100 sf

#34: Hothouse (1962) by Brian Aldiss

2009-05-23T16:01:00.009-05:00

“Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.”

“Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices.”

Brian Aldiss does some funky things with physics and nature in Hothouse. He has the Sun expand its intensity. He has the Earth with one side permanently facing the Sun, one side not. And he has insect webs connecting the Moon and Earth. Oh, and did I mention the fact that plants rule the world and humans have become a minor, hunted species?

Once you’ve got all that down, the plot follows simply along. Mostly it’s the tale of Gren, one of the few human males on the planet, his relationship with morel---a sentient fungus that exists in symbiosis with him---and his journey to find out what’s really going on with the Earth, Sun, and Aldiss’ crazy physics. Otherwise, the book is really a fantastical romp through Aldiss’ imagination. He invents plants, insects, and the directions of human evolution.

I must admit that I grow tired of Aldiss’ fantasies at times and a few sections of the book were a real slog for me. On the other hand, the book is generally beloved, as is Aldiss. So you don’t have to take my word as final on the issue.

Availability
IDW recently brought this title back into print.

RIP #6

2009-01-14T16:07:00.003-06:00

Patrick McGoohan, #6 on one of my favorite classic sf tv shows The Prisoner, died yesterday at the age of 80. Perhaps it's best he didn't live to see the remake of series that is currently in production. Either way, he will be missed. *Sniff*

#33: Venus Plus X (1960) by Theodore Sturgeon

2009-01-13T14:47:00.007-06:00

“In measuring a circle, begin anywhere.”—Charles Fort

"I'm glad I'm not bisexual. I couldn't stand being rejected by men as well as women."—Bernard Manning

Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) has a relatively simple narrative. A young man named Charlie Johns awakens in a world called Ledom, scooped up by the inhabitants (also called Ledom) with a device he takes for a time machine. The Ledom tell Johns he’s been brought to Ledom to judge their society. And as he does, Johns has progressively more shocking discoveries about the place and the people. The whole thing then wraps with a shocker ending that I personally guessed in advance, though that didn’t diminish my (continuing) evaluation of the book.

The biggest shock comes to Johns early on: the Ledom are all hermaphrodites. They possess both the ability to inseminate and become pregnant—something that Johns is surprisingly cool with for a man from 1960. The Ledom culture is also quite advanced. I was particularly drawn to their education device, called a “cerebrostyle,” which can both record knowledge and implant it directly into the brain. Johns receives a schooling on the whole history of sex, gender, and reproduction in “homo sap” versus the Ledom (by the way, have you looked at that word backwards yet?) in a matter of moments, for example.

But Johns’ story in Ledom isn’t the only narrative in the book. Sturgeon alternates these chapters with a series of vignettes of a 1950s nuclear family wrestling with the differences and similarities between men and women. Readers may be a little perplexed by these scenes, until the end of the book when we find out...

I honestly don’t know how I feel about Sturgeon’s novel. I’ve been trying to think of it in context. In 1960, the sexual revolution hadn’t happened yet. Science fiction novels were often still boring boys adventure fantasies. And the complex unraveling of sex and gender that came with the New Wave and Ursula K. LeGuin’s masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness was still a few years away. So I applaud Sturgeon for his adventurous storytelling relative to the time. I also found the novel to be extremely readable, and it only took me a couple of sittings to read it from cover to cover. On the other hand, I found something lacking in the book, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on it. Somehow, I just wanted it to be more.

Availability
This second Sturgeon novel on Pringle’s list is in print through the good graces of Random House.

And Finally...Happy Holidays

2008-12-23T12:00:00.000-06:00

Soviet Zombies

2008-12-23T11:50:00.003-06:00

I'm not a Metallica fan, but their new video is a great piece of short sf filmmaking.

Adaptation of the Original Original

2008-12-23T11:42:00.003-06:00

The blog Diversions of the Groovy Kind has a reproduction of an entire 1970s Marvel Comics adaptation of "Farewell to the Master" here. It's a lot more enjoyable than the second half of the current film remake.

A Tale of Two Movies

2008-12-23T11:20:00.006-06:00

Curiosity got the better of me, and I actually went and paid to see the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Considering my last adventure at the movie theater, I probably should have known better. But it was both not as bad as I expected and far worse. Granted, I thought I’d hate it. But in the end, the first half of the film I found intriguing. The second half? Like a drill slowly burrowing into my brain as the second hand on my watch moved backwards.

This “reimagining” of Robert Wise’s 1951 classic exchanges the fears of earthly war mongering for environmental devastation. Klaatu’s race/organization/whatever doesn’t fear what humans will do to each other, but to the precious resource that is a planet able to support life. In the original, Klaatu is sent with robot guardian Gort to warn humanity that its destructive nature (and development of nuclear arms) will ultimately force the rest of the universe---the civilized part that is---to destroy it. Klaatu in the current film comes without warning to destroy humans right now. Humanity is inherently destructive to the environment, he decides. Though after a little squishiness, he’ll see that there is “another side” to us later in the film.

The Good.
1. I actually liked Keanu in this film. He was able to pull off a foreignness in his portrayal that made “first contact” believable. In the original film, Michael Rennie’s Klaatu becomes more and more human. We never make the mistake of thinking the same about Keanu’s Klaatu. There is a distance between him and the human characters throughout.

2. The premise of an advanced civilization’s concern over the environment. There’s ample belief in the scientific community that few planets like ours exist. That an advanced civilization would consider this planet as a resource that far outweighs the moral implications of genocide seems plausible.

3. The morality of Klaatu’s civilization. On the other hand, that this “advanced” civilization chooses to destroy humanity instead of sharing technology and helping us along is interesting. Though Rennie’s Klaatu threatens humanity with destruction at the end of the film, he is sympathetic to its primitive state throughout. Keanu’s Klaatu doesn’t have any patience for us. His civilization seems to have a sense of entitlement. I found this interesting to ponder.

4. The technology of Klaatu’s civilization was fascinating. Gene manipulation, biological interface with electronics, and organic metal. Truly awesome.

The Bad.
1. Why does every Hollywood film have to have a cute fatherless/motherless child?

2. If this other civilization is so concerned about the environment over everything else, why does a little weepiness from the previously mentioned cute child cause Klaatu to reevaluate wiping humanity out? So a kid cries about his dad, does that really mean we won’t burning this baby down with greenhouse gases, plastics, and overpopulation? I say torch the humans.

3. Everything after Klaatu meets with Dr. Barnhardt. If you do see this film, when John Cleese leaves the screen, LEAVE THE THEATER.

4. I still don’t see why this film had to be remade (or “reimagined”). The original is a piece of art from a certain period. It forever belongs there. There was nothing about it that needed to be updated or reinterpreted. Please, Hollywood...please start producing some original screenplays.

don’t underestimate the ferocious beat of the dark side

2008-11-09T14:33:00.001-06:00

#32: Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budrys

2008-11-09T14:13:00.004-06:00

“Intelligent men pride themselves on their control. They go to elaborate lengths to disguise their impulses—not from the world; they’re not hypocrites—from themselves. They find rational bases for emotional actions, and they present logical excuses for disaster. A man may begin a whole series or errors and pursue it to the brink of the pit, and over the brink, all unaware.”

“Life is a dead-end street.”—H. L. Mencken.

A large alien artifact appears on the Moon. There is a way to enter it, but perhaps no way to exit. Just what is it and how can it be navigated? This is the puzzle that is laid in the lap of Dr. Edward Hawks in Algis Budrys’ 1960 novel Rogue Moon. Hawks leads a secret project that has developed a matter transmitter. This transmitter is used to send “copies” of volunteers to the Moon to investigate the artifact. One by one, the copies are sacrificed inside of the object. See, there seems to be a pattern to the type of movements one can make in the artifact: turn slightly right here, don’t bend down there, look up here, don’t jump across that there. As each copy arrives on the Moon, the “original” is suspended in sensory deprivation back at Hawks’ lab. For some reason, this allows a psychic contact between the two that allows the original to experience everything the copy does, only survive to tell about it...sort of. It turns out that experiencing the death of your other self is enough to drive a person mad.

This unfortunate detail leads Hawks to search for the perfect man to volunteer for the project...perhaps a sociopath of some sort? The quest for a perfect death-defying man puts Hawks in close contact with a string of manipulative characters. First there’s Vincent “Connie” Connington, the head of personnel at Continental Electrics—the place that houses Hawks’ lab. Connie suggests that the perfect man for the job is one Al Barker, an adventurer who lusts for death. Barker is romantically paired with Claire Pack, a woman who uses sex to manipulate men and who forces Barker to continually prove himself to her. By the way, Connie lusts after Ms. Pack, so perhaps he has ulterior motives for suggesting Barker, eh? Well, it turns out that Barker is the right one for the job; he’s able to withstand watching his death over and over. But as he progresses through the maze, things get stranger and more disturbing. In particular, the landscape becomes littered with dead Barkers. And in the end, Hawks desires his own place in the mapping of the artifact. Good idea?

Budrys (1931-2008), a Lithuanian immigrant known for his deft short stories, crafted an unusual sf novel in Rogue Moon. Prefiguring the “inner space” stories that would come out of sf later in the 60s and 70s, Budrys’ work is literary and pulp-y simultaneously. He lingers on character development but is short on technological definition. Nonetheless, I found the work intriguing and a joy to read. In particular, the alien artifact fascinatingly prefigures modern video games: endless lives shed in a landscape that requires specific tasks to be performed in a specific way in order to reach a goal. Also, Budrys asks fascinating philosophical questions about the nature of self in this work. Are these “copies” perfect in every way? What does it mean if just one memory, say the color of a childhood home, is disturbed? Can it be said that the copy is accurate enough to be thought of as the same individual? And once the copy and the original diverge in experience, are they each unique individuals? Or is one just a distortion of the other? While Budrys gives the reader the tools to ponder these and other questions of personhood, he leaves it up to reader to decide the answers. Lucky us.

Availability
*Sigh* Out of print. Buy it used or get it from the library.

Vonnegut 2081

2008-10-14T14:17:00.005-05:00

One of Vonnegut’s most famous short stories, and one of my favorite short stories period, is “Harrison Bergeron.” In HB, society has achieved equality for all...by force and by lowering people’s capabilities to the most basic level possible (the only way to achieve true “equality” in skill). The agile and strong are weighted down. The intelligent have buzzing noises forced in their ears. Those with excellent vision are given lenses to distort it. And so on. The piece can be found in many collections, including Welcome to the Monkey House. So go read it!

Vonnegut first tested out the idea of equal disability in The Sirens of Titan through his description of some believers in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent:

Everyone wore handicaps of some sort. Most handicaps were of an obvious sort—sashweights, bags of shot, old furnace grates—meant to hamper physical advantages. But there were, among Redwine’s parishioners, several true believers who had chose handicaps of a subtler and more telling kind.

There were women who had received by dint of dumb luck the terrific advantage of beauty. They had annihilated that unfair advantage with frumpish clothes, bad posture, chewing gum, and a ghoulish use of cosmetics.

One old man, whose only advantage was excellent eyesight, had spoiled that eyesight by wearing his wife’s spectacles.

A dark young man, whose lithe, predaceous sex appeal could not be spoiled by bad clothes and bad manners, had handicapped himself with a wife who was nauseated by sex.

The dark young man’s wife, who had reason to be vain about her Phi Beta Kappa key, had handicapped herself with a husband who read nothing but comic books.

Redwine’s congregation was not unique. It wasn’t especially fanatical. There were literally billions of happily self-handicapped people on Earth.

His idea was then used as inspiration for the 1995 film Harrison Bergeron. Now, in my humble opinion, many attempts at adapting Vonnegut’s material to film have been greatly flawed. I would include the 1995 Sean-Astin-vehicle Harrison Bergeron in that category. Nonetheless, there’s a new production based on Vonnegut’s famous work in the works. This one is called 2081. And I gotta say, in all fairness, the trailer looks kind of intriguing. (Gulp!)

#31: The Sirens of Titan (1959) by Kurt Vonnegut

2008-10-14T13:06:00.011-05:00

“I guess somebody up there likes me.”---Malachi Constant

“As far as I’m concerned, the Universe is a junk yard, with everything in it overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.”---Malachi Constant

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody.”---Beatrice Rumfoord

The Sirens of Titan takes place between World War II and the Third Great Depression, during a time when “inward space had not yet been explored” and the famously wealthy Malachi Constant might be the luckiest person in the world. Also famously rich at this time is Winston Rumfoord, who, along with his dog Kazak, is stuck in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum--what Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) described as a meeting point of contradicting truths, a place where those truths can exist simultaneously. Being stuck there causes Rumfoord and Kazak to materialize on Earth every fifty-nine days predictably. It also affords Rumfoord the ability to see into the past, present, and future simultaneously--a skill that he both abuses and uses for good on occasion.

Rumfoord is a complex man. He has a relatively loveless marriage with his wife Beatrice--particularly so since his chrono-synclastic infundibulum problem came about--and his best friend is an intelligent machine named Salo from the planet Tralfamadore, who is stuck on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, waiting for a replacement part for his broken down space vessel. Rumfoord is deceitful, charismatic, honest, caring, and vengeful. But you don’t really find out when he’s been which until the end of the novel. Huzzah!

TSOT begins with Rumfoord inviting Malachi Constant to visit him during one of his materializations. At the meeting, Rumfoord prophesizes that Constant will marry Rumfoord’s wife Beatrice, have a son with her named Chrono, and will live on the planet Mars. Both Beatrice, who learns of the prophecies herself, and Constant try to do everything possible to make these things not come true. This, of course, only brings them to fruition.

In the second section of the narrative, we follow a dimwitted private named “Unk” in the Martian Army. Unk, like most of the soldiers in the army, is controlled by a small antenna implanted in his head, which makes even the drumbeat of a military march infectiously demanding of action.

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent!
Rented a tent!
Rented a, rented a tent.

These antennas are key to the Martian design for war with Earth. But not for Unk. Someone has other plans for him. It turns out that Unk is to be an important figure in a new, but quickly growing religion on Earth called “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.” This religion also has much to do with Malachi Constant and Winston Rumfoord.

While only Vonnegut’s second novel, TSOT establishes several themes and characteristics of Vonnegut’s writing: his informal style, his quippy narration, and his overwhelmingly sad love of humanity. But TSOT particularly wrestles with the concept of free will, from Unk’s antenna to Rumfoord’s foresight to the mission Salo was executing for Tralfamadore when he was stranded on Titan. Since Rumfoord can see into the future and the past, can he change it? When he reveals the future to others, can they change it? More importantly, does any of it really matter? I mean, would knowing that life is predetermined stop you from living it? But what if that predetermination is actually controlled by someone? Well, so it goes.

Availability
As long as there are young people, Vonnegut’s writing will never go out of print. So it is with The Sirens of Titan.

PS Rest in Peace, Mr. Vonnegut. You will always be one of my favorite writers.

#30: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

2008-10-01T16:07:00.008-05:00

“But there was in that time a man whose name was Leibowitz, who, in his youth like the holy Augustine, had loved the wisdom of the world more than the wisdom of God. But now seeing that great knowledge, while good, had not saved the world, he turned in penance to the Lord.”

“If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it.”

Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is basically three interconnected novellas that jump six hundred years in time between each story. The constants between the three are a Catholic monastic order called the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz (well, sort of--Leibowitz isn’t actually canonized until the end of section one), a “Wandering Jew” character, the theme of cyclical history, and the tension between church and state. ACFL is Miller’s only novel...again, sort of. He did work for years on a sequel to ACFL called Saint Leibo witz and the Wild Hor se Woman, but he committed suicide before finishing it. That book is in publication, however, because Terry Bisson completed the novel for him. I still haven’t read it. Anyone else?

The philosophical undercurrent of ACFL is that there are cyclical patterns in human society. The novel begins six hundred years after a massive nuclear war, which is referred to as the “Flame Deluge.” Human society has returned to a period akin to the early Middle Ages. Most knowledge has been lost or forgotten, in part because of a violent rebellion against learning and the learned in the period of “Simplification” that followed near nuclear annihilation. Scientists were lynched, books were burned, and the Catholic Church became a refuge to those persecuted. One of those refugees was an engineer named I.E. Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist who converted to the religion after the “Flame Deluge.” Leibowitz went on to start his own order, named in part for Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century saint associated with science. Leibowitz’s Order took to smuggling books (“booklegging”) and hiding them in the desert. Others in the Order put books to memory (a la Fahrenheit 451) or copied them. Leibowitz himself was martyred for the cause. And now six hundred years later, books are still being copied and knowledge is still being preserved by this Order at an abbey located in the desert. Among these monastics is a sympathetic, if not all that bright, character named Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, who unwittingly discovers the cache of a lifetime...a store of Leibowitz’s writings, as well as mechanical blueprints, in a fallout shelter revealed to him by a Jewish pilgrim (perhaps Leibowitz himself?). A lengthy period of authentification follows, and Francis finds himself a key player in the safety of the documents.

Six hundred years later, in section two, a Renaissance period is unfolding, and the Order is still a major center of knowledge. But now the secular world has turned to the Order for its holdings. In particular, a well-connected scholar named Thon Taddeo comes to the Leibowitz abbey to examine the documents Brother Francis found and discern their wealth. This situation does not come without its tension and repercussions for scientific and societal advancement.

And finally, after another six hundred years has passed, section three takes place in a time when the world has advanced to the point of interstellar travel, and off-Earth colonies have been formed. But a Cold War is in place, and the tension between humanity’s two superpowers, the Asian Coalition and the Atlantic Confederacy, is beginning to escalate. The Church begins to make plans for the worst-case scenario by assembling a team of capable believers, clergy, and monastics that will take a microfilm copy of “the Memorabilia” (the collection of writings and documents from St. Francis’ find) safely off planet.

While clearly a positive portrayal of the Catholic Church (and it’s unusual for sf literature from this time being positive about religion at all), there are few moments of outright apologism in the book. Though perhaps the most blatant comes in the third section when the Abbot of the Leibowitz abbey physically advances the belief that euthanasia for nuclear fallout victims is abominable. And as for myself, I find the suggestion that the Catholic Church is a vessel of scientific knowledge--whether in the future or the real past of the Middle Ages and Western Renaissance--more complex than Miller portrays in this novel. Nonetheless, this is one of the great books of speculative fiction--I believe this is the fourth time I’ve read it--and it deserves to be read by everyone. Everyone! So get to it.

Availability
Should be in print for a long, long time to come.

PS There's a couple of good guides to the Latin found in the book. Here's one.

US Presidential Election Primer

2008-09-22T11:40:00.000-05:00

The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part II

2008-09-22T11:09:00.006-05:00

Mary-Lou: “What are they like, your children?”
Newton: “They’re like children. Exactly like children.”

The 70s and early 80s were interesting times for speculative filmmaking. That period contained a series of artistic, pensive films that were the children of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alpahville, as well as a trio of films that would completely alter the landscape of the genre by creating an immense appetite for big-budget, space westerns that form the core of an entity now know as “sci-fi movies.”

Films like The Lathe of Heaven and Born in Flames distorted known landscapes into the otherness of future. While films like Silent Running made the future of robots and self-contained environments present. And as for the societal fears of a sexually emerging and violent youth...A Clockwork Orange.

One of the pinnacles of this type of speculative narration, in my opinion, is Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 adaptation of Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg’s film is significantly different from Tevis’ novel. On a grand scale, he makes you work as a viewer for meaning. Visual suggestion and subtle dialogue replace some of the more overt aspects of Tevis’ book. He also builds substantially on the implied sexuality of the novel. Newton and Betty Jo (renamed Mary-Lou in the film) have an intense physical relationship. Bryce, the professor turned World Enterprises Corporation obsessive, is no longer the widow, but a divorcee jumping from tryst to tryst with interchangeable coeds looking for someone who is both like their father and also nothing like him. And Farnsworth, Newton’s patent lawyer and business partner, has become a vulnerable homosexual partnered with a younger, stronger lover.

Part of Roeg’s brilliance in this film is casting. As a character, Newton is otherworldly (duh). He at times mimics human emotion, and at others, feels it more intensely (perhaps). Through money, he’s powerful. But his frail body and ignorance of human behavior make him exposed to manipulation and control. So it was a real stretch when Roeg courted David Bowie to play this androgynous, lost-in-the-world alien (ha!). Bowie is brilliant.

Roeg sets the film in New Mexico (as opposed to the Kentucky of Tevis’ novel). The landscape is like that of Newton’s world--a world beset by drought--, but here it is populated with cowboys and dusty main streets instead. As viewers, we’re often privy to the visions and dreams of Newton. In them, he often thinks about his family and the time he left for Earth. But does he miss them? Does he miss his world? Is he sad? Roeg gives us no clear answers. And, as in the novel, Newton sometimes just prefers to have a drink.

Death Race: An Interrogative

2008-08-29T15:46:00.004-05:00

(with apologies to Crispin Hellion Glover)

What is the best thing for a Friday afternoon in late August? A movie? A book? A video game? What if you could mix two of them together? What if you could have the narrative structure of a video game in the form of a movie?

Does a film with less than ten pages of dialogue deserve to be made? What about Quest for Fire? Le Dernier Combat? Microcosmos? Koyaanisqatsi? Can a film with excessive violence be considered art? Are films with less on-screen violence more disturbing than films filled with graphic displays? What about Psycho? On the other hand, what about American Psycho? What about A Clockwork Orange?

Can a film with a short written statement at the beginning about economics, violence, and television, which then turns mostly to action sequences, qualify as social criticism? Was Death Race 2000 social criticism? The Running Man? The Phantom Menace? The Terminator? Does it matter?

Would the audience of 2012 really find prisoners racing around the track in machine-gun-loaded muscle cars entertaining? Would large-breasted co-drivers with little on-air face time really be needed? Would a gay driver really require only male assistants? With the economy in shambles, would there even be an audience willing and able to afford to watch such races? Would over 50 million?

What would you call the person who directed this film? A hack? A genius? An auteur? A man with the goods? How about the person that goes to see this film? Will he get his money’s worth? Or will he be wishing afterwards that he could get that 89 minutes and $6 matinee ticket price back?

What a Feeling

2008-08-22T15:55:00.000-05:00

Mandalorian Dance
by PatrickBoivin

The Man Who Fell to Earth, Part I

2008-08-16T14:50:00.006-05:00

"Like morphine it all depended upon proper measurements."

Among the novels I would suggest Pringle’s list mistakenly overlooks is Walter Tevis’ masterpiece from 1963, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tevis (1928-1984) had a rocky childhood and stint in the Navy behind him when he started seeing steady publication in the 1950s. His first works were pool hall tales, including his first novel The Hustler, which was of course the basis of the 1961 Paul Newman-Jackie Gleason picture. TMWFTE was his second novel and also the source material for a film (and a tv adaptation, as well as a forthcoming Broadway musical and second movie).

The novel centers around the seemingly effete Thomas Jerome Newton, a distant traveler who has been sent to Earth to establish an intergalactic ferry to bring the few remaining inhabitants of his home planet, Anthea, here for resettlement. Anthea was ravaged by radioactive war. Of the three intelligent species that once inhabited the planet, only one remains. And of them, there are only about three hundred survivors. Not only do the Antheans wish to settle on Earth, but they also hope to socially engineer human society away from atomic suicide, such as Anthea suffered.

Newton has a few obstacles in his way. One, he doesn’t surround himself with the soundest company, including his main companion, a rube named Betty Jo who introduces him to gin and who witlessly pines for his foreign physiology.

“She began to feel a touch of wicked excitement in her from flirting at the edge of the idea of that strange, delicate body against hers. Looking at him and letting her imagination play with the thought, she knew that the particular thrill came from his strangeness–his strange, unmanlike, unsexual nature. Maybe she was like those women who like to make love with freaks and cripples. Well, he was both–and she did not care now, was not ashamed, with the tight pants on and the gin in her. If she could arouse him–if he could be aroused–she would be proud of herself. And if not–he was a dear man anyway and he wouldn’t be offended."

His main source of income is a series of radically advanced patents—self-developing film, powderless toy caps—that raise the suspicion of at least one scientist, as well as the CIA and FBI. And he has a penchant for taking unnecessary chances, like leaving the “lifeboat” spacecraft he arrived in on an open area of a farmer’s field.

But this is perhaps understandable. Newton’s sole interaction with human culture before arriving is the radio and television waves drifting through space. And Tevis nails the otherworldliness of this strange creature. Newton suffers physically and emotionally. He takes on some human traits, while utterly rejecting others. Mostly he’s just vulnerable. He’s left his family and life behind for a dicey gamble at Anthean survival. Physically, he’s like glass. He incessantly pops pills to keep going and nearly breaks his birdlike bones every time he rides in an elevator or fast-moving car. But he can be alternately patronizing and vicious. On living with humans: “Think of living with the monkeys for six years. Or think of living with the insects, of living with the shiny, busy, mindless ants."

The ending? Well, it’s devastating. This isn’t E.T., Mr. Spielberg.

The Real Price of Oil

2008-08-15T15:17:00.001-05:00

Stephen explains all...

More Blogs About Bikes and Music

2008-08-15T13:25:00.007-05:00

I'm behind the times, a serious late bloomer. My current obsession with the album More Songs About Buildings and Food proves it. I’m thirty years out of date! David Byrne, the musical genius behind that album, however, isn’t. Byrne was a bicycling fool well before I had training wheels and US cities starting seriously integrating bike transportation routes into urban planning (though many still don’t!). Byrne’s latest scheme was working with the Department of Transportation in New York, running a design contest for bike racks as functional art. The seriously wonderful trouble was that Byrne got so worked up by the contest that he submitted his own designs--thus compromising his role as a judge. But hey, it’s all for a good cause. And who else would think of putting up a bike rack on Wall Street that’s in the shape of a dollar sign?

Byrne also regularly blogs about his daily bike trips (and his various other interests) and the wonderful things one can see from the slow road. And I second the possibilities. Just yesterday, I saw a flock of Horned Larks hanging out near a cornfield and several Eastern Tiger Swallowtails fly past me while I took a leisurely trip along some rural Indiana highways. Sure misses from the inside of an air-conditioned gas monster. But I digress...

#29: Alas, Babylon (1959) by Pat Frank

2008-07-29T15:26:00.007-05:00

“They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, ‘Alas! alas! thou great city, thou mighty city, Babylon! In one hour has thy judgment come.’”--Revelation 18:10

“Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.”

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” ---Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Pat Frank’s novel Alas, Babylon rubs shoulders with the British “cosy catastrophes” that have littered the David Pringle list so far, yet it is distinct from them in its examination of Soviet/nuclear war paranoia in the US during the 50s and 60s. So yes, the book is dated. Nonetheless, it is an entertaining journey through Cold War fears. And heck, I’m a sucker for survivalist, tear-it-down-and-build-it-back-up narratives. Aren’t you?

Pat Frank (1907-1964) is the pen name of Harry Hart Frank, a man who spent much of his life as a journalist and critic of the US government and its role in nuclear proliferation. Though AB is his best-known work, it was Frank’s third trip down the nukes-are-going-to-mess-us-up road. Previously he had written Mr. Adam, a tale about mass sterilization in the US caused by a radiation leak, and another US-Soviet knockdown like AB called Forbidden Area. But it’s Alas, Babylon that he’s known for, and it’s Alas, Babylon that made David Pringle’s cut.

The protagonist of the novel is Randy Bragg, a kind of 1950s-style slacker who lives the bachelor life on his family's estate in Fort Repose, Florida (modeled after the real town of Mount Dora). Randy is a Korean War vet, but the real military man in the family is his brother Mark, who lives in Omaha with his wife Helen and their two kids. Mark is an intelligence officer for SAC (Strategic Air Command). One day, Randy receives a telegram from Mark that reads, “Alas, Babylon.” It’s code from their childhood. Mark and Randy used to listen to their next-door neighbor “Preacher,” patriarch of the Henry family, punctuate his impassioned sermons with these two words. And Randy immediately knows what Mark is trying to tell him...nuclear war is imminent.

Mark’s family rushes to live with Randy at the family home while Mark goes “into the hole” to plan the US’ military strategy. Randy gathers goods and tells trusted friends about Mark’s warning, including his girlfriend and the Henrys next door. Almost immediately after Helen Bragg and the kids arrive, “The Day” (as it is referred to by the characters thereafter) takes place and civilization falls apart. In particular, the strategic bombing of Orlando by the Russians cuts off Fort Repose from the rest of the United States--what’s left of it--and the town quickly slips into a more primitive state. Bartering becomes the norm, governance comes at the end of a gun, and goods become extremely scarce. Luckily, Randy builds a small community of good people around himself. The Henrys grow citrus crop and raise hogs, there’s fishing from the stream just outside his home, and the group receives periodic updates from the shortwave operated by the retired admiral who lives just down the road. Add to this clan a librarian, Randy’s girlfriend and her father, the local telegram operator, and a doctor, and you’ve got a group of about fifteen that can fend for themselves...until they run out of fuel, salt, and eyeglasses. Oh, and throw in a little radioactivity and ruthless highwaymen, just to make things interesting for them.

But all of this has got me thinking, is David Pringle obsessed with catastrophe and social rebuilding? Because there’s been an awful lot of it on this list so far.

Availability
HarperCollins keeps this Cold War classic in print.

PS One of my favorite things about YouTube (really?) are all these high school kids making films about books they've read for class. Alas, Babylon is no exception...

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes

2008-07-29T10:57:00.003-05:00

TV writer and essayist Jon Ronson was given quite an opportunity after Stanley Kubrick’s death; he was allowed to go through the renowned American director’s “boxes”---decades worth of intense research material Kubrick collected (and never got rid of) for all his projects, kept meticulously organized at his English estate. The boxes contain everything from photo stills of doors, architecture, and possible droog hats to fan mail, both praising and cranky, organized by city of origin (!). Ronson has now made a fifty-minute documentary musing about the ~~four~~ five years he spent going through the boxes. The end result both illuminates and enhances the enigma that was Stanley Kubrick. Enjoy.

PS I recommend reading Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is a romp through the history of the American military's obsession with the paranormal.

Klaatu, say it ain’t barada nikto!

2008-07-17T10:49:00.004-05:00

For the most part, Hollywood does what Hollywood does and I just shrug. Other than avoid their rehashed hash as much as possible, what can I do? It has gotten to the point where Hollywood produces close to zero original screenplays. Instead, it mines old movies, tv shows, even Disney amusement park rides for source material. It seems to me, coming from the perspective of a soon-to-be-no-more bookseller, that a lot of novelists are even writing their books as first drafts of screenplays. I’m sure Chuck Palahniuk is already exercising his vocal chords for his eventual commentary track on the special edition DVD release of Choke---a film that hasn’t even hit the theaters yet. Anyway, enter The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring **shudder** the Keanu. Keanu is fine and all in certain roles, such as Neo, but as Klaatu? Really?

The original TDESS is with no doubt one of the greatest science fiction films ever made. The story of space traveler Klaatu arriving on Earth to warn us that our flirtation with insanity (i.e., nuclear armament and war paranoia) had consequences that the rest of the universe could not ignore was a paradigm shift for sf filmmaking. No tentacled, Earth-women-lusting, monstrously strong aliens here. Klaatu is a messenger of peace; the villains are us. This point is tragically made in one of the very first scenes of the movie. Klaatu holds a small metallic device in his hand as he first steps out of his spaceship. A young solider assumes it is a weapon and fires on Klaatu, and the device is destroyed. Klaatu sadly explains that it was a gift for the president and was a machine that could help humans study life on other planets. As the movie continues, Klaatu refuses to negotiate only with the US (or the USSR for that matter) just because of its military might and economic superiority. Rather, he demands conference with humanity as a whole. In the end, the only way he is able to achieve this is by addressing a collection of the world’s leading scientists---and not only ones with white faces (this was 1951 mind you). It's a truly moving film that came out at just the beginning of H-bomb paranoia.

Granted, the 1951 Robert Wise film itself was an adapted screenplay, based on the short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, but the film stands on its own and is significantly different from the original story in many ways (including nixing the twist ending). I’m sure this new version will also be significantly different from the previous film. For instance, the Keanu-as-Klaatu version will be dreadful. We’ll see if I’m wrong.

Colbert Green Screen Winner

2008-07-11T08:15:00.000-05:00

Thomas Michael Disch, 1940-2008

2008-07-08T15:06:00.005-05:00

Tom Disch committed suicide on July 4.

I haven’t been able to get that sentence out of my head the last few days. I didn’t know the man personally and I can’t even begin to understand what pain he must have been going through to take that action, but I respected the hell out of his writing and the whole thing makes me really, really sad. One of the strongest, most thoughtful voices of the New Wave is gone.

Disch didn’t only wear an sf hat, he was also a poet, essayist, and children’s book author. He wore an image of a tough-as-nails New Yorker, though he was born and raised in the Midwest. He’s probably best known for Camp Concentration and 334 (both of which appear on Pringle’s list, along with On Wings of Song), two pieces of literature I’d gladly put in the hands of any reader. But my favorite book by him is his first novel, The Genocides. On the face of it, it’s just a simple horror fantasy about giant plants taking over the Earth. Underneath that, a brilliant study of human nature and our relationship to the environment lurks--Disch was always a cogent critic of society and culture. He even took sf as a whole to task in Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, one of the best social histories/critiques of the genre I’ve ever read, if rather angry and presumptuous at times.

In the last years, Disch was a moody, darkly insightful writer on his web journal Endzone. And friends have suggested that he was particularly so because of the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor in 2005. He was apparently living a meager life in a rent-controlled apartment in New York when he took his life. I don’t know what else to say. The whole thing just sucks.

Star Trek XI First Look

2008-01-29T15:08:00.001-06:00

Arthur C. Clarke's Birthday Message

2008-01-15T21:40:00.000-06:00

#28: Time Out of Joint (1959) by Philip K. Dick

2008-01-15T20:22:00.001-06:00

"The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!"--Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky. He saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence.”

Time Out of Joint was Philip K. Dick’s (1928-1982) first hardcover novel published in the United States. I mention this only because Dick was mainly a filler for paperback racks for most of his career and he didn’t really come to take his place as *perhaps* the most respected and most read American sf author until after his death. He didn’t even live to see the first film adaptation of one his books, Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), finished. And I think we could easily guess that this often reclusive, mostly paranoid writer--who strived to be accepted by the mainstream--would have never guessed that in 2008 he would be one of the most heavily sampled, adapted, lifted from, and cited authors in America. All hail the mighty PKD.

TOJ isn’t Dick’s most clever or thoroughly plotted novel, but it hits at most of his main themes: paranoia, war, inhumanity, and facades. To borrow a metaphor from a friend of mine, his characters are like water bugs that walk tensely above a vast world of truth hidden just beneath the surface. In the case of TOJ, the main character is a man named Ragle Gumm. Gumm lives with his sister, brother-in-law, and nephew in the suburban world of 1959. But Gumm makes a living in an odd way; he’s the grand champion of a newspaper puzzle game called “Where will the little green man be next?” The game itself appears to be completely random. There are 1208 squares to choose from and includes a number of cryptic clues like, “The bell told on tee-hee.” But Gumm is confident in his methodical deconstruction of the clues:

Gibberish, certainly. But it suggested homosexuality. ‘Bell.’ And the ‘tee-hee’ the effeminate laugh of the queer, the belle. And the John Donne sermon with the line, ‘For whom the bell tolls.’ Also a Hemingway book. Tee might be tea. Ring bell, get tea served. Tiny silver bell. Mission! The mission at Capistrano, where the swallows returned to! It fitted.

The first part of the novel then reads, more or less, like a pleasant, not overly critical examination of 50s mores and lifestyles. Until…until the bug breaks the surface tension.

While Gumm is at a soda stand one day, it disappears. All that’s left is a piece of paper with “SOFT-DRINK STAND” written on it. But this isn’t the first time this has happened to Gumm. He also has strips of paper reading: “DOOR,” “FACTORY BUILDING,” “HIGHWAY,” “DRINKING FOUNTAIN,” and “BOWL OF FLOWERS.” Gumm starts to drive himself mad with the idea that the world around him is there only for him--a notion that crosses the mind of most folks at one time or another. And then he finds the first real confirmation. While listening to his nephew’s crystal set he hears people talking about him (you thought The Truman Show thought that up?). Later, he finds a Time magazine from 1997 (remember, this is 1959) that lists Ragle Gumm as “The Man of the Year.” His world falls apart from there. But he’s not going crazy. In fact, for some folks in position of power, the truth of what’s happening is the most terrifying thing: Ragle Gumm is going sane.

**SPOILERS**In reality, it is 1998 and Ragle Gumm is the most important person on the planet. There’s a civil war going on, and Gumm’s brilliant military strategy (the puzzle game) has saved numerous lives…but continued the war. So as he awakens, he faces a moral dilemma about what side to take. He also feels stupid: why hadn’t he ever questioned why he didn’t even know simple things like the name of the city he lived in?**END SPOILERS**

Reading this novel in the context of the other pieces from the 50s on Pringle’s list, it really hit me why Dick has to be considered a genius within the genre. No one before had asked the questions he did or wrote the way he did. This novel, for instance, has no spaceships or overly sweet sexual relationships. Rather, Dick was getting at the core of what makes us human and what makes reality real. Something we're going to see again--Dick appears six times on Pringle's list.

Don’t Tell My Coworkers

2007-11-28T20:32:00.000-06:00

As a bookseller, I’m supposed to hate Amazon’s Kindle and the rest of its electronic brothers. In reality, I find it incredibly intriguing. Now I don’t have the 400 bucks to spend on one, and I don’t really like the fact that its features are only in black and white. But it marks a major step forward in the creation of a viable electronic book reader, and I find that exciting. I’m all set for a small portable machine that contains a library worth of material in it. Less paper, less waste. More memory, more flexibility. I’m also ready for color graphics and what will come quickly thereafter…music, movies, and word processing wrapped together with e-book technology, internet access, and phone capabilities. That ~~would~~ will blow my mind. It’s just around the corner.

#27: Have Space Suit--Will Travel (1958) by Robert Heinlein

2007-11-28T20:05:00.000-06:00

“I’ve heard all the usual Sweetness and Light that kids get pushed at them—how they should always forgive, how there’s some good in the worst of us, etc. But when I see a black widow, I step on it; I don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. A black widow spider can’t help it—but that’s the point.”

Kip is a good boy; he works hard. And he really, really wants to go to the moon. His dad is fair, but strict. He tells the teen that if he really wants to go to the moon, he’ll find a way. It’ll take effort and desire. And if those two things are there, and a person sets his mind to it, anything is possible. Sounds like the Heinlein we know, doesn’t it?

Robert A. Heinlein wrote about a dozen “juvenile” novels in his career. Have Space Suit--Will Travel is the last of them, and it’s an engrossing read. Heinlein’s themes of individualism and self-determination seem easier to swallow here. Who wouldn’t want to root for a bright young man with a goal of achieving his dreams? And Kip is a swell kid, right out of the 50s--he even works the soda fountain at the local pharmacy.

Quickly he comes up with a plan, he’ll enter a jingle contest for Skyway Soap. Grand prize--a trip to the moon. Skyway doesn’t set a limit on entries, so Kip sends one, then two, then fifty, then hundreds. By a technicality, Kip loses out on the first prize, but he does take home the consolation: one *used* space suit. While taking the suit out for a spin, Kip’s life forever changes. A distress signal brings him into contact with “Peewee,” a brilliant young girl being held by “Wormface” and his henchmen, and “the Mother Thing,” a big-cat-like space cop. Kip, Peewee, and the Mother Thing battle Wormface, travel to the moon, and become involved in a trial to decide humanity’s future. Heinlein just can’t leave the big themes alone, which is one of the reasons he’s such a fun writer to read. The book would be more than entertaining if it just contained the space exploits of Kip, Peewee, and the Mother Thing. But humanity on trial! Yikes!

The Trouble with NASA

2007-11-28T19:59:00.000-06:00

The Year 2000

2007-11-04T09:25:00.001-06:00

Czech style

Katy Trail Photos

2007-10-30T10:49:00.001-05:00

Mrs. Jason and I recently took a biking trip along the Katy Trail. I wish we had had more time. And, of course, Amtrak was late picking us up. 2 hours! How is that possible for a train that just goes back and forth between Kansas City and St. Louis all day? And this was the first train of the day.

It was supposed to rain all week, but somehow we missed it

The scenery changes often along the way: bluffs, forests, farmland, river's edge.

There were a lot of cats that came out to greet us. Go figure. This was a particularly lovable one. He had also clearly been in a fight recently--scratches, missing fur, and a screwed up right ear.

Our favorite rest stop was in Defiance at Katy Bike Rental--lots of candy, ice cream, snacks, sodas, antiques, and bike stuff.

I'd also recommend Apple Gate Inn in Augusta if you need a place to stay while on the Katy or after drinking too much at the wineries. I could barely get on my bike after breakfast I was so full of yummy goodness!

Um...

2007-10-30T00:13:00.001-05:00

Overdue

2007-10-29T23:41:00.000-05:00

Reaching the quarter century mark of my reading project has come late; I’m way behind if I want to read all 100 of David Pringle’s recommendations in a timely fashion. I wish my excuse was that I was savoring the novels. In reality, life has gotten in the way on too many occasions. Mea culpa to anyone listening.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The list starts out classy with 1984, and it follows up with four heavy hitters of the genre. I had never read George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (#2) before, and neither have many others my age--the book was out-of-print for a long time (thankfully that has changed). I highly recommend it.

6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Limbo (#6) is sadly out-of-print. In my estimation, it should be considered alongside literary giants like Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange. The Paradox Men (#10), on the other hand, was the biggest disappointment so far. I was really looking forward to it, and I found it less than thrilling.

11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Bring the Jubilee (#11) was perhaps the inspiration for Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (# 37) and one of only two novels on the list I’ve read in one sitting. Ward Moore is a forgotten master of narration!

16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (#18) shows her depth as a literary writer and that she wasn’t just the narrative brains behind George Lucas’ best film. The Stars My Destination (#20) is Bester’s best work.

21, 22, 23, 24, 25
The Death of Grass (#21) is the other one-sitting read. It’s superior to the similarly themed Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore, which is also worth the time.

#26: A Case of Conscience (1958) by James Blish

2007-10-29T22:41:00.000-05:00

“‘Animals have no souls,’ said Descartes, throwing a cat out the window to prove, if not his point, at least his faith in it.”

I’ve tended to think of James Blish (1921-1975) as a Star Trek hack most of my life. I knew he was a smart guy; I knew that his “Okie” series and A Case of Conscience were well respected. Hell, I’m even a Star Trek fan. But, without reading any of his work except a couple of short stories, I had no respect for him. Then David Pringle’s list made me sit down with one of his novels.

ACoC is divided into two parts. Generally, the first is considered the better of the two halves, and I will agree that it is the stronger narrative. But the second half has its merits too. I suppose it is much like the other great sf novel about Catholicism: A Canticle for Leibowitz (# 30 on the list). That book also has mismatching narrative limbs.

The first half of ACoC focuses on Jesuit priest and scientist Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez. RS is one of the more interesting characters I’ve ever read. While Blish is critical of religion, he’s evenhanded with the good Father. RS is part of a four-man team of scientists on a planet called Lithia. They’ve been sent there to determine whether the planet would make a good way station--balancing out the needs and wants of both Earthlings and the Lithians themselves. The native inhabitants are quite interesting. They’re twelve-feet-tall reptiles that resemble a dinosaur with a kangaroo pouch (in the case of the females). They’re intelligent and industrious, and they live in a harmonious society with no crime, war, or religion. And that last point is the real bugger.

When it comes down to the vote on Lithia’s future, the four men couldn’t be further apart. One believes Lithia to be an absolute cultural gem that should be kept open and in active dialogue with Earth. Another feels that it should be turned into an armory and weapons-making factory. A third is indecisive and almost apathetic about the responsibility of his decision. And then there’s Ruiz-Sanchez. RS has had the deepest contact with the culture up to this point. He’s thoroughly studied the environment of Lithia. He’s mastered the language. And he’s made friends with a Lithian named Chtexa. But RS can’t wrap his mind around the idea of a society without god, particularly a rational, well-functioning one. He decides that the planet itself, as well as its inhabitants, must be the creation of the Devil. And while this suggests a Manichean heresy (strict theology purports the Devil has no creative abilities such as God has), he accepts it as the only possibility and votes for the planet to be permanently quarantined. Before he leaves, however, Chtexa gives him a present: a fertilized Lithian egg.

The second half of the novel follows the disastrous earthly development of Egtverchi, Chtexa’s son. Egtverchi is neither fish nor fowl on Earth--a problem most twelve-foot, sentient reptiles face. He’s also quite paranoid about war, which is a theme running throughout the novel. As I mentioned before, Cleaver (one of the scientists on Lithia) has the hawkish idea to develop munitions on Lithia, all for the armament against an enemy that doesn’t exist. Most of society lives in underground, shelter communities because of some sort of nuclear fallout. And there is a growing dissatisfaction on the part of the have-nots of society. Egtverchi does his best to fan the flames of tension. While this section of the novel meanders at times, it’s worth waiting out the anti-Hollywood ending. There are also some small gems of social criticism along the way, such as the concept of “planned obsolescence”: a series of built-in flaws that every product contains, in order to insure that it has an ephemeral existence that propels the public’s consuming habits. Or, a party ride that shuttles passengers through a series of hallucinogenic scenes, ending with a trip through the furnace doors of Belsen, only to be blasted with “mind-cleansing oxygen” on the other side. What fun!

Phildickian Prose

2007-10-19T14:43:00.000-05:00

A great quote from Robert Guffey's article "White Noise: Don DeLillo's Postmodern Autopsy of the Twentieth Century" in the current issue (September 2007) of The New York Review of Science Fiction...

If one accepts the notion that science fiction is the simulation of a future that hasn't happened yet, then perhaps mainstream fiction could be considered the simulation of a present that will never exist.

St. Louis #1

2007-10-12T11:58:00.000-05:00

In something good for once. According to yesterday’s St. Louis Business Journal, St. Louis has had the largest growth in light-rail use over the last year in the entire nation. Ridership was up 38% in the first six months of 2007 over the first six months of 2006. We also rocked out in the number of folks using public transportation to get to work, the number of folks trying public transportation for the first time, and the number of riders who use transit five or more days a week. (I average six days of use per week--aren’t I special? Well, according to these statistics, I guess I’m not.) Okay, now let’s expand this Metrolink!

Go North Along the River

2007-10-02T19:19:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite bike paths in the area is the Riverfront Trail that runs along the Mississippi from the old Laclede Power Station to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. For me, it represents all that’s good and bad about St. Louis: its industrial and shipping past, its neglect of most things north of Delmar Boulevard, its beautiful vistas, and its (surprising) optimism about the future. The trail is well designed and should provide plenty of connections to St. Louis and Illinois in the future. And the rest stops along the way have water fountains for dogs!

Heading north, the first five or six miles are industrial, and it’s pretty amazing to see and hear all the scrap heaps, coal cars, payloaders, and railroads at work. It can also be pretty smelly and even a little dangerous if you’re not watching at the points where the trail crosses industrial traffic. Running above part of this section is an old train trestle that connects to the McKinley Bridge. Both the bridge and the trestle will soon be open to bike traffic, and there should be pretty amazing views of the Mississippi River, downtown, and smashed up cars from up there. I can’t wait.

The next leg runs along the top of a grassy embankment. There are good opportunities to see turkeys and deer along this stretch. There’s also a good opportunity to get windburned. Mrs. Jason and I were out there on Sunday, biking to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge to have a picnic, and it must have taken us twice as long as normal with the headwind that day. She swears that the wind was so strong it stopped her completely at one point, even though she was still pedaling. This section is also completely exposed to the sun. I, of course, forgot to put on sunscreen this go. Ouch.

After a quaint winding pass through North Riverfront Park, which always seems to be populated with the nicest walkers in the City, the trail comes to the jewel of the bike path--the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. The bridge was an important part of Route 66 because of its unique bend in the middle. Though it closed with the building of the New Chain of Rocks Bridge for I-270 and was unfortunately the site of a gruesome double murder back in 1991, it’s rocking and rolling with bikes, walkers, picnickers, rollerbladers, and the like these days, thanks mostly to the good folks at Trailnet.

#25: Non-Stop (1958) by Brian Aldiss

2007-09-27T23:59:00.000-05:00

“The Teaching warned him that his mind was a foul place. The holy trinity, Froyd, Yung, and Bassit, had gone alone through the terrible barriers of sleep, death’s brother; there they found--not nothing, as man had formerly believed--but grottoes and subterranean labyrinths full of ghouls and evil treasure, leeches, and the lusts that burn like acid. Man stood revealed to himself: a creature of infinite complexity and horror. It was the aim of the Teaching to let as much of this miasmic stuff out to the surface as possible.”

Brian Aldiss (b. 1925) can be a little crotchety at times. As a critic, he coined the term “cosy catastrophe,” a derogatory epithet for the writing of fellow Brits like John Wyndham. As a novelist, Aldiss’ characters are often grey morally and his view of society is unpleasant. His narratives don’t end wrapped up with a pretty bow. That's why one of the great travesties of contemporary sf filmmaking for me is the mess Stephen Spielberg made of Aldiss’ short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long.” For instance, one of the minor bits from the story that didn’t make the film was Aldiss’ description of the consuming habits of the rich. In the future, through the help of nanotechnology, the rich consume vast quantities of food without losing perfect form. Expensive microparasites make sure of it. So while the developing world unravels because of food shortages and the poor of all nations go hungry, the rich eat more than any human being should and previously could. Ah, the decadent West. Non-Stop came out before “Super-Toys.” In fact, it’s one of Aldiss’ first novels. But like STLASL, it doesn’t let society off the hook.

The narrative follows hunter Roy Complain of the Greene Tribe--a group that is decidedly fearful of the outside world. When he becomes ostracized within the tribe, Complain is convinced by religious leader Father Marapper to go exploring with a motley crew of thugs and misfits to see what’s out beyond the land of the Greene Tribe. Actually, Marapper has a pretty radical idea. He’s convinced that all the known tribes live in an enclosed world called a ship and that this ship is not the natural habitat of humans. He even has a map to prove it.

Marapper’s group works its way through the “ponics,” a thick vegetative growth that encompasses many areas of the…well hell, I’m just going to tell you…the spaceship that they live in. See, all the tribes are the descendants of the original crew of a generational starship. But something went wrong. They’ve been traveling for too many generations and are thought by those in the know to have passed by or gone in the completely wrong direction of their destination planet. While adrift, the inhabitants have forgotten their origins and civilization has devolved into primitivism. And the reason they haven’t reached their destination is the real shocker of the novel, not the fact that the place is a starship (which is revealed on page 28). I mention this only because folks blew a gasket when the novel was retitled Starship in its first US printing. Too much is given away about the plot in the title, they said.

Anyway, Marapper’s group ventures through the ponic-filled “Sternstairs,” “Quarters,” and “Deadways” to the “Forwards” area of the ship. The pieces really start coming together there. They find out about the “Giants” who built the ship and who seem to have returned. They learn the secret of the control room. And they find a lost captain’s log that details the beginnings of “The Teaching”--the religion of the ship--, which is a distorted, mythologized version of psychoanalytic theory. (All praise to its prophets Froyd and Yung.) Complain, Marapper, and the boys also find lots and lots of rats. Super-smart mutant rats that live in rat cities and lord over creatures of lesser intelligence. Creepy.

Aldiss’ big shock ending doesn’t make one feel comfortable. And his characters certainly aren’t heroes. Marapper is a megalomaniac, Complain's morality comes from his crotch, and the Giants are, among other things, patronizing. He also makes the idea of generational space travel downright sick and twisted. It’s just my kind of sf story!

Availability
In print: a blessing because Aldiss is not as revered in the States as he is in the UK.

HipHopKetBall II: The Rejazzabration Remix '06

2007-09-26T22:31:00.000-05:00

Interiors

2007-09-25T10:03:00.000-05:00

I.
I haven’t ventured much into the world of online gaming, though I did play a furious session of Star Wars Galaxies while visiting a friend in DC once. For the most part, the closest I’ve come to that sort of thing is tooling around in Second Life. But there’s no question that some interesting things are going on in the gaming world. I recently discovered, for instance, that there is a talk show called This Spartan Life that happens within the game space of Halo 2, and the folks who run it were profiled on Studio 360 this weekend (Kurt Andersen even entered the game space). What a weird/crazy/fascinating idea. Chris Burke, who hosts the show through his avatar Damion Lacedaemion, is actually a guy who games with his kids. It’s pretty amazing that while he’s interviewing folks like Malcolm McLaren, the world is going to hell around them and other players are shooting at them. I guess it’s some sort of statement on art after 9/11, eh?

II.
While putting together a MySpace page for my current place of employment, Subterranean Books, I decided to set up a page for myself--just to give the store another friend (ha!). What a total time suck it is. Goodness. But I’m always looking for new friends, so here’s the page if you’re interested.

Run through the Lathe

2007-09-14T12:16:00.000-05:00

I like Ursula K. Le Guin. She’s smart and thoughtful. She challenges western ideology, gender politics, and the role of the hero in her novels. To her great credit, she also made it okay for women to read, write, and enjoy science fiction. She’s a bigwig on the sf literary landscape with an interesting pedigree. Her father was the anthropologist who wrote the book on Ishi that probably inspired George Stewart to write his book about Ish. David Pringle includes two of her most influential novels on the 100 list (The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed), but he left off The Lathe of Heaven, which is just as good as those two.

Le Guin sees TLOH as a Taoist novel. The main character, George Orr, has the power to control reality through his dreams, but he is beholden to his unconscious to control that control, so to speak. He ends up being forced into “voluntary” therapy with Dr. William Haber, a dream specialist. Haber wants to be a de facto benevolent fascist. He tries to manipulate Orr’s power for the better: an end to war, racism, overpopulation, and environmental degradation. Along the way, he throws in some personal perks too--like a sweet dream institute with a swank office. But Papa Haber deserves the best for all his hard work, no? Anyway, Orr is a Taoist hero to Le Guin. He lets purpose unfold and accepts what he cannot change. Haber, on the other hand, is the Taoist antagonist: aggressive, manipulative, impatient.

In the late 70s, PBS wanted to adapt one of Le Guin’s novels for television. She was shocked when they chose TLOH for their source material because in the novel “nothing happens.” With a miniscule $250,000 budget (this is post-Star Wars remember), the end result is generally considered one of the greatest science fiction films ever made. Shown on various PBS stations until 1988, when the broadcast rights expired, the film was shelved in limbo. No one could afford the rights because of a costly licensing issue with the film’s use of the Beatles song “With A Little Help from My Friends.” PBS, in particular, gave up hope and lost track of/destroyed/dropped into a black hole the original copies of the print in their archives. But, as often happens, enter fandom.

According to WNET, the original producer of the film, The Lathe of Heaven became the most requested PBS production for viewing in PBS history. (Too bad they couldn’t show it or give it out, eh?) Well, the overwhelming call for the film caused someone to come up with a brilliant idea: switch a cover version of the Beatles’ song out with the original. But wait. There still wasn’t a copy of the film around. Luckily, some loving fan had kept a VHS copy taped from television. Now here we are in 2007 and the film is available again, and on DVD no less. The quality is actually pretty good for a VHS transfer, but the cover version of the song is only so-so. Like many great sf films, it’s flawed. But it is also recommended viewing.

Epilogue: Circuitous Cuckoo

2007-09-01T18:23:00.001-05:00

The Midwich Cuckoos came out in 1957 and was quickly adapted to film. In 1960, Village of the Damned was released. The film’s eerie, sinister blond children reappeared in two more films and have influenced everything from the Simpsons to pop music and comic books. The X-Men series, for instance, features the Stepford Cuckoos, created by Grant Morrison (the occult-loving crazy man who breaks new ground with every comic he writes). The SC is a group of (originally) five mutant sisters who mirror both The Stepford Wives and the creepy children from Village of the Damned.

#24 The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham

2007-09-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

“No other evidence has been produced to suggest that on that Monday, until late in the evening, Midwich was anything but normal.”

“Naturally, in America [alien invasions are] all rather bigger and better. Something descends and something comes out of it. Within ten minutes, owing no doubt to the excellent communications in that country, there is a coast-to-coast panic and all highways out of all cities are crammed by the fleeing populace--except in Washington. There, by contrast, enormous crowds stretching as far as the eye can reach stand grave and silent, white-faced but trusting, with their eyes upon the White House, while somewhere in the Catskills a hitherto ignored professor and his daughter with their rugged young assistant strive like demented midwives to assist the birth of the dea ex laboratoria which will save the world at the last moment, minus one”
--Gordon Zellaby

“If you wish to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does…”
--Gordon Zellaby

I saw my first cuckoo (a Yellow-billed Cuckoo to be exact) at Magee Marsh several years back during a birding trip my wife and I took to northwestern Ohio. It was beautiful, and I have objective proof--the Mennonite family behind me said so. Now cuckoos are normally known for two things: brood parasitism and clocks. The two don’t really have a lot to do with one another, except that the cuckoo sound of a cuckoo clock mimics the voice of a European Cuckoo, and it’s the European Cuckoo that is the notorious parasite that inspired John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos. These common cuckoos of the old world lay their eggs in nests of other birds. Usually, the cuckoo eggs hatch first, the young birds develop quickly, and they kick the other, more proper eggs out of the nest. My beautiful cuckoo of North America isn’t much for parasitism though. Well, okay, it does drop her eggs off in another nest occasionally, but it’s usually just a Black-billed Cuckoo’s nest, and they’re kind of like family, right?

Wyndham’s cuckoo novel begins much like a “cosy catastrophe,” such as his other book on David Pringle’s list of the 100 best science fiction novels, while also being very much a Fortean event. One evening, everyone in the small English town of Midwich just collapses, and anyone or anything that comes within a certain range of the town does the same--an event Midwichers come to refer to as the “Dayout.” In the midst of all this passing out is a large, shiny object that one may confidently assume is an alien spacecraft, though that’s never explicitly said. However, before you know it, the object is gone and everyone wakes up. They’re all okay. Hurrah! What was the big fuss?

Nine months later sixty big fusses arrive. All the women of childbearing age--including singles, widows, and the virginal--mysteriously became pregnant during the Dayout and they all have their children at the same time. Now, as you could probably guess, these children aren’t normal. Thirty boys and thirty girls that are almost identical: golden, piercing eyes; pensive dispositions; and matching kerchiefs. (I made the last one up.) Wyndham knew children were terrors, like a lot of other sf writers from the time did. Ray Bradbury, in particular, wrote some of the best children-as-pure-evil tales I’ve ever read (try “The Veldt” if you don’t believe me). But I digress. So Wyndham’s children possess strange powers that no terrible child I know has. First, they are emergent. All the boys form, from their smaller, individual intelligences, one great intelligence, and the girls the same--like an ant colony or a computer system. Teach any one of the boys something, and they all know it. They also physically age more quickly than normal humans. Nine years after birth, they look like teenagers. Teenagers with golden eyes and matching kerchiefs no less! And they appear to have strong telepathic abilities.

After two suspicious murders happen in the town, the Children (referred to in the capital “C” sense throughout much of the novel) quickly run into trouble. Most of the men in town were secretly emasculated by the whole situation of the Children to begin with. They knew they couldn’t have all gotten the ladies knocked up on the same day, and these kids certainly don’t look anything like them. They’re not stupid enough to think they are the Children’s **real** fathers. Now the kids are murdering…that’s the last straw. But not so fast, says Wyndham. What right is there to wipe out a new species? Well, apparently, a lot. See there were other groups like the Midwich cuckoo bunch. One in Australia, one in Siberia, and one in an Inuit community. They all knew what the Midwichers are only starting to find out: these children represent an evolutionary leap; they signal the end of the species. Or do they? Read the freakin’ book to find out.

There’s a lot going on in the novel. On the one hand, it’s the story of the generation gap--a serious growing pain in the west during the 1950s. But it’s also a cold war story: paranoia about a mass of conformists (communists) corroding individuality and civilization from within. It’s also a novel about evolution and its ill effects. Is it survival of the fittest or survival of the ruthlessly violent

Availability:
Easy to get used or at a library. The only edition currently in print in the US is an illustrated abridged version for children, however.

A Far-Away Legacy

2007-08-31T11:39:00.000-05:00

I have mixed feelings about Star Wars. On the one hand, one of my earliest memories was standing outside of a movie theater in Michigan City with my dad, mom, and two brothers, waiting to get in to see the original film. I’ve been a space geek ever since that day, so much so that my parents had to coax me into seeing the first Indiana Jones film by telling me that Han Solo was the star. Lucky for me they did, because I loved that film too. However, Star Wars ruined sf filmmaking. Small, thoughtful sf films like The Man Who Fell to Earth were the hallmark of 70s cinema until SW came along. Now genre films tend to be large, lights-and-explosions affairs with little content or thoughtfulness, even when their source material is a metaphor-laced story by Philip K. Dick or Brian Aldiss. But I also must admit that SW’s place in pop culture is one of the few things that tugs at my thin feelings of nostalgia, and I still get chills from the opening sequence from the series. What a sucker, eh?

A Simple Plan

2007-08-23T21:54:00.000-05:00

I know I don’t live in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or one of the other top cycling communities in the United States, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have certain expectations for St. Louis...like good bike parking. St. Louis' bike parking situation sucks! A rack in back by the dumpster at a box store or a dish drainer outside a shopping strip or a nice rack along a busy multi-lane road with no shoulder that few bicyclists would be caught dead (literally) riding along ain’t doing it for me or the community. So if I’m going to dream, I might as well dream big.

Suggestion 1: Secure parking

In California and Oregon they have these handy, secure metal boxes that store your bike for a small fee. Mostly they're located near public transportation stops. I could see them working in downtown St. Louis near Washington, at the Clayton Metro Center, and where the crappy, abandoned auto shop now stands on Delmar. The following video illustrates. Please ignore the early focus on New York.

Suggestion 2: Take away car parking

Bicycles take up a lot less room than cars. One and a half car spaces, according to a plan Portland now uses, equal enough room for thirteen bike racks. So take a couple of car spaces out and put in some darn bike racks! Something this *radical* would surely work on Delmar. There are too many cars on the street as it is. Delmar needs to be more pedestrian and bicycle friendly, and it needs to become less conducive to auto traffic. A perfect spot for the type of design in the following video would be where the curb juts in/out near Meshuggah. Taking one or two spots away from cars there would hardly affect traffic flow (unfortunately), and it would create a place to park all those bikes that currently litter the parking meters and trees along the street without affecting pedestrian life. It would also get Mr. Patterson to write a nice blog post about how St. Louis did something right for once.

#23: The Door Into Summer (1957) by Robert A. Heinlein

2007-08-16T10:15:00.000-05:00

“I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior beauties of the past could have been with me--dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs--I had become used to a better way of living and 1970 was a series of petty frustrations until I got the hang of it again.”

“You can’t do much if you do time travel. As Fort said, you railroad only when it comes time to railroad.”

Robert Heinlein begins The Door Into Summer with a noir setup. Daniel Boone Davis is on a drinking binge, and his only friend is the surprisingly loquacious Petronius the Arbiter, or “Pete,” his pet cat and moral consciousness. Davis has just been swindled out the company he founded, Hired Girl, Inc., by his war buddy and business partner Miles Gentry and Davis’ fiancée, a noir vixen named Belle Darkin. Hired Girl makes robots that do house chores, and Davis was too deep into developing the greatest robotic service device ever, Flexible Frank, to notice that Belle was cozying up to Miles and plotting against Davis with the aid of her “prenuptial gift”--enough shares in Hired Girl to vote with Miles against Davis’ wishes. Next thing you know, Davis is thrown out of the company with nothing more than a few shares. He was too naïve to even patent Flexible Frank, which is the now the property of the company. Davis decides to turn to a get-rich-quick scheme called “Cold Sleep.”

“Cold Sleep” is a commercially available suspended animation procedure. It was first developed in the 60s (the current year is 1970) for mass troop mobilization during America’s successful “Six-Week War” with the Communists. Now folks use it as an investment accelerator. Buy some stocks at age 30, go to sleep for 30 years, wake up at age 30 with an overnight 30-year return on your investment.

However, when Davis awakens in the year 2000, he finds himself penniless instead. But no worries. Davis is a Heinleinian hero after all. Step one, grab boot strings with both hands. Step two, pull. With Miles and Belle long gone from the company, Davis gets hired back on with Hired Girl as a promotional figure--company-father-returns-to-see-the-fruits-of-his-labor type-of-thing. Between photo shoots, he spends his free time catching up on the latest engineering, plotting revenge, and looking for…now did I say that Pete was the only friend Davis had. That isn’t entirely true. See, Davis also had a very close relationship with Miles’ 11-year-old stepdaughter Ricky “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” Heinicke. But Davis has had trouble over this girl for a long time. She was much like an adult at 11, but of course she was way too young for him. Which is why he allowed himself to fall for Belle in the first place. In 2000, she’d be 41 and perhaps too old for him. But he looks for her anyway. However, it turns out she took the sleep too. My, oh, my, what is a man to do? You’ll just have to find out for yourself.

But that’s only the first half of the story. Things really get cooking when Davis finds out about the very real possibilities of time travel. And before you know it, he’s hooking up with nudist lawyers, smuggling gold, and returning to the scene of a crime he’s already been at. Many people would call that last one a time paradox, but it’s not a problem for Heinlein. He didn’t believe in them. If God created a physical universe that allows for two of the same person to be in the same place at the same time, it’s just nature.

Availability:
Like most of Heinlein's best known work, The Door Into Summer is widely available new, used, and at libraries.

Sex, Violence, and Politics: A Sketchy Profile of Robert Anson Heinlein

2007-08-14T15:16:00.000-05:00

A more thorough investigation of Robert A. Heinlein than what follows can be found elsewhere, even Wikipedia. I’d suggest, for instance, the chapter “How SF Defused the Bomb” in The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of by Thomas Disch (available for purchase at my place of work, Subterranean Books), the entry on Heinlein in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (ridiculously out of print), and Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction by Marxist critic H. Bruce Franklin (unnecessarily out of print, but a limited number of copies are available from Franklin direct). Nonetheless, I’d like to say a couple of things about the old boy. First, he was born and raised in Missouri, and that should be a source of pride for us Missourians. Heinlein defined American science fiction in the 50s and 60s. Say what you want about Asimov, but there was not a more influential sf writer in America during that period. Partly that had to do with Heinlein’s unique ability to square pulpy, fast-paced dialogue and narration with hard science. The sensitive man with a slide ruler who can kick some butt while dressed in patriotism is a character no one but Heinlein would have thought to write. And his characters are a reflection of his seemingly contradictory political views. On the one hand, Heinlein was a strong supporter of the military. He himself spent time in the navy before being discharged due to pulmonary tuberculosis. On the other hand, a novel like Stranger in a Strange Land (also available at Subby) was a literary gateway to the counterculture of the late 60s--a rather anti-military movement. (Though he claimed otherwise later in life, Heinlein was also, for a time, a member of Upton Sinclair's Socialist EPIC movement.) Mostly this was because of the recurring theme of sexual liberation in Heinlein’s work: nudism, sex changes, and cross-generational dating. Rarely does a character make it through to the end of one of his novels without taking his or her clothes off and bedding a fellow Heinleinian construct. Heinlein himself was married three times, though he remained with his third wife, Virginia, until his death forty years after they first married. He’s often lauded as a Libertarian hero, but perhaps he’d be better described as a right-wing anarchist. He certainly wouldn’t have been mates with the Neo-Cons of today’s politics. I find his writing damned infuriating and outrageous, but way too entertaining to put down. What can I say? He's a Grand Master.

An Anniversary of Sorts

2007-08-12T13:05:00.000-05:00

I like numbers that are divisible by five for some reason. I spent five years in undergraduate, my wife and I married five years from our first date, and five years ago this month I sold my car for good to my friend Kristopher. My wife and I have been a car-lite family, and I’ve been a dedicated public transportation rider, ever since. For the bulk of those five years, I occasionally took a spin on my decades-old, left-over-from-my-high-school-days 10-speed bike. But all that changed back in the spring when I upgraded to a hybrid and started adding bike commutes, quick runs to the grocery store and library by bike, and so on. I’ve lost 15 lbs in that time (also divisible by five) and have started a deep love affair with my Giant bicycle. This is all just to say that if a once car-loving, fast-food-eating, devout sf geek can cut down the use of a car to just a couple of times a month, anyone can. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. But technology is an instrument that can be used for good or bad, and we’ve made four-wheel, high-powered transportation into an insane energy whore. A bicycle is still the most efficient form of transportation, and I love efficiency.

Star Wars: Making You Dumber Than You Need to Be

2007-08-09T06:30:00.000-05:00

FYI: Gene Siskel saw Jedi at the same Michigan City movie theater I saw all three films at when I was a kid.

#22: The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. Clarke

2007-08-06T21:28:00.000-05:00

“Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now Time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert’s face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. The long winter nights might dust the desert with frost, as the last moisture left in the thin air of Earth congealed--but the city knew neither heat nor cold. It had no contact with the outer world; it was a universe itself.”

“He was always wanting to go outside, both in reality and in dream. Yet to everyone in Diaspar, ‘outside’ was a nightmare that they could not face. They would never talk about it if it could be avoided; it was something unclean and evil.”

Alvin is a boy who wants more than life currently has to offer him. He lives on Earth a billion years from now, and everything around him is desert. He lives in Diaspar, a walled-in city that's the last on the planet, and the people of Diaspar are agoraphobic to the point of not even being able to look over the city walls at what lies beyond. A long time in the past, humans traveled the galaxy, but then they ran foul of an aggressively expanding civilization called “the Invaders.” Violence ensued; many human lives were lost. Humans and Invaders eventually made a pact. If humans stay on Earth and never travel the stars again, the Invaders won’t wipe them out. Or at least, this is the story the people of Diaspar have been told for millions of years…

Diaspar is kind of like a sophisticated Second Life. A central computer maintains everything in and about the city. The computer controls the rise and fall of the urban landscape, as well as the memories and essences of people. Folks aren’t born, they’re created…over and over. When reborn, the new you comes out bellybuttonless and fully formed, and after about twenty years, your old memories return too--with a little editing. Objects can be gained through thought alone. I want a beer…(poof)…there it is. People go around through a kind of Second-Life avatar. Large gatherings, for instance, usually include no physical beings; Alvin has rarely been in the physical company of his “parents,” who are more like assigned guardians. And kids play virtual reality games that are fantasy quests that reinforce the status quo (“don’t leave the city”).

Alvin has had enough; he wants to know what’s outside Diaspar. In particular, he wants to see the stars. And an odd fellow named Khedron the Jester befriends him in this quest. Khedron is an element of chaos planted in society by the central computer (or rather the designers/programmers of the central computer). The thought is that utopia without crime is too much of a bore; a little chaos does a society good. Khedron helps Alvin find a way out of the city because it will shake things up. Lucky for Alvin and unknown by any other Diaspar resident, an ancient tram system exists underground. It's in bad shape, but it can still make it to one destination…a place called Lys. Alvin takes a free ride.

Lys turns out to be another human settlement, but one quite different from Diaspar: rural and resistant to the technologies of Diaspar. People in Lys are born and die naturally, and they want nothing to do with Diaspar and its unnatural ways. Lys residents have their own irrational fears, thank you. Once Alvin finds Lys, his journey truly begins.

Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars has a fantasy element--the hero’s quest--that separates it from the rest of his (hard-science) work. But the investigation of the unknown and the Clarke paradox (a belief in the power of science to make human life better while simultaneously looking to a higher intelligence--but not a god--to help usher human progress along) are as present here as in his other writing. And fantasy notwithstanding, Clarke’s intention in the novel is clear. Humans are bettered through science and questioning. In this way, Alvin is as Clarkean as one can get, and the novel is in good science-fiction company.

Availability:
Like many good sf novels, The City and the Stars is not widely available in an in-print edition. However, the St. Louis City and County libraries both have a copy.

#21: The Death of Grass (US: No Blade of Grass) (1956) by John Christopher

2007-06-26T21:43:00.000-05:00

People where I live (Southwest St. Louis City) go a little crazy over grass. We have a neighbor, for instance, who--I swear to you--trims every so often with a pair of scissors and a ruler. That’s a bit extreme considering it’s just zoysia. Now zoysia originates in Asia, and…

British novelist John Christopher (nee Christopher Samuel Youd) (b. 1922) sets the scene of another British disaster novel (a la John Wyndham) in The Death of Grass, but departs greatly from Wyndham in execution. After a brief prologue about two brothers, John and David, the novel begins a few years after the nasty “Chung-Li virus” has ravaged the rice fields of Asia--most heavily in China. Western and British reaction is typically racist: these “Asiatics” don’t know how to handle emergencies and govern themselves, so naturally all shit breaks loose when the staple of their diet disappears. Of course, the noble Brits wouldn’t react in such way. No, according to Christopher, they’d be much worse.

The virus, as you could guess, quickly moves to the West, and it jumps from just rice to almost every type of vegetation out there, most visibly grass. Whole areas become dirt deserts, and citizens quickly begin to panic. Enter the two boys from the prologue. John is now urbane, a family man who works as an engineer in London. David, on the other hand, followed in the footsteps of the boys’ grandfather and became a farmer. David is hold up on the farm growing potatoes. John is trying to flee with his family and hangers on to the safety of David’s farm. And it’s here that Christopher writes a very different book from the average “cosy catastrophe.”

In a Wyndhamian world, white, middle-class folks like John will ensure that civilization will be reborn from the clean slate of disaster, and that it will be truly civil. Christopher’s world is much nastier. Rape, theft, misdistributed arms, ruthlessness, and the legacy of corrupt governments ensure that things won’t go so well in the post-crisis world of the future. Men and women are killed for canned foodstuffs and blankets. Towns form posses that strip refugees bare and leave them for dead. Women are chattel. Traumatized children are eligible for marriage. Families come to gunshots over a sliver of land. And individuals truly change. John, for instance, who was selected “leader” of a band of London refugees by a coin toss, hardens more and more as the novel progresses, all the while promising his wife that he’ll change back to his old self once they “settle down” at his brother’s farm. But it’s hard to wash all the dirt and blood off before relaxing in a rocker near the fire in a quiet country setting.

#20: The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester

2007-05-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

“This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice…but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks…but nobody loved it.”

The Stars My Destination is generally considered the sf The Count of Monte Cristo. The main character, Gully Foyle, is a directionless sailor who spends time in prison and escapes with the help of a fellow inmate, with riches near on the horizon. Not too unlike Edmond Dantes. Foyle is also driven by revenge. While left trapped on the merchant starship "Nomad" at the beginning of the novel, Foyle signals for help from a passing vessel, "Vorga." But "Vorga" leaves him to die, and Foyle finds something to live for…revenge. Foyle’s escapades accelerate from there. He spends time with a tribal group living on an asteroid, plans a terrorist bombing, takes on the identity of an upperclass dandy, and even trades in those dreaded weapons of mass destruction. Literarily pulpy, this novel is perhaps Bester at his best.

Last time we left Alfred Bester, he was writing about the skills of the mind. And so TSMD begins. The landscape of human civilization was radically changed years in the past by a skill called jaunting. To jaunte is to travel from one point to another instantly, purely by thought. The ability was first discovered by Charles Fort Jaunte, and many of the early practitioners died while attempting it. But once the general populace gained the skill, all shit broke loose. The poor began jaunting out of slums, thieves jaunted into anything they could, the ruling class turned to sexual Puritanism, and security lost its meaning. By Foyle’s time, civilization has come to a relative calm again. But things are strange. For instance, the rich show their wealth by not jaunting—resorting to expensive bicycles before doing something so beneath them. The rich also keep their daughters locked in blind rooms that ensure no contact with the outside world. Purity. Virginity. Fascinating stuff.

Bester also takes a page from Golding and describes a tribal group of humans. Gully’s first stop on his revenge trip is an asteroid inhabited by the descendents of a stranded scientific research team. Calling themselves the “Scientific People,” they speak an odd dialect, tattoo themselves with elaborate Maori masks, and line the interior of the asteroid with parts scavenged from abandoned, wreaked, and lost space vessels. Foyle makes more than one visit to this strange asteroid during the course of the novel, and his sense of what these people are changes with every visit. Bester also describes a group of neo-Skoptsy. And they’re frightening. Instead of just settling for castration like their Russian cousins, these Skoptsy sever their central nervous system in a belief that sensation itself is the root of all evil. They spend the rest of their lives living in eternally dark catacombs on Mars, never again seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. Gully Foyle calls them “the living dead.”

In the end, Bester seems to be looking towards the next stage in humanity in TSMD. Beyond rocketships and moon dreams, what does it really mean to have the stars as a destination. Gully Foyle finds out.

Poor Me

2007-05-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

I set out to read a book a week on this project. It went well until I wanted to…I don’t know…read anything else, see a movie, get some sleep, make dinner, work in the yard, go for a bike ride, travel, etc. It’s looking like one a month is more reasonable for the foreseeable future. I hope to bump that up to two. Track me. I dare you!

#19: The Inheritors (1955) by William Golding

2007-04-11T17:48:00.000-05:00

“We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this…seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature.”
--H.G. Wells, Outline of History

“[The Inheritors] could not possibly have been written were it not for the discoveries of palaeoanthropology, the study of Stone Age humanity through bones and tools it has left behind. The perspective which The Inheritors imaginatively exploits is the dark backward and abysm of time, as it has been revealed to us by one branch of modern science.”
--David Pringle

There’s little more frustrating to me than being forced to slog through--instead of devouring or cherishing---a novel because of external forces: work, family, sleep, looming library fines. I started The Inheritors no less than four times, and after repeated renewals at the library, I was forced to read it in only two sittings. A shame really. Though short, the novel is deliberately paced, thoughtful, and thought provoking. It’s meant to stay with you, the literary peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth--delicious, yet troublesome. Alas, while I did finish the book, it was not my finest hour as a reader.

Sir William Gerald Golding (1911-1993) is not known as a sf writer, and this novel is rarely, if ever, billed as a piece of science fiction (it’s definitely a speculative fiction book, however!). But that’s the way Pringle wants it to be known. And in terms of this list, what Pringle wants Pringle gets. And why shouldn’t he? As per the quote above, the novel, as any good sf novel does, stems from scientific knowledge and exploration. It’s a book about the last days of the Neanderthals for goodness sake. And as Arthur Clarke sees it, progress and science run from the bone in the hand of primitive man to the starship in the sky.

***here be spoilers***
The narrative is simple. A small group of Neanderthals returns to their seasonal cave to find their world adjusted. The log they use as a bridge to cross the river is gone and food is unusually difficult to procure. Quickly they realize there are others in the area. Beings both familiar and utterly foreign. Members of the clan begin to disappear (i.e., are murdered). Soon after, their leader dies from an illness, and all that is left is a male and female pair, Lok and Fa. They track down these others in hopes of finding their young one, Liku, and discover that these others are the inheritors of the Earth. They’re homo sapiens.

Lok isn’t particularly bright, and he’s not cut out for leadership. Fa is naïve. The two of them, as is to be expected from the naturally peaceful, childlike Neanderthals (if we are to believe Golding), can’t quite conceive of what’s going on. Why would the others kill? Why do they wear the skins of animals? How do they ride in logs (canoes)? Particularly perplexing to the pair is the matriarchal-animistic religious rites of the others. Anyway, I’m sure you see where this is going, yes? In the end, only one is left. One to cry in frustration over what is no more and to watch helplessly (the Neanderthals can’t even cross the river because of their fears) as the species dies out and the rule of the inheritors begins. Though I must say, for all their superior intelligence, the homo sapiens are equally perplexed by the Neanderthals. The real reason for the slaughter…they feared the Neanderthals were devils.
***end spoilers***

The Inheritors is Golding’s second novel. His first is the beloved Lord of the Flies, and there are certainly some thematic similarities between the two: clan identity, ruthless humanity, and the corrupting nature of power and leadership. Golding’s version of the world is pitiful. The hungry aren’t filled. The meek don’t inherit the Earth. And the merciful find only mercilessness.

#18: The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh Brackett

2007-02-27T22:36:00.000-06:00

“No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.”--13th Amendment of the US Constitution

“There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing suicide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called rationalizing, and it’s done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.”

“There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance. A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance.”--Rush, “Free Will”

Two generations in the past, an all-out nuclear war ruined the cities of the world and led to the question of whether technology and scientific knowledge are worthwhile pursuits. The new ruling class of America, the agrarian New Mennonites, said no. Machines, electric power, atomic energy all come from the same source--evil. The New Mennonites enacted the 13th Amendment, a de facto ban on cities and progress. Civilization now stands still in the middle of a wheat field.

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) is best known for her career as a Hollywood screenwriter. Among other works, she penned, at least in part, two great Raymond Chandler adaptations: The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. And she also cowrote a little sci-fi picture known as The Empire Strikes Back. Many of her novels and short stories were seen as pulp, which isn’t accurate, at least in the case of The Long Tomorrow, a novel that is decidedly literary.

The narrative follows two young New Mennonite boys, cousins Esau and Len Colter. They live a small community called Piper’s Run. But they long for more. They desire a place where ideas are freely exchanged and machines aid human civilization. The main catalyst for these desires is the boys’ grandmother, who tearfully recalls her childhood days when planes filled the air, cars and busses crowded the streets, and folks had leisure and luxury. After witnessing the horrific stoning of an outsider thought to be from the mythical “Bartorstown” (perhaps the last city) and coming to realize the limits of New Mennonite living, the boys set off to find this last refuge of human progress.

However, Bartorstown may not exist. Or it may not be what they think it is. If it’s out there, it’s somehow connected to a traveling trader named Mr. Hostetter. And the journey contains many obstacles: lust, jealousy, ignorance, and fanaticism. The West, for instance, has wandering bands of New Ishmaelites, a group that renounces all possessions and who frequently and randomly rise up violently against the followers of the flesh (i.e., everyone who isn’t a New Ishmaelite) when called by God in a moment of religious ecstasy. And in the end, the boys must decide which is more frightening, the monster closely regarded in its cage or the monster pushed to the fringe of society and ignored. And just what is this monster anyway?

#17: The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov

2007-02-18T20:33:00.000-06:00

“He loved a complex of factors; her choice of clothes, her walk, her manner of speech, her tricks of expression. A quarter century of life and experience in a given Reality had gone into the manufacture of all that. She had not been his Noys in the previous Reality of a physioyear earlier. She would not be his Noys in the next Reality.”

The Eternity in the title doesn’t refer to time directly, but rather an organization that acts as the Platonic overseers of the course of human existence. This Eternity exists outside of the timestream and is a stratified, bureaucratic organization. At the top are “Computers,” the deciders as Bush would say. They use the other kind of computer (called a “Computaplex”) to plan changes in human existence (“Reality Changes”), and those changes are executed by Technicians, the bastardized workforce of Eternity. These changes are often slight--a jammed clutch here, a stolen notepad there. Ideally, Eternity uses the M.N.C. (“minimum necessary change”) that will cause the M.D.R. (“maximum desired response”) to human history. The end goal is a society without war, without crime, and without space travel.

Okay, a couple of things about Eternity. One, it’s a rather bland outfit. It’s essentially a boy’s club housed in a clean, grey, metal atmosphere--no women. Throw data in a computer, check a chart, get a response, ride the timewave, make the change, back home again. Two, the outfit was originally a wholly commercial enterprise. Eternity bought goods in surplus in one century and turned around and sold them to centuries of need. They got into the reality change game much later. Third, they ride through time in “kettles,” and the trips involve no perceived movement--like a carnival ride that never starts because the carny’s too wasted to pull the lever. And finally, I can’t stress enough, THERE’S NO WOMEN! One can only assume the sexual frustration going on in the workplace, and we all know how successful and efficient an organization run solely by men is.

The main character is a dedicated fellow named Technician Andrew Harlan. He’s the pet boy of one of the big wig Computers, a chap named Twissell. Harlan is obsessed with “Primitive History,” which is basically anything before the 27th century. Eternity didn’t exist before the 27th, and there’s no way of traveling back before the moment of Eternity’s creation. So Harlan satiates his Primitive appetite with an odd assortment of leftover goodies: a stack of newspapers from the early 20th century, a beaten copy of works by H.G. Wells, and some writings by the mysterious W. Shakespeare. Twissell sets Harlan up as the mentor to Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, who (**here be spoilers**) is going to go back and teach the creator of Eternity, the almighty Mallansohn, how to create Eternity. Did you catch that? Eternity is created by Eternity. But before that can happen, Harlan falls for a real woman, Lambent Noys, and the whole thing becomes jeopardized by lust. (**end spoilers**).

I will be the first to admit that I’m not a huge, huge fan of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), and neither is David Pringle. Pringle says in his entry on End of Eternity that Asimov is the Agatha Christie of sf, but that he’d just rather read Christie if given the choice. He includes EOE in his 100 list because a) Asimov is too big of figure not to include and b) EOE is straight sf (not a mystery, and not a galactic retelling of Gibbon--Pringle’s idea, not mine--as The Foundation Trilogy). I’m glad to say that Pringle is a little harsh in this instance. Sure Asimov has some crazy prose (re: Noys’ appearance, “Isn’t she built like a force-field latrine?” huh???), and characters keep saying things like “Great Time!” But Asimov makes an interesting statement in this novel. Basically, he says that the bland--passivity legislated paternalistically by a bunch of guys who don’t have girlfriends and ride around time in kettles--will kill humanity. We need the danger of the unknown and the possibilities of an uncharted future to keep us alive.

Handmade Star Wars

2007-01-30T18:03:00.000-06:00

#16: A Mirror for Observers (1954) by Edgar Pangborn

2007-01-30T17:10:00.000-06:00

“He wallowed in Mark Twain and Melville; I knew he was startled by Dostoevski, and amused by the thin wind of fallacy that blew through the unsanitary beard of Marx.”

“Do you think Christ could live any longer in the twentieth century than he did two thousand years ago? Galileo recants again, Socrates drinks the hemlock again, every day of every year.”

Quite the opposite of Hal Clement’s writing, Edgar Pangborn’s (1909-1976) writing comfortably fits within the soft or social sf camp. A painter and composer in addition to being a writer, Pangborn is relatively forgotten now. However, before his literary devotee Ursula K. Le Guin was churning out novels lacing scientific exploration with emotion, he was paving the way for the New Wave. His work is decidedly literary, slow moving, and filled with grand ideas. A Mirror for Observers, for instance, is no less than the chronicling of social shepherds fighting genocidal mania. Yikes!

The novel is basically comprised of two sections, both collections of missives written by a Martian named Elmis who is living among humans and battling another Martian named Namir for control over the direction of Angelo Pontevecchio, a young genius living in a rough section of Latimer, MA. Martians (who refer to themselves as “Salvayans”) abandoned their planet 30,000 years ago when it became uninhabitable. Since then, they’ve acted as Observers of human culture and history here on Earth. That is until recently, when Namir and a group referred to as “Abdicators” broke away from the Observers. They’ve concluded that humans are nasty apes who might as well kill themselves off and allow the Salvayans to take control of the Earth’s surface. The Salvayans, by the way, have lived all these years in interconnected subterranean cities spread across the globe.

Elmis shows up as a boarder at young Angelo’s house. He’s had a little plastic surgery (to make him look human), and he’s going by the name Benedict Miles, a Canadian ex-pat working on a book. He introduces Angelo to the literature of ethics and the ideas of the beautiful life. Miles/Elmis is, among other things, a great lover a music, which leads him also to befriend a young piano prodigy named Sharon. But Angelo is confused, and he falls too often under the influence of a young punk and gang leader named Billy Kell (who happens to have a close relationship with…you guessed it, Namir the Abdicator). After a street war, Angelo disappears and Elmis spends years looking for him.

Part two. Angelo is a grown man who goes by the name “Abraham Brown.” He’s still under the influence of William “Billy” Kell. William is part of a neo-fascist group known as the Organic Unity Party. I don’t need to tell you that Namir is involved. There’s also a scientist working on pandemic-producing chemical warfare, a suicide, and a grown up Sharon bringing down the house with her piano recitals.

Pangborn grew up surrounded by writing. His mother, Georgia Wood Pangborn, was a successful writer of ghost stories. And while I was a little disturbed by Elmis’ relationship with Sharon and an overall strange description of children by Pangborn (“That March day was like a little girl fresh out of her bath, cool, sweet, ready for mischief.”), the novel is intensely thought provoking and another example that sf is a diverse form of literature and more than the picture drawn by detractors: base escapism meant for children, with no literary merit.

#15: Mission of Gravity (1954) by Hal Clement

2007-01-16T21:18:00.000-06:00

“I want to know why a fire glows, and why flame dust kills. I want my children or theirs, if I ever have any, to know what makes that radio work, and your tank, and some day this rocket. I want to know much--more than I can learn, no doubt.”

David Pringle once said that Hal Clement (Harry Clement Stubbs, 1922-2003) wrote as if he had a slide ruler next to the typewriter. Clement was one of the fathers of a subgenre in science fiction known as “hard sf,” and Mission of Gravity is usually considered one of the first novels of this type. Like any genre, subgenre, or the like, the meaning of what hard sf is creates debate. In my mind, sf is literature that has ideas for protagonists, and hard sf is sf storytelling where accurate scientific ideas play those roles. There’s no question in my mind that MG is a hard sf novel.

Clement is a world builder. His creation in MG is a large planet called Mesklin. Mesklin is shaped like a very wide but quite short top. And like a top, it spins quickly. A Mesklin day lasts about 18 minutes. The shape of the planet and the speed of its rotation also create variable gravity on the planet. At the equator, Mesklin’s gravity is about three times that of earth. At the poles, somewhere around 700 times. Before the novel begins, an important human research vessel crashes near one of the poles and human Charles Lackland has made contact and developed a limited relationship with a Mesklinite trader ship captain named Barlennan. Mesklinites look much like centipedes. They’re also instilled with a deep fear of falling (mere inches at the poles could be fatal).

Most of the novel follows the adventures of the Mesklinite crew as they journey from the “Rim” (equator) to the pole, in order to retrieve the information gathered by and stored in the earth research vessel. They’re guided, at first in person, later through instant communication, by Lackland. Barlennan and Lackland respect and trust each other, and because of it, the Mesklinites, who are rather primitive in some ways, ask for more and more human knowledge about the sciences.

Though he was also a painter (under the name “George Richard”), Clement was trained in science, and he spent most of his life as a high-school science teacher. Perhaps this explains why his dialogue and character development are wooden. Really, the narrative seems often to exist solely to give structure to Clement’s scientific points. But that’s not to say the novel isn’t enjoyable. In fact, the journey of these strange centipedes is oddly compelling, and I think Joseph Campbell would have been proud of Clement’s presentation of the hero’s journey. But as Peter Nicholls once said, the reader is introduced to these fantastic and believable creatures from another world, and then they open their mouths and “sound exactly like Calvin Coolidge.” Fascinating Calvin Coolidges though I must add.

#14: More Than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon

2007-01-02T23:37:00.000-06:00

“Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?”

Theodore Sturgeon (pen name of Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) imagines superman in More Than Human without cape, nice haircut, and cartoon ethics. Rather superman is the whole of a gestalt human made from mutant freaks with paranormal powers. The “head” of this homo gestalt--the future of humanity--is Lone, and his formation of the gestalt is the focus of the first section of MTH, which is a collection of three interconnected novellas. At the beginning of the novel, Lone is pitiful. He’s an “idiot” without language or social skills who uses strong telepathic powers to find food and shelter. But his life changes drastically when he’s taken in by a grieving farm couple. They put him to work, teach him how to speak, and provide for his needs. Eventually, Lone moves on with his life. He builds a shelter in the woods and takes in three refugees: a telekinetic girl and twin teleports. Together, they find the rest of their oneness: a super-computational baby and a street urchin.

Section two takes place after Lone has died. The gestalt reforms with a new “head,” though a particularly inexperienced and ethically questionable one. They go to live in the moneyed home of someone from Lone’s past. However, this living experiment ends in murder.

The final section revolves around the “normal” human Hip Barrows. Hip’s mind has been blasted into fragments for an unknown reason. The gestalt’s telekinetic, Janie, helps him to piece it back together. Meanwhile, the gestalt as a whole searches for a conscience.

Sturgeon’s strong suit has always been considered the short story format, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that his best-known and best-loved novel is actually a collection of three novellas. MTH is filled with pathos--starting with the pathetic idiot Lone struggling with basic existence and ending with a new lifeform painfully piecing together an identity and the will to do right. The book can be awfully dramatic and overwrought with emotion at time because of it. In particular, the third section features a love story that I found sour to the taste. But I also marveled at Sturgeon’s daring for the time. For instance, his new species is multiracial. The gestalt’s twin teleports are black, though to the rest of the gestalt they are just other parts of the whole. Sturgeon also has two non-mutant characters named Alicia and Evelyn Kew who blatantly reflect the attempts of 20th-century man to control, manipulate, and destroy female sexuality. They live in a de facto prison with their father as warden. Father Kew keeps them ignorant of the outside world (they’ve never seen or heard of an automobile), ignorant of their bodies (they’re forced to dress and bath in absolute darkness), and completely sheltered from human contact. Chilling.

#13: Ring Around the Sun (1953) by Clifford D. Simak

2006-12-20T11:14:00.000-06:00

“It had been the blade at first, the razor blade that would not wear out. And after that the lighter that never failed to light, that required no flints and never needed filling. Then the light bulb that would burn forever if it met no accident. Now it was the Forever car.”

Ring Around the Sun (1953) is a yarn about androids, parallel earths, mutants, and the death of capitalism. Now Clifford Donald Simak (1904-1988) wasn’t a socialist, but he was certainly a believer in some kind of sf agrarian populism--cornfields, barns, and robot labor. Simak grew up in rural Wisconsin, which would explain both his philosophy and the fact that most of his stories take place, at least in part, in rural Wisconsin. RATS is no exception.

Things start off simple enough. We see the day-to-day life of Jay Vickers, a Wisconsin native living the writer’s life in rural New York. Vickers lives alone, has a friendship with the odd old man on his street, and pines for a high-school sweetheart--straight out of a John Mellencamp song--who disappeared one day after a cinematic walk in the valley. Then things get a little Twilight Zoney. First, everlasting gadgets appear: razors that don’t need to be sharpened, light bulbs that never burn out, lighters that perpetually light. Then big ticket items: cars that run silently forever and houses that function solely on solar energy. World governments secretly fear a coup behind the appearance of these things, even more so when their makers start giving away free food substitutes. Vickers is mysteriously drawn into this milieu by a secret government agent.

Along the way, Vickers finds the door to the ring suggested in the title (a metaphor for a series of parallel earths that circle the Sun in separate timelines), and the key is a child’s top. The worlds are waiting, limitless and virgin expanses suited to cure humanity’s need for lebensraum. A genetically separate strand of humans with extraordinary abilities (“mutants”) have a population redistribution plan that involves these earths. They figure giving away cheap housing, everlasting goods, and free food will ruin Earth’s economy and cause a revolution (so the governments were right to be afraid!). The revolution will bring folks to these parallel earths (it’s complicated). Actually, folks are already waiting for something like this. There are rumors in the media about time travel, and many citizens spend their free time in Pretentionist clubs--groups that pretend to be living in a different time and place. For instance, one club lives like the world is as described in Pepys’ diary (perhaps they are called Pepys Peeps). Anyway, the mutant plan also happens to involve Vickers.

Growing up in a rural Midwestern town myself, I must confess that I sometimes have Simakian fantasies, though I’m not a true believer. Agrarian life is fine in Thomas Hart Benton paintings, but it can be a real bitch in reality. That’s not to take away from Simak’s work though. I find his concept of time interesting in particular. Time travel isn’t possible, rather there are unique timelines that can be traversed, in the case of RATS, by (paranormal?) mental capabilites. And I think his fantasy of elbow room would appeal to many, no? How often do we hear murmurs of overpopulation, overuse, and a human-caused environmental instability? And of course, city life can be a drag.

It hits better than I do

2006-12-14T18:58:00.000-06:00

#12: The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

2006-12-12T15:03:00.000-06:00

“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.”

“But--and here’s what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation--each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it’s simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest--three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.”

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919) and Cyril Kornbluth (1923-1958) first met back in the 30s as members of an influential group of sf fans in New York known as the Futurians (also in the group were Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and James Blish). The pair, which Thomas Disch referred to as “magnificent smart-alecks,” was unique. Kornbluth, for instance, was rumored to never brush--his teeth were literally green--and he drank black coffee not because he liked it but because writers were “supposed to.” The Space Merchants (originally serialized in Galaxy as “Gravy Planet”) was the first collaboration of many between Kornbluth and Pohl, though their partnership abruptly ended when Kornbluth died at the age of 34 from a heart attack.

I had always heard SM was a funny novel, a humorous take on Wall Street advertising agencies and corporate culture. While the humor is there, I fear readers don’t take Kornbluth and Pohl, who himself worked in advertising for a time, seriously enough. SM is deeply disturbing in its accurate, though metaphorical, depiction of a world handed over to marketing firms.

The narrator is Mitch Courtenay, a high-powered ad man in the dominate agency of the time. He’s given the task of marketing Venus to consumers in order to create a workforce that will strip the planet of its resources. Like all commercial goods and ideas in society, Venus’ true value to the consumer is not revealed through advertising; rather the planet is portrayed as an escape for the individual, a greener-grass community. In reality, Venus is barely inhabitable, and its future residents will live in industrial slums, work long hours, and garner very little pay. Mitch’s obstacles, however, are not the minds of the consumers. Rather, he fears two things. First, the competition. The world of SM is one in which corporations operate in a manner similar to the mafia. Hits are taken out on competing companies, a made man (i.e., executive) can only be offed by permission, etc. So will the Venus account be forcibly taken from him? Perhaps even by another executive from within his own firm? The other obstacle is the “Consies” (Conservationists). Consies believe environmental exploitation is wrong, and they act as a cell-based terrorist organization to stop it. Almost immediately, there are attempts on Mitch’s life.

Eventually, Mitch is given a taste of the consumer life when an enemy (internal office competitor? competing company official? the Consies?) switches his identity to that of a worker in a Costa Rica plant. This plant harvests a genetically manufactured, organic meat substitute known disgustingly as “Chicken Little.” Working in this plant is indentured servitude with all the trimmings: perpetually growing debt to the company, inflated charges for all services and goods (including bathroom time), malnutrition, and a dangerous work environment. But does this experience shake Mitch out of his well-fed corporate haze?

Pohl and Kornbluth’s world is fascinating: police are private agencies who have enforcement contracts with citizens, marriages come in varying degrees of contractual length, Congress represents corporations and not states, and the biggest celebrity in the US is a little person who’s the only human who’s actually been to Venus and who happens to be a womanizing drunk. Short marriages, ridiculous celebrities, corporate control of government, advertising that appeals to sex and death urges…no, it’s nothing like our world. Thank god it’s just science fiction.

Harryhausen Menagerie

2006-12-12T11:30:00.000-06:00

Classic

2006-12-08T11:21:00.000-06:00

Nothing's more sf than a bunch of South American kids (the Gauchos) playing the Iron Maiden classic "The Trooper."

#11: Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore

2006-11-29T23:01:00.000-06:00

“The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely--or mistakenly.”

One of the staples of the sf literary diet is the alternative history/alternative reality subgenre. Really, this type of storytelling has been around since the first person thought “what if blumpity blump happened instead of…,” which I imagine was a long time ago (what if Ung crushed Grok’s skull with a rock instead of Bron’s). In the modern age, there are two main events sf writers have tended to ask the what if question of--World War II and the Civil War. I would guess this is because both are often perceived to have been “won” by the “right” side. So wouldn’t it be scary if the bad guys came out on top for once. One of the defining novels of this subgenre is…wait for it…that’s right…Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee.

Joseph Ward Moore (1903-1978) was certainly not prolific, but because of Bring the Jubilee and his earlier novel Greener Than You Think, he’ll always have a place of honor in the field. BTJ is the story of Hodge Backmaker, a child of the 20s living in a world where the Confederacy won “The War of Southron Independence.” The United States is a backwater collection of 26 states barely surviving, while the Confederacy encompasses not only the southern part of our US, but also much of Central and South America. So while New York is a city of 1 million in the 1940s, with folks still driving horses and Brooklyn acting as a neighboring city, the real centers of industry and growth are St. Louis (finally we come out on top of Chicago!!!), Washington-Baltimore, and Leesburg (formerly known as Mexico City). The United States has also driven out all black folk, seen large anti-Asian (murdering) campaigns, and exists in a state in which most of its inhabitants live indentured to the few landed families left. The Confederacy, on the other hand, abolished slavery and has an open immigration policy. Along with Britain, which also rules British America (Canada), and the German Empire, which grew unfettered during the Emperor’s War (WWI), the Confederacy is a world superpower.

Now Hodge is a historian by profession, and since the great eastern schools in the United States are just hollow shells of learning, he joins an interesting commune in Pennsylvania known as Haggershaven. Haggershaven is an alternative to the university system. Scholars, researchers, intellectuals live together on a farm, sharing both chores and intellectual pursuits. Among these folks is the inventor of a time machine. What better device is there for a historian than a time machine? Well, the problem is…

I’m glad David Pringle made me sit down with this one; it would have sat on my “to read” shelf forever if not. And that would have been a shame. The novel is fascinating. Moore’s characters are either actors or spectators. Hodge is the latter. At times this is a saving attribute, other times not so much. While on the one hand he befriends an intellectual from Haiti named Enfandin, he also spends his early adulthood loyally working for a member of the Grand Army--an organization that plays a similar role in the alternate US that the Ku Klux Klan played in the real South after Reconstruction. And there are other fascinating aspects about this world: the 40s and 50s are almost like the 19th Century of our world, only with gadgets (almost steampunkish if you ask me); familiar figures take on new roles (Henry Adams is the author of Causes of American Decline and Decay); Freud seems not to have developed psychiatry, rather a fellow at Haggershaven is doing that work; and there’s a damn time machine, people!

#10: The Paradox Men (1953) by Charles L. Harness

2006-11-27T18:11:00.000-06:00

“He had not the faintest idea who he was.”

“If the man with the spear could have reasoned first and hurled second, his descendants might have reached the stars within a very few millennia.”

Charles Leonard Harness (1915-2005) was closer to being a true pulp writer than most of the folks on Pringle’s list, but he was also a major influence on many sf writers (particularly Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss), even if most fans have never heard of him or read his work. Writing was always a secondary pursuit in his life, regardless of whether that’s the way he wanted it to be or not. A native of Texas, he spent most of his adult life as a patent lawyer out East. He also, like a many sf writers from his generation, had a strong background in science, particularly chemistry, and one passion from his childhood was building his own radio from scrap parts. His writing style was schlock-y, but his science background came through in the end, as it does in The Paradox Men.

Harness always had more of a following in the UK than he did in the States, which has led to a sparse and uneven printing history for TPM. Its first form was a novella, and when it was expanded to book-length form, the title was Flight Into Yesterday. It wasn’t until a later revision and expansion that the book gained the title it is generally referred to by today.

The story itself is a bit of a mess: part swashbuckling adventure, part space opera, and part meditation on the paradoxes of Einsteinian physics and Toynbeean history. The main character is a forgetful fellow known as Alar who has taken up with a society of thieves rebelling against the repressive, slave-sanctioning imperial government of America in the 22nd Century. Alar, like all thieves, wears a protective shield that stops projectiles but not hand-held weapons. Thus, swordplay is in vogue and the best of the best have unusual weight in an otherwise gadget-filled society. An East-West war is on the verge, and a group of Toynbeean historians has built a spaceship they hope will help usher in the next Toynbee civilization, T-22 (also the original working title for Harness’ novella). A fascinating idea really considering Arnold Toynbee has next to no presence in history departments these days. But I digress.

At the heart of the narrative is a time paradox. This spaceship or one just like it crashes on Earth five years before it has been built. One of the passengers is Alar, who has no idea who he is and who exhibits superhuman powers. Gone missing during this same time period is Kennicot Muir, the founder of the thieves’ group. His wife, Keiris, is now a slave wife of mover-and-shaker Haze-Gaunt, who happens to keep as a pet a weird tarsier (also a survivor from the crash) that has the ability to speak but only the phrase “Don’t go! Don’t go!” Crazy enough for you? Well, there’s also a former circus freak named Meganet Mind who can answer any question, a major crash into the Sun, and an appearance by a Neanderthal.

Aldiss calls Harness’ work “Widescreen Baroque,” by which he means a story that transcends space opera and allows its characters to act in an unfettered manner. And while I won’t lie and say that The Paradox Men is my favorite novel of the first ten on David Pringle’s list, Aldiss’ description is true. You never know what’s going to happen on the next page.

#9: Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

2006-11-22T00:10:00.000-06:00

“There had been no warning when the great ships came pouring out of the unknown depths of space. Countless times this day had been described in fiction, but no one had really believed that it would ever come. Now it had dawned at last; the gleaming, silent shapes hanging over every land were the symbol of a science man could not hope to match for centuries.”

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (b. 1917) is one of the big guns of sf. He, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov are often referred to as “the Big Three.” British by birth, Sri Lankan by residency, he’s had a long and illustrious career. I personally think he's one of the most fascinating and brilliant sf writers ever, and there’s no question that he’s unique. Clarke has a background in physics and mathematics, and he served for a time in the RAF. He’s also an accomplished skin diver, and he’s been a featured commentator on science for sources worldwide. It’s no surprise then that his work is often thought of as part of the “hard science” subgenre of sf. But that’s not the whole story. Clarke’s work also shows a fascination with the spiritual and, in the case of Childhood’s End, the occult. (He’s even been a fan of Yuri Geller.) This all adds up to what Peter Nicholls has called “the Arthur C. Clarke Paradox”--a belief in the power of science to make human life better while simultaneously looking to a higher intelligence (but not a god) to help usher human progress along.

As I said before, Childhood’s End features Clarke’s intertwining of hard science and spiritualism, and it’s one of his best novels. The first section of the book takes place during the first years after a worldwide shock. An alien species nicknamed “the Overlords” arrives in gigantic spaceships that they park in the skies above all the major human settlements across the globe. (V and Independence Day copied this powerful image, but ACC was there first.) Despite the menacing image, the Overlords are on a peaceful mission, and they become caretakers of the planet and usher in a scientific and intellectual utopia, while simultaneously refusing to reveal their physical appearance. Then the shocker comes when they finally do--they look just like demons: wings, horns, and all. They even smell like brimstone.

The second section of the book details the utopia the Overlords have created: almost no crime, a leveling of classes and races, complete freedom of movement and access to information, a 20-hour workweek, and the elimination of mechanical and menial tasks. I have one word for it…SWEET! Granted, the rule of the Overlords has the smell of the British Empire (Clarke has lived in Sri Lanka as a rich, white ex-pat Brit since the mid-50s), and there are some serious restrictions in the society they create. Most severely, the Overlords allow no space travel for humans. Now that would piss me off, but otherwise I could get use to the Overlord utopia. Come on short workweek!

The third section features two narratives. One concerns the journey of a human who discovers a way around the sanction on space travel. The other is the basis for the book’s title. Clarke reveals the end of humanity’s “childhood.” And while I won’t tell you what that is, I’ll let you know that it was the inspiration for a certain Led Zeppelin album cover. And if Led Zeppelin put it on an album, don't you think you should sure as hell read it?

#8: Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

2006-11-14T16:53:00.000-06:00

“Let me take you to the empty place in my fire engine.”--13th Floor Elevators

“Those who don’t build, must burn.”--Faber

Most people in the US read Bradbury’s (b. 1920) Fahrenheit 451 at some point. Perhaps because of Bradbury’s puritanical view of comics, fast cars, and music piped straight into the ear, high school teachers seem to be big fans and throw the book at students year after year, especially during a lesson on censorship and/or during banned books week. And why not? Fifty years later, don’t we see faint glimpses of Bradbury’s world around us: iPods, shrinking pedestrian zones, aggressive driving, flatscreen tvs, and the general sense of a faster world with less leisure time?

So you know the story: fireman Guy Montag rebels against a book-burning America after meeting a strange young girl, seeing a woman burn with her books, and actually sitting down with a couple of texts himself. What a strange and clumsy character Montag is--not really the stuff of legend. He’s almost unable to make decisions without some sort of input from another: his boss Beatty, a seventeen-year-old neighbor, the reclusive Faber. But he’s a man trapped in a morally confusing job with the status quo of society sleeping next to him in bed every night--a recipe for confusion. But Montag also has balls enough to recite poetry, burn the bejesus out of his superior, and cross the river to the land of intellectual hoboes. So let’s give him credit for that at least.

Something that really sticks out to me, having now read the book four times in my life, is how much more complex society is in the novel than how the official line (“It’s a book about censorship”) suggests. Bradbury suggests, I think, that it’s our society that creates the situation of Fahrenheit 451, not a fascist government coming to power and shoving censorship down the throats of its citizens. Literature becomes smaller and smaller (condensed novels, magazines, comic books, etc.) while more and more groups lash out at insensitivity and offensiveness in literature. This equation leads to voluntary book burning, and we can assume that’s when government stepped in to use the intellectual climate for its own agenda. Years later, most people don’t care. They get to drive as fast as they want, they have entertaining (maybe) and interactive tv to watch, and their homes are fireproof (what else could you ask for?). This all leads to a kind of amnesia. Firefighters don’t remember that they used to put out fires, not create them, and Montag’s wife Mildred can’t even remember how she met him. By the way, do you remember the major events of 2005 still? Or even what happened over the last summer? Just checking.

But what are Montag, Faber, and Granger (hobo intellectual) fighting for? The rights of the minority to be able to read? An eventual evangelism of the classics? The rebirth of literature itself? I think most of us come away from the novel thinking we know the answer. Most students would say free speech and the right to obtain and collect intellectual property. But what about literature itself? The depths, peaks, and valleys of it. The good and the bad. Sorrow and happiness. While Montag is able to elicit an emotional response from Mildred’s friend when he reads “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold to her, literature might be dead to him, too. Truffaut seems to have had the same thought. In the end of his film adaptation, Montag and the rest of “the Book People” pace through a snow covered field unemotionally reciting his or her “book” over and over. Is there any meaning left?

#7: The Demolished Man (1953) by Alfred Bester

2006-11-08T16:30:00.000-06:00

“Eight, sir; seven, sir; six, sir; five, sir; four, sir; three, sir; two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.”

As you probably know, the Hugo Awards are given to (mostly) science fiction works and are doled out every year at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), which is the oldest convention of its type. The award was named after Hugo Gernsback, a pulp publisher who all but created American science fiction. Hugo Award Winners are determined by the “members” of the Worldcon, and the awards, while prestigious, are generally considered to reward the more popular works out there since the voting body is mostly made up of fans, as opposed to the Nebula Awards, which are determined by writers. The first novel ever to receive the award was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man in 1953.

Bester (1913-1987) is a generally beloved writer in the science fiction community. He worked in almost every facet of the genre at some point, including radio and comic books. Bester is often credited with creating the Green Lantern Oath (say it with me: “In brightest day, in blackest night…”), though he pooh-poohed the credit later in life. While he didn’t produce many novels, both The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger, Tiger) are regarded by most folks foolish enough to put together a list of the best science fiction novels as two of the greatest works in the genre. So, not surprisingly, they both make David Pringle’s list.

The Demolished Man revolves around two main characters. One is Ben Reich, a powerful corporate businessman who runs an entity known as Monarch. The other is “Dishonest Abe” Lincoln Powell, a police prefect with powerful ESP abilities. ESP is at the heart of the novel, which is set in a future society where mental abilities of this type are common in a minority of the population (known as “peepers”). Peepers are part of every influential segment of society--most importantly law and law enforcement. For instance, peeping has basically eradicated premeditated murder…until Reich comes along. Reich wants to off his main competitor, a man named D’Courtney, because he refused to merge his company with Monarch when Reich’s back was to the business wall. Reich enlists the help of several individuals to help him, including a corrupt peeper, and he uses a repetitive, advertising-like jingle (see top quote) as a mental smokescreen to protect him from mind readers. This is all fine and good until a witness appears at the murder scene. And from there, the story moves into a decidedly noire direction, but with plenty of proto-cyberpunk imagery (a psychedelic brothel born from the heat of a vicious war for instance) and Freudian symbols thrown in (Reich is chased at night in his dreams by a man with no face). Powell becomes the main investigator of the murder, and he stops at nothing to bring Reich to society’s ultimate punishment--Demolition, a mental stripping of one’s personality.

I used to love TDM. I thought it was a fascinating journey into the mind, while also a revelation about the future possibilities of ESP and non-physical perception. Years later, it's not my favorite book anymore but I'd still highly recommend it to folks. Even if ESP doesn't thrill you (I'm right there with you), Bester knows how to entertain. He also pushes pulp writing in fascinating ways throughout the novel. For instance, when peepers gather together in social situations, their conversations are, of course, far from mundane. Bester represents these conversations graphically, showing how meaning is enhanced by the physical arrangement of words (basket weaves, musical notations, mathematic curves, etc.). And beyond all that, Tenser, said the Tensor…

What’s Missing? part i

2006-10-31T19:18:00.000-06:00

I’m calling this “part i” because any debate about what David Pringle left off his list of the 100 Best Science Fiction Novels will necessarily go on forever. These are just my thoughts tonight, and what I’m about to suggest aren’t necessarily books that I think HAVE to be on a 100 list. Instead, I mean these as suggestions for consideration. In that respect, I have to admit up front that I haven’t read every page of every book that follows. But here’s something to chew on…

First things first, there are clearly several books that could be on a list like this if it had been compiled more recently. Looking that direction seems fairer to me than working backwards (which for fun’s sake would have to include Wells, Olaf Stapledon, and here I’m doing what I said I wouldn’t) because Pringle had a definite starting point in mind when he put his list together. Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), China Mieville (The Scar), the always-out-of-print-in-the-US Iain M. Banks (The Player of Games?, Excession?), and Greg Bear (though I personally would not vote for Moving Mars) would be there somewhere, yes? Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy or Three Californias series would have to be up for serious consideration. Perhaps Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker missed Pringle’s eye because of publication dates. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and David Brin’s forget-the-Costner-film-already-and-read-the-book The Postman would have to be given serious thought because of their popularity. And speaking of popularity, it’s seems Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would be included, and I personally think it would be a no brainer to have Ender’s Game on the list.

I think one major difference, if Pringle had written his book now, would be the number of female authors on the list. Octavia Butler is already there, but Kindred is not. And I think Parable of the Sower would be a good candidate, too. Cherryh (Downbelow Station or maybe Cyteen) and Willis (Doomsday Book) are serious candidates for the final cut, and I would be strongly in favor of seeing The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell on the list.

My own personal qualms with Pringle, however, are often not with the writers missing but with what books he’s chosen by the ones that are there. For example, there are six Philip K. Dick novels on the list but no A Scanner Darkly. Thomas Disch is on three times, so I don’t really have reason to bitch, but I really do enjoy (I can see the hate mail now) The Genocides. I love Camp Concentration, 334, and all, but the simplicity and gruesome disaster thrills of TG win me over. Like Pringle, I’m not a huge fan of Asimov, and even if we were all to dismiss the Foundation Trilogy like he does, it seems like there are some better choices for Asimov’s sole representation on the list than The End of Eternity. If The Martian Chronicles and 334 count as novels, maybe I, Robot can as well. And if it doesn’t, perhaps The Gods Themselves might be a nice choice. Which Heinlein books to include can be debated ad nauseam, but I would like to have seen The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or Starship Troopers get its due. As well, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite sf novels and created the whole big-ass-strange-thing-flying-in-space subgenre, though it’s nowhere to be found. Delany’s Dhalgren and/or The Einstein Intersection are missing, as is Slaughterhouse-Five, Ringworld by Larry Niven, Lord of Light and Damnation Alley by Zelazny, and Pohl’s Gateway.

Beyond all that, many miss van Vogt. But the one novel I really wished was there is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which seems like a David Pringle kind of book to me. And if we threw in non-English titles, a whole new can of worms would be opened. Top of the list for me if that were true: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. But, yak, yak, yak. Any of the five people I know read this have any thoughts? Or certainly any one else out there. If Pringle wrote the list as 1949-2006, what should be included? Any quibbles with the novels within his timeframe (1949-1985)? Do you think I have any idea what I’m talking about?

Interlude: Kenobi Car Shops

2006-10-30T13:25:00.000-06:00

From BBC series Dead Ringers

#6: Limbo (1952) by Bernard Wolfe

2006-10-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

“So then: Immob started as a joke. A joke that miscarried. But every one of the big Salvationist movements in history--from the Ten Commandments all the way down to the Mormons’ Later Day Sainthood and Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Fletcherism and Bolshevik-Leninism and Dianetics and Orgonotics and Santa Monica Vedanta and Mandunga--every one of them started out as a great Swiftean joke. That some humorless man got hold of and took literally.”

Wolfe (1915-1985) is an interesting figure with a diverse background. A BA in psychology from Yale, he spent 2 years in the Merchant Marine before working as an editor, writer, and journalist. He also served for a time as one of Leon Trotsky’s bodyguards, and, judging by this novel, he was a raging misogynist. But with that said, I must say that Limbo is clearly one of the best sf novels ever written by an American in terms of ideas and literary value, which makes the fact that it’s a very, very difficult book to find that much more sad and frustrating. I have to admit that I myself had never heard of the book until I picked up David Pringle’s text five years ago, and I’m not sure why that is. Wolfe’s investigation of the possibilities of cybernetics predates similar issues addressed by cyberpunk writers by almost 30 years. How has this book been so forgotten?

The story revolves around the figure of Dr. Martine, a neurosurgeon who went AWOL from the military 18 years prior to the novel during a time when World War III is being waged by the States and the Soviets, both controlled militarily by EMSIAC: MAD computer strategists bent on total victory. Martine spent those eighteen years performing lobotomies for a tribe of pacifists (who are such because of the lobotomies) on a secluded island near the Indian Ocean. Martine has mixed feelings about the surgery because it removes not only aggression but also its “Siamese twin” the ability to orgasm. Martine flees when a group from the Island Strip (the remnants of the United States) arrives. Oddly, the folks that show up are all quad amputees wearing powerful mechanical prosthetics.

Martine eventually ends up on the Island Strip and finds a world where men (and only men) voluntarily have their limbs amputated as a sign of their pacifism (know as “Immob,” as in immobilization). Philosophically these men are split into two groups: pro- and anti-prosthetics. The pro-pros are comprised of folks like the ones who arrived at Martine’s island. The anti-pros spend the rest of their lives in baskets, cared for by sisters, wives, mothers, etc. Martine is horrified by all this, and he becomes almost delirious when he finds out…Immob’s principles are based on Martine’s own journal writings from his time in the military! Satirical jokes he made about the sacrifices of young men were taken seriously, and he is held up as a martyr for the cause. The fascinating conceit here then is the idea of a society’s savior being able to return “after death” to witness the distortions of his writings and thoughts and then comment on them. One can only imagine if someone like Marx was able to do the same thing.

Limbo is loaded (pun intentional) with sexual frustration, Freudianism, metaphorical castration, and even a couple of highly disturbing rape scenes. There’s no question that Wolfe knew Civilization and Its Discontents backwards and forwards, and that’s equally true of his character Martine. It often seems that Martine’s major qualms with Immob are its progression towards voluntary castration and its resultant flip-flop in sexual predation. Of course, women are not really up to the task of being sexual hunters for Wolfe, and Martine suggests that “when a woman [is] cavalier in her handouts, the suspicion [arises] that what she [has] to offer [is] less a rare gourmet’s delicacy than a soggy free lunch.” And there’s a lot more of that type of thing in the book, which is a fascinating and quite disturbing look into the mind of a writer dealing with the tensions and frustrations of the cold war, women’s lib, and the beginning of modernism’s slow death. But by no means is that a reason to throw the book on the fire. Wolfe’s sexual dwellings are at least honest, and I think it’s awfully difficult to separate ideas about human/machine relationships, international conflicts, and power relations between developed and developing nations from sexuality and gender. And sex isn’t Wolfe’s only focus. The book is filled with the complexities of pacifism, the individual’s responsibilities to society, and just what handing culpability over to a machine (namely a computer) means. But as LeVar Burton says, don’t take my word for it…

Interlude: Limbo in limbo

2006-10-21T11:40:00.000-05:00

So out of this list of 100 books David Pringle likes so much, a good chunk are out of print, which is really a sad commentary on the state of the publishing industry. The long tail theory hasn’t quite kicked in yet, because I know through my experience as a bookseller that almost every day I look for a classic title for a customer/myself/the store that’s no longer available. I think we live in the time of the sure thing--if it’s not Harry Potter, a NYT bestseller, or touted by Chavez at the UN, there’s a good chance that a couple of print runs later you won’t be able to find it.

This leads me to Limbo by Bernard Wolfe, my current read from the list. This is a novel, if you don’t know, that was considered on literary par with Brave New World and 1984 in the 50s and 60s. Technically, there is an expensive hardcover version in print that is quite difficult to get a copy of, but realistically, this book has been out of print for almost twenty years. For me, it’s made this project difficult. I’ve had to read it at its only location in the St. Louis region, UMSL’s Utopia Collection, which is part of a closed library that’s only open on one of my days off, closes for a least an hour in the middle of the day, and kicks people out of the “reading room” at 4:30 in the afternoon. This isn’t a slam against them, by the way. The people that work there are great, and I’m so thankful that they’ve been letting me read the novel there, even though I have no affiliation with the University of St. Louis system whatsoever. But why hasn’t this book been picked up by a publisher? It’s for sure still used in sf literature courses taught at both American and British universities. My only hope is that print-on-demand will take off at some point or someone will invent a viable electronic text display--something portable with no glare or difficult fonts…you know, like what Jake from DS9 used to write and read on. Speaking of, I’m also waiting for holodecks and replicators, too.

#5: The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham

2006-10-04T22:11:00.000-05:00

“You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.”

John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-1969) first published pulp stories in the 30s, but it wasn’t until this novel was published and he changed his pen name to just “John Wyndham” (thought by many to be a new writer because of it) that his career first took off. Triffids came from a long tradition of British science fiction, dating back as far as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), which features disaster stories. Brian Aldiss refers to this narrative type disparagingly as “cosy catastrophes,” and Triffids is often held up as the quintessential novel of this type--middle-class values couched in mindless adventure narrative. Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily a fair description of Wyndham’s work, but this story is certainly about whites rebuilding white civilization.

The storyline is easy. Bill Masen, the narrator, wakes up one day in a hospital after a terrible tragedy (think 28 Days Later). Seemingly everyone but him is blind from a comet explosion/weapons system gone wrong/unknown reason. He was lucky enough to have been recovering from an eye injury during the event and thus avoided the effects. Anyway, London, Britain, and perhaps the world have gone crazy from the disaster. And then the triffids rise up. A triffid is an ambulatory plant perhaps developed by Trofim Lysenko or from outer space or originating from god knows where. They were once regarded as quaint by the Brits, showing up unannounced in cherished garden plots when Masen was a boy. Later it became clear that they could be dangerous--they can lash out with seriously damaging sting-y “tongues.” And they get totally out of control after the blinding event. Along the way, Masen finds others with sight, takes a trashy novelist to be his lover, considers joining a community based around plural wives, has a run in with a man who enslaves the sighted to care for the blind, is disgusted by a puritanical commune, deals with an out-of-control military unit, and finds lots and lots of triffids.

The novel is entertaining as all, but also quite strange. Wyndham never really explains things: where the triffids come from, what the blinding event was, whether the triffids are sentient, what’s going on outside of the UK (though many are unwisely convinced the mighty US was spared or is too resourceful to be in chaos), and even details about some of the more important characters in the book. Many folks in the novel make odd decisions, and there is much less emphasis on philosophical implications as there is in a book like Earth Abides. But that’s almost part of the fun. Wyndham’s narrative allows the mind to wander, which I often find is the point of such a disaster piece. He’s particularly full of innuendo and leading comments in the area of sexual relations and gender, and who can beat that (no pun intended)?

Triffids on the web:
-on the Gorillaz website there’s a potted triffid in the kitchen of Murdoc’s trailer
-this art piece
-a textile
-a nebula

-a craft project
-an Australian rock band from the 80s
-a nursery
-and so many more…

like a plant distributor and the classic sf film and tv series

Interlude: Bad Day at Work

2006-09-26T18:41:00.000-05:00

#4: The Puppet Masters (1951) by Robert A. Heinlein

2006-09-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

“The Russian propaganda system began to blast us as soon as they had worked out a new line. The whole thing was an ‘American Imperialist fantasy.’ I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia first; the place seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought, I wondered what difference it would make.”

Let’s get something straight, Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) was a great writer--he’s known as the “Dean of Science Fiction” for god’s sake--but he was also an irritating, perplexing, stubborn son of a gun, too. His novels overflow with machismo, radical individualism, libertarian ideology, and militarism. But if you can stomach the ride, it’s fantastic.

The Puppet Masters is from an early part of his career (he didn't start writing until he was 32) and one of his most entertaining novels. A page turner about slug-like creatures that invade Earth (landing first in that Mecca…Grinnell, Iowa), attach themselves to the spines of humans, and rule their “puppets,” body and mind. Anti-communist propaganda? You bet. The affected zones are red (gee, what color is associated with communism?); the liberated zones are green (what’s the color of money?). The slugs are intellectual but devoid of culture and physical ability. They secretly take over positions of power, they scare citizens with false news stories and misinformation, and they are sexless (what could be worse? One of the main characters, a hottie named “Mary,” is able to “sniff” out the “hagridden” men by seeing if they are attracted to her or not. Yikes!). On top of that, there is a subplot about a freaky human commune gone bad, people run around naked to prove they are free of parasites, and there are some not too subtle jabs at American liberalism. It’s always a political feast with the H-man!

The book is written in first-person, with a feverish narrative that seems to be fed on the hardboiled writers of the time. It gives a particularly delicious entertainment to the novel, especially when the narrator becomes the host for his own sluggy parasite. There’s also the strange, typically Heinleinian characters: a strong and resourceful woman who’s ready to bootlick her lover like a pet after he treats her like dirt (“I’ve loved you ever since you slapped me.”), the cold father figure who uses his “children” like Kleenex and later claims it’s to build character, ineffectual members of Congress, a perception-driven President, and a narrator who’s as likely to crack a terrible joke as cry (Heinlein’s idea of a strong man).

I’ve got much more to say about Heinlein (like the Socialist party membership he tried to hide evidence of later in life), but there’s plenty of time for that--this is the first of a couple of his novels on David Pringle’s list. And with reason. Heinlein is one of the heavy hitters from one of the most popular periods in sf’s history.

(P.S. There’s a really bad movie version that stars Donald Sutherland…don’t bother.)

Interlude: The Number of the Beast

2006-09-19T19:34:00.000-05:00

Since Heinlein is next, I thought we might all enjoy this visually pleasing trailer for an adaptation that’s not really being made.

#3: The Martian Chronicles (1950) by Ray Bradbury

2006-09-19T18:37:00.000-05:00

"They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad jobs or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, or dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all. But a government finger pointed from four-color posters in many towns: THERE’S WORK FOR YOU IN THE SKY: SEE MARS!”

Bradbury (b. 1920) is one of my favorite writers. He brilliantly slips in, out, through, and between science fiction, horror, fantasy, and straight literary writing in almost all of his work. He’s particularly deft at inserting macbre scares and psychological horrors into stories that also flow with symbolism and emotional depth.

Although his novels are fantastic, Bradbury’s strong suit, as with many sf writers of his generation, is the short-story format. And that’s why The Martian Chronicles is so good. In this novel/short story collection hybrid, Bradbury strings together a series of narratives connected limitedly by characters, themes, and chronology. On the face of it, they’re all stories about the colonization of Mars. But like most Bradbury stories, they speak much more about the present--at least the present that was the late 40s/early 50s: nuclear paranoia, racial tensions, late colonialism/early postcolonialism, Midwestern idyllism, the rise of suburban living, and a gnawing sense of loneliness. I find it a pleasure to read every time I pick it up.

Some favorites of mine:

“The Earth Men”: When the second expedition lands on Mars, the native Martians find the human astronauts crazy and put them in a mental institution.

“The Third Expedition”: The third Earth party finds Mars populated by humans from the 1920s, including several dead family members and friends. As they reunite with their lost loved ones, the captain spends a sleepless night next to his formerly dead brother pondering the best way to execute a sneak attack on foreign invaders. Wouldn’t...really take them by surprise? Still makes my skin crawl.

“Night Meeting”: A human and a Martian from the past (maybe?) meet at the crossroads of space and time. Whose perception of the “present” and “truth” is most valid? Does it matter?

“Way in the Middle of the Air”: All the black folk in a southern town board rockets for Mars to flee Jim Crow. A sole white taskmaster tries to stop them.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”: Probably one of the most famous and popular science-fiction stories ever. A self-sufficient house continues its daily chores after its inhabitants are vaporized in the explosion of an atom bomb.

“The Million-Year Picnic”: The last refugees of war-torn Earth meet the next generation of Martians.

#2: Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart

2006-09-13T23:02:00.000-05:00

"Generations come and go, but the earth abides forever." --Ecclesiastes 1:4

Stewart (1895-1980) was a literature professor at the University of California, and he’s thought to have used the real-life case of Ishi (“man”), the last surviving member of an American Indian tribe who surfaced in California in the early 20th century, as inspiration for the main character in Earth Abides, Isherwood “Ish” Williams. Ish is a graduate student in geography who’s out in the hinterlands when a terrible viral plague washes out most of the human population. When he comes to find what’s happened, he looks at the incident in almost Malthusian terms and decides to become the documenter of the natural world sans humanity. Later, he becomes the leader of a new community called The Tribe, along with his lover/partner Em (who is clearly, though not explicitly said by Stewart, black--how amazing is that for a 1949 science-fiction novel?). The rest of the novel sees Ish’s frustration in trying to instill culture and creative thought (i.e., what he calls “civilization”) in a group that’ll have none of it--food and supplies are too easy to get from the stores, and who needs book learning when there’s no human society outside the small group? In the end, we see the real direction of humanity after civilization fails, and you’ll have to find out for yourself what that is.

This is truly a lost classic. Once a book taught in high school and college English classes, try finding ten people who’ve even heard of it now. And that’s a shame because it’s fantastic. The post-apocalyptic subgenre, along with dystopian literature, has been the backbone of sf writing during large periods of its history. This particular member of that subgenre is unique. No biker gangs warring over gasoline or large insects prowling the Arizona desert or apes ruling over humans in slavery. Stewart instead ponders the effects humans have on the natural world, and he takes a refreshingly pragmatic view on how easily/difficultly the leftover humans would survive if 99.9% of us kicked it tomorrow.

Sexism? Maybe. There’s certainly a 1940s separate spheres, division of labor thing going on, but Em and several other of the women in The Tribe are strong. However, the men make the decisions and do all the dangerous stuff. I give it a little slack because of the time in which it was written. Racism? Hell no. While there is a questionable scene with some “Negroes” in Arkansas, the white man Ish thinks the black woman Em is the cat’s pajamas, and he chooses her to be his lover/mate not because of her race but because she’s strong, tender, and intelligent. Anti-religion? Well…I’m going to cowardly claim ignorance on that one. How would someone with a MA in Comparative Religion know anything about that?

The book came back into print earlier this year, so read it for yourself already.

Interlude: Spock's Casa, Baby

2006-09-10T19:02:00.000-05:00

#1: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell

2006-09-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

"War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."

I must embarrassingly admit that I don’t know if this was the first time I’ve read 1984 cover to cover or not. I’ve certainly tried to read it a couple of times in the last few years and never made it through to the end for one reason or another. And really there’s no excuse because it’s not that long of a novel and the language is simple yet poetic. Most everyone is probably familiar with the plot: Winston Smith mentally and physically sins against a future government, which regulates top down through surveillance, manipulation, and torture. Orwell (aka Eric Blair 1903-1950) originally titled the book The Last Man in Europe, in reference to the fact that Smith appears to be the only human who still hides his real self…in a tiny section of his brain no less. And if he really is the last, then humanity is royally fucked because... Well, I can’t really tell you that, can I?

I’ve come to agree with Neil Postman’s argument that the world we live in is much closer to (or perhaps actually is) the world of Huxley’s Brave New World and not 1984, though the fear of Big Brother runs rampant through pop culture, conspiracy theories, and the political fears of the far right and left. While reading the book this time, I couldn’t help but think the novel is more of a reflection of European fears and despotic fantasies in the 1940s than America in the 21st century. I don’t think most Americans would recognize or understand Orwell’s portrayal of European socialism (as both he wishes and fears), proletarian culture, or Goldstein’s concepts of class consciousness and division of power as anything other than being part of something they know as “fascism.” But that’s not to say that parts of American culture aren’t seen in the novel.

1. Newspeak--the idea that language is more malleable by the elite when vocabulary is shrunk and ambiguities and shades of truth are eliminated through word choice and word corruption. This makes me think of two things in American culture. The first is the current executive administration, particularly its figurehead--limited vocabulary, black and white definitions, shrewd word choice. His inelegance creates meaning which is shielded from criticism by pseudo-pragmatism, jingoism, and fantastic constructions of “strength.” The second thing is advertising. If anything is a direct reflection of Newspeak in our culture, it’s this. Let’s all call it Adspeak for god’s sake.

2. Internal class warfare. Whether Americans want to admit it or not, the US is a class-based society. Perhaps there aren’t the same minute delineations as there are in a society like Britain’s, but Goldstein’s rather simplistic but bell-ringing truths about the three main strata of society and the realities of internal conflict are present. One out of every three US Senators is a millionaire. That’s compared to the less than 1% who are in the general population. And, of course, just by being in Congress, every member receives a six-figure salary from that job alone. But the US isn’t really ruled by the rich, is it? Certainly middle-class values don’t have an effect on urban decay, civil design, and social services, right?

3. Surveillance. I won’t even get into the federal standards on the issue. Instead, I’ll just mention that it’s my belief that the up-and-coming generations are becoming more and more comfortable in handing their privacy over. Look at any site for teen blogs. They’ve become confessionals--including biographical data, personal writings once reserved for “Dear Diary,” photos, and intimate video--that can be accessed by everyone from classmates to strangers halfway around the world. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I do worry about where this is headed, particularly if polling data does accurately reflect the belief in the general population that safety is more important than liberties and rights.

**But all this leads right back into my initial point that Brave New World might be here--a society governed by soft fascism and too entertained to care.**

Orwell's novel is fascinating, even if an incredible downer at times. Proof of his writing’s power is in all the words we’ve incorporated into everyday speech from it: Big Brother, Orwellian, Thought Police, doublethink, and so on. Now it’s certainly speculative fiction, but is it science fiction? Rocketships and space aliens? No. Future technology like all-seeing televisions, speculation on humanity’s future and the future of warfare? Yes. Does it really matter considering it’s a thought-provoking, well-written novel? Not really.

Das Projekt

2006-08-30T11:57:00.000-05:00

For some time now I’ve wanted to read the books listed in David Pringle’s Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels in order. Pringle’s list appeals to me for several reasons. First, he’s clearly a fan of literature from the social schools of sf writing, including the New Wave of the 60s and 70s. I’m also a fan, so the list includes several of my favorites—Bester, Dick, Ballard, Disch... He also has several selections from “literary” authors like Orwell, Burroughs, and Vonnegut. That’s great. What interests me most in writing—the relationship between humans and technology, political agendas, power dynamics, modern myth, good narratives—can come from any genre or space on the literary shelf. If it’s interesting, it’s interesting. I’ve also wanted to use the list because I’ve never read several of the titles on it. Shamefully, for instance, I’ve read no novels (only short stories) by some of the real legends—Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon (shame, shame) are two good examples and are both represented. I also like the fact that Pringle lists his selections chronologically. No fanboy fighting over the greatest this or that, and by reading them in order perhaps some understanding of the genre’s development will become apparent. Beyond all that, I like Pringle’s other work. He’s done a lot for the genre, and (perhaps since he’s a Scotsman) he has a nice balance present here between American and British sf.

Now Pringle published the list in 1985, so the most recent novel on it is Neuromancer. That’s a little disappointing, but it doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the first novel on the list is 1984, which was published in 1949. Thus, none of the great pulp fiction of the first half of the 20th century is to be found, and, of course, there’s nothing from the grandfather of the genre, H.G. Wells. But no list of this type is perfect.

The timetable I’ve set for myself is roughly two years. I just started 1984, and I hope to finish Neuromancer by the next presidential election (perhaps all the dystopian literature on the list will give me some perspective!). That’s basically a novel a week with a break here and there. Not too difficult. I thought about giving myself a year, but I don’t think I would be able to read much other than what’s on this list if I did. That seems a recipe for giving up on it. But the real incentive is posting my reviews and thoughts here. Okay, I’m off for a date with Winston Smith and Big Brother…