books

Notes on recent reading:

Fear (1951) and Final Blackout (1940), by L. Ron Hubbard. These pulp-era gems haven't lost their sparkle, especially if you can read them objectively as fiction and not as chapters in the larger story of the creator's life (although they can be approached either way). A project for science fiction studies would be a compare-and-contrast with an unlikely peer, Philip K. Dick. Final Blackout presents an alternate-future story a la Dick's Man in the High Castle, with a libertarian drift. In Dick's book the Germans and Japanese have won World War II and divided the US into eastern and western provinces dominated by the respective victors. In Hubbard's yarn, the US stays out of "the war" while Europe becomes a depopulated wasteland.

Both stories have more on their minds than military what-ifs. Dick revels in the Borgesian play of intersecting parallel worlds and Zen consciousness in his Occupied California, while Hubbard's tough-guy survivor character, The Lieutenant, achieves a kind of agrarian utopia in a UK slowly rebuilding from its ashes. By means of strong leadership, without the corrupt bureaucracy that fueled the war in the first place, the Lieutenant keeps the people busy and happy with reconstruction tasks, never allowing the jobs to harden into permanent organizational structures. He decides to forgo factories and re-industrialization, leading to a new, pleasant England resembling Tolkien's Shire, minus hobbits. Complications arise when the United States shows up with a flotilla of sleek, high-tech warships, saying that it wants to "help" war-ravaged England but actually planning to use it as dumping ground for its own burgeoning population. Hubbard sympathizes with the agrarians despite reverent descriptions of the US's Buck Rogers technology. The author's blueprint for leadership of an unorthodox group is of interest to the modern reader because, well, you know.

It's difficult to talk about Hubbard's other "classic" novella, Fear, without giving too much away. It starts off somewhat similarly to Fritz Lieber's novel Conjure Wife (1940), with a small town college setting and a professor-protagonist who scoffs at the existence of demons and magic. Soon after, step by step, inch by nerve-jangling inch, the main character's ordered life begins to come unraveled. While Lieber's professor eventually pushes back against the occult forces with the help of his wife's superior lore, Hubbard's character ventures deeper into the Dick-ian (or what later became thought of as Dick-ian) territory of a waking nightmare that may or may not be solipsistic.

The Santaroga Barrier (1968), by Frank Herbert. I lost all my Dune paperbacks but still own this book and gave it a re-read recently. A philosophical science fiction horror story, written in the mid-'60s as interest in psychotropic substances was, shall we say, peaking, once again presents us with a dilemma of an unorthodox group. The gripping tale keeps the reader's sympathies ping-ponging back and forth between the small town with enlightened ideals that has a repressive need for consensus and the wider world with messy uncertainties that nonetheless belongs to exploiters and propagandizers. Events don't reach the Waco/Branch Davidian stage but that end game is never far from the current reader's mind. With a minimum of speechmaking, and mostly through the unfolding of its suspense plot, Herbert opposes the idea of large, transcendent, archetypal knowledge not channeled through language -- poetic beauty as seen by the mystics, which sounds like schizophrenic ravings when encountered by outsiders -- and the dull, weaponized language and manipulative metrics employed in TV and marketing. By the end, there is no shortage of doubt regarding the town's methods of preserving its collective innocent honesty.

The Lonely Silver Rain (1985), by John D. MacDonald. The last Travis McGee book meant to introduce a new chapter to the long-running character's saga: "Trav" discovers he has a daughter out of wedlock, who gives him renewed purpose. Henceforth (we're led to believe) he'll be doing his urban detective "salvage" work -- taking 50% of funds he recovers from clients who have been swindled, conning the con men, as it were -- to put money in his daughter's trust, and not just working for his own selfish pleasure. Then the author died, at age 70, leaving the series on a melancholy note despite this 11th hour revelation. Trav does quite a bit of self-lacerating, aided by his mouthy offspring, about his "adolescent" lifestyle. Living on a houseboat, engaging in serial romantic relationships (Trav was too noble to be a mere "womanizer"), enjoying the music collection he recently laboriously converted from vinyl to cassette tape (ah, 1985, when could you be more disastrously wrong in your consumer choices). In the earlier books MacDonald included eloquent justifications that the 9-to-5 life was actually horribly worse -- this being the same regimented and materialistic America that disgusted the town of Santaroga and menaced Hubbard's Lieutenant -- but there's none of that here. Unquestionably the series presented escapist fare for the deskbound, steeped in assumptions of the Mad Men era, but surely there was a way to evolve the character without indicting, as mere immaturity, the reader's dreams of leaving the rat race.

Am continuing to flesh out the Charles Fort post, post-RSS publication. Made an addendum yesterday and here's a revised version of that:

It must be Fortean non-coincidence that two days before I posted (without my seeing it) the Smithsonian had an article about the connections of earthquakes and lights in the sky, a topic Fort covered extensively in his book Lo!, published in 1931. At that point science had more excuses than explanations for a phenomenon eyewitnesses had been reporting for centuries, so Fort took the ball and ran with a wild theory of connections among earthquakes, lights in the sky, and stars that went nova around the same time. In order to make this work we had to believe that scientists were also misleading us about the speed of light and that's where Fort's thought experiment fell apart. Nevertheless, science still has only its own untested fancies about why lights in the sky appear before, during, or after an earthquake. Fort would have had great fun with this passage from the Smithsonian article:

“The process starts deep in the crust, where rocks are subjected to high stress levels, prior to the stress being released to produce an earthquake,” Thériault says. In certain types of rock, Freund has shown in lab experiments, this stress can break apart pairs of negatively-charged oxygen atoms that are linked together in peroxy bonds.

When this happens, each of the oxygen ions are released, and these can flow through cracks in the rock, towards the surface. At that point, the thinking goes, high-density groups of these charged atoms will ionize pockets of air, forming a charged gas (a plasma) that emits light. [emphasis added]

"The thinking goes." Peroxy bonds.. plasma... And we are also told of luminous owls.

It's somewhat mind-blowing that Fort was writing about the Smithsonian's topic 80 years ago, based on solitary, assiduous research of newspaper accounts, and institutional science is only just getting around to acknowledging a connection. The learned professors still aren't being humble about barely having a clue of an explanation, something Fort complains about throughout his books.

Figuring that Theodore Dreiser, Jack Womack and Paul Thomas Anderson can't all be wrong, am delving into Charles Fort's books, which are available online (I prefer the e-books, which are available for 99 cents each). Have known about Fort and Fortean phenomena (rains of frogs, etc.) for decades but was curious about the actual writing.
Enjoyed the first half of Lo! but then he spent the second half trying to convince me that earthquakes, strange lights in the sky, and stellar novae were all connected, and that it was just as reasonable as not to assume that earth hangs immobile within a shell of stars much nearer than we're told they are. This was written in the late 1920s, but c'mon.
Am now reading Wild Talents and this passage from Chap. 10 leapt out at me from the e-reader, while on the subway:

My suspicion is that we've got everything reversed; or that all things that have the sanction of scientists, or that are in agreement with their myths, are ghosts; and that things called "ghosts," are, because they are not in agreement with the spooks of science, the more nearly real things. I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right -- that there is a ghost-world -- but that it is our existence -- that when spirits die they become human beings.

I now have a theory that once upon a time, we were real and alive, but departed into this state that we call "existence" -- that we have carried over with us from the real existence, from which we died, the ideas of Truth, and of axioms and principles and generalizations -- ideas that really meant something when we were really alive, but that, of course, now, in our phantom-existence -- which is demonstratable by any X-ray photograph of any of us -- can have only phantom-meaning -- so then our never-ending, but always frustrated search for our lost reality. We come upon chimera and mystification, but persistently have beliefs, as retentions from an experience in which there were things to believe in. I'd not say that all of us are directly ghosts: most of us may be the descendants of the departed from a real existence, who, in our spook-world, pseudo-propagated.

That's damn good.

Addendum: But let's be clear that Fort isn't a mystic, except to the extent he makes a personal religion out of contrarian argument. Nowadays his thinking might be called post-structuralist, focusing on paranormal phenomena more for what they say about the failures of enlightened science to explain them than what Jack Womack calls "the Woo-woo." Fort scoffs at official excuses such as "it must have been product of mass hypnosis" and spins amusing counter-theories; the above passage is an especially good example. Critical satire, anticipating Philip K. Dick's dream realities by some twenty years.

Addendum 2: And it must be Fortean non-coincidence that two days before I wrote this (without my seeing it) the Smithsonian had an article about the connections of earthquakes and lights in the sky (but not stars going nova). Fort would have had great fun with

“The process starts deep in the crust, where rocks are subjected to high stress levels, prior to the stress being released to produce an earthquake,” Thériault says. In certain types of rock, Freund has shown in lab experiments, this stress can break apart pairs of negatively-charged oxygen atoms that are linked together in peroxy bonds.

When this happens, each of the oxygen ions are released, and these can flow through cracks in the rock, towards the surface. At that point, the thinking goes, high-density groups of these charged atoms will ionize pockets of air, forming a charged gas (a plasma) that emits light. [emphasis added]

"The thinking goes." Peroxy bonds.. plasma... And we are also told of luminous owls.

More