Michael Cisco: Outlining An Aesthetic Register

I've had an interesting relationship to the works of Michael Cisco. Originally I came across The Divinity Student on Amazon and thought it looked amazing--except that edition was out of print, and so I forgot about it. A few weeks later I found another reference to his work, checked out his website, and immediately bought every novel he'd written. This is a bad habit of mine (as my post concerning China Meiville probably conveys), but the results were much more positive than they often are. I spread my readings out over the space of a few months--completing The Divinity Student twice--and finally got around to the The Tyrant this week.

I can't help but be disappointed in the lack of criticism dedicated to Cisco--really, there isn't any, as most reviewers are so intimidated by the language they emphasize nothing but how different they are. I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, but I think they fail to identify even the most prominent aesthetic stratum on display--and when discussing Cisco, that means you haven't said anything at all. This isn't a conclusive essay in any sense--certainly, an informal one--but I hope to penetrate at least a bit within this territory.

Cisco is undoubtedly one of the foremost stylists within speculative fiction. His works feature horror overtones within a number fantastic contexts, leaning heavily towards the surreal. Based on the prominence of images in his work, and position within independent lit, I'd place him next to Zoran Zivkovic and Forrest Aguirre despite their dissimilarities (seriously... this has nothing to do with Leviathan--seriously), and perhaps make some yet more distant comparisons to M. John Harrison or Carlos Fuentes in Terra Nostra. Cisco seems to be extensively influenced be Burroughs (obviously I can't say for sure--anyway, this takes place within a framework of reapplication rather than imitation), particularly if he undertook a brief course in Faulknerian sentence structure....

Imaginative fiction, particularly the New Weird, is the literature of synthesis. Cisco embodies this more than any other author I've seen--and among them, he's probably the one I enjoy most. The Divinity Student and The Traitor are nearly masterpieces--his others noticeably less so, but I get the feeling he's yet to write his definitive piece. It seems like people only pay attention to The Divinity Student... hopefully at some point this will change, even if I'd agree in saying that, at this point, it's probably his best. (If they made a movie on it he could become the next Anthony Burgess....)

Cisco seems concerned primarily with phenomena beyond (perhaps beneath) the realm of articulation. Actions manifest as associations rather than definite psychological objects. Due to his punctuation schemata, the prose is like a sequence of iron bars, pulsing with electricity, featuring fairly consistent internal mechanics and a prominent sense of authorial disassociation, occasionally with a hint of a scientific tone. Possibly I'm taking my above theory too far, but this allows associations to be presented as they are experienced: indistinct within the greater perceptual unit.

Also, I'm going to try real quickly to dispel the notion of similarities between Cisco and Wolfe. I've read every novel by both (next to Delany, Wolfe is my favorite science fiction author, so I'm almost an authority on this). Although the two both feature a significant diversion from the conventions of speculative fiction, that's about as far as it goes.... The Divinity Student (a stoic male character) and the architecture of San Venificio recall The Book of the New Sun a little bit, but... not really, and the mechanics of their fiction are so disparate as to be nearly incompatible. Wolfe operates primarily upon a medium of omission, so that his novels are like majestic broken machines--conveying (as an intellectual construct, only after a greater sense of the pages has been obtained) the obscurity immediately apparent within the first page of any Cisco novel--and generally complex (note my abstract use of the term) in an entirely different manner.

On another note, as someone who never, ever reads horror, a number of the images in Cisco strike me as gaudy, even when their presentation is not... but the absence of a certain problem makes up for it entirely: Wolfe is a fairly serious right-winger (and it shows), whereas the undertones of nihilism, anarchism, and misanthropy that inform Cisco's work place him on the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Considering his chosen genre--in which these ideas are often decorative at best--its not surprising to find them here, and he does a decent job presenting them; but interestingly, they're featured in the protagonists.

Cisco's books almost present themselves as studies in isolation, portraying characters who are terminally cut off from society, their energy channeled into one or another occupations (excepting only The Golem, in which this becomes a journey): therefore, in a spiritual sense, his characters are all artists.... Not that you can blame him. Really, it's impossible to be an author producing admirable material (or really, an intellectual of any sort) without being a bit of a misanthrope--as well, we experience a similar sense of distance from the cities that populate these works.

Anyway, in conclusion, while his work isn't perfect (not that I pretend to be his perfect reader--like a said, I never read horror, and I'm only passably interested in darkness, be it visual, psychological, or metaphysical), Michael Cisco is undoubtedly one of the most interesting authors working in English right now. I am, of course, immediately biased towards anyone applying sophisticated styles to the fantastic--but you can't go wrong in checking him out, whether to expand your sense of language or to witness the extent imagination can be taken to.