Mansfield Park in space: talking prose with Una McCormack
“Ooh that was a good noun... Oh, I admire that subordinate clause.”
After the recent Wired article slating the fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson (my thoughts here) I spoke to the science fiction author Dr. Una McCormack. Una and I chatted about lyrical and non-lyrical science fiction, her theory of the three things novels can achieve and why you can usually only have two of them, the marvellous Ursula K. Le Guin, and why Mansfield Park is the best Jane Austen novel and ought to be set in space. We had a rambling chat, which I have edited into a more condensed form. I stopped doing interviews after the reader survey so this is a shorter, text-only experiment… (Note: I did a round of proof reading of this with chatGPT which I thought did a good job. Let me know if you find errors.)
(If you are interested more generally in questions of what constitutes good writing, I believe there are still one or two tickets left for my debate with Robert Cottrell of The Browser. “Orwell's Rules For Writers” will take place at 7pm on Tuesday, April 25th, at City Lit, 1-10 Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Free(!) tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/orwells-rules-for-writers-tickets-591357886357
Password: rulesforwriters)
Science fiction and fantasy is not an area I know much about and I was pleased to get some expert conversation from Una. This was probably the central point about the Sanderson debate:
sometimes science fiction can read quite crudely, but in fact, that’s because it’s doing something else that perhaps people who don't read a lot of it don’t realise it’s doing.
Here is Una’s website and Twitter and bio:
Dr Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling science fiction author. She is passionate about women’s writing, science fiction, and helping people find their words and voices. Her 2020 release, Star Trek: Picard novel The Last Best Hope, became a USA Today bestseller.
HO: So let’s start with Brandon Sanderson. What did you think of the Wired article?
UM: I think that there was so much you could have written about. If you basically don’t like the books, and I know he’s read a lot... I would only want to write about something that I was interested in understanding, and I don’t think he’d even remotely gone in with that in mind. He’d kind of gone in with preconceptions and just made himself look mean. And I’ve not read a Brandon Sanderson and I never will.
HO: Why not?
UM: It’s a kind of fantasy that isn't my cup of tea. This kind of big world building, so so far as I understand. I’m not interested in rules and magic, it doesn’t float my boat. It’s not my kind of fantasy. I mean I love Tolkien, but I basically don’t read that kind of epic fantasy.
HO: Tell us what you mean by magic and rules.
UM: Okay, so as I understand it, a lot of the kind of charm of Sanderson’s books is that he’s come up with these quite complex systems of how magic can operate in fantasy novels, and he’s made this distinction between soft magic and hard magic, which is meant to be analogous to kind of soft science fiction and hard since fiction. Hard science fiction derives its ideas from science, extrapolating from science, and soft science fiction maybe would derive it from sociology or political theory or whatever.
It’s quite a contested divide, but what Sanderson has done is he’s gone, alright, you can do something similar similar in fantasy. It’s quite Thomas Aquinas in its approach to the world. I think this is parodied in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell [my review here] where you’ve got those two kind of schools of Magic, the kind of rational book learning theoreticians and the instinctive geniuses. I know from mixing in speculative fiction circles, it’s the kind of thing that people really enjoy to the extent that they probably enjoy it more than the actual stories. So I’ve got friends in science fiction circles they don't read the book anymore, what they’re interested in is the kind of structure of how the world operates.
For that and other reasons I wouldn’t enjoy it. It wouldn’t be stylistically of interest. I can read that kind of thing if I'm simultaneously going, “Ooh that was a good noun... Oh, I admire that subordinate clause.”
HO: For me, the central question about Sanderson is the way the Wired article said he couldn’t write good sentences, and I wrote recently saying, Well, sometimes bad sentences... That is good writing because it’s what you’re trying to achieve, right?
UM: They’re efficient. They’re effective. They know their audience.
HO: Exactly, exactly. It meets the demands of its genre, and therefore to that extent is good writing.
UM: Effective writing is the phrase I would use, it does what it sets out to do.
HO: Yeah, that’s a good distinction. This has brought up a discussion about lyrical writing in science fiction and fantasy. I guess one of the best examples of lyrical science fiction is Ursula K. Le Guin?
UM: Yeah, yeah, although when you look at it, one of the most distinctive things about Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing is it unfussiness. I think her writing is on unfussy, but it’s not invisible. And this is a kind of ideological interest of hers, you are meant to be aware of the work that is done in the achievement of culture, and that’s not just the writing, that’s the cooking of the meals, the paying the bills. Her prose represents her political project in a very crafted and thought-through ways.
HO: Tell us more about that.
UM: A lot of Le Guin is concerned with invisible work, which you can see in her essays where she takes a couple of hits at Hemingway. It’s that Alan Bennet line, history is women following behind with the bucket. There are stories that we tell that invisiblise certain kinds of human activity, and Le Guin is thematically, and I think stylistically, concerned with that. Her language is unfussy but you make a mistake if you think it’s not crafted.
HO: The only books I know of hers are the Earthsea novels, which I’m reading.
UM: Okay they’re lyrical!
HO: That’s lyrical in the sense that it’s what in literary terms you might say is quite poetic prose.
UM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should read the Lavinia, you’d love it.
HO: I plan to. But I guess the argument here is that the guy who wrote the Wired profile is basically saying Brandon Sanderson is no good because he doesn’t write in the way that Ursula Le Guin wrote Earthsea.
UM: I think we mistake people make is that they polarize. It’s got to be poetic or it’s got to be plot-driven. I don’t think science fiction works like that. It’s got these three things it’s juggling. It’s juggling idea. It’s often juggling plot, beause there’s expectations and certain expectations attach to science fiction, not always... And then at the same time, it’s kind of juggling wisdom about people, which is the reason we read novels, to be honest, or the reason I read novels, to get knowledge or wisdom about people without actually having to talk to any. Science fiction is doing some other things as well, and I think all novels are doing this. I think you can do two of them extremely well, and most literary fiction can do that. It can do style and it can do character.
UM: It might hit a wall when you get to ideas, I just read John Lanchester’s The Wall, and it does style and character extremely well. There’s not a novel idea in the book. It’s very beautifully done, but there’s nothing fresh in it: nobody reading it will think anything differently as a result, and that means it’s efficient, effective prose. But if it’s meant to convert or change your mind it's not gonna do it.
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HO: So an example in more traditional sort of quotes “literature” would be someone like George Bernard Shaw. He’s got very real people who clearly he knew. He’s a wonderful prose stylist, his dialogue is very crafted, as people would say, but he’s also highly didactic, and you cannot leave one of his players without thinking.
UM: George Eliot would be another one.
HO: And Jane Austen I think as well. [Crosstalk: disagreement!] Let’s not get diverted into an argument about Jane Austen.
UM: I love Jane Austen but I don’t think you’re going to a Jane Austen novel to wrestle with philosophy.
HO: But with economics, social science.
UM: Yeah, yeah, possibly. I would say it’s about invisible roles...
[Technical fault—pause in conversation.]
UM: We were bickering about Jane Austen but ultimately we think she’s amazing.
HO: So what you’re saying is that in science fiction, it’s more possible to achieve that George Bernard Shaw combination of all three things, ideas, style and plot than it is in John Lanchester-type literary fiction.
UM: In fact I think that science fiction often has to sacrifice style, and this is what people perhaps are not understanding about Sanderson, or people who pick up a science fiction novel who do not read much science fiction novel are often rapidly very bewildered. And that can be for two reasons, partly, the writer has, I think, has had to ease off on style to be able to convey world, and partly with really good science fiction, the style is part of the speculation, and it might be doing things with the world building, that mean language is being bent in interesting ways, bending language to build world, and I think people often bounce of science fiction for that reason. Not if they’re kind of skilled readers of modernist texts. But sometimes science fiction can read quite crudely, but in fact, that’s because it’s doing something else that perhaps people who don't read a lot of it don’t realize it’s doing.
HO: Let’s talk about Margaret Atwood, because I often think that in a book like The Handmaid’s Tail or Hag Seed, which I thought was a good book, there is a kind of plainness to her prose or a straight forward-ness that you could either attribute to the fact that she is heavily influenced by someone like George Orwell, and she comes out of that 20th century novel tradition of plain style, or it might be what you’re saying, which is that because she’s really, really trying to get the idea of this world across credibly, if she was to write more quotes “lyrically” she would essentially get her idea wrong, she wouldn't be able to be accurate about it,.
UM: The lyricism is there in something like Alias Grace. It's not that she’s got a single mode. You could say, in order to convey the big ideas, the prose is stripped back, it’s deployed in a different way. But it’s deployed effectively.
HO: This mirrors the debate you have within literature of the plain style and the ornate style, and I always think, well, these are both good styles, and if you read a T.S. Eliot poem, he will move between them quite seamlessly. Because he has different things he wants to achieve...
UM: Absolutely, and the style suits that agenda.
HO: And Atwood is a bit like that, and actually so is the whole of science fiction, and that’s what the Wired profile got wrong, which is that it assumes that the ornate or lyrical or whatever style is the good writing, and that the plain is bad writing, whereas in fact, the plainness is a tool. Without that blend as you can’t have The Handmaid’s Tale or whatever.
UM: It’s trying to do something that perhaps a regular reader will understand because they’ve been familiar with the mode, but if you come into it cold or it doesn’t work for you, you’re gonna think why people reading this... It’s bad. It’s probably not bad, it’s probably just doing something slightly sideways.
HO: Let’s say there are people reading this and they read the profile and they largely agree with us that that profile didn’t seem to understand Sanderson... Let’s say we want to read some science fiction that is not lyrical to help us understand how it works, and your theory of the three things give us like five book, five good books to start with.
UM: An absolute exemplar of this is a writer called Lois McMaster Bujold, and she’s a hugely entertaining writer of series fiction, so if you like Georgette Heyer, Patrick O’Brian, Sharpe, Cadfael, she’s a brilliant writer. Plot-driven. The characters have the sort of vivacity of a very lively Heyer, that spring off the page. There’re imaginative science fiction ideas, mostly tied to biochemistry, and she’s a good fantasy writer as well. She would absolutely exemplify someone who I think knows exactly what she… She genre switches effectively. She knows Shakespeare. Or she knows her Romans. The earth in which trees are planted is well mulched.
HO: In that article you sent me, you said that when you read literary fiction you often wish it was set in space so that it could be abstracted to get the universal ideas... Do you want someone to rewrite Jane Austen in space, Charles Dickens.
UM: I keep on saying, I’m gonna do Mansfield Park in space.
HO: Oh it’s my favourite. Please do.
UM: Quite right. It’s the best one. I mean, Persuasion is the one I cry at. But Mansfield Park …
HO: Tell us why you think that’s the best one.
UM: It’s her most serious attempt. I think sometimes with Austen, she knows what has talent is and she gets easy hits from it. People say Mansfield Park is not funny, it’s not joyful, and I think that’s because she works against her own talents in a way. She goes and I’m not gonna go for the cheap hits, I’m gonna do something more sustained. And she does it. She absolutely does that. It’s a brilliant book. And also it’s the whole image of the House as the microcosm, you can see it as a generation ship. Like Golding’s cathedral is like a spaceship. That hermetically sealed microcosm of the wider world is like you say economics and social structures. You could completely put that on a spaceship.
HO: I'll be the first reader if you do Mansfield Park in space.
UM: Why do you think it’s the best?
HO: I think Fanny is the only heroine who entirely keeps her own counsel and is then vindicated at the end. She never actually gives into the system in her mind. She keeps the difficult balance between the conformity that she has to keep and not believing things that doesn’t want to believe, and even when she does sort of conform to what they think at certain times, she does it with a lot of doubt. And then she is fully vindicated at the end. the people who say that she’s wet and boring or whatever, they simply haven’t understood.
UM: Completely agree. On the critical points, she does not back down, she doesn’t marry.
HO: She doesn't get involved with the theatre production, and she quite openly says to her uncle, are you sure you’re making money in a morally acceptable way, and no one else is prepared to say that. She knows how to leverage her position as outwardly conformist in order to say things that no one else will say. It’s like being at work, the house is the corporation, the office, the whatever. It’s a series of meetings, which is anyone who’s had an office job knows that work is a series of meetings and you try and do work in between the meetings, but the meetings are where decisions get made and where assessments get made, and that’s why the book is all dialogue and Fanny, if you read her closely enough, you can learn from her how to succeed at work and how to say things that you’re not allowed to say without getting fired.
UM: Interestingly, a friend of mine who made the case to me for Mansfield Park has written brilliantly about the connections between Bujold and Fanny Price. In Soraya, There’s a character called Ekaterin Vorsoisson who is similarly constrained by quite a traditional society, but puts her foot down quietly and ends up getting everything she's wanted. Fanny had to be behind it.
HO: The one thing they can never do is tell you what to think.