Major spoilers including surprise ending so come back and read later.
A thoughtful space opera, where we once again suspend disbelief and imagine a universe with faster than light drives and antigravity in order to perform thought experiments about a society kind of like the U.S. and its relations with countries kind of like terrestrial 3rd world nations. (Think drone-fired rockets tearing into a Yemeni village X infinity.)
Let's get right to ruining the twist ending: the main character, a mercenary, doesn't know that he's actually his evil half-brother. This explains much of the character's élan regarding violence, but after you've lived with him for many chapters, you can't accept that he would be capable of the sadistically cruel act against his family and human decency that constitutes his main repressed memory. Banks has prepared us for the effect such sadism would have on the character we think we're channeling but not for how the act squares with the life of the character we're actually channeling. We see the evil half-brother in some childhood flashbacks but he's not particularly evil. When did he become a flayer, exactly?
The vignettes of the merc's life (going forward and backward in alternating chapters) contain some enjoyable, short-story-like writing: in one of the best episodes, the ambivalent warrior tries to live the life of a simple, solitary beachcomber and ends up getting entangled with some local nomads, leading to, whoops, death and violence. Banks excels at Deus ex Machina situations where a primitive society's claustrophobic reality smacks up against those hellish drones from the sky (also called drones in his books), or even just the superior training and experience of an "advanced" outsider. This is a staple of TV shows from Star Trek to Firefly but well-imagined and -described by Banks. Examples in Use of Weapons include scenes where a flying, briefcase-sized drone annihilates a pack of desperados on horseback and later in the book, the same drone performs brain surgery on a stroke victim in a backwoods-planet's hospital. These scenes are meant to thrill but plenty about the book questions the wisdom of the "Western civ" stand-ins' flagrant, repeated violations of Star Trek's prime directive not to interfere in developing cultures. The directive of Banks' (literally with a capital-C) Culture civilization is actually to interfere, often, with lesser beings but to do it discreetly, through mercenaries. Hence their recruitment of the military genius headcase who is our main point-of-view character.
books
how we buried the '70s
From Holding Out For a Hero, a short book in blog form by Carl Neville about steroids, yuppies, Reaganism, and especially Schwarzenegger:
Westworld along with many of the Sci-Fi movies of the Seventies still partakes of a certain degree of technological utopianism, something which has evidently completely evaporated by the early eighties. Westworld still has all the trappings (as do its inferior sequel Futureworld, Donald Cammell's Demon Seed, Logans' Run. Thx 1138, A boy and his dog or Zardoz) of the future as Apollonian and post-scarcity, a techno-utopian Age of Aquarius ruled by benign and enlightened beings, though often of course this seeming paradise is built on a dirty secret which the Nietzschean central characters in their drive for truth must unmask while (to use the ugly and elitist contemporary expression) the "Sheeple" are content to unquestioningly consume and gratify their newly liberated desires. The out-and-out dystopian trend probably starts with George Miller's hugely influential Mad Max, set in a violent post peak-oil world in which civilization has collapsed and continued in the wildly successful sequel The Road Warrior from which almost all later dystopian cyberpunk/Sci-Fi takes its look.
Neville's blog/book reviews other pop culture tropes through the lens of this paragraph from his intro:
Neoliberalism may have heralded a rebirth in America, seen it rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the 70s, but this is a baptism in steroids, cocaine (and cocaine money) egotism, debt, cheap oil (and Arab oil money funnelled through American banks) deregulation and offshoring. In what sense are the questions of the Seventies, the environmental and social concerns, the Limits to Growth posed by the 1977 Club of Rome reports, actually addressed and solved by Neoliberalism, and to what degree are they simply ignored, held at bay in an essentially infantile thirty-year fantasy of growth and restructuring, that collapses along with the housing bubble of the late 00s? It seems that the financial crises along with numerous jobless recoveries have left us faced with the same set of problems that Neoliberalism was assumed to have permanently solved. The end of class struggle, the move away from manufacturing to services in the "core" economies (there is much talk at the moment of needing to "rebalance" the economy) the end of boom and bust.
Neville keeps coming back to Schwarzenegger as symbol of this inflated denial of the '70s critiques. A key text is 1977's Stay Hungry (a fascinating film, worth looking up):
Stay Hungry's vision is one of a compact between old money and the less nihilistic, more disciplined elements of the hippie/freak revolution. What it also offers is the sobering truth that generational conflicts, rejection of authority and struggles for independence and "new spaces" are often merely cyclical conflicts within capitalism, moments of rupture when the struggle for succession takes on a de-territorializing or anti-oedipal aspect that doesn’t offer any kind of definitive break with the past, but simply seeks to reconstitute old practices on new ground and in new guises.
Stay Hungry tells you that the entrepreneur, this fabled figure, the apotheosis of mankind for the Austrians, the Atlas upon whose shoulders all lesser men stand for the Randians, is not a heroic or titanic figure, not a Nietzschean self-creator, but a slumming, peevish child of privilege whose revolt consists in rejecting the family business and instead using daddy’s money and influence to do some cool shit of his own.
You start off with the Flat Earth News, a whole new business model and a bunch of wacky friends, but all the same you end up with Foxxcon.
In this passage Neville conflates the Jeff Bridges character (child of privilege) with his role model in the film (the bodybuilding, violin-playing reluctant ubermensch played by Schwarzenegger).
Afterthought: A Boy and His Dog, based on a Harlan Ellison story, had as its setting a Mad Max-like desert wasteland but there was still a society living well (if freakishly) in caves underground. Even Max had civil society, with a police force. Road Warrior was the one to really jettison all trappings of advanced civilization and imagine humans living the Hobbesian life in a vast junkyard. This is the image the current Galt-fantasists invoked when they saw images from Hurricane Katrina on TV.
Update, May 2018: Neville's blog was published by Zero Books under the less interesting but apparently copyright-safe title No More Heroes. The blog disappeared for a while but when I checked this month I noticed it was back online.
Doris Piserchia e-books; Doomtime reviewed
Left: Doris Piserchia, Doomtime paperback cover (DAW books, 1981)
Right: E-book cover for the same book (Gateway books, 2012)
Much of the writing about science fiction writer Doris Piserchia laments her disappearance from publishing in the mid '80s and the subsequent, unjust lack of interest in reprinting her thirteen novels: brilliant and rather eccentric imaginative tales appearing between 1973 and 1983, graced with pulp covers (see above left). SF critic John Clute classified Piserchia as a "new wave" writer, which would put her in the august company of Delany, LeGuin, Aldiss, et al, although she worked in several genres (subversively).
Now, at last, six of her novels have been published as e-books by Gateway, a subsidiary of Hachette UK, with more promised to come soon. Still classed as science fiction, but we take our gains as they come.
In case you're wondering what's up with that orange-haired man, that's Creed, denizen of a far future Earth where humans are bit players in a struggle between two malevolent, Everest-sized trees. The roots and shoots of Tedron and Krake (as they are known) straddle the entire globe, and fight like slowly-writhing snakes in areas of contested geography. An Amazon reader review details some of the bizarre qualities of the world in Doomtime:
...fungus creatures which meld with humans, strange fungus pools that unravel people's psyches, humans sucked dry by Tedron and Krake, humans mutated beyond recognition by the trees, humans turning into trees, fuzzy smallish fungus which grow around peoples' necks, addicted humans stuck in hibernating trees desperate to meld...
The most disturbing element of this novel is how little the humans have control over their situation. Entire groups of humans are transformed by these trees: humans are in no way the superior lifeforms. Piserchia is the master at showing instead of telling, often in an offhand matter of fact way which intensifies the dread and unease. This has to be one of the more unusual and disturbing worlds I've ever read about.
The book has a quality of lucid dreaming but always with a sense of structure and purpose.
As we kill off species and muck about in the gene pool it's not impossible to imagine a future Earth where nature shifts the balance and humans bow to sentient super-colony organisms, a la Kudzu vines run amuck. But environmental jeremiad lies more or less in the background here; Piserchia ponders what people will be like in this changed world and it's mostly an ignoble bunch: addicts and vainglorious asses stumbling around in a fog of hallucinatory confusion. Creed is our POV character who gradually gets a clue and starts considering what can be done about the trees, using bits of super-powered "old tech" left around the landscape by his remote ancestors. That's a classic genre hook but it's those imaginative details told in an offhand tone that make this "lit."
Donald Wandrei's novels
Here's a puzzler: you have Centipede Press, a maker of collectible fantasy and SF books, retailing for $100 and up.
Four of their titles have been reviewed in depth on Amazon by Nguyên, who has written no other reviews except these.
Nguyên clearly isn't the publisher's nephew because the reviews are frank and mostly not too kind: Nguyên complains about typos, image quality, and even the press's choice of authors.
I was planning to write about the book above, containing the two novels written by Donald Wandrei -- a pulp writer of the 1930s, friend and correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft, and co-founder of the publisher Arkham House -- and discovered Nguyên's review, which I mostly agree with. Instead of a review, here are some sticky-notes to Nguyên's takedowns of Wandrei's novels (both written by Wandrei in the early 1930s, when he was in his early 20s):
Dead Titans, Waken! Parts of this resemble Lovecraft's classic tale "The Call of Cthulhu" but it's not fair to call it a knock-off. The first half presents a detective story (I liked these chapters best) centered on the finding of a mysterious green stone in an English cemetery and the calamities it causes, a middle section has a "Cthulhu"-esque news clipping montage describing the increasing agitation of savages and psychopaths the world over as they anticipate the return of monstrous stellar beings to Earth, and then the tone abruptly shifts to a rhapsodic diary where the previously clinical professor-protagonist talks about his deceased wife (for no apparent reason), his dreams, and his eventual sorcerous showdown with those astral Titans on Easter Island. The narrator is then flung 500,000 years into the future into a heavily-populated, urban, barely recognizable Earth, just in time for the Titans to return again.
Invisible Sun. Nguyên nails one problem with this well-written, never-before-published book, which is that its main character (clearly modeled on the author) is very unlikable. For a couple of hundred pages we share the childhood memories and late adolescent thoughts of this brilliant, poetic, obsessive, self-absorbed young jerk who, the first time he falls in love and is rejected, must [SPOILERS} kill the girl and himself, bringing his (and the reader's) agony to a merciful end. The book intriguingly chronicles the bohemian smart set in the US upper midwest during the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Paris debaucheries have nothing on Wandrei's description of the "pyjama party" that unravels our narrator's life. This is real '60s swinger stuff, taking place in the 1920s. Wandrei's friends in the fantasy community (particularly August Derleth) were so critical of this book that Wandrei permanently shelved it. Structure-wise, it could use some tightening but for present-day readers, it is an intense document of a recluse-in-the-making who didn't kill himself, a man clearly aware of Modern literature but lacking a "circle" that could nurture this kind of writing.
Wandrei wrote Invisible Sun while living in New York City, and he worked for Dutton and other publishers, but he cites as literary inspirations Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams and the poetry of fellow fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, as opposed to Hemingway, Faulkner, et al. Wandrei also mentions Swinburne in the book and seems more generally drawn to the Romantic tradition than the strain of factual, existentialist-style writing emerging in the '20s, yet his book has changes of tone and narrative voice as self-conscious as some of Faulkner's experiments. Invisible Sun is modernist in its fragmented, kaleidoscopic style and intermittent use of stream of consciousness but outsider-ish in its lack of participation in a critical tradition where those disjunctions could be understood and evaluated. They seem to be ideas Wandrei plucked out of the air.
We read the fantasy pulps today for their flights of wild poetic description and links to the Gothic tradition and those are Wandrei's strong suits as a writer, with added increments of science-fiction rationalism making the narratives more plausible, a la Lovecraft. A memorable passage in Dead Titans describes a vault deep under that British cemetery where the narrator discovers an enormous heap of human bones. For close to a page, his scientist's eye keeps spotting older and older specimens of skeletons in the pile, and he takes us on a tour of superhuman observation going back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time into the realms of various ape-like proto-humans, presumably all victims of sacrifice or self-sacrifice. This is a marvelously creepy way to depict ancient evils, dwarfing literate humanity's pitiful, striving seconds on the geological clock.
See also: earlier post on Wandrei and the Lovecraft copyrights.
new Roadside Picnic translation; Stalker compared
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's science fiction novel Roadside Picnic resurfaced last year in a new English translation. Highly recommended -- it's a much smoother read than the 1970s version's probably more literal transcription from the original Russian. If you haven't read either, the plot centers on a mysterious region of earth called The Zone, left behind after a visit by extraterrestrials who never communicated with us except by means of the junk they left behind, which one scientist hypothesizes might be the refuse of the titular "picnic" -- meaningless to the aliens but profound to us ants. "Stalkers" are humans who go into the Zone and comb through the aliens' garbage, which is full of lethal traps. Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker was loosely adapted from the book.
Some of the new translation's ease of reading comes from replacing '70s slang with current idioms (no one said "he was checking her out" back then, not that we really needed that) but there is also a conscious attempt to streamline the prose. What's missing is a certain poetry/difficulty/awkwardness that contributed to the feeling that you were reading a novel from a truly foreign culture, with different mores and certainly a different political system. The Strugatskys wrote the book as if it took place in the West (possibly the Pacific Northwest, either in the US or Canada) but its intrusive and bumbling bureaucrats seem very "Soviet" -- less so in the current version but the taint is still there. As for the missing poetry, for example, "mosquito mange" is now "bug trap." It's a much clearer and more accurate mental image of the phenomenon the Strugatskys describe -- invisible "graviconcentrates" that cause a body or thrown object in the Zone to move (or even be held in place) in a manner contrary to physical laws, as opposed to a parasite-borne skin disease -- but part of the pleasure of the original translation was wrapping your mind around strange phrases that correlated (or didn't) to unearthly phenomena beyond your comprehension.
That's what the book is about, and it's already suffered one major misinterpretation in Tarkovsky's film, or rather, self-misinterpretation, since the Strugatskys wrote that film's screenplay, several years after their book. Tarkovsky treats the novel as a religious allegory (and later claimed that the only thing the film had in common with the book were the terms "Zone" and Stalker") whereas the book is having none of that. What happens in the book's Zone -- a blighted area oddly prescient of the landscape around Chernobyl, filled with those eldritch artifacts -- may be strange but it's not subjective based on one's degree of religious belief, as it is in Tarkovsky's ambiguous film. The reader is veritably assaulted throughout the book with the objects, effects, and aftereffects of the Zone, described in minute detail. These range from benevolent technologies that the stalkers pull out at great personal risk, such as perpetual batteries, to highly dangerous products such as "hell slime" and "heat lamps," sought by criminals and unscrupulous governments, to behavioral horrors such as the mutant children of stalkers, the revived corpses from cemeteries near the Zone, or the epidemic of lethal bad luck that follows people who live too near the alien visitation area and later emigrate to other cities. The book asks how much we would change as humans in response to so much mystery and horror, or even what it means to be human when the Zone has seemingly limitless potential to transform us into something else.
Tarkovsky had no special effects budget (or desire to use them) so the "alien-ness" of the film's Zone is suggested with eerie synthesizer music and close-cropped shots of an exotically dilapidated, post-industrial landscape in the former Soviet Union. Nothing much happens in the movie, and our fear of the Zone is mostly a matter of pregnant silences and the lugubrious Stalker informing us how dangerous it all is. The movie has a "surprise" ending that tells us the Zone is real, which it greatly needed after two hours of watching three middle-aged men stumbling around the woods and confessing their anxieties. The movie's big payoff -- entering "the room" where supposedly any wish is granted -- is an anticlimactic shaggy dog tale. The movie even has a dog wandering around the Zone that accompanies the Stalker back to his squalid apartment (whereas animals in the book's Zone tend to be crushed flat). The movie exudes atmosphere and its sound and cinematography are stunning but -- let's say it -- it's no Roadside Picnic.