I just finished reading A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. Since I’ve been cultivating a gestalt knowledge of the science fiction canon for nearly two decades, I was able to notice nods and reflections of past works. The book owes an obvious and huge debt to James Blish’s Cities in Flight, but there are also Tolkien references, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity nods and more.

The most surprising aspect of the book was its not-so-nuanced championing of free market capitalism. I’m used to science fiction that puts forth some sort of commentary on contemporary life or a specific philosophical or political position, but I’m also used to these aspects being just one or two of the story’s many supports. In A Deepness in the Sky the triumph of the free market is the story.

The mutliple POV story-telling conceit keeps the pace lively, and the well placed plot twists maintain engagement, but I think the story could have benefited greatly from significant editorial culling. It is a good choice for lovers of hard science fiction and thick volumes.

I finally had the chance to try out the Euclid Corridor today, riding the #6 to a Flash ActionScript class at the Cole Center for Continuing Education. When I started at the ISC just over a year ago the director emphasized his encouragement for us to take skill-building classes. If there was an award for most classes taken, I’d probably win it. I haven’t quite figured out how the whole Euclid Corridor thing works, but the bus drivers know it, and stepping off a bus right onto the bus platform was much nicer than stepping off a bus into a big puddle of snowmelt, and I only had to walk half a block to get to the Center.

First snowfalls and mornings are hand-in-glove. It was very quiet and dark waiting for the bus, then chattering brightness.

Now all the days and nights of journeying through the forest drew together and were behind Falk. He was not camping: he had come to a place. He need not think at all about the weather, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit stretching out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in company with another, could bathe in front of the fire in a wooden tub of hot water. He did not know which was the greatest pleasure, the warmth of that water washing dirt and weariness away or the warmth that washed his spirit here, the absurd elusive vivid talk of the old man, the miraculous complexity of human conversation after the long silence of the wilderness.

Ursula K. Le Guin - City of Illusions

Time for class.

The way home wasn’t nearly as fun. The #6 doesn’t run westward on Euclid just yet, and the 9X, with its status as an Express, doesn’t stop and runs relatively rarely on Chester, so I had to walk 30 blocks to Public Square, where I was just in time to catch the 23. On the plus side, during the walk I saw a roller-blading Santa Claus wielding a ski pole.

The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank was a fairly easy read and interesting to me from the standpoint of economic ethnography. I don’t know much about economics in an academic sense, but after reading this book and reflecting it is obvious that I use it on a daily basis. In retrospect this makes sense because economics is a method of codifying everyday behavior.

Although the volume is slim it gets repetitive fairly quickly. Everything seems to boil down to opportunity costs, which could very well be correct, but is certainly boring. The premise is based on a method Dr. Frank used in his classes where he would have his students come up with an interesting question and observation about everyday life and then explain it in economic terms. One question I was hoping for, but which wasn’t there is “Why do spammers continue to send out spam email when the emails no longer make any sense?” I could probably try to exercise the little knowledge I picked up from the book to answer this myself, but I’m feeling a bit lazy today.

The book also reminds me of the trivia books I’d read when I was little; The Quintessential Quiz Book, How Did They Do That?, Why Did They Do That?, et cetera. Although, as a point in Frank’s favor, it did manage to teach a bit of actual methodology in addition to the straight fact-laying. It is a good book for light reading, or toilet-sitting, many of the questions and answers are brief, so the book can be read in small doses.

I ordered The Road from the library a day before I found out it won the Pulitzer, because of a year-old review from an old copy of Stop Smiling that I picked up at Pitchfork. The Pulitzer notification, coming as it did from a thread about literary critics and their derision for genre fiction, stayed in my mind as I read the book. It is the first thing that I’ve read by Cormac McCarthy, and I picked it up because the Stop Smiling review indicated to me that it was science fiction written by a non-sci-fi author.

What is immediately evident is that McCarthy doesn’t care for traditional reading cues like quotation marks around dialogue and chapter breaks. I’m a big fan of experimental novels, but at times in The Road it is very difficult to figure out who is talking to whom. Similarly, no character has a proper name. In fact, I don’t think there is a proper noun in the entire book. So when the man runs into another man and they talk to each other or have a tussle it is pretty much impossible to figure out who is doing what. The writing itself is often superb, but it seems to stumble just as regularly, as when words like ensepulchraled and crozzled sit together in the same sentence and have lunch. The quality of the writing doesn’t enhance or uphold the plot either, which to me seems like a fairly large problem, since I read books for the stories, not the writing. What I mean is that McCarthy seems interested in writing interestingly for its own sake and using the story itself to manipulate the reader into a certain mindset as opposed to writing and developing a plot purely for the sake of storytelling.

It could be argued and I would agree with the assertion that all story-telling is a manipulation of the audience, but what I’m thinking is that McCarthy is more interested in evoking a specific emotional reaction from his audience than telling the story. It is a determination of vectors. The story is about a man and a boy in a post-apocalyptic world [just what destroyed the world is unclear, but from inference I gather that it was some sort of meteor impact] where everything is dead except for a few other humans, and life is hiding from the others and scavenging canned goods.

They boy and man are dependent upon each other, but as the book progresses it becomes evident that the boy is the one best suited and morally understanding enough to live in this new world. The man cannot let the past go. The boy has no memory of it. The basic plot actions are easily foreseen; you know they’re going to find a fall-out shelter and that this will be the high point of the narrative, you know that their belongings will be stolen, you know that at least one of them will die [most likely the man, due to various other clues] and that this will be the low point of the narrative.

In the end, I wasn’t that impressed. The writing was excellent about half the time, but the story never got me going. I’ve read more effective and better written apocalyptic literature, and stories with just as much despair in less than the 241 pages of The Road. The dust jacket said this would be McCarthy’s masterpiece, and if that’s the case, I’ll pass on the rest of his stuff.

During unending hours in the back of a conversion van and brief respites on land in Canada I read Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City. This book was recommended to me by Nate Scheible during a discussion outside of Parish Hall while waiting for a noise show to start and over a few Commodore Perry IPAs. He found out that I was a metal fan of old and recommended that I read it.

The book’s essence is how glam-metal [bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison and Cinderella] gave Chuck an entrance into the wide world outside of North Dakota. His point is, that no matter how derided glam-metal was, is and probably ever shall be, since it was an important part of the growth of a generation it shouldn’t be. Now, this wasn’t the kind of book I was hoping it would be. I hate glam-metal. To me there is nothing really metal about dudes with with flammable hair nancing about in spandex and singing about banging. That’s fine, but it’s not metal. I’m more of the Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Ozzy fan for first-gen metal and Pantera, Anthrax and others for second-gen. I hate nü-metal, [Korn, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit] and technical-metal noodlers like Yngwie Malmsteen and Mastodon don’t do much for me either.

So basically, like every other metal fan, I’m a huge jackass about what I like.

Chuck’s book is good, although he mentions fly-fishing for walleye, which I think, while not impossible, is utterly ineffective. ANYWAY, there are digressions, tangents, anecdotes and the sorely desired lists and name-drops of random bands to dig for, but mixed in with all of this is some excellently penetrating commentary on both metal itself and its place within the zeitgeist of the 80s and 90s. These are the best parts. The most interesting parts of the book came at the end for me; when he got away from the hair and Axl Rose and started talking about what qualifies a band as metal, what bands are carrying on the metal torch [still, for him, in terms of glam] and how grunge killed it off.

He’s good at putting things in context, giving depth to what appears to be shallowness and rubbing his theories against possible criticisms to see what holds and what tears. He does some straw-manning, but hey, he’s a journalist. The book is often hilarious, as when he lists the kind of women each band likes to fuck, and geekily earnest, as when he lists his favorite metal albums and how much you’d have to pay him to never listen to it again.

One area I think he missed out on was talking about Euro-metal and its continuing massive popularity over there. That’s probably a completely different book though. If you’re even a slight fan of metal, or a fan of 80s glam or somewhat analytical discussions about Tawny Kitaen humping a Corvette, this is the book for you.

This spring/summer seems to be turning into biography time so far. I’ve been picking up books at Visible Voice, and the Walker Evans biography was one of them. For the most part it is an interesting well-written and informative look at the personal life and motivations of my favorite photographer. Chronologically it gets a bit boring toward the end, mainly because Evans wasn’t doing much with his life but rest on his laurels. It succeeds admirably in defining Evans’ initial quest for direction and the important relationships that provided him with the necessary impetus to actually complete his work. Namely, James Agee. The fact that Evans is known mainly for the 18 months of work he did for the FSA is a bit telling about his entire career. I’m left with the distinct impression that no matter how much I admire his photography, I wouldn’t have enjoyed his company very much.

As I wait for Amazon to ship me the latest Tolkien release, The Children of Húrin, I find myself disagreeing with several reviews I’ve read, in terms of placing this work in context with his other stuff. The lede in the Washington Post review:

If anyone still labors under the delusion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of twee fantasies for children, this novel should set them straight.

From the Salon review:

If you’re looking for the accessibility, lyrical sweep and above all the optimism of “Lord of the Rings,” well, you’d better go back and read it again.

This idea that Tolkien’s works are mainly positive, light-hearted adventures is so superficial that it drives an amateur Tolkien scholar like me up the wall. If you judge Middle-earth by the aberrant text of The Hobbit [a tale written for his children; intentionally different from the actual Middle-earth that was first put to scraps of paper during the First World War] then I can see where you’d get that idea. The film treatment of LotR was reworked so extensively because the book was too bleak for mass appeal as a film.

Galadriel speaks Tolkien’s overarching worldview when she says

Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.

nearly verbatim from his own words on his faith. More on that here.

Tolkien’s works are thoroughly Modernist in their tone and focus. This is somewhat wry since much of the tone is taken from the most ancient Northern tales. I think that the reviewers are right in pointing out that The Children of Húrin is a bleak tale, but have made a misstep in equating it as exceptional rather than standard. Nits picked.

US Guys is a book by journalist Charlie LeDuff; a series of vignettes that are marketed as an examination of manhood and masculinity in American culture. It starts off well enough, the writing is crisp and the observations are fresh and interesting, but by the end Charlie seems to have run out of observations about masculinity and simply recounts his experiences, it ceases to be journalism and becomes more of a memoir. I was expecting something a bit meatier, and less filled with self-aggrandization. Part of LeDuff’s modus operandi is this sort of self-revelatory no-holds-barred truthfulness, but at times the book becomes more about him than the folks he’s there to learn from.

In some ways this is good, as LeDuff becomes a prominent example of the very thing he sets out to chart, but the perspective is a bit lacking. It is ethnography without conclusions, and therefore, ultimately just so much popcorn. Unfortunate. It is a good read, but not much more.

I’ve got a couple of cheap pulp novels that have to do with my name. The first is Donald Barr Chidsey’s Captain Adam:

The history of an audacious young seaman from the American colonies who duelled and prayed and sinned his way to magnificent adventure on the lawless seas of the early 18th century!

The cover [not this one, but like it] has a tall skinny dude with a sword on it and a hot redhead who is chained to the deck of a sailing ship. I picked that one up from the [now closed] Antiques and Curios store that was just down the street from me.

Another one, picked up from Mac’s Backs, is John Boyd’s Barnard’s Planet, which happens to be a really really really shitty science fiction novel. The only good parts are quotes from better writers. I’ll probably try reading Captain Adam after I finish this one.

One of these days I’ll find a cheesy book with Harvey in the title worth completing the collection.

James Agee has long been one of my favorite writers. Recently I received a book of his film criticism from the library. It is published by one of my favorite publishers: The Library of America. Typically I’m not a fan of any particular type of journalism or journalist, but Agee doesn’t really fit a type; his earnestness, passion and frankness make his bell-like prose all the more interesting.

I’m currently really enjoying reading his old reviews from The Nation in the 1940s. A fair number of the films I’ve seen; some I’ve never even heard of, but want to track down now. He thought Casablanca was maudlin. His writing is also a very accessible cultural snapshot of the US during WWII. His poetry isn’t the best, but sometimes it can be insidious. From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

(To Walker Evans.

Against time and the damages of the brain
Sharpen and calibrate. Not yet in full,
Yet in some arbitrated part
Order the façade of the listless summer.

Spies, moving delicately among the enemy,
The younger sons, the fools,
Set somewhat aside the dialects and the stained skins of feigned
madness,
Ambiguously signal, baffle, the eluded sentinel.

Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,
Bring your blind father, and describe a little;
Behold him, part wakened, fallen among field flowers shallow
But undisclosed, withdraw.

Not yet that naked hour when armed,
Disguise flung flat, squarely we challenge the fiend.
Still, comrade, the running of beasts and the ruining of heaven
Still captive the old wild king.

He’s also the man who wrote the motto I try to live by, again from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

What should I read this summer?

Earlier this year I finally finished a book list from the Science Fiction Book Club, and since then I’ve been searching for another list to cut my teeth on. I’ve finally settled on one. I’m going to watch every movie issued on DVD by The Criterion Collection. To easily keep track of this, I’ve made a page listing the current spines and the dates I’ve reviewed the films. Three or four are already listed. I’m actually already ten percent done, as I’ve seen a lot of the Japanese films, noir and some of the French New Wave stuff on the list [30 all told]. I figure if I watch one movie a week, I’ll finish the list sometime in the next six years.

I’m also considering that I might start to read all of the literary collections provided by the Library of America, which is a non-profit preservation publishing company. I’ve looked over their catalog and it seems to be a quite varied selection of American literature, much of which is unfamiliar to me. If I start working on that list and have a goal, I’ll be much more likely to buckle down and read some Herman Melville or William Faulkner. I believe they only have about 155 spines in their current catalog, so I think I should be able to go through that in a similar amount of time as the Criterion list. I must be crazy.

This entry brought to you without hyphens and a distinct shortage of commas.

Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe is a book by Gene Wolfe in a continuing series of books by Gene Wolfe that I have been reading a lot of Gene Wolfe lately, haven’t I? I’m now reading a collection of short stories by Gene Wolfe called The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.

Free Live Free takes place in what was at the time of publication contemporary Chicago. Four down on their luck soldiers of fortune take up an advertisement on its offer, free living space. The soldiers of fortune include an extremely short and nearsighted unlicensed detective, a door to door joke salesman, a fat prostitute and Madame Serpentina. This book proceeds as a comedy of errors until the last ten pages or so when in typical Gene Wolfe fashion all the tumblers finally fall into place and a little door opens shedding bright light all over the place and making you squint your eyes a little bit because the light is so bright it hurts a little since you’ve been wandering around in the dark for so long that you forgot you were in the dark.

Ben Free’s house is condemned and the four tenants are enlisted to help defend it. They do a pretty good job for a couple of hours, but end up boot to backside and homeless. They sneak their way into a hotel and decide that the now disapparated Ben Free had dropped enough hints to indicate that he had some sort of treasure hidden in the house. The tenants bicker and bitch and eventually decide to go in together find the treasure and split it.

At this point the story intentionally frays into its component parts and you wonder what the hell happened to the plot. At one point all the threads come back together in an illusion of cohesion. Hilariously, all of the main characters and various supporting characters end up committed to Belmont Asylum when all they tried to do was go visit someone there. That part goes on for a while, but is so tongue in cheek and absurd that it doesn’t get old. Each person they run in to psychoanalyzes them and finds them irreparably insane even though they aren’t. Needless to say they end up taking over the asylum and then escape. Everything frays apart again and they each pursue their own particular heart’s desire. They get them, and find out that their heart’s are lacking.

I won’t spoil the ending.

Link of the day: For all my vegetarian friends and family: Vegetarian Beer List.

There Are Doors is Gene Wolfe’s version of the ancient Indo-European legend of the Goddess/Queen of the Wood and the Horned King. Of all the various versions I’ve read of this story, Wolfe’s definitely has the most interesting and nuanced portrayal of the these figures. In this iteration the relationship between The Wood and The World is described in several different ways, as reflection, frequency, and perhaps most strongly as Sea and Land. Mr. Green [Horned King] is in search of Lara/Lora/Marcella/Tina [The Goddess] through both worlds. Once a person from The Wood has met a person from The World, doors take on a special significance and act as portals between the two areas. I’m used to reading about the Goddess as a cold-hearted and puissant woman who is mourning the loss of her lover, usually without explaining why is this way. Wolfe adds substance to her distant nature by making her the only immortal in either world, and by adding a twist that every man from The Wood who has sex dies immediately after, like drones in a bee colony. When the Queen seeks love she has to go to The World, but also has to leave her lover afterward. So her coldness is a way for her to protect herself from the pain, As she takes other lovers, each of the previous ones becomes a bit sardonically a cuckolded version of the Horned King. We find that she does indeed love all of her Kings, and ones that are persistent enough to pursue her and catch her are allowed to serve her. The service isn’t subservience, but an expression of love.

Gene Wolfe is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. His books move slowly and appear to jump around until suddenly the pieces fall into place and run smoothly and rapidly to a conclusion. His greatest strength seems to be his ability to lace a story with enough ambiguity that uncertainty never really leaves you until the last page, if then. Mr. Green is in and out of mental hospitals throughout the novel, so we’re not sure if the world through his eyes is true or not. The type of storytelling isn’t like Peace, but the doubt is ever present. I’m starting to round up anything I can find by him.

Peace by Gene Wolfe is a perverse fictional fictional memoir written from the point of view of a maybe senile maybe stroke victim named Alden Dennis Weer. Definitely an untrustworthy narrator. This book is really fucking disturbing. At no point are you sure where or when the actual narrator exists. Since it is a memoir, it is very possible that the entire book takes place during the aforementioned stroke as a sort of extended life-flashing-before-the-eyes montage. But there are hints that the memoir even continues after the death of the narrator. Basically the only things approximating substance that we ever get are hints. There are hints that Mr. Weer is a seriously evil man, a sociopathic mass-murderer, and more hints of rape and child molestation [Mr. Weer being the one molested, although he does pork a 16 year old who offers herself as a sort of bribe to him] as well. The upshot of the novel is that you really don’t ever know what the fuck is going on, apart from the fact that you know something is going on that Mr. Weer doesn’t want to talk about.

Apart from that the book is also filled with nostalgia and regret; taking place in the early 20th Centurty Midwest and going from kerosene to television. A regret for the loss of innocence that is likely mirrored in Weer’s own disturbing life. There are constant references to death, isolation, abnormality. It reads like a book an outsider artist might write, which is testament to the skill of Mr. Wolfe, since Weer who is writing the book is an outsider in his own hometown. It’s no wonder that this book is apparently one of Neil Gaiman’s favorites. I definitely recommend reading it. I’d appreciate having someone to talk to about it.

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is, on the surface, a novel about a crisis of faith when a priest is confronted with a perfectly moral and ethical alien society that has no sense of faith, or doubt or even guile. But James Blish is one of the most intelligent science fiction authors I’ve ever read, so the novel is also much more than that. Blish was an atheist for most of his writing career, or as Greg Bear mentions in the introduction to the version I read, an “apparent agnostic”. Since he has written a Hugo-winning masterwork of religious science fiction, I’m leaning toward the agnosticism angle myself.

I’ve had little to no contact with the Society of Jesus, despite my lifetime immersed in Roman Catholicism. But from all I’ve heard and read, the Jesuits seem like my kind of Catholics, not afraid to wrestle with thorny problems of faith. Blish’s Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is not exception in A Case of Conscience. The book opens with the padre working his way through a labyrinthine moral dilemma in Finnegan’s Wake, and we then find out he’s doing this in his spare time, since he is actually a xenobiologist on Lithia, an alien world 50 light years from Earth. So Fr. Ramon is a man who has no trouble reconciling science and faith, since he places faith as a higher order of magnitude in his world. The crisis of faith comes to him subtly. His role on this planet is to determine its viability for human colonization. The padre doesn’t do this through a purely scientific criterion. First and foremost he feels that it is necessary to determine the sentient alien species state of grace. They are called Snakes and their society has no deviants, no taboos, no restrictions of any kind, and runs like a precision instrument. As I mentioned before, their complete lack of philosophical and moral thoughts creeps Fr. Ramon out. When he finds out how the Lithians reproduce and raise their young, he falls close to the heresy of Manicheaism which is something along the lines of believing that Satan has creative power; or more broadly, in a dualistic universe. In my understanding, this is considered heresy because Satan is defined by absence and opposition, he refuses to be anything that God is, and therefore cannot be creative, he can only spin illusion, or somesuch. Needless to say, it is explained sufficiently in the book.

He comes back to Earth with a gift from the Lithians, one of their children. As Egtverchi grows up he becomes quite frightening, reminiscent of Ivan Karamazov, but even more nihilistic and dangerous. I think Blish intended this marooned being to be as close to Satan incarnate as he could get. The reader gets hit with a big old guilt-hammer here since we know that the only reason Egtvertchi thinks in the way he does, is because of the mistakes his caretakers made in raising him. I guess that makes his claims of ultimate free agency all the more frightening. Once a genetically predisposed rational materialist gets a bit of philosophy, look out! Not even the existentialists took their idea of freedom in such a selfish light.

I read this book in an evening, it is about 250 pages, and very interesting. Blish is a lot like C.S. Lewis, I think. A very intelligent man working his way through his own crisis of faith, his own case of conscience, for personal reasons. I get the sense that Blish was wrestling with these issues merely because they are always going to be there to be wrestled with and since he isn’t bound to either of the dual sides he picks, he can make each of them equally potent. He’d've made a good Jesuit.

A tangentially related link: a few thousand science fiction magazine covers.
If you’d like more science as your religion instead of religion as your science, I recommend James Blish’s Cities in Flight

When I was nine years old, way back in 1990, Robert Jordan published a fairly large and interesting fantasy novel called The Eye of the World. It was one of a new breed of fantasy story, the mega-giganto-epic, tales that are planned from the outset to exceed the typical trilogy set-up by volumes and volumes. Terry Goodkind and George R. R. Martin join Robert Jordan as the top three super-enormo-epic writers [and probably J.K. Rowling now that I think of it...]. Terry and Robert have another thing in common, they both betrayed their stories in favor of a larger bank account. They’ve both turned their worlds into serial killers, into Stories From The Black Lagoon, things that never seem to end. Each book is around 700 pages. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series was initially slated as an 8 volume tale, but after volume 4 popped out, it was obvious he was getting serious pressure to drag out the tale as long as possible. Now it is set for a twelve volume series. After reading volume 11, I think number 12 is going to be unabridged OED in size, unless, of course, he extends it again.

Jordan’s writing style [and now that I'm quite grown up, I realize he couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. Tell a good story, yes. Write, hell no. He's a physicist.] is very detail oriented and descriptive. It got way overblown when volume five came out and instead of skimming over descriptions and travel sequences we started getting details about what each and every character, no matter how minor, looked like, wore, you name it. The plot basically dragged to a standstill and sprouted subplots like a sow dropping piglets. And now he’s stuck like Peter Jackson and the third LotR movie, with tons of ground to cover and not much time to do it. Knife of Dreams starts to get back to the action, but it is obvious that turning to the tale back on course is taking a lot of torque. Ponderous is still the word. I think the end might be in sight though. I’ll be glad, that is for sure. I’m tired of being on this road for 15 years. I’ve really turned away from fantasy novels because of the tendency to bloviate, people imitating Goodkind and Jordan. There isn’t much good fantasy that gets the recognitition that it deserves. Instead the focus is on creating a franchise. Thankfully John Crowley and Patricia McKillip stick to one book stories and write robustly.

This is a reminder to note the triple stack-flare and sulfur stench emanating from the steel mill on my pollution form once I get home. The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner is speculative environmental disaster fiction, first published in 1972. It takes place in the near future, at the turn of the century, our contemporary; so it is a bit dated, but also eerily prescient in some respects. Brunner’s strength lies not in the technology and material change of his futures but in his understanding of broad spectrum social interaction [See my review of Stand on Zanzibar]. Context is important when reading this book. In 1972 the EPA was barely two years old, no one had any idea about HIV/AIDS, DDT, and defoliants, napalm and even thalidomide had people pretty leery of chemical impacts on the environment. But no one expected digital technology or hyperinflation or peak oil.

Brunner takes the current fears of his time and extrapolates them into future impacts. Environmental sci-fi doesn’t scratch my belly like other stuff, for the most part it never seems done too well [Nevil Shute's On the Beach is strong because of the characters, not the jet-stream borne radiation and Gregory Benford's Timescape is strong because of its firm footing in physics, not the impromptu behavior of biological systems]. The Sheep Look Up does a better job than most, with a constant barrage of impacts that are in your face, or quite subtle. In your face: filtermasks, which just about everyone has to wear to filter out the pollution in the rank air. The Mekong Desert. The abiotic Great Lakes. The dead Med. Subtle: the Japanese businessman who spreads enteritis pandemically throughout the US when he comes for a visit. You only figure that out after you realize the order of the cities that were hit is the same as the itinerary of the businessman. [SARS did this and avian flu could easily do it as well.] The contaminated Colorado water that ends up driving thousands of Africans and Hondurans batshit insane. Most bacteria and viruses and insects have undergone rapid evolutionary selection due to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and pesticides and now “shrug off anything but a direct blow with a brick.” Can you say superbugs? The pesticide thing was probably well known by 1972, since the mosquito and malaria populations in Panama went through a similar drastic selection process while the canal was built.

The social side of things seems a bit prescient too. Terrorists attack the United States, sensationalism du jour is the entertainment and media access to government information is heavily restricted. An American city is a disaster zone because of polluted water. Scapegoats and whipping boys abound. The president has a dumb nickname, “Prexy”, and is only available for war-mongering “Why Do You Hate America?” sound-bites when he is not on vacation. Seriously. I can’t make this shit up. The book is too heavy-handedly political, but the writing is good and the build-up of panic is good, even if the moral seems exactly the same as Stand on Zanzibar.

Link of the day: The Legendary Tube Bar Recording.

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora is right up there with Dangerous Visions in terms of quality and perspicacity in science fiction anthologies. I could go spouting off on how wonderful it is to see black writers growing in a field normally dominated by white guys, but all the is addressed in the book, especially in Samuel R. Delany’s essay “Racism and Science Fiction” at the end, which is one of the most cogent and thoughtful essays on racism that I’ve ever read. [excerpts at the bottom]

Instead I’m going to briefly delve into the quality of the stories themselves, as works of craft, and then give some thoughts on my own reactions to some of them. Briefly, the quality of the stories is very high. The first half dozen or so required me to put some time aside after reading them for mastication and digestion. They are potent tales. W.E.B. du Bois, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Samuel R. Delany are just a few of the slew of folks who have tales in this book. I now have a bunch of new authors to check out as well, especially Nalo Hopkinson. For me, the quality slowly tapered off after the first few headchewers, again much like DV. Not to say that any of the stories were bad [none of them are], but amidst the masterpieces the others don’t shine as brightly.

Since I’m a cracker from downcountry Indiana and attended a private Catholic college whose percentage of black students suspiciously matches up with the percentage of non-Catholics on campus and the percentage of non-white athletes, I don’t have a whole lot of experience when it comes to diversity. Hell, I don’t think I even met a Jew until I was in my twenties. The closest thing I knew to a minority growing up was the old country Italian grandmother down the street. Basically, I’m saying that what I’m about to say is most likely going to be somewhat ignorant.

It seemed like many of the stories could be easily interpreted as fulfilling black stereotypes. For instance, probably a good half of the stories have music and rhythm as central themes and tropes. Thankfully they are often used to highlight other concerns, avoiding a truly shallow and unproductive interpretation that black folks can dance and sing while white folks have rhythm like a fat man’s heartbeat [although Evie Shockley's "separation anxiety" doesn't do so well at that]. Similarly, there are constant references throughout of slavery and the slave trade, often with anger still seething under the surface. This is something I can’t understand at all, and I’ve tried. My initial reaction to the resentful mentions of slavery was “Man, that was over 150 years ago, you should be over it by now.” Unfair to say the least, since I can have no idea how long it takes to heal the ethnic trauma of hundreds of years of slavery. I also don’t have any personal experience with contemporary race relations from the black side of the equation. What I’m deploring here is my ignorance and also my inability to effectively find sources to alleviate that ignorance. I learn best through empathy, but how can a privileged white boy empathize with blackness?

I guess I had the expectation that black science fiction writers would be more likely to avoid what I perceive as a heavy-handed use of America’s less than savory past. I think I expected to engage in examples of blackness that wasn’t defined by disenfranchisement and ostracization. Instead I felt that these writers don’t have much hope that things will get better for them and theirs. For us. But then, maybe I was expecting black writers to write like white writers. I don’t really know. Dark Matter is the perfect name for this anthology on a whole bunch of levels [darkness of content, darkness of outlook, darkness of the authors, not to mention the main metaphor of the anthology; that black influence is the dark matter of our society] and it is definitely something I want to add to my sci-fi book collection.

These are some of my immediate reactions, tempered a bit by subsequent thought. Obviously I’ve not been able to untangle the skein of my societal preconceptions. I’ve known I’m never really going to do that on any topic, which is why I try to ignore the subconscious murmurings of sexism and racism that bubble up from time to time and deal with each person as a person and not some specific thing in a pigeonhole. Everybody seems to live much happier that way.

Excerpt from Racism and Science Fiction by Samuel R. Delany [via]

Racism for me has always appeared to be first and foremost a system, largely supported by material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions. Thus, though racism is always made manifest through individuals’ decisions, actions, words, and feeings, when we have the luxury of looking at it with the longer view (and we don’t, always), usually I don’t see much point in blaming people personally, black or white, for their feelings or even for their specific actions — as long as they remain this side of the criminal. These are not what stabilize the system. These are not what promote and reproduce the system. These are not the points where the most lasting changes can be introduced to alter the system.

[...]I don’t think you can have racism as a positive sytem until you have that socioeconomic support suggested by that (rather arbitrary [placement of walls]) twenty percent/eighty percent proportion. But what racism as a system does is isolate and segregate the people of one race, or group, or ethnos from another. As a system it can be fueled by chance as much as by hostility or by the best of intentions. (”I thought they would be more comfortable together, I thought they would want to be with each other. . .”) And certainly one of its strongest manifestations is as a socio-visual system in which people become used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so—because people are used to it—being uncomfortable whenever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever proportion, with whites.

[...] As such, [the system] is fueled as much by chance as by hostile intentions and equally by the best intentions as well. It is whatever systematically acclimates people, of all colors, to become comfortable with the isolation and segregation of the races, on a visual, social, or economic level—which in turn supports and is supported socioeconomic discrimination. Because it is a system, however, I believe personal guilt will never replace a bit of well founded systems analysis.

Links to other stuff on DM:ACoSFftAD:

SciFi.com- Makes the DV comparison right off the bat too!
The AALBC has an excerpt of W.E.B. du Bois’s “The Comet” and a Table of Contents.

As was recommended to me, I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. And indeed it was a good book. Folks seem to like calling Coetzee’s writing “sparse;” and I guess you could say that. I tend to think that writers who are wordy don’t really know what they are trying to say. What comes through with Coetzee is that he has a keen and deft mind. Anyway the book
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The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writing by Richard Brautigan came in the mail yesterday. This is a collection of Brautigan’s writing from when he was young [21 or so] and unpublished. It sat in a safe deposit box for years until Edna Webster, the mother of his first girlfriend, contacted a publisher.
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The Unreasoning Mask by Philip José Farmer is yet another first edition hardcover I picked up for 50 cents. I’d been impressed with his book To Your Scattered Bodies Go, so when I stumbled across something else by him, and for such a good price, I picked it up. It was alright. I think Mr. Farmer does a much better job with characterization instead of talespinning. Spoilers past the jump.
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A few months back I picked up a first edition hardcover of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik for 50 cents. I finally read it, yesterday. It is typical, full of mind-bending Dickisms, so worth a read. Spoilers past the hoo-ha.
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By recommendation I read Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. It is a novel about the history of philosophy, written in such a way the the concepts from the pre-Socratics through Kant and up to Sartre could be grasped by a juvenile. Spoilers past the jump.
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Polish science fiction was new to me. Stanisław Lem is great. His Cyberiad is appropriately subtitled Fables for a Cybernetic Age and concerns itself with two wily constructors, Trurl and Klapaucius, who are just stupid enough to get into all kinds of scrapes, and just smart enough to get the best of everyone in the end.
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The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002

I finally managed to track down every book on the above list, many are/were unfortunately out of print. But I did it. I’ve read them all. Mini-Reviews of all 50 are inside.
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I just finished The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson [who is, incidentally, from Cleveland]. It is comprised of three books: Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War and The Power that Preserves. With this series I have finally, after three years, finished the Science Fiction Book Club list: The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002 which I will provide a large review of sometime this week. First a review of Thomas Covenant.
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All My Sins Remembered is the second book I’ve read by Joe Haldeman. The first, The Forever War, was a really good book about the social and psychological effects of extended space travel when it screws with subjective versus objective time. All My Sins Remembered is similar but different.
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The Book of the New Sun is a tetralogy composed of The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of The Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch. It is sort of a blend of both fantasy and science fiction in terms of genre, but with chapter titles like “Eschatology and Genesis” it is also much more than that.
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I’ve read everything Cordwainer Smith ever published now. That is somewhat disappointing because I like him and his tenacious stories quite a bit. Norstrilia is one of the classic science fiction books I bought for 10 cents apiece while antique shopping last week.
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I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick and while this novel is supposedly his breakthrough work, The Man in the High Castle is my least favorite of his works. The basic premise is that the United States of America and Britain lost World War II and now the USA is split between Imperial Japan and the Third Reich.
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I honestly don’t know why this book was in the Top 50 Science Fiction books list. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison is a collection of short stories that wrestle with gods and worshippers, both new and old, and from different angles.
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Wilmar Shiras’s Children of the Atom is a hard book to come by. It had been out of print for quite some time until relatively recently. I now only have four books left to read on this list. Thankfully, I can find them all in the Cleveland library system.
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I’m currently reading John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. I managed to get my hands on a first edition in fair condition. Paper wasn’t acid-free in those days, so the paper is getting a little soft, but it is still very readable. First off it reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.
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A few weeks ago I finished reading The Rediscovery of Man, a collection of short stories by Cordwainer Smith. His real name is Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger and he was the godson of Sun Yat Sen, a professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins, spoke several languages, wrote the seminal work Psychological Warfare and was a spy [more here].
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I finished Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson this morning because I woke up at 5am, for no reason, for the third consecutive day. It is a “novel in verse” and a blending of Greek myth and contemporary life.
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What a curious book. This guy is layered a bit like an onion and there really isn’t any reason to trust anyone who claims anything in the entire book. The humor is droll, very Scotch, and the type that makes you want to smack the people upside the head for being goofballs. It was an enjoyable, somewhat ribald read that is reminiscent of a Jerry Springer Show, with a bit more class.
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I’m almost finished with all of the books I received for Christmas. I currently have around 75 pages left to read in Alisdair Gray’s Poor Things and then I have to read Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and I will be without reading material once again. Here is what I read while my site was wigged out:
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I finished reading my first Christmas book today. The Changeling Sea by Patricia McKillip. Despite the fact that she writes fantasy aimed at a mainly female audience she remains one of my favorite fantasy authors.
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I am still 6 feet, one and one half inches tall, I am 167 pounds, my heartbeat is 71 bpm and my blood pressure is 133/81. I also voted today and am disappointed that I did not receive a sticker.
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I’ve been running low on things to read lately. Most of the science fiction and especially the fantasy stuff looks like completely shallow and unoriginal tripe. And while there are plenty of other things to read besides science fiction and fantasy, I don’t really know where to start.
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Over the weekend I had a conversation with B rd over at edlundart about time and since then I’ve coincidentally read several short stories dealing with time travel by Michael Swanwick.
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I finished reading Ivanhoe the other day. It was good, surprisingly so. I ended up liking the main villain more than any other character.
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I went to Half Price Books on Friday and managed to not buy the whole store. Instead I bought three illustrated books of fables and folktales. All brand new and all rather cheap.
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“There are… two concepts of the artist. The one gives all to his work, in a very real way; if he does not produce volumes, at least he goes through many, many drafts. He neglects his life, and his life totters and sways and often plummets into chaos. It is presumptuous of us to judge him unhappy: or, when he is obviously unhappy, to judge the source of it.
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…if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. -Economy

I read two books in two days. Yes, I’ve already finished the books I picked up Sunday at the library. Besides both having the word ‘heaven’ in the title and both using the word ‘milquetoast’ in the exposition, they are very different.
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I’m on rileydog today!

I’m almost done reading Louis Aragon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. Apparently, this is also a parody of a story written by Fenelon in 1699. I’ve had previous experience with Dadaist films and visual art, but not literature. This experience has been appropriately strange. Aragon warps everything for his own pleasure. Greco-Roman is wrestled into something resembling farce after a night of hallucinogenic drug use. [not that i know anything about that, mind]. Minerva is Mentor, the guide or something or Telemachus. A foul ball, Mentor/Minerva’s incessant proselytizing is an endless source of amusement - while at the same time containing the meat of the book. sweetmeat i suppose. i would think her a lesbian if she didn’t bang Calypso in quite such a masculine way. Telemachus and nymph Eucharis do the nasty a few times as well, as for Telemachus, that saucy Greek, i’m not sure his heart is in it. When they see an onerous play called “The Adventures of Telemachus” it takes nothing more to convince me that Aragon is mocking Fenelon.
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Minutes ago I finished reading Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is, undoubtedly, one of the best science fiction novels I have ever perused. It makes no bones about its status as allegory [which I, like Tolkien, have cordially disliked for some time]. But it does not strike me as an allegory about humanity as much as it is for humanity. The story is about universal potential. It also works as a good accompaniment to the film.

Sir Arthur deserves his knighthood for Contributions to Literature from this book alone. The writing is superb, concise, and poignant. He is able to keep a theme running for over three million years by the use of a simple symbol and a remarkable grasp on basic human impulses. Perhaps hardest to fully appreciate is Clarke’s intimation that an extrasolar entity is responsible for the the success of humanity. Although it could very well seem insulting to standard man-ape that we are merely an experiment, Clarke somehow manages to convince the reader to be proud that we are an experiment - mostly because we are a successful one.

This is definitely a book I plan on purchasing at the next available opportunity.

I’ve been wending my way through Fritz Leiber’s refreshing short story fantasy lately. I consider myself somewhat of a connosieur of otherworldly literature, and Fritz, I must say, is not a stale author. Much fantasy is either bad Tolkien imitation or based on an RPG of some sort. Needless to say, I’d rather read Tolkien and the other Inklings than bad imitation, and I’d rather play an RPG than read about one.

But I digress.

Fritz started writing about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser way back in the forties, contemporary to Tolkien, in a magazine called Fantastic. Pulp fiction back then was the lowest of the low, and even though Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler made do, short story writers for mags didn’t. Thus, his ideas were established in a completely different medium from Tolkien that he did not succumb to toothy mimicry [bad Tolkien bites]. That is not to say that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are toothless. These stories are swashbuckling, and if you can see in the swordsmanship and other qualities of this duo, the seeds of D&D then you might not be all wrong.
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This is the summer of sci-fi for me. Last year was the beat generation, and distopias. Philip K. Dick could somehow qualify in each of those categories. What I find most interesting however, is the ease with which his stories are converted into films. Blade Runner is based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Total Recall is based on the short story ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale;’ Minority Report and Imposter are based on short stories of the same titles; and Screamers is based on his short story ‘Second Variety.’ All of which I have now read.

It has been said that the difficulty in converting a story to a screenplay and then a movie lies in the inevitable loss of detail and nuance that is present in the written form. The reason it seems that Dick is so easily converted to film, is not because his work is shallow, far from it, but the fact that he provides implications for his readers to ponder. The open-ended themes point to a feeling in Dick’s writings that the stories are not bookended, what he writes about is something that is always continuing. This allows a great deal of manipulation to be present in the conversion from written to visual, while keeping Dick a presence. I’m glad I’ve read him, it has given me a few insights into both writing and film. hoo-eee!

I’ve been burning my way through the Top 50 Science Fiction books of the last 50 years. I’ve recently read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Williams Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Currently I am reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I am 28% finished with the list.

Last evening I finished Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It was a fabulous book.

After finishing the last page, closing the book, and sitting up straight, I was overcome with awe. Truly, this book was like no other science fiction I had ever read. Was the ending positive or negative? Bittersweet perhaps? But I get ahead of myself.

Once upon a time, at the beginnings of the Cold War, man was poised to thrust himself with reckless abandon into the cold embrace of outer space. Before he could do this however, earth was visited by what man came to call the Overlords.
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The Summer Reading List currently contains:

1. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
2. Ulysses - James Joyce
3. The Hawkline Monster - Richard Brautigan
4. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
5. His Dark Materials Trilogy - Philip Pullman
6. Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
7. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
8. Something by Kafka

I’m always taking suggestions as well, especially poetry.

Tomorrow I get my St. Joe County Library Card.

I finished The Bell Jar last night. I can’t really say that it blew me away. The obvious autobiographical references to Plath’s own life were rather…obvious, and the depiction of mental decay and rebirth didn’t do much for me either. Granted, since the narrator is the crazy one, the narrative is going to be colored by and twisted by hestitancy and outright refusal to tell us everything. For instance, Esther hates Buddy Willard. But if you think about the times you actually meet Buddy he’s not that bad of a guy. I didn’t like the asylum bits either. they seemed clich , perhaps this is because of my distance from when people still got shock treatments. of course they are horrible. also, since it is set in the ber-restrictive and conservative post-war years, the McCarthyite era, the proper things to do etc. that Esther has problems with just bored me. things have changed, but The Bell Jar hasn’t. it is one of those works that is radical for its time but seems stuffy and whiny to us young’uns.

i think i don’t like it because it is too attached to the time it was written. now it seems a period piece, and the ’50s are kitschy that anything about them doesn’t interest me much.

I don’t listen to them anymore: they annoy me. They’re going to sleep together. They know it. Each one knows that the other knows it. But since they are young, chaste and decent, since each one wants to keep his self- respect and that of the other, since love is a great poetic thing which you must not frighten away, several times a week they go to dances and restaurants, offering the spectacle of their ritual, mechanical dances….

After all, you have to kill time. They are young and well built, they have enough to last them another thirty years. So they’re in no hurry, they delay and they are not wrong. Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence. Still … is it absolutely necessary to lie? (p. 111 of Nausea)

that about covers it.

upon rereading Nausea i am interested in the existentialist take on regret. Roquentin seems less alienated to me than he did the last time i visited him, instead he seems more concerned with what used to be and what has changed. he does not accept this change to Nausea and mourns for his past. is this Sartre’s example of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of infinite resignation?’ and why is the extreme awareness of being-in-itself so disgusting? why is this knowledge of difference nauseous instead of euphoric? it doesn’t sicken me…

“I must not put strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something.” - Antoine Roquentin (p. 1 of Nausea)

Robert Jordan’s newest Crossroads of Twilight will be released on the seventh. and i must say that i am ready. since i started his Wheel of Time series in 1994 and it offers very few signs of impending closure, i have become slightly impatient and perturbed and even at times apathetic regarding the series. it has taken so long for him to write it that i have outgrown my teenage nerd interest in the series. that doesn’t mean however, that i won’t finish it. i’ve invested enough time and cash into purchasing and reading the books that i must finish what i have begun. i just wish Robert Jordan could do the same. the first four books in the series were very engaging but he has sputtered ever since, i think, because he is trying to stretch the story into a few more books to make a few more bucks. i’m expecting to be disappointed. hopefully i’ll be wrong.

Book Review: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

i’m not one who has much knowledge of literary trends in novel-writing but House of Leaves strikes me as a book that could very well be the great work of postmodern literature. which means everything and nothing. as an experimental novel it is a remarkably well constructed thing. i had a bit of trouble getting in to it, but the book teaches you how to read it as it goes along. at my last count there are three and a half stories all revolving encased within each other. starting from the core we have The Navidson Record, a non-fiction film and documentary in the true meaning of the word, of the Navidson’s house on Ash Tree Lane that is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. within the depths of this house, or perhaps within the depths of the souls of the people that live in the house dwells the shadowy minotaur. this story is the subject of a pseudo-academic examination of The Navidson Record by the blind Zamp no. this person is dead. but Johnny Truant who knew Zamp no takes it upon himself to organize and footnote this paper, almost at the cost of his sanity. the half story comes from the editors who take it upon themselves to provide translations for the numerous passages in foreign languages.

the entire work is heavily footnoted which effectively keeps the reader from becoming too engaged in any one story at a time. also, 4 different versions of the book exist. in the super-duper de-luxe version, every occurrence of house is in blue and the word minotaur and struck passages are in red. plus, one struck line is in purple and there are braille passages and color plates.

as a film student i was fascinated with the criticism of The Navidson Record. i want to make this film. As for what the book intends to do, i have only slight clues. i need to read it several more times and enjoin myself to the message boards on the book. i suspect that the meaning will be different for each person. if you like to read, then add this book to your list. i loved it.

i’m about 75% through Screams of Reason by David Skal. Its mostly about Hollywood’s fascination with mad science. Its ok. but a good shot in the dark by my mother who bought it for me. i can see many different tracks where expansion and deeper academic discourse would add some insights but it is pretty hard to find good academic texts on film since most are targeted to hobbyists and film buffs instead of academics. yes i’m pompous. fuck off.

3 days till b