Review of Osama by Lavie Tidhar

From pulp-minded cynics there is the impression that the literati like nothing more than a book which presents fractals of reality impressed upon social and cultural situations—the more politically and historically significant, the better.  If you can somehow throw in the values of literature (meta or otherwise), well, that’s just ink for the Nobel.  Post-modern the name of the game, numerous are the works of serious literature (no quotes needed) attempting to portray existence as ever deconstructing relativity for critical acclaim.  Speculative fiction a genre not well known for its forays into this realm of literature, there have been successful attempts, nevertheless.  Jorge Luis Borges, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Jeff VanderMeer, Philip K. Dick (though perhaps unintentional) among them, adding his name to this list is Lavie Tidhar, Osama (2012) the novel securing his position.

Ostensibly, Osama is the story of the private investigator Joe and the bizarre case he’s contracted to take on.  Living in Ventiane, Laos, his only loves are cigarettes, whiskey, and the series of pulp paperback novels he reads religiously called Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante.  The main character Osama an anti-hero, the books tell the story of bombings, destruction, and the overall machinations of a man attempting to bring his version of justice to the Western world.  A strange girl entering Joe’s office one day, she asks him to track down the writer of the fictional antihero Osama, Mike Longshott.  Though wanting to say no, the plastic with unlimited credit handed his way serves to change Joe’s mind.   Beginning his investigation into Longshott’s whereabouts things quickly become strange: mysterious men in black suits shoot at him for no reason.  For poor Joe, however, that’s not as strange as things become, particularly the closer he gets to the reclusive writer.

Review of Sergeant Chip by Bradley Denton

The sentient dog has quietly snuck its way in to become a sub-sub-genre of speculative fiction.  Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius, Clifford Simak’s City, Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes, Terry Pratchett’s Moving Pictures, and others use articulate canines for varying reasons (juxtaposition, evolutionary markers, disorientation, social commentary, comedy, etc.), in 2004 Bradley Denton added the novella Sergeant Chip to the mix, empathy against the political scene the reason.

The ultimate in obedience, Sergeant Chip is a trained soldier dog assigned to Captain Dial.  Top of his class at the academy, he is able to perform all of the training exercises with utmost intelligence, skill, and speed.  He also has an implant in his neck which allows him to sub-vocally communicate with Dial.  Not in a “Hi, how are you today?” sense, rather in a simple giving of commands and making intentions known.  All is well in their relationship until war comes calling, and Dial and Chip are sent to a distant outpost to guard a base.  Enemy attacks eventually coming fast and strong, it comes as a surprise who the enemy actually is. 

Review of "The Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang

One of the main reasons I utilize youtube is to look for interviews with interesting authors.  Kim Stanley Robinson reveals himself to be as erudite in person as the content of his books; William Gibson proves some of the most influential novels the past decades are rooted in a deep understanding of our modern world; China Mieville, while only beginning to employ his knowledge in his novels, reveals the adjectives flying chaotically on paper can be pulled out of the hat just as easily when speaking.  Iain Banks is even more fiery with a microphone in front of him, and Bruce Sterling comes across as more obtusely alternative than what we see in his stories.  In the midst learning this, I discovered a presentation by Ted Chiang delivered at EXPO 1: New York in the Museum of Modern Art (found here). Discussing all facets of life-logging, including the benefits and disadvantages of prosthetic memory (and memory recall), the talk is eye-opening regarding the technology and its possibilities.  Implementing the idea in story form, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” is the fictional result.

The novelette is the first person narrative of a journalist describing the research he performed for an article on the latest technology to hit the market: Remem.  Essentially Google for the video life-logs people carry and keep, Remem allows a person to search their past for any recorded moment and view it.  Type or sub-vocalize ‘first party at university’ and in a few seconds a tiny screen pops up in the corner of your retina featuring your first big-scale social experience away from home.  But testing the technology has unforeseen results for the unnamed narrator.  Video of of a troubled experience with his daughter revealing details he remembered differently, he faces a reckoning if he is to move forward with their relationship.

Review of More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke hog the spotlight for channeling the optimism of modernism into fiction.  Kings of the Silver Age, their stories feature squeaky clean space modules where every pipe, switch, and console functions as it should, scientists with nothing but altruism for the human race at heart, and a no-situation-can’t-be-overcome attitude toward engineering and problem solving.  The hope space offered was on their, and the Western world’s mind.  Falling in these writers’ shadows were those who utilized other burgeoning subjects du jour.  Parapsychology something many were equally optimistic about, it features in numerous works of the era.  Alfred Bester put it to wide use, as did Jack Vance, Frederik Pohl, Phillip K. Dick, Harry Harrison, (early) Robert Silverberg, and others toward telling stories of the mentally possible, and in turn popularizing the idea.  But the pinnacle of psi-power’s sanguinity is certainly Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human.  A undeniably modernist statement from the perspective of parapsychology, the novel's premise sags beneath the weight of time but remains powerful for the high quality prose and transcendence of traditional mores.

Now perceived as more fantasy than science fiction (an interesting transition considering the material itself underwent no change), More Than Human is the story of the oddest of odd humans and their drawing together to become something more.  Opening in fairy tale tone, the reader is introduced to the “fabulous idiot” and the trials of life (and love) he must go through to be functionally independent.  A trio of young girls eventually finding their way to his forest home, the idiot doesn’t bat an eye learning one is telekinetic and the other two—twins, in fact—can teleport at will.  But finding a baby left behind by a farmer turns out to be the game changer.  A catalyst binding the bizarre group together, they are now equipped to revolutionize society.  Whether they know it or not, however, is another story.

Review of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The list of genre authors who are or were recognized by the literary world at large is not great in length.  Despite the amount of attention and success she has received within the field, Ursula Le Guin has never been able to fully crossover.  Gene Wolfe, through all of the literary pretense, has yet to engage the non-genre community in any significantly manner.  Iain Banks had to add a middle initial to keep his two writing personas separate.  Orwell and Huxley are lauded by everyone, genre aficionados to the literati, but their careers began and were built on writing literary realism and non-fiction.  Michael Crichton is one of the few who has more readers on the mainstream side despite the fact his stories are clearly science fiction, and Stephen King, well, he is just a force of his own.  Ray Bradbury was/is a successful crossover, but if you remove Fahrenheit 451 from his oeuvre, his recognizance outside the field drops significantly.  One of the few who have successfully and consistently made the jump is Kurt Vonnegut, and the subject of this review is his most read work Slaughterhouse-Five.

The novel is the story of Billy Pilgrim.  Time having no hold, Pilgrim slips back, forth, and all around—past, present, and future.  He swims in a pool in his youth; he is an eye doctor in old age; he’s in an shopping mall; he’s meeting with aliens; and above all, he doesn’t know or seem to care why.  But the majority of his narrative is spent as a soldier in WWII.  Likewise indifferent to the affair, things happen around him, people die, bombs are dropped, he becomes a prisoner of war, but, like the aliens, nothing seems to have effect.  So what then is the point of it all?

Review of Making Money by Terry Pratchett

The (Disc)world his oyster, Pratchett has the length and breadth of human existence to discuss in the great land traveling through space on the backs of elephants and a tortoise.  From time in Thief of Time to film in Moving Pictures, law in Truth to women’s rights in Equal Rites, religion in Small Gods to war in Jingo, seemingly no aspect of society and life is exempt from the getting ink from Pratchett’s pen.  Making no bones about it, the thirty-sixth Discworld novel Making Money announces its subject matter on the cover, and in turn tells the joke that our worldwide economic system has become.

Making Money is the continuation of Moist von Lipwig’s story.  The postal system now humming along, Patrician Vetinari attempts to use Lipwig’s criminal past to blackmail the Postmaster General into taking over the Ankh-Morpork Bank.  Unsuccessful, it takes the cleverness of an old lady to give him the responsibility for the ageing institution.  The remainder her family viciously upset at a stranger owning the majority of shares, Cosmo and Pucci Lavish, when not warring amongst themselves, aim to undermine Lipwig’s efforts at bringing the bank back to life.   Striking upon a revolutionary idea to accomplish this while daydreaming one day, only the Chief Clerk, one Mr. Bent, has any idea what Lipwig is about to unleash, and it may be something beyond anyone’s control. 

Review of Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt

If there is anything forums, chat rooms, comments sections, blogs, news reporting, and other media have made us aware of, it's the variety of opinion on what is "right" for humanity.  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World pointed some easy fingers at what is "wrong" for humanity, while others have purported social structures as ideal, holes appearing in them as well.  A microcosm of debate in what is "good" for humanity, Jack McDevitt’s 1996 Ancient Shores is not so much a story of alien discovery, rather humanity’s reaction to it.  And what a reaction it is.

Ancient Shores literally opens with the discovery of a yacht buried in the middle of a North Dakota wheat field.  Unearthed and set up as a tourist attraction in the farmer’s barn, the discovery that its hull and sails are comprised of an element that does not exist on Earth, and that it emits a strange green glow at night from power sources unknown, quickly have the scientific community scrambling for answers.  Said answers not easy to swallow, an even larger wrench is thrown into the perception of reality when a second unidentifiable object is discovered in a nearby canyon.  Turning the small North Dakota community, and eventually the world, upside down and shaking it, the best manner in which to put to use the ever-fascinating possibilities of the discoveries becomes as heated a topic as only humans can argue.

Review of All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

Literature can be one of the fine arts.  (Given the current state of publishing, the operative ‘can be’ is preferred to ‘is’).  Yet it is far from first on the list when one mentions gallery exhibits.  The novel an art whose value is intrinsic to the meaning of words on a page rather than something nominally visual, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art nevertheless commissioned Paul Park to write a novel based on the theme of an industrial exhibit by Stephen Vitiello called All Those Vanished Engines (details here).  Park one of the more literary-minded speculative fiction authors working today (this means you won’t find him on the Hugo ballot), the resulting novel is what one would expect with such an impetus: experi-meta-ness.  Featuring alternate history, near-future, and present day storylines, and occasionally Paul Park himself, the three interlinked novellas that form the work All Those Vanished Engines (2014, Macmillan-Tor/Forge) are an artistic vision about the meaning of writing, fiction, art, history, and the self in an interconnected form that extends well beyond orthodox storytelling.

All Those Vanished Engines, the Vitiello project, is an old factory that has been cleaned up, doctored with a sound system emitting industrial noises, and opened to the public as an audio-visual experience.   The pipes, valves, hoppers, scaffolding—all of which remain concatenated in production line fashion, provides the metaphorical structure of the novel.  As such, All Those Vanished Engines the novel, only begins in linearly coherent form.  Soon thereafter it fragments as images from the other timelines and locations begin to pop in and out.  This offers a strong sense of the randomly surreal when, for example, an alien appears in the middle of a paragraph which began as a scene from post-Civil War America.  The intrusions continuing, the second novella twists the reality of the narrative further by opening as the first-person narrative of what is ostensibly Paul Park the writer.  Visiting an old age home, he hears the stories told by a former factory worker.  (This account has been made publicly available here as both an excerpt from the novel and background info to the art exhibit.)  The setup of the factory explained, and historical motif introduced, thereafter Park switches to personal matters, including the novel he is working on, as well as bits about relationships, memories, and ideas.

Review of Millennium by John Varley

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is one of if not the original time travel story, and uses the concept as a tool to comment upon the industrialization of society.  Isaac Asimov took the idea and converted it into commentary on the long term potential for human evolution in The End of Eternity.  Michael Moorcock, in Behold the Man, used time travel to tell a personal story of religious proportion, and fellow New Wave writer Robert Silverberg commented upon authoritarianism and isolation in Hawksbill Station.  Tim Powers played with time to tell a beautifully plotted story in The Anubis Gates, and Connie Willis traveled back to Medieval Ages to gush historical knowledge in Doomsday Book.  In 1982, John Varley decided to use the concept to attempt to snark at social and environmental concerns of the late 20th century. Starting as a short story (“Air Raid”), developing into a script idea, and then novelized in conjunction with a film, Millennium is the thrilling Hollywood-esque result, but begs to be more.

Millennium is the story of Louise Baltimore and Bill Smith.  Baltimore living in an extremely dilapidated version of Earth thousands of years in the future, the carelessness of 20th century environmental practices has brought humanity to the brink of extinction.  Technology having advanced significantly in the meantime, time travel has been invented, and in order to forestall the loss of humanity, snatch missions are sent to the past to grab healthy humans and bring them to the future to continue the species.  Knowing that any disruption in the past may cause irreparable damage to the future, only the imminently doomed are taken.  Airplanes about to crash the best target, time gates are opened minutes before the accident and the passengers offloaded to the future and replaced with meat dummies just before the collision.  None are the wiser, that is until Bill Smith, investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, is called to the scene of a two plane crash.  Bad relationships and an alcohol problem not getting in the way of his investigation, a few inconsistencies in the debris start his mind churning. Wrist watches behaving erratically, stomach contents not matching up, and a most bizarre weapon are enough to have Louise and her support team scrambling to send a mission team back to rectify the anomaly.  Good intentions, however, are not always good enough.

Review of Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber was one of the genre’s most versatile writers.  Writing literary fiction at times, and pulp epic fantasy at others to keep the bills paid, he was also fully capable of writing horror, fantasy, and science fiction.  Capitalizing on the most recognized of his output, in 1979 Gollancz published a sampler of the author’s award-winning work.  Ship of Shadows brings together short stories, a novelette, novellas and a short novel that won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, or Locus awards—some more than one.  Featuring atypical horror, the Weird, supernatural, alternate history, a deal with the devil, literary science fiction, sword and sorcery (a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, to be exact), the following is a review of the six selections.

Ship of Shadows opens with the eponymous novella.  Though technically horror, it remains a highly original, Weird text with a science fiction motif.  The story of the poor-sighted janitor named Spar who works at a space station bar, his life is anything by normal.  Drunk half the time and having few friends who respect him, his daily tasks put him in contact with a wide variety of characters on the gravity-less station, including a talking cat.  Strange events occurring with increasing rapidity around the supplicant, old man, Spar soon finds himself in the thick of danger—whether he wants it or not.  Leiber escalating the story wonderfully, what begins as obtuse threads waving disparately in the breeze are slowly braided into a yarn that has the reader in pure wonder as to what will happen next.  (See here for a longer review of the story on this blog.)