Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolf

What is one to make of a book entitled The Shadow of the Torturer? This famous 1980 novel by Gene Wolf, the first of a four-part series, is paired with part two, The Claw of the Conciliator, to form Shadow & Claw.

The title is not sensationalistic in the manner of some recent books, but genuinely reflects the topic of the book. The “hero”, Severian, is in fact a member of the “torturer’s guild”, and does in fact torture and execute a number of people. That he commits a grievous offense against his order/build—by allowing one of his charges to commit suicide—is the most we can say about Severian as a human being; there is not much otherwise to recommend him as a protagonist.

Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, of which Shadow & Claw comprises the first half, is considered a canonical book of science fictional fantasy. I use a wishy-washy phrase like that because the text is difficult to pin down in either camp. The immediate text, that of sword-swinging, castles, and magic, seems like something firmly fantastical, a direct child of the sword-and-sorcery genre. And yet, Wolf drops subtle clues and sidelong references to the story taking place in the far, far future (with the sun noticeably dimmer), and mechanical contraptions that sound vaguely like engines or firearms, and manned spaceflight.

Unfortunately for readers, much of the world-building that goes on is entirely in the form of subtle clues; having read through the first two books, I still cannot say for sure what Wolf’s created world is aside from a far-future dystopia; the rules which govern Severian’s universe remain largely unspoken, and we learn very little of them by praxis. In my research of the series, I’ve found this to be a common complaint; I can only hope the picture becomes clearer in the second half.

As I mentioned, Severian is a young apprentice of the Torturer’s Guild; perhaps in part to his youth or Wolf’s desire to make him a protagonist we could relate to, early Severian takes care of a disabled dog, and falls in love with Thecla, a prisoner and subject of the guild’s ministrations. When he affords her the limit of his power as a torturer apprentice—a contraband knife with which she can take her own life—he is unofficially booted from his guild, but given the trademark fuligin (a color “darker than black”) cloak and a sublime executioner’s sword known as Terminus Est, and sent to a distant city called Thrax to serve as a lowly executioner.

This new sojourner Severian seems a different man than the apprentice we know; he is clipped in manner, amoral, and swift to anger. He is no longer an immediate foil to the corrupt world in which he lives: a empire run by an Autarch whose power is so absolute that citizens are compelled (either by fear or mandate—it’s not clear which) to follow every invocation of his name with some ridiculous honorific like “whose forbearance knows not walls nor seas” or “whose pores outshine the stars themselves”. This state of affairs reminds me not a little of North Korea, where a repressed citizenry are compelled to worship Dear Leader as a god, inventing stories about birds mourning his death, &tc. Severian then, becomes a protagonist not because he seems to be one, but because the narrative centers around him, and Wolf’s continuing hints make it clear that he’s supposed to be one.

Also, his mask is ridiculous

After a number of strange, rather disjointed adventures, Severian ends up in the service of Vodalus, a revolutionary and a traitor to the Auturch, whose life Severian saved in the opening pages. Early on, Severian professed to follow Vodalus, even though we’re never quite sure what Vodalus stands for aside from being against the Autarch; I suppose our innate sympathy with the little guy—Rebels v. Empire—is supposed to inform our feelings as readers. Vodalus tasks Severian, who is still technically on his way to Thrax, to deliver a message to a servant in the Autarch’s massive castle-cum-city, the House Absolute. Captured by guards, they are thrown into the “Antechamber”, essentially a prison, and at this point the story begins to get really strange; I won’t go into details, since they would only be more confusing in this context, but it has to do with Koreans, robots, space-travelers, and lots of allusions to Kafka. Severian meets the Autarch himself, and swears service to him (isn’t it rather difficult to swear service to Vodalus and the Autarch at the same time?).

There is a long interlude wherein Severian and his traveling companions perform a play, the entirety of which is reproduced in the book, and I’ve never seen a more absurd stretch of obviously-allegorical but maddeningly-opaque verbiage. Imagine Waiting for Godot but with the entirety of the play imbued with the febrile incoherence of Lucky’s monologue. Given how the story has progressed thus far, this seems duly appropriate.

Jonathan McCalmont writes,

The great mystery behind The Shadow of the Torturer is that there is no mystery. It is an entirely solipsistic piece of writing that does not seek to comment upon the real world or the human condition. It has no deep spiritual meaning or political significance. Instead it is a monument to the author’s skill at controlling the perceptions of his readers. His use of pseudo-mystical imagery seeks us scurrying here looking for hidden meanings, his repetitions of certain phrases and images make us consider them to be somehow significant. We read and re-read his words trying to make sense of them and when nothing concrete can be coaxed from the text Wolfe benignly pats us on the shoulder and says that it is not easy trying to work out what someone as clever as him is trying to say.

While I cannot deny the possibility that the second half of the series will tear away the veil, so the speak, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement.

(If you enjoyed Jonathan’s superb write-up of The Shadow of the Torturer, see also his critical reading of The Claw of the Conciliator).

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Boxset by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I should disclose right away that prior to the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I had never heard of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s superlative graphic novel(s). The only reason I watched it, in fact, was a combination of my friends’ rave reviews (despite lackluster box office performance) and the fact that I absolute adore directory Edgar Wright’s previous films. My reaction to the film was positive and visceral, as it seems to hit all the right stylistic notes, and of course its contents were a geekfest of epic proportions.

The Scott Pilgrim series came in six parts between 2004 and 2010, with the last entry arriving a mere month before the movie’s debut. Though the movie is named after the second book of the series, its plot comprises the entire six books, so either my information is wrong or O’Malley let the screenwriters in on the secret well in advance.

It’s difficult to talk about the graphic novel without talking about the movie, at least for me, since the I enjoyed latter the both first and tremendously. Upon beginning the graphic novel, I was immediately struck both by how spot-on the casting was for the film and how faithful the movie was to the graphic novel, at least until about halfway through, at which point the movie appeared to diverge for the sake of time. I will now stop talking the movie, since there’s nothing more obnoxious than someone reviewing one medium by prattling about a different one.

Everything about the story of the Scott Pilgrim series is great. I say that unabashedly, even though it sounds rabid and not very helpful. Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old Canadian slacker with no job, who plays bass in a crappy band (the Sex Bob-Ombs), lives in a run-down apartment with a gay roommate named Wallace, dates a 17-year-old Chinese schoolgirl named Knives Chau, and—worst of all—lives in Canada. In other words, Scott Pilgrim is a loser, and we have very little reason to like him other than (a) we sometimes like losers and (b) he’s good at other things, like fighting robots.

Everything changes when he meets Ramona Flowers, a hipster chick with dyed hair and rollerblades, fresh from America, for whom he falls like a hammer-head. In order to date Ramona, however, Scott must defeat her Seven Evil Exes. This takes the form of literal fights in the style of anime and video games; in fact, much of the fantastical aspects of Scott Pilgrim come straight from that geek tradition, and the whole series is full of such references, either generic genre references…

Did they have skateboards in Fallout...?

…or even very specific but unstressed references to particular games, such as this obvious (I think) allusion to Final Fantasy VII…

Come this spring.... I'm leaving this town for Midgar.

What’s so interesting about Scott Pilgrim is the way O’Malley blurs the distinction between what happens literally in the comic, and what is a fantastical representation of something mundane. Scott Pilgrim, for instance, fights Ramona’s evil exes until they burst/explode into a pile of coins—of course we aren’t supposed to take this literally…. right? Remember too that Scott Pilgrim is a scrawny loser, and yet he’s renowned in his small town as a fighter. This makes sense only when you consider the real/fantasy fights as a proxy for the sort of video game expertise so valued by Scott Pilgrim‘s likely readers. Even more interesting, though, is that although O’Malley appears to initiate a sort of contract with his readers in which we agree to suspend our disbelief and accept either that Scott Pilgrim literally fights people in the manner of Anime or read the fights as an interesting metaphor for social turmoil, it becomes clear later on in the book that the representation of these fights, especially when told through the lens of Scott’s memory, is unreliable.

Realistically, would the tale of Scott Pilgrim be interesting without the videogame physics? The mithril skateboards or extra lives or subspace purses? I don’t necessarily think so—at least not in graphic novel form. And yet by the end of the book, we’ve come to realize (or at least I did) that boss fights and other such geeky fantastika aren’t nearly as interesting as we thought, and in the meantime we’ve come to care for Scott and Ramona and the rest of the roster, even though their problems are stupid and dramatic soap opera nonsense. It’s a dirty trick, of course, but it’s also a small slice of genius on O’Malley’s part.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

The father-son dynamic in books is old as books themselves, and done with varying levels of success. From the rolls of my own little book meme, I can cite Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard, Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, and McCarthy’s The Road. What makes this dynamic so powerful is that while it appears to be an ancient and simple sort of narrative thread, it turns out to be much more complicated and nuanced than we ultimately expect.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a quirky late-bloomer bildungsroman masquerading as a science fiction novel in the vein of Douglas Adams. With respect to this latter point, the influence is obvious.

Minor Universe 31 was slightly damaged during its construction and, as a result, the builder-developer who owns the rights abandoned the original plans for the space.

At the moment work was halted, physics was only 93 percent installed, and thus you may find that it can be a bit unpredictable in places. For the most part, however, while here travelers should be fine relying on any off-the-shelf causal processor based on quantum general relatively.

The technology left behind by the MU31 engineering team, despite being only partially developed, is first-rate, although the same can’t be said of its human inhabitants, who seem to have been left with a lingering sense of incompleteness.

There’s nothing wrong with sounding like one of the masters (the master?) of sci-fi satire; it’s impossible to avoid the comparisons when writing in Adams’ historical shadow. In Yu’s case, anyway, the flippant logorrhea of cerebral sci-fi jargon is merely the flashing lights and ringing bells which will distract you while Yu spins a tale of a broken family… a tale in which the mechanics of time travel act as convenient and poignant metaphors for the vagaries of psychosocial turmoil.

At times, in fact, it seems almost too obvious that Yu is painting a very thin veneer of Hitchhiker patois onto a character drama; I prefer somewhat oblique mappings, as it seems too easy when the author gives them to us. Consider when Charles Yu the Character describes his time machine, the TM-31 (emphasis mine):

I guess I could describe [the TM-31] as closest in size to, though not quite as large as, a hotel shower, not the kind of a curtain, but the cross-sectionally-square-shaped kind that is see-through from floor to ceiling, except that the main hatch to the TM-31, while it can be made transparent like a shower door (if that’s what you’re into), also happens to be a super-cooled magnetic compression system, designed to insulate against temperatures ranging from, at the low end, about half a degree above absolute zero to, at the high end, about a million degrees Kelvin. Hot, cold, people opinions. All of it just bounces off. In addition, you can install an aftermarket cloaking device, so that the unit can be made invisible with the flick of a switch. You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

It reminds me, in its brashness, of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels, which accomplish a similar task with an evolving kit of increasingly incapable metaphors like portable homes or prescription drugs. Despite the occasionally clunky handling of his metaphors, though, I think Yu the Author does a good job with the science-fictional tropes, as the topic is naturally well-suited to this sort of thing, and there’s a freshness to Yu’s writing that Palahniuk hasn’t had since his earliest novels.

So why does time travel create such a perfect set of tropes for talking about troubled familial relationships and self-despair? Despite the plots of so many other books and movies that talk about time travel, Yu’s version isn’t good for much, because the past has already happened and can’t be changed, no matter how much we’d like it to; neither can the future, once witnessed. So Yu the Character finds himself speeding inevitably toward his own immediate death, and attempts to both delay the impending doom and look for his author, time-machine-creator, who long ago disappeared to someplace or somewhen unknown. So there’s no meeting your mother in high school and having to hook her up with your mother, or having to launch one’s time machine back to the future via lucky lightning strikes. Even time travel, Yu posits, is rather dull.

With less creepy potential incest, though

Along the way, he comes to realize that his fear of “chronological living” (that is, living and aging normally along with the normal timestream relative to oneself) is a cop-out, and that his criticisms of those who live chronologically is by extension a criticism of himself.

As Ander Monson says in his NY Times review, “The novel’s central, lonely story is wrapped in glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction.” Extended talk about fictional but authoritative-sounding hypotheses and phrases like “chronodiegetical schematics” pepper the story. “These unexpected formal moves keep the story from dipping into the sentimental, as they usually lead to actual human emotion and thinking about what constitutes the human sense of self.”

“Lonely” seems to be the operative word, as How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is deeply melancholy, even plaintive, but not despairing and darksome in the manner of The Road. There is something of a happy ending for Yu with respect to his father, but it is literally an afterthought, as Yu the Character’s story is almost entirely intellectual as opposed to narrative. If it were anything else, I don’t think it would capture the strange beauty that it somehow manages to do as the quirky, febrile, hyperliterate sci-fi jaunt that it is.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go is yet another in a long list of influential science fiction that I keep meaning to read. It won a Hugo in 1972, and represents the first in a series of books known as Riverworld. As with all good science fiction (I don’t know how many times I’ve said this), it’s not even particularly science-fictional except in narrative skeleton, but instead spends most of its time exploring sociological issues.

One of the more interesting things about …Scattered Bodies… is that its protagonist is a real historical figure—namely Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890). An all-around badass, Burton was a consummate explorer in an age long before GPS; he was also before his time in many ways, such as his stance against colonialism. At least in Farmer’s universe, he’s also a lover, fighter, skeptic, stoic, and all-around excellent guy to have on your team if you wake up on a strange planet wearing no clothes and under the apparent watch of a technologically-advanced race of beings whose intentions may be malevolent.

Burton, in the book’s timeline, dies in 1890 and wakes up on Riverworld, an alternate world (actually, a planet in the far future), in what is clearly some sort of experiment. The length of the river, which appears to stretch for hundreds of miles, is lined with “grail stones”, which provide food in the form of, basically, MREs, for all of the billions of inhabitants, all them historical persons resurrected along the river. They are people from all places and times, from modern 1970s Americans to Neolithic nomads. Farmer alludes to the inherent problems of communications, and the disparity of technological progress among peoples, but largely smooths these over as a function of time and practice. It’s a cheap tactic, but in fairness, I can’t think of solving it any other way short of magic. Burton, in any case, takes charge, attracting a small group of followers who either want his protection (ladies from Victorian England) or know for historical fact that he is, in fact, a badass (20th century American admirers), or simply intuit it (neanderthals). Also, he can’t shake off an apparent connection with none other than Hermann Göring, drug addicted Nazi and all-around terrible human being.

He's bringing sexy back

Obviously, if you find yourself on a strange world along with every other person in existence who has ever died, your natural assumption is that you’ve found a rather strange afterlife. This is one of the themes that Farmer explores in-depth, though to no real conclusion. Many people, of course, renounce faith in the face of what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that their scriptures were wrong. Still other kept their beliefs, assuming that what was prophesied to them was simply yet to come. Of course others charlatans formed new groups, preaching that they knew the answers, if only you would join their group. To Your Scattered Bodies Go isn’t, of course, a comment on religion, since it becomes clear that it does not deal with an afterlife; rather, it is to some degree a book about how people react when information is scarce. Think Lord of the Flies meets Foundation.

But of course Riverworld is not an afterlife, as Burton finds. Though early on, the book’s resolution is time is minute, it later skips ahead by months and even years as Burton eventually seeks the river’s headwaters and the architects of the world. In the meantime, he meets a rogue member of bespoke architects, sails up and down the river, falls into and escapes enslavement by various tyrants, and dies—sometimes intentionally—hundreds of times, only to be resurrected as in the book’s beginning, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther from the river’s headwaters; Burton calls this the “Suicide Express”.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go does not answer the all questions it raises—many are, I imagine, saved for sequels. This makes it a little difficult to evaluate the book on its own; as the whole, the series may be internally consistent and neatly resolved, or it could be an incoherent mess, but one cannot know for sure without reading the rest of the series. Despite its Hugo award and raft of praise, the book didn’t capture my imagination or curiosity quite enough to continue the series, which leaves me in the uncomfortable position of either foregoing the knowledge of Riverworld’s architects, reading a plot summary online, or simply adding the sequels to the end of my Brobdingnagian list of books to read.

John Dies at the End by David Wong

As a young boy, my brother tended to get Cracked magazine rather than Mad magazine; I think it was probably cheaper for essentially the same content (or so it seemed to a young boy). In any case, he (and therefore I) grew up with Cracked. By the time the magazine itself went under, of course, I had stopped paying attention, but at some point in the last few years, I began regularly checking the new Cracked.com, which I find is much funnier than it likely should be.

At the helm of this new digital enterprise (sans Sylvester P. Smythe) is senior editor David Wong, a pseudonym for Jason Pargin. It was really only via this association that I learned about John Dies at the End, Wong/Pargin’s satirical horror novel, recently rescued from an indie publisher by St. Martin’s Griffin. Given my positive associations with the new Cracked, giving John Dies at the End a shot was a no-brainer. Also, it’s being adapted into a movie with Paul Giamatti.

I expected more out&out slapstick and or snide commentary, but I never got it; John Dies at the End, though full of enough random events and subtle digs at horror tropes to fulfill Wong’s contractual obligations for what constitutes hilarity in horror novel. For all that, though, he’s managed what is—most of the time—and engaging “B Horror” book, the sort of which reminds me of my youth watching MonsterVision and the indomitable Joe Bob Briggs.

The book is split roughly into three parts, indicating its origins as a serial publication on the web. Its prologue (I don’t know if it was added for the final manuscript or if it existed in serial form as well) is somewhat misleading, as it introduces its characters as something of a midpoint in the story, and—if I might editorialize—assigns them a confidence and skill that they don’t have. David Wong and John Cheese are ghostbusters, or something to that effect; the prologue is intentionally vague about the nature of what they do, but it nonetheless finds the dysfunctional duo (and the dog Molly) venturing to an isolated farmhouse where, with great aplomb, they do battle against a malicious, paranormal force. Though the impression of David and John as slackers and somewhat bumbling malcontents is inescapable, one can’t help but feel as though they are just a little badass.

The start of the book proper immediately dismisses the second impression, heaving the reader bodily back to the recent past, with David and John as grunts at a struggling video rental store at an undisclosed, unremarkable Midwestern town. At a local music festival, David and John get tangled up with a lost dog, a crazy Jamaican drug dealer, and a strange drug called “soy sauce” which, it turns out, is made of cryptozoological “rods“, and gives its users rare powers such as clairvoyance if it doesn’t kill them instead. Because of this “soy sauce”, David and John are launched into a series of adventures which contain a whole host of horror and science fiction tropes, intentionally referential and somewhat scatterbrained. Shadow people from other dimensions, demons inhabiting humanoid forms comprised of sausages or cockroaches, exorcisms, lots of violence and gore that seems somehow too incredible or ridiculous to be disgusting (e.g. Kill Bill Part I), and a nonchalance with respect to the space-time continuum that is either lazy or brilliant. Continuity in general is something of a problem, either by design or simply because it was too difficult to take certain things back when published serially; Molly the dog is alive, possessed, dead, alive again, and potentially dead again, with no particular explanation as to why or how. Trips to other dimensions to meet Korrok, a demon/demigod and the book’s official(?) malefactor, pay homage to the Doom video games and turn decidedly scifi with Artificial Intelligences and ray guns. Most of this is wrapped in a frame narrative of David telling his story (or at least the first two parts) to a skeptical human interest reporter named Arnie Blondestone, and even this frame narrative ends up taking a strange twist that makes little sense because Arnie is dead before the interview even begins.

Oh Google, is there anything you can't find?

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I’d never heard of Justin Cronin before picking up The Passage; he’s won awards for previous work, though I’m given to understand that this latest work represents something of a departure for him. It may be new to Cronin, but it’s certainly not (or shouldn’t be) new to most readers, as The Passage is an overly-long pastiche of well-worn horror and sci-fi tropes, with a lot of solemn navel-gazing as filler.

The Stand (Spy v. Spy)

The Passage begins (in a roundabout way) with the destruction of humanity by an viral outbreak which turns the infected into some reasonable facsimile of vampires—superhuman creatures who eviscerate any survivors lucky enough to escape infection. I’m not divulging any spoilers when I say this, as the vampire apocalypse is the narrative premise of the entire book, but said apocalypse doesn’t actually occur until more than 200 pages into the book. Compare this to, say, Stephen King’s The Stand, from where Cronin borrows many of his ideas, in which the end of humanity happens both early and swiftly; the rest of the The Stand‘s literally biblical length is divided between narration relevant to the plot and tangential character-building which does not necessarily have any impact upon the novel. However much may be said about The Stand‘s cultural importance—which is, I believe, vast, or at least so within the genre—it is at its most basic a very simplistic good v. evil story so aptly illustrated by the Spy vs. Spy cover art which adorns one of its editions.

Chronologically, the book can be split into three sections, although the third is really a subset of the second:

1. Near-future, c. 2018. South African bats carry a virus which affects humans. Government conspiracy ensues. Uh oh.
2. Far future, c. 2108 (or ≈90 A.V.). Small enclaves attempt to resist the large monster population.
3. (Really) Distant future, c. 3018 (or ≈1000 A.V.). Some kind of human civilization allows for universities and academic conferences, at least in the antipodean world, far from the initial site of outbreak.

In the near-future, a scientist documents his ill-fated trip into South America. The biological phenomenon being studied is one which has the potential to create ageless humans by reactivating the thymus, but the trip and the knowledge in question ultimately kills mankind as we know it (oops). In the far future, scattered enclaves of humans survive on century-old technology which is rapidly falling into decay. Excerpts from written documentation about the apocalypse and the time after, listed in the book as being presented/read at a conference in New Zealand almost a thousand years after the outbreak of the virus (or so we can intuit from the designation “A.V.”) more or less indicate to readers that humanity survives, and moreover survives to a point where it can hold academic conferences, even if they’re relegated to far-flung locations like New Zealand. In other words, Cronin immediately removes some of his narrative suspense by letting slip the fact that humanity survives the spread of a virus, even if it takes a millennium to do so, effectively eliminating this question as a potential point of tension for readers. What’s left? There’s either the sheer interest of post-apocalyptic life (hint: this isn’t it), or else Cronin has co-opted the Mad-Max-Meets-Team-Edward schtick for a character drama. We know that Amy Bellafonte, the mysterious young girl around whom the book revolves, is an anti-personality and therefore of only morbid curiosity; early characters, such as the government agent Brad Wallgast (father-figure for Amy and essentially a co-conspirator for the viral outbreak), come and go, built into passingly-interesting characters whose involvement ends abruptly for reasons one can easily surmise.

It’s important to note here that The Passage, despite its length, is only the first of a planned trilogy, meaning that just because a plot point failed to be important in The Passage doesn’t mean it won’t become important at some future point. Still, one feels a little cheated when humanity takes 200 pages to end; for all intents and purposes, Cronin could have spend 20 pages on the pre-apocalypse portion and not appreciably altered the story that came after. Why, one must ask, does Cronin see fit to tell Amy’s history by first telling the story of Amy’s teenage mother, who is given a detailed back-story and a tragic parting-of-ways which has no bearing on the plot? Is it because this will become important in successive novels (unlikely) or because Cronin subscribes to the Stephen King school of writing, wherein any character development, whether in a vacuum or written to a particular end, is considered important? I remember reading The Stand, and thinking during most of it that King could stand to learn a few things from Poe.

One thing that both King and Cronin share is a strange desire to mix the scientific with the mystical. In both The Stand and The Passage (and, for that matter, Richard Matheson’s superior I Am Legend), the root cause is viral (or, more accurately, pathogenic). Cronin, in fact, begins with a Harvard scientist emailing his colleague from the jungles of South America, where an attack by uncommonly-aggressive bats sets events in motion. But both ultimately devolve from a scenario wherein understandable, biological causes are the root of the problem to one wherein a lot of predestination, extra-sensory knowledge, and other hocus pocus come into play. In King’s novel, at least, one accepted the fight between good and evil as a simple dichotomy and one that was at least largely allegorical, even if Randall Flagg quickly approaches the designation of a literal devil; by contrast, Cronin attempts to explain all the voodoo of the “virals” as analogous to the social structure of ants, but the layman’s explanation falls short and the whole situation smells like a bad case of stock supernatural lore, explained by modern science (sort of), which then regains all of its original mystique and inscrutability by way of solemn pronunciations, predestination, and narrative hyperbole. It’s a valiant effort, I suppose, but it ultimately stinks of inconsistency, and one wonders just what kind of book Cronin is trying to write: The Stand and/or I Am Legend, wherein a realistic story has a supernatural engine, or Twilight, wherein the supernatural is literally magical for no purpose other than sparkles. I don’t know, and I suspect Cronin didn’t quite either; the resulting mélange is surprisingly two-dimensional and wholly unsatisfying.

As I mentioned, The Passage is the first entry in a planned trilogy to be released in rapid succession; the thought of having to slog through two more ponderous novels of the same indecisive nonsense makes me weary: there isn’t enough narrative tension to make me interested, I don’t like the characters enough to care who dies, and I don’t enjoy the writing enough to read it for the thrill of the art. Clearly, The Passage is not a storyline I’ll be continuing.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson novels are always a treat. It would be inaccurate to say they are formulaic, as each one is uniquely and wildly creative; however, they tend to share some characteristics, for better or worse. Last year I read Snow Crash, and prior to that I read his Cryptonomicon, and can’t help but notice, as others have, that though Stephenson expends considerable energy setting up a complicated plot and a tremendous, realistic world in which it occurs, his plot climaxes are so short and unexpected that one isn’t quite sure if it happened or not.

While Snow Crash sat very solidly in the realm of cyberpunk, The Diamond Age offers a variant of a variant, mating cyberpunk’s stepson, steampunk with nanotechnology. It’s been referred to as “post-cyberpunk”, which I don’t think quite does it justice.

As is custom for *punk novels, the book takes place in the relatively near future, and governmental institutions and nation-states as we know them are largely gone. In contrast to traditional cyberpunk, wherein a token, ineffectual government is overshadowed by powerful, global corporations, The Diamond Age proposes a future wherein people are divided in phyles, which are cultural or political groups, which may or may not existing together under corporate and/or governmental umbrellas. The larger phyles are still cultural ones along national lines, namely the Anglo-Saxons, the Han (Chinese), and the Nippon, as well as the up-and-coming Hindustan, but smaller phyles exist as well.

The technology at the heart of The Diamond Age is speculative nanotechnology. Stephenson imagines an age, based on work by Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle, wherein constructed organic “diamondoid” material at the nanometer scale is so cheap and easy that creating flawless diamonds is actually cheaper than creating glass. At the same time, computers as we know them today don’t exist either, replaced instead by a version which runs using nano-scale gears and “rod logic” rather than transistors.

At the heart of the book are two competing narratives. The first is that of John Percival Hackworth, a nanotech engineer living in the Victorian-era phyle of New Atlantis, who commits a crime in order to make a copy of a new interactive book for his daughter, Fiona. The consequences of his doing so take him on a decade-long journey that I still don’t quite understand.

The book, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, resembles a normal book, but is in reality a very complicated piece of nanotechnology, used to help raise young girls and inculcate critical thinking and engineering skills. Hackworth’s copy accidentally comes into the possession of Nell, the young daughter of a neglectful whore of a mother whose succession of physically abusive boyfriends eventually drives Nell and her older brother into the streets. The benefit of the Primer is that it not only acts as a teacher to Nell, but via the use of “ractors”, or paid actors working over a digital network, actually provides a human narration and level of interactivity. Essentially, acting as a surrogate mother.

A good deal of The Diamond Age is told as a story within a story, as the Primer re-tells Nell’s current situations in fairy-tale style, adding dashes of pedagogy (such as not trusting strangers), and making the stores more mature as Nell grows into a teenager. She ends up in an anti-nanotech community, goes to a prestigious school, and never stops using the Primer, though of course she depends on it much less than in her youth.

All this is a very simple summary of what is, in reality, a tangled web indeed. There are a number of intersecting narratives; Hackworth goes on a decade-long mission as a double-agent for the New Atlantis phyle as well as for a rogue Han named Doctor X, which leads him into an underground community called The Drummers which have special powers that Stephenson doesn’t do a good job of explaining, though they are an integral part of this plotline. At one point, his daughter Fiona joins him (Fiona, for whom Hackworth’s illegal copy was originally intended, and who ends up with yet another copy). Other characters orthogonal to the points come and go; allusions to cryptographic networks take readers down deadend speculative paths; Nell takes part in Primer simulations that do little for the story except allow Stephenson to create interesting analogies for Von Neumann architecture.

The abrupt crescendo, when it does come, makes little sense and creates even less satisfaction. Hackworth’s plotline is not only dispiriting, but damn near unintelligible. The resolution of Nell’s plotline is equally strange, crashing into a tangential plot point from much earlier in the book, the resulting wreckage of which is suitable grandiose but rather nonsensical. The book’s end, it seems, is its least satisfying part.

The Diamond Age is interesting for two reasons, and this is a criticism which applies to most of Stephenson’s books (at least all that I have read). First, Stephenson is great at world-building: he has a knack for detail which is typical of “hard” scifi writers and well-grounded speculative fiction writers, and one gets the impression that in a perfect world, he’d be able to write novels that are nothing but a sandbox, in which there are no central plots, but merely a place for him to speculate about near-future governments and technology; to an extent, this is what his books are anyway, since the plotlines seem a weak and post-hoc addition. The only, well, “plot” structure of this novel which seemed genuinely unique and interesting was Nell’s relationship with her Primer, and her adventures in a fantasy kingdom that teach her boolean logic are great fun… so much so that pivoting back to the murky machinations of Hackworth and inter-phyle politics is something of a letdown.

Even knowing in advance Stephenson’s idiosyncrasies as a writer, I was surprised how much the general messiness of The Diamond Age bothered me. The post-*-punk worldbuilding was interesting, and Nell is perhaps his most human character to date, but the book seems to lack what little narrative focus Stephenson usually does include.

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Science fiction has a tendency to ignore religion; this may have stemmed from its early Enlightenment-style emphasis on rationality, or it may have been sheer laziness, since predicting how some of our oldest cultural institutions would fare years into the (often dystopian) future is difficult at best.

There are notable exceptions to this, and the situation has gotten better as the years wind on and the genre refines itself. Writers aren’t always nice to religion, but they’ve generally stopped ignoring it as a force for (or resistance to) change. But even in scifi’s early days, there were some writers who not only included organized religion in their stories, but actually centered the plots on it. Most frequently cited is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But just a scant year before Miller published his first and last novel, another titan of the early science fiction scene, James Blish, published A Case of Conscience, whose protagonist(?) is a Jesuit priest.

Like most of the best (or longest-lived) science fiction, A Case of Conscience‘s focus is largely sociological; there are no laser battles, though there are plenty of large, reptilian aliens. On the planet of Lithia, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is priest/biologist, one of four human scientists sent to the world to determine if it should be opened to general human availability. This is partially an academic exercise of determining if the environment is malicious or benign to homo sapiens, but also to understand the culture of the native Lithians and predict whether being a spaceport will wind up more like Sweden or more like Afghanistan for loud Westerners.

Blish’s decision to make Sanchez a Jesuit is no coincidence; the Jesuits are [in]famous for being the most scientific and rationalistic of Catholics, so Sanchez seems in many ways more like a scientist than a Padre, but it soon becomes apparent that what could be a nuanced, meaningful interplay of religious conservatism and futuristic scientism is destined to be turned into two flailing caricatures, and I think the Catholics get the worse end of the deal.

The Lithians, though they resemble pulp-era science fiction villains in appearance, are a squeaky-clean species: intelligent to a fault, they are utterly rational, inherently moral without any sort of religion or notion of faith at all; a peaceful, self-sacrificing race whose unique skill at interdisciplinary fields would make them valuable partners to Earthlings, whose economy and minds have been warped by years of a “shelter economy”, driven underground for entire generations by the threat of nuclear holocaust. Schizophrenia is on the rise, and a strange system of have/have-not closely resembling that of the Soviet Union seems to pervade. But this is all thin political blustering; at issue is the apparent “perfection” of the Lithians, which ultimately brings Ruiz-Sanchez to a horrifying conclusion: the planet of Lithia was created by The Devil in order to convince Man to stop believing in God.

Regardless of one’s spiritual convictions, this is a rather hard to accept, even in science fiction. It may stem from Blish’s agnostic misunderstanding of Catholic dogma; perhaps it represents the sort of thing that really would concern a Catholic back in 1958—this was, after all, before Vatican II, when Catholicism was, if it’s even possible, draped even more mysticism and incense-and-dagger horseshit than it is now. In any case, Blish made sure to mitigate the ridiculousness of Ruiz’s sudden revelation with an even more exaggerated Henry-Kissinger-as-comic-book-villain exposition from Paul Carver, another member of the four-man expedition, who hates Lithia and Lithians and wants to turn the entire planet into a thermonuclear weapons factory. This point is about halfway through the book, even before Ruiz-Sanchez shares his blithering revelation, and Blish could not make Carver sound like more of a megalomaniacal Bond villain if he tried. Once again, I’m not sure if Blish simply happened to traffick in caricatures, or if he purposely wrote Carver as a slavering Cold War missile-monger in order to offset what must have seemed, even in context, like a “Dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith” kind of fairy tale from the Jesuit.

The second half of the book deals largely with a young Lithian, Egtverchi, who is given to Sanchez in egg form as a gift/ambassador. Lithians have no real sense of familial structure, evolving into intelligence mostly on their own, but Egtverchi manages to grow up, let’s say “wrong”, and becomes a rabble-rouser on Earth, instigating violence and social upheaval. The image, I suppose, is supposed to be one of leftist rationalism bunker-busting Cold War-style mindsets, though Egtverchi himself is something of a cipher and the events that follow are somewhat tangential, including a party scene at a sex-crazed political socialite’s mansion that accomplishes nothing in its significant length except serving as Egtverchi’s debutante ball, where he “comes out” to the human world as an obnoxious teenager.

I won’t spoil the ending, although it won’t come as a surprise in a story about Cold War politicking. Though one can sense Blish was attempting an ambiguity, he only succeeding in making Ruiz-Sanchez look like a hysterical moonbat, eclipsed only by his (Norwegian!) pope and by extension the entirety of the Catholic church. Though one may guess that I’m no great friend of the institution, I give it, generally, a little more respect than flailing caricatures. Even more disappointing is that Blish’s initial setup seemed so promising; the conflict between Ruiz-Sanchez’s rationalist flavor of faith and crass utilitarian Realpolitik might have been meaningful, but the final execution was poor then, and ages even more poorly.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

Though I don’t listen to altogether too many comedy albums, I’m a fan of Patton Oswalt, who I think is one of the smarter mainstream comics working today. To the best of my knowledge, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is his first serious attempt at a published book, and while it’s short and somewhat inconsistent, I think it’s shows a great potential for grander works.

Generally, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland reads like one of Oswalt’s standup sets: funny vignettes that border on narrative, sometimes wistful and sometimes full of dick jokes and LSD. In the book, however, Oswalt gives his natural tendency toward storytelling a little more room to breathe. This, I imagine, may be a sore point to some of Oswalt’s fans who have grown accustomed to a more immediate payoff in the brevity of his routine. But his first “real” chapter, which tells the story of his time working at the local three-screen cinema in Sterling, Virginia, is both poignant and slapstick, and is actually handled like a proper short story; the characters are built up and given personalities, the story is given context and meaning, and there’s a sense, however small, of personal engagement between the narrative equivalent of punchlines.

Oswalt proves he has chops, at least stylistically, or some larval stage thereof which could be excellent someday with proper care. In the midst of this, however, he does what many comedians will do when venturing into books: pad the pages with filler. There are short sections which would play better as stand-up bits, a graphic novel portion which, though I suppose well done, has no real business in an otherwise text-based book. This is not America: The Book wherein the premise is as graphical as it is comedic; nor is it as consistent. The first story is a high point, and at no other point of the relatively short book he he regain that peak.

The closest he comes is the title essay, which is a somewhat confusing categorization piece which labels all young personalities as either a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland. Zombies are the lumps whose defense mechanism makes them shuffle and stumble through life in apathy; Spaceships are the social outcasts (he uses computer nerds as an example) who seek to flee the earth and watch it from a distance. Wastelands, finally, seek the scorched earth option, obliterating their past lives in an apocalypse and thereafter roaming the deserts as changed men. Oswalt counts himself among this last group (fleeing the boring safety of a planned suburb to becoming a coastal comedian and do LSD), though in fairness, this taxonomy is not particularly wonderful or insightful. What makes it compelling—maybe—is that Oswalt insists on science fiction tropes; he’s a geek’s comedian (and therefore a geek’s writer), and much of what he jokes about is informed by a childhood of progressive rock, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and a general Cheetos-eating, scifi-loving, fat-kid-at-dodgeball sensibility that makes fans of the same disaffected stripe love and respect him even more.

For my part, I enjoy both Oswalt’s standup and his serious writing, though I’m somewhat annoyed by this book’s tendency to conflate the two. At his best, Oswalt gives Chuck Klosterman a run for his money, and with thankfully more disdain for the sickly and sickening bits of culture that make Klosterman’s glasses fog up. At his worst, however, Oswalt’s book is a throwaway; it’s a motley of verbal bric-a-brac that doesn’t reward the effort of acquiring and reading the book instead of searching for clips of the guy on Youtube.

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

The cinematic version of 2001: A Space Odyssey is widely considered one of the best films ever made, and certainly one of the high points of Kubrick’s career; slightly less known—or perhaps just as well known by a much different demographic?—is Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name. Uniquely, one was not a novelization or screen adaptation of the other, but rather were written at the same time in a partnership between Kubrick and Clarke. The differences between the two have more to do with changes made by Kubrick for budgetary or stylistic reasons.

When one thinks of the film, the vivid images that come to mind are the opening scene of hominids surrounding a monolith as Strauss trumpets; the red, unblinking eye of HAL9000 calmly questioning “Dave” (Bowman); the last recorded transmission of Bowman… “My God… it’s full of stars!” The middle item, that of HAL9000, the malfunctioning AI, is perhaps the most iconic part of the film, and it launched a whole genre (that of the “malfunctioning robot”), though it’s really only a small portion of the film, and an even smaller portion of the book.

Clarke’s book tends to be a little slower in its rising action; it spends several chapters alone on the hominids, for instance, which foreshadow the meaning of the monolith, even if it doesn’t do much to expand the story. The importance of Clarke’s long introduction here are to instill in his readers a sense of the biological and philosophical evolution of Man, since the state of our humanity, both in absolute terms and relative to the posited intelligences of the galaxy, becomes a major theme of the novel.

In Clarke’s vision, there are three primary sections, each focused on a particular individual. In the first—that of the hominids—we follow the exploits of Moon-Watcher, a man-ape who, seemingly endowed by an alien monolith with the capacity for higher thought and the use of tools, becomes the great-grandfather to the generations of man to come. If you’ve seen Mel Brook’s excellent History of the World: Part I, you’ve seen both the iconic monolith scene from the film and the concept of tool-discovery itself lampooned, and it’s about this much care which is dedicated to the notion in Clarke’s novel. That is to say, the implication is self-evident, and the dedicated of several chapters to material suitable for a single one is perhaps indicative of the meandering, tangential and altogether unfulfilling path the rest of the book will take.

Fast forward millenia and ages named after their iconic building materials, and Clarke presents us with a curious interstitial section about Dr. Heywood Floyd, a scientist who leaves Earth on a top-secret government mission, arrives at a way-point, and then travels to the moon, where a team doing a routine magnetic scan has discovered, deep beneath the surface, an alien monolith, which we as readers are given to understand is of the same variety that sparked intelligence in Moon-Watcher. Clarke spends time describing Floyd’s trip from earth, his meaning with a colleague on the moon, and other general character-building exercises for reasons I still cannot fathom, since Floyd will soon be used no more as a character aside from a name-drop during a later chapter. It’s as though Clarke subscribes to Stephen King’s “Why Not?” school of writing, giving backstories to throwaway characters and details to dead narrative branches.

It is only once we get to David Bowman (100+ pages in), on board the spaceship Discovery One along with his colleague Frank Poole and three others in suspended animation for the trip, that any pertinent narrative begins. I don’t believe it’s overstating the case when I say that everything preceding this point could have been condensed into a single chapter of exposition without undue harm to the narrative. Granted, Clarke doesn’t have the power of visuals: Kubrick’s famous monolith scene accomplished, more or less, in a relatively few frames of film what Clarke accomplished in forty pages of text.

So begins Bowman’s infamous trouble with HAL9000, the powerful, apparently self-aware onboard computer, who either accidentally or purposely kills every other inhabitant on board. Based on HAL’s proportion of the film’s iconography, one would expect the conflict between Bowman and the rogue AI to last longer, but like most things, it represents only a small chunk of subplot in the book. In fact, had this conflict been the primary theme of the novel, it would have made for excellent intellectual fodder: the nature of machine intelligence, the natural rights allowed to sentient and semi-sentient forces, &. It is rather brusquely run through, like fast-forwarding through a tape, after which point Bowman reaches the moon of Saturn, Japetus, gets sucked into some plot device resembling a wormhole, and the rest of the novel circles around a drain of cosmic unintelligibility, the nadir of which is Bowman’s transformation into a post-matter being.

Clarke’s implication in all this is that the evolution on intelligence on a universal scale is relatively fixed: ape-men → intelligent tool-users → cyborgs → beings of pure energy. Or something to this effect. It’s a rather simplistic and starry-eyed bit of science-fiction yarn-spinning, though I suppose perhaps forward-looking when it was written. Of course, if some species of alien, long since evolved into pure energy, is responsible for the creation of intelligent civilizations across the universe (a sort of technological panspermia), that rather puts on a damper on the notion that there’s a predictable or inexorable pattern to the rise of life; brain-warping monoliths are a strange voodoo, and while they made constitute a perfectly valid point of plot, they don’t jive well with Clarke’s grandiose “Star Child” culmination or solemn intonations about civilizational parallels. If you’ve any doubt of the general pusillanimity at work, you’ve only to read Clarke’s sequels, which fail to even keep an internal consistency with the original (while simultaneously evaporating any of its mystery), underwhelming though it was.