Turn Left at Venus Read online

  ‘When we die,’ Leyla said, ‘it has to be like this.’

  ‘Like this,’ Ada agreed, meaning with fully awoken consciousness, with blissful integration.

  Leyla said, ‘There is so much advice on how to live but who teaches you how to die?’

  Ada said, ‘We should be taught a story about the best way to die.’

  ‘It has to be so beautiful, with everything that makes life beautiful.’

  ‘A celebration, a ceremony, a ritual.’

  ‘Music, beautiful clothes, a lovely place.’

  ‘I’ll write that one,’ Ada promised; this promise meant a great deal more to her than to Leyla.

  ‘It was the first drug I ever tried; San Francisco, when the band was new; in the park.’

  ‘LSD was your first drug. OK. With?’

  ‘Leyla. She came to visit for a couple of days, from LA. Where were you?’

  ‘I took it in a prison-like house in the depths of winter,’ says Noemi. ‘And I knew I had to leave there and everything was about that. Great visuals with the cobwebs, though.’

  Ada remembers, ‘We talked about death. Death. Dying. How to die.’

  Noemi says, ‘And you’re not even Mexican.’

  In the evening they parted to change clothes and met again at Leyla’s hotel and went to a club Leyla had heard the name of, a bar really, with an area for a band. Jazz, a trio, the piano guy was especially amazing. No one else in here had also been in the park that day. Or would have believed that they had. Leyla wore a shiny sheath dress with colours that changed. Ada wore that cream suit from Charles.

  That night Leyla said to Ada, ‘You know, you’re a cool cat.’ Because Leyla and Ada could trip out in the day in the park where the kids went and at night they’d be here with natural sophistication, mellowing out with the glow still coming off things, colours still seen in waves, sipping on bourbon and listening to this adult music that constantly surprised you, with its melancholy and joy and surprises, could not be predicted, made a unique shape out of the moment. ‘We are cool cats,’ Ada said. They applauded the musicians louder than anyone, and the pianist bowed in their direction. The day’s glow wafted off them and drenched everything in glow.

  They parted at the end of the night, to have a good long sleep. About to crash so hard. Take a day to rest up. Eat well, extra sleep, do their own separate little chores. They’d meet the day after.

  Ada turned up to find Leyla standing at the desk in her own gleaming hotel lobby. With her travel bag beside her. Checking out.

  Ada could not say, were you going to tell me? Leyla would point to the impeccable timing of Ada turning up in time. As if they’d arranged it: come and say goodbye if you want to.

  ‘I never say goodbye,’ said Leyla. She was wearing a knee-length striped shift, big dark glasses, her hair stacked atop her head.

  Leyla had made new plans. She was meeting her husband, he’d sent a car, she was going to a place called Esalen.

  Leyla had already withdrawn into that life. Even while they hugged and said they would keep in touch.

  ‘You’ve got my address.’

  ‘I’ll see you …’ Ada didn’t know how to say the rest.

  ‘When it is meant to be,’ said Leyla, stepping through the door held open for her into the car.

  24

  WHEN I WAS A WOMAN STARTS LIKE THIS

  The bartender turned up the sound on the television. Almost everyone present was watching, or at least listening, but for some men arm-wrestling at a corner table. It was the kind of place where people came to be friendly or to be left alone.

  Linda picked up her drink in its tall frosty glass and looked around for an available table. A woman sat alone, avidly watching the screen. She was strangely dressed, like a soldier training for combat, in pants and shirt with a camouflage pattern, and large heavy boots with soles like tire treads. There was no evident peace sign pendant to explain the outfit. Linda walked over, slightly tottering, as she should, in her evening shoes.

  On the TV, the interviewer was demanding , “Are you asking us to believe you have two mothers and a wife? All our viewers can see you are a woman. What kind of place do you come from anyway?”

  “I’m trying to use language you understand,” replied the alien female.

  The woman at the table indicated that Linda could sit down next to her. “I’m Lara,” she offered.

  “Linda.”

  “I live on Yetubee,” the stranger on the television said.

  Lara said, “Obviously we finally won on Yetubee.”

  Linda didn’t catch her drift. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  Lara said, “I want to know how we did it”, paying rapt attention to the television.

  “Is that anywhere near Earth?” asked the interviewer. “Could we send over some men?” He grinned out at his audience who would share the point he was making.

  “I’d like to see your leader,” said the alien visitor on the television. Her name was Liliana and she was the sensation of the day.

  “Can you explain how you got here?” the interviewer asked.

  “And explain how I got here,” Lara muttered to her drink.

  “On Yetubee that is not a question,” said Liliana to the interviewer.

  Over at the city’s Knowledge Depot, Lidia’s boyfriend Twig was saying, “Don’t get any ideas”, then he chortled – the idea of his woman getting ideas was his little joke. He could not know that Lidia barely heard him, so adept was she at the smiling, nodding expression that let him know he was always right and always in charge. “I got an idea,” he suggested, expecting to have to persuade her.

  “Sure,” said Lidia agreeably, hoping he wouldn’t just yet make her go somewhere she couldn’t hear the television anymore; “I just have to finish polishing this table then I’ll be right along.”

  Two miles down the road, a small cat had climbed a tree and then found it could not descend without assistance.

  “What do you expect?” Lara demanded of the bemused, disoriented visitor.

  “But how did I even get here?” asked Lidia. “Where am I? I’ve never been in a jungle before.”

  Lara slashed at some undergrowth with her retractable claws. The newly created space revealed they were on a ridge, which opened onto a vista of rocky valley. Swiftly surveying the area before them, Lara seemed satisfied. “We’re safe here for now.”

  “Safe from what? Oh heaven help me, this place doesn’t look like anywhere I’ve ever even heard of.”

  “Something like that happened to me too. Was it only yesterday? I was suddenly on some other world, and there was this kind of peace zone or neutral zone and I saw a woman on television who was from a world where we had won. Why are you dressed like that? We’re on patrol and the enemy is close.”

  25

  PORTAL: UTOPIAN VISION

  Most of the comments were about a minor point: “Going Out: Space Traveler Reports” is an example of a utopian vision, a proposition for an attainable better way to think of our time on earth, with purpose, intent, and communality to the very end. thread

  Going Out is a horrendous fantasy of a communist dystopia where people are fooled into social conformity to the extent of being led to their death.

  No fucking way. Going Out totally is in the Utopian tradition, it is an inspiration for what would happen in a world with more freedom, compassion, joy. It makes you ask, why not, and you have no answer.

  A sad and sorry example of what our materialist, irreligious culture comes up with

  And that is why A.L. Ligeti’s first book, now over sixty years old, is said to have relevance. New relevance, it is said. The longing for that place where they just do things better is felt more acutely when we feel we’re living in a place where even the ways we once did things better is being attacked and undermined, discredited and de-funded.

  The utopian vision lives on. The utopian vision has not been discredited in as widespread and persuasive a manner as some
believe or hope. It lives on in the realm of imagination and desire of those writers of speculative fiction who never stop asking, what could a perfect world look like? The question might have been, more simply, more modestly, what could a better world look like? For writers like Ligeti, the question might be more specifically expressed as: what could a world be if it were not subject to the gender stereotyping and strict sex roles of the societies we live in and know about?

  Interestingly, questions of economic and social equality inevitably attach to these questions. The critique of conventional gender roles, it becomes evident, is a denunciation of capitalism itself.

  Notably, in none of Ligeti’s stories do the old anti-communist tropes, so commonly appearing in stories from the Cold War period, which to some has never ended, appear: there is no complete and lamentable loss of “I”, of the individual self and identity. (Present in many fictive societies of collective ownership, communal parenting, guaranteed cradle-to-grave care.)

  “A new look at an old Utopia” Join the discussion

  Why do academics spoil everything?

  Let’s face it Utopias are boring. No-one really wants to live in a place without any conflict, without any flaws. There can’t be drama without conflict.

  Obviously you haven’t read Ligeti. Her books are all about the fatal flaw.

  It’s like the Garden of Eden, as soon as humans had any choices they made the choice to go their own way. Even if that meant to leave paradise. Because it’s better to be free.

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  Don’t feed the trolls. We come here as one of the few places to have a civilised conversation.

  Utopias don’t work. Period. It’s not that their basic idea is so evil. It’s just not effectual.

  That’s what the dominant economic and social system wants you to think. It supposedly proves that the status quo must triumph, with inequality, injustice and violence as its norms. You could just as easily point to the successes of some utopian experiments.

  What successes? This is a sincere question. I never heard of a success.

  Utopia is not a template. It’s a direction. It’s the journey that matters.

  It’s a point worth repeating that the gains we have seen in our world did not come about through attempting utopia, but by processes of reform, building step by step on advances already made. Examples? The spread of democracy. Women’s rights. Other minority rights. Lessening of poverty. The lesson? Slow and steady work— that’s what brings about improvement. The perfect is the enemy of the good

  What cloud did you come in on?

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  People say utopian experiments failed but they did not fail: people learnt from the experiments, that’s what experiments are for. Experiment does not mean the end of the road, experiment is a road that leads to other roads.

  Right. A real utopia would constantly examine itself, make space for change, for people do change, each generation become something other than the ones that preceded it.

  Utopia is destroyed by human nature — its contradictions, its hypocrisies. And utopia is made again by human nature — the endless quest for the perfect social arrangement.

  The debunkers of the utopian ideal will point to all its failures, and to utopia’s sordid bedfellows, for, they might say, even the Nazi ideology contained a kind of utopic vision. But we must judge an ideal by its best outcomes, its best practitioners, just as we judge an artist by their best examples, not by their sketches, experiments, lesser achievements. (Some people are just too prolific.)

  We were made to read Ligeti in my Anthropology degree. The books make you ask whether what you had been taught as bad manners, wrong thinking, or undesirable relationships, whether that was a description not of the world but only of your own culture’s customs and prejudices, which would mean it’s all entirely relative, not part of the essential commonality of humankind. I got an A.

  While the writer’s strengths are not so much in unforgettable characters, nor in extraordinary prose, Ligeti’s strength shows most in her world-building, in the creation of vividly described worlds that invite, indeed entice the reader’s collusion.

  Ligeti’s strategy is the employment of the trope of an outsider, usually implicitly someone from a planet like our own, entering an alien society with rules, mores, morals, conventions that are other than those we know.

  An exception was When I Was A Woman, an experimental Can we talk about the mystery of the author’s identity? Is Ligeti a man or a woman?

  Why does it matter?

  Are you a man or a woman? Does that matter to you?

  Can someone explain what scuit means? I’m trying to get through the book, we have to read it on our course. Is it just a word for sex?

  Basically that’s it. Sex in the sense of physical acts with the aim of procreation. Here’s the relevant passage:

  The Stranger then understood that at a time in a Lueshiran’s life, a kind of womb equivalent became active in the body. At a time in their life, a kind of penis equivalent was charged with seed. People matched up and embraced. Scuit led to the birth of children.

  Parenting — looking after children, guiding and protecting them — had nothing to do with being the birthing or engendering parent; guidance and protection came from everyone around the child.

  Who wants to live on a planet where sex is only about procreation? Sex for pleasure is not mentioned on Lueshira, (except that vague fuzzy emo moment).

  So did The Stranger set out from a future time on Earth?

  Not very future. The Stranger travels with the assumptions and knowledge of the time Turn Left was written. He came from our world in the 1950s, but with advanced technology, the means for extra-terrestrial travel.

  The problem with the utopia is that democracy, which is the best system, there’s no serious disagreement about that, works best with a society of agonism. A world where all conflict had been eliminated is not a perfect world.

  In a good relationship, a bedrock of trust and protocol makes a safe space for Agon: disagreements and differences can be aired and addressed without the threat of destroying the firm ground on which they operate

  I read AL Ligeti to remind myself that we cannot stop imagining better worlds, and maybe that is actually the function of art. I’m not from SF fandom but I read widely and I read Ligeti.

  The problem with the utopian fictions is the way they are read — as if they intend to predict the future. They don’t. This kind of fiction expresses the irrepressible desire to create a better world. Utopian desire never dies and rises phoenix-like after each defeat.

  What do you mean by feminist utopias? Are they women-only societies? Or an ideal society where everyone has feminist values?

  Both kinds can be found in Ligeti’s body of work. An example of the former: When I Was A Woman; the latter: the Lueshira books.

  Is there really any Utopia in When I Was A Woman? Is Liliana’s women-only world a utopia?

  Nothing about When I Was A Woman is utopian

  Why are Utopias back again? Is that why Ligeti is being read again?

  I never heard about utopia until I read Turn Left At Venus.

  Ligeti to me you can see that the author is a man, in the way the stories don’t show the effects on children of being brought up in a society they didn’t even choose.

  I bet the author does not actually want to live in that world they made up.

  Imagining is the easy part. Trying to live your ideals, that’s something else. You have to move from abstract utopia to concrete utopia.

  Here’s what Ligeti did create, unlike those real people who were trying to live in utopias on earth but still always wanted somehow to regulate conjugal relatio
ns. As in a certain commune I happen to know very well. In Ligeti, you see how to free up the very idea of relations of any kind.

  Which is more important in a utopia, the way they organise their economy or the way they organise their relationships?

  The question is, what do you base your economy on? We’re currently taking greed and selfishness to their limits. How’s that working out for us?

  Which brings down a utopia more the desire to revolt or the desire to conform?

  Has anyone here experienced utopia? Even if it didn’t last? Should this be a new thread?

  We need utopias more than ever. Look what the world has become. What are our dreams. What world do we want to empower.

  I’m mostly a Linda because the world is still Linda’s world and a bit of Lara because I feel life is a battle.

  I’m definitely a Lara, life is a non ending battle, even if we don’t use actual weapons, or at least not always ha ha

  I’m a Liliana when it comes to who do I want to be. I want to be from a world of all women.

  I want to be Liliana but I’m really Linda, just wishing for a change, restricted to the reality of the world I live in.

  I’m still more of a Lidia, I yearn for the old days of women on a pedestal. Of course, belonging to the class where they had pedestals.

  Aren’t they all the same woman?

  I’m Liliana, if you believe you can you can now make manifest your world as one of all women.

  That part where Lara goes to Linda’s world, that’s my whole life right there.

  They’re not the same woman.

  They’re the same woman in the sense of Woman who is multifarious, multifaceted

  I can’t believe how anyone could say this book is outdated. What rock do they live under? Rights of women to control their own bodies, their own lives, to make their own choices, are stripped away more than won.