Steven Millhauser’s first novel appeared in 1972. It was a satire on publishing, and particularly on literary studies, whose story is mostly told in the novel’s extraordinarily long title: Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. Do the math: The great American novelist, Edwin Mullhouse, died when he was eleven years old; and Jeffrey Cartwright, his lifelong friend and biographer, is similarly eleven years old when he produces this book. Millhauser’s novel works, both as comic novel and as satire, for one reason: He takes the two children and their work entirely seriously. We believe in Edwin’s skill as a writer, we believe in Jeffrey’s faith in his friend’s talent, and so the undermining of the literary world over the course of the book is revelatory.
Great comic writing depends on keeping a straight face. The more the author winks and gurns at the audience, the less we are surprised and delighted by the humour.
Lincoln Michel’s second novel is a satire on science fiction publishing, and particularly on science fiction scholarship. The great short story writer Taras K. Castle has died (technically, this is a spoiler, but if you are paying the slightest attention it is obvious from the opening pages of the novel); and he is memorialised by his lifelong friend, Mike Lincoln. Neither Taras nor Mike is a child; they are both about thirty years old when we meet them, though in many ways they are more childlike than Edwin and Jeffrey. But Michel’s novel differs in one key respect from Millhauser’s: Michel does not take his characters, still less their work, seriously. Instead, he is constantly pulling faces at his audience, saying to them: Can you believe these guys? Aren’t they hopeless?
To be fair, Michel treats everything to do with science fiction—the publishers, the fans, the novels and TV programmes—with exactly the same disdain. This is not a science fiction novel, nor is it a novel about science fiction; it is a novel that uses science fiction, most consistently as the butt of jokes.
Our narrator is Michael Lincoln, a fairly blatant reversal of the author’s name (this reminded me of the resonance between Millhauser and Mullhouse, which is what sent me back to that far superior novel in the first place); but then, about halfway through the book, Lincoln Michel actually appears as a minor villain, a villain who clearly doesn’t do subtlety. For his own part, Mike Lincoln (the character) is that rather overused figure: the helpless, hopeless loser who constantly congratulates himself on his own brilliance. He never completed his education, he can’t hold a job, he is virtually friendless, and yet, more by luck than good judgement, he has become the tenant of a Brooklyn apartment, which he pays for by sponging off his parents.
To help keep himself afloat, Mike sublets rooms in the apartment to his childhood friend, Taras Castle, and to another would-be writer who goes by the pen name S.O.S. Merlin. Castle and Merlin immediately form a writers’ group with Castle’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, Darya, and another friend, Jane. The group calls itself Orb-4 and it meets in the apartment. Mike is constantly trying to insinuate himself into the group and is just as constantly rebuffed; one of the rather predictable running gags is that he keeps coming across evidence of how everyone else regards him as weird and creepy, but completely fails to take it on board.
Mike has appointed himself archivist and analyst of Orb-4, and Metallic Realms takes the form of the nine stories, partial and completed, written by members of the group, along with Mike’s own analysis and memories of events in the life of the group at the time each story was written. The three strands of the book interact in quite a complex way, though to ends that seem remarkably simplistic. It is, after all, not a challenging or original position to note that science fiction reflects the world and the circumstances in which it was written; J. G. Ballard said as much over half a century ago. But here Mike seems to consider it a breathtaking revelation that the various members of the group incorporate the banal events and emotional storms of their life directly into the crude fictions they produce.
It is a fair measure of Mike’s acute critical insight that this resonance between life and art would probably have escaped his notice entirely had they not been incorporated into the stories in such an undigested form. None of the four take the stories they produce within the group particularly seriously. They form the interlinked chronicles of the starship Star Rot and its crew of misfits—each of whose clichéd characterisation is made all the more obvious by the fact that they are nothing more than avatars for the equally clichéd characters who are supposedly writing these stories. But for Mike, The Star Rot Chronicles constitutes the most revelatory work in the entire history of literature, and Taras K. Castle is an undoubted genius. Therein lies what would be the tragedy of the novel if it had all been handled with a bit more aplomb, a bit more faith in the reality of Mike and his fellows.
The closest we get to such reality comes when Jane—who, as an MFA student, is outside the group—sells a work of “autofiction” for a six-figure sum (oh, if only publishing really did work like that for MFA students producing their first semi-autobiographical novel). We are given a brief extract from this autofiction (dreadfully pretentious, but still far better than anything else around it), which not unexpectedly shows her to be slumming in science fiction (as I suspect Michel is slumming in science fiction)—and which also contains a devastating and barely fictionalised portrait of Mike and the rest of Orb-4. I can’t help feeling that this would have been a far more satisfying book if it had concentrated on Jane’s autofiction with Mike’s work as interpolated passages; but that’s only because I think at this point that Michel takes Jane far more seriously than he takes Mike.
The stories themselves, pretty flimsy but still the skeleton from which everything else depends, are fairly dreadful. Let’s just say that if you were to picture the sort of work imagined by those who hate science fiction without ever reading it, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. The first one we encounter, “The Duchy of the Toe Adam,” is at least as bad as that dreadful title: skimpy, under-developed, poorly structured. I can see it being rejected even by third-rate pulps in the middle years of the last century. At least, if I encountered it in an anthology, I’d be unlikely to finish that anthology. Others are slightly better, but that is because they riff on more familiar stories, most egregiously in “The Ones Who Must Choose in El’Omas,” which entirely misses the point of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973).
To be honest, I assumed that these stories were deliberately bad in order to (over-)emphasise the satirical point of the novel. Or at least I did until I read the acknowledgements at the end of the book and discovered that an early version of “The Duchy of the Toe Adam” had actually appeared in a VICE-published magazine called Terraform. So maybe The Star Rot Chronicles is where science fiction is today, and Metallic Realms is an accurate portrait of our little world? Please, say it ain’t so!