January 2023 Reading Round-Up

Back in college, I read through all five volumes of Philip K. Dick’s short stories, so there wasn’t necessarily anything new in Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick so much as a chance to revisit some of the short fiction of one of the all-time great science-fiction authors. Moreover, to read Dick’s short stories – especially if you’re only familiar with his novels, particularly some of his more philosophical ones – is to remember how great the man was at executing a pulp premise. The hook of “Paycheck” is so flawlessly executed that I’m just in awe of it – and how the rest of the story delivers on that hook is a treat to watch unfold. The same could be said about so many here – “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” “The Minority Report,” “Adjustment Team,” and many more – but what I appreciate about this collection is that it’s not just the great pulp tales. No, what makes this collection a fantastic primer for the newcomers is that it feels like a chronological plunge through Dick’s development as a writer, starting with his pulp stories and ending with his fascination with the afterlife and Gnostic ideas. And along the way, you get his takes on society, religion, capitalism, and more, with the book serving double duty as both an essential collection of Dick’s tales and a superb overview of his career, including the fun and the heartbreaking (I can’t let this review go without mentioning the astonishing and quietly horrifying and devastating “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts”) as points on the continuum. I’m already in the tank for PKD, so you can factor that into my review, but as a fan, this is probably one of the most solid “overview” collections out there I’ve found. Rating: *****

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The Secret History, by Donna Tartt / **** (review here)

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E. O. Chirovici’s The Book of Mirrors is the English debut of a Romanian author, and it’s a book successful enough to be picked up for 37 different translated versions, as well as an upcoming film adaptation starring Russell Crowe (although that film’s proposed synopsis sounds wildly different from the book I finished). All of which, quite honestly, is more interesting and intriguing than the book itself, which has an interesting enough hook and structure, but whose story kept me waiting for an interesting twist or wrinkle that never came, leaving me feeling like I finished the literary equivalent of a movie on cable on a Saturday afternoon. The Book of Mirrors starts off promisingly enough, with an agent receiving a manuscript that seems to shed light on a cold murder case, only to stop abruptly, leaving questions begging to be answered. From there, the book shifts through a chain of narrators, each one giving more links to the story and shifting our perception of the events, leading to a revelation…except. Except that our various narrators all basically sound the same, feeling almost indistinguishable despite wildly different backgrounds, races, jobs, and more. Except that the plot doesn’t build so much as trickle out, leading to a whimper of an ending that makes half the book feel irrelevant. Except that the book squanders goodwill even more in the epilogue by dismissing one of the mysteries we cared about. Except that even at 270 pages and decent sized font, the book still feels overstuffed, with my favorite unnecessary bit being a conversation with a boring guy on an airplane that adds nothing, despite giving us a named character and more than one page of time here. You get the gist. The Book of Mirrors kept me engaged, but never did much more than that, and even now, I am realizing that it’s a book that I’ll remember little about within a week – an irony, for a book so interested in the fallibility of memory. Rating: ** ½

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I wasn’t really sure how on earth Anthony Horowitz could do a sequel to Magpie Murders, a wildly inventive mystery about dead mystery author Alan Conway, whose final book holds the secrets of his death – meaning that the novel includes a book within itself, which we read alongside the main story, and which comments on and twists our perceptions of the ongoing mystery. But now we have Moonflower Murders, which follows our heroine Susan Ryeland as she’s approached by a hotel owner whose daughter has gone missing after discovering something in one of Conway’s earlier books. Once again, Horowitz has a lot of spinning plates here, giving us not one but two complete mystery stories – one in the present that involves a murder and a disappearance, and one within Conway’s novel that brings back his version of Poirot, Atticus Pünd. Unlike Magpie Murders, Moonflower doesn’t alternate between the books – we get the setup for the main story, then the entire Pünd novel, and finally the resolution of the main tale. That means that Moonflower feels a little less inventive and twisty than its predecessor, but at the same time, that didn’t stop me from delighting in the way that Horowitz twists together his dual stories into one narrative, hiding a slew of secrets and reveals in the Pünd novel without ever detracting from the mystery itself – and then doing it all again in the “present.” I don’t think that Moonflower is quite the book that Magpie is – the first book benefitted from the surprise and novelty, and the stories there were a bit more tightly woven together – but it’s still a beautifully constructed mystery, and a wonderfully entertaining read. It’s a mystery within a mystery, and then when you least expect it, Horowitz pulls back the curtain to show us how well it’s all tied together, creating one story out of all of them. If you’re in the mood for a modern take on a classic mystery (say, after watching Glass Onion or something like that), this is the way to go. Rating: ****

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It’s hard for me to talk about Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange without thinking of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Like Portis’s classic, The Strange is the story of a precocious and strong-willed girl who sets out into a harsh and unforgiving wilderness to seek revenge for a crime perpetrated against her family. It’s just that, instead of being on the western frontier, The Strange takes place on an unsettled Mars, and that quest finds our heroine making her way into a mining camp whose excavations of a native Martian metal have left the camp’s inhabitants deeply changed. Far from the nightmarish and Barker-esque horrors of Wounds, The Strange straddles the line between Western and science-fiction ably, sprinkling in a little dose of horror for flavoring, but anchoring its tale in its prickly, stubborn, naive young narrator whose solipsistic concern has consequences that she can’t foresee. Ballingrud’s depiction of Mars and its technology is fascinating, and the ongoing thread of just how this planet is affecting its machinery is never less than compelling and a little unsettling; for all of that, though, what really hits home here are the moments when young Anabelle is forced to see things in a new way, be those things her own actions or the way of the world. The Strange fizzles out a little bit at the end; while Anabelle’s story comes to a close, it feels like the end of a season, not a series, and ultimately left me a little disappointed (even though, again, the True Grit parallels are obvious). But that’s a small knock on The Strange, which creates a fascinating and rich world, populates it with great characters, gives me a flawed but earnest heroine, and a great Western tale of revenge that takes place in an utterly alien world. It’s a glorious blend of genres that I ripped through and hated to see come to an end. Rating: **** ½

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Much like its inspiration Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel cum memoir Persepolis nicely ignores genre distinctions between “novels” and “comic books” (indeed, since this is a memoir, even the term “graphic novel” doesn’t apply) without real concern or care, instead mirroring stylized drawings with a confessional tone to tell the story of Satrapi’s youth in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, her eventual departure from Iran into a difficult few years as an outsider in another culture, and her somewhat brief return to her country and reunion with her family. Although it’s technically a four-part story (published in two parts here in America), Persepolis flows effortlessly together, to the point where I finished part one and felt like I had only gotten half of a story – something “part 2” helped with immensely. Honest, funny, outspoken, and a little too fearless, Satrapi makes for a great narrator, especially in her youth as she bluntly assesses the flaws of those around her, has conversations with God (who looks a lot like Karl Marx, she decides), wishes more of her family members had been to prison so they could be better heroes, and gradually finds herself pushing against an ever-changing and repressive regime (inspired by her own progressive and rebellious parents, who have their own family history with the regime). And then, as part two develops, we see the long-lasting effects of all of this as Satrapi comes of age in a culture that doesn’t understand her and doesn’t particularly want to, allowing the book to touch on issues of the effects of isolation and cultural loneliness without ever becoming lecturing. My initial reaction to Persepolis was that it was lighter and less dense than I expected, but that feeling has shifted as I’ve let the book sit longer; the more I think about it, the more richly detailed I think it all is – the better its rich psychological memoir is, the better its details about life in Iran are, the more lived-in its story is. Lighter than Maus and never daunting or difficult, Persepolis is deceptively easy to read – but its heart and thoughts are more complex, layered, and nuanced than I first realized, to say nothing of the way it immerses you in the heart of a culture too many of us know not enough about. Rating: *****

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It’s been too long since I read William Gibson, and The Peripheral reminded me of everything I love about his books: the effortless extrapolation of present day technology into future trends, the way he blends genre elements into his storytelling while also feeling like speculative fiction (here, there’s equal bits noir, mystery, and action movie), and more than that, his crisp, tight prose. Explaining The Peripheral in a short paragraph is challenging, but here goes: in one timeline, a PR agent witnesses a horrific crime and finds himself cleaning up the mess, which includes a stub – a quantum computing server that allows the owner to communicate with the past, creating a timeline that splinters off from the original line at the point of contact. Sliding back and forth across these two periods, Gibson creates a sprawling conspiracy that’s working to cover up an assassination, but also dives into the mysterious “jackpot” that happens somewhere between the two periods, and left the “future” world in dire straits. If all of that sounds like a lot, well, it is, and I’m not sure it all entirely comes together in the end – the ending feels a little anticlimactic, and ultimately feels like there’s a lot more story to tell and that I wasn’t really sure what the “main” thread of this book was in hindsight. (In the book’s defense, it is the first book in a planned trilogy, but typically, Gibson’s trilogies are standalone works that connect through characters and themes.) But that didn’t keep it from being incredibly gripping throughout as Gibson corkscrews his plots together again and again, nor the way that he brings his usual gripping ideas about where technology could go (the titular peripherals here are a fascinating idea). It’s maybe too ambitious, but too much ambition in a book this gripping is something I can live with. Rating: ****

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I had somehow gotten it into my head that Stephen King’s earliest short story collection, Night Shift, was an uneven one, with a few standouts but also a pretty bad wheat to chaff ratio. But let me tell you: rereading it for the first time in probably 25 years mainly just left me wanting to smack myself for an incredibly wrong opinion. The weakest stories here (the truly weird “The Lawnmower Man” and the relatively one-note “I Know What You Want”) are still fine, but the rest of the collection is just a series of knockout horror fiction writing. Two trips to Salem’s Lot – one historical, one a sequel to the book – both give off truly nightmarish vibes, while a “Graveyard Shift” in a filthy factory basement finds the horror of rats turned up to eleven. The outwardly silly concept of “The Mangler” – a demonically possessed industrial laundry machine – should be absurd, but King finds the humanity in his characters and the weirdness in the horror, delivering an ending that escalates in wild directions. And then there are the ones that you think you remember because of the countless Z-grade movies – “Sometimes They Come Back” and “Children of the Corn” – and you forget just how good both of them are as relentless living nightmares that don’t let up. Even here, though, you can see what made King stand out from the crowd, filling every story with rich characterization and lived-in detail that make his tropes all the more effective because we genuinely care about our characters, be they the nihilistic teens left over at the end of the world in “Night Surf” or the helpless narrator of “I Am the Doorway.” Don’t want supernatural horrors? Well, “Quitters Inc.” and “The Ledge” find King operating in the horror of fanatics and cruelty, delivering tension and unease without a single supernatural element. And if all that isn’t enough, there’s “The Last Rung on the Ladder” and especially “The Woman in the Room,” two quietly heartbreaking stories about families, guilt, and loss. (Indeed, “Woman” might be the best story in the collection, and it’s not horror at all – just the devastating portrait of a man whose mother is dying of cancer.) Basically, I don’t know what past me was thinking, because Night Shift is incredible – even more than 40 years after being published, it’s a murderer’s row of great stories, and even the few missteps are never dull. Rating: *****

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Amazon: Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick | The Secret History | The Book of Mirrors | Moonflower Murders | The Strange | Persepolis | The Peripheral | Night Shift

Science Fiction Double Feature: Station Eternity / The World Jones Made

Mur Lafferty’s Station Eternity has such a great hook, and finds so much fun to do with it, that it almost doesn’t matter that it can’t quite stick the landing. Here’s the premise: there’s a young woman named Mallory Viridian, and she has a problem. Murders tend to happen wherever she ends up – but not just your run-of-the-mill crimes of passion and the like. No, Mallory is basically a traveling Murder, She Wrote show, with elaborate casts of characters assembling in confined spaces, leaving her seeing the clues and pieceing together the mystery, complete with all the shocking reveals of the series.

And she hates it. The blood is starting to get to her, the FBI is (obviously) interested in her, the anxiety is crippling – so why not go to the recently discovered Station Eternity, a “nearby” space station that serves as Earth’s link to the newly discovered expanse of space races? Obviously, if there’s no humans, there can’t be murders, right? All well and good…until the first shipment of other humans shows up at the station, and then the bodies start piling up, and Mallory has to figure out what’s going on, all while the power struggles for control of the station are starting to kick into high gear…

Look, that’s a fun premise for a book, and Lafferty absolutely runs with it, finding the black humor in all of the situations that Mallory has been through, all while also remembering what a life like that might actually do to people. And once the murder case proper gets going, Lafferty plays fair, giving us enough details to slowly figure out what’s going on, and even finding a way to answer some questions about Mallory herself without making it feel like a cheap exposition dump. Add that to a wide array of alien races that genuinely feel odd and non-human, and you have a book that’s really a ton of fun – it moves well, the plot is a blast, the characters are good, and that premise is great.

Does it stick the landing? Well, admittedly, no; the wider the scope of the book gets (and as the murder leads more and more into station intrigue), the less interesting things get; while the alien races are fascinating, they don’t have the hookiness of Mallory’s plight, and ultimately, I found myself far less interested in station politics and revolution than I was the gradual realizations of what was going on with all of these bodies. But even so, I still had a blast with Station Eternity; the ending isn’t bad enough to ruin the book, and the story as a whole is enough fun to more than outweigh the negatives. Rating: ****

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Philip K. Dick’s The World Jones Made is apparently the second novel ever published by the master; as a result, I’m not completely shocked to be reporting that it’s got its issues. The book often feels like about three stories all thrown together a bit carelessly, and frequently can frustrate as you feel like you’re engaging with something rich, only to find yourself jumping to another plot thread that doesn’t quite fit.

But, to focus entirely on those downsides is to really ignore how compelling and interesting each of those individual story threads are on their own terms. Take Jones, the precog who sees one year into the future – more accurately, who constantly lives exactly one year in advance of the current moment, experiencing every year twice (once in advance, once in the “present”), and being unable to change a thing about it. That’s a wild idea – one that taps into some of Dick’s interests and tropes – and Dick explores it in interesting ways, tying it into the idea of a populist dictator who uses people’s fear of unknown aliens in an effort to gain power. No, neither of the ideas quite coalesces together, but Dick does them both right, really diving into the ramifications both of Jones’s abilities (and capturing the horror of what a life like that would be) as well as how it would give him a power over a crowd (even if his xenophobia doesn’t quite feel like it meshes with what’s going on). And much the same could be said for the story about the group of humans being brought up to be explorers of a most specific type – while they never quite feel organic to the story, that doesn’t make the details any less fascinating or well-realized.

That, more than anything, is the real treat of The World Jones Made. Yes, PKD has written better books, and as he learned to pick and choose his ideas and explore them in depth, he would only improve. But even here, in only his second book, you’re reminded that his imagination is really unlike nearly anyone else I’ve read in science fiction, even more than a half century later. To read Dick’s work is to find ideas that don’t feel like anything else you’ve read, and to be forced to really think about them in all of their chaos and randomness, exploring the ramifications and philosophical implications. And if everything in Jones doesn’t quite add up, that’s okay; it’s got ideas for days, and a lot to think about, and some wild storylines, and all of that still makes for an engaging, if lumpy, read. Rating: ****

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Amazon: Station Eternity | The World Jones Made

A Trio of Pulp Stories

There’s only a single issue I can come up with regarding Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the seminal piece of noir fiction that holds up every bit as well as I remembered, even after nearly a century, delivering a dynamite tale full of crackling banter, taut writing, and a slew of shady characters, including our nominal hero, Sam Spade. That problem is that John Huston’s iconic film version so nails the book that it’s all but impossible to separate the actors from the roles – from Humphrey Bogart as Spade to Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo to Elisha Cook, Jr. as the poor “gunsel” Wilmer Cook, and especially with Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman. What’s more, given how rigorously faithful the film is to the book – nearly all the dialogue is lifted verbatim – you can’t help but hear Huston’s perfect timed patter through it all. But then again, why wouldn’t you lift the dialogue here verbatim, given how absolutely dynamite it all is? Every character talks in a style all their own, but Hammett flows it together rhythmically, letting everyone talk around each other, playing their cards close to the chest while striking the pose that they most need to display. And none of that even touches on the plotting, which is gleefully intricate, using the titular bird to explore a web of deception, greed, selfishness, and brutality. But above it all, there’s Sam Spade, whose motivations are so often impossible to read, who’s either in it for himself or for something more, who maybe trusts too much or doesn’t trust at all – and as he plays the various figures against each other, you can’t help but be sucked in. What an amazing genius Hammett was. Rating: *****

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Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra starts with a deeply satisfying hook, to put it mildly. After the banning of psychotherapy across America, a practitioner is told that he can re-open, because the government needs to make sure he treats a certain patient. The government has access to time travel, you see, and they know that it’s imperative that this man be treated. The practitioner asks who it is, so he can dedicate himself to succeeding. And that’s when they explain that his success won’t happen – what they need him to do is fail. That’s a great setup for a book, but the reality is, that plot thread is only one of about a dozen going on in The Simulacra, a novel that’s overstuffed with intriguing ideas but ends up feeling like barely contained chaos. You’ve got underground psychotherapy, secrets about the President and First Lady, alien life that influences mood, lemon car salesmen, buildings that are self-contained societies, nationwide talent shows to perform for the First Lady, government conspiracies, a paranoid schizophrenic musical genius, a neofascist group that might actually be against the Nazis somehow, a race of mutants living in the wilderness – and honestly, that’s only the ones that come to mind. The Simulacra has some fascinating concepts along the way, including ideas about the nature of power, the way we’ve substituted charisma for leadership, worries about how we treat mental illness, and more, but in the end, the book is simply so chaotic that it barely makes any sense. It’s the rare case when Dick’s usual lean page count works against him, giving us enough material for a half dozen books in less than 200 pages, and leaving me more baffled and befuddled than anything. As ever, you can’t fault Dick’s imagination and ideas, but this is definitely one that’s far, far less accessible than his best work. Rating: ***

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I’ve never read Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder novels before, but based off of Bank Shot, I have been missing out on this delightful mix of comedy and crime, with dialogue that made me laugh out loud and a plot that’s both ridiculous and deeply enjoyable at the same time. Kicking off with an former FBI agent who got let go for, among other things, insisting that the bureau should have a secret handshake, Bank Shot follows your standard heist setup: the hatching of the plot, the gathering of the crew, the execution of the plan, the mistakes, etc. Mind you, what sets Bank Shot apart – other than its winningly comic tone – is the premise for that heist, because where else can you see a story where the goal is not to rob the bank, but to steal the bank itself? That’s the hook for Bank Shot, which sees Dortmunder drawn into the plan against his will, all while dealing with a revolutionary with expensive tastes, a criminal and his mother working on insurance fraud, some guards just doing their best, a pulp-obsessed former Fed, and more. Westlake delivers on both fronts of the book – both the mechanics of the heist and the absurdity of the characters – and manages to never let one overwhelm the other. Like his Parker books, Bank Shot is as interested in when a crime goes wrong as it is anything else, but here, everything is handled with a weary resignation more than apocalyptic anger and danger. I had a blast reading Bank Shot, and it’s sold me on reading more Dortmunder soon – if they’re as enjoyable as this one, I’ve got some good reading ahead of me.

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Amazon: The Maltese Falcon | The Simulacra | Bank Shot

The Cosmic Puppets, by Philip K. Dick / ****

When you pick up a Philip K. Dick novel, you know you’re going to be in for a wild ride. Here’s an author whose work has become nearly synonymous with stories that question reality, undermine a sense of self, peel back the curtain to see cosmic powers, and oh so much more. So when The Cosmic Puppets opens with a man returning to his beloved childhood town only to find that he recognizes nothing about it…well, you know you’re in for some insanity.

And yet, even Philip K. Dick standards, it’s hard to prepare for just how wild The Cosmic Puppets really gets. Malevolent children, clay golems, cosmic warfare, faked realities – all of that comes at you fast, and even that doesn’t prepare you as the novel takes a fast dive into Zoroastrianism, turning a moral conflict into something quite literal and terrifying – into something far more complex, theologically and morally profound, and deeply confusing on a truly existential level.

In other words, what you get here is an odd blending of the early and late eras of Dick. The Cosmic Puppets has the myriad pleasures of his early, pulpier work, with its Twilight Zone-esque premise, broad characters, lean page count (less than 150), and sheer propulsive energy. But it’s late-era in the way that it grapples with a deep cosmology, evoking a theological complexity that comes up in works like VALIS and the rest. In many ways, in fact, it feels like a trial run for those later books, exploring those ideas in unwieldy ways that nonetheless keep you gripped with uncertainty and unease.

Make no mistake, The Cosmic Puppets is definitely unwieldy, though. That same marriage of pulp and philosophical depth ends up making the book feel a bit overstuffed, even before it gets to its mind-bending climax that rushes by and left me more than a bit baffled. (My lack of familiarity with Zoroastrianism might not have helped, but it’s hard to tell how much Dick needed you to know the “true” beliefs anyways.) And, in pure pulp fashion, the characters are all a little flat – most notably the female characters, almost every one of which is discussed in terms of looks and body shape (a touch which feels more influenced by the demands of pulp than Dick himself, but who knows).

Still, reading The Cosmic Puppets gives you that weird exhilaration that Dick always gives you, tossing you into a world where everything is uncertain, reality keeps shifting, identity is malleable, and the rules of the universe aren’t even remotely clear. That he got better than this is understandable – this is one of his first few books, after all – but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t give you that same sense of mind-blowing imagination that Dick often does. Embrace the pulp and enjoy the insanity.

Amazon

2019 Vacation Reads Part 2: The Crack in Space / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Cyberiad

After keeping up my blogging for a nice streak (I went more than 40 days without missing a one!), going on a vacation with my family gave me a nice excuse to take a break from my reviews. But, of course, it’s vacation, which meant I read…a lot. So over the next few days, I’ll be doing some shorter reviews to catch back up to date on everything I read over vacation (and a couple since then as well.)

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It’s somewhat unusual to find Philip K. Dick being as overtly political as he is in The Crack in Space; after all, Dick is mainly known for his more philosophical and cosmological ideas, and less for his direct commentaries on the world around him (even though the influence of the times is fairly evident in his work). And yet, The Crack in Space is about the first African-American candidate for president, and just what it would take for America to overcome racial prejudice in order to consider electing a non-white man to the highest office of the land.

Even if Dick was too conservative in his timeline in how long it would take the country to do that, his ideas here about what it would take are strong ones. There’s overpopulation, a younger generation that feels there’s no place for them in society, and concern about employment, all of which contributes to the economic anxiety of the country. Oh, and there’s also a gateway to a parallel universe that might provide an answer to all of this – if, that is, we could just figure out what keeps happening to our explorers over there.

As with any Dick novel, The Crack in Space has ideas to spare, but unlike his best work, they don’t entirely flow together all that well. Indeed, The Crack in Space feels a bit all over the map, with interesting ideas and characters dropping out of the novel abruptly, an ending that feels vague and too open-ended, and too many themes that don’t quite coalesce. But even so, it’s compelling in the way Dick can often be, as he zeroes in on this parallel world (one that turns out to be a sequel to one of my favorite Dick short stories, “Prominent Author”) or plays around with a pair of twins with a most unusual shared attribute. It’s readable and intriguing, as always, but it’s a novel more for Dick completionists than for casual fans. Rating: ***

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It’s taken me a few books to get into the rhythms of Ursula K. Le Guin and to understand how she approaches her stories. In many ways, my issues with The Left Hand of Darkness are the same issues I had with The Dispossessed, my initial exposure to Le Guin as an adult. Both are novels more about their ideas and worlds than any traditional plot; they are stories, yes, but ones told entirely through inference – through the ways that a society can shape an individual, through Le Guin’s ideas about how we think about our own relationship to our communities, through the exploration of character as a product of our civilization, and not the other way around.

All of which goes to explain why I think I admire and respected The Left Hand of Darkness more than I truly “enjoyed” it. I was completely immersed in Le Guin’s world of Winter, where the inhabitants’ gender changes and shifts over their lives, leading to a world similar to our own, but one where the traditional gender roles never truly developed in the way they did on our own. This seemingly simple change ripples throughout the world of Winter, giving Le Guin a way to comment on how gender defines so much of our own lives, all without ever explicitly saying such.

Is there a story to The Left Hand of Darkness? There is, as the representative of a galactic order attempts to convince the world of Winter to join it. But that story often feels secondary to the book, pushed to the background to allow Le Guin to immerse the reader in folklore, power plays, societal rituals, and more. Really, this is a book – much like many episodes of Star Trek – about looking at an alien society and seeing our own through it. And while some aspects of the novel work better than others (I will defer here to Charlie Jane Anders’s rich essay on the novel in The Paris Review that looks at the novel’s exploration of gender through the eyes of a transgender woman, evaluating what it does well and where it falls flat), there’s no denying that Le Guin has made a world that lives and breathes mightily. It is a remarkable achievement, but for all of that, it’s one whose pleasures are more from the world it makes than any story or plotting, or even characters. It is a masterful piece of writing, but one that you may “enjoy” less than you respect. Rating: **** ½

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If, like me, your only real exposure to the works of Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem is Solaris, The Cyberiad will likely throw you for a bit of a loop. Solaris is a moody, philosophical, complex work about human longing and loss, using the trappings of science-fiction to tell a story about love and death. So when it turns out that The Cyberiad is a collection of comedic, goofy stories about robots and inventors – and that they’re not only genuinely funny, but wildly and comically inventive – well, that wasn’t what I expected. But it certainly didn’t keep me from thoroughly enjoying every wonderfully weird page of this collection.

The stories in The Cyberiad revolve around Trurl and Klapaucius, two of the greatest inventors of the universe, and their various competitions, journeys into the universe, rivalries, and more. What this allows Lem to do is make a wide variety of stories, all of which touch on rich ideas about cybernetic intelligence and the nature of self, all within deeply comic, even silly frameworks. In one, Trurl makes the dumbest computer of all time, and then has to run from it when it refuses to believe that 2 and 2 don’t make 3; in another, Trurl and Klapaucius encounter the famed “PHT” pirate, only to discover that he’s actually a PHD pirate who wants knowledge, and demands the inventors make him something that can feed his desire for more information.

Trying to convey the plots of any of these stories is a fool’s errand, to put it mildly; the closest thing I can sometimes compare this to is Voltaire’s Candide, where the sheer inventiveness of the silliness can provide its own joy, even as it sometimes makes the plots wonderfully incomprehensible. And while The Cyberiad isn’t as insightful as Candide (or Solaris), that doesn’t mean that the collection doesn’t have a lot to say. Whether it’s exploring man’s desire to dominate others through technology or the appeal of stories or wondering what the Highest Possible Level of Development of life in the universe can be, Lem has no shortage of ideas and thoughts about the world, and his stories allow him to play around with his ideas in ways that encourage thought while still focusing on just having fun. And if you can’t appreciate a world in which someone creates a machine that can make absolutely anything, as long as it begins with the letter “n,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. But it was a genuinely fun read, and a different side of Lem than what I knew existed. Rating: **** ½

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Amazon: The Crack in Space | The Left Hand of Darkness | The Cyberiad

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick / *****

It’s hard to write about Philip K. Dick in general – what new can be said about a writer who was so influential and who’s inspired so much writing? And that goes doubly for Ubik, one of Dick’s most acclaimed novels. And yet, here I am, trying to describe one of the best novels written by one of the most fascinating and interesting science-fiction writers who ever lived.

Those of us who love Philip K. Dick usually concede that it’s not the craft and the prose that draws us to his work; it’s the complicated, mind-blowing plotting (usually more evident in his short stories) or the rich, thoughtful philosophical musings (a staple of his novels). Ubik is the best of both worlds, though – a head-scratching, dizzying display of plot twists, confusion, and surreal touches that all come together perfectly, all while anchoring itself in musings about the afterlife, causation, time travel, and the nature of consciousness.

Trying to describe the plotting of Ubik is a fool’s errand, but more than that, it would remove the pleasure of unraveling the book’s mysteries for yourself. Suffice to say that the book gives us a future in which company’s provide anti-psychic services in an effort to protect corporate secrets, which has led to what amounts to underground warfare between the psychics and those trying to thwart them. Into this comes a whole new talent that could change the game – but first, a most unusual contract comes across the desk of the leading anti-psychic agency, one that’s going to make the next few days exceedingly strange.

If that sounds vague, well, good – as I said, much of the pleasure of Ubik comes from unraveling all of its disparate pieces and seeing how Dick toys with his audience. But more importantly, for all of its rich plotting, Ubik is packed with fascinating world details, from a society where everything is automated and linked to your credit report to mortuaries where people are kept in a half-life state so you can speak with them for years after their death. And it’s those aspects that make the book so fascinating, as Dick plays with our ideas of the afterlife (here, he’s drawing in no small way on Tibetan beliefs) and how it will play out, but also our own self-awareness. Few authors were as fascinated by the malleable nature of reality as Dick was, and Ubik brings that in spades, as characters unravel, fall apart, and see the world devolving in front of them. The very question of “what is real?” becomes central not only to the plot, but to the lives of our heroes, as they attempt to figure out any sort of purpose or meaning to their existence.

There are better written Dick books out there (A Scanner Darkly); there are richer novels (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is my favorite); but few marry Dick’s playful side with his thoughtful as well as Ubik does. In many ways, it’s the platonic ideal of a Philip K. Dick novel, and maybe an ideal gateway into his work for those who’ve never experienced it. More than that, it’s just a blast of a read, with enough substance to satisfy those wanting a bit more than pure pulp.

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Chattanooga Film Festival 2018: Day Three

For the past several years, I’ve gone down to the Chattanooga Film Festival – it’s one of my favorite weekends for film every single year. (You can see my previous year write-ups since moving to this blog here.) A festival that’s in love with genre films, trash cinema, and embraces the weird and wild, CFF’s philosophy is that every film is worth watching in some way, and it’s an idea I can always get behind. This year, I managed to get back down there for all four days, which means there’s a lot to talk about.

Day one wasn’t that great. Day two was a lot better. But day three? Best day of the festival, with solid film after solid film, and my personal pick for Best of Fest.

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One thing I’ve always loved about CFF is the fact that Saturday morning always holds a family-friendly free screening that’s both in keeping with the film fest sensibilities and yet wholly appropriate for young audiences. That’s led to some great watches in years past, including Song of the Sea, Ernest and Celestine, and My Life as a Zucchini, all of which married lush/imaginative animation with rich storytelling and surprising amounts of depth and heart.

This year’s selection, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales, wasn’t quite as heavy on the heart and emotion. What it more than made up for that with, though, was its anarchic, absurdist streak of humor, lending a much needed comedic break to the film festival’s otherwise very dark offerings. A trio of tales put on as “plays” by the inhabitants of a barnyard, The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales is about nothing so much as it’s about rampant silliness and ridiculousness – and that’s far from a bad thing. One tale  involves some animals attempting to deliver a stork’s neglected charge to its family; the second, a fox that ends up raising some baby chickens in the hopes of turning them into dinner one day; the third, meanwhile, finds our cast from the first story attempting to play Santa Claus for the year. In all three cases, there’s a little bit of sweetness at the core, but largely, all three mainly function as joke delivery systems. Luckily, they more than succeed, leaving me cracking up and thinking about how much my two kids will love this one when they get a chance to see it. Rating: ****

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One of the great joys of horror and exploitation film over the decades is the way that it’s allowed films to take the side of the marginalized and the victimized in the guise of “revenge” or horror films. Sometimes that comes in the form of films made by the oppressed; sometimes, it’s filmmakers smuggling in the subtext; but whatever the case, it allows for a richness to the films that gives them an added punch. Such in the case with Ted Geoghegan’s Mohawk, which takes place during the War of 1812 and follows a small group of Mohawk tribespeople caught between the British and the Americans. The British are attempting to arm the Mohawks and encourage them to fight the Americans; meanwhile, Manifest Destiny seems to be in full swing just under the surface of the colonial soldiers.

Mohawk feels like a film made in our modern era – there’s a lot of anger under its surface at how we treated the indigenous people of the land, of how white men treat everyone who’s not a white man, and how the fight for our own survival can tear apart our lives. It’s more of a thriller than an all-out horror film – though it comes close, especially in the great final act – but more than that, it’s a generally tense and intense affair. Geoghegan generally uses his low budget well, losing the viewer in the sprawling and unfelled forests and mining that lack of civilization for all the uncertainty he can. And when Mohawk gets violent – and it does – there’s no escaping the way that Geoghegan and co-writer Grady Hendrix are mining America’s fraught racial history – and present – for material. It’s an angry, nasty film, and there’s no denying that it lays it on a little thick at times (I honestly did think a character might say that we could “make this land great again,” but it never does happen). But sometimes, a bit of cathartic anger – and some historical revisionism – can make for a satisfying time at the movies. Rating: ****

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The only real problem I have about The Endless, the latest film from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (the duo behind Resolution and Spring, both of which I want to see but haven’t), is that it’s incredibly hard to describe, because you should really go into it as cold as possible. So all I’ll say is that The Endless is the story of two brothers (Benson and Moorhead) who, when they were much younger, escaped from what they describe as “a UFO death cult”. But now it’s years later, and they’re both in dead-end jobs, and the youngest brother, Aaron, asks if they can go back, just for a day. After all, he says, they never did kill themselves or anything. And maybe it would help him get out of this slump, and feel better about the choice they made to leave.

And so, they go back. And then things get…well…

Look: plain and simple, The Endless was my favorite film of Chattanooga Film Fest 2018, and it’s not even a contest. Part sibling relationship drama, part indie-feeling comedy, part suspense tale, part Lovecraft-inspired horror story, The Endless is completely wild in every imaginable way – it’s the kind of film that you could never be prepared for where it’s going to take you if I gave you hours to take your guesses. But what’s all the more remarkable is how well it handles all of the various genres above and more, shifting between them effortlessly – and sometimes, even within the same season. Low-key banter gives way to unease; horror gives way to heartfelt moments; quiet drama gives way to the utterly alien. And somehow, a) it all works incredibly well, b) it’s filmed beautifully, and c) it’s incredibly acted, grounding the story in the characters and their relationships, even as it gets wilder and wilder.

The Endless is the kind of movie that keeps me coming back to the movies year after year, because I always hope to find something like this waiting for me. Never playing it safe, never following any easy rules, never falling into the slightest chance of being predictable, The Endless glides in and out of every genre effortlessly, but somehow does it all while telling an honest, heartfelt, and strong story about siblings and how they so often work to help – and harm – each other’s lives. I loved every second of it, and can’t wait to start hearing from the many, many people I’m going to make watch it. Rating: *****

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Filmed in black and white that feels like it’s being used to cover up the low budget, often coming across like it’s little more than a talky play turned into a claustrophobic film, sometimes relying on cheap CGI that turns the movie into a bad FMV game from the 90’s – to put it simply, there are all kinds of reasons that The Laplace’s Demon shouldn’t work. A low budget Italian thriller that feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode or Philip K. Dick novel turned into a movie, The Laplace’s Demon is about a team of researchers who’ve been working on predictive software – that is, software that can help to predict even the most chaotic of variables in any situation. But when they’re called to a small, isolated island to meet with a mysterious professor, the team begins to realize that they’re being used as pawns in an experiment themselves – one with much farther reaching implications than they would have guessed.

The movie I found myself thinking of often as I watched The Laplace’s Demon was The Man from Earth, another film that’s more successful because of its ideas and conversations than it is for its filmic qualities. Mind you, Laplace has some great visual moments that I loved, and its black and white noir style is pretty great, but there’s no way that what you remember about this film is the way it’s made. No, what makes Laplace so gripping is the conversations it follows – about free will, about mathematics, about the nature of the universe and our choices, about whether we have any true agency in the world. Laplace is one of those films that truly finds itself in conversations like this, and enjoys letting its characters be intelligent and speak intelligently, expecting that that’s enough for the audience. And while there are some thriller elements in there, this is definitely a film of ideas, for better or for worse; what’s gripping about it is not necessarily how it’s being told, but what it’s telling. Is it a great movie? Definitely not. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting or fascinating to watch play out, even if you wish it was more of a movie in the process. Rating: *** ½

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I’ll admit that, by the time I saw Let the Corpses Tan, it was very late at night on the third day straight of watching movies, and I was more than a little tired. And I definitely spent a little bit of the film’s running time fading in and out of sleep. That all being said, in some ways, I can’t help but think that that’s the best way to see Corpses – a little tired, a little bit out of it, and just able to soak in the film’s glorious visuals and atmosphere and not worry about that pesky plot – because, trust me, I’m not sure filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani worried about it at all. In theory, Let the Corpses Tan is the story of a criminal gang hanging out at a abandoned Mediterranean hamlet as they prep for a gold heist. But not long after the heist, the gang finds themselves in a violent shootout back at the house when the cops show up. And then…well, no. That’s really it, in terms of plot, because Corpses isn’t that concerned with what’s happening; it’s concerned with how stylish it can make it all look.

And my god, does it ever look stylish and then some. The closest I can come to conveying what Corpses looks like is that if you imagined someone threw Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and pretty much every iconic Italian genre director into a blender, you might get something like this. There’s not a shot that’s not calibrated for maximum “cool” – from slow motion to color correction, from Morricone-style music to saturated palettes, Cattet and Forzani are incapable of just giving you a standard medium shot – not when they can go showy.

And, look, there’s no denying: it looks incredible. But it’s all style and basically no substance, and at a certain point, it definitely begins to drag and leave you feeling the empty calories. It looks amazing, but I can’t help but feel that Corpses is one of those movies that would be best served playing without sound on the screens in a trendy club, whether the visuals could be their own attraction. Yes, I may have been drifting off a bit, but honestly, I don’t think I was missing anything along the way – apart from more astonishing visuals. Rating: ***

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Also on Day Three: I have yet to read Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell, in which the horror author gives an overview of the horror boom of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, as well as the lurid pulp covers of the period. What I have done, though, is gotten to see Hendrix’s presentation form of the book, which is an absolute treat – it’s funny, engaging, wildly silly, and also done with a lot of love for the era. Hendrix’s presentation follows the horror boom from the big three books that kicked it off – The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Other – and follows it through the folding of some of the big horror publishers. But rather than giving a dry recapping of publishers and business, he covers Nazi leprechauns, the horrors of self-pleasing women, vermin storms in England, and so much more. I had a blast with it – I laughed throughout the entire thing, but also came away impressed with Hendrix’s affection and knowledge. Highly recommended if you get a chance; in the meantime, Hendrix’s fiction and Paperbacks have moved quickly up my “to read” list.

IMDb: The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales | Mohawk | The Endless | The Laplace’s Demon | Let the Corpses Tan

The Warren, by Brian Evenson / *****

I’m a huge fan of Brian Evenson, an author whose works I find unsettling, thought-provoking, unconventional, and incredibly well-written in a way that’s hard to convey. At times coming across like some weird fusion of Edgar Allan Poe, Cormac McCarthy, and Gene Wolfe (to whom this novella is dedicated, which makes sense, given the massive unreliability of our narrator(s)), Evenson writes genre fiction full of fractured protagonists who don’t always understand themselves, grappling with themes of identity, morality, and religion, all while following his dark stories to their inevitable conclusions. More importantly, he’s not interested in holding the reader’s hand; Evenson is an author who immerses you in his characters’ heads deeply, only giving us the limited scope of the world that they can perceive, and expecting his reader to engage with the text to think about what’s happening and character motivations.

All of that comes together beautifully in The Warren, a tight science-fiction novella following a confused survivor named X and set in a post-apocalyptic world whose nature only gradually becomes clear. (Fans of Evenson’s might feel like there are connections to his previous novel Immobility, though reading that book isn’t necessary to appreciate The Warren.) But really, The Warren isn’t about its world so much as it is about its protagonist – or, should I say, protagonists. Because what becomes very evident, very quickly, is that despite his thought that he’s the last surviving member of his kind – and what kind that is, exactly, remains open to debate – there must be someone else alive in this world, because things keep happening that he doesn’t remember doing.

The exact nature of what’s going on with X doesn’t take long to become clear, but it’s worth experiencing it cold, the way Evenson intended, because only then can you start to realize just how meticulously crafted and careful the narration of this book is. Written with Evenson’s usual masterful, stark prose, The Warren makes its debt to Gene Wolfe clear, giving us a narrator who is massively unreliable on multiple fronts, not all of them in his own control. But despite these elements of confusion, what’s in doubt isn’t the plot or what’s going on, but rather, what it all means. Evenson uses the character’s existential confusion to address any number of issues – the nature of consciousness, what it means to be a “human” or a “person,” the construction of an identity – and plays with them in fascinating, thoughtful ways.

The Warren won’t be for all tastes; Evenson has never been an author who’s interested in answers and spelling things out, and even by those standards, The Warren is cryptic, giving you just enough to draw you in and leave you thinking, but never offering much concrete or decisive. If you’re fine with that, you’ll love this; for me, I admire the book’s refusal to give easy answers to questions that have no answers to them. And with Evenson’s crystalline prose, his complex characters, and the compelling confusion of his story, what you have is a knockout of a little novella that’s deeply satisfying for those who are up for its uncertainties.

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The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin / *****

Even before her recent passing, I’ve known that my lack of experience with the works of Ursula K. Le Guin was a shortcoming I needed to rectify. The only book of hers I’ve read was The Dispossessed, a book I admired a lot while ultimately finding a bit dry and didactic. (It’s also a book I plan on revisiting soon, ideally after reading some more Le Guin and now that I know what to expect, to see if I feel differently about it.) And, as authors paid tribute to the legendary author in the wake of her passing, one novel that I saw mentioned again and again was The Lathe of Heaven, which I knew nothing about.

And, man, am I glad I checked it out. Often viewed as Le Guin’s tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick, The Lathe of Heaven undeniably feels a lot like a Dick novel, with a surreal hook used to explore philosophical questions about reality and who we really are. But as you’d expect from Le Guin, there’s no shortage of more social questions raised here, from the nature of peace to the dangers of global warming, all done within a great narrative that twists and turns underneath you.

The hook is simple enough: there’s a man named George Orr (yes, the half allusion is probably intentional) who is scared to dream, because his dreams become real. But what makes this hard to prove is that his dreams don’t just create reality; they rewrite it, making whatever he dreams not only true, but making it always have been true, so that no one remembers the change but him. That’s true until George goes to court-mandated therapy, where his therapist seems to be aware of the change – and his ability to possibly control George’s ability.

Like she did in The Dispossessed, Le Guin explores any number of ideas about utopias, the role of the individual in society, the question of the greater good, and her concerns about utilitarianism. At what point should the individual give way for society? Where is the cutoff between acceptable sacrifice for the greater good and too much? And what is the responsibility of one person to give it all for the world? But whereas The Dispossessed engaged with these ideas in the forms of detailed discussions, The Lathe of Heaven lets them remain more subtextual, unfolding as a battle of wills between George, his therapist, and a lawyer George brings in to help him. More than that, The Lathe of Heaven unfolds as a bizarre thriller of sorts, with reality constantly bending and shifting underneath us, and Le Guin able to explore the ramifications of so many changes, and what it would take to fix some of the problems in our world.

It all adds up to a great book, one that I really enjoyed. And if it’s a bit derivative of PKD, well, that’s okay, because Le Guin makes it her own, following the political and social ramifications of her conceit, not just the philosophical ones. It’s a book I really enjoyed and absolutely couldn’t put down, and has me eager to dive into more of an author I don’t feel like I ever properly appreciated in her lifetime.

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Blade Runner 2049 / *****

It’s been almost a year since I last saw the original Blade Runner (well, the “Final Cut” of the movie, anyway); as a result, I don’t know that I need to spend an inordinate amount of time describing my feelings on the film when you can just read them for yourself. Here’s the simple version: I think the original Blade Runner is an incredible accomplishment; it’s a film that created a world unlike anything else in cinema, and while I have some issues with the film’s plotting (or lack thereof), there’s little denying the way its world lingers with the viewer long after you’ve finished. It’s also a film that I’ve never felt earned its philosophical conversations at times; while the film deals with interesting ideas, it’s never as engaged with them as I wish it was.

All of which brings me to Blade Runner 2049, helmed by Denis Villeneuve (and shot by Roger Deakins), starring Ryan Gosling, set thirty years after the original, and following up on the original story in ways both direct and indirect. Once again, we follow a “Blade Runner” (the film’s term for an LAPD officer tasked with “retiring” rogue androids that are attempting to blend in with “normal” humans), this time an officer named K., as he’s tracking down some remaining Nexus units. Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t follow in the plotting footsteps of the original for long, though; not long into the film, K. makes a discovery that sets him on the path for a far stranger, more complicated mystery, one that gets right to the heart of the philosophical questions so often raised by the original film.

That’s about all of the plot that should be known about Blade Runner 2049 for a new viewer; suffice to say, the film’s plotting is more interesting and more complex than the original film, with more to discuss. And yet, for all of that, Blade Runner 2049 in no way compromises on the moodiness, pacing, and stillness of the original film, using every minute of its lengthy running time to immerse viewers in this saturated, gleaming future. There’s little chance that longtime fans are going to argue that Villeneuve has “betrayed” the original film here; 2049 is of a piece with its predecessor, spending just as much time luxuriating in its scenery and the silence of its lead, and mainstream success be damned.

What’s incredible, then, is that in some ways, Blade Runner 2049 might be even better than the original film, fixing my issues with it and somehow improving on the one thing that seemed unbeatable about the original: the visuals. As helmed by Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049 isn’t just the best-looking film of the year; it’s got to be high in the ranking for most beautiful, astonishing films in recent memory, delivering shot after shot that left my jaw hanging open and nearly in tears. From brilliant framing to incredible shadows to stunning use of colors, Deakins turns in the best work he’s ever done – and when you look at his credits, that’s no small feat. Words genuinely can’t do justice to the look and feel of Blade Runner 2049; suffice to say, if you’re interested in seeing it, and don’t see it on the biggest screen you possibly can, you will be kicking yourself for years to come. (Myself, I paid for an IMAX ticket, and was immediately glad I did within two shots; it only got better from there.) Mixing film-noir shadows with neon-drenched skyscapes with desolate waste lands, Deakins turns every frame of Blade Runner 2049 into a work of art that somehow equals the original.

So, the visuals measure up – welcome news indeed. But what about the film itself? How does the content stack up to a film whose simplicity invited any number of readings? How can Villeneuve grapple with some of the biggest questions of the original – such as whether Deckard is a replicant or not – without ruining the mystery? And can the film manage to not simply retread the plot of its predecessor?

Miraculously, 2049 manages to succeed on every one of those fronts and then some. The thirty years (both in-story and in the real world) since the previous film has only led to deeper, more unsettling questions about the gap between what’s “real” and what’s synthetic, and 2049 deals with these questions more head-on than Scott’s original film, with a plot that drags the film’s subtext into the light, forcing us to grapple with it whether we like it or not. It’s aided by Gosling’s outstanding performance; without getting into too much information, Gosling has a difficult role to pull off, but he does it superbly, letting K. convey so much of his internal monologue with a bare minimum of movement or expression. But he engages deeply with the material, grappling with the philosophical debates of the film in a way that Harrison Ford’s no-nonsense Deckard rarely did.

Which brings us, of course, to Ford, who appears in the film as Deckard, older and still alive. Where he’s been – and why he’s in 2049 – I leave for the viewer to discover. What’s worth discussing is how strong he is in the role, giving us a looser, more vulnerable Deckard who’s not the man he once was. That makes sense, given the nature of the story, but it’s a joy to see Ford reminding you once again that he can be fantastic in films when he’s interested and committed to a role, as opposed to the coasting he’s done in so many recent years. More than that, he makes a superb counterpart to Gosling, as we see what this job can do to those who deal in death for a living.

But as rich as the plot is, as good as the performances are, and as incredible as it looks, none of it would matter if Blade Runner 2049 wasn’t as engaging and rich as it is. In many ways, it’s more loyal to the spirit of author Philip K. Dick than the original was; it’s more thoughtful and complex in its storytelling, yes, but it’s also more interested in dealing with questions of consciousness, of reality, of what it means to truly be “alive” – and how we react when those limits are questioned and overturned. That’s heady stuff, and it’s to the film’s credit that it does all of that while still giving us a gripping – if thoughtful and dreamlike – story. In short, it’s everything a sequel to a beloved cult film should be – faithful to the spirit of the original, while standing on its own and expanding on the ideas of its predecessor in interesting, unexpected ways. It’s brilliant hard science-fiction, astonishing filmmaking, and all in all, an incredible achievement – one of the year’s best films.

IMDb