I see the light and it's made of lasers!

Book: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Authors: Lots (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Published: 1994 (collection; Tor)

Pages: 988

Holy shit was this book ever difficult to get through, guys.

Let me clarify right now that I don’t mean because of the quality; it was purely a size thing. Almost 1000 pages crammed with tiny type about physics and biogenetics and astronomy and advanced mathematics and, weirdly enough, more than one whirlpool. Plus dragons.

I’ve been chipping away at this collection since the beginning of July, and it really helped to take two, several-smaller-books-sized breaks. Even then, finishing it still gives my brain that way-too-full sensation of going to a museum and reading every single plaque next to every single exhibit. Ow.

And that is what this gi-fucking-normous book functions best as: a very complete history of sci fi. (Well, up to a point. The youngest story in here is older than I am.) I read it because I want to learn more about the genre, and it gave a really thorough tour through a lot of different trope origins, teaching by showing off examples. Which was the best way to learn, because here you get all the lasers and moon colonies where people have already gotten cynical about the wonders of space and deep-sea aliens and sentient monkeys who escape wearing orange Bermuda shorts and carrying their typewriters and children’s games that lead into another dimension and Asimov computers compiling information about life’s biggest question until the end of time.

It’s all blended together, in case you can’t tell. I think partly because I read all the intros to the stories, too, which each boiled down to “This guy is awesome and [chose one] severely under-appreciated” OR “recognized as one of the leading writers of the genre and a bunch of people still copy him.”

(Regarding that last adjective, there are a relatively decent number of female authors represented here, which is to say two more beyond Anne McCaffery [dragons!] and Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection was also co-edited and compiled by a lady.)

I thought the one they chose for Poe was weaksauce because it’s a sailor describing how he got out of a whirlpool, which, while still affecting, was the most conventional Poe story I’ve ever read. Also, maybe I’m just not appreciating historical nuance, but H.G. Wells’s “Hey, Tanks!” (actual title: “The Land Ironclads”) was also not nearly as good a representation of that author as they could’ve picked. And I can’t really get over McCaffery’s dragons getting put into a collection dedicated to hard sci fi when the definition of the subgenre specifically eliminates magic as a reason for anything.

But once I got into the rhythm and let my eyes skim the passages with incomprehensible engineering equations in them, I had a great time. I’m struggling with the decision about what to do with this physical book now, though. To the pros and cons list!

It throws my spine out of whack whenever I try to lug it around in my shoulder bag, and I automatically deduct major points from any reading material I can’t carry with me at all times.

As a city girl whose pedestrian ways has grown a healthy wariness of potential muggers, I appreciate having a blunt object that will stun but not kill and look completely innocent while doing so.

I can’t see myself ever plowing through the whole thing again, like, ever.

But it’d be great to have to spot-check and keep as a future readings list for authors I would never come across again.

Oh, hell, I’ll just keep the damn thing so I’ll have an excuse to either weed my crowded fiction bookshelf or build another one that looks like the TARDIS. 

And so we came to the end (of a series)

Book: Mockingjay

Author: Suzanne Collins

Published: 2010 (Scholastic)

Pages: 390

Let's get straight to the ending! That's all I ever wanted from this trilogy anyway.

I liked it. I thought it was mildly shocking in a way that made sense. I loved how it leaned hard on the theme of "who exactly is the bad guy here?" that this book spent like 300 pages developing. There were enough broad hints about SPOILER ALERT NO SERIOUSLY I AM ABOUT TO DESTROY ALL YOUR SURPRISES District 13 President Coin that Katniss shooting her instead of Snow was an inspired last-minute instinct.

But the lead-up to it reminded me of watching Doctor Who and noticing that they're just now getting into trouble when there's 10 minutes left in the episode. These storylines can go two ways: a rushed ending or a two-parter. Obviously the two-parter scenario is ideal because it means I have a built-in excuse to watch more Doctor Who, but Mockingjay made me considerably more nervous because there was for sure nothing else after I finished it.

And it manages to wrap up in a timely fashion by one of the most annoying tropes I've noticed in this series: Katniss getting seriously injured and whisked away to treatment in the middle of the action. She, and consequently we, hear about the most interesting bits of battles and such through second-hand pure exposition.

I thought the whole point of her being the Mockingjay was that she would be put in exactly the right place to witness and show everything as it was happening. I expect that from all my protagonists, guys.

I did love how the rebels were aware of and could use media manipulation just as well as the Capitol. That's been my favorite part of the series and really put the focus on the ambiguity of each side, like, if they use the same propaganda techniques--if they both use propaganda at all, how can we tell which side tells the truth? How can we tell if there's a truth at all? I totally couldn't, and I never fully trusted those District 13 bastards anyway.

But oh my god did I want there to be so much more of a psychological showdown with President Snow! He showed how good he is at being creepy with flowers--flowers, y'all! And then when Katniss didn't shoot him, I was all, "OH SNAP [regrettably, I really do say this out loud; am trying to train it out of myself] they're going to psyche each other out SO HARD for the COUNTRY!"

Nope. He dies choking and getting crushed like two minutes later, and she hears about this from...say it with me now...her hospital bed. 

Now we get to talk about Peeta and how every time I hear someone say his name out loud, I think of Elaine and her "Stellaaaaaaaah!" He felt plot-device-y in this one. And my apologies; I reread Catching Fire while waiting to borrow Mockingjay, and holy crap is there for sure some teen love angst going on there. I missed it because Collins is so dang good at plot. I forgive her so much for that. And honestly, Peeta and Katniss bonded in blood. Twice. They know the most horrible experiences of each others' lives, and they know what the other went through, and they know just exactly how much they both need a little peace. Gale sounds like he's hotter than Peeta, though.

So what'd you guys think of how this series ended? How'd you think the series worked as a whole?

O my brothers

Book: A Clockwork Orange

Author: Anthony Burgess

Published: 1986 (this edition--Norton Paperbacks)

Pages: 212

There's nothing to fear about this book; the slang is omnipresent but easily penetrated, while at the same time enough to keep the violence at an abstract distance. Which I guess is one facet of the point, another of course being the extra chapter that  was originally left out of the American edition (and, consequently, Stanley Kubrick's movie adaptation).

(Side note: After reading this, I want to watch the Kubrick movie to see how it stacks up to The Great Shining Debate, which is when Liberry Tom says Kubrick's The Shining is a great movie because it's shot so well and I say it sucks because it completely misses the point of the source material.)

I wasn't super shocked by anything in here. It's a fairly straightforward plot: brutal young man gets off on doing violent things to people, gets caught, gets put into mind-altering therapy that gives him visceral reactions to violence, tries to get right back into it, gets depressed and tired of it. 

That's not to say I didn't like reading about all that. It's still a fascinating journey, and it's all in the narrator. This book is one of the strongest arguments I've read for the importance of unique character voice. Alex goes from simple to sick to existential, all his confusion wrapped in his comforting blanket of slang whose familiarity isn't nearly enough to protect him from the changes forced on his emotions. He remains a sympathetic character in a way that makes me feel like a terrible person for saying that, which means he's very well-written. A well-written sociopath.

The last chapter--I don't see how it's such a controversy. It's the logical, if somewhat muted, continuation of Alex's life. Leaving it out could be seen as approving such violence that he's gotten back into, or at least saying that it's an inevitable part of decaying society, but it's made clear that even though he's pushed past his conditioning, Alex won't be able to sustain his sociopathic behavior for much longer without it taking an even more crushing toll.

Anyway, go read this and see if you can tease out the metaphor for clockwork oranges. I didn't get that bit.

Origin stories

Book: Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal

Published: 2011 (The University of Chicago Press)

Pages: 334 (not counting endnotes)

Holy shit, comic book writers are just as crazy as you think they are.

Kripal’s conclusion is a lot more nuanced, academic, and sympathetic than mine. But all his research into the great minds of speculative fiction basically comes down to this. Everyone from Alan Moore to Jack Kirby to Philip K. Dick to pulp writers of the 1950s had some sort of paranormal/religious experience that brought them out of their own consciousness in some elaborate mind-melting way that may or may not have involved drugs (it’s split about even along the users/nonusers line). And boy howdy did they ever want to dissect the hell out of these experiences in print.

I won’t cheat or pretend to remember by paging back through for some random quotes about any of this stuff. It was confusing and blurred into one giant blob of higher intelligent beings revealing themselves to grant their higher knowledge on the open-minded. Basically, these guys did not go, “You know what would be AWESOME? SPACESHIPS and sexy goddesses!” and proceed to make it up as they went along. They were transcribing, translating, and interpreting. Their work was not their own.

To me, that’s disappointing, mostly because I want to hear how artists take control of their own creativity. I wanted to read about how they took ordinary lives and molded them into fantastical allegories about their world and its direction, disguised in mystical experiences that their audiences would use for escape. I did like that Kripal had enough insight to divide the experiences into different socio-historical anxieties, like alienation, radiation, orientation, mutation. 

But then he dropped giant musing paragraphs into the middle of everything and lost me out in the cosmos. Maybe I’m just not ready for enlightenment yet.

Keeping America safe (after checking with supervisors)

Book: Captain Freedom: A Superhero’s Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves

Author: G. Xavier Robillard

Published: 2011 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 255

Everything exciting has already happened to Captain Freedom at this point in his career, but he’s not willing to accept that. He’s vain, kind of dumb, overconfident and delusional about it all. And dammit, he deserves public recognition and an official archnemesis!

So the search and clash of all this is played as satire on something nobody has ever skewered before, ever: modern celebrity culture </end sarcasm>. It hits hardest when Captain Freedom throws out asides that reveal what he thinks is perfectly normal. A lot of those are brilliant little nuggets of hilarious entitlement. The rest, the Big Picture, the part that’s probably supposed to be the book’s comedic backbone, the string of incidents that wander chronologically through his superhero life without linking together in an arc or overall theme—eh.

It wasn’t boring and it WAS funny, but it did seem aimless.     

Doctor Who double feature

Book: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (#81)

Author: Terrance Dicks

Published: 1983 (Target)

Pages: 128

Book: Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep (#110)

Author: Victor Pemberton

Published: 1986 (Target)

Pages: 189

Let’s be honest, I got into Doctor Who for David Tennant and his thousand-yard stare.

But I very quickly stayed for everything else. And these novelizations of the original TV show are just like watching episodes from when all the special effects were spray-painted cardboard instead of cheap CGI; that is to say, rollicking, unintentionally hilarious adventures where everyone is shouting exposition at each other and the Doctor just knows everything somehow and the companions alternate between terrified and indignant that no one believes him and there are monsters.

Fury from the Deep occasionally read like a PSA because the main monster was this giant sentient seaweed that tried to choke everybody and control their minds on this series of oil rigs, so “evil weed!” and “vile weed!” (heh, shot of honey mustard, stat!) were sprinkled in there. The characters were all pretty flat, of course, but I was disappointed this included the Doctor. And one of the companions, Jamie, was a Highlander only when the author remembered. Seriously, y’all, he said “Och!” and “duna worry” in between speaking like an American high schooler. And they got rid of the seaweed by amplifying the shattering sound waves of companion Victoria’s screams. And then afterward she decides to stay behind on the oil rig because she’s homesick and tired of almost getting killed by traveling with the Doctor.

BECAUSE A 20^TH CENTURY OIL RIG IS SO MUCH LIKE THE VICTORIAN ENGLAND SHE ORIGINALLY COMES FROM.

Haha, I told y’all this was good.

The Five Doctors was better writing, more complex plotting, and more distinct characters. All five regenerations of the Doctor get pulled from their time streams back to Gallifray to play this deadly game buried deep in the timelords’ planet so they unwittingly spring the traps so the president chief timelord dude can get to the ancient ring that promises immortality. Which he gets, only in living stone instead of life like he thought.

I liked watching the Doctors interact with each other. They were each distinctive in appearance and temperament and I never mixed them up. This book brought together all the feistier companions, too, and including a brief cameo from Jamie that revealed he WEARS A KILT AND TAM O’SHANTER. ALL THE TIME.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s still all terrible writing. So many adjectives and adverbs, y’all. So very many. But I feel like Cardboard David Tennant approves. 

KING WRITES WELL ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

Book: 11/22/63

Author: Stephen King

Pages: 842

Published: 2011 (Scribner)

Whatever else there is to say about him, Stephen King can tell a damn fine story when he concentrates and somebody gets brave enough to remind him that he still needs an editor. This book on time travel used to stop JFK’s assassination is proof I will drop upon his head if he ever lets something like Under the Dome out of his writing drawer again.

This one’s giant, meaty, compelling, and straightforward. Straightforward! In over 800 pages, he doesn’t make any unnecessary side trips, physical or philosophical, and the only reason I’m not calling that a miracle is because it didn’t feel miraculous. It felt—simple.

I won’t give away the whole plot since this is a brand-new book (for once), but basic outline: protagonist discovers a time travel portal in the back of his friend’s diner. It always leads to the same September morning in 1958. Diner owner uses it to buy meat super cheap and bring it back to the future. (One of my favorite details.) Diner guy is dying and wants protagonist to go prevent JFK’s assassination. Protagonist does and comes back to see how that’s affected 2011. Now between those last two sentences, add massive piles of well-intentioned lies, skipping towns, sporting bets, runs from the mob, using money to solve problems, murders, notes from the diner guy, shitty apartments, falling in love, sacrifices, consequences, Russian ex-pats, cigarette smoke, the Cuban Missile Crisis, blood, broken bones, and a past that DOES NOT want to be changed. Bam. You got yourself a long satisfying glut of Stephen King plotting.

His writing ticks (repetition, heavy reliance on exposition-tastic and unhumanly “hip” dialogue, overextended use of metaphor, defanged climax) are kept at a minimum, but he does do that thing where the protagonist is a bland everyman hero and the girl he falls in love with is even less sketched out. WHY AND HOW DO THEY LOVE EACH OTHER? I DON’T KNOW, and it’s the driving force for the novel’s full back half. Her major trait is she’s tall and clumsy and although she gets upset about the protagonist’s lies, she eventually just accepts him without any further explanation. I don’t know why she changed her mind. SHE doesn’t know why she changed her mind. Manic Pixie King Girl, right there.

And I so, so wish he would’ve written more deeply into a villain. He’s absolute best when he’s describing a psychopath unraveling. But from a characterization perspective, I do appreciate his ability to keep Lee Harvey Oswald a fully rounded human and not a cardboard holder of evil and guns.

It didn’t take me nearly as long as it should have to read this book because I kept wanting to know what happened, and the ending paid off my ignoring other things to read for a couple more hours. Which was awesome.    

Blade Runner the book

Book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Author: Philip K. Dick

Published: 1968 (Del Ray)

Pages: 244

I’ve been wanting to read this book since I heard about the movie Blade Runner and that it was based on a book. Fortunately, I’ve just moved a very walkable distance from the main branch of my new county’s library system and had a disconcerting lunch that drove me in search of a giant pile of emotional reading. While I initially wandered in to idly check the sci-fi section, I got excited when I saw they finally had this one in and went a little apeshit in the rest of the general fiction. You’ll hear about the rest of those by November 19.

But! I digress! Unlike Mr. K. Dick, who cuts great swathes of plot about a bounty hunter who chases down androids to pay for a new, real animal in a world where that’s like buying a new car. He gets caught up in a tangle of questions about reality, empathy, and identity that pulls apart his world view. The book ends after he goes back home to his wife, before he can reconstruct anything, which didn’t bother me but did leave me wanting to know a little more.

The whole story was like that; it introduced a lot of metaphysical difficulties that I wanted K. Dick to explore better. I think another hundred pages of that and character distinguishing would have elevated this good read to excellent. He can’t improve a bit on that title, though. It’s magnificent.      

Robots...

Book: The Destroyer #47: Dying Space

Author: Warren Murphy

Published: 1982 (Pinnacle Books)

Pages: 196

Can fun writing be automatically thought of as good because it makes the reading experience a pleasure, even if that pleasure is laughing hard at seriously-meant dialogue and plot twists?

I think there’s inherent value in something like that, mostly because this book kept me very amused for a couple hours. It’s pure paperback pulp about a missile-controlling robot that is accidentally brought to life by two garbage men. The robot skins (!) one of the garbage men and takes his form to stay unnoticed while he goes to destroy Remo, a wiseass assassin who…you know, I don’t know what Remo did to the robot to piss him off so much. It was covered in previous books.

Anyway, they all end up in Moscow so the robot can stop the Russians from firing a nuclear missile—at the moon. The moon. Not at anything more alarming. Which, to whatever astrophysicists are reading this to keep their minds off NASA, I know blowing up the moon would screw us over down here. But in an indirect way that I’m sure y’all could figure out how we could live with. In this book, Russia is just so jealous of the US’s moon-conquering abilities that it wants to destroy the moon so we won’t have anywhere else to expand our empire. It apparently never crosses their minds to blow up our direct, terrestrial, and no doubt much easier because much closer nerve systems of big cities on either of our coasts.

So that was dumb and took all the tension out of the final couple chapters, which were action-packed and included a drunk randy scientist trying to make up for her unappreciated habits by helping the robot she built and a Russian commander who likes the “kinky boom-boom” Remo apparently stumbled into when he was trying to escape her room.

Two women in power; both of their sexualities are used as jokes meant to break tension. At least they’re both brilliant (when a man isn’t around to make them feel good). Hmpht.

They don’t get to live happily ever after, either, but everybody else does except in the epilogue the robot comes back to life and resolves anew to kill Remo. Of course he does.    

Dark tea-time of the soul

Book: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Author: Douglas Adams

Published: 1987 (Pocket Books)

Pages: 306

Ah, humorous British sci fi. I will always compare you to Dr. Who. But don’t worry, Douglas Adams; I’m pretty sure you taught the Doctor a thing or two about looking adorably incompetent while actually knowing exactly what’s going on.

I found this paperback in my dorm’s “library,” by which I mean one of three bookshelves shoved into our common room along with the old (comfortable) furniture and boxy non-HD TV that nobody wanted out in the open. I went down there a lot of Friday nights last semester to soothe my raging weekend boredom and loneliness and also to watch The Soup.

A friend of mine introduced me to Adams in high school by lending me a giant paperback edition of all four (five?) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels. I loved them. I loved the absurdity-driven adventures and I loved the characters who seemed so human even if they were two-headed aliens and I loved Adam’s apparent delight in playing with logic—really playing, as in having fun with it and writing all this fun down in a way that only seem like random tangents until you get to the end of them.

He brought a lot of this to this book, minus a little bit of the wacky. This is a mystery about who killed a not-so-well-liked computer company CEO; was it his cellist sister, or her forgetful awkward boyfriend who writes music using intervals found in nature, or his old (very, very, old) professor who’s afraid to use his time machine apartment for more than petty magic tricks ever since he accidentally caused the extinction of the dodo, or the stupid magazine editor who loved his work but was pushed out of it when his dad the owner died, or the detective Dirk Gently himself while denying his psychic abilities and trying to tie everything in the world together while eating other people’s pizza? Or possibly the Electric Monk that’s programmed to believe everything?

SPOILER ALERT: It was aliens. In ghost form. Uh huh.

I liked this story, but my favorite part is the author photo, in which Adams is holding a tea cup and saucer and looking like he wants to shove said tea cup and saucer up the bum of whoever suggested it. I like to imagine him thinking, “I’M BRITISH WE GET IT.”    

Attack of the shit-weasels

Book: Dreamcatcher

Author: Stephen King

Publication: 2001 (Scribner)

Pages: 617

Over the past few summers, I’ve made it a soft, unofficial goal to read all of King’s non-Dark Tower books. Dreamcatcher is one that I’ve put off a couple times for stories that looked more interesting. I wasn’t terribly eager to slough through bastardized Native American mythology or another The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. (That book was good. Let a good thing stand on its own, King.)

But this book isn’t like either of my expectations, and that was enough to keep me reading. 

Aliens and weasel-larvae who chew through humans’ intestines to spread a reddish-gold virus that grows worse than kudzu should be really, really interesting. Except the aliens have been here doing diddly-shit since the 1940s, the weasels provide way too many excuses for fart jokes, and the virus can’t survive Maine winter so it dies out without anyone’s help.

Hear that “wamp-wahhh” sound? That’s what an anticlimax sounds like.

My two main problems with this book as a writer: 

1. The dreamcatcher. It’s unnecessary. It feels like King thought he needed something specific and physical to hang all the metaphysical  stuff on, but he already had that in Duddits. Saying “This is all in the Dreamcatcher” Is actually way more confusing than just admitting, “Okay, dudes, we’re in Duddit’s mind and have to finish this quickly so shit gets done before he dies. 
2.  The women. I’m only complaining about this because I know King can write good women characters but doesn’t do it enough. In this book, every single woman is either stupid or mean. Sigh. 

There was still good stuff in here. King can write buddies like he’s taking dictation from bull sessions; he’s particularly great at getting the casual but still newly obscene rhythms of young teenage speech. I’ve gotten a few of my favorite swears from him: “Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar” is one, and “bitch-kitty” always seems to sum up a pounding headache. I love his leaders gone crazy, who always pump their deranged messages like evangelical showmen. I liked that the ending to this book is both hard-earned and neatly sewn up. That’s a really difficult balance, especially for a full science fiction showdown.

I also found this quote: “Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.” It has nothing to do with any of the major themes or plot threads, but it’s great, and true, and therefore I can’t hate this book.