FILTER HOUSE by Nisi Shawl

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

This isn't a book report, more of a personal reaction--cross-posted from my LJ, of Nisi Shawl's first science fiction/fantasy collection.

In recent years I've enjoyed collections by Ted Chiang, Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan and Neil Gaiman, all celebrated writers whose reputations led me to their work. Filter House is my first exposure to Nisi Shawl, and I got the book only because I did a curiosity-google after having read some of her criticism via a link on Locus Online. The author not being as famous as (I think) she ought to be, I feel a certain anxious obligation not to screw up in talking about this book, compounded by the fact that Filter House isn't the easiest-to-describe collection I've ever encountered. Shawl doesn't hit you over the head with what she's doing; she slips it in your vein while you're distracted, and afterward you're not quite sure what's happened to you.

I'm going to do my best to talk a little about the stories here, but imho they need to be read. They speak for themselves.

 

The title Filter House is explained in a note at the beginning of the book, which I'll try not to spoil. The individual narratives are framed in association with an image that is odd, unabashedly scientificky and viscerally beautiful. And if I got the sense that the book represents the author's 'filter house' for the meaning of the world, then as a reader I must add that it is also a potent delivery system for her vision. These stories form little knots of thought that unravel inside you in surprising ways. Like the ancestors who guard and advise a number of their protagonists, the stories hang around in the background of your mind after reading, ready to (sometimes) wreak havoc. But mostly to heal.

All too often science fiction can be disembodied. Disconnected from the heart, the digestion, the spirit. No such problem here. This work uses the SF tropes of space travel, virtual reality, extraplanetary colonization, genetic engineering and nanotech to dig deeply into what is going on with human beings. With power relationships. With racism in America. These stories need science fiction in order to be told. I doubt the specific and searing agony of a piece like 'Maggies' would be possible in realistic fiction. In this story it's impossible not to observe Shawl's easy familiarity with the dialectic of SF and at the same time her ability to create a completely new vision with those same old tools. And, several weeks after reading, I feel that I've undergone emotional surgery.

At the other end of the psychological spectrum, 'Good Boy' proposes a marriage between proto-cyberpunk and West African (I think) spiritual tradition that brings the 1970s vividly to life--in outer space, of course. With water pistols. I just...have a great big smile on my face when I think of this story. I even googled 'Dr Funk' because I was convinced there had been such a person and that I'd heard his records, but apparently I imagined him...

Not everything here is SF. Shawl writes beautifully and playfully as a fabulist, and I have a special warm feeling about 'At the Huts of Ajala', rich and alive in wonderful frictions and in hope. 'The Beads of Ku' has a similar once-upon-a-time quality, as does the hilarious 'The Pragmatical Princess'. Other pieces are 20th century literature with magical elements. The magic in 'Wallamelon' and 'But She's Only A Dream' seems to flow out of the language itself; it does not present itself as a trope or effect. It is intrinsic.

In some pieces ('But She's Only A Dream', 'The Rainses', 'Little Horses') the author deals with racial injustice head-on. In others, such as the SF story 'Deep End', racism forms the taken-as-given underpinning upon which the piece's whole interpretation relies. There is an emphasis on vulnerability, and a number of the stories feature children and young people as protagonists or key players. 'Little Horses' really got to me. The protagonist here has been wounded and robbed by white people in myriad ways, and at the same time, inextricably involved. She has no escape from her situation. Though compromised at every turn, she never allows her humanity to be stolen. I read the ending of this story as an assertion that love (even when it's bondage) is magic.

'The Water Museum' is a skillful piece of near-future SF that has the landscape and resonance of a novel--the sense of an entire imagined world--crunched into a small sheaf of pages. The ambitious 'Shiomah's Land' weaves science-so-fancy-it's-godhood into another exploration of power relationships between intimates, and its protagonist is a typical Shawl heroine, who through lateral thinking outwits her oppressor.

Shawl is a poet, and not in a flashy, 'look at my language' sort of way. Always grounded in vivid sensory truth, her writing is damned good without ever making a big deal about itself. 'Momi Watu' stands back from a giant socio-scientific issue and looks at its distant ripples and how they change us, day to day. The author's examination of the not-obvious angles to a concept imbues the mundane with a significance that becomes apparent in sneaky increments. Ideas creep in quietly and go to work. In the end, I suspect it is this ability to osmose their meaning across the border between external and internal that makes the stories in Filter House exceptional.

I can't wait to see what Nisi Shawl does next; I'd follow her writing anywhere.

Comments

[bork.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU for posting this review! Just this morning, I was wanting to order this book from Amazon, but I had spaced on the name. Now that I know it, I can get it!

And I've seen Nisi on some panels at Norwescon. She is outstanding.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

Yay! It's an amazing book.

Nisi is here on LJ as nisi_la if you're interested.

[littlebutfierce]

I loved this collection too--& didn't I see your username pop up in wiscon today? Nisi goes to WisCon too. ;)

[arantzain.livejournal.com]

Buying. I have a Nisi Shaw story in So Long Been Dreaming that I read and loved, it's wonderful to know the rest of her corpus is so outstanding.

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

So Long Been Dreaming is in my tbr pile. I see that the story is 'Deep End'--if you like that I'm sure you'll like the collection. A lot of the stories are SF.