Turn Left at Venus Read online

  But Ligeti’s stories were never set on our own world, not even those that seemed to be a version of the future of our world.

  Actually Heinlein had pocket phones in his stories in the 1950s, around the time TL@V was first published.

  There’s no point in saying was this or that prescient, can you see that world in the world today. It was always this world /it was never this world. This world has never been exactly as it is now ever before, so nothing that exists quite describes it.

  ‘Prescient’ is a word commonly applied to Ligeti’s first book. Turn Left At Venus eventually came to be read as a forerunner in foreseeing something like what the future actually turned out to be, our present that is, a future the earlier writers had not in some ways fully intuited. Turn Left At Venus is almost always mentioned when the predictions of science fiction are discussed or listed; when, that is, Ligeti’s work is admitted as science fiction at all. Of what did this prescience consist? The kind of technology we use today, represented by the vaguely described ‘device’ on Lueshira? The social arrangements that reflect the mid-century breakdown of the standard nuclear family and strict gender roles? The sense of identity disturbed by

  There’s one way the book is prescient. While Ligeti’s description of the device owned by everyone on Lueshira provided no technical specifications at all; the device was described in terms of how it felt to use it—the feeling of being able to reach anyone alive, and get the answer to any question that anyone has ever already answered.

  We may assume that Ligeti, like other writers in the genre, decided they would not ever convincingly master the hard science, not ever quite understand the speed of light and the calculations involved. These writers declared a new kind of physics that had quite disturbed all knowledge of time and space, even the outer limits kind. In Ligeti’s The Shelf of Bone, the term ‘ubervelo’ is used to describe the speed needed to depart Dunya (Earth) to reach Lueshira, and ubervelo turns up in some of the collected stories. It didn’t catch on like ‘warp speed’ or even ‘tesser’ did but has been appropriated by, among others

  Ligeti I would call more slipstream than Science Fiction.

  The genre for when something fits into no genre ;)

  Slipstream doesn’t mean anything anymore if it ever did. Look at everything that wants to be called Slipstream. A lot of it doesn’t even make you feel very strange.

  Genre is a dead issue.

  Do people here think Ligeti is New Wave?

  The books sound like they’re more sci-fi than Science fiction

  There is no useful distinction between sci-fi and science fiction.

  What’s the problem? Sci Fi is an abbreviation for Science Fiction. The end.

  There’s Hard Science Fiction and there’s Soft Science Fiction. Sci-fi. Science Fiction. Space Opera, Science Fantasy. Speculative Fiction. Call it what it is. Ligeti writes Space Opera.

  What is the point of these categories? Who do they help?

  They’re only a marketing tool but they keep people away from books as much as draw them to

  Ligeti is a Speculative Fiction writer. And the truth is we can’t do without categories.

  Category is for the market, applied from the outside of the creative project. Genre is an indication of the work’s own sense of identity, the aesthetic and conceptual universe it’s loyal to.

  I believe there is something called Science Fiction but when I try to get close to it and find out just what it is made of it’s like a giant cephalopod just shot its ink into my perceptual technology

  What kind of writer creates a world and never makes it clear whether people have sex for fun?

  The question of, or debates about, whether Ligeti had “transcended the genre” implied there was something to transcend. Which there was, and will I dare say what? Turn Left does transcend being one of those genre books that only the genre tribe would devour, the genre aficionados, addicts, the fans, the self-styled geeks. Transcend that, to be read by other readers. By the general reader.

  Transcend being attractive to only the initiated. And how? By being literature, having literary values … which are?: well-crafted prose, let’s say, a distinctive voice maybe, a unique vision could be it, a way with figures of speech, an ability to create characters that leap off the page into your dreams, into your thoughts, into your fantasies, into your life, making your morning coffee for you, doing your shopping, discussing the fruit in season at your no longer solitary meal, being your portal to Lueshira

  I know right? The thing is, we’ve been telling stories for, like, since we could even speak. Like, ‘I nearly killed a woolly mammoth today’ and probably soon after people were trying to put stories into categories — hunting stories, home in the cave stories, what’s in the stars stories. And after like a few millennia they come up with genres. And one day someone says science fiction but first you have to have science. But a lot of what is called science fiction doesn’t have any science. Or pretty much none. A.L. Ligeti anyone?

  Are creation myths science fiction? Are all the ways story tellers have tried to invent meaning for the meaningless, explain what can’t be explained, like why are some people luckier than others? Religion anyone? And now it’s like all those stories finally have one main purpose: to fit into someone’s category.

  SF was popular in the communist East; my parents used to read Science Fiction in Bulgaria in the 80s and they’ve told me that it was one way to explore ideas about freedom and democracy without getting into trouble.

  A.L. Ligeti’s books had a common theme: the stranger in a strange land, travel, new worlds. The work is all about being foreign. Basically, Ligeti is a travel writer.

  The Genre mentality is the Gender mentality. Fit into a box. But works of art don’t fit, or what’s more, they aren’t explained by putting them into their box. Nor are people.

  Why is Lueshira fanfic so unable to go beyond

  “Queer science fiction” is a thing. According to a history of Science Fiction in Australia, A.L.Ligeti belongs there, though gets only one mention.

  Gender is a kind of genre. That attempt to have just a few fixed categories everything has to fit into.

  If we’re going to go there again, can we have a new thread for that?

  No. This time we’re going to keep the gender question with the genre question.

  Women were always welcome in the genre. It was begun by a woman … Mary Shelley, in case that name didn’t spring to mind at once, in which case, what are you doing here?

  There is a petition here about casting MaLila as The Stranger

  17

  DISASTER WRITTEN ALL OVER IT

  The years trying to have a marriage with Ray. ‘Disaster written all over it,’ Ada tells Noemi.

  So many years ago it was as if it was a story about someone else, a woman who had married a homosexual man who thought he could become heterosexual, who thought that was a worthy goal.

  ‘I used to say,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘that it was a masterly piece of manipulation.’ Ada used to claim to be manipulated at the times she admitted to a youthful marriage. She would cast herself as someone whose fault was to be too trusting, too idealistic, too much needing something this marriage promised to provide. A someone. A belonging. A shared life. Understanding, being understood. Someone to be. That must have been the idea.

  ‘But different insights came later,’ says Noemi.

  ‘What I wanted was protection and a blueprint for living.’

  ‘Then we realise we have to make our own.’

  ‘I couldn’t really say I was manipulated.’

  ‘Though there are times we can actually be manipulated.’

  ‘I could say, I took a sideways step.’

  Noemi says, ‘No one’s only walked a straight line. I told you about the time that I thought I could live in a commune.’

  Ray and Ada’s terrace house was in Paddington, still considered a raffish neighbourhood in the late 1950s; houses were cheap, students and artists l
ived there among working-class families. They were ahead of the trend, Ray would say. They were not going to be suburban, they were not going to be bourgeois.

  Out in the suburbs everyone lived very separately but were supposed to all be the same as each other. In the Cross people lived on top of each other and could be as different as they were.

  Ada did not want to live in the suburbs ever again. She never would know the pleasures others found there: wildlife in the gardens, comforting routines, having a car too. Ada had her own version of Toxic Suburbia, the one you lived in Kings Cross to avoid. Women’s place was in the kitchen, going out only to hang out the washing, which might be a chance to chat over the fence with the neighbour, who had troubles of her own but no idea that all women had to do was refuse. No, it wasn’t all, first they had to know about refusal. Men in singlets washed their cars on weekends, their transistor radios loudly blaring, someone screaming the horseraces or dog races. You could walk streets and streets and never see a cafe, never see a place where people gathered, sat about, watched each other, were content to be watched, the theatre of sidewalk cafe life, street theatre where new strangers came, the essence of city.

  That much, Ada and Ray agreed on. They’d somehow seen an urban ideal, probably in films where people sang in the streets of New York.

  ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To’ was the song Ray played for her.

  He had it all worked out up to this point.

  Les Messieurs had disbanded after what happened to Charles, or maybe they met somewhere else; in later years a couple of them were known in public life, conventionally married too.

  Ada had not at their first meetings thought Ray was so outstanding; she had to recast her memories of the visits to Charles’s salon to put him there, to make Ray’s face and presence emerge from the cluster.

  He’d sing phrases from ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. Mentality, reality; he liked lines like that.

  To make herself believe there’d always been a something, a feeling.

  If there were a thrill, it would not be from mere alcohol, all the drugs would only bore him terrifically. He’d want it to mean that he got a kick out of her but only for that short time when they convinced themselves fast that they were what they were looking for.

  He made love to her with his eyes closed, or with her facing away from him. The oral foreplay he required was not reciprocated and she did not know how to even think about how to ask for it, it was all so delicate.

  So much there were not words for.

  Her protective care of him.

  He accepted that she could not be a housewife.

  But knew that she was going to try to be someone you came home to.

  Ada and Ray never actually said, they never admitted, that they hastened to marry because of what had happened to Charles, and also other people, to the musician, to the artist. The times had become repressive, punitive. When lives became scandals, when lives became ruined, over private tastes and practices that didn’t even hurt anyone, they were glad to be married, to be safe. A strange sort of gladness, secretive, guilty. Glad without gladness.

  Ada went on to try living in a marriage of the era prescribed by every one of those proscribers. Even while they thought they were still somewhat bohemian, Ada and Ray, with their student friends, their separate bank accounts, his Cole Porter records, her own studio to work in. Ada would write until she fell asleep in there, and she and Ray accomplished together a rueful recognition that she was a night owl while he had to be up early to get to the office on time, to be there the same time everyone had to be there. So Ada and Ray would spend less and less time together, and before too long they never made love, never slept in the same bed anymore.

  At home, Ray played his records, played ‘Night and Day’ by night and by day, did his best for those songs at his own piano.

  The studied romance of them. The longing in them, transformed by melodic insouciance. In those songs Ray expressed his hidden real self and lived the life he had dreamed of, had once had to some extent, had almost had.

  There was shyness and distance between them, and a guilty sense of failure that could not be acknowledged.

  Evenings they sometimes went out with other couples. Women went to the Ladies together and there found out how they were really feeling, somewhat fed up, somehow unsatisfied, all to be laughed off, or calmed away with a pill.

  Increasingly Ada sat in her room reading or writing and he was in the front room playing his records or playing the piano.

  Ada tells Noemi, ‘The marriage ended with kindness all around, and a promise to stay friends, but we soon lost touch.’

  ‘That’s when I first went to San Francisco,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘and the next time I went back to Sydney I didn’t try to find him, as far as I remember. I really hope he didn’t go on being so lonely.’

  ‘So long ago!’ Ada and Noemi tell each other, coaxing from each other summaries of early life.

  ‘Even while we also say,’ says Ada, ‘how could that much time have passed.

  ‘It is long ago. For me, even longer,’ says Noemi, who is ten years older than Ada. At this time of life what do you think, is it much of a difference?

  Because they’d grown up in different places, that was always more a part of their differences.

  Noemi says, ‘After a while at the commune, which was meant to be my escape from bourgeois life, I was looking for a new escape.’

  Escape? wonders Ada, when did we stop always trying to escape, did we ever stop, but we don’t want to escape each other, though perhaps once in a while.

  Noemi says, ‘It did provide escape eventually.’

  Ada says, ‘My problem was I couldn’t imagine how escape would be possible in real life.’

  Noemi says, ‘We needed a template, an example, a paradigm. It wasn’t like it is now, now you can find out anything. Though it helps if you know what you’re looking for.’

  Ada says, ‘And after the commune you went to San Francisco.’

  ‘And passed you in the street one day,’ she says, this fancy having been created by them to gain the status of a foggy memory.

  Ada spent her married days reading every book in the city library. Even when they opened a branch in Kings Cross she liked to make her way into town, stopping for a while at the fountain in the park, its classical heroic figures holding a promise.

  That was another way to spend her time, walking for hours in the city. She walked all the way to the Gardens and the peninsula with the old tram depot, beyond that the ferry quays. She walked to parks by the Harbour.

  Ray took the train to North Sydney to his job at the ABC. He was a different person in the mornings.

  Ray was ambitious enough, he had to join the blokes for a drink, exchange remarks on their wives (the ways of women), go to dinners where only couples were invited, and everyone should be part of a couple, man and wife. Ada found that she had a social self: quiet, poised but kind of shy, but she had a talent for egging on an extrovert.

  Ray wanted, he thought he wanted, to belong to conformity’s world. He had been to a doctor who persuaded him – or, who knows, thought Ada at some later point, maybe Ray had persuaded the doctor – that there was only one kind of desire that was healthy and a doctor should help him to cultivate healthiness.

  Something had frightened Ada as well.

  That she could go on writing and sending her work into silence, into a black hole. That someone far away would publish a book you’d written and after a momentary small flurry (that interview) there would be nothing.

  That all she could ever do was only to repeat the part of her life where she was living alone in Kings Cross and writing something but next time it would not be the same, not be a fresh new thing and it could feel terrible, could feel stuck.

  As it always would until you created a supernatural sense of someone waiting to read what you wrote. Even if that is your own future self. How, where, could she find a sense, a vision, of that future self? Where
, how?

  Only in dreams that shivered into ineffable oblivion.

  Ada wanted a new life, and that’s what Ray gave her.

  Ada’s book had been published in America.

  And then nothing happened.

  They sent her four copies, with a cover that seemed strange and unsuitable.

  Ada didn’t know how book covers were chosen.

  But she was published! And now her life should change. She would be an author.

  There were no other copies she ever saw, not in the newsagent at the Cross, not in the bookshop in the city.

  After some time she wrote letters to the publisher and there was no reply.

  What happened now?

  ‘There was a newspaper that sent someone over,’ Ada eventually told Noemi. ‘It was someone who had no idea what I’d written, someone told someone told someone who knew someone on the afternoon paper, a tabloid with few pretensions to serious news. So this reporter came, who wrote for the Womens Pages, which was a thing then, I think women weren’t meant to read the rest of the paper, and the men didn’t read the Womens Pages. This reporter had no idea, came with some questions on a paper, including, I swear, “What’s the most important item in your glory box?”, which I somehow knew meant a trousseau. For years later I was thinking up smart replies I wish I’d thought of then. I felt like an idiot, and must have seemed like one; it showed me how easily you can act like what you’re meant to be. So out came this story with this headline, “New Australian girl pens Thrilling outer-space story for young and old”.’

  The boy reporter from her rooming house had left by then, got himself a ticket on a boat to England. Couldn’t blame him, but she’d been going to ask him about Womens Pages reporters.

  The interviewer asked her something about publishing in Australia. Ada had assumed all books naturally came from abroad. She had started to read about the lives of writers. They all took place on the other side of the world. She later thought, I’d heard of Australian writers but all I knew was they wrote about the wide brown land.