Brian Conn - Hallucinogenic, absurd & funny, horrifying & brutal, a startlingly original cross between SF and innovative prose

Brian Conn, The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season, FC2, 2010.

"Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dream-like logic.
At its heart is the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague. Citizens—the infected and healthy alike—are routinely quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into the pastoral, a woman who nurtures spiders and a man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual proliferation. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, senseless ritual, and post-late-capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical."

“Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut. - Brian Evenson

“With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.” - Jedediah Berry

"I just participated in a MindMeld where I didn’t take the assignment about new movements that seriously, except in the entry entitled “Next Wave”. However, another bit, while played for humor, also had a serious component:
Connpunk: Stealthvirus Brian Conn will rewire all of our brains by 2015 and connect them to the Mother Spider that we may power the engines of his narrative monsters. No book not written by Conn will exist by 2020. All hail Conn. (Damn you, Conn.)
Although a joke, I was also referring to Conn’s excellent debut novel, The Fixed Stars, which came out earlier this year to much less fanfare than it deserved. It’s one of the most original novels I’ve read of late, and it deserves more attention. - Jeff VanderMeer

“The late capitalists named that sea the Sea of Giants,” the tender of herbs said: “the Giants’ Sea. Why did they name it thus? They named it thus because those who inhabited this coast were giants: not that they were larger in their bodies than you or I, but that they kept a boundless faith in their hearts, even as they doubted all things; and therefore their hearts were thought to be large, ineffably so, in order to accommodate the immiscible and indissoluble multitude of their visions, as well as the other phantasms which forgathered there. In our civilization, we too must become giants, and admit all things into the ever-expanding chambers of our hearts.”
The Fixed Stars is definitely one of my favourite releases of the year. Conn creates a world that is almost dreamlike and ephemeral despite his concrete and sometimes forceful skilled prose. The narrative is almost impossible to describe, it involves a contagion, kidnappings, festival celebrations, ritual building, amongst others things that bear no relation to each other in a narrative sense. Instead Conn weaves together a series of vignettes that become sort of post-modern fairy tales or folk lore of an impossible to place pastoral post-late capitalist future. At times absurd and funny, and at others horrifying and brutal, it is a startlingly original cross between science fiction and experiential literature that defies any comparisons that I can think of.
I wanted to be able to say more about the novel, but it is difficult to talk about, it is illusive and evasive; Conn purposely makes it difficult for the reader to be able to grasp on to anything that is going on in the traditional sense. At one part, the story launches into a “historical play” about a marriage set to take place on Venus with a traditional narrative, only to be cut short by ellipsis. It is a rather astonishing debut, and for those of you who like that sort of thing (which I expect considering the books I tend to talk about is most of you, my readers) I highly recommend it as one of the highlights of 2010." - Paul Charles Smith

"Brian Conn’s debut novel is called The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season. It is such a singular achievement that I would urge him to never publish another novel again – or at least to do so under a pseudonym – lest the idiosyncratic distinctiveness of his achievement be burdened by associations with and comparisons to his future – and in all likelihood, one would hope, quite distinct – output. I often think of how sullied Anthony Burgess’ oeuvre has been by A Clockwork Orange – I don’t particularly like the book; undoubtedly, many find that the pall of his most successful novel only heightens the appeal and effectiveness of his other works, imbuing them with unseemly potentials that might not otherwise therein exist – and I do not want this to happen to Conn.
I mentioned, just several clauses ago, that “one would hope” that Conn’s future works be distinct from The Fixed Stars; this is not because the territory that he has explored here has been mined to its fruitfully-mineable extremes. Quite the opposite: he could continue with such similarly elusive works forever, and it would undoubtedly find him a place – a niche, at the very least – in the twenty-first century literary canon; he could very easily, I imagine, pursue the myriad narrative innovations he has made with his debut for the rest of his life. I say this merely because The Fixed Stars reads to me as so entirely distinct from anything currently being published that, for entirely selfish reasons, I would not want the uniqueness of the work to become part of a “club,” so to speak, even if it were a club whose sole members were Conn’s other publications. I imagine that, had I been a canny enough prepubescent to read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline when it was first released, I would have wished the same thing for George Saunders; had I had the wherewithal and unprecedentedly premature birth to speak to Don DeLillo after he published Americana, I would have told him to quit while he was ahead; had I been born before the release of Lydia Davis’ first collection, The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories, I likely would have urged her, too, to give up writing entirely. But, like Saunders, and like Davis, and like DeLillo, Conn is likely to only further develop and engage with his Weltanschauung, and The Fixed Stars will soon appear merely a spotty blueprint for the more considered and masterly work of his literary maturity. I look forward with immense impatience to this period, for it is his alone to pursue, and, unless he reins himself into less unique territory, whatever it yields will prove as exploratory and exciting and unforeseeable as Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation, as Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and The End of the Story, as The Names and White Noise.
What has Conn done to deserve such anxious considerations of his future as a writer? He has written a remarkable, unique book. It exists in a largely timeless and placeless environment – references to time and place come not infrequently, but they render the world only more limitless and unfathomable – delineated in a prose style that reads as though in literal translation from some mock-Slavic language. The narrative – peppered with pronouncements and aphoristic statements that are absent, to the reader, of any easily relatable or fully comprehensible meaning or consequence – proceeds with a fascinating inscrutability comparable to a largely forgotten folk tale for which contemporary Americans can summon little immediate empathy. The prose is clear and concrete, and everything reads as solemn and forceful; yet the clarity and concreteness only make the world more foreign and incomprehensible, as the reader may find little correlation between the clarity and cohesion of the novel’s world and his or her own.
The world is intensely insular and circumscribed, yet it is difficult to get a precise sense of it, so that, to the reader, it has an opaque expansiveness and breadth that feels entirely distinct from its characters’ experiences of it; we are consistently at odds with the characters’ understandings of the rules of their world, and yet we are able to gather a certain intuitive sense of what fits and what does not. Occasionally, the narrative ventures into areas and expands certain sections in ways that seem out of place with my intuitive understanding of his world; I would imagine that other readers’ intuitive senses of the limitations of the novel’s space are wider than mine, and that such allowances would seem entirely in order. Conn does not make any demands on the readers’ understanding of this world; he merely makes inferences, which we can find fitting or out of place. Conn’s responsibility to remain arduously attuned to his intuitive understanding of the world becomes all the more important, then, as does the meticulousness with which he expands it; there is an almost palpable sense that Conn restricts his narrative from his wilder impulses, so as to maintain the intuitive clarity of his structure.
The narrator’s inability, unwillingness, or unconcern in expressing or articulating precisely what is happening and where it is happening, or to cogently convey a deeply involved image – the essential incompatibility between the clarity of the characters’ comprehension of the world and the opacity of the reader’s – ultimately works quite well, uncomfortable though it may be at times. The reader is invited into this world merely as an observer, albeit a somewhat blinded and deafened one; to gain any sense of this world means relying on senses not usually required – at least not foremost – while reading a novel: one feels as if one must touch and smell what is being given – merely reading it leaves one cold, unmoved, and exasperated, because any standard articulation and evocation – of how things and people interact, of the meaning of their interactions, of the sense of all of this – seem perennially just beyond the capacity of the descriptive passages.
There is much talk of love, particularly in extremes: characters often profess that they love something more than they do or have anything else; but what does this love mean? What is the sense of this love? We only get pronouncements; we rarely get articulated meaning. This creates an emotional divide between the characters and the reader, for we cannot quite empathize with their fears, loves, jealousies, and sadnesses; that two of the final sections are very moving is then entirely unexpected, and it is because, within this unempathic yarn, Conn has fashioned a sneakily subtle method of conveying feeling – it is quite unlikely that, were I to have read these sections earlier or separately from the novel, I would have done so with the same lump in my throat that Conn’s slow, indoctrinatory storytelling method coerced me into having.
He seems to address the discrepancy between meaning to the reader and meaning to the novel's characters early on, speaking to the attempts of representing a road in mosaics: “no two mosaicists could agree what the new road looked like. Perhaps indeed it was many new roads, a different one for each of us.” Conn makes the enlivening suggestion that his is merely one interpretation of this world. It is to me a novel proposition; usually, the worlds of writers of, for lack of a better signifier, speculative fiction are distinctly their own; no one understands the worlds of Philip K. Dick more than Philip K. Dick, and no one can represent the worlds of William Gibson more accurately than William Gibson. Conn is more inclusive: his representation, he seems to suggest, is merely one of an innumerable many; he has no more mastery over his allegorical world than any realist author does over those in which we all ostensibly live. It is an invigorating proposal.
There is a certainty not just to the prose but also to the way in which everyone approaches and understands their surroundings – this is a staple of fairy and folk tales: everything is governed by rules that, no matter how seemingly inscrutable or superstitious to the reader, are true and irrefutable within the tale. There is a fixity to everything that lends the novel a certain intractability. It is only the presumption that Conn’s telling of this story is a mere one of many that saves it from become somewhat tiresome: this is a world more malleable than the one suggested by the rigidity of the prose.
The numerous stories told within the novel bear structural similarities to those specific to fairy tales, such as foreshadowing and resolution, but Conn refuses to strictly adhere to them, often leaving a tale largely unresolved, or resolving it in a manner not dependent upon any presumed foreshadowing. They read like last-minute dismissals of, or departures from, the styles to which they are otherwise indebted. Tropes are used for the purpose of abandoning them. While this may seem a tired postmodern trick, the progression of the novel, and the characters’ seeming unconcern for any such fairy tale-esque resolution, serves only to further bolster the idea that this is a world comparable to but far from compatible with “ours”: resolution is neither expected nor necessary. There is an effectively unnerving lack of clear consequence to anything, an unrelenting weightlessness to each part of the novel; even when events are endowed with a consequential flavor, the significance is supplied through a sheer exposition that beguiles far more than it informs. When the final two chapters of the novel build toward a resolution of sorts, it feels anticlimactic and unnecessary: we have long since abandoned the world of resolution.
It would be difficult to discuss this novel without at the very least addressing its postmodern elements. Conn takes a nearly Mannerist approach to his telling, but there is a sincerity to his tongue-in-cheek style – indeed, this sincerity is all that allows the work to sustain itself; otherwise its already considerable self-imposed limitations would only further encroach upon the connotative expansiveness of the work, and it would collapse under its own self-conscious cheekiness. This is not to say that the work is not cheeky: the syntax is of a kind of mongrel fairy talese, and references to “post-late-capitalism” abound. This latter term beckons the likes of Frederic Jameson and Francis Fukuyama, and in many ways these invocations are the weakest part of the novel: such allusions seem out of place to my increasingly intuitive understanding of it, even while it was precisely these allusions that initially allowed me to feel as though I had gained access to any such understanding. The term seems designed to create a framework for understanding the novel as a kind of post-postmodernist work, as a take on Robert Coover’s take on fairy tales – a return to the source, in a way, but a return dependent upon discursive postmodern departures.
Is a description of the novel’s plot necessary? I don’t believe that it is; at the very least, my enjoyment of it was not dependent upon the plot – indeed, many of the more plot-oriented passages were for me the least engaging –, and many of the finest passages – most notably, a simply terrific short “historical” play, which details the events surrounding the marriage of the Commander of the starship Theseus, Duke of Athens to the daughter of the ambassador from Neptune – do little to advance the narrative. Suffice it to say that there is a plague, an annual celebration of great import to the society, considerable preparation for a pageant, kidnappings, messenger-delivered children, quarantines, efforts on the part of the society's children to accumulating knowledge about their society’s history and culture, and a great much more: people get lost, people get in fights, people have sex in unusually pungent or asensual ways, people grow jealous and suspicious of each other. The events take place in some distant future, after all that we have taken for granted in some fashion or another leads to the destruction of contemporary civilization. Wonderfully bizarre aphorisms – “Let peace erupt within you” –, beautifully unexpected descriptions – “The binder of brooms leapt into the room and struck the boar-bristle woman behind the ear with a young pumpkin” – and hilariously stilted dialogue – “'I am only playing a haunting melody in this dell, in order to frighten the children’” – abound, but, after the abundant quirks and whimsies pass and fade into memory, what is left is a singular portrait of an obtuse, alien, and impossibly knowable society. There is a distinctly patriarchal quality to this largely collapsed society, despite certain efforts to place female characters at its forefront; but Conn does not use this to offer any analyses or interpretations of patriarchal societies, as perhaps he shouldn’t – it would read entirely at odds with the style of the rest of the novel, even as it might make it a more comfortable or comforting read.
Conn’s achievement is not so much in his fantastical and stoic fabrications as it is in the unexpected inclusiveness of his telling of them. The frame of the narrative is so tenuous and its contents so weightless that any story held solely within it seems to evade memory; those that extend beyond the narrative frame – the play, an early passage between two girls on a river, a later passage between two men and a corpse – are indelible in their alternately funny, sweet, and chilling singularity. The vagueness of this world is charted in concrete terms and phrases, but, between the limited and wonderfully awkward vocabulary and syntax and the incomprehensibly meaningful pomp of everything, Conn lets his readers in to roam and make of it what they will. This world isn’t Conn’s; he’s just its messenger." - Benjamin Gottlieb

"The Fixed Stars takes place after the end of the world. The causes are not clear, though you can feel them always pressing. Much of it takes place in a community at the brink, threatened by plague and scarcity. The people are alien, their culture is strange -- at times they seem admirable in their love, their selflessness, their generosity. At times they are opaque. Negotiating with them, imagining them, feels good. And there are many other stories -- romances, terrors, monsters, weird scientists, etc. The tone vacillates and slithers. It is rich, complex, at times difficult to read, at times compulsively readable. It is, like the magazine Conn co-edits, a brilliant example of the power that lies in taking science fiction seriously as a way of making art. You should buy it and read it.
I have to admit I've been puzzled by the apparent lack of buzz about this book. I've talked to people who loved it and I've read as much in scattered comment threads, etc. Brian Evenson has done his best to talk it up on his site and when I saw him at AWP, and in interviews, and presumably elsewhere. I don't know if it just hasn't found the right hands or what. Maybe it's selling like hotcakes and it just hasn't inspired a lot of coverage. I've got no idea. But one of the reasons I want Uncanny Valley to become something big is writers like Conn - the ones that don't obviously fit a niche even in the weird little ecosystem of indie lit, but whose writing is so compelling that I believe they could be huge, if only they were given the chance. FC2 has given Conn the chance. So why hasn't the 'net wised up yet? What do I have to do to get you to read this book?" - www.uncannyvalleymag.com

"In the tone of language, The Fixed Stars reads like something that has dropped out of the 19th or maybe even 17th Century. In content it is anything but. It’s an hallucinogenic head/road trip through a ‘post-capitalism’ future, a world where new industries have grown to include breeding spiders for their specific threads. It’s tragic and funny and at times utterly repugnant and ghastly and not a word is out of place. It sits somewhere strange between Delaney’s Dhalgren, Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String and a Grimm’s fairy tale after they’d eaten far too many magic mushrooms. But what is particularly stunning, given it is Conn’s first book, is the sheer mastery of language. It is perhaps not for the squeamish. At one point a malevolent doctor files a women’s toe-nails and the collects the dust. Soon after we encounter this:
“In the afternoon she observed the doctor to sprinkle the dust from the cotton envelope onto his snails before he ate them. He stared across the river as he munched, bearded in snail slime: sprinkled and munched, sprinkled and munched.
“The snails alone are not sufficient nutrition, she thought.”
It is essentially a book of dystopic science fiction. Despite the somewhat retarded, semi-rural community, when their eyes fail they can be replaced. But, apart from a strange segue into a Space Opera performance in the centre of the book, Conn’s world is one of herb farmers and weavers of reeds, a world where children are mysteriously delivered by messengers carrying boxes on wagons drawn by oxen. It is a world where only the mildest hints of post-capitalist architecture remain, the denizens having fled the cities for reasons that are only darkly hinted at. It is a world rife with contagions – Conn hints at zombies and a werewolf-like creature with inhuman strength called “the boar-bristle woman” and what could be radioactive or chemical fallout. It is also very much a world of violence and when blood spills, Conn, to chilling effect, makes a point of counting each drop.
I was made aware of The Fixed Stars by Brian Evenson, a man who seems to have a satellite dish directed to detect new talent. He also blurbed the book, stating that: “Brian Conn’s wonderfully perilous crossbreeding of SF and innovative prose reads like what might result if Dhalgren and A Canticle for Leibowitz engaged in salacious acts with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Fixed Stars is a funny, absurd, and beatifically strange book, one in which you simultaneously have the feeling that not one word is out of place and that everything that language brings to us opens onto a void. The Fixed Stars is the future of the future, and it is a truly outstanding debut.”
Author Jedediah Berry also weighed in, commenting that: “With bits of machinery culled from post-apocalyptic science fiction, gothic horror, and ancient myth and ritual, Brian Conn has built a beguiling puzzle box of a novel. The Fixed Stars is a thorny, disjunctive fable that unfolds like a night-blooming flower. This is strange, intoxicating stuff.”
In some ways Conn’s world is not unlike the post-apocalyptic pastoral depicted in Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney. Until the contagions really start to take over there seems a potentially more-or-less idyllic aspect to the weird world he portrays.
Conn’s brief biography on the book stated that, along with being co-editor of the on-line and hard-copy literary journal Birkensnake, he studied mathematics in southern Rhode Island. “The bio actually became incorrect a few weeks after I sent it to the publisher,” he admits. “I no longer study mathematics, at least formally. Long story. I do still roam country lanes thinking up new ways to doubt various notions of infinity, but that’s on my own time. I am likely to study mathematics again someday.”
Literary/mathematical crossover has bred some strange offspring over the years, most recently including David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More, a factual history of Infinity and Neal Stephenson’s handling of the mathematician Alan Turing in Cryptonomicon.
“I love David Foster Wallace, but I’m not convinced by his math,” Conn says. “I think he doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. I once brought this up with a professor whose abstract algebra class I was auditing, and he said, ‘Yeah – that guy...’ and then got a troubled look and sort of trailed off. The same professor said that the most mathematically inclined writer he knew was Borges, which I think was astute.”
“You mentioned ‘less practical’ mathematics. At heart math is just a method of radical abstraction. What quality does a line of iambic pentameter have in common with the constellation Cassiopeia? Answer: they are sets of five things (feet, stars). A lot of math deals with numbers because numbers are easy to abstract from many different situations. But non-numerical qualities can also sometimes be abstracted. Math is just the impulse to abstract whatever qualities you can and manipulate those abstractions. If you think of it that way you can see why Borges makes sense as a mathematical writer.”
But if his musical tastes are anything to go by, Conn is far from your straight-laced professorial type. When Conn was asked by the editor of Sybil’s Garage to attach a piece of music to the short story ‘Six Questions about the Sun,’ Conn cited the German Industrial-Punk band Einstürzende Neubauten.
“[That] story prefigures The Fixed Stars in many ways,” Conn says. “The editor of Sybil’s Garage, where that appeared, asked me what music I associated with the story, and it happened that there was something that I had been listening to and that seemed to have influenced my writing. This is sometimes the case for me, but not often.
"When I was finishing up The Fixed Stars I did for some reason listen several times a day to the Stone Roses’ first album, which might seem like a strange choice, but somehow it always brought me back to the state in which I’d left off writing the day before."
“I don’t like to have a writing ritual. I start to feel like it is the ritual doing the writing instead of me, which would be okay except that I can’t imagine a ritual writing anything interesting.”
The Fixed Stars is, strictly speaking, a ‘post apocalyptic’ novel and while such a mode is far from new, has become increasingly common in recent years.
“Maybe it is necessary to prepare for the approaching apocalypse?” Conn suggests. “Maybe it is necessary to reconcile ourselves to the apocalypse that is even now occurring? Hard to say…. It could also be that ‘post-apocalyptic’ is a way to frame a certain kind of fantastical material so that it becomes acceptable in mainstream literary discourse. Things that happen to fairies and things that happen on Mars are hard to sneak out of the genre section, but the same things can often happen in a post-apocalyptic setting and qualify as real literature.”
Indeed, the apocalyptic library grows apace. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Brian Evenson’s Dark Property, not to mention Ballard’s Hello America, Delaney’s Dhalgren, Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, to mention just a few, suggest that Conn could well have been lumbering into well-tread regions.
“I think of The Fixed Stars as post-apocalyptic only by accident. I didn’t set out to write a post-apocalyptic novel. I had an old man who didn’t like to talk about cities or fire, and I set out to learn what was up with him. As I went on it became clear that some kind of dramatic event must have intervened between the world we live in and the world this man lived in, and so then the book was post-apocalyptic. But I actually find the old man’s world quite pleasant, barring certain features of course.”
Despite its futuristic time-set, there is also something distinctly timeless about The Fixed Stars, something it shares most clearly with Dhalgren.
“Dhalgren was definitely on my mind. Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics was on my mind. Ballard was not on my mind but probably should have been. Gene Wolfe’s book The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the whole book is worth reading; do not stop with the title novella) also should have been on my mind, but unfortunately I only read it last week and discovered it included most of the interesting features of The Fixed Stars."
“Maybe The Prisoner also was on my mind. I mean the Patrick McGoohan TV show from the ’60s. Idyllic but somehow off. I confess I always thought I’d be pretty content in that village Patrick McGoohan wanted so much to get out of.”
“I find it very hard to know what really inspires anything I think, do, or write. There are certain obscure or unexpected books that I read a long time ago that somehow became so deeply rooted in my mind that I can no longer tell where their influence begins and ends. For example, The Glass Harmonica, by Barbara Ninde Byfield (republished, stupidly and unattractively, under the title The Book of Weird) – I think of that book at least 300 times a day, and when an idea comes into my head I don’t know whether it is mine or Barbara Byfield’s.”
Conn begins his book with a strange, slightly rambling, monologue from an old man to his daughter and his apocalyptic scenario is laid out as though it is an ancient fire-side story. “I think it just emerged in the process of unpacking the voices of various characters, primarily the first old man,” Conn says.
But halfway through the book there is a strange shift, a theatrical play dubbed the “John’s Day Drama” – a move into space operatics that seems overwrought to some extent, almost as though the author were poking fun at himself for writing a ‘science fiction’ novel.
“I’m glad that you mentioned that. I’ve had relatively little feedback thus far from readers, so I still don’t know what likes, dislikes, and interpretations will emerge. Several other readers have singled out the John’s Day Drama as their favorite part, which worried me slightly: I would like the book to be like a tarot deck, with different sections that speak like different cards, some to some people and others to others. Of course everyone is sort of interested in Death and few people spend much time thinking about the Emperor (right?), but I hope the book will to a certain extent act as a mirror, or maybe a Rorschach blot.
“I think of the John’s Day Drama as the result of future historians’ conflating of largely unrelated discourses. Shakespeare and Star Trek (more or less) – in these people’s eyes they were contemporaneous. I guess in a way it does poke fun at science fiction, but no more than it pokes fun at Shakespeare.”
In his blurb, Jedediah Berry refers to “machinery” culled from Sci Fi and Gothic Horror, however The Fixed Stars is, in many ways, unclassifiable. “I spend a lot of time wondering what is going on with genre,” Conn admits. “Fantastical content does not seem to be the primarily determinant of whether a work is considered SF or not. Nor does language. SF does sometimes seem less tolerant of a certain kind of ambiguity than does conventional literature. For example, Dhalgren is experimental in form and language, but in the end I think its experimental features are subsumed in a relatively coherent authorial statement – and it’s SF. Contrast to, say, The Age of Wire and String, where even articulating what the book is ‘about’ is perhaps more a creative than an interpretive act – and it’s not SF. I don’t think this is a universal test for distinguishing SF from non-SF; it’s just a very general and oversimplified observation, or maybe proto-hypothesis.
“I also notice that genre fiction tends to be more exciting than other fiction and less like school. So maybe the difference lies there somewhere.”
“Genre is ghettoized by the kind of people who ghettoize genre. In my world John Steinbeck is ghettoized. I think genre is a primitive way of bringing readers together with the books they might like to read, flawed but not entirely useless. Goodreads and Amazon and the like seem to fill the same role more effectively, and may eventually kill genre.”
Conn utilizes a strange lilting language in both his short stories and his first novel. There’s a strong touch of the Brother’s Grimm (there’s a quote from The Six Servants prefacing the book), the Shakesperian and even potentially Biblical or religious language embraced.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘religious,’” Conn says. “I’ve actually read very little of the Christian bible in any version, although I agree that the language in The Fixed Stars often seems biblical. It’s secondhand biblical. My mother, with whom I lived until I was 11 (I think?), is a California New Ager who is into the Church of Religious Science. My father and my stepmother, with whom I lived after I was eleven, were Scientologists. Note that Scientology and the Church of Religious Science are not the same thing, and neither one is the same thing as Christian Science. Each has its own language.
“I was reading a great deal of both Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm as I wrote. The Grimm’s book actually has some very strange linguistic features. Their goal was not only to collect German folktales, but also to present them as the basis for a German national character, and so the tales are heavily and often clumsily redacted as a means of dictating that character. A typical example: in most versions of Rapunzel, the witch finds out about the prince when Rapunzel becomes visibly pregnant; the Grimms instead have Rapunzel make a bizarre and implausible slip of the tongue that tips the witch off, in order to avoid mention of pregnancy. Once you know that this kind of thing is going on, the language, and the way it’s particular about certain things but glosses over other things, begins to seem like an elaborate apparatus for concealing what the characters are actually doing.”
Towards the end of Fixed Stars, Conn makes the reader clearly complicit. The children speaking seem to be afraid of us, the reader; the pre-post-capitalist. In this regard The Fixed Stars can be read as a warning to the contemporary world.
“If it’s a warning, it seems to warn us against things that would be difficult to abandon: our acceptance of hierarchies, our notions of success and comfort, our attachment to personal identity. I don’t see those going away any time soon. We used the term ‘post-apocalyptic’ before, and that implies a disaster, but a disaster is only a disaster when you’re on the wrong end of it. The people in The Fixed Stars seem to see the event not as a disaster but as a change. The thing to remember about a change, even a big change, is that something does come afterwards.”
With this, his first published novel, Conn clearly remains a fairly humble writer: “I read a lot of books when I was a kid,” he says. “Thought I could write some pretty easily, and was stubborn enough to continue trying even when the truth became evident.”
But Conn is decidedly off the mark there. The truth is that his first book is something of an instant – albeit decidedly odd – classic." - Ashley Crawford


"The Nothing is the only ground—or background—against which we can apprehend existence. It is existence. It is existence's potential of absence and nullity, but also of energy...In this sense, things only ever exist ex nihilo. Things only ever exist out of nothing." —Jean Baudrillard, from Impossible Exchanges

Brian Conn's debut novel The Fixed Stars is a fable, a myth, an image, a rant, a mantra, a spell, a vision of a time past time. What it is not is a game. At first read, it is tempting to try to puzzle out cause and effect, to suss the gimmick of this fragmented, episodic novel from its scant, but tantalizing, clues. There are repeated characters (Molly and the man like a bear, the children and the builder, both young and old,) repeated settings (the bathhouse, the arachniary, the proscenium meadow, the river and the road) and specifically structured chapters which descend from category to subcategory like a scientific catalog. At about the mid-point of the book, when the vast majority of the characters are celebrating in an orgiastic summer festival, there is even a take on Hamlet's play within a play, but with characters who faintly echo Demetrius, Helena and the rest of the players in A Midsummer Night's Dream and whose action is performed on the Starship Theseus, Duke of Athens, in case one missed the joke. Yet, for all the referential, self-referential and linguistic play it is only when the reader relaxes, stops trying to mash together pieces of a puzzle that cannot and will not fit, that the true work of Conn's novel becomes apparent.
At its most fundamental level, The Fixed Stars is an anti-capitalist manifesto. The setting, in as much as there is a specific setting, is located in a post-apocalyptic, anti-Promethean world. Here humanity has simultaneously descended to "life...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes would have it, and ascended to a utopic agrarian existence where the needs of the community are provided for, sexual appetites are freely satiated and the people neither mourn the past nor fear the future, as violent as that future often turns out to be. Whatever happened to the world of the reader, the world from which this one is descended, happened out of human memory or record keeping, long enough in the past to have distilled into powerful myth. The structures, habits and mores of the "late capitalists," as they (as we) are called are feared and scorned, and yet the society of the novel habitually operates on a sophisticated pseudo-technological platform that involves genome manipulation and bacterial cultures, spiders who weave elemental metals, spores which are capable of transmitting messages instantaneously and over great distance. However, far from being a simple romp through the tropes of sci-fi parody or a dystopic alarm-system in the style of 1984, Conn has chosen to defamiliarize his novel on all possible levels in order to create a larger anti-structure: that of the void.
There is no narrative cohesion in this book. By this I do not simply mean that the narrative is fragmented, elliptical, intermittent or written in any other mode of Modernist or Post-Modernist method. Rather the pieces of this novel actively resist any sort of logical organization, and do so with a gleeful insistence. Every time the reader seizes upon a repetition that might serve to create story-line, the structure of that story is dashed so thoroughly its original existence actually serves to underscore the empty center of the novel instead of to build scaffolding upon which Conn's clearly joyful sense of language could hang. For example, in the first chapter, Molly and the man like a bear (who are not main characters but merely named characters in a novel largely populated by interchangeable folk described through their duties to the community: the sorter of the larder, the nurturer of cabbages, the deliverer of infants, and so on), are tricked into a level of the bathhouse from which it is often impossible to return. Much later, however, these two do return to the novel and, what is more, after a long journey of impossible circumstance, they return to the same valley at the foot of the same mountain from which they originally were cast. This is known because Molly recognizes the goats they encounter on their way down the ridge and unearths several items she herself buried there long ago; yet, when Molly and the man like a bear do descend into the valley they find it empty of people, the landmarks familiar but somehow wrong, a strange dust in the air, a strange track on the ground. "Perhaps we are in a place not quite the same," Molly says, and then, "Can it be that the same goats are here,..but not the same people?" In this book, that is indeed possible. When Molly and the man like a bear take abrupt leave of the novel shortly thereafter, their brief, haunting, but ultimately anti-epiphanic resurfacing underscores for the reader how little can be counted on to remain consistent in this world. Not characters, not place, not even the goats can be trusted to remain what they appear.
The seemingly multi-dimensional wandering of Molly and the man like a bear, as well as the strange calamity that befalls the society of children at the book's climactic peak, calls to mind a very early description of one of the society's central landmarks: the bathhouse.
"Just so," said the man like a bear. "But the chambers of the bathhouse climb so innocently, and curve so cunningly, that we misperceive them, and, stepping within, believe ourselves in a suite of ordinary rooms; but in fact we stand in a spiral chamber, and similar chambers lie above and below us; for in this shape each chamber lies at once above and below every other chamber."
This nautilus, Escher-like shape—with its echoes of both fractal theory and the Fibonacci Sequence—is a guiding metaphor for the book as a whole. Time does not progress on a line, but rather in a spiral. The future does not supplant the present, but exists in tandem with both the present and the past. Identity is not fixed because it is not singular and the rituals that keep the spirits of darkness at bay are, at another point on the spiral, the same rituals that call them down.
If capitalism at its most basic level can be defined as a system in which production of a good or a need is carried out to generate and sustain profit, then it clearly follows that the reality necessary to maintain this production must be essentially entropic. If energy—manpower, horsepower, fossil fuels, or, in The Fixed Stars, spiders—were inexhaustible or available without manufacture, then the product itself would be innumerably accessible, so common its value would be as nil. Capitalist philosophy hinges on the idea that energy can be expended until it is used up, at which point another source of energy must be discovered or, in the case of western theology, resurrected. What Brian Conn's novel does is reject this idea on every possible level. Time is renewable, helical. Identity is dependent on use and thus fluid. Gender, even as it pertains to procreation, is unfixed, often hermaphroditic. There is no ownership of goods, dwellings or sexual partners, and even the binary relationship of children and adults is turned on its head as, in this world, the children seem to be much older than their adult counterparts, though they are neither "other" than the members of the community nor, as they mature into sexual beings and strike out onto the road, do they appear to be fixed in some loophole of time.
For whatever authority any static determination of meaning holds over this fluid, slippery novel, by the end of the book, it is clear that the Fixed Stars is about language as much as it is about anything else. Conn writes simultaneously about the joy and the void of the word. When the word is sundered from its role as a commodity to be meted out in limited quantities for specific tasks, when it can be equally, simultaneously, and interchangeably used to signify any character, any place, any unfixed point in time (and the sweet plum woman and the lemon peel woman can be the same; the green olive woman and the string bean man can be the same) the result is a language that flashes rather than beams, that sways rather than builds. The sign and the signifier do not divorce each other so much as they tease each other and the novel is unbidden by its form.
"The Nothing does not cease to exist as soon as there is something. The Nothing continues (not) to exist just beneath the surface of things," says Baudrillard. Ultimately, he concludes that, without a mirror held up to the world, without a kind of verification he determines to be impossible, there can be no such thing as reality. The constructs of our familiar society—economic, political, legal, aesthetic, and so on— have no meaning outside themselves and thus, in the true spirit of the capitalist agenda, no value. Yet, within this seemingly grim pronouncement Baudrillard finds the potential for a surprising kind of happiness. "The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible," he says, "and the task of thought is to make it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible."
"For we prefer that all images consist side by side in our minds, none dominating any other, but each gathering to itself the singular strength that belongs to it, that we might enjoy them all equally and all at once," says Brian Conn. I believe he is saying something very similar to Baudrillard. In The Fixed Stars joy and fear, grief and love, ritual, superstition, doom and salvation exist in the same moment. The result is a book as remarkable for the sheer joy of its voice as it is for the implacable terror of its emptiness." - Diagram

Read it at Google Books

Literary Geometry: an interview with Brian Conn by Jedediah Berry