Other Fictions: Weird Modes

My new year's resolution for 2021 is to stay adamantly positive about the world.  In that vein, I'd like to recommend a few fictional universes for you all to get lost in.  If escapism makes you feel guilty, don't worry -- that's not all this is about.  Let's call it 25% getaway, 75% inspiration for the now.  Refueling rest stops for the soul.

I've got two primary recommendations -- for which the "delivery modes" may be as unconventional as the content -- and two secondary ones, which many of you probably already know about.

First, I'd like to tell you about a science-fiction podcast called The Strange Case of Starship Iris.  Created by Jessica Best, the first season was released between 2017 and 2019, and the second season just started earlier this week.  

 

 

Okay, it's the year 2191, and humanity has spread to the stars.  A few years prior to the events of the show, there was a war with an enigmatic race of purple aliens known as Dwarnians.  During the war, there was a military coup that saw the human worlds taken over by a kind, benevolent Intergalactic Republic.  (Shh... they're listening.)  In the first episode, we check in on an IGR research ship exploring Planet 5925, and we begin to meet our characters.

The above summary doesn't do it much justice, because it's really about those characters.  The official podcast description says "It's a story of outer space, survival, espionage, resistance, identity, friendship, found family, romance, and secrets. (Also there's jokes.)"

To that I'll add: ramen noodles, linguistics, awkward crushes, and songs!  Also, the Dwarnians may be on their way to a place in my heart -- alongside the Bajorans, Minbari, and Time Lords -- as one of the few alien cultures in which I'd truly like to immerse myself.

The characters live in my heart, too.  I hope you get to know them.

* * *

Second, I'd like to recommend the world of Whisperwind, which is delivered in the form of ASMR videos on Youtube.  Yes, these kinds of videos are often the subject of giggles and disdain, but there are gems.  There are pearls.  Sometimes the talents of the artist are just perfectly matched with the medium, and the Story (capitalization intended) just breathes through the screen.

It's kind of a D&D world, with a mix of humans, elves, gnomes, goblins, werewolves, vampires, and such.  But there's amazing depth... multiple fleshed-out towns and cities, quite a few parallel plot lines, and occasional flashbacks to an adventuring party from hundreds of years ago whose actions continue to have an effect on the present.  Amazingly, it's also all told in the second person.  You are a character in this story, and over time we come to learn just as much about your backstory, motivations, and secrets, as we do about the other characters (nearly all of whom are played by Sage, the creator of this story).

And, it's all very relaxing.  :-)

* * *

Lastly, my other two recommendations.  I'll be quick:

• I think the recently concluded 3rd season of Star Trek: Discovery has been the best season of Star Trek in its entire history.  Controversial?  Maybe, but I stand by it.  Some individual episodes of the other shows have been better, but taking the season-long arc as a whole?  This jaunt into the 32nd century shines.
  
  
• Just last week my family and I started watching The Watch, based on the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett.  I haven't read them, but now I might.  So much fun.

Dangerous Reviews (3 of 3)

Finally... Here's the third part of my ongoing review of the 33 stories in Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.  In part 1, I reviewed the first eleven stories, and in part 2, the second eleven.  Some stats and summary at the bottom.

23. "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" by Sonya Dorman

What do you get when you mix a depressing, dystopian future with a bright-eyed, well-drawn protagonist?  I'm not quite sure.  At just 6 pages, there was nowhere near enough time or space to really find out.  What this story did do was remind me that I truly ought to read Octavia Butler's Parable series.  I've been remiss.  This story, though?  SKIP.


24. "The Happy Breed" by John Sladek

Okay, this may be another cautionary ("if this goes on...") type of tale, similar to a few others in this collection, but it was really well done.  Seriously creepy vibe, conveyed simply and straightforwardly.  It makes you feel for the fate of the protagonists, and it stings.  Why?  In the 1960s, they were a bit vague about how "The Machine" could become so firmly ensconced in our lives.  Now, we have smartphones, the internet, streaming everything, and home devices that you converse with.  It's here.  (Also, I read this on a plane, where you definitely get the sense they're trying to lull the passengers into a similar zombie-like state as the "Musselmen" in this story.)  WOW.


25. "Encounter with a Hick" by Jonathan Brand

Let's joke about that big taboo called "religion," why don't we.  This ultra-short story has the similar genetics of mockery as the ones in this collection from Lester del Rey and Damon Knight (which I loathed), and in some ways, this one is just as shallow and silly.  I won't be pulling out comparisons to Voltaire or anything.  If this was published elsewhere, I'd guess it would've been in a like-minded venue of the time, say Playboy or National Lampoon.

However...

The voice of the hippie-ish first-person narrator held my interest for the duration.  His patter (in the form of a transcribed legal deposition) was zippy and even a bit lyrical.  Still led to a stupid punch line, but OKAY.


26. "From the Government Printing Office" by Kris Neville

Despite the clever conceit -- a jaded grown-up voice narrating the thoughts of a toddler -- I can't find much to redeem this story.  It's another one that extrapolates a nasty, brutish future from one slightly whimsical and inconsequential concept.  Oooh... "Doctor Spock, but evil..."  SKIP.


27. "Land of the Great Horses" by R. A. Lafferty

Cute concept.  I'd never read Lafferty before, but the prose reminded me a bit of Harlan Ellison's (which is a decided compliment).  Just a bit politically incorrect by today's standards, but not a hugely "dangerous vision."  OKAY.


28. "The Recognition" by J. G. Ballard

Very well written.  About as spooky and folksy as Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" earlier in this collection, but in a very different setting (swap out America for England).  However, this story also suffers from that same bleak malady of British pessimism that suffuses Pink Floyd's Time, Rick Priestly's Warhammer, and the absurdist ending to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Not my thing at all, but still so nicely wrought, craft-wise.  OKAY.


29. "Judas" by John Brunner

Silly silly silly.  Semi-interesting, possibly, as an example of a 1950s aesthetic one could call "chromepunk" (youngsters of today: visualize the pre-bomb Fallout universe?).  But the story itself was just a thin veneer for more simplistic religion-bashing.  Zero nuance or subtlety.  SKIP.


30. "Test to Destruction" by Keith Laumer

Interesting combination of a hard-drivin' rock-em sock-em adventure with an old fable that tells us how absolute power corrupts absolutely.  With a dash of alien hive-mind telepathy, for flavor.  Not really very deep, but it holds the attention.  OKAY.


31. "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad

Entertaining O-Henry-ish tale of the "be careful what you wish for" variety.  Not very science fictional, but somewhat phantasmagorical and solidly a product of the sixties, man.  OKAY.


32. "Auto-da-Fé" by Roger Zelazny

This one was masterfully written.  A bit silly in its own way, too.  The conceit is clear in the first couple of paragraphs.  I don't need to go into the details, but I will say that it forced me to think about those creepy online speculations about the pre-history of the universe occupied by Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater.

I was a bit surprised by how "straightly" Zelazny played it all.  He didn't feel the need to drive home any explicit Moral Of The Story™.  However, I couldn't really find much of an implicit meaning or message, either.  I'm not saying every story needs that, but in this particular case I think it was reduced in stature by lacking some deeper why of it all.  It's probably regarded as a sci-fi classic in some circles, but I can't see much beyond the tricksiness of it.  Ultimately, just OKAY.


33. "Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany

All righty.  FINALLY, not since perhaps the fourth story in this collection, here is a story truly worthy of being in this anthology.  I'm actually not going to say anything about the story itself, except that it makes wild extrapolations about the weirdness of humanity that really aren't that wild or weird.  I've written some purple praise about Delany in the past, and even though since that time I've heard about some other opinions of his with which I vehemently disagree, I still think his writing is amazing.  WOW.

- - - - - - - - -

Statistics:  I've recommended 12 out of 33 to skip (36%), copped out on 16 out of 33, that lie in the murky middle (49%), and given only 5 out of 33 the "blew my socks off" rating of wow (15%).  Is it ironic that the author who said "ninety percent of everything is crap" only rated an OKAY?

I didn't really expect to be so negative about the majority of the stories in this collection, and I searched for good things to say whenever I could.  It's probably just obvious that 53 years is a long time, and the norms and tastes swirling around the concept of a "dangerous vision" have shifted quite a bit.  I'm still very glad I did this, and there are a few authors that I'll be seeking out more from.

Then hopefully I'll be catching up on some other topics relevant to this blog, which hit an all-time low number of posts in 2019.  I hope to bounce back those numbers a bit, at least!  ;-)

Dangerous Reviews (2 of 3)

This is the second part of my ongoing review of the 1967 sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions.  Find part 1 here (for reviews of stories 1 through 11), and stay tuned for reviews of stories 23 through 33.

 12. "Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber

I think this might be the first time (for this collection) that, when finishing the story, my immediate thought was "I'm going to have to read more from this author."  Shame on me for being a fan of classic D&D and never having read Leiber before, but what can you do?

On the surface, this seemed like a classic American spooky tall tale, descended from Ichabod Crane through the genealogy of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King.  There wasn't very much sci-fi, so maybe you can think of this story as the slightly more red-blooded cousin of Rodman's "The Man Who Went to the Moon -- Twice."  Despite the (feigned?) simplicity of the first-person narrator's working-class point of view, Leiber's words are poetic and cadent and gleaming.  Just for the craft alone, I've gotta say WOW.


13. "Lord Randy, My Son" by Joe L. Hensley

Initially, I was put off by the Twilight Zone trope of the creepy kid with the weird powers, but Hensley took the idea much further than I've ever seen it taken.  Hats off to that.  The author's vision of the not-too-distant future was hugely pessimistic.  A fair bet in the 1960s, I suppose, but I'll never be a fan of the anti-Panglossian vision of the "worst of all possible worlds."  Still, Hensley kept the tension running high throughout, and the ending did kind of leave you wanting more.  So, on balance, let's say OKAY.


14. "Eutopia" by Poul Anderson

Quite interesting.  I've read some Anderson before, and he always seemed quite adept at exploring the fuzzy boundaries between sci-fi, fantasy, and other thematic corners of speculative fiction.  This story was no exception, because it contained a combination of:

(a) The classic trope of dimension-hopping adventures between alternate Earths,

(b) Philosophical musings about how human society should be ordered,

(c) Just a pinch of taboo-busting, to give it the dangerousness required for this anthology.

Did it really need (c)?  I probably would have been more comfortable with the story if that aspect had been left out, but it didn't ruin the story for me, either.  I'm actually curious to find out if Anderson ever wrote any other stories set in this interesting multiverse.  But, for this one in particular, I think I won't go farther than OKAY.


15. "Incident in Moderan" by David R. Bunch

Oh lord, I was actually rolling my eyes.  War Bad.  Yes, we get it. Maybe there's a smidge of something interesting here regarding the unintended consequences of transhumanism (i.e., uploading ourselves into robot bodies), but it's really just an unmitigated SKIP.


16. "The Escaping" by David R. Bunch

Editor Harlan Ellison really talked up Bunch's writing, to the point of giving him two back-to-back stories in this anthology.  This second one ended up being an abstract mood piece, without even a hint of sci-fi set dressing.  Maybe I should call it the outline of a thought of a seed of an abstract mood piece.  The words were engaging and surreal, but at just over 3 pages there wasn't nearly enough room to see how this seed might sprout into something truly interesting.  OKAY.


17. "The Doll-House" by James Cross

Sigh.  Not another Twilight Zone trope.  It had some interesting concepts, and some key details of its execution certainly appealed to the wannabe Greco-Roman classicist in me.  Definitely too heavy-handed on the condemnation of 20th century consumerism and status-seeking, but that's the 1960s.  I could probably write out exactly what Rod Serling would've said at the end.  OKAY.


18. "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" by Carol Emshwiller

Weird weird weird.  I can't quite tell if this story takes place in an alternate universe, or if it's our world and all the "dangerousness" was in the mind of the narrator.  The one main weakness of it, I suppose, is that I didn't truly understand what the author intended to convey until reading her Afterword.  Interesting concept, but mainly just OKAY.


19. "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" by Damon Knight

Kind of a mix of the eye-rolling banality from stories #1 ("Evensong") and #15 ("Incident in Moderan").  Please just SKIP.


20. "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon

The stories that I rank "okay" are a mixed bag.  Some I like, and some I don't like. This one I liked.  The writing popped and entertained.  I'm not sure I've read any Sturgeon before, but I can see clearly that his craft was on par with the greats.  The story was probably included in this anthology because of some solidly Dangerous™ squick, but you can see in my reviews that this doesn't automatically repulse me.  No, my avoidance to give the highest grade, in this case, comes from a violation of that old standard: "show, don't tell."  It's a 39-page story, and the story itself was almost over (except for a big reveal) by page 29.  Unfortunately, the big reveal came in the form of a dry 10-page monologue, told by one character to another.  Isn't that Ayn Rand's territory?  So close, but alas merely OKAY.


21. "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?" by Larry Eisenberg

Is it true that the worst thing you can say about a joke is "I don't get it?"  This wasn't sci-fi in the least, and although it was a mildly inventive take on the hard-boiled detective story, it just went nowhere fast.  SKIP.


22. "Ersatz" by Henry Slesar

I'm impressed that such a short piece could be so stupid, so offensive, and so pointless all at the same time.  Please skip this one.  If you read it, you'll think very much less of this collection and all its participants.  Every story here probably contains some little thing that marks it as having been written in the 1960s, but there's dated, and there's dated.

(In the author's afterword, there was an interesting question raised about whether fiction ought to highlight our best angels or our worst.  The case for the latter being that rose-colored glasses can sometimes blind us to real problems in our midst.  It's the case for 1984 and other dystopias.  But every piece of fiction need not play this role!)

I'll say it again.  SKIP.

- - -

Ack... only one "WOW" this time around.  That makes only 3 out of 22 so far.  Will the remaining stories change that ratio?  Come on back to see...

Dangerous Reviews (1 of 3)

Last December, I said I was going to wait until I was done reading all 33 short stories in the 1967 sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions before posting my mini-reviews.  Well, I'm not done yet, and I'm prone to procrastinate.  So I've decided to just post the first one-third of the bunch.  Maybe that will spur me to keep the reading and reviewing off the back burner.

In the following reviews, I'll do my best to avoid giving plot spoilers, but I won't hold back on anything else.  I'll sum up each review with one of three possible grades, which might be useful for readers who decide to pick up the anthology and want to avoid the clunkers.  Hopefully the names for the three grades (WOW, OKAY, and SKIP) are self-explanatory.  :-)

I won't be reviewing Harlan Ellison's introduction, or Isaac Asimov's two forewords.  They're interesting as character studies of these two titans -- and as an insight into some major sci-fi history -- but they're not what the seeker after visions dangereuses are really here for...


1. "Evensong" by Lester del Rey

Sorry, just a banal groaner.  I'm finding it hard to believe this was considered socially relevant, or even somehow remotely edgy, even in the 1960s.  SKIP.


2. "Flies" by Robert Silverberg

I'm sure I've read Silverberg before (I subscribed to Asimov's all through the 1980s), and I'd classified him in my mind as one of the good ones.  However, this story is pointless and unnecessarily crude.  Although the author's "big idea" is made abundantly clear at the end, (1) it's kind of just as stupid as that in the previous story, and (2) I can't quite believe the author thought readers would see past the shock-value and nod their heads sagely when seeing the big idea at the end.  SKIP.


3. "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" by Frederik Pohl

I liked this one.  It's very much a product of its time, and it's essentially all lead-up to a single punch-line at the end, but that punch line was kind of worth it.  OKAY.


4. "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip José Farmer

Holy crap... what a story.  At 30,000 words, it's the longest in the anthology, and so far it's been the most memorable.  A deep and phantasmagoric look into one possible future, and into the psyches of some of the people that inhabit it. The author cites Joyce's Finnegan's Wake quite a few times, but I think of it more as a crazy child of Joyce's peripatetic Ulysses, Jarry's absurdist Ubu Roi, and Huxley's soma-filled Brave New World.  If you can hold all three of those in your mind at once, you might be ready for the Purple Wage.  I fully acknowledge that, in a different frame of mind, I may have been turned off by the crazy stream-of-consciousness prose and the, um, vivid explorations of sexual taboos.  However, on the days I read it, its overall spirit and cleverness just happened to charm me.  I had to put the book down once every few pages to chuckle.  Its last words spoke to me directly.

This wild wild thing was definitely a product of the 1960s.  I hadn't heard about the Triple Revolution document before (and I can't say I'm a fan now that I have), but I've got to give Farmer points for extrapolating such an interesting future from it.  I also can't stop thinking about how this story fits into the wider scope of literature.  In addition to its forefathers Joyce, Jarry, and Huxley, I'm wondering if there was some influence from Tommaso Marinetti's blazing Futurist Manifesto.  Also, could it be possible that more recent fictions such as Idiocracy, Wall-E, and Demolition Man were influenced in some way by this particular dangerous vision?  WOW.


5. "The Malley System" by Miriam Allen deFord

The first half definitely went overboard on the "shock value" that seems to be an occupational hazard in this particular anthology, but I eventually understood the point of including it.  Interesting idea behind it all, but I'm fine with just saying SKIP.


6. "A Toy for Juliette" by Robert Bloch

Aha, now this is how to do shocking content, without the need to go overboard on the gross factor.  Nice twist at the end, though the editor's introduction kind of gave it away.  (Read the story first, if you can.)  Bloch's tale inspired Harlan to write the next one as kind of a sequel.  OKAY.


7. "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" by Harlan Ellison

Now look, Harlan is the reason I'm here writing about this book, but I was less than impressed.  Knowing the genesis of this story from the introduction(s), it honestly felt like an unnecessary addendum to Bloch's Juliette.  Harlan did include some fascinating (and new to me) deep-dives into a historical topic that I'd assumed was already rather played out.  But I can't be very enthusiastic about this 20-page tale, after Bloch essentially said it all in just 6 pages.

For all of the above, I might have said to skip this one, but it's Harlan, and I can never recommend missing out on his impassioned prose.  OKAY.


8. "The Night That All Time Broke Out" by Brian W. Aldiss

Mildly entertaining sci-fi conceit, for the 1940s or 1950s maybe.  Aside from one drive-by mention of Nabokov's Lolita, I can't figure out for the life of me how this milquetoast story got included in a purposefully Dangerous™ anthology such as this.  SKIP.


9. "The Man Who Went to the Moon -- Twice" by Howard Rodman

This one still intrigues me.  Harlan's intro emphasizes how it may not seem initially very much of a sci-fi tale, and I agree that's it as subtle as all get-out.  Is it shockingly New Wave?  No, but that's kind of the point.  Definitely worth your time for fresh insight into the scope of history that transpired between the beginning and end of the 20th century.  WOW.


10. "Faith of Our Fathers" by Philip K. Dick

The ordering of the stories is interesting, because right after the last one (which was so understated and homespun) we get the psychedelic's psychedelic, the gnostic's gnostic, the source of weirdness at the heart of Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Man in the High Castle.

Actually, this is the first prose of Philip K. Dick's that I've ever read. I was a bit worried that it would be a drug-induced stream-of-consciousness, a la Bukowski or Ginsberg, but it wasn't.  It wore the clothes of a 1960s-era science fiction story quite comfortably.  Of course, it had those Dickian tropes we hear so much about:  Is this the real world?  Am I the one having the mind-melting hallucinations, or are they having me?  There was a taste of the Lovecraftian, too, and it reminded me a little of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald."  In the end, it felt a bit unfinished to me, but I guess Dick himself was working out these ideas throughout his whole life.  A lot of fascinating stuff to chew on, but I think I've got to give it an OKAY.


11. "The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven

I dunno.  If Niven's goal was to create a plausible extrapolation of present (mid-sixties) trends to a horrific possible endpoint, then mission accomplished I suppose.  But now, 50 years later, the scenario seems a bit silly.  Sometimes the future doesn't happen like you think.  SKIP.

- - -

Stay tuned for reviews of the remaining 22...

Less Than Favorably Reviewed

A few months ago, the indomitable Suze posted a review of a well-enjoyed movie about which the critics were less than glowing.  It spurred in my mind the idea to take this on as a theme.  Naturally, there have been plenty of times when the erudite balcony-sitters have been out of step with popular opinion, but what happens when both the critics and the public are arm-in-arm in agreement against an army of one:  me?!

(I also admit to almost forgetting about this idea until the site io9.com posted something similar a week or so ago... a virtual confessional for admitting unpopular geek likes & dislikes.  So, thanks io9!)

I've got a set of micro-reviews of 6 films that hold a special place for me, but maybe not for many others:  3 movies that everyone seems to love to hate... 1 television mini-series that's thought to be a crap sandwich compared to the novel that inspired it... and 2 well-regarded movies that are often lost in the shadows of even more popular & acclaimed "siblings."

First, there's the 1996 blockbuster Twister.  Yes, it's a cliche-filled summer action movie... but it also features the red-blooded pursuit of scientific data.  Having been released the year I defended my PhD, it definitely holds a special place in my heart.  The film made lots of money during its release, but its embrace of crazy spectacle often leads people nowadays to treat it like a bit of a punching bag.  That's too bad, I say.  The lead actors (Carol the Waitress and Private Hudson) did an okay job, but the real soul of the movie was the motley crew of sidekick researchers, including Cameron from Ferris Bueller and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.  I'll make a detour for Aunt Meg's steak and eggs any day.

Hawk the Slayer was a low-budget fantasy movie from 1980 that capitalized on the rise in popularity of Dungeons & Dragons.  Most peoples' memories of the film tend to focus on either Jack Palance's egregious scene chewing, or on the Tolkien-esque adventuring party: a Spock-like elf, a wise-cracking dwarf, a bald giant (well, "slightly taller than average dude")... i.e., pretty much the randomly rolled PCs one would get from 3d6 in order.  I haven't seen this movie in probably 20 years, but I can't imagine that re-watching would change my nostalgic "so bad it's good" opinion.  Lots of others just delete the "it's good" part.  :-)

Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) seemed to want to be a bunch of things at once.  Is it a decade-spanning murder mystery?  A tragic story of regret and lost love? A meditation on how intense creativity (replete with shout-outs to Rimbaud) is corrupted by success?  Or was it just a vehicle for an up-and-coming band who got to do an entire soundtrack?  The critics seemed to think "none of the above," but this one always pulls me into its gravitational pull when I come across it.

I first encountered Stephen King's "It" when its miniseries version aired in 1990.  I went on to read the 1000+ page novel it was based on, and was kind of put off by the latter.  The author is a master, of course, but I actually liked how many plot elements were streamlined to make a workable film.  (The less said about the book's "ritual of Chud" the better.)  I also really liked many of the performances... especially John Ritter and Annette O'Toole as Ben and Beverly, and of course Tim Curry in a career-cementing role as Pennywise.  But despite the all-star cast, I have a feeling the critics and King fans overwhelmingly prefer the book.

Hmm, I notice that one common element in all four above movies is that the protagonists are all parts of a diverse and fun-loving "rag-tag team."  Maybe all of them -- not just Hawk the Slayer -- would make for good tabletop RPG adventures!

Next, the two well-regarded movies that I'm in the minority for thinking that they outshine the other more famous output of their cinematic auteurs...

Bogey and Bacall were legendary (as were Bogey and Bergman).  But you can keep your Casablancas, your Big Sleeps and Have Nots.  I've seen them all, but I've got to maintain that the real gem is 1948's Key Largo.  It's just so much psychologically deeper and more interesting than those others.  Maybe it's that this one had an engaging bad guy (Edward G. Robinson's infinitely quotable Johnny Rocco) that was a worthy opponent to Bogart's stoic war vet Frank McCloud.  The romance angle with Lauren Bacall was a bit secondary to the plot, but it was still quite sweet.

The Coen brothers are known best these days for a series of Oscar-nominated classics.  Everyone loves Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men, and so on.  But pride of place, to me, goes to 1987's Raising Arizona.  It soars, this movie; it soars.  It's got tons of clever lines, twisted humor even in the set design and lighting, and Nicolas Cage's most out of control hair.  It's also got acres of heart, combined with a slightly ambiguous ending that calls back to the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses.  Okay, then.

- - - - - - -

FYI, I originally wrote a bit more to list a few opposite cases to the above: movies around which everyone seems to link arms and sing Kumbaya, but I can't stand.  But I deleted that noise... the world doesn't need more negativity.  Just go treat yourself to one of the 6 imperfectly perfect gems listed up above, and I'll be happy.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Zamyatin's We

Wow -- I think it's been half a year since I've been able to participate in the Armchair Squid's wonderful gathering of online book lovers.  A few weeks ago I happened upon Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 short novel "We."  I thought I knew the landscape of bleak 20th century dystopias pretty well... Orwell, Huxley, Rand... later Bradbury, Vonnegut, Burgess, and a host of movie-makers.  I didn't know about Zamyatin, who was the granddaddy of them all.  (Turns out that Orwell and the rest knew about him, though!)  The manuscript of "We" was smuggled out of the young Soviet Union and translated into English many years before it would ever see publication in its native language.

Readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451 -- and fans of Logan's Run and Brazil -- won't be surprised by the broad-brush outlines of the plot.  Mathematician D-503 (no names here) is living in the perfect collectivist world, and is happily working towards humanity's greatest achievement: a huge rocket called the Integral that will bring mankind's well-ordered lifestyle to the stars.  Archaic concepts like freedom and individuality were bred out of humanity thousands of years ago.  But what happens when he meets I-330, an alluring woman who has some frustratingly outdated ideas about life?  And why does he start seeing the word "MEPHI" scrawled in graffiti on the walls of his perfect city?

I had to pause quite a few times to marvel that "We" was written in the late 19-teens, long before so many of these sci-fi tropes were set in stone.  Zamyatin's protagonist is writing a day-by-day account of his life to be stored aboard the Integral and be read by the surely primitive beings on other worlds.  The alienness of his society is conveyed by the fact that most adjectives (and other descriptions of what D-503 sees around him) don't contain cultural references, but instead refer to Kandinskian abstractions like pure colors, geometrical shapes, and mathematical concepts.  In stark contrast to all this rationality is the ever-present diary format, which is meant to be raw and unedited.  Often there are sentences that just trail off with no resolution, allowing the imagination to....

Many cautionary future tales suffer from the weakness of being too heavy-handed -- so much so that you can't quite picture how anyone let it happen, or how anyone manages to carry on living day after day.  But Zamyatin conveys some of its appeal.  The people aren't the hypnotized drones you might expect.  Most of them live engaged, stress-free lives in a world in which they are living out their purpose.  I've got to say that I was a bit hypnotized by the ordered bliss at times!  Of course, every few pages the protagonist would contrast his perfect world with the ancient, barbaric chaos of liberty, and the reader is immediately reminded of what's coming.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for mathematically ordered music:

"Crystal chromatic degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Maclaurin formulae with a gait like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy; the melancholy melodies of diminishing oscillations; pauses producing bright rhythms according to Frauenhofer lines, the spectral analysis of planets... What magnificence!  What unwavering predictability!  And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy..."

It kind of reminds me of Hermann Hesse's futuristic realm of Castalia in The Glass Bead Game -- i.e., inhabitants living a sparkling inner mental life, while being surrounded by social conditions that we'd find stifling and unacceptable.

Although there are some parts of the novel that drag on a bit, there are some truly original insights and ideas.  I won't spoil the ending, but I can say that, in a way, it's more intriguing than the endings of all the dystopian books and movies I mentioned above.  I'm glad I found this novel, and I highly recommend it as an alternative if you're considering dipping back into Orwell or Huxley yet again.

"We" have assumed control.

Wind's in the East

A few days ago I finally saw Saving Mr. Banks, a recent quasi-historical look into the meeting between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins.  

Forewarned: This post really isn't a review of the movie; more so a smattering of my impressions, and some hints about other things it spurred me to think about.

I've got Suze to thank for putting this on my radar.  For a good stretch of time in my single-digit years, Mary Poppins was my favorite movie.  In those pre-VHS days, I was lucky that the Disney classics were on a near constant rotation in the 99-cent matinee theaters, so I saw it many times.  At age 6, of course I identified with the Banks children, and I had a magical nanny figure in my own life, too.  It probably wasn't until I saw the movie again in my early 20s that I realized that Mary Poppins had another reason for blowing in with the east wind: the redemption of the father.  I don't think it's exaggerating to say that this realization held lessons for me that I continue to draw from, especially now as a father myself.

If all Saving Mr. Banks does is to convey a bit of that to its audience -- and to highlight the wonderful (and absolutely unabashedly unsubtle) ways that the music of the Sherman brothers accomplished it back in 1964 -- it deserves as much praise as I can give.  But I think it does a bit more, too.

It's cliched to talk about how our lives are enriched by stories.  This movie, I think, pierces to the heart of this cliche and shows how it works, and why it matters.  Telling stories remakes the world.

There are two senses that the above is true:  In a literal way, when people hear stories that uplift them, they can be inspired go out into the world and do things they might not have done before.  Even apocalyptic dystopias can cause people to work hard to make sure the bad stuff doesn't happen.

The second way is more subtle.  Stories shape our surreality, and literally change how we think.  Last year I began reading Douglas Hofstadter's newest book that suggests the making and manipulating of analogies is the core activity of the human mind.  He starts with the simple ones, involving single concepts and phrases, and then goes on to say that fictions and narratives are just extended versions of the same thing.  I suppose this is also related to the "scripts" of Transactional Analysis, which I mentioned in my last post.  (Many others have realized this, too; see hints of it in the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in J. R. R. Tolkien's classic essay "On Fairy Stories.")  I'm convinced that any Glass Bead Game worthy of the name is going to have these ideas at its core.

Back to Saving Mr. Banks, there's also another level of "remaking the world with stories" here, in that the actual, real-world interaction between Walt Disney and P. L. Travers didn't quite go the way it did in the movie.  Much like Travers may have used Mary Poppins to remake her troubled childhood, screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith did some remaking of their own.  But to valuable effect, I say.

(And, much like another recent controversial bit of historical storytelling -- the tale of Giordano Bruno in the new Cosmos TV series -- I'm less upset about the inaccuracies than I am that some of the most "prickly" and avant garde aspects of their lives weren't highlighted.  Travers, like Bruno, was far weirder and cooler than her depiction made it seem!)

You go, Ginty!

Space: Above and Beyond

"Courage. Honor. Dedication. Sacrifice. These are just the words they used to get you here. Now the only word that means a damn to you is life -- yours, your buddy's. The one certainty in war is that in an hour, maybe two, you'll either still be alive or you'll be dead.  For the next hour, here's your best chance of staying alive."

I forget if I've talked about my family's tradition of watching some good (or bad) sci-fi on the weekends.  Last week we finished going through the full set of David Tennant's run as the 10th Doctor.  This weekend we started something a bit different.

Space: Above and Beyond was a science fiction TV series that ran from 1995 to 1996.  Yup, just one season.  But what a season!  This show is typically in top-ten lists of "awesome shows that were cancelled before their time."  It was created by Glen Morgan and James Wong, two guys that started out writing some of the best early episodes of the X-Files, and then were given the chance to create their own show for Fox in the mid-90s.

My wife and I enjoyed this show at the time it first aired, and we were disappointed at its cancellation.  Watching the pilot again today, we were pleased at how much held up.  The characters remain engaging, the special effects aren't too clunky, and the patented Morgan-Wong monologues still have the ability to tug at the heart strings.  (They must have been big fans of classic American theater... Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and so on... They put in at least 2 or 3 identifiable bits of eloquent speechifyin' per episode.  For a show about war, love, and loss, it works.)  Our boy really enjoyed it, too.

The show follows the path of five fresh lieutenants, space marines in the year 2063, who happened to join up right as humankind happens to discover that, no, we are not alone.  In the wake of a horrific series of Pearl Harbor type alien attacks, they have to finish their training fast and head to the front lines.  There they meet the 6th main member of the cast (and fan favorite), Colonel T. C. McQueen, a battle-hardened vet who gave the speech I quoted above.  The actor who portrayed him may share the same name as a famous mojo-risin' lizard king, but he's all about the gravitas, with a cauldron of emotion simmering under the surface.  Back in the 90s, we were hooked by the plot and effects, but we kept on watching for him.

We'll be going through this wonderful old show over the next 20 or so weekends.  I can't promise to review every single episode, but I'll pop in with thoughts as I have them.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Lost Worlds of 2001

The back cover of my copy of Arthur C. Clarke's 1972 memoir The Lost Worlds of 2001 contains the following blurb:

MIND-BLASTING

PROBES

INTO DAZZLING

ILLUMINATION

Yes sir, this was the late sixties / early seventies, all right.

This book is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the famed 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  A book like that, in itself, wouldn't be so unique, but I don't know if a book like this could be written about any other movie.  It contains some of Clarke's short stories that inspired the plot, entries from his writing journal, a bunch of unused chapters from his 1968 novel of the movie (with very different versions of events), and some interesting personal reminiscences about director Stanley Kubrick.

I hadn't appreciated the true nature of the multi-year back-and-forth creative process that went on between Clarke and Kubrick to make this combined... thing.  (Wikipedia calls it a "science fiction narrative" to convey the intertwined nature of the movie and novel.)  I had it in my mind that Clarke's novel was kind of written "on spec" and Kubrick was calling all the phantasmagorical shots.  In reality, it was a fascinating, tumultuous two-way collaboration.  Early on, they planned essentially for the movie to say "directed by Kubrick and Clarke" and the novel to say "written by Clarke and Kubrick."  (The lawyers didn't let them.)  The initial impetus, though, was Kubrick's.  According to Clarke,

"He [Kubrick] wanted to make a movie about Man's relation to the universe -- something which had never been attempted, still less achieved, in the history of motion pictures. Of course, there had been innumerable 'space' movies, most of them trash. Even the few that had been made with some skill and accuracy had been rather simpleminded, concerned more with the schoolboy excitement of space flight than its profound implications to society, philosophy, and religion."

My own history with 2001 is kind of strange... I read the novel, and did a middle school book report on it in 1978, prior to ever seeing the whole movie.  It was never about the phantasmagoria for me -- the novel explained many things that the movie left ambiguous and trippy.  Even the final "beyond the infinite" part was set in my mind as strange sci-fi, but still solidly in the realm of "this could someday happen."

That brings me to the unused chapters from Clarke's novel, which take up much of the real estate in Lost Worlds.  Like I said, the final version of the 1968 novel explained a lot more than the movie.  These "lost" chapters go even further to reveal much more about the plans and motivations of the aliens that make contact with early hominids, then wait patiently for us to catch up.  We often see events through their eyes.

I've got to say, though, that I was kind of surprised that the unused chapters felt so, well, 1950s-ish.  Is that a word?  Sci-fi readers will get my drift.  The aliens who sent the monolith were humanoid.  The astronauts were all standard issue scientist-heroes, smoking pipes and twirling ladies on the dance floor, prior to setting off in the Discovery.  HAL-9000 was a robot.  It was kind of amazing that Clarke, a leader in the sci-fi community, started out this project with such a hokey take on the material -- especially when so much New Wave experimentation was being done at the time by his colleagues.  It was even more amazing that such a counter-cultural masterpiece of a film eventually came out of it.  (Clarke kind of blamed a lot of the trippiness on the art department!)

Anyway, even though I'm glad that all the extra explanation and tired tropes were eventually pared away, it was fascinating to get such a complete and intimate peek at the origins of this classic story.

Oh, and that 1978 book report?  It was accompanied by a presentation at a school book fair.  Don't believe me, do you...?

Note, both in the poster behind me and on the table in front of me, that we "updated" the Pan Am space clipper from the movie to the real Space Shuttle that was just a couple of years away from its first launch.  No 60s nostalgia there!  :-)

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Pleae go even further beyond the infinite to visit the other blogs participating in this month's Cephalopod Coffeehouse!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Grossman's You

I'm pleased to be a part of the Armchair Squid's go-your-own-way online book club again.  This past month, I read Austin Grossman's recent novel titled "You."  It's a slightly nostalgic look at the growth of the video game industry through the eyes of a fictitious team of programmers who were in it from the early days of home computers.

I ended up not being totally pleased with the book, but there were some good things.  Let me first issue praise where praise is due...

• I loved the sense of camaraderie and purpose of the core characters, who built up a thriving video game empire from humble beginnings as outcast high school students.  Their early years -- especially their time at an experimental computer camp in the woods of western Massachusetts -- reminded me of the early years of the tight-knit team of "losers" from Stephen King's novel "It."  (And no, I didn't think of that just because it's another novel with a pronoun for a title!)
• As someone of pretty much the exact age of the protagonists, I recall those early years, too, and I think Grossman captured a lot of its charm quite nicely.  I certainly shared the characters' drive toward their Platonic ideal of the Ultimate Game.  Some blurb on the back cover said something to the effect of "Now I want to go break out my old Commodore 64 and revisit some of those games."  I felt the same way.

But I couldn't ignore the problems.  Much of the book was built on flashbacks, and they were rolled out kind of haphazardly.  Almost as if Grossman was just making it up on the fly, as each new chapter was written.  In the early chapters, the present-day versions of the characters should have known about their past experiences together, but it's almost like they had amnesia until the flashbacks were presented.

The protagonist, Russell, was kind of a bland cipher, and (to me) borderline unlikable as a person.  Instead, I wanted to know more about Simon, the brilliant, unstable innovator who died a few years before the "present day" action of the book -- but who nonetheless drove much of the plot.  I think I've known a few people like Simon in my life, and I was left wondering if Grossman ever really knew or understood someone like this.

Part of me wants to wax philosophic about how modern literature seems uncomfortable with straightforwardly heroic personalities.  Do they see it as more preferable to have a wavering dud like Russell as the point-of-view character, than someone like Simon?  Someone who seemed to be honest, good, and unflinching in his will, even with flaws, even unto his own demise?

I was also unhappy with how the plot got resolved, but I'll leave out spoilers.

Still, the story made me think about a lot of things that I hadn't thought about in a long time, and it made me think about them in new ways.  I'm glad I read it, even if I wanted to throw it across the room when I was done.  :-)

- - -

Oh, one other thing.  Grossman's descriptions of Simon and his best pal Darren (the latter being the taller, smooth-talking pitch man who helped convey shy Simon's visions to the wider world) reminded me of another pair, where one of them does the talking for both... often to excess...

This comparison also got me to thinking of a few similar pairs in popular culture, where there's one who is silent and supposedly "deep," and the other who compensates by being more of an over-the-top goofball...

Can you think of any others?

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Surfaces and Essences

For the first installment of the Armchair Squid's free-for-all blog book club, I've been aiming to profile the new book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking.  Problem is... I haven't finished this sucker yet!  It's almost a running gag that Hofstadter's books are long; this one clocks in at 592 pages and I've really only gotten to 135.  I considered switching from reading to skimming, to get further by now, but I don't want to short-change it.

I'm still thinking this book will be important in my ongoing quest to build a real-world version of Hesse's Glass Bead Game, so I'm intending to do a mini "progress report" with today's post, and just keep reading at my own pace.  The full review will come at some point.  :-)

Ah, Douglas Hofstadter.  He's becoming an internet meme for being the patron saint of "meta" (i.e., self-referentiality taken to the Nth degree).

His books have been considered difficult, but mind-expanding if approached with effort and earnestness.  Gödel-Escher-Bach (1979) won many awards for its mix of musings on intelligence (natural and un), complexity theory, and deep connections between far-flung fields.  G-E-B gave me an important weapon in my arsenal of Glass Bead Game concepts: it showed that the idea of "rising tension, followed by release" is central to a huge number of different kinds of human-created works of art and science -- especially sequential works that one experiences linearly in time.  I've blogged about that here and here.

Surfaces and Essences may be just as long and involved as G-E-B, but I think it's central thesis is much simpler to communicate:  Hofstadter and Sander claim that just about every step in a human being's thought process is governed by the making and manipulating of analogies.  They use a pretty broad definition of an "analogy:" any way of comparing something to something else, or noting that an idea has some commonality with another idea.  (They talk briefly about the formal logical kind of analogy -- sometimes known as the SAT analogy -- but these "jewels of precision and elegance" are only a tiny subset.)

The early chapters are full of interesting linguistic examples that show how we use words and phrases to help us define mental categories.  Once we have these (usually fuzzy-edged) categories swirling around in our brains, they help us approach new and unfamiliar situations.  When we see something new, we search our storehouse of categories for something similar to compare it to -- i.e., we search for apt analogies -- so we can make sense of the new data.  This is usually done unconsciously, all the time, as we navigate through life.  In some cases, the new data cause us to refine or redefine our categories; this happens much more frequently when we're very young and still learning to speak and understand others.

Above I mentioned "words and phrases," but it goes beyond that, to full stories.  Those can be useful categories, too.  If you see a colleague at work whom you know wanted to get a big promotion, then didn't get it, and then feigned relief at not having to go to boring meetings with all the higher-ups, you may recognize that immediately as an example of Aesop's fable of the fox and the sour grapes.  But making that connection is a very subtle thing.  Nobody can figure out how to teach a computer to recognize that kind of non-surface similarity, but our minds do it constantly.  Hofstadter and Sander go further to actually define sentient intelligence as the ability to size up a new situation quickly by identifying concepts that get to its core (i.e., that separate the relevant wheat from the useless chaff). In other words, intelligence is the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies!

Like I said, I'm only through the first few chapters.  There will be many more examples to come, and I'm especially excited to get to the chapters about how scientists, mathematicians, and artists have created super-insightful analogies that have rocked their fields to their foundations.  I'm also looking forward to the chapter titled "How We Manipulate Analogies," because I'm really wanting to know how I can exploit this knowledge to create a better Glass Bead Game!

More on this later!  :-)

Review: Clockwork Angels, the Novel

In June, I posted a review of Rush's newest album, Clockwork Angels.  I also reported that drummer and lyricist Neil Peart was in the process of collaborating with an author to devise a sort of "novelization of the album."  The book was published a short time ago, and I just finished it.

It's an odd little bird, I'll tell you.

We can get the most of the bad out of the way quickly.  My initial impression of it can be boiled down to one word: "simple."  Peart and author Kevin Anderson took the basic adventure plot from Voltaire's Candide, removed nearly all of Voltaire's wit and subtlety, and substituted in some stale steampunk set dressing.  Having to take the plot through the rather linear set of situations suggested by the songs was a bit plodding and ho-hum.

Other than a few exceptions, the characters were cartoonish.  The evil "Anarchist" is motivated by a backstory only Lex Luthor would see as viable.  His counterpart, the evil "Watchmaker," micromanages his kingdom like a mad puppeteer, determining everyone's careers and approving their marriages and living situations.  That's okay on its own, but to drive the point even more to the edge of overkill, he also forces scientists to hew to a literal Ptolemaic cosmology.  The deviations of the planets from perfect circular orbits is recognized as a "problem" by some, but it's a problem that all have faith in the Watchmaker to fix by (someday) moving their orbits into their proper, anal-retentive shapes!

And the "Easter Eggs."  Oh, the Easter Eggs.  I get that Anderson is friends with Neil Peart, and is probably a huge fan of the music.  But the insertion of out-of-context song lyrics from Rush's 40-year history -- pretty much one every 3 or 4 pages -- was jarring and annoying.  I'm not misusing the word literally when I say I literally turned my exasperated gaze skyward whenever I came across one of these groaners.

Okay, the worst is over.  What's left?

The negative points listed above were just about all that were filling my head as I was reading the first few chapters.  But then, somewhere around a third of the way in, I had a mental shift that made me far more forgiving of its flaws:  I pictured reading it to my son.  He's 11, and will soon be a wistful teenager looking to break away and have adventures of his own.

Actually, this book couldn't be a better guide for that.

Its simplicity can be forgiven as the allowances that (I assume) must be made in all Young Adult type fiction.  In that vein, it does remind me a lot of the overall reading level of the Harry Potter books.  (And by "reading level" I don't just mean vocabulary and sentence complexity, but also the themes, ideas, and challenges the main character is exposed to.)  The cartoonish characters are no worse than those created by George Lucas, and they may be just as memorable for someone who doesn't know the dozens of literary originals that were plundered to create them.  The Rush lyrics wouldn't be a problem -- unless a prog-geek Dad like me would be constantly pointing them out and talking about each song they come from!  :-)

There's one other troubling aspect that I discussed in my review of the album.  ("Spoiler alert," I suppose.)  In both the lyrics and the book, we see that the main character eventually finds a happy home and leaves behind the grand battle.  We learn in the book that he was a symbolic "pawn" that both the Anarchist and the Watchmaker desired to convert to their way of thinking.  He said "No thanks" to both and went his panglossian way.

I know that a protagonist doesn't always need to defeat the bad guys and save the world, but I still felt the lack of righteous "comeuppance" for the villains as a pang of emptiness at the heart of this thing.  They need to be checked, or their darkness will grow.  The Watchmaker will always want more.  If I can quote myself from my review of the album:

Okay, maybe I'm not at that point of inner peace where Neil Peart abides.  I still want to see the redeemed Prince By-Tor defeat the Necromancer.  I want to see the apotheosis of my namesake Cygnus, the god of balance, who teaches silly Apollo and Dionysus the errors of their extremism.  I want to believe (yes, there's Fox Mulder again) that the death of the guitar-discoverer in 2112 wasn't in vain, and that the elder race of man really did return in the end to knock some Syrinxish heads.

I guess I'm guilty of including Rush Easter eggs, too, but the book didn't give me the kind of closure that Neil has espoused in the past.  Maybe it's the mature choice, the choice that will help guide young readers to live healthier lives full of forgiveness.  But it's enough to stop me from loving this story wholeheartedly.

Review: Batchelor's Antarctica

This is a review of a novel with a long title by an author with a long name. The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica, published in 1983, was John Calvin Batchelor's second novel.  Batchelor wrote a half dozen other books, then went on to become a radio talk show host.  I've read two other of his novels, and have never heard his show.

I've also read this book more times than I've read any other novel.  I just finished what is either my 6th or 7th time through it.  In many ways, it's a touchstone for me, and I keep coming back because there is still so much I don't fathom about it.  Someday, I'll understand it's depths.

Antarctica, as I'll call the novel from now on, is a strange bird.  It takes place in an imagined future, but it's not sci-fi.  Remembering that it was published in 1983, most of the action spans the 1990s and the early 2000s.  One of the final chapters is titled "Christmas, 2037 AD."  It deals with mass migrations and the collapse of civilizations, but it's wholly about people and not technology.  (I don't think the word "computer" can be found in the novel at all!)

Antarctica is also the story of Grim Fiddle, a young man raised by quirky American expatriates in Stockholm.  Grim grew up playing Viking warrior at the summer camp run by his family, doing odd jobs to make ends meet, and learning a lot about life without ever going to school.  But tensions were brewing in this alternate Sweden... When Grim celebrated his 17th birthday with his family (who were all working in the kitchens at the Nobel Prize Ball), he didn't know that he was on a collision course with not only a cadre of xenophobic demagogues who wanted to cleanse their holy land of foreigners, but also with his father's haunted past and cursed future.  I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Grim and his family soon became intimate with phrases such as "the Age of Exile" and "the Fleet of the Damned."

Many online reviewers balked at the sense of loss and tragedy (often written through the lens of pagan Norse fatalism) in Antarctica.  When a sibyl tells Grim that his destiny is with the cold and the cruel, and that the blackened and hurt half-men await his coming, she's not wrong.  The lows are low, it's true.

Elsewhere online, I've gone on record despising the "tragedy porn" of much of what passes for contemporary literature.  (Is it fair to cite McCourt's Angela's Ashes as a poster child?  Irving's Garp?)  It seems sometimes that a novel can't be considered "serious" without some gash of nihilistic atrocity running through it.  But this, I feel, is fundamentally different from what happens in Antarctica.  Like Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, the bad stuff here is the result of flawed, fatal decisions.  Going through it with the characters is part catharsis, part reminder (this has happened before), and part warning (don't let it happen again).  Through it all, there is earned happiness at the end.

This review is getting long, but I shouldn't neglect to mention the beauty of Batchelor's words.  Maybe that's the siren song that keeps me coming back.  Here's a taste:

I believe that every man and woman, no matter what their station or luck, is granted a right to high dreams. If one exercises such a right, it costs. One pays with heart. That is not a bottomless account. It can be replenished after depletion -- the sun, some good food, a human kindness -- but it can also be exhausted, and after that sort of despair, death has no meaning I can think of. And I insist these high dreams speak every language, come to the very old, the very criminal, the very young.

That last sentence is an example Batchelor's trick of eliminating the penultimate "and" from lists of three, which for some reason still strums me like King David's secret chord.

There are aspects that won't be to everyone's taste.  Batchelor has a habit of naming characters based on punny stereotypes.  Grim's dad, ever the wanderer, is named Peregrine.  As another example, here are two names: Cleopatra Furore and Charity Bentham.  One is a silver-haired, matronly economist.  One is a dark, passionate, and manipulative beauty.  It's not hard to figure out which is which!  :-)

Antarctica is also a discursive novel full of meaty philosophical asides that don't move the plot along. (I like that in a novel... Why spend weeks to months in a universe without that universe being fully fleshed out?)  These asides are often political in nature, but Batchelor has the gift of saying a lot of meaningful things, and speaking a lot of truth, without hitting on the sore spots that would get people on either the left or right to throw the book away in anger.

The novel itself is supposed to be Grim Fiddle's own autobiography, and he writes what he feels like writing.  It ends up feeling kind of like "Moby Dick by Charles Dickens," if you get my drift... From Dickens you get the sometimes cartoonish characters and melodramatic themes of love and revenge; rich versus poor.  From Melville you get those long digressions, the ocean and exile, and some hard-edged religion.

Finally, there's the matter of the ending.  I won't give away too much, but it can seem rushed.  The last 60 pages of this 400 page book do have a more rapid tempo than what came before.  There are also big swaths of major plot squeezed into those pages.  There is an in-story explanation for why this is so, and I'll leave it to readers to decide whether that's convincing or not.  I used to be majorly perplexed by this accelerando of an ending, but I think that's because I often rushed through it myself, in a marathon reading session.  I broke it down into smaller pieces this time, and it made much better sense to me.

I love this novel, and I recommend it highly.  However, it's not a light, summer beach read.  Maybe it's more of a winter solstice read.  :-)

Review: Rush's Clockwork Angels

I'm not sure if there's much of an audience here for music reviews, but this one called out to me.  Each new album by Canadian prog trio Rush has been a big event in my life since 1984's Grace Under Pressure.  Clockwork Angels is their first studio album in about 5 years, and I'm still mulling a lot over after just one listen to it all the way through. Still, I thought it worthwhile to get my thoughts down on virtual paper...

For the spoiler conscious (to the degree a rock album can have spoilers!) I'll put my comments on the lyrics and "story" below a cut at the bottom.

Before getting into the music, I must mention their use of alchemical symbols on the album cover.  They've always catered to their geeky fans with stuff like this, but this goes above and beyond!  Each of the 12 songs gets a unique symbol whose alchemical meaning resonates somehow with the lyrics. The full set corresponds to the clock-face in the image above, too.  (Notice that the time on the clock is 9:12?  If that's PM, then it's 21:12!)  I was happy to see a few that I was considering for my April A-Z posts on symbols, so, yeah, I'm the target audience, here.  In the liner notes, it gets even more geekily complicated, with a nested inner ring of 8 symbols surrounding an even smaller ring of 4 symbols (the four elements, I think), surrounding a central core that's divided into two halves (day/sun and night/moon).  We'll be analyzing that quite a bit, I think!

The band has been lauded for getting back to its prog-rock "concept album" roots with Clockwork Angels, but I'm not sure how much that extends to the actual music.  They do some stretching by bringing in some guest instrumentalists (strings and piano) as well as a BIT of flirtation with the synthesizers of old (e.g., some almost psychedelic sound effects on the title track).  But, overall, I'd say that 80% to 90% of the music is straight guitar, bass, and drums, and the style wouldn't be a surprise to people familiar with their last two studio albums.

The composition and execution of the music is technically flawless (as far as this non-musician can tell).  For dudes who will soon be celebrating their 60th birthdays, they're still in top form.  However, there's one thing that prevents me from truly lavishing complete praise on the music.  I think many people may recognize that you can split up Rush albums into two distinct time periods:

1. Phase One (1974 to approx 1991): The era in which they knew how to write good, singable melodies.
2. Phase Two (1991 to present): Um, not so much.

I'm using 1991 as a stand-in for the time period running from Presto (1989) to Counterparts (1993), during which the melodies seemed to gradually fade away.  Does anyone else see this?  To me, it's a major seismic fault running through their career.  For some reason, the recent songs are plagued by lyrics that (though the ideas and poetry are brilliant) aren't just that suited to be melodic lyrics at all.  It almost seems like there are too many syllables in each "line" for Geddy to sing. The end result is that he can't do anything other than just modulate up and down, up and down, by little half-steps of pitch, without the melody actually going anywhere.  Certainly makes it hard to have a memorable hook to sing in the shower!  :-)

But, for me, the music is secondary.  It's really about the mind of this guy:

Professor Pratt Narpet

and please click down past the cut to hear more about what words and ideas come pouring out of that mind...