Not enough superlatives for this collection from Ted Chiang - feast for a hungry brain that didn't know it was even hungry. Chiang applies the precise reasoning of the best hard sci fit and the melancholy reflections of the best humanist sci fi to the angst of religion and evolutionary intelligence with rigorous prismatic perspective. While the thought experiment has fallen by the wayside in recent years as a backlash to the speculative literary or the opportunistically filmic, Chiang's resuscitation of private obsessiveness in science fiction is a welcome return to the notion that natural inquiry should by necessity inform our approach to the mysteries in life.

The film, Arrival, is a wonderful adaptation of Story of Your Life - a titular tale of first contact but also a reflection on the ways which communication and knowledge have the power to transform. Overly atmospheric but meditatively beautiful, Arrival leans hard into the personal and elides the science behind the premise. Such slippery dramatic editing tunes the sympathies of a broad audience to the inherent triumph of the heart or the mystical deus ex machina of the plot. However, the central strength of Chiang's story is a rationalist's emotional transcendence - the idea that the details of scientific resolution matter, that the hard work of gaining knowledge in order to truly comprehend and break through, is something that no greater power can gift us.

Lexicon was recommended by a white haired Neal Stephenson fan at an airport bookstore after being queried for a new Science Fiction read. Tightly constructed, Lexicon is actually a thriller bolstered by fast paced action writing tempered with just enough social/media commentary and academic hypertext to feel like more than just popcorn fluff without getting bogged down by theory. Centering around the student of a Hogwarts-esque school (if Hogwarts specialized in a nefarious mind control curriculum for blossoming con artists), the story cross-cuts between a mysterious amnesiac, and an enigmatic bounty hunter. The prose is better than expected and often emotionally resonant in ways that contributes to our understanding of the characters within the framework of an unexpected romance or coming of age. Meanwhile, the premise hovers just in the background - context at large - degrading communication in the the age of mass media and how the widespread dissemination of personal information is used as a performative, manipulative, semiotic attack on self agency. The ties between the two are tenuous, as the heady stuff is to the plot, but overall a fun, cohesive enough, ride

Incredibly dense and hyper prescient, Synners reflects the sensory overload of a dystopian cyberpunk world on the cusp of technological/biological revolution. Cadigan sometimes lost me in a grimy industrial haze of transistor underbelly, Machiavellian corporate, digital world building confusion. But the book builds like a fever dream and the pain is worth the tox, ie trip, and by trip I mean technology is the next literal new drug. Save your synapses for this read.

In reference to the ongoing Hugo Brou-Ha-Ha (to which I've refrained from commenting), the cultural ancronymosity surrounding it, and the greater controversy to which it rightfully belongs, I throw my hands up at the pseudo political catch-22. Because, regardless of my gender, or political leanings, or small obsessions, I do not self-identify with m/any parties in "the war" except the one which is deeply personal - namely, an abiding relationship with the body of science fiction, fantasy, games, and literature at large that has profoundly shaped who I am as an individual. I have never needed the genre to reflect me, despite many contradictions or exclusions, because I came to expect fiction that explored the contemporaneous hard questions beyond me, to push the boundaries of what we can and should expect from our future, to delve into places that are impossible or simply incredible - to both remonstrate and demonstrate. Yes, at the same time, to escape, entertain, to exhilarate. And also, Yes, to communicate in a such a textual barrage of marvelous craft and language so as to convince me that there are different ways of looking at things whether I agree with them or not. Science fiction, in short, liberated me, and to find myself at this moment inadvertently in bed with some backward imperative to categorize, weaponize, attenuate, and defile is just, in a word, shitty.

Two (ok four) very compelling, very hard sci-fi books and one equally compelling movie in a span of a two weeks. Plus there was that big red moon not too long ago. And now, for a review of those recent novels which made me despair, and the counterpoint book which inspired me to catalog stuff and spend an inordinate amount of time buoyed by faith in all things good about people in space.

The Rifter Trilogy

An unfortunate cultural bias becomes apparent when the idea that astronauts need to be sociable, stable, professional and down to earth (pun intended) seems far-fetched, that the inevitability of human failure, emotionally and intellectually, is a given. Take for example, Peter Watt's deadly depressing depiction of life in earth's most proximal deep space - the ocean. The specter of the unknown abyss, primordially eerie and ferocious, plays a huge role (Starfish particularly) in establishing the idea that people can only survive deep space conditions, or perhaps persevere in anything, through shitty experiences. The rest of the series proceeds to devil's advocate that fallacy by exploring the superheated Darwinist fallout of relativistic morality through biological and digital global apocalypse. Watt pursues the chilling logic of self defeating interpersonal chaos to an uncomfortable, unsparing dystopia of potential transcendence.












The Martian

In the same way that Moon returned a sense of wonder to the potentiality of space travel, Andy Weir's near future survival story, The Martian, expresses incredulous awe for the ingenuity of man to traverse the universe despite the frankly terrible, horrible, no good odds. Written as a Murphy's law solution handbook for Mars, Weir's elegant and sometimes desperate problem solving exercises are utterly compelling on their own. But consider this...Science-ing the Shit out of something is also an evolving story written daily act in the act of research and building stuff - from particle physics to the bridge that straddles the San Francisco Bay to the water that comes out of the tap. In the mundane context of daily life, a celebration of scientific accomplishment is often forgotten but no small miracle.

The truly remarkable idea embedded in the Martian's hopeful, exuberant expression of love for all things geeky - engineering, biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, astrophysics, and daunting capital-m Math - is that all of it is accomplished by capital-p People. Qualified people that somehow didn't make it onto the crew manifest of the ill-fated Nostromo. In some ways, Weir's portrayal of the scientific community is an ode to all the individuals - even all those pesky admin party poopers - who come together to get things done, like I dunno, designing the perfect bolt so that the soft, squishy biology of a human being is able to propel like some suicidal shooting star into the inhospitable terror of outer space and penetrate a resolutely unfriendly world for the purpose of nothing more than something bigger than themselves.

Increasingly, I'm convinced that making interesting positive art is more difficult than painful existential and material drama. Certainly, happy endings are more difficult after painful existential and material drama in most of life. So if my promotion of all things positive and happy and generous towards the human spirit sounds fantastically and idealistically old fashioned, just a silly Tomorrowland Disney hallucination for children, then consider the dreary, soul-sucking alternative.

Bonus:

Sean Bean on the Council of Elrond. Twice, you geeks...

Fantastic article on Mars expeditions in the New Yorker.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Miyazaki
Much preferred to the film version... this beautifully illustrated Manga pits the determined mystic against mankind's need for warlike resolutions to save a ravaged world.

Cities in Flight - James Blish
Elegantly written prose probes economics and restless political imperatives during the long relentless game of survival.

"Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Good-bye John..."
He thought that what she had said was probably the truth - for a woman. For a man, he knew, life is a process of dying, again and again: and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.

In the Garden of Iden - Kage Baker
Fanciful blurring of lines between history and science fiction, young romance and religious passions to serious affect. Not an accident is the fall from Eden.

And as the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so was my beloved among the sons. Et cetera. What would I give, to have that night back, out of all my nights? No treasure fleet could hold it. What I'd give; no caravan of mules could carry it away.

House of Suns - Alistair Reynolds
Much preferred to the elephant series, though burdened with similar lackluster character writing. Stay for the utterly compelling investigation of space travel and various permutations of corporeal knowledge encompassing eons.

To see something marvelous with your own eyes—that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment …that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie
Let not the confusing pronouns and big statements deter you, this book deserves it's accolades on the basis of of imaginative characters, an unusual central conceit, and a tensely plotted narrative whole that reveals one bit at a time.

Thoughts are ephemeral, they evaporate in the moment they occur, unless they are given action and material form. Wishes and intentions, the same. Meaningless, unless they impel you to one choice or another, some deed or course of action, however insignificant. Thoughts that lead to action can be dangerous. Thoughts that do not, mean less than nothing.

Gateway - Frederik Pohl
A very masculine text with a flawed, psychologically unstable protagonist and his band of ruffian friends, making and breaking their fortunes at the edge of the known human world in a way that will feel utterly universal. Probably my favorite out of this bunch of readings.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?

On the Steel Breeze resolves its central narratives through lengthy dialogues and redundant expositions that are punctuated with action set pieces and not much else. While there is plenty of world to explore and morally suspect tech to engage with, the author is mostly concerned with human concepts of fragmented selves, forgiveness, etc in a post-cloud world. Somehow, collective humanism ends up coming off a little shallow. Not a bad read all in all, still better than lots, but a bit toothless compared to the Revelation Space series.

The illustrious Perdido Street Station was an interesting read with a lot of ideas, but well... enthusiastic with clunky young writer prose. Even the the author himself admitted in an interview that the writing was perhaps not quite up to snuff. But China Mieville has grown up. Or rather grown into his skin. And Kraken is just so. Incorporating street slang and meta hipness with egghead meta philosophizing. Mieville has perfected the expository paragraph - compact and communicative, drawing in with clauses and expelling with statement, inserting 411 packages rhythmically into the windup structure and noir dialogues to make the story hum.

Kraken is a grown man's Harry Potter (a comparison that Mieville slyly references), set in a London underworld teeming with magic but dirtier, grittier and much more violent. Mieville's obsession with the urban world and contingent conspiracy is less cut and dry in Kraken than Perdido Street. Reversal and intrigue reveal the man behind the plan, behind the other man behind the other plan and all the cockroaches taking advantage of any weakness in between. This is no criminal mind forcing his vision lockstep into being, but a messy sort of survival, where bits of meaning catalyze and go extinct on the constantly mutating fodder of human belief. Not surprising then, that the battle between Faith and Darwin is the fulcrum on which the story revolves.

There really is a lot of esoteric to chew on in this novel but the cranky, sarcasm and breakneck pace throws you into the fray front-loaded with information; an experience of truth seeing as malleable and consensual, elided meanings, always being made and broken and never really understood till just too late, a messy process that not only rewrites history but revises it as if the former never was.

Biographies are a kind of mirage, a layer of one person over another, a layer of time over the past, everything constructed, artificial, or perhaps overly factual in an effort not to be artificial, although there's always a feeling that the entire narrative is an act of fiction and that the subject not only disappears but will never have been once the film is inevitably wiped away. Truth in identity, then, is illegible in domestication, and best avoided. However, the biography of Science Fiction author Alice B. Sheldon, also known as James Tiptree, also known as Racoona Sheldon, compels for illuminating exactly that conflict.

"To grow up as a "girl" is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing - and nearly to become that thing. To have no steady routine of growth and training, but only a series of explosions into unwanted adulation - and then into limbo. The world was not my oyster." - Alice Sheldon 

Julie Phillips doesn't create a vivisection for our study, but delicately knots together the contradictory desperation, drives, and desires that eventually allowed Sheldon in the guise of a man, to reveal herself to the world. From Phillips, we empathize with the intensely, internally mercurial Sheldon and her public elusiveness, even to herself. The relief then, when Tiptree allows Sheldon to drop her own baggage for a moment to speak and be heard, is both in the biography and the work. Her fatalism is there too. In a way, Sheldon's entire life is a coming of age story that is cut short, one in constant flux with it's own narrative, self aware and disguised, but much realer for it.

"Tip" started publishing only in her late years, and that work is some of Sci Fi's best. Dr. Ain, the short story on which 12 Monkeys, and before that, La Jetee, is based, come on like a fever, quaking through the theme of suicide dreamlike and neurotically towards the impending apocalypse, and carrying the fatalism heavily and rationally. Often told from the perspective of "innocent" contemptuous male narrators, Sheldon's stories express a deep outrage for the workings of gender politics, letting slip the masks of female acculturation for those in the know, to reveal the deep rage and violence beneath. At once fielding the morally squishy and hard science with instincts of a thriller, Sheldon's work defies gender authorship but is labile with feminism.

Accordingly, the book takes the temperature and meaning of Sci Fi through decades, first personally for the author and culturally, as context. As a fan, this peep into the heady world of Golden Age and New Wave editing rooms is a particular treat, how our tastes are shaped, what humanist principles those editors were trying to sculpt, and in particular, how institutionalized ideas of gender restricts our understanding of the hard/soft paradigm of Sci Fi at large. Pleasant asides: Sheldon's tentative wooing of various authors through erudite letters assigned to Tiptree, and his penetration into the circle of sometimes similarly reclusive people, their collective work creating a safe harbor for the deranged, the damaged, the insightful and oppressed, in other words - the alien.


Note: Reading this biography was a highly personal experience. But I think anyone who has suffered from or is interested in the effects of repression or depression may gain something from both Sheldon and Phillip's insight. While Mad Men's Sally Draper is definitely an unsympathetic character, I imagine that in some sense she, and all the other women on that show, would empathize in a primal way if not fully understand Sheldon's personal despair of "seeming" just a woman yet "being" so much more.


NPR interview with Julie Phillips.


Rare, for me, promotional Amazon link to Sheldon's short story collection,  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

I suppose an education of classics has always been penciled on my bucket list, but navigating the prolific output of the genre and separating wheat from chaff is a daunting task. Spurred by the quality of The Stars My Destination, I'm planning on wending my way down the list of SF Masterworks, a series of out-of-print sci-fi novels republished by Orion/Gollancz. My hope is to discover some writers I may have missed, and visit left of center novels of authors I enjoy. Also of interest, are the Gollancz Future Classics, and Fantasy Masterworks titles. Apparently these objects are highly collectible, but seeing as how I'm mostly interested in content, I'm sure I'll find most books at the library.

Bonus:

Edward Gorey's online comic strip interpretation of Star Trek episode, The Trouble with Tribbles.

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester

This book is on countless best of sci-fi lists and for very good reason; hard and soft, prose and pulp, literary and accessible, scientific and mystical, fantastical and satirical, cyberpunk and steampunk, fastpaced and thoughtful... Hitting the sweet-spot between the directives of speculative techno/cultural fiction and new-wave psycho emo/humanism is a rarity - a feat even more astonishing, given the truly well-crafted storytelling and Bester's liberal though accomplished writing style.

There's almost nothing, including my typical gender nitpicks, that I really dislike about this book, from premise to structure to execution. And while countless imitations, spin-offs and sub-genres have centrifuged away from Bester's serialized novel with enough conviction of their own, The Stars My Destination manages to think and read fresh more than 50 years later. An excellent read.

Not the film based on Do Angels Dream of Electric Sheep, but The Bladerunner, a 1974 novel by Alan Nourse. In some near future, good health care is provided to anyone who agrees to pay the fee - sterilization. Those who don't want to comply with these terms are forced to turn to black market practitioners. The idea is to weed out those who have genetic diseases or those with less immune resistance, allowing the rest to breed healthier, stronger children. Truly deadly epidemics, however, choose victims indiscriminately regardless of healthcare choices. The book is really a cautionary tale about the dangers of "socialized" or two tier medical systems.

I suppose in the the early 70's, this doomsday prediciton may have sounded like a pile of invisible cymbals making an unnecessary din, or communist evil. But substitute "lots of money" in place of sterilization and "HMO/single payer/insurance" for government medical center and Nourse's book is amazingly prescient. Some of these fears have become founded - a two class system of those who have and don't have healthcare, "free" clinics = black market, mutated man-made super virus, children with poor immune defense systems, etc. We have yet to see if nationalized healthcare will produce such a staggering social program like the one in The Bladerunner, but we know that China ran such an experiment for a long time. To think of this story loosely and in global terms is important because disease is transmitted in exactly that way.

Two of my most favorite artists ever, Eiko Ishioka (Dracula, The Cell, Beijing Olympics and oh! so much more) and Julie Taymor (Lion King, Titus) have ganged up to produce the ubernerdy Turn off the Dark, a singing, dancing Broadway show based on Spider-Man. To all my geeky girls who played Street Fighter and loved Les Miserables, this is the one for us.

Oh yeah, Bono and The Edge do the music. Meh.

Deadly apropos reality TV Sci-Fi satire with a fun, absurdist twist at the end. Directed by Elio Petri, whose work is really worth unearthing, the film is  based on Robert Sheckley's short story, The Seventh Victim, but was later novelized as The 10th Victim. Echoes of the assassin game can be found in Alistair Reynolds novel, Revelation Space, but with much less wit and much more hubris.

Sleeping Beauty Disney Castle, Tron-ified




Joseph Kosinki, Architect of the New Tron Film

 

"Dalek: You cannot hurt me. I am immortal.

Rose: You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space. Every single atom of your existence. And I divide them."  -- Dr. Who, Season 1 Finale