→ June 17, 2014
→ By

The Dispossessed.

I answered questions from our fantasy baseball staff for a new Insider post today.

I’ve been an avid reader for most of my life, but often became burned out on reading when I was younger because I wanted to read something different from what was being forced on me in school. The drudgery of assigned reading in junior high school and my first two years of high school left me reading very little for pleasure, something exacerbated by a gift of a Commodore 64 around that same time that found me absorbed in games rather than pages. It was my chance discovery of a science fiction book that got me back on the reading track when I was 15, a spine that jumped off the shelf first because of the author’s name, Isaac Asimov*, and then because of the description of the book, which hooked me right away.

* I was familiar with Asimov’s name for a number of reasons, from the sci-fi rag that bore his name to the long out-of-print Realm of Algebra, which I used one weekend in sixth grade to learn the subject, because my school was switching me to a different math class. Any other famous sci-fi author’s name wouldn’t have had the same effect on me in the bookstore.

I wasn’t aware at the time that the book, Foundation, was an important work in the history of science fiction, or part of a long series. I saw what sounded like a cool story and bought the book, which prompted a stretch of reading for pleasure that ran right through college, through the entire Foundation series, then other Asimov titles, then the Dune series (pro tip: stop after book one), Lord of the Rings, the entire works of Kurt Vonnegut to that point, and even a dozen or so novels by Philip K. Dick, along with a handful of one-off works in the sci-fi and even fantasy genres.

There came a point in my early 20s, however, when that paroxysm of reading slowed to a near-halt. I gave up on fiction, for reasons I don’t even remember, and was only reading a book a month, if that. And when I gave up on fiction, I gave up on science fiction more or less for good. It wasn’t a conscious choice, nothing driven by disdain for the genre, but perhaps an association of science fiction with my own childhood that made me switch to more traditional, mainstream literature. There were exceptions, including the book that provoked my second wind as a reader, the first Harry Potter novel; I read that on a business trip to California in the fall of 2000 and have read over 600 novels since then because J.K. Rowling managed to reawaken in me the love of a great story, the desire to get lost in a dazzling plot with descriptions so vivid that I could be consumed by the words. (To this day, the only time I’ve ever had a dream that put me in a book was one where I was just a regular student at Hogwarts, witnessing the story as a classmate rather than a reader.) But even Rowling’s work didn’t push me to read more fantasy novels; I shifted to the classics, many of which appear to have been influences on the Harry Potter novels, and left science fiction almost completely behind me.

The closest I’ve come to sci-fi in the interim, aside from the two titles on the TIME 100 (Neuromancer and Snow Crash), are dystopian novels, those that depict an alternate society, sometimes set in the future, but nearly always incorporating some element of science into their visions of authoritarian regimes or personal struggles for identity and freedom. My interest in dystopian novels also dates back to that first fling with sci-fi in high school, when I read 1984 and Brave New World and Wells’ The Time Machine, but has never stopped even though the genre includes its fair share of solipsistic duds. (Its sister category, utopian novels, is even worse in that regard.) Reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We earlier this year made me seek out other highly-regarded titles in the catgory, which led me back into sci-fi and to The Dispossessed, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel by acclaimed sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Not only was it an excellent representative of what a good dystopian novel can accomplish, it balanced the fiction and the science beautifully, reminded me of what I once enjoyed so much about the genre.

Le Guin’s setup in The Dispossessed differs from those of all of the dystopian novels I’ve read previously. She’s set up two sibling worlds with antithetical societal structures, neither of them clearly utopian or dystopain. Shevek, the physicist and lead character, was born on Anarres, the large moon orbiting the planet Urras. Anarres was colonized by dissenters nearly 200 years before the events of the book, dissenters who called themselves “Odonians” and practice a form of true communism they refer to as “anarchy,” using the literal sense of the term (without government) than the colloquial one (chaos). Over several generations of isolation from Urras, the people of Anarres have organized into syndicates to allow for fundamental economic activities, but within those syndicates, there exist cliques and fiefdoms that stymie Shevek’s attempts to develop his science further (and his friend’s endeavors to develop his art), resembling authoritarian regimes in their denial of anything deemed subversive or unnecessary. Shevek chooses to become the first person from Anarres to visit Urras since the Odonians’ departure, hoping to expand on his research into “temporal physics” and to find the freedom the people of Anarres had lost.

Most dystopian novels focus on tyranny by a single, usually totalitarian government, but Le Guin doesn’t take sides between Anarres and the pseudodemocratic regime Shevek visits on Urras. (Urras also has a Soviet-style regime, Thu, and puppet states where the two superpowers fight proxy wars.) Anarres has a social safety net, no inequality, and a high degree of mobility. Urras has an actual government, with poverty, conspicuous consumption, disease, and waste, but offers a kind of liberty that Anarres lacks – until it becomes clear that Shevek’s ideas may challenge the government there, at which point he encounters the limits of Urrastian liberty and has to make a choice that will affect the histories of both worlds.

Le Guin succeeds so well here in crafting a philosophical treatise within a novel because she focuses more than anything else on the “fiction” part of science fiction, notably the plot. There are science aspects to the work, primarily the settings – and her imagining of an inhospitable world of Anarres is superb, to the point where you can feel the dust on the pages – and the many references to Shevek’s physics work and its importance for interstellar travel, but those details are superficial, laid on top of a very serious work about freedom, especially that of choice. What does it mean for a human being to be free? Is it intellectual freedom? Freedom from want, unless others are also wanting? Freedom from envy? Freedom to choose one’s work, one’s partner, one’s abode?How petty can one despot be and still despoil one man’s freedom?

The Dispossessed won both of the major awards for the year’s best science fiction novel, although the correlation between the Hugos and the Nebulas is so high as to render the two redundant. I did pull the list of Hugo winners and found a number of interesting titles, including the most recent winner, the comic novel Redshirts, which I’ve already picked up based just on the description. With only ten read out of 62 total winners, I imagine this will help keep me busy even as I’m winding down my sojourn through the classics.

Next up: I’ve only got about a thousand pages to go in Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 13, 2013
→ By

We.

New Insider content since my last post here – Marlon Byrd contract reaction (hint: not positive) and my NL Rookie of the Year ballot, plus the offseason buyer’s guide for relievers.

I’ve long been a fan of the subgenre of dystopian novels, stories set in an alternate reality or in the distant future in an anti-utopian state, nearly always under a totalitarian regime that has quashed all individual liberty. The two most famous novels in the dystopian oeuvre, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 sit at 74th and 58th, respectively, on my ranking of my top 102 novels of all time, while Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a novel of social commentary in a dystopian setting, is 32nd, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is 96th. It turns out that most novels in this realm owe a direct or indirect debt to the novel I just read, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 work We ($1.99 for Kindle), a response to the authoritarian Soviet regime that had just taken control of Russia that was banned by the authorities there and eventually led to Zamyatin’s exile to the West.

We is set in the bleakest dystopia I’ve encountered, a world several hundred years in the future where people have numbers but not names, where cities are enclaves separated from all forms of nature by a “Green Wall,” and where all buildings are made of glass so that there is no privacy from the state Guardians. All personal activities are prescribed by mandated calendar, including sex, which occurs at set times of day and for which a person obtains a partner by submitting a pink ticket as a formal request. All physical activities, including but not limited to work, follow Taylor’s principles of maximizing efficiency. Food is petroleum-based, and the Guardians view smoking and drinking as crimes against the state. Math is ascendant over all, rationalism taken to the edge of its extreme, as emotions are dismissed as atavistic tendencies that should already be extinct.

The narrator, D-503, is a drone in the hive but an important one as he’s the designer of a spaceship called the Integral that will take this “perfect” society out into space – until he’s targeted by the rebellious woman I-330, who openly smokes and drinks while provoking an emotional response in him, Pleasantville-style, that leads him to tentatively consider a rebellion of his own. D-503 struggles to deal with these new emotions, with this seeming infidelity to his somewhat regular lover O-90 (who is deemed too short to bear a child under the state’s eugenics rules), and with the emergence of vivid dreams that he thinks are a sign of creeping insanity. I-330 eventually introduces him to a world of drones who are plotting against the state, forcing him to choose between compliance and sedition.

We shares the terrorizing power of Huxley’s and Orwell’s works through its vision of egalitarianism gone horribly awry, Harrison Bergeron-style, under the thumb of an omniscient government apparatus that has removed all personal choice and liberty from its subjects. Zamyatin enhances that fear by putting the narration into the hands of his protagonist, pushing the reader into his mind to experience his emotional/rational struggle firsthand. The technique has its greatest effect when D-503 is confused by this inner conflict and begins to render dialogue in fragments, forcing the reader to interpolate or complete sentences, bringing the confusion off the page into the reader’s mind. Reading a dystopian novel creates an involuntary barrier between the reader and the characters in the book because the situation in the story is often unrecognizable to us; Zamyatin’s trick of mimicking the confusion in D-503’s brain allows the feeling to slip through the barrier and affect the reader the same way that Orwell sowed fear in the reader’s mind with the rats in room 101.

Zamyatin and Orwell were specifically attacking Soviet-style totalitarianism, a topic that has lost some relevance in the twenty years since nearly all of those regimes fell or adapted by embracing economic liberty without political liberty. I’m less afraid of a technocratic, rationalist dictatorship than I am of a theocracy, as we live in a country that can’t accept evolution or climate change but is still fighting to restrict access to birth control or to ban same-sex marriage (which, all moral arguments aside, is about as anti-libertarian a policy as I can imagine). I imagine there are plenty of readers out there who’d take the opposite view, that rationalist-athiest totalitarianism is a greater likelihood or threat to our personal liberty, and for them We might be a more powerful allegory.

While Zamyatin’s tactic of eschewing character names for numbers dehumanizes the characters, it also makes reading the book more difficult than it needs to be; keeping the characters straight isn’t that hard, since Zamyatin doesn’t reuse letters and he reserves vowels for females and consonants for males, but I found the lack of actual names disorienting as I read. We is otherwise a very quick read with strong narrative greed, as it’s unclear what direction D-503 will take and his confusion rapidly becomes yours as you read. Zamyatin’s ending is ambiguous as well, although I believe I-330 foreshadows his intent with some of her earlier statements about revolutions and the mathematical nature of infinity. Given that the Soviet regime didn’t fall for another 70 years, a neater, pat ending would have felt too optimistic. It’s essential reading for fans of the dystopian genre given its influence, but also a tremendous lesson in building emotion in a reader even when your story itself revolves around its absence.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ July 6, 2013
→ By

The Orphan Master’s Son.

When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.

I’ve read about half of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, including the last thirteen, and overall, my impression is that they pick some pretty dreary books. Many titles won for what I thought were fairly obvious reasons of political correctness, and others have won for reasons that escape me entirely. A few seem like lifetime achievement awards, like Faulkner winning for two of his lesser novels or Cheever getting an omnibus award for his short stories. Last year, they punted entirely, failing to name a winner for the first time since 1977, sparking some outrage from independent booksellers who see a spike in sales of the winner in years when the board deigns to name one.

The most recent winner, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, breaks that recent trend in many ways, all of them good. Unlike most winners, the novel isn’t set in the United States, and has nothing to do with the American experience. It’s set almost entirely in North Korea, yet explores themes, especially the natures of freedom and identity, that go well beyond the confines of the world’s most repressive regime. It’s rendered with deep empathy for nearly all of its characters, encapsulating a surprising amount of humor (some of it dark, of course) in a wide-ranging tragedy that harkens back to Shakespeare. Johnson even crafts government agents who are better than caricatures, and makes the horrendous conditions of life in North Korea real on the page without pandering. It’s a compulsive read in spite of, or perhaps in part due to, the difficulty of the subject matter.

The main character, introduced to us as Pak Jun Do, the son of the book’s title, begins life in a North Korean orphanage run by his father, after which he progresses through a series of jobs that bring him into increasing conflict with the regime that controls every aspect of North Korean life. His final role involves the assumption of the identity of a national hero, bringing him into the orbit of the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong Il, leading to the ultimate conflict that drives the final half of the novel, where Pak Jun Do, now called Commander Ga, tries to save his new wife, whom the Dear Leader wants for himself.

Johnson spins an elaborate plot that remains quite easy to follow, even with his technique of telling the Commander Ga story through three different perspectives – a third-person view, the first-person narrative of one of Ga’s state interrogators, and brief dispatches from the state’s own mouthpiece. The first third, covering Pak Jun Do’s life from the orphanage to his time as a spy on a fishing vessel to a trip to Texas with a low-level diplomat, is all prologue to the story of the actress, Sun Moon. Yet even she is only a part of the larger story of Pak Jun Do’s own disillusionment and attempt to find what freedom he can in a totalitarian state, and to fashion an identity for himself after the state wiped out the first one and gave him another.

The development of Pak Jun Do, whose name sounds similar to the English “John Doe,” allows Johnson to explore those these of freedom and identity while folding in stories like that of the true-believer state interrogator who questions not just his allegiances, but the entire structure of his life to date – but does so subtly, almost as an objective outside observer of his own life, while he continues his job of chronicling prisoners’ lives before wiping out their memories with electroshock therapy. Johnson humanizes the inhuman, and gives texture to flat images that seem too awful to contemplate, weaving it all into the narrative as background, so that the characters’ stories can occur in front of a realistic setting that might otherwise have overwhelmed them.

Johnson did visit North Korea, but like the few Westerners allowed to enter that backwards nation, he wasn’t permitted to speak to any average citizens, which meant that he had to imagine their quotidian lives and their typical dialogue without the benefit of first-person research. I found his incorporation of the omnipresent state into nearly every conversation realistic, or at least reasonable, for a situation where a single errant sentence could get you sent to a prison camp (which, by the way, the North Koreans still deny they use) or worse. The refraction of normal conversation through the prism of the police state twists not only words, but the mores of everyday life:

“What happened?” Buc asked him.
“I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”

Even though Pak/Ga does some awful things during the course of the book, including participating in kidnappings of Japanese citizens (something the North Koreans have admitted doing), he earns the reader’s sympathy through the strange development of his character. The use of a “John Doe” soundalike name can’t be a coincidence; he is a blank canvas, growing up with memories but no independent identity, and shapeshifts into different roles, developing his moral compass and his emotions later in life, so that the person he is at the end of the novel bears no resemblance to the person he was at the start. It’s only a minor spoiler to say that the conclusion finds him at his most free, and with the clearest identity he’s had in the entire story. How he gets there, and how Johnson takes us along, is one of the strongest experiences I’ve had as a reader in years.

Next up: I’ve just finished Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami and am about to start Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 1, 2012
→ By

Gun, with Occasional Music.

I did a final blog post on Arizona Rookie League prospects yesterday, including the Cubs’ big bonus baby Juan Paniagua; some other Cubs, Rangers, and Royals prospects; and notes on Tyler Skaggs and Jacob Turner.

—

Back in December, reader JD recommended Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel Gun, with Occasional Music to me, saying:

It’s the best and funniest modern (well, futuristic) noir I’ve read — Chandler and Hammett by way of Philip K. Dick and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And it’s shorter than a playoff game, to boot.

All of which is pretty accurate – the various pull quotes from critics include two that mention the Dick/Chandler combination, but Lethem’s dystopian hard-boiled detective novel is also more wryly funny than either writer was, and occasionally a little too wrapped up in its own sci-fi stylings (although so was Dick’s Ubik). It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the quickest, including a clever twist in the final third of the book that differentiates it from the standard (and slightly hackneyed) hard-boiled format.

Lethem’s detective, Conrad Metcalf, is a drug-addicted “private inquisitor” – but the drug addiction isn’t a big deal, as everyone in the novel is using “make,” a blend of drugs provided for free by the government and customized for each individual, including components like Forgettol, Acceptol, and Addictol, as an actual opiate of the masses to keep everyone in line. Citizens also carry around magnetic cards that track their “karma points,” which can be increased or, more commonly in this book, deducted by formal inquisitors from The Office, the Gestapo-like police presence that stands in Metcalf’s way as he tries to help a client who’s been set up by the Office for a murder he didn’t commit – one that pushes his karma down to zero, threatening him with this new world’s equivalent of prison, cryogenic suspension. Oh, and Metcalf is being dogged by a trigger-happy gunsel who just happens to be an evolved kangaroo.

The rich details of Lethem’s dystopian world start to overwhelm what is, at heart, a straightforward detective novel, one where Metcalf starts investigating one case and ends up enmeshed in a conspiracy to cover up one crime that eventually involves a second murder, Metcalf getting knocked unconscious*, and a web of lies and suspicions of adultery that doesn’t clear up until the penultimate chapter. Even though I felt little or no sympathy for any of the characters involved in the crime, Lethem layered enough complexity into that part of the story that the story maintained my interest level right to the end, both to see how the crime took place (I didn’t figure it out) and how Metcalf’s own side story would be resolved.

*If there were a hard-boiled detective story drinking game, the detective taking a blackjack or other blunt object to the back of the head, describing the carpet as it approaches is face, and waking up somewhere else would be worth two shots.

The dystopian aspects varied in their effectiveness. The “make” was at the top of the list, both because of its veneer of plausibility and because of its increasing relevance to our dependency on Big Pharma (and I say this as someone who depends on them myself). The evolved animals are largely props beyond the kangaroo, who could just as easily have been human. The “babyheads,” children with evolved brains but immature bodies, seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. The karma cards, once you get past the RPG experience-points feel, also feel somewhat prescient, written seven years before the Patriot Act and the start of our era of no-fly lists, monitoring of electronic communcations, and other erosions of privacy in the name of increasing security. It’s dark but feels more madcap than paranoid, even though there’s a clear paranoia underneath the surface. If you can gloss over some of the slightly siller sci-fi trappings of Gun, it’s a fast-paced detective story with enough of a serious underpinning to elevate it above the various pulp authors who’ve tried (and mostly failed) to repurpose Chandler and Hammett into different eras.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, which, after reading about 40% of the book, I would call an Italian version of Portnoy’s Complaint.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ November 14, 2011
→ By

It Can’t Happen Here.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is the best-known of his works after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 (making him the first American author so honored, although they resumed their habit of giving the award to western Europeans the following year). It’s a protest novel, less purely literary than his classic novels of the 1920s (led by Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Main Street), while angrier and livelier and a faster read.

It Can’t Happen Here melds two protests into one. Lewis depicts a United States leading up to and in the first few years after the 1936 election, where the nation seems to wilfully ignore the tyranny and pending genocide happening in Europe, and is also ripe for the rise of a demagogue of its own, a role filled by Berzelius “Buzz” Wintrip. Wintrip, a blowhard right-wing senator who spouts populist nonsense aimed at propelling himself to the White House, is backed up by Lee Sarason, the brains of the operation to elect Wintrip and a man who similarly desires power but does so for different ends. Wintrip’s ascension to President and establishment of his own dictatorship comes despite the claims of several characters early in the book that what happened in Germany and Italy “can’t happen here.”

Doremus Jessup, a liberal newspaper editor in a small town in Vermont, stands as one of the few voices of reason before Wintrip’s election, stating quite clearly that it can. He is the book’s great moral center despite a lack of moralizing; his goals are fundamental and based not on orthodoxy or theology, but on simple concepts of basic human rights and dignity. He also knows a charlatan when he sees one, and fears Wintrip’s rise because he recognizes that human nature will push him into office and then will allow the same people who voted for him to be ruled by his iron fist.

Jessup’s observations and Lewis’ simultaneous use of broad and fine strokes to define his setting give the book such tremendous staying power, so that even seventy-five years after its publication, Jessup’s observations (these before the election) still seem so familiar today:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage‘ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles?’ And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the – well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina moutnaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their Children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? (…) Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!”

I don’t remember those incidents, and a few of the names were completely unfamiliar to me, but I remember Freedom fries, and I remember the Kansas evolution hearings, and I remember a whisper campaign about the religion of a major party Presidential candidate, and I remember hearing a crowd cheer the governor who mentioned the 234 executions during his tenure, and I don’t really think anything is all that different today from the nation Sinclair described 75 years ago. We have more money and better toys and the tremendous degree of freedom afforded by the Internet, but we are still the same people subject to the same forces of persuasion.

The downside of Lewis’ anger is that he spends so much time setting up his alternate history and having the narrator and/or Jessup verbally knock it down that the personal part of the plot comes in fits and starts. Wintrip is elected and within hours declares martial law and begins a Khmer Rouge-like process of rolling back the clock on progress while rounding up enemies, real and potential, a process that accelerates as time passes and leads to the introduction of concentration camps. Jessup joins the opposition, supported by a government-in-exile based out of Canada, as do several members of his family and his circle of friends and business associates (with a few turncoat exceptions, including his son), with largely predictable results. There’s some narrative greed from the macro storyline as unrest begins to build locally and nationally, and more from the government’s reactions to Jessup’s treason, but the two storylines aren’t well-blended. When I was fifteen, I would have been riveted by things like descriptions of how Wintrip abolished the states and established new subdivisions to the country, but now I find them boring.

The other problem with It Can’t Happen Here is inherent to the genre of protest/dystopian novels – you know where they’re going. The individual rebels, ends up arrested, some people close to him will suffer or be killed, he’ll get out of prison, and so on. 1984, written thirteen years later, follows a similar structure but spends far less time on the political storyline and far more on Winston Smith himself. The timeless nature of Lewis’ observations on human nature and American culture balance out these flaws, but you have to be ready for a little preaching, as in these (very reasonable) lines from Jessup:

“I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

That could refer to battles today over stem cell research or vaccination, or to the murder of Hypatia sixteen centuries ago. I’d give Lewis a 50 for storyline, but a 60 for his incisive take on the baser side of our nature.

Next up: A change of pace to some non-fiction – Donal O’Shea’s The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, the story of the history and solution to another one of mathematics’ most famous problems, which lay unsolved for a hundred years (despite many attempts) until an eccentric Russian came up with a proof, only to decline the accolades that came with it. It’s a “bargain book” right now on Amazon at $6.38 new.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 25, 2010
→ By

Ubik.

Those of you on the fence about buying a Kindle from amazon.com may be interested to learn that they’ve cut the price to $189. Competition is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

—

Philip Dick’s novel Ubik made the TIME list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, one of the few genre novels on the list (and, I’m guessing, a book for which Lev Grossman stumped). I’d read nine other Dick novels, putting The Man in the High Castle – the least sci-fi of any of the books I’ve read from him – on the Klaw 100, but hadn’t read any of his work in close to a decade before picking up this title.

Ubik is typical Dick in that it involves reality turned on its head, where he changes the fundamental conditions of our physical existence, then inserts relatively ordinary people and sees how they act and respond. This time around, there’s a new scientific process that allows people who have died to be placed in a state called “half-life,” where they remain physically dead but their brains can continue to function when they are, in effect, plugged in, a period amounting to a few hours in total between physical death and brain death. So Glen Runciter, who runs an anti-psychic operation, can communicate with his dead wife for a few minutes when he has to make a critical business decision (how terribly romantic), although he runs into trouble early when one such session is interrupted by a neighboring half-lifer who manages to invade the signal.

Joe Chip is one of Runciter’s employees and he, Glen, and ten other employees embark for a highly lucrative mission that goes very wrong when a bomb explodes and somebody dies. What is not clear to the reader is who has died: to the employees, it appears that they all survived but Runciter died, but their world begins acting oddly and they receive messages from their old boss that indicate that they are in half-life and he was the only survivor. The primary mystery of the book is whether or not Joe and his dwindling team are actually alive or in half-life, and they try to chase Runciter’s clues and figure out what they need to do to (half-)survive, with a secondary thread surrounding who is actually controlling their new, unpredictable environment. And the title, a play on the Latin word, ubique, meaning “everywhere” (present in our word ubiquitous or in the Spanish verb ubicar, “to be located”), turns out to be a substance that combats in the rapid physical decay that starts to overtake the members of Joe’s team.

The chapter intros, advertising all manner of products under the Ubik name, usually with comical product warnings, reminded me of the epigrams and fake quotes before chapters in Jasper Fforde’s novels, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear Fforde was a Dick devotee. (Stop laughing.) I also thought the idea of a world being created to order for the person(s) experiencing it has been reused a few times, including The Matrix and one episode of 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone,” at the least.

Dick uses a few early misdirects to keep you guessing about the real explanation behind the bomb and the weird possibly-half-life world, although the result does leave a few plot strands hanging. I also thought the final chapter, barely over a page in length, felt like a cheap add-on, one that undermined a fairly strong if slightly conventional conclusion in the prior chapter. And it takes a good 20-25 pages for Dick to set up his universe, explaining in often dry terms the various forms of psychic abilities in use as well as the whole half-life phenomenon, a section that took up about 10% of the book. Overall, though, it’s a clever, mind-bending novel, and following Joe (the main protagonist) through his confusion about the changing world and then his attempts to save himself, if not others on his team, was compelling.

The question I have is whether this merited inclusion as one of three true sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic book. I’m not an aficionado of the genre, but I could make a case for the Foundation trilogy (they did give The Lord of the Rings a spot, as well as A Dance to the Music of Time), and would argue for Dick’s alternate-history work The Man in the High Castle as more literary and seemingly more serious. And there’s a separate debate over whether six entries out of 100 is too much for the combined sci-fi/fantasy genre, not including works like Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, or Animal Farm that used elements of altered reality to tell much more serious stories. I liked Ubik and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little sci in his fi, but as a top 100 candidate it fell short for me.

Next review: I don’t usually review Agatha Christie novels, but Taken at the Flood interested me enough that it’s worth a few grafs.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 24, 2010
→ By

In a Perfect World.

Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World soft, ethereal prose with a distinctly dystopian vision hauntingly grounded in current reality to tell a story about grace and maternal love in difficult, unexpected circumstances. It’s a little like The Road as written by the female version of Richard Russo.

The protagonist, Jiselle Dorn, is a flight attendant who has just married a handsome pilot and widowed father of three named Mark and moved into his house with his three kids just as a virulent illness known as “the Phoenix flu” is starting to spread, killing, on page 9, Britney Spears, as well as a few other celebrities. Rather than drop us into a post-apocalyptic world as McCarthy did, Kasischke focuses on minutiae, with the relationship between Jiselle and two of Mark’s three kids – her immediate bond with his youngest child, Sam, and the animosity she faces from middle child Sara – at the center of the novel’s first half. The flu’s spread accelerates and society begins to slowly crack around the family, while Mark ends up stuck out of the country, leaving Jiselle to run his house and family and cope with large and small issues simultaneously while evaluating the choices she’s made, the factors in her life that made her make those very choices, and the evolving situation around her.

The novel ends almost mid-sentence, without clear resolutions to macro plot questions like how far and wide the epidemic spreads. The resolution resides in tiny gestures and words and little symbols of hope and grace, and I had to re-read the last few pages to grasp where Kasischke wanted to leave us while shaking off my innate desire for some sort of clear conclusion to the Phoenix flu storyline, which was, after all, just background. It’s a bold way to end a novel, risky for anyone looking for a mass-market audience that likes its chapters short, its villains villainous, and its endings neat. But because Kasischke crafted the Jiselle character so well, I empathized with her to the point that, after the second read, I got the ending by standing in the character’s place.

The one flaw in the novel mirrored Russo’s work as well. Russo has never been great at crafting female characters, and nearly all of the men in In a Perfect World are two-dimensional or worse. Mark in particular is more plot device than character, and I found it very hard to understand some of his actions toward Jiselle and his children. Outside of Mark’s son, Sam, the rest of the men seemed like props, and a potential plot thread involving neighbor Paul Temple went nowhere.

In a Perfect World was published in 2009 and I assume it was written in 2008, before the H1N1 threat emerged, making her choice to build the book around a scary communicable disease a little prescient. Beyond that, however, Kasischke touches on issues like climate change, energy costs, and distrust of government, dropping accent colors in the background rather than giving us long-winded sermons by central characters. It’s a thoughtful, compelling read if you appreciate books driven by small events and emotions rather than major turning points, and the gradual decline in the world inside the book provides more than enough narrative greed to get you to the end.

Next up: As promised, Aldous Huxley’s Island. I received both books gratis from the publisher.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 21, 2010
→ By

The Dolphin People.

Latest posts on ESPN.com are on three prep prospects for the draft and on Michael Ynoa and Ian Krol. I’ll be on AllNight on ESPN Radio tonight live at 1:27 am EDT, and am tentatively scheduled to be on ESPNEWS on Monday at 2:40 pm EDT.

—

“Fix? Nothing broken can ever truly be fixed again. … None of this can ever be fixed, and it will all lead to more breakage, more pain. Nothing can change that.” I said goodnight to the professor and went to my hammock. He was right – broken things couldn’t be put back together the way they used to be.

The Dolphin People, by the author writing under the pseudonym Torsten Krol, is a bleak adventure/survival story told by a young boy, Erich, whose family ends up seeking refuge from a remote Amazonian tribe that has had little contact with outsiders. These natives, called the Yayomi, believe that Erich and his family are dolphin-gods who have taken human form, but their superstitions have limits and it becomes clear that this ruse can’t last forever, leading the “dolphin people” to try to plan a dangerous escape.

The hitch is that Erich’s family is … well, complicated. His mother loses her wits after a few days in the isolation of the Yayomi commune, probably a lot faster than reality would have it. His stepfather is a former Nazi (the book is set in 1946) who still believes in the party’s ethnic cleansing policies. And his younger brother has a rare genetic condition that puts him in obvious danger once it’s revealed.

The cover of The Dolphin People is covered with laudatory pull quotes from other authors and from major newspapers, full of adjectives that seemed to reflect the content of a different book. For example:

“funny,” “witty,” “riotously funny:” Those came from three different reviews, but if there was humor in this book, I missed it entirely. It was dry and matter-of-fact, and unless you find the odd ways in which some of the characters meet their ends funny, it was humorless.

“wild,” “absurd,” “bizarre:” It’s a strange setup, to be sure, but part of what made the book work was that Krol, having created his universe, largely abides by its laws. The characters are not that well-developed, but they do behave in reasonable ways, and he even states in a postscript Q&A that he researched primitive South American tribes to make Yayomi culture and customs as realistic as possible.

“written with relentless, breakneck velocity:” Absolutely. The book flew by in a way that few novels have for me. I had a flight to Vegas while I was reading this and read 150 pages in the 100 minutes between boarding and disembarking. That’s Rowling-Christie-Wodehouse territory.

“gruesome:” There are two unpleasant deaths, and one example of severe violence, but Krol doesn’t linger on any of them, avoiding the lurid approach and dealing more with the aftermath. I don’t see “gruesome” as any sort of compliment for a serious novel, so that adjective seemed completely out of place.

“honest:” I have no idea what that really means when describing a novel. It’s fiction. He made the whole thing up.

“thought-provoking:” I would genuinely like to agree with this adjective, as Krol was clearly after some Big Themes in The Dolphin People, but I’m split on whether he achieved them or whether they were worth tackling. I mean, Nazis are bad – we’ve established that by now, right? Human experimentation is also bad, right? The novel loses too much time to anachronistic arguments along those lines, and it detracts from what I think Krol was trying to explore about prejudice.

The real failing of the novel, for me, was the extraordinary number of coincidences and plot conveniences Krol employed to keep things moving forward. They get to the Yayomi village and, hey, whaddya know, there’s a German already there who can translate for them! They need a diversion that would allow them to escape with the Yayomi pursuing them and, hey, whaddya know, we’re just a few weeks away from the once-every-seven-years rainfall that produces massive flooding! Little of what Erich and his family do is organic, and maybe that was Krol’s point – that we are largely powerless in the face of nature and chance – but given his emphasis on prejudices and how many ideas, superstitions, and mores Erich finds among the Yayomi mirror those of our own society. If you focus on those points, and enjoy a good survival story, The Dolphin People is a very quick read without the empty calories of your standard John Grisham novel, but there was enough lacking here that I wouldn’t give it a “highly recommended” tag.

(Full disclosure – I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.)

Next up: I’ve already finished Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World and just started Aldous Huxley’s Island, both of which were also review copies. Island was Huxley’s follow-up to Brave New World.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 31, 2008
→ By

The Road.

In The Road, the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Cormac McCarthy tells a story about goodness surviving in the most awful of circumstances, but does it in such a brutal, hopeless way that it’s hard to walk away from the novel feeling good about much of anything.

The Road takes place in a world devastated by a nuclear holocaust. Most of the world’s population appears to be dead, and all animal life is presumed extinct. Nuclear winter is gradually setting in; the sun is barely visible through the permanent cloud of ash and dush, and the temperatures are dropping. The story itself involves a man and his son moving south on The Road to try to get to a warmer climate, struggling to survive along the way, needing food and water while also avoiding the derelicts, bandits, and cannibals – yes, cannibals – who also travel The Road.

If you focus almost entirely on the interactions between the man and his son – identified, in true McCarthy fashion, as the Man and the Boy – you find a powerful and tender portrait of filial love. The Man is motivated to press on in hopeless circumstances because of his love for his son, who was born on the night of the first bombing. The other people remaining in the world are separated in the eyes of the Boy into “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” and while the latter appear to far outnumber the former, there are hints of goodness here and there in their limited encounters with the good guys, and of course, in the sacrifices the Man makes to give the Boy a chance at some kind of life.

It was hard for me to glean those glimpses of goodness or faith in the human spirit among the sheer desolation of the setting and the stark brutality of McCarthy’s view of humanity, which borders on misanthropy, muted only slightly by the glimpses of empathy he slips into the text at the bleakest moments. Yet the most powerful moments in the book are the most depraved and the most disturbing, not the few moments of tenderness of the Man towards the Boy or the one meeting with “the good guys” on the Road. The prose, as it was in Blood Meridian, was amazing, and McCarthy knows how to weave little mysteries into his writing with talk about “the fire,” but again, beautiful writing that looks into the abyss is still, at the end of the day, about the abyss. It’s a brilliant work, and I can see why it won the Pulitzer, but it was an arduous read and one I can’t say I enjoyed.

Next up: I’ve already finished Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and am most of the way through Sandor Marai’s Embers.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 26, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part four.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part five (#20-1)

40. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not sure I buy into Vanity Fair‘s oft-quoted review (“The only convincing love story of our century”), but as a study of obsession, arrested development, and rationalization, it’s powerful and cheerfully unapologetic.

39. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the strangest books on this list, as it starts out as a story of drunken revelry at an English prep school and ends up as a story of a romance torn asunder by theological disagreements (also explored in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair). Think of it as a fictional memoir that intertwines nostalgia for a bygone era of English culture with a re-examination of the narrator’s spiritual emptiness.

38. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Major Major, Nately’s whore, Milo’s cotton schemes … and the flying missions that never end in a serious war with some very un-serious behavior. A sharp satire full of madcap laughs.

37. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first novel in the Western canon, and the first comic novel, Don Quixote is actually two novels now published as one; Cervantes wrote a sequel in response to the flood of knockoffs and unauthorized sequels that followed the enormous success of the first volume of his work. If you’ve read it, check out Julian Branston’s The Eternal Quest, a funny homage that includes Cervantes and an unnamed “errant knight” as major characters.

36. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Never mentioned in discussions of the Great American Novel, but isn’t a tale about immigrant families working to create better lives for themselves and their children an integral part of the American story?

35. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The consummate Gothic romance, with a little magical realism (although it was written a century before the term existed) and a couple of absurd coincidences, still captivates readers and, of course, gave us Thursday Next and The Eyre Affair.

34. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

33. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal. Sort of a French picaresque novel, but with a heavy dose of the realism that characterizes most great French 19th-century literature. The protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, is a slightly dim young nobleman who sets off on a Quixotic quest to fight with Napoleon’s army (even though Fabrizio is Italian) and become a hero.

32. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. The history of Afghanistan, told as the tragic story of two childhood friends separated not by war, but by a child’s severe error of judgment. Whether he finds redemption as an adult is left to the reader, but unlike, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Hosseini’s work at least opens the door.

31. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. The toughest read on the list, because Faulkner – never an easy read – wrote the first fourth of the book from the perspective of the severely developmentally disabled Benji, who senses all time as now and drifts in his rambling narrative from the past to the present without warning. The four parts describe the decline of a Southern family – and of an entire stratum of Southern society – from four different perspectives. And by the way, the book’s title comes from Macbeth: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

30. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. A bit rich for such a recent book? I won’t deny it, but despite being set in contemporary America, Empire Falls harkens back to the storytelling of American literature from the first half of the last century, following a cast of ne’er-do-wells around a failing Maine mill town as they wait for something good to happen.

29. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell. Full review. Powell’s twelve-part sequence follows Nick Jenkins as he moves from boarding school to college to the army to the publishing world, with him serving as our wry tour guide through the follies and life events of a wide-ranging cast of characters.

28. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Full review. A dystopian novel about the simple things in life, like free will.

27. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A great romance and a commentary on first impressions and, of course, how our pride can get in the way. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the unctuous William Collins rank among Austen’s best comic creations.

26. Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Full review. A Fitzgerald-esque novel about one man’s self-destruction through alcohol as he rebels against the confines of the small town where he and his status-conscious wife live.

25. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is better known for his science fiction – the dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 just missed the cut for this list – but this old-fashioned gothic horror story uses fear to drive the narrative forward as a sinister circus comes to a small Southern town and two kids find that their curiosity may do more than kill a cat.

24. Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Although it doesn’t have the gravitas of Greene’s serious novels (like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair), Our Man in Havana is the most serious of his “entertainments” that I’ve read. It’s a rich satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited as a British spy and fulfills his duties by sending in blueprints of vacuums and passing them off as new Cuban weapons systems.

23. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. Full review. Dickens’ first novel and perhaps the first true best-seller in English literature, Pickwick is a classic picaresque novel that showcases the sense of humor Dickens apparently lost somewhere on the way to two of the banes of my high school years, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.

22. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. Full review. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, two years after The Magnificent Ambersons won, Age combines a love triangle, biting but hilarious commentary, and the stifling social norms of the Gilded Age for one of the greatest American novels ever written.

21. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Anne Elliott was persuaded by her father and Lady Russell to decline an “unfavorable” match with a poor sailor when she was nineteen. Now twenty-seven and apparently headed for spinsterhood, she learns that her suitor has returned to England a wealthy captain. Austen’s last novel is the tightest and brings the most tension without skimping on the wit provided by, among others, Anne’s complete fathead of a father.

Filed Under: Literature, Sports Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,