John Clute on" The disappearance dell'Erebus "by Dan Simmons
John Clute is a living legend.
literary critic of the first magnitude, the author and publisher, is (among much else) the co-author of the monumental The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction .
His reviews and critical essays, which have influenced and shaped generations of readers (and writers) have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni , F & SF: his book, "Excessive candor," appeared for years on the SF Weekly. At present, a similar book, " Scores," is published in Strange Horizons.
As often happens, in his case a culture and a deep extraordinary ability and critical insights are accompanied by a boundless kindness.
E 'its only thanks to a selfless act of kindness and hospitality that we are proud to present the translation of a brilliant review of Mr. Clute is currently unavailable even on the Net A John Clute our thanks go, in full conviction that not many have responded with such kindness and absolute indifference to the permit application publication of a work by a group of Italian fans.
Thanks, Mr.Clute.
A word about the review.
We talk about "The Terror" by Dan Simmons, we came up with the unlikely title " The disappearance dell'Erebus.
Who has not read the novel and plans to read it will do well to pay close attention. John Clute is aimed at readers who have finished the novel and reveals, analyzing it, the surprising ending of the book. For this reason, those who act not having read the book will also receive unwanted information (especially from mid-on review). All, however, good reading.
In the belly of the Thing
No player who has started to become familiar with the literatures of the first twenty-first century should be shocked by the strangeness of The Terror (The disappearance dell'Erebus , Mondadori, 2007 ) that appears as a historically accurate account of the famous and doomed exploring expedition conducted by 'unspeakably stupid Sir John Franklin (1786 - 1847), which claimed the lives of 130 men in an attempt to find strength in the Northwest Passage, but that is actually something completely different. The Terror is not just a story about men who do not understand the world they live: it is also a story about how wrong it is a certain type history.
This is because there is no way to understand the crazy and outrageous assault led by Franklin for the great frozen North of Canada continent, nor the "supernatural" intensity of the experience of dying of cold up there in the world , considering it as nothing more than a simple narrative whose outcome is commonly unavoidable. The history of the Franklin expedition in itself is not a realistic story - a story that can not be told in a plausible manner within the framework of a conventional mimetic narrative process, despite the 650 pages that Simmons uses pretending to obey the demands of "realism." Why The Terror is not a quasi-documentary based on facts perceived or real, is much more real than that. It 'a fairy tale.
begin in medias res , where meaning begins, six months after Franklin has finally died, in one of two ships inextricably embedded in the ice because of his refusal to listen the voice of reason about what the expedition was facing. The view of the story at this point, is that of Captain Francis Crozier, a man whose authority is to prevent any further career opportunities as it is Irish by birth, and quite clearly - Simmons seems pretty faithful to the chronicles of the point - the only one among the officers who could have saved the Franklin expedition. But it's too late. Neither ship nor Terror nor the 'Erebus , will survive. Crozier is drunk beyond his deep conviction that it could not save his men, two anomalies haunt him: the girl with no Inuit language, known as Lady Silence, whose arrival and stay remains a mystery and a threat to composure of the crew, and the constant raids of the "thing", a shapeshifting monster - as if (he thinks) it was horrible essence of the "evil" represented by polar bears carnivores, which in turn are almost impossible to kill - continues to savagely dismember anyone who roams alone on the ice for more than a minute.
Many readers of the twenty-first century - most of whom believes today that any new romance set on this planet will bring strength to the mind dozens of previous stories, whole moraines of quotations and jokes and clues left by the big blob of references - immediately identify the "thing" like an echo of the film by Christian Nyby / Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World "(1951), just as identify the story that inspired "Who goes there?" by John W. Campbell Jr. (1938, Astounding ). They will not have needed the help of Simmons - The Terror, because he devotes almost the entire cast and most of the film crew - to notice, that does not name the film, however, clearly indicates the type of player Simmons is expected to attract: a reader who is familiar with the fantastic in literature, that a typical reader of the first twenty-first century. Simmons assumed, correctly, that we probably will understand perfectly.
error Crozier about the "what" is its assumption that it is as something else. Crozier is still, at this point, what could be called a victim of history wrong will not be able to save themselves in any way before leaving, so to speak, the mimetic tradition in that it is insufficient to handle the excesses of the genuinely paramimetica extreme and a set of experiences that deform the mimesis well beyond the breaking point. Treating the long death of Franklin and the men who he kills in the north of the Arctic Circle in terms of "realistic" means telling the wrong story, it means distorting the true story of history and means for more fail to understand the underlying drama The Terror: which is not only the tragedy of 600 pages on the long agony of innocent men until they died of cold or "what", since the terror that gives shape to this surprisingly readable novel lies elsewhere.
If we take literally everything that happens, we think of ourselves as people of a different kind of story. It 's a story of errors of assessment - the kind of errors that, in a novel of the fantastic, advocate and point out some amnesia about the true nature of the world. Franklin and his officers - including the versatile Crozier beginning, at least before I begin to understand the reality of the facts - not just white men who miss the point, although it is so blindingly clear that their cultural contemptuous refusal to adopt the techniques that the Inuit use to survive in the far north is a fatal error of understanding of a very practical concept, namely that you can not force the world to do what you want mistreated. But it's not all. What the white men The Terror reveal is that another, more terrible and final, a fact the twenty-first century: that although we can not force the world to do what you want with strength, it is certainly possible in an attempt to destroy it.
Simmons spends a lot of time to kill his cast - and makes an extremely vivid and exceptionally documented in describing the ways in which can and should die from a cold inhuman - while making it possible to understand that the dismemberment of his cast is a model and a forecast of the fate of the white race in the course of history. But this, with all due respect to the consistency and determination needed to create the first 650 pages of The Terror, did not cause the player much more than what could be called a mere reaction kinetic experience vividly represented. This means that The Terror a tale of fantasy - in a novel in a position to shape the modern reader's point of view about the shape of the world - is what happens when Crozier is found to be the only survivor of the deadly West farce Caught in his own ice.
We are deep in the book. The most degenerate members of the crew were shot in cold blood Crozier and the same then they will die in front of the "what" shape-shifting, we might think that Simmons dealt with as a metaphor of our condition as the monster in "The Planet Forbidden "(1956), clear example of our ills. But things are different. Through an unbroken sequence, we find ourselves in a universe transferred Inuit, as Lady Silence Crozier has saved and brought it back to life, but to a different life. Through the shared dreams, example and perseverance, she has revived as an inhabitant of the real world, the world of the Inuit, the "Real People", which is exposed to a terrible threat.
Lady Silence is no language for it is A-Who-Walks-With-The-God, a spiritual mediator between humans and the "God Who Walks Like A Man", which is not a "thing" but a principle of balance. And the true story of The Terror - his real terror - on the page suddenly becomes clear: the terror of the book lies in its revelation of the insufficiency of God as a principle of balance as opposed to the white man, the kabloona that makes its way by force through the delicate world irreplaceable breaking the ice. How had long predicted the Inuit tradition:
[ ... ] when the domain of Tuunbaq [of God] was finally invaded d people pale - the kabloona -there would be the beginning of the End Times. Poisoned by the souls of pale kabloona the Tuunbaq would ill and died. The Real People would forget their customs and their language. Their homes were filled with drunkenness and despair [ ... ] and the Real People would lose their good subject ni.
When Tuunbaq die because of the wickedness of kabloona , they knew the spirits of Governors of the heavens, his cold white domination will begin to heat up and melt and thaw. The polar bears will disappear as the ice house, so that their baby will die [ ... ] The birds will run in a circle and ask the help of Raven, having gone their breeding ground.
This is the future that they saw.
Crozier becomes One-Who-Walks-With-the-God, along with Lady Silence is now his wife. Back to his ship, the Terror , who died, captured the last offensive of the ice, haunted by the "unhealthy kind of ghosts that haunt an evil place," and walks away. He evades the future predicted.
The Terror is that we can not.
