Book Review: The Light of Day

Eric Ambler
1962
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

On the surface of it, this book had all the ingredients of a great mystery story. It is set in exotic locations in Greece and Turkey. The main character is a dumpy small-time crook who gets caught up to his neck in international intrigue. The British author, Ambler, who was described on the book’s 1962 cover as “the greatest living writer of the novel of suspense,” had been, among other things, a songwriter, a vaudeville comedian, an ad executive, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. So I was raring to read it.

The story is about Arthur Abdel Simpson, son of a British father and an Egyptian mother, who lives in Athens and makes a living as a petty thief and distributor of pornography. One day he picks the wrong tourist to scam; his mark turns out to be a member of a ring of spies (or maybe thieves or drug smugglers) who catches Arthur red-handed trying to steal his travelers checks and blackmails him into helping with a major caper.

At first, Arthur’s task is just to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul. It is supposed to be an easy job but he forgets that his Egyptian passport has expired, so he gets stopped at the Turkish border. The car is searched and the customs officials find guns and grenades hidden in the door panels. The Turkish equivalent of the CIA then makes Arthur a deal: they won’t arrest him for possession of the weaponry if he agrees to stay with the gang and provide information about what they’re up to. So Arthur wangles his way into becoming the gang’s full-time driver, lodges with them in their villa outside Istanbul, and generally gets involved way over his head in their scheme.

It’s hard to say sometimes why a book doesn’t quite catch your imagination the way it seems it should. What happened was that I’d often reach the end of a paragraph and realize that I’d spaced out and missed what had happened and had to go back and read it again. I didn’t look forward to picking this book up again after I’d taken a break and would find myself reading other things instead.

It had a heck of a lot of what seemed like unnecessary detail. All distances were exactly estimated: there was an island sixty kilometers from Pendik; a wall was twenty feet high; they had one-hundred fifty yards to go; there was a sheer drop of thirty feet; the roof was thirty-five feet wide. The gang’s preparations seemed needlessly convoluted: they went to garages, resorts, restaurants, museums, and back and forth to Istanbul about fifty times, without anything major happening most of the time. And every move Arthur made was described in excruciating detail even though he seemed to spend most of the time dusting the car and filling it with gas.

The best parts of the book were actually Arthur’s rare flashbacks to his British public school childhood, when he was a loner and a troublemaker and had colorful run-ins with teachers and administrators.

Book Review: The Dispossessed (Part 2 of 2)

Ursula K. Le Guin
1974
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

SPOILER ALERT

This is a continuation of an earlier review. For a description of the back story and plot of this book, see my post from last week.

I think that the real power of The Dispossessed is that it gives you a chance to explore both a libertarian anarchy and a capitalist government - populated by very similar people - through the eyes of someone with a very open mind. And in a more subtle way than either Le Guin's own earlier work or Heinlein’s polemics.

The main character, Shevek, was born and raised on the moon Anarres, in a society founded as an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism. For him, this is the comfortable default; he has been raised to think of governmental structure as inherently corrupt and of the drive for profit as an unjust and ineffective motive.

In many ways, the Anarresti system is a good one and Shevek is justifiably proud of it. People trust each other (there is no reason not to, since nothing is private). People do, for the most part, work together. No one is left to starve while others have extra food. No one is forced to take an illegal, oppressive, or dangerous job just to survive. Everyone is of equal status – men and women alike.

The problem is that, in spite of itself, Anarres has started to develop a government-like bureaucracy. The Anarresti structure is meant to foster choice and open-mindedness. But every crisis requires the imposition of a little more process which never really goes away when the crisis is over. 

It doesn’t help that the moon is so inhospitable. A five-year famine tests the Anarresti social commitment to the breaking point, with mobs coming awfully close to hijacking food shipments designated for somewhere else. So the bureaucracy, such as it is, clamps down tighter to make sure everyone gets fed. This, plus Shevek’s own experiences with close-mindedness and even censorship at work, make him realize that their system may not be as infallible as he was raised to believe. More and more, norms and regulations are putting the needs of society as a whole before individual freedom.

Urras opens Shevek’s eyes even more - and confuses him.

Some aspects of Urrasti capitalism are indeed as bad as he was taught. When he meets the elite, they all seem anxious, and he wonders if it is worry because someone always has more, or guilt because someone always has less. Women, servants, and laborers are second-class citizens, and they are by no means all happy about it. Large groups of sometimes violent Urrasti people want a change and want him to be their spokesman.

But he also sees things that show him that a profit-driven system might not necessarily be all bad:

“He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work – his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy – and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.”

What Shevek is learning is that neither type of society is inherently, self-consciously evil. Both kinds of incentive can be used to get people to do things. Both can be effective, to a point and in the right context. And both have dangers.

He also realizes that the mental and physical walls between the worlds hide a big lie: Anarres needs Urras. Although Anarres is anti-capitalist, it is essentially a mining colony of Urras. The Anarresti receive manufactured goods, machinery, and new strains of plants in exchange for their ores. And, although no one seems to acknowledge it, it is largely the fear and hatred of Urras that keeps the Anarresti social bond strong.

In addition, it may be mainly Anarres’ isolation that allows the system to persist. As one of Shevek’s new Urrasti friends points out, it’s easy to be anarchists when your population is small and you have no neighbor states. If Anarres was threatened by an aggressive nation, they’d have to change (like by developing a military) or be wiped out.

By the end, you find yourself feeling that it is impossible to be an ideological purist about any one system. Every system, no matter the theoretical underpinnings, requires vigilance and creativity to avoid either tyranny or stultification.

In describing the theoretical physics he works on, Shevek explains that he thinks in terms of two types of time. One is “arrow time,” in which time is linear, progressing from past to future. The other is “circle time,” in which time goes in predictable, repeatable cycles like the seasons; where past and future exist simultaneously and our "now" is just us experiencing a sliver of what always has been and always will be.

Shevek says that in order for his theories to work, we must exist in both types of time simultaneously. Arrow time enables us to have progress; without it there is no change. Circle time enables predictability and constancy; without it there is chaos.

Sometimes the needs of the many
do outweigh the needs of the few...
or the one.

I think Le Guin is drawing a parallel between Shevek’s physics and society. We need to make sure that fulfilling the needs of a few individuals doesn’t mean that the needs of the many go largely unmet. But we also need to make sure that the needs and drives of the individual don’t get entirely submerged by the needs of the whole.

The best solution lies in a balance. And achieving a balance, in turn, depends on open communication between people with different ideas, each constantly providing feedback and challenge for the other.

All of this makes me think of the words of the wise and articulate poet Jello Biafra, when he wondered: Where Do Ya Draw the Line?

Book Review: The Dispossessed (Part 1 of 2)

Ursula K. Le Guin
1974
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

SPOILER ALERT

So far, this is my favorite of Le Guin’s novels.

I have criticized some of her other books for having too obvious a message. This one is obvious about its real subject matter – different governmental philosophies – but it is subtle about delivering any simple message or judgment about them.

I also liked the main character very much. He is a smart guy going through a difficult time, learning hard truths about the way he was brought up.

And her writing, as always, is clear and flowing - if maybe a little dreamy.

This book is about two worlds: the planet Urras and its moon Anarres. Urras is a densely-populated analogue for Earth; its main superpower nation is a prosperous capitalist country with a comfortable upper class and struggling lower classes. Anarres is a dusty, barren, barely hospitable mining colony.

Several centuries ago, a small group of Urrasti anarchists were banished to the moon Anarres. After the freighters brought the last group of them up, the exiles built a wall around the spaceport. They kept the port operating for a handful of cargo shipments each year, but resolved that no one else from Urras would ever be allowed up. Then they set about building a non-authoritarian communist utopia based on the teachings of their philosopher Odo.

As a result, today, on Anarres, there are no governments, no bosses, and no wages. Clothes and other necessary goods are available free to anyone at communal depositories. Food is served for free at communal refectories.

Jobs are dispensed by a central computer. You feed in your skills and your requests for location and the computer comes back with a suggested placement. You do not have to accept the placement, although pretty much everyone does.

You have no obligation to do anything in particular. You have the freedom to learn or work at whatever you want at any time. You are owned and governed by no one.

The catch, of course, is that no individual can own or govern anything. No one can become rich or powerful. If you are found to be “egoizing” – keeping goods for yourself or doing things solely for your own aggrandizement, you are isolated and ostracized.

Anarresti children are brought up to see themselves as part of a whole; as a single cell in the body of society. Their role is to find their own best individual cellular function and do that – the idea being that if they do what they do best, that is the greatest contribution they can make to society.

The plot centers around an Anarresti physicist named Shevek. Shevek is happy; he has a loving partner, children, and friends. He is always willing to do his part. He grows up trusting his countrymen and assuming unquestioningly that everyone is working together. He grows up distrusting and fearing the profit-driven people of Urras.

But as Shevek gets closer to developing a General Temporal Theory, which will enable faster-than-light space travel, he discovers that instead of being freely exchanged, his ideas are being stifled.

For one thing, his work is threatening to his advising professor, Sabul. Sabul has been discouraging the publication of those ideas of Shevek’s that he doesn’t understand and, contrary to Odonian teaching, has been publishing the ideas that he does understand under his own name.

Shevek’s work is also a threat to his society; it threatens to break down the walls that protect Anarres from Urras. His university will only permit him to teach basic courses, claiming that not enough students are interested in the more complex ones. The job-posting computer starts to send him to godforsaken places to do mining or agricultural jobs that have nothing to do with physics and separate him from his family for long periods.

An Odonian society is supposed to be in a state of permanent revolution, encouraging of initiative and freedom of thought. But Shevek starts to realize that, little by little, in spite of itself, Anarres is developing a bureaucracy that functions very much like a government and serves to limit radical thinking.

So Shevek reaches out to physicists on Urras, sending them letters via cargo shipments. His correspondence often gets “lost” in transit but the few responses that come back show him that the Urrasti physicists are intensely interested. Thinking that this could be a way to reunify the two worlds, he smuggles himself off to Urras.

The Urrasti receive him with open arms. At first, he is astonished by how luxurious everything is and how happy the people are. But he gradually realizes (mainly through clandestine little notes slipped into his pockets by servants) that he is being coddled by the elite, who hope that they will profit from his General Temporal Theory. They have carefully prevented him from seeing any slums or poverty or other downsides of Urrasti capitalism.

Shevek eventually goes on the lam, gets caught up in a street protest, and is almost shot by the police, before coming up with a solution that serves his needs – and almost everyone else’s, whether they realize it right away or not.

But here I’ve gone on and on about the plot and I’ve hardly talked at all about the real reason to read the book, which is the subtlety and thoughtfulness with which Le Guin, through Shevek’s eyes, compares the Anarresti and Urrasti systems. Any review of The Dispossessed should really include an insightful, complex discourse on capitalism versus socialism, on anarchy versus government, and on how it is impossible to be an ideological purist about any one system.

I feel that this is, alas, beyond my analytical abilities but, to at least show my appreciation for what Le Guin has done, I will try to address it in a small way next week.

R.A. Dickey: Namer of Baseball Bats

The New York Times reports that Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey names his bats after swords out of Norse myth:

One bat is called Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver and the other is Hrunting. Dickey, an avid reader, said that Orcrist came from “The Hobbit.” Hrunting — the H is silent, Dickey said — came from the epic poem “Beowulf”; it is the sword Beowulf uses to slay Grendel’s mother.

“Just having fun,” said Dickey, whose mystical weapons must be working. His career average entering the weekend was .246, sixth best among active pitchers with at least 60 at-bats.

The best part comes next: the fact-checking from the peanut gallery. Apparently, Dickey told the reporter that Orcrist was Bilbo's sword. But as "AR" from Waldwick, NJ and "Diamond Jim" from Fairfax, VA both pointed out in the comments to the article on the Times's website, that's not true. The Times issued the following correction:

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Book Review: The Lingala Code

Warren Kiefer
1972
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Lingala Code is a bit like a simplified, jazzed-up version of a John Le Carré spy novel, but set in Africa and with an action hero as the main character.

It packs a pretty good punch of excitement, with riots and shootings and spear-throwing Kasai warriors and even a car chase.

The book is set in 1961 in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The Congo at that time had just gained independence from Belgium and was a mass of turmoil, with lots of violence, corruption, poverty, and competing warlords jockeying for power.

The main character is Mike Vernon, a former Air Force pilot and current CIA agent (unofficially) working for the US embassy (officially) in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).

At the beginning of the book, Vernon’s best friend and CIA/embassy colleague gets shot to death in a supposed home burglary. But Vernon is suspicious of the shooting and sets out to find out what really happened, opening up a whole huge can of dangerous worms. His investigation pulls in some of the warlords and a local terrorist and eventually reveals a Soviet mole in the embassy.

All of which is indeed very exciting, even if I did sometimes get confused which of the corrupt politicians was which and who worked for whom.

Vernon’s activities take him all over the country. I am not sure if Kiefer had actually been to the Congo when he wrote this, but the details of what Vernon sees in all these places sure made it seem real and I very much enjoyed being immersed in the sweaty world of central Africa for a time.

At one point, for example, Vernon has to fly a tiny prop plane several hundred miles over thick, dirty green jungle to meet a contact at a plantation just downriver from Stanleyville (now Kisangani). He describes his flight in detail - how he uses the lake near Inongo and the town of Boende as checkpoints and how the crocodiles look like logs floating in the mustard-yellow river below him.

I also liked Vernon’s description of his ride on the car ferry from Kinshasa to Brazzaville:

“Out on deck there was no breeze, but it was better than inside the car. The view across Stanley Pool to Brazzaville was not exactly inspiring: green and yellow clots of jungle hyacinth floated by like small islands, while the ferryboat engines pounded and shook beneath our feet...

The Pool is swift in places and the boat was old and underpowered - probably the same one Joseph Conrad sailed upriver seventy years ago. To maintain course to the opposite bank it sometimes crabbed at a forty-five-degree angle upstream.”

I said earlier that this book was a little like a simplified Le Carré novel with more action. The problem is that more action is not necessarily to a spy novel’s benefit. Le Carré's best novels are gray, bleak, and filled with the unromantic, unglamorous, often tedious work that is real-life spycraft. That’s what makes them so real and, strangely, so tense and nerve-wracking. The dramatic Lingala Code requires, on the one hand, more suspension of disbelief and, on the other hand, less sympathy for the main character.

So perhaps Mike Vernon is actually more like James Bond than George Smiley. The bad guys in The Lingala Code were pretty much bad and the good guys were pretty much good; there weren’t many subtle characters or surprising twists. (Although when there were twists, to Kiefer’s credit, he didn’t try to dangle the suspense along way past when you’d figured something out.)

As happens all too often in murder mysteries, the love interest falls flat. Vernon’s girlfriend Françoise was hard to take as the totally stereotypical gorgeous and understanding Frenchwoman from Aix-en-Provence. I found her completely unbelievable as a motivating factor.

Oreilles Gauloises (Music Festival Edition) - Less is More...

I realized tonight that it's been over a year since I've last posted an album review on this site...incredible. Not sure how that happened exactly, but it's definitely a habit I have - doing something for a while, and then just stopping without any warning or clear reason. I'll have to cogitate a bit more on that at some later time, and maybe I'll put up a post about my mental ruminations on that topic.

In any case, I'm a year older now (technically, I turned 42 about 11 hours ago, GMT +1), and as my album-listening and live music experiences have drastically decreased over the last year (for a myriad of reasons), I figured that when I feel I have something to say about the musical world, I should just do it without thinking too much about it.

So, in that vein...

I went to Coachella a couple of weeks ago. All three days. I had a great time, and if there was one thing I took out of that experience, it is definitely that the smallest bands tend to make the loudest sounds these days. That very much appeals to me, especially in contrast to the larger outfits with bigger "production" in their records and in their live acts.

So, for example, the bands that made the most impression on me that weekend were the ones that had at most two people in it. In comparison, the biggest disappointments were all bands with at least four members, or musical acts that relied heavily on stadium-style stage productions, with dancers, fireworks, etc.

My favorite act was The Black Keys. Bass, and guitar. Nothing else. Nothing to hide behind. If someone blows clams, you hear it, zero distortion. It's clear then that when they're less-than-on, their show can easily become a disaster. But they were definitely on that day, and they blew everybody else off the stage.

Another example was Death From Above 1979, who recently reunited after breaking up about five years ago. One drummer, and one bass player. Same deal: nowhere to hide. If you suck that evening, you don't have anyone to lean on to prop you up and make you sound a bit better. It's a musical tightrope without a safety net. But just like the Black Keys, DFA 1979 was ON, and the result was impressive. It could easily have gone either way, though, and everyone seemed to know it.

One last example of that concept was Lightning Bolt, a bass/drum duo from Providence RI who's been around since the mid-90's. Probably the loudest thing I've heard since My Bloody Valentine, and definitely one of the most exciting live act I've seen in a long time. But again, just two guys, and despite the wall of sounds from all the effects pedals and voice distortion, you knew that this train could come off the rails at any point. It was exciting to watch and listen to, not the least of which because the danger inherent in the music was palpable.

So, the main lesson for me from that whole weekend was very clear: less is often more, especially if the number of warm bodies on that stage doesn't go above two! So I left Indio CA feeling blown away by The Kills, and completely unsatiated by the likes of the Kings of Leon, or Kanye West and his 12+ dancers/light show/fireworks.

Book Review: Hominids

Robert J. Sawyer
2002
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

In the documentary Wordplay, crossword-puzzle fan Jon Stewart admits that sometimes when he’s in a hotel he will do the USA Today puzzle. But, he says, “I don’t feel good about myself when I do it.”

I felt the same way about this book. It grabbed my attention right away and it read very easily and fast, but when it was done I didn’t feel good about myself for reading it.

Hominids has all the elements of a blockbuster best-seller: uncomplicated characters; carefully-paced rising tension; a crisis, pinch, and climax at precisely the right spots; resolution of conflicts so the good guys win; and a love story sideline. And it has just enough of a scientific veneer to qualify as science fiction.

The book is the first in Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and sets up the premise for the whole series, which is that there exists a parallel universe in which Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent species on earth and homo sapiens was the species that died out. In the parallel universe, a couple of Neanderthal physicists conduct an experiment in quantum computing. There is an accident during the experiment causing one of them to get transported to our universe, where he lands in the middle of an experiment being conducted by a human physicist.

The human physicist spirits the Neanderthal physicist away to a doctor friend’s remote country house before the government can get its hands on him. The two humans call in a geneticist to make sure the Neanderthal, whose name is Ponter, is what they think he is and then the four of them hole up in the house to keep the press and the feds away while they figure out where Ponter came from and whether or not they can send him back home.

One of my major issues with the book is that the characters are pretty formulaic. Ponter, for example, is universally beloved in his own universe. He is kind and gentle and understanding at all times. The three humans who befriend him (the physicist, the geneticist, and the doctor) are all super-intelligent, earnest, straightforward, excellent at keeping confidences, and uniformly good-natured. So, also, are Ponter’s Neanderthal man-mate, his woman-mate, and his daughter back home.

Any opportunities for real internal crises are deftly skirted. One of the most troubling is that one of the key characters (the geneticist) is raped at the very beginning of the book. She decides to handle it by not telling anyone and going on as if nothing has happened. And while this clearly isn’t easy, and the memory of the rape comes up over and over again in her mind, she essentially all but recovers during the Neanderthal business (which spans maybe a week) and finds (thank goodness!) that she’s still attracted to men… or at least to beefy, well-endowed Neanderthals.

The other main issue I had was with the science. The New York Times is quoted on the cover of the hardcover first edition of this book saying, “Sawyer is a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.” I would certainly agree with that, if by “scientific extrapolation” they mean “wild and contrived applications of perfectly decent theory.”

Many reviewers give the book kudos for being so thoroughly researched, and there certainly is a long bibliography at the end. But there’s no anthropologist among the main characters, and the science about Neanderthals that comes up either seems too pat and basic or too fanciful and wacky.

For example, the Neanderthals in the parallel universe have a much more peaceful and progressive culture than ours. They use solar energy, are all secular humanists, are practically crime-free, have intimate relationships with both women and men as a matter of course, never domesticated plants or animals to any great extent and so have hardly any pathogens, and are appalled by our wars and man’s inhumanity to man. It’s definitely a message of “O, what these noble savages could teach us!” Maybe it’s just my cynical homo sapiens nature coming out but it’s hard to believe all that would result from their inherently different biology. It’s also hard to imagine it working on a large scale with hardly any missteps or conflict.

And the explanations for the parallel universes, and for how they are supposedly going to bring Ponter home to the exact right single universe out of all the infinite possibilities, both just seemed silly. Even for a blockbuster best-seller.

Book Review: The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
1970
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book was an enjoyable combination of decent plot, good characters, and great style.

It is a murder mystery set in Stockholm. It sucks you in right away, starting with a pretty gripping description of the shooting of nine people on a double-decker bus late at night in a remote part of the city. Two less-than-enthusiastic patrolmen from the bordering suburb of Solna stumble across the bus first and trample all over the scene, eliminating many of the clues.

To make matters worse, one of the murdered passengers turns out to be an off-duty member of the homicide squad who had no discernable reason for being on that bus.

The case, naturally, becomes a red ball for the Stockholm P.D. and you spend the rest of the book watching the stressed-out detectives solve the crime.

It was neat to read a mystery set in Stockholm. I got to see not only the Swedish police but also a bit of Swedish culture from the inside. Stockholm becomes not a glamorous European destination but a big gritty city. Northern and southern Swedish accents set peers apart, make them feel inferior. Americans even start to look a little bit different.

The team of Stockholm detectives is made up of distinctive, believable characters. You see the story from almost every detective’s point of view and you see how confused and frustrated they all are.

The book was originally written in Swedish but I don’t think it’s the translation to the English that makes the writing style so entertaining. The authors (a husband and wife team) use matter-of-fact, uncomplicated sentences that are just a little bit quirky. This is the description of the patrol route the uninspired Solna patrolmen chose before they ran across the bus – a route designed to avoid running into anything that might actually require policing:

“It was a brilliantly thought-out course, leading through areas which were almost guaranteed empty of people. They met not a single car the whole way and saw only two living creatures, first a cat and then another cat.”

Often what the authors will do is start out with a really short sentence that has only basic information in it. Then they’ll repeat the sentence, making it a little bit longer by elaborating just a little bit. And then they’ll do that again… and again. Until after about five sentences, you have this really long sentence with all kinds of crazy detail in it that is a hundred times more informative than the original sentence. It’s like they’re reluctant to tell the story but can’t help letting it dribble out in spite of themselves.

There were a couple things about the book that were annoying. For one thing, sometimes key pieces of information would be withheld from me and then would be revealed by the policeman I’d been following without me even knowing that he’d been doing any extra investigation. I don’t mind surprises but I like at least knowing that there’s something I don’t know. This felt like my characters were sneaking around behind my back.

And, frankly, the motives of the culprit, some of the victims, and the dead policeman’s girlfriend, all of which were key to the plot, seemed a bit dicey and unrealistic.

But I got over that.

Book Review: Stations of the Tide

Michael Swanwick
1991
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ – – – –

I started out excited to read this book because of the setting. It takes place on a planet called Miranda which has a very long annual cycle lasting several of our years. There is one large dry-land continent (“Continent”) on Miranda and one ocean (“Ocean”) surrounding it. During half of the year, the polar ice caps melt and the tides come in and Ocean rises to cover half of Continent. Any creature living on the land who is not prepared for the annual tides gets swept into Ocean and drowns.

The indigenous animals of Miranda, collectively called the “haunts” by the colonizing humans, have evolved to be able to take either land or water form, as necessary. Miranda’s native mice, for example, change into sort of swimming mini-otters when the tides come in.

Unfortunately, although the setting is cool, the plot is confusing and ill-defined, and the characters are either annoying or just plain boring. I don’t know how William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson could have given it the stunning reviews they did.

Basically, the story is about a bureaucrat (“the bureaucrat”) from the governing worlds many light years away. A mysterious Mirandan wizard named Gregorian is rumored to be in possession of proscribed technology, and the bureaucrat is sent to find him and get him to give it back. Along the way the bureaucrat has life-threatening adventures, learns Gregorian’s true identity, experiments with mind-altering drugs, and has pretty kinky, very explicit sex with a witch. It all takes place on the coast in the last days before the tide is scheduled to come rushing in, adding a certain urgency to his task.

My major problem with the book is that Swanwick has a Vernor Vinge-like habit of continually bringing in new ideas and plot lines and technology, and then never carrying them through. From the Mirandan’s somehow restrictive census bracelets to the feverdancers that affect your brain when you’re on drugs to the weird TV drama that everyone is always watching, many of the early details you think hold promise and are going to be explored further are just left vague and hanging. And some elements essential to the ending are brought up for the first time in the last five pages.

In addition, many of the ideas are painfully derivative of better earlier work by other people. For example, one of the characters has to go through a test of strength and character that involves sticking their hand in a pain-box in a scene that could have been copied directly from Dune. Even the dual nature of Miranda’s haunts seems similar to, but not as well developed as, the local fauna and flora in Speaker for the Dead.

Note: I did appreciate the overt homage in which the massive, multi-towered granite government buildings the bureaucrat works in are called “the Mountains of Madness” by the employees.

Swanwick sprinkles references to The Tempest throughout the book, undoubtedly inspired by the ocean forces that hover in the background, threatening inundation at any moment. Celestial bodies are all named for characters in Shakespeare's play – the sun is Prospero, one moon is Caliban and the other is Ariel, and then of course there is the planet Miranda itself.

None of the references are carried through with any meaning, though. He throws them out but feels no need to incorporate any deeper parallels to The Tempest into the story. That would have been quite possible; after all, one of the main characters is a powerful magician, and it takes place on what is essentially an island whose inhabitants feel constrained by their colonial government (although they are also kind of colonizers themselves).

I have to admit, though, I never really liked The Tempest either. I don’t like Shakespeare’s plays about fairies and romances nearly as much as the ones about despotic rulers.

Our lives may be such stuff as dreams are made on, but this book definitely is not.

Book Review: The Eighth Circle

Stanley Ellin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The cover of the 1959 paperback edition of this book makes it look like a trashy piece of pulp fiction. It has a drawing of the main character, handsome private detective Murray Kirk, being leaned on by a lovely young lady who is half out of her satin dinner dress and matching heels. A block of text next to the pair describes the book as “a story about the special world of a private detective.”

But it’s actually a perfectly decent detective story.

And, as far as I could tell, Kirk never actually sleeps with any of the ladies he runs across. Not one. Oh, sure, one falls asleep on the rug in front of his fireplace and stays the night there, and he has to help another off with rain-soaked clothes and warm her up in his shower to prevent her from passing out from the cold, and there is certainly a lot of racy talk and innuendo, but no major hanky-panky.

And not only that, but the case doesn’t revolve around a murder; it’s just a book-keeping scandal. And I think only one or two of the bad guys even has a gun.

What happens is that Kirk, who runs a successful detective agency in New York, gets personally involved in a minor case, the arrest of a policeman accused of taking payoffs, because he’s madly in love with the cop’s fiancée. He’s hired by the cop’s lawyer to dig up information that will prove his client’s innocence, but he actually hopes that his client is guilty so the fiancée will call it off and go out with him instead. Of course the case gets extremely complicated and pulls in plenty of characters from both high society and the unsavory underworld.

While it wasn’t fantastic, it was generally a well put-together, mostly page-turning mystery. It definitely stayed true to its genre and vintage; I wouldn’t read this book expecting anything unusual or stereotype-flouting.

For the most part, I liked Kirk. He doesn’t always guess right about clues and certainly has bad days. He’s no-nonsense and savvy but not quite as hard-boiled and gruff as, say, Philip Marlowe. He’s a little slicker than that. He’s also relatively kind to the women in his life (for a 1950s P.I.).

The men, both good and bad, are pretty well developed characters. The women, on the other hand, are completely one-dimensional. Each one is absolutely beautiful and in dire need of his help except for his (naturally) super-efficient, loyal, middle-aged secretary (who used to be absolutely beautiful).

Book Review: Parable of the Talents

Octavia Butler
1998
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (For Parable of the Sower)

A few years ago I read Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is a prequel to this book. I liked Sower's premise but much of the time I was pretty irritated with the main character, Lauren Olamina, who narrated the story. I thought she was stubborn and annoying. She had also developed her own religion, “Earthseed,” and spent most of her time proselytizing it all over the place.

So I was hesitant to read Parable of the Talents. But I am glad I did; I liked it much better than Sower. Talents is partly narrated by Lauren Olamina, again, but it is also partly narrated by her daughter, Larkin, who is a breath of fresh air; she thinks her mother is stubborn and annoying and wishes she’d stop always proselytizing her religion all over the place.

The back story (mostly told in Parable of the Sower) is that by the 2030s, for a combination of environmental and political reasons, economic inequality in the US has grown to the point that all middle-class and rich people have to live in iron-walled, guarded sections of cities protected from the chaos and crime and poverty outside. Eventually things outside the walls get so bad that the poor people blast their way in to these citadels; during this revolt, most of the rich and middle-class people are either killed or have to go on the road and scavenge like vagabonds.

Lauren Olamina is one of these people. Most of her family is killed during the invasion of their middle-class home in LA but she escapes and makes her way on foot up the coast, gradually collecting a tribe of people with her who buy into her hippyish Earthseed religion. They settle in northern California on her husband's property, start farming and teaching and having kids and making new lives.

This is roughly where Sower stops and Talents picks up. Just when things are starting to look comparatively rosy for the Earthseeders, a fascist right-wing president gets elected and his minions come and take over the Earthseed compound (claiming that it is a cult, which it sort of is) and steal all their children and adopt them out to nice Christian households. One of these children is Lauren’s daughter Larkin.

Talents is partly the story of Lauren persevering and rebuilding after the demolition of her Earthseed farm; this part was less interesting to me. But it is also partly the story of Larkin growing up in an adoptive household, achieving her own success, and eventually going to find her biological parents. Larkin is understandably a bit ticked off when she finds out how little Lauren did to find her until many, many years had gone by; Earthseed and the compound were clearly more important to her than her lost child.

The Omega Man

The premise of the Parable books is an example of one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres, in which humanity is all but destroyed by war/disease/rioting/environmental catastrophe and a few survivors are left to band together and make a new civilization while being beset by other humans who want to take what they have and/or control them. There are tons of awesome works of fiction with different takes on this idea (The Stand, The Day of the Triffids, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Omega Man, etc.). One of the best things about science fiction is that you can do this kind of thought experiment and explore the ways people might deal with each other, for good and for ill, when they have next to nothing left.

Existentialtainment.com

I've decided to start a new little blog called Existentialtainment. I hope to turn it into sort of an online gallery of examples of existentialism in movies, TV, theater, music, popular fiction, and other forms of entertainment.

What's "existentialism?" Well, it depends on who you ask. I'm by no means an expert on it. From what I've been able to gather, it's the collection of issues that human beings face when they try to figure out what in the heck they are doing in the world and how they are supposed to behave. Should I accept the bad things in my life or try to change them? Am I responsible for all the results of my actions or just the ones that I can conveniently attend to? If I am unhappy, is that because of external forces or because of how I choose to think about the situation? If the Earth is eventually going to be consumed by the Sun and vanish from existence, what is the point of exerting any effort at all?

For many if not most people, these questions are at least partially answered by religious doctrine. But others of us, while we recognize that religion can have much to teach us about everyday life, find that religion does not answer all of our questions about how and why to go on living. We have to figure it out ourselves.

My favorite movies have always been stories of ordinary individuals trying and often failing to grapple with life, films like "The Graduate," "I Heart Huckabee's" and "About Schmidt." And last year, I discovered a couple of TV shows—"Louie" starring Louis C.K., and a British show called "Peep Show"—that humorously deal with the everyday struggles of everyday guys. Over time, as I've learned a bit more about existentialism, I started to realize that the thing that these favorite movies and TV shows all had in common was that they covered existential themes, like choice, responsibility, futility, alienation, resistance, integrity, and uncertainty.

Existential themes have always been well covered in literature, by authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and by high-brow playwrights such as Samuel Beckett. But they also crop up frequently, if not so explicitly, in popular culture, and that's what this website is going to focus on.

We'll see how long I can keep it going. One feature of Existentialtainment.com is that it allows readers to submit their own examples of existentialism in entertainment. I've been encouraged that in just the first week, I've received and published three outside submissions, including one from Michael A. Britt, host of a popular psychology podcast called The Psych Files.

For the time being, over in the right-hand column of the front page I've added a list of links to the last five exhibits on Existentialtainment.com. It's right below the random photo and "Today's Death-Grip Pairing" (another new little web project of mine, on which more later).

All-Purpose Management Exercise Input

Last week I took a bit of a break from award winners and read Bellwether by Connie Willis. Willis has got to be one of my favorite authors now and I heartily recommend anything she has ever written, even the things I haven't read yet.

Bellwether was really fun. I won't get into it here except to say that it is all about fads. In it, one of the characters reveals five things that are always appropriate to give as input for whatever faddy productivity exercise you are forced to go through by Corporate Management. I thought I would pass them along, for the benefit of anyone else out there who has to go through such exercises:

1. Optimize potential
2. Facilitate empowerment
3. Implement visioning
4. Strategize priorities
5. Augment core structures

From the "Life Imitates Art" Category...

What do these three famous persons all now have in common?

Hint: Violence is no solution.

Curt Schilling's Lost Weekend of Tweeting

I happen to follow former Red Sox pitcher / current video-game company entrepreneur Curt Schilling on Twitter. He rarely posts anything not related to his current venture, a video game company called 38 Studios (the company recently decamped to Rhode Island after the Ocean State gave it a $100 million loan guarantee).

But this past weekend, apparently alone in the house, he decided to get on the Twitter and start answering questions from followers. Someone asked him about the best athletes he's seen, and I was surprised to see this response:



Shows how little I know about Fernando Valenzuela. Looking on Wikipedia, he was indeed an above-average hitter for a pitcher, winning two Silver Slugger awards.

Anyway, lots of interesting nuggets from Curt about playing baseball and the off-field life of a baseball player:

Curt Schilling Answers Questions on Twitter
(note that the tweets are shown in reverse-chronological order).

Book Review: Peter’s Pence

Jon Cleary
1974
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book is sort of the Da Vinci Code of 1974. It’s a heist story set in the Vatican, so it has the same sort of caper-in-the-inner-circle-of-the-Catholic-church thing going on. There is a disillusioned, lapsed-believer lead male character and a gorgeous Romance-language-speaking (Italian, in this case) lead female character who end up running from the law through (almost) no fault of their own. And they are pursued the whole time by a creepy crazy man devoted to a fanatical cause.

As a piece of writing, it’s a bit better than the Da Vinci Code. A little bit.

The book starts with a group of IRA members plotting to steal some of the Vatican’s treasures so they can use the ransom money to bribe corrupt Ulster politicians and finally bring about peace in Northern Ireland. They get Fergus McBride, the Vatican’s press relations man and the American son of an IRA martyr, to help them get inside. But the heist goes terribly wrong and they end up kidnapping the Pope instead. They spend the rest of the book trying to figure out how to get out of the situation with the ransom but without having to kill the Pope.

In the meantime, the son of a German SS officer is running around Rome trying to assassinate the Pope because the Pope, who is also German, was imprisoned in Dachau during the war and gave evidence against his father which led to his execution.

Problem #1 is that the characters are all unbelievable and annoying.

The IRA gang is made up of an Irishman, an Australian, a tortured, self-divided Irish/English man, and the aforementioned McBride. The Pope is a kindly German and the SS officer’s son is an evil German. The Roman chief of police is a mustachioed, macho Italian. Each man is a complete ethnic stereotype and acts according to type. I found the Irishman particularly over the top.

And don’t even get me started on the women. There are four women with substantial speaking roles in the book. One is the “man-hating” (yes, that is a quote) nun who is the secretary to the Pope. Two and three are the classic jaded prostitutes with hearts of gold who work the street outside McBride’s apartment building. And the fourth is McBride’s girlfriend Luciana, a member of the Italian aristocracy. She is ravishing, passionate, prone to fits of panic and fiery anger, and, of course, has a steel backbone when it comes to protecting her man. Luciana is explicitly described as having elements of both the Madonna and the whore. I had thought that was always just an unspoken cliché.

Problem #2 is that the writing and the plot both just plain drag. There was just barely enough of a wisp of tension to keep me reading the whole way through.

Snowmelt

Revealed on a Boston sidewalk when two months of snow melted away:

Sticks & leaves
Cigarette butts
Broken glass
Broken taillight
Dog poop
Roll of paper towels
Coffee cups (Dunkin' Donuts, Mike's, Newman's Own)
Cow femur head
Chicken bone
Empty pack of American Spirit cigarettes
Latex surgical glove
Cheerios

Book Review: This Immortal

Originally published in serial form as ...And Call Me Conrad
Roger Zelazny
1965
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The funny thing about this book is that it is not a terrifically complex story, and it is pretty short – 216 pages in my 1989 paperback edition – but it shared the 1966 Hugo award for best novel with the mighty Dune.

And I have to say, I agree with the Hugo voters. It’s a really good book.

I think the reason it is up there with Dune in spite of its plot’s relative normal-ness is because of Roger Zelazny’s character development and writing style. He has this weird combination of plain speaking narrative that occasionally switches into the elaborate, archaic language of religious texts and ancient legends with total smoothness. This can be really funny and also oddly mournful. (Zelazny exhibits this talent to the hilt in his other Hugo-award-winning novel, Lord of Light.)

The story takes place on Earth several hundred years after a three-day nuclear war wiped out most humans and destroyed most continental mainland. The few humans that survived mostly fled to islands or to off-world colonies on other planets or space stations.

Since the war, we humans have met the Vegans – that is, blue-skinned humanoid aliens from the planet Vega. They are far more advanced and civilized than us (which is especially obvious since we blew up our planet) and have basically taken over, buying up much of the remaining quality Earth real estate and turning the absentee human government on the planet Taler into a puppet regime.

The Vegans send an emissary down to be led on a tour of Earth’s greatest places. He is supposedly there to write a travelogue, but some humans – especially those in the anti-Vegan resistance movement known as the Radpol – think he is there to figure out how to put the final nail in humanity’s coffin.

This is where it gets good. Because the puppet human government has assigned him a native Earth guide and bodyguard – Conrad Nomikos, the narrator of our story. Conrad is ugly, proud, grumpy, and cynical, but also a natural leader, an excellent fighter, and cool-headed and sane compared to just about everyone else. He is none too pleased about acting as a Vegan’s protector and pretty much just wants to be left to himself to lounge around on his Greek island with his wife.

He also just happens to be immortal (a side effect of a radiation-related mutation). He does his best to conceal this from his acquaintances but sometimes it just, you know, comes out. Especially when he runs into one of his great-great-grandchildren or someone else who knew him in a previous life, or somebody, like the Vegan emissary, takes the time to do a computer search on humans with Conrad’s unique physical characteristics and comes up with four or five matches spread out evenly across several hundred years.

Which, as it turns out, is why the Vegan chose him as his bodyguard and tour guide in the first place.

The story is basically just the tale of Conrad accompanying the Vegan on his mysterious tour and trying to prevent various Radpol agents from assassinating him until Conrad can figure out if the mission is for good or for ill. They also run into plenty of dangerous mutants – human, animal, and combo human/animal – who want to do them in. It’s a bit of a parallel (overtly referenced by the author) to the twelve labors of Hercules, with Conrad as the Herc.

The story is fun and plenty of the other characters and beasties are entertaining. But what it lacks (compared to Dune, at least) in depth and length, it makes up for primarily with the quirkiness and appeal of both the main character and the writing. It’s more of a modern, quickly-read narrative and less of a fantasy/religio-legendary tale than Lord of Light, but Zelazny does this one just as well.

Mailing a Coconut: A True Story

While on vacation in Hawaii recently, one of my traveling companions and I decided to mail coconuts to friends back on the mainland.

It turns out that this is significantly more difficult than just dropping a coconut in the nearest mailbox.

We found two likely coconuts under some palm trees on the rocky shores of Onomea Bay, just north of Hilo on the Big Island. After pounding them with sharp rocks for about three times as long as it would have taken a stone-age person, we were able to peel off the green outer husks to reveal the hard brown shells underneath.

We took the de-husked coconuts back to Hilo, where we were staying. I poked a hole in the end of mine to drain out the coconut water while my friend decided to leave his intact. Then we let them both dry out for about a week.

When they were dry, we sanded off all the little hairs on one side to make a smooth writing surface and addressed our respective coconuts with a Sharpie. One coconut was destined for Colorado and the other for Massachusetts.

Feeling a little ridiculous, we then took the coconuts up to the counter at the main post office in Hilo. The postal worker helping us looked concerned and said that he had to check with his supervisor. He took our coconuts into the back of the post office where we heard some low conversation and then some giggling.

When he returned, he said that we had to get our coconuts inspected by the Agriculture Department before they could be mailed to the mainland. He gave us two places where we could get it done: the state office downtown or the federal office out at the airport. We opted for the state office, since it was only a few blocks away.

The State Department of Agriculture office in Hilo is a one-story white cinder block building with no discernible main entrance, just a series of widely-spaced dark-tinted glass doors along one side. We followed a couple hand-written "AGRICULTURAL INSPECTION THIS WAY" signs taped to the outside of the building and eventually came to a locked door with a buzzer and a poster listing prices for inspection of various items (seeds $25, plants $40, bacteria $100).

We rang the buzzer and asked the man who opened the door how much it would cost to get our coconuts inspected for mailing. "You wanna put 'em in a box or just wanna send 'em just like dat?" he asked in a familiar Hawaiian accent. When we confirmed that we just wanted to send them as they were, he said that the inspection would be free, but that he couldn't do it. "You gotta get 'em inspected by da Aggie guys at da airport," he told us.

Were we getting the runaround? Were we ever going to be able to mail our coconuts? No way were we giving up now.

We drove out to the Hilo airport and marched up to the curbside agricultural inspection station, where air travelers have their luggage inspected for contraband plants, soil, and other organisms. We were met by an alert-looking official wearing a crisp white shirt with blue and gold military-style insignia. When we explained that we needed him to inspect and certify our coconuts for mailing, he suddenly became baffled and fearful. He wanted no part of us or our coconuts. He quickly ushered us away from his station and directed us to the main USDA office at the other end of the airport.

The main USDA office was located in a tiny building at the far end of the airport by the lost luggage area. When we went in we were met with an icy blast of air conditioning. The office was empty of people but jam-packed with stuff. Books and papers and three-ring binders filled several rows of shelves on all four walls and USDA uniform shirts and vests hung on hangers from several of the top shelves. We were in front of a tiny counter in a tiny reception area just big enough for the two of us to stand in with the door closed.

We stood there for a minute, holding our coconuts, not sure what to do, until what turned out to be the world's coolest U.S. Department of Agriculture Employee came in through the door.

When he opened the door we had to flatten ourselves against the reception area wall to let him past us and around the counter to his desk. We told him about our coconut inspection needs and he didn't bat an eye. He grabbed my coconut and took a quick look at it and said, "Can you just take some more of the hairs off of this side? I need a flat smooth place where I can put my stamp."

We panicked momentarily but then remembered that we had brought some sandpaper with us. We took our coconuts outside to the curb, hastily sanded down another large patch on both coconuts, and brought them back into the office. With consummate professionalism and flair, our federal "Aggie" made several practice rolls with his stamp on each coconut before actually applying ink. The final result was thrillingly official, with a big red APPROVED BY U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE completely legible on each nut.

We thanked him profusely and headed back out to the car, carefully avoiding smearing the still-drying ink.

Luckily, there is a post office right next to the Hilo airport, so we didn't have too long a drive for the last step in the process. We walked into the post office and proudly presented our coconuts for mailing.

Amazing as it may seem, the guy at the post office clearly had never encountered someone trying to mail a coconut. He hefted the coconuts like a coconut expert, weighing them in his hands. He held each one up to his ear and shook it, confirming that mine was empty and that my friend's still had some water in it. He asked us where we got them and agreed that Onomea Bay was very nice. He marveled that we had ripped the husks off of them by ourselves: "Lot of labor went into these coconuts, then."

He checked out our fresh USDA stamps and nodded with approval. He asked what it took to get the inspection stamps and was interested that the state inspectors had actually appeared less familiar with coconut rules than the federal inspector.

He weighed my empty coconut on the scale and calculated the postage: $2.75. Then he weighed my friend's water-filled coconut: $10.20.

He went through the standard mailing questions for us but answered them all himself. "Do you have anything liquid in this package? Yes, in this one is coconut water. Anything fragile? No, it would be really hard to break this package. Anything perishable?" (This one he had to think about.) "No, it will last until it gets there."

He printed out the postage labels and fastened them carefully and securely to the sanded parts of the coconuts. "I am going to make sure these make it to their destinations," he said. Then he placed them on top of all the other packages on the outgoing mail shelf, in full view of the other customers, "to give other people ideas to mail their own coconuts."

I happily handed over my $2.75 and my friend happily handed over his $10.20 (he said later he would have paid $50, just to be able to see this through). We walked out of the post office into the Hilo sunshine, true coconut-mailing champions.

Both coconuts made it to their respective destinations three business days later, to the awe of their recipients.

Black-White-Yellow Bauhaus Rug

Another book-review-vacation post: check out this pattern for a knitted & felted rug based on a design by Bauhaus fiber artist Anni Albers.

Black-White-Yellow Rug Pattern

Armageddon

I'm taking a break from book reviews for a couple weeks and getting outside for a change.

In the meantime, I thought I would leave you with this excellent passage from A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which a nuclear arms race, ensuing apocalyptic third world war, and aftermath is described by the priests who survived it.

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: “Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m’Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought.”

But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.

Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge.

Within weeks – some said days – it was ended, after the first unleashing of the hell-fire. Cities had become puddles of glass, surrounded by vast acreages of broken stone. While nations had vanished from the earth, the lands littered with bodies, both men and cattle, and all manner of beasts, together with the birds of the air and all things that flew, all things that swam in the rivers, crept in the grass, or burrowed in holes; having sickened and perished, they covered the land, and yet where the demons of the Fallout covered the countryside, the bodies for a time would not decay, except in contact with fertile earth. The great clouds of wrath engulfed the forests and the fields, withering trees and causing the crops to die. There were great deserts where once life was, and in those places of the Earth where men still lived, all were sickened by the poisoned air, so that, while some escaped death, none was left untouched; and many died even in those lands where the weapons had not struck, because of the poisoned air.

… So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become.

… To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks’ robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived and could be reoccupied, for the religious were less despised by the mob except when they openly defied it and accepted martyrdom.

Book Review: Room to Swing

Ed Lacy
1957
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This novel just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its ridiculous cover – or its teensy size.

It proves that just because a book is short (a tidy 128 pages) and just because it went out of print and had to be resurrected by a tiny publisher who obviously scanned in the original text and then didn’t edit it afterwards so that there are typos, skipped sentences, and "& pound; s" scattered throughout the text, and whose extensive cover design consisted of reprinting a tiny picture of the original 1957 cover artwork (shown here) surrounded by an enormous plain black border, and who jammed the text so close to the tops of the pages that the headers and page numbers are practically cut off, doesn’t mean it can’t be action-packed and establish great characters.

The plot is tried-and-true mystery fare: the main character, Toussaint Moore, is a New York detective hired to track a man who quickly winds up being murdered. Moore is the first to find the body and is of course mistakenly accused of the crime; he then has to solve the murder in order to prove his own innocence.

I loved Moore’s style. He doesn’t take any guff and doesn’t go out of his way to make people feel comfortable. He is abrupt, snappy, and slangy, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe at his best. But Moore is also human and you see his fears.

Lacy’s writing is fast-paced, clear-headed, and straightforward – which is the only way the book can be this complex and this short and still work. I liked that he starts by dropping you right smack in the middle of the story, so you have to put the background together for yourself as he gives it to you. And what I liked even more was that you got the clues and solved the mystery at the same time Moore does. You might think that would lead to less suspense, but it actually was more exciting.

What makes this novel unique for 1957 is that Moore is black. (He is, in fact, described on the back of my copy of the book and in several reviews as “the first credible black detective” in popular mystery fiction.)

For a black detective in the ‘50s, racism is never far away. Especially when most of the people he has to deal with in the story are white, including the people who hired him, the police who are chasing him, and the man he was trailing and is accused of murdering. This is a constant additional tension, to say the least, that a white detective would not have had to cope with.

In the course of solving the crime, Moore ends up traveling from New York to Bingston, Ohio, a small town just north of the Kentucky border. The contrast is educational for him. Bingston is plainly, overtly racist; Moore can only make phone calls from certain gas stations, can't eat at the cafeteria or stay at the hotel, and is constantly called “boy” and treated with hostility. New York is certainly better than Bingston; black people have a wider choice of professions, have at least the legal right to eat and lodge anywhere they want, and night clubs often have both black and white patrons. (It even has out-of-the-closet Lesbians (capitalized), whom Moore is totally okay with.)

But even with the most “liberal-minded” white New Yorkers, Moore constantly walks a tightrope of behavior, judging when to put up with insensitive remarks or outright insults and when to defend himself. And he still has to fight the pressure, even from his girlfriend and his own pesky conscience, to give up his risky detective agency venture and run to a safe civil service job.

Book Review: Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner
1968
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Stand on Zanzibar is set in the 2010s which, in 1968, was the relatively near future. The world has become severely overpopulated, which has serious effects on everyday life. Internal combustion engines are banned in most large cities and have been replaced by fuel-cell and fly-wheel vehicles. Almost everyone has to share housing, even the rich. In jails, prisoners are tranquilized and stacked on bunk beds, one on top of another, which can be pulled in and out of cells like drawers in a filing cabinet.

Rich countries have enacted various forms of eugenic legislation to control birth rates. In the US, for example, you are forbidden to have children if you have genes for certain hereditary conditions like hemophilia, diabetes, phenylketonuria, or color-blindness.

~~~~~~~

There are two semi-intertwined main plots, each centered on one of the two somewhat asocial main characters, Donald Hogan and Norman House. Donald and Norman are roommates and are also probably as close to being friends as would be possible for either of them.

Norman is black, Muslim, and a VP at General Technics, the world’s largest technology firm. His company sends him to Beninia, a remote African country, to work out a deal to allow GT to mine Beninia’s natural resources before its neighboring countries can invade and do so. While there, Norman finds that Beninians are very strange – no wars, no murders, not even lost tempers – and he sets himself to learning why.

Donald is white, Christian, and a spy for the US government. He gets sent to Yatakang, a remote Asian country, which has announced that it is developing the technology to clone embryos, select out the ones with undesirable traits, and then implant the best in any woman. This may have disastrous consequences for governments as it will allow anyone to get around eugenics laws and have a child. Donald’s mission is to either expose their claim as a fraud or, if it is not a fraud, to make it not come to pass.

~~~~~~~

Reading Zanzibar is a little like reading Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange in that it is pretty hard to follow at first. Brunner creates a whole new vocabulary for this future dystopia that you have to get used to. Some of the new terms are abbreviations (“dicty” for “addict”); amalgamations (“Afram” for “African-American”); free-associations (“codder,” from “codpiece,” for “man”); or just plain slang (“shiggy” for “girl”).

But if you persevere, by the time you’re halfway through the book, you can read and understand a sentence like “Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders!” without batting an eye.

Even the table of contents is wacky. Chapters are listed not in chronological order but by category, of which there are four:

“Continuity” (the main plot)
“Context” (explanations of the main plot)
“Tracking with Closeups” (side stories about minor characters)
“The Happening World” (jumbles of ads, gossip, conversations, and news)

The four types of chapters are interwoven throughout the book. It is a little chaotic, but that is part of what Zanzibar is all about. The combination keeps the plot going, helps you understand it, provides detail and color, and gives you an idea of the volume of stimuli constantly bombarding the populace.

~~~~~~~

Stand on Zanzibar is similar to Neuromancer in many ways. It has a trippy style and a unique vocabulary. It has advanced technology such as fuel-cell cars and internet-like, real-time global media. It has widespread use of hard-core drugs. It has a massive self-aware computer that controls many everyday operations for all of humanity worldwide. And it even has a woman with metal eyes (in this case, chromed contact lenses).

The main difference (aside from the fact that Zanzibar came out 16 years earlier) is that it is less about the self-aware central computer and more about humans coping with each other in a crazy, overcrowded world. Brunner is bitingly sarcastic and cynical and, at the same time, handles complex issues with a lot of sensitivity and understanding.

Brunner’s main focus is how the loss of privacy and property affects us psychologically. Humans are social animals – until we get overcrowded, and then we turn on each other. The world of Zanzibar is full of violence: individual killing sprees, terrorism, riots, and war. Many people try to escape from it with drugs, most of which are legal or at least tacitly allowed; everything from marijuana to powerful, laboratory-synthesized hallucinogens with names like Triptine and Skulbustium.

Brunner also explores how the pressure created by overpopulation exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and, at the same, binds them more closely. His main message (sent primarily through the character of the popular, cynical sociologist/commentator Chad Mulligan) is that even though you may think you are rich, you are not, really, if the rest of the world is horribly poor. Mulligan points out that water is eleven times more expensive than it was fifty years ago; that all our foods are prefabricated in factories; and that the fanciest new building being built in the world is a jail.

And throughout the whole book runs a perceptive debate about reproduction. In an overpopulated world, choosing to have a child is itself a political statement. And whether or not you want a child, you have to deal with complex emotional issues. Some people desperately want to have a child but are not allowed to because one partner has a bad genotype. Some have good genotypes but are infertile. Some people have excellent genotypes but don’t want children, and are constantly questioned (and constantly question themselves) why they don’t.

There are a million different ways to have a child: donor eggs or sperm, externally-fertilized ova, adoption, cloning. Each option brings anxiety and pain. And when the Yatakangis announce their cloning program, it brings up new issues about tailored babies. Is it right to breed for certain traits and against others? And do parents really want children who are more advanced than them?

Book Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. LeGuin
1969
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

LeGuin creates very human, reachable characters. And her writing is somehow…soft. I don’t mean wimpy-soft; I mean that it carries you along easily on a soft cushion of plot and description. You don’t have to struggle to follow the story. And you certainly don’t have to struggle to figure out what messages she’s trying to send.

Because her novels always do have messages. Most of the time they involve the idea of The Other – how society and/or individuals understand and accept or fear and reject someone who is different from themselves.

I generally appreciate these messages. Sometimes, though, they are just a little too loud. It can be hard to have fun reading when you’re too consciously aware that you’re receiving a MESSAGE.

All of the above, both the good and the bad, were generally true with this book.

There are several minor themes in this novel (the nature of patriotism; the importance of uncertainty) but the main messages are about gender and our assumptions about gender roles. It wasn’t the first piece of science fiction to deal with androgyny but it remains one of the most sensitive and was certainly groundbreaking for its time.

The main character, Genly Ai (a man), is an ambassador for the Ekumen, a peaceful association of 80-plus planets (including Earth) allied for the mutually beneficial exchange of information and trade. Ai is posted to the remote world of Winter (or “Gethen,” to the natives) to try to convince its residents to join the Ekumen.

Gethen is in the middle of an ice age, so it is covered with snow and ice and is always freezing cold.

The Gethenians are all androgynous except for a few days each month when they go into “kemmer.” During kemmer, either male or female hormones temporarily become dominant and the person’s body changes slightly to take the form of that gender. This is the only time the person can mate with somebody else (as long as that other person is also in kemmer and has taken the opposite gender role). Then they revert a few days later back to their normal neutral status. Any person can be male or female in any particular cycle; everybody has the potential to be a mother in one cycle and then a father the next.

This sets up a perfect framework in which to explore issues of difference and acceptance. As an Ekumen scout, sent to the planet undercover long ago, wrote in her report, any ambassador to Gethen “must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”

The Gethenians are freaked out by Ai, who they see as a pervert, a person in a permanent state of kemmer. The genderlessness (or, rather, dual gendered-ness) of the Gethenians is also a challenge to Ai. He is uncomfortable thinking of his associates as both men and women – he is always trying to pigeonhole them as one or the other.

Plugging ahead with his job, though, Ai first appeals to the king of Karhide, a poor but basically happy land. The king is threatened by the idea of the Ekumen and exiles Ai and Ai’s main local ally, Prime Minister Estraven. Ai and Estraven then go to a rival country, Orgoreyn, which is richer and more technically advanced than Karhide, but which has work camps and secret police and an atmosphere of fear. Eventually they are exiled from Orgoreyn as well.

The two of them then have to go through a life-threatening mid-winter cross-country trek during which they, naturally, bond and attain a deep understanding of each other despite their differences. A major breakthrough for Ai comes when Estraven goes into kemmer as a female during their ordeal. “And then I saw again,” Ai says, “and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left was, at least, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality…I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship, to a man who was a woman, to a woman who was a man.”

In general, I liked the themes and the characters. I also liked the descriptions of the icy scenery and the incredible cold of Gethen:

“Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny cracking noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a snowstorm.”

Ai and Estraven traveled over a glacier “covered with great lumps and chunks of ice,” “slick blue ice hidden by a white glaze,” “broken pressure ridges taking queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults.”

It’s just that, as I said, sometimes it felt like the main messages were kind of bald. It’s hard to define where the line is but I know it felt like too much when at one point Ai drew the yin/yang symbol for Estraven, explaining that it represented him - “Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Male, female. It is yourself...Both and one.” I get it already.

I thought that LeGuin’s Dispossessed was a slightly better exploration of the process of growing to understand people who are different from you. Or, anyway, I felt like the main character was a little stronger and that the message was a little more subtle and well integrated with the story.