All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE EMPEROR OF GONDWANALAND AND OTHER STORIES by Paul Di Filippo:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/24/2006]
In the 09/09/05 issue of the MT VOID, I talked about Jorge Luis Borges at some length including a long commentary on "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". At one point I suggested that if someone wanted to do a theme anthology, they could do worse than one of stories inspired by Borges. Well, they can add the title story of THE EMPEROR OF GONDWANALAND AND OTHER STORIES by Paul Di Filippo (ISBN 1-56025-665-6) to their table of contents. In "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", Mutt Spindler starts looking at web pages for micro-nations and finds a site for Gondwanaland. This site was far more elaborate than other micro-nation sites, with a wealth of detail and dozens of boards discussing all aspects of life in Gondwanaland. At first Mutt thinks that these are all people who are even more fanatic than Civil War re-enactors or Renaissance Faire types, but soon he begins to think there is something more. Certainly even at this point the elaborate imagined world is reminiscent of Borges's story about Tlon, but when Spindler goes to Buenos Aires to find the "Funes district of Tlun" I think we can conclude that Borges was a major inspiration for this story. (Strangely, Di Filippo mentions a Steely Dan song as inspiration in his introduction, but not Borges.)
To order The Emperor of Gondwanaland from amazon.com, click here.
FUZZY DICE by Paul Di Filippo:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/30/2004]
Paul Di Filippo's FUZZY DICE (ISBN 1-902880-66-8, PS Publishing, UK) is one of a new sub-genre of science fiction written by Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, and Clifford Pickover (among others), though its roots go back to Edwin Abbott. If the sub-genre has a name, I don't know it. It's not "mathematical science fiction" per se, but that's a big part of it. I would describe it as science fiction with a heavy underpinning of quantum physics and geometry. In FUZZY DICE, the narrator is given a yo-yo and a Pez dispenser that let him travel between alternate worlds (as in the multiple- worlds theory of quantum physics). One of them, a cellular automata world, has a lot of similarities to Abbott's FLATLAND. Another is a more traditional alternate world in which hippies have taken control. (Rudy Rucker provides the introduction with a summary on page five of all the worlds visited. Don't read it first.)
All this is imbued with a sense of humor. For example, when the narrator is first visited by the being who gives him the yo-yo and dispenser, a creature he describes as "a self-similar metal shrub of fractal dimensions", he responds thusly: "I scooted back, bumping into a rack of abridged audiobooks. 'No way! I don't even know why I'm listening to you! You're probably just a hallucination anyhow. I knew I was on the verge of cracking up, but I didn't realize I had finally gone over the edge! Or maybe I fell asleep reading that boring science book. An undigested blot of Egg McMuffin, that's what you are!' I slapped myself across the face to wait myself up, and it hurt like the dickens."
Groan.
This was published as a limited edition in Britain, so whether it will ever become widely available in the United States or even Canada is unclear. (Canada is a good place to buy British books-- the exchange rate is reasonable, and the shipping charges are much better. I usually save up my purchases for our annual trip to Toronto, but I have also used http://www.chapters.ca.)
To order Fuzzy Dice from amazon.com, click here.
COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED by Jared Diamond:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/29/2005]
Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED (ISBN 0-670-03337-5) is not as well structured as his earlier book, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES. Diamond hops around quite a bit in both time and space in COLLAPSE, and (perhaps more seriously) in what factors he examines. So when he looks at past societies, he goes from Easter Island (failed) to Pitcairn Island (failed) to the Anasazi (failed) to the Mayas (failed) to Iceland (succeeded) to Greenland (failed) to New Guinea (succeeded). There is no chronological or geographic progression, nor is there a continuum of factors here. (The five factors he cites and examines are ecological damage by humans, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly neighbors, and a society's responses to problems.) He also spends a lot of time discussing Montana's Bitterroot Valley as an example of how a current society is responding to problems. In addition to the lack of "flow", I thought Diamond spent a lot of time repeating himself. I understand that he wanted to show the similarities and differences in the various collapses, but I found myself skipping chunks of material that I felt he had already presented in earlier chapters. Diamond is not anti-big- business, but he is an environmentalist. A lot of the later part of the book discusses how what is good for the environment can be good for business, but I can't say I left feeling wildly optimistic.
To order Collapse from amazon.com, click here.
"The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/20/2007]
In preparation for the film NEXT, I read the story upon which it is based, "The Golden Man". This appeared in IF in 1954, and was reprinted in Judith Merril's BEYOND THE BARRIERS OF SPACE AND TIME that same year. Of it, Merril wrote, "The theme [of predestination vs. free will] is handled here, with unusual dramatic impact, by a young West Coast writer of exceptional promise." And who was that writer? Philip K. Dick, now so esteemed that he is the only modern science fiction author whose name is actually used to promote movies based on their work. I am sure there is some anthology or collection in print with this story, as Hollywood usually makes sure that there is advertising for their films even in bookstores.
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/02/2006]
Our science fiction group read Philip K. Dick's classic alternate history, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (ISBN 0-679-74067-8). Some things became more meaningful for me after our Hawaiian trip, such as references to the Wyndham-Matson shipping line. But the I Ching references are still something I assume Dick got right, because I am not so familiar with it that I can recognize the hexagrams. The one or two I looked up were accurate, but more importantly, Dick relied heavily on the I Ching in writing the book (making one of the characters semi-autobiographical in that regrad anyway). Characters use both the yarrow sticks and the coins, though the coins are much easier to use. The alternate history aspect was very unusual at the time, but people reading it now may well ask what the fuss is about. And Dick has decided to show the Japanese influence on society by having his characters talk and think in the stereotypical pidgin English spoken by Japanese characters of the time ("Essential to avoid politics. ... Yet they might arise. ...Mr. Baynes, sir, they say Herr Boormann is quite ill. That a new Reichs Chancellor will be chosen by the Partei this autumn. Rumor only? So much secrecy, alas, between Pacific and Reich."). One could argue, I suppose, that if the Japanese were the conquerors, they would not feel any need to learn perfect English (did the British learn Hindi in India?), but why would the American characters be talking and thinking like this?
We got somewhat side-tracked in a discussion of what the title "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" (the title of the book within the book) is supposed to mean. It comes from Ecclesiastes 12:5, but even that source seems to have as many interpretations as there are interpreters.
The entire verse reads in the King James Version as "Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets;"
The one phrase is variously rendered as:
ASV/KJV/WBS/WEB: the grasshopper shall be a burden
BBE: the least thing is a weight
DBY: the grasshopper is a burden
JPS: the grasshopper shall drag itself along
YLT: the grasshopper is become a burden
(The Vulgate refers to "lucusta", or locust, but everyone translates it as grasshopper.)
Everyone agree that the verse as a whole, refers to old age, but the precise meaning of this phrase is unclear. The Geneva Study Bible annotates the phrase as "They will be able to bear nothing." Wesley's Notes says, "They cannot endure the least burden, being indeed a burden to themselves." Another commentator says that the grasshopper is used as a metaphor because it resembles a man on crutches.
Of course, none of this got us any closer to what this meant as the book title, unless it is the notion just as even a small a thing as a grasshopper can be impossible to carry, so even the smallest change in reality may be impossible to accomplish.
To order The Man in the High Castle from amazon.com, click here.
"The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2008]
Our science fiction group read the short story "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick. This tied in with the lectures on values Mark and I have been listening to, particularly those on the legal system and punishment. One of the big questions in the lectures was why the crime of "attempted X" almost always carries a lesser penalty than the crime of "X" and whether this is justifiable. I cannot remember if it discussed the crime of conspiracy as well, but that certainly fits in with Dick's notion of Pre-Crime, the Pre-Crime police force implementing what might be considered a very well- informed campaign against conspiracies, even those of which the person or persons involved may be unaware. Manzanar, Guantanamo Bay, ...,--all these seem like merely imperfect implementations of Dick's Pre-Crime. (And though Dick's hero makes sure Pre-Crime survives--for the good of society--it is worth noting that he himself manages to escape it and head for the frontier, where presumably things are more like the Wild West and Pre-Crime doesn't exist.)
Of course, the scientific (or rather logical) basis of precognition has some flaws. For the story to work at all, we must accept that precognition is accurate. Assume the pre- cogs see a murder and Pre-Crime arrests the (potential) murderer, thereby preventing the murder. But then their prediction is not accurate, because there is no murder. There seem to be only two possibilities. One, preventing the crime changes the timeline to one not seen by the pre-cogs. Or two, the precognition is merely probabilistic. Neither one sounds very convincing, although either explanation is consistent with Dick's notion of a minority report.
A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/03/2006]
Our science fiction discussion book this month was A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K. Dick (ISBN 1-400-09690-1). My first observation is that in 1977, Dick felt it necessary to explain that a 7-11 grocery store was part of a chain in California. He also predicted plastic houses by 1994. (He was somewhat more on target with security guards checking for what is basically identity theft.) But I must admit I gave up after a hundred pages, because it seemed basically unreadable.
To order A Scanner Darkly from amazon.com, click here.
UBIK by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/30/2005]
Our science fiction discussion group read UBIK by Philip K. Dick (ISBN 0-679-73664-6), a novel that we all agreed was fairly incomprehensible the first time through. At Philcon, the Philip K. Dick panel mentioned that John Carpenter's film DARK STAR seemed heavily inspired by this novel, and indeed the film does have the consultations with the dead (who seem to be in some sort of suspended animation even though they are dead), and the talking elevator (and bomb) in the film are similar to the voice of Joe Chip's apartment. Dick is an author we will be re-visiting; THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE was chosen for April.
To order Ubik from amazon.com, click here.
AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION by Charles Dickens:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/22/2005]
Charles Dickens's AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION (ISBN 0-14-043077-6) is about Dickens's 1842 trip to the United States, during which he visited prisons, workhouses, orphanages, and asylums, and wrote about them. Sometimes he found them models that England should emulate; other times he found them horrific. He says very little about society or social events. I'm sure she attended some, but his goal in describing his trip was more social reform than to write a 19th century "People" magazine. He spends far more time describing the clothing of the working class than of the cream of society, and points out the flaws he sees. For example, he notes "Some Southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and swells with Sultan pomp and power." And as the book goes on, he finds more to complain about, from the practice of chewing (and spitting) tobacco to the practice of slavery, which he finds abhorrent. Yet he too has his blind spots. He describes traveling through some areas where he was served by slaves, and also through women's prisons, yet later says, "Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention" (page 192). What he seems to mean is no white woman, and for that matter, probably only those of the higher classes.
But I do love his description of the sleeping arrangements on one of the canal boats he took: "I found suspended on either side of the cabin three long tiers of hanging book-shelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning" (page 193).
And Dickens, or rather his guide book, certainly disagrees with Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft when it says of the statue The Spirit of Justice in the Capitol, "the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the opposite extreme" (page 165).
This book serves as a good way of seeing the social philosophy and attitudes informing Dickens's novels as well as an outsider's portrait of life in mid-19th century America. (Alexis de Tocqueville traveled a bit earlier, about 1831. He also came to inspect the prisons and workhouses, but wrote about considerably more.)
To order American Notes for General Circulation from amazon.com, click here.
BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/24/2006]
BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens (ISBN 0-553-21223-0) seems to be the current "classic du jour" with both an eight-hour "Masterpiece Theatre" presentation and a five-hour BBC radio adaptation in the last few months. I figured I should read the book first, before watching or listening to either of those, but after 200 pages (out of 800 pages total), I decided that Dickens was definitely paid by the word, and this was way too padded out for me. Oh, there were some fine passages, such as "Sir Leicester is generally in a complacent state, and rarely bored. When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man to have so inexhaustible a subject. After reading his letters, he leans back in his corner of the carriage and generally reviews his importance to society." [Chapter 12]
Nothing so displays the poles of wonderful reading versus repetition (to me anyway) as Dickens's first two paragraphs. The first, about London in November, is as evocative of a scene as any; the second, about the fog, is merely repetitious:
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street- corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier- brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
In fairness, I should say that Vladimir Nabokov thinks this repetition is a positive thing, saying in his LECTURES ON LITERATURE, "Dickens enjoys a kind of incantation, a verbal formula verbally recited with growing emphasis; an oratorical, forensic device." I disagree with this (as well as with Nabokov's use of the semi-colon). ("Forensic" seemed to be wrong also, but it is defined in my somewhat older dictionary as "suitable for debate; rhetorical".) Then again, maybe Dickens is a *man*'s author, since Nabokov starts his lecture (given at Cornell when that university was all-male, one presumes) by saying, "In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port."
In spite of Nabokov's words, I have liked other Dickens, but perhaps the fact that this not only drags on and on, but that the plot is about a lawsuit that drags on and on, make it seem far more tedious than, say, A TALE OF TWO CITIES.
To order Bleak House from amazon.com, click here.
BOUND TO PLEASE: ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS AND THEIR BOOKS by Michael Dirda:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/01/2005]
Michael Dirda's BOUND TO PLEASE: ESSAYS ON GREAT WRITERS AND THEIR BOOKS (ISBN 0-393-05757-7) is a collection of some of his book reviews from 1978 to 2003. One of things worth noting is that Dirda does not review only "literary" fiction or non- fiction. He includes an entire section of "Serious Entertainers" (Vernon Lee, Avram Davidson, Terry Pratchett, and a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs), as well as an appendix of a basic reading list of science fiction. Lest you think this is just setting up a "ghetto" for this, I'll point out that Dirda includes Philip Pullman's THE AMBER SPYGLASS in his "Writers of Our Time" section.
One problem from a reader's perspective is that this is not a good book to read from the library. There are probably close to a hundred reviews here, and after many of them you will want to stop, think about it, go out and find the book(s) discussed, and read them before going on to the next review. Given the usual lending periods of most libraries, this will not be possible. (Of course, from the writer's perspective, this just means that people are more likely to buy the book.) Obviously this was less of a problem when the reviews first appeared, one a week, in the Washington Post. (I've already added works by Fernando Pessoa, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Iain Sinclair, as well as Tyndale's translation of the Bible.)
To order Bound to Please from amazon.com, click here.
CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE by Michael Dirda:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/14/2007]
And as I was still reading this, I found CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE by Michael Dirda (ISBN-13 978-0-15-101251-0, ISBN-10 0-151-01251-2). This is Dirda's fifth book of essays about classics, so by this point the classic are not quite as classic as you might expect. On the other hand, Dirda does cover some more "popular" authors, such as Agatha Christie, Philip K. Dick, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The real problem I had is by the time I got to this book, the last thing I needed was more recommendations of books to read.
To order Classics for Pleasure from amazon.com, click here.
AN OPEN BOOK by Michael Dirda:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/21/2005]
AN OPEN BOOK by Michael Dirda (ISBN 0-393-05756-9) is an autobiography of sorts, covering his life through college and focusing on his reading. Growing up in a working-class town sometimes made his reading difficult--of trying to write an essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he writes, "Because the Lorain [Ohio] libraries didn't carry much Enlightenment philosophy--there wasn't, apparently, a lot of demand for it--I rode my bike to the Elyria Public Library (eight or so miles), . . ." He also talks about convincing his parents to spend $400 for the "Great Books" by telling them he would then win the $500 third prize for the essay contest and they would be ahead $100, and his school would get a free set to boot. They do--and he does! Not only that, but three of his sisters eventually do as well! (The third actually won the second prize of $1000, and got to keep the books donated to the school: "At that point, the school didn't really want any more "Great Books".) I'm not sure that younger readers will remember that there was a time when there was not a book superstore in every town and amazon.com for the places in between, but a boy had to ride his bike to the drugstore that had a wire rack of books, or the fact that the only places for used books were the local thrift shops. (Well, we may be back to the latter.) For those who remember those times, though, it will be wonderfully nostalgic.
To order An Open Book from amazon.com, click here.