just as the nascent USA’s revolution did for Lord George Germain’s government around 1780. It’s unclear at the end of the book whether a more democratic government in London would maintain that struggle, give it up, or reach some accommodation with the rebels.

In Larklight, young narrator Art Mumby writes of American colonies in the first pages, indicating that they’re still firmly part of Britain's Empire in this 1851. But later, when discussing who’s tried to steal away Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical secrets, Art lists “Frenchmen and Russians and rebel Americans.” The first two were Britain’s rivals for influence in the early 1800s (before the emergence of a united Germany), but the last reflects a perception of the American character that extends even into this fantasy world.

I can’t help but see a bit of national wish-fulfillment in how these books show Britain still ruling America, especially in a decade when many people on both sides of the Atlantic have perceived the opposite. The American market has been very lucrative for British fantasy authors, but there’s bound to be a little ambivalence, isn’t there?

More of the British Empire in Larklight

Like Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, Philip Reeve's Larklight revisits the British Empire. Indeed, it revisits that empire during the Victorian period, as it approached its height, and then takes it even higher.

In this "steampunk for punks" science fiction, not only does the Sun never set on the British Empire, but that empire extends to both sides of the Sun, from Mercury to the moons of Jupiter.

Like Stroud, Reeve explores the tensions of empire by showing the British elite dealing with extraterrestrial beings, but shies away from portraying how the same empire might have worked on Earth. We never know quite how much terrestrial territory Reeve's Victoria rules. We meet Sir Richard Burton, but he's exploring the heavens, not the Earth. The perennial "servant problem" seems to have been solved with robots, thus requiring no vulnerable underclass.

Larklight offers one glimpse of Earthly racism, but only in the previous generation: an aristocratic young Englishman fell in love with a black Caribbean woman, and his family disinherited him. The couple then rocketed off to a remote space colony to raise their family.

One of their children, Jack Havock, has ended up confined at a scientific institute in London which also collects extraterrestrial beings. But I recall no hint that the imperial elite locked up Jack because of his parentage. Rather, those scientists did so because his parents had turned into trees. (It's a long story.)

For all its young narrators' pleasure in being British, Larklight ends up championing universal equality. Almost all the intelligent lifeforms we meet end up forming one happy band: humans of all backgrounds, Jack's fellow inmates, Shapers--everyone, it seems, but ten-legged white spiders. Jack and one of those upper-class English narrators fall in love, but her family make no complaints about the prospect of a "mixed marriage" (nor are they in any position to do so). Larklight readers thus get to cherry-pick Victorian values, believing in progress but not prejudices.

Of course, today's enlightened British authors can’t treat empire as a Good Thing, even if that empire has been sugar-coated. Reeve undercuts the pillars of Victorian Britain, starting with Victoria and Albert themselves, who end up hiding under a rowboat. The Duke of Wellington (who really should be the conqueror of Europe and autocratic Prime Minister in Stroud's series) makes a cameo appearance, grumpy and superannuated. The Crystal Palace of 1851, the height of Victorian science and industry, turns out to be a mere illusion of human progress.

Larklight's British Empire may be larger and stronger than what really existed on Earth in the 1800s, as well as more welcoming. But we still mustn't believe as whole-heartedly as the Victorians that it was a Good Thing.

Shine on Your Larklight

Philip Reeve wrote Larklight in the voices of a Victorian brother and sister trying hard to be paragons of their culture. Art Mumby tells us: “...I was British, so must be brave.” His older sister Myrtle is more of a snob, saying: “they look terribly common. Why, they are not even human, let alone English.”

One ingredient in the siblings’ conception of being British is being Christian. When Myrtle must make noise to discourage threatening cacti, she “sang ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ and then started over again on ‘To Be a Pilgrim’.” Their home spaceship’s escape pod is equipped with “only a keg of water, a case of fortified biscuits and a copy of the Holy Bible.” Another youngster has Scripture lessons as part of his schooling in London.

Which is not to say that the children rely on Christianity for religious rituals, moral teachings, or spiritual peace. Their adherence seems to have more to do with the simple formula that [I = Christian], [Christian = Good + Right], ergo [I = Good + Right]. We could substitute “British” for “Christian,” and the formula would work just as well for the Mumbys.

Their main theological belief seems to be a monotheistic Creationism. On page 197, Art writes that Jupiter and its moons appear “as if God tried out his craftsmanship here in miniature before he set to work on the rest of our solar realm.” Later in the book Art and his companions learn that the solar system was in fact shaped by a different being, one who’s not a “he” at all. That prompts this dialogue on page 326:

“If it is you Shapers who make everything,” Mr. Munkulus asked, “what place is there for God?”

“Think, dear. . . . Who made the Universe and lit the suns? Who shaped the Shapers? For Shapers are not gods, just servants of that invisible, universal will which set the stars in motion.”

So Creationism can survive; it simply has to be pushed back in time and space.

That still leaves a challenge for Christianity, however, which Larklight doesn’t address one way or the other. And that challenge has been around at least since the Renaissance, when Europeans learned about both:

• new continents with new peoples
• the possibility of new planets with new peoples

The priest and philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was the clearest voice of the latter idea, inspired by notions of infinity and the Copernican model of the solar system. Bruno apparently didn’t understand the science, but he understood the philosophical implications of planets revolving around the Sun and the Sun being like other stars. In De l'Infinito Universo et Mondi (Of the Infinite Universe and Worlds), published in 1584, Bruno argued:

There are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours. For no reasonable mind can assume that heavenly bodies which may be far more magnificent than ours would not bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human Earth.

Such ideas made Bruno unpopular with Europe’s religious hierarchies. He managed to be excommunicated by both Lutherans and Calvinists before the Vatican jailed him for several years and finally burned him at the stake. Although some people assume that Bruno was executed for his astronomical statements, he gave the Inquisition plenty of possible heresies to choose from.

It’s not just that Bruno’s ideas contradict a literal reading of the Bible; most modern faiths have been able to adjust to astronomical facts. Rather, his vision of many worlds with intelligent creatures casts doubt on a fundament of Christianity--that God so loved this world that he incarnated himself as a human on it. What about all those other worlds? What about those other creatures, some “even superior”?

Art and Myrtle Mumby live in the universe that Giordano Bruno imagined, visiting several populated planets and other forms of intelligent life that don’t come from any known planet at all. Larklight portrays the Victorian impetus toward anthropology, but not the Victorian effort at evangelism. Aliens creatures seem to have their own theism--four-armed Mr. Munkulus asks about God--but there’s no discussion about how Art and Myrtle’s Holy Bible applies on the worlds they visit.

Instead, the book ends up reaffirming part of the modern creed of children’s literature: Tolerance is good. (Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that.) “Just because they look a little odd,” Art has told his sister on page 68, “doesn't make them villains.” Then Myrtle falls in love with one of those villains, and Art has to learn his own lesson in toleration:

there are some sights too stomach-churning for even the bravest British boy to contemplate, and the soppy way Jack and my sister ran to cuddle and to kiss each other is one of ’em.

Larklight ends with a hint of marriage years in the future. What sort of marriage ceremony isn’t discussed.

Mysteries of Larklight

I wrote about Philip Reeves’s Larklight once before, but only in connection with its punctuation. (Though set in a version of the Victorian British Empire, the book uses post-WW2 British typesetting conventions, and Bloomsbury didn’t reset the type for the US edition.)

Yet in her reading update Betsy Bird at Fuse #8 writes:

everyone and their brother (most recently J.L. Bell) seems to think that this is the finest thing since sliced bread.

I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering how she knew. She’s an information specialist and all that, but is she reading minds now?

Indeed, I do think Larklight is great. And, given all the modern conveniences advertised in its pages, like Coalbrookdale’s Phlogiston Ranges and the celebrated Martian Moss Cake, sliced bread is a fine analogy.

I enjoyed Reeve’s first book, Mortal Engines, but felt that its characters were types: the naive boy engineer, the bitter girl outlaw, the corrupt society leaders, yadda yadda yadda. Of course the airship pilot would be a glamorous Asian woman with an eyepatch. (At least that’s what I remember from a few years ago. I haven’t read later Hungry City titles, so I don’t know if I’d see the pattern continue.)

The same sense of conventionality pervades Larklight, but here it’s part of the fabric of the book. The narrators are an upper-class Victorian British brother and sister, reflecting the values of their culture even after that culture has expanded into much of the solar system. And their narrations are in the first Person (albeit with different Perspectives, since one sibling writes a memoir and the other keeps a diary). So whenever I think, “Oh, I’ve read something like this in so many old boys’ adventures,” this time I can remind myself, “But this is supposed to read like an old boys’ adventure.”

Or, “Isn’t Captain Jack Havock’s remark on page 246 just like something Captain Jack Sparrow says in Pirates of the Caribbean?” In which case I can tell myself,...“Well, yes, it is. Almost exactly. Just keep reading.”

Of course, there’s a lot in Larklight I’ve never read before. The whole “vacuum of space” thing doesn’t apply in this space opera, for instance. Gravity can be generated with a switch--so much more convenient than finding a huge mass. Although the characters have to contend with less breathable air or weaker gravity than good Englishmen deserve, there are far bigger dangers in this outer space. But I don’t want to spoil any surprises.

As soon as I finished Larklight, I recommended it to my mother. Her last science fiction book was...

Come to think of it, I can’t think of when Mom’s read science fiction. And it didn’t come easy. In our next several conversations, she kept asking me, “And why do you think I should read this book? It has nasty giant insects and rickety spaceships and an overall fey quality.”

But then she got to the moment when one of the children reunites with a parent, and read the rest of the book in a night. She likes stories about parents and children reuniting, you see. She’s the only person I know who thought Home Alone was about Catherine O’Hara reaching Macaulay Culkin rather than about Macaulay Culkin hitting Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in the head.

Larklight is one of the rare children’s adventures in which a parent is not only on the scene, but often in charge of where the adventure goes--but yet that’s not a problem. I won’t give away any more, beyond mentioning that Mom made a connection between it and Phyllis Root and Helen Oxenbury’s picture book Big Momma Makes the World.

TOMORROW: The religious side of Larklight.

The Great British Punctuation Shortage

Today I started to read Larklight, by Philip Reeve, with illustrations by David Wyatt, published simultaneously in the UK and US by Bloomsbury.

Other British fantasies of late—Rowling’s Harry Potter, Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Jones’s Chrestomanci series, Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy—have been reset by their American publishers. In the notorious case of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Scholastic even retitled its edition for American readers, lest we be turned off by the idea of philosophy. Resetting those books allowed the publishers to change certain words (though others remain untranslated). But as Bloomsbury published the heavily illustrated Larklight in both countries, it evidently chose to avoid the expense of resetting the whole book.

As a result, Larklight follows the modern British convention of using single-quote marks around dialogue. And that brings up a typographical mystery that has nagged at me for years: the Great British Punctuation Shortage.

As far as I can tell, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries British and American publishers followed the same general rules about punctuation. Even as spellings deviated (favourite, cheque, programme), publishers on both sides of the Atlantic used the same conventions:

• double-quote marks at the start and end of ordinary quotations: “To be or not to be.”
• serial commas: Tom, Dick, and Harry
• M-dashes—the width of a capital M
  
• periods after such common abbreviations as “Mr.”

Thus, this page from an early edition of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby shows double quote-marks and “Mr.”, as does this page from Dombey and Son, this 1913 Spectator review, and this 1914 Daily Telegraph review. Similarly, in 1837 Bentley’s Miscellany was using the serial comma: “pitch, tar, coals, and rope-yarn.”

My copies of The Strand magazine, published in London in the early 1900s (the first appearances of E. Nesbit’s fantasies), follow the same punctuation style as copies of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books published in Chicago at the same time.

In the last fifty years or so, while Americans have continued to adhere to those conventions, British publishers have adopted a different style:

• single-quote marks: ‘That’s the ticket, guv’nor.’
  
• no serial commas: blood, toil, tears and sweat
  
• n-dash – the width of an n, with spaces on either side
  
• no periods at the end of some abbreviations: Mr, Mrs, Dr

I first noticed these differences in P. G. Wodehouse Penguin editions unavailable in the US. Neea Paatero saw the same pattern comparing the original US Great Gatsby with a more recent Penguin paperback. Harry Potter fans have tried to puzzle it out. All these changes seem to head in one direction: using less ink.

When exactly did this style take hold? What was the rationale? I’ve looked for answers, but people don’t seem to want to talk about it, at least on the internet. The Chicago Manual of Style mentions the national differences, but doesn’t explain them. People spill lots of ink and pixels over the relatively minor question of whether commas and periods should go inside or outside quote-marks, but hardly anybody addresses the form of the quote-marks themselves.

I’ve therefore been forced to come up with my own theory: postwar rationing. Without enough periods or commas (regular and inverted) as in the glory days of the Empire, mid-century British publishers cut back on their use of punctuation while making minimal fuss about it.

Mortal Engines's bumpy Atlantic crossing

While I was in England a couple of years ago, a good friend recommended that I read Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. I'm glad he did so then because I never would have picked up the US hardcover edition, from the EOS imprint at HarperCollins. The US dust jacket managed both to prettify the book (hiding the heroine's facial scar) and make it look ugly. Granted, it was bad luck to put out a jacket featuring a tall structure billowing smoke in 2001, but a color palette that runs from tan to chocolate isn't terribly attractive, even if those muddy colors fit the book's description of the ravaged Earth.

For the softcover edition, EOS picked up Scholastic UK's jacket art, shown here. EOS tried again with an all-blue jacket for the first sequel, Predator's Gold, but seems to be throwing in the towel. It's adopted the British art for Infernal Devices, the upcoming third book in what it's calling the "Hungry City Chronicles" series. Meanwhile, in Britain the series is up to four volumes, festooned with readers'-favorite awards and no need for a name besides the author's.

Mortal Engines begins with a sentence designed to pull you up hard:

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

In this dystopic world, the world's big cities have been mounted on huge tractor treads and move around the surface of the Earth like predatory animals. The class system within London has gone vertical; the elite live in fresh air at the top levels and oppressed workers toil below. But don't get too worked up about such inequality. The book isn't a tract but a thrill ride.

Mortal Engines felt like a summer action movie, full of spectacular destruction bursting out of scenes contrived for maximum suspense. In a nod to steampunk, there are airships aplenty. I didn't find the characters--naive, bookish, high-born male teen; scarred teenaged female outlaw out for family revenge; coolly capable Asian female pilot; and so on--to be as intriguing or innovative as the setting. But of course the setting is especially interesting because it doesn't just set there.