All reviews copyright 1984-2009 Evelyn C. Leeper.
ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL, FALLEN HOST, and MESSIAH NODE by Lyda Morehouse:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/18/2003]
Lyda Morehouse has a series of religious-based science fiction/fantasy. Currently there are three, ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL, FALLEN HOST, and MESSIAH NODE. They are supposedly specifically respectively Christian-oriented, Muslim-oriented, and Jewish- oriented, which makes me wonder what the fourth (last?) volume will be. I say supposedly because I read only the first one and part of the second before giving up--it just didn't seem to be progressing very much. They are, as I noted, both science fiction and fantasy. Fantasy, because there are angels and God and all sorts of other religious beings. Science fiction, because there are advanced computers and networking and futuristic bombs (including one that has turned the entire Bronx into glass). And there are also elements of the hard-boiled detective story. I found the premises and milieu interesting, but feel it would have been better if paced a bit faster.
To order Archangel Protocol from amazon.com, click here.
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To order Messiah Node from amazon.com, click here.
PARNASSUS ON WHEELS and THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP by Christopher Morley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/18/2003]
For people who like books about books and bookshops, Christopher Morley wrote two classics: PARNASSUS ON WHEELS and THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP. The first is the story of a traveling book salesman, and the spinster who decides to buy his wagon (and his business). The second [slight spoiler here] is about the same characters after they have bought a bookshop in Brooklyn. The stories take place in the early twentieth century. While both are paeans to books, the first is also full of lavish descriptions of the Connecticut countryside, and the second is a mystery-thriller. THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP also references another one of those "little" books of the sort I mentioned last week, with the bookshop owner saying, "I get ten times more satisfaction in selling a copy of Newton's 'The Amenities of Book-Collecting' than I do in selling a copy of--well, Tarzan; but it's poor business to impose your own private tastes on your customers." This was apparently a well- known book at the time--my edition is a Modern Library edition.
(Oh, I have one quibble/question about THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP. At one point a character is walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, is set upon by ruffians, almost tipped into the water, and then flags down a passing vehicles. When we walked across, the pedestrian walkway was well above--and inaccessible from--the motorway, and was above the center of the motorway, which would mean that if you went over the railing, you would land on the motorway, not in the river. Was this the case in 1920?) The Morley books are both available on-line through Project Gutenberg.
To order Parnassus on Wheels from amazon.com, click here.
To order The Haunted Bookshop from amazon.com, click here.
THEODORE REX by Edmund Morris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/09/2005]
THEODORE REX by Edmund Morris (ISBN 0-812-96660-7) covers just the seven-plus years of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency, though there are references to his life before then. While Morris obviously finds Roosevelt fascinating, he does not idolize him, and Roosevelt's faults are covered as well as his virtues. (And his faults are often the faults of his time--his attitudes toward race, while in some ways more enlightened than his age, in many ways are just as backward as those of other people of his time. Unless you're a history student, though, I suspect that this is more a book to be partially skimmed than read in great detail-- there can be such a thing as information overkill.
And as proof that there is nothing new under the sun, I offer this quote: "The consistent features of the political landscape, as he saw it, were fault lines running deeply and dangerously through divergent blocks of power. Political chasms lurked between Isolationism and Expansionism, Government and the Trusts, Labor and Capital, conservation and development, Nativism and the Golden Door. And since the last election, the fault lines had widened. As William Jennings Bryan kept saying, 'The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.'" (page 37)
To order Theodore Rex from amazon.com, click here.
SUPERHEROES AND PHILOSOPHY by Tom Morris and Matt Morris:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/16/2006]
SUPERHEROES AND PHILOSOPHY edited by Tom Morris and Matt Morris (ISBN 0-8126-9573-9) is a collection of essays that is volume thirteen in a series called "Popular Culture and Philosophy", whose earlier volumes cover Seinfeld, the Simpsons, the Matrix, Buffy. "Lord of the Rings", baseball, the Sopranos, Woody Allen, Harry Potter, Mel Gibson's "The Passion", and more. This volume deals with superheroes, primarily comic book superheroes. (That is, there is not much talk about Hercules or Mercury except in conjunction with such comic-book parallels as Superman or The Flash.) The most interesting essay (to me, anyway) was Christopher Robichaud's "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: On the Moral Duties of the Super-Powerful and Super-Heroic", which analyzes the superhero's responsibilities in terms of Jeremy Bentham's and John Stuart Mills's utilitarianism and Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative". Another essay worth pointing out is Michael Thau's "Comic-Book Wisdom", which analyzes the disappearance of wisdom in comic books, due (Thau says) to our skepticism and cynicism about wisdom. For example, the original Captain Marvel takes on both the strength of Hercules and the wisdom of Solomon, while the more recent version acquires the strength of Hercules but *not* the wisdom of Solomon—his wisdom becomes merely an external voice giving advice. For fans of comic books, this book is certainly highly recommended, but I am not a fan and even I enjoyed this enough to recommend it.
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BIBLE STORIES FOR ADULTS: by James Morrow (Harcourt Brace, ISBN 0-15-600244-2, 1996, 243pp, trade paperback):
Everyone needs their traditions. For me, these include reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "'History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations'" on New Year's Eve and James Morrow's "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant" on Passover.
Now the problem is that I'll end up reading all the other stories in this volume at the same time.
This is a great collection.
There are twelve stories in this book. Four are Morrow's traditional "Bible Stories for Adults": Numbers 17 (The Deluge), 20 (The Tower), 31 (The Covenant), and 46 (The Soap Opera). The other eight have varying degrees of connection to the Bible. In his preface, Morrow categorizes these and gives what he sees as the connections between them and the Bible or religion. While there is obviously some validity in what he says, there are other connections to be drawn as well. For example, while "The Confessions of Ebenezer Scrooge" may ask, as Morrow says, "whether charity alone can exorcise the demons that drive monopoly capitalism," it also serves as a companion piece to "Bible Stories for Adults, Number 46: The Soap Opera," examining justification. Or perhaps it connects to "Bible Stories for Adults, Number 20: The Covenant," looking at what motivates human behavior.
Is "Daughter Earth" a miniature version of "Diary of a Mad Deity"--or is it the other way around? Morrow says that "The Assemblage of Kristin" looks at the mystery of consciousness, but it's also about death and resurrection. If Morrow's traditional "Bible Stories' are telling us that we have gotten it all wrong, what is he trying to say with "Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks"?
And to be honest, one might ask what "Known But to God and Wilbur Hines," "Abe Lincoln in McDonald's," or "Arms and the Woman" have to do with Bible stories. On the other hand, they're great stories, so who cares? (In fact, I was surprised to discover that the only award nomination for these stories was a Nebula nomination [and win] for "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge." There are at least a couple of other stories which are at least as good as anything nominated in their years.)
Morrow manages to put into words feelings that many readers will recognize that they had but never formalized. The most obvious example (to me) is "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera," where he looks at the real meaning of the story of Job and comes to a conclusion that will have many readers shouting, "Right on!" And maybe this is what connects all these stories: their ability to make us look at what we have always been taught and ask what it really means and if it's really true. In this context, even the stories that seem at first unconnected fall into place as examinations of beliefs and belief systems. What motivates the people in all these stories is a belief system, perhaps not Biblical, but certainly ones that could be labeled religious. And Morrow shows us that these belief systems have implications that many proponents would prefer to gloss over. (If I were to suggest a companion piece for these stories, it might well be Mark Twain's "War Prayer.")
I've avoided saying too much about the stories themselves, because I feel they will have the most impact if you don't know a lot about them beforehand. But I will say that I highly recommend this book. (I suppose I should provide a caveat here. If you are distressed by a frank look at your religious beliefs, you may not find this to your tastes. But then, you probably knew that.) Also being reprinted by Harcourt Brace at the same time is Morrow's novel Only Begotten Daughter, the perfect companion piece for this collection.
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BLAMELESS IN ABADDON by James Morrow (Harcourt Brace & Company, ISBN 0-15-188656-3, 1996, 404pp, hardback):
Blameless in Abaddon is the sequel to Towing Jehovah. In that book, the corpse of God has been found, and a disgraced tanker captain is hired to haul it to the Arctic.
In Blameless in Abaddon, the corpse has somehow ended up as the main attraction in a religious theme park cum miraculous shrine. Justice of the Peace Martin Candle hears there is neural activity in God's brain and decides to bring this most infamous criminal to justice. This is part of the age-old attempt to find an answer to mystery of suffering, and in the book, it is clear that Morrow has done his homework in researching the theologians who have attempted to answer this question. (At least from a Jewish or Christian perspective--one might argue that finding "Jehovah" means one needn't look at Buddhist or Hindu explanations, but a few Islamic sources might have been nice. On the other hand, it's unlikely the characters involved would have access to or inclination to look for these.) The person defending Jehovah is based on C. S. Lewis, and the story also involves scrabble-playing dinosaurs. (As Morrow quotes from Dostoyevsky, "If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen.") We also find out that God is a Platonist.
Morrow has said that he enjoys writing this sort of work in the genre, because "science fiction makes very literal what in other fiction is metaphorical." He also said that it might be nice if people took these things more seriously here (not "it's just a novel"), but on the other hand, he appreciated being able to write a novel such as this without having to go into hiding as Salman Rushdie did.
I would certainly recommend that you read Towing Jehovah before reading this, but then I would recommend that you read Towing Jehovah in any case. After all, it was nominated for a Hugo, which is a pretty amazing achievement for a story more cerebral than action-packed. Morrow writes books that are thought-provoking and entertaining, and this is certainly both of those.
(Morrow is now working on a third book, titled The Eternal Footman.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/20/2007]
I re-read BLAMELESS IN ABADDON by James Morrow (ISBN-10 0-156-00505-0, ISBN-13 978-0-156-00505-0), the middle book of his "Towing Jehovah" trilogy, and the one which most discusses theodicy, its defenses, and the flaws in them. I suppose one can get one's philosophy in a more traditional philosophy book, and in some sense Morrow is as enamored of the "expository lump" approach as Kim Stanley Robinson. But as with Robinson's work, the exposition is part of what makes it good.
To order Blameless in Abaddon from amazon.com, click here.
THE CAT'S PAJAMAS & OTHER STORIES by James Morrow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/26/2004]
James Morrow's THE CAT'S PAJAMAS & OTHER STORIES (ISBN 1-892-39115-5) is Morrow's third collection of stories. As with all his other works, Morrow looks at morality from all angles and in all its aspects. Of all the current writers, I would say he is the most Swiftian in his approach, and also that he is one of my favorite authors. His writing at times achieves a level of bizarreness also reminiscent of Howard Waldrop, another of my favorites. If I asked who would write a story about King Kong, Godzilla, and 9/11, you would be likely to guess Waldrop, but it's Morrow. Or of a real Martian invasion--ditto, it's Morrow. The collection includes several pieces never before published, making it a must-read for Morrow fans.
To order The Cat's Pajamas & Other Stories from amazon.com, click here.
SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA by James Morrow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/20/2009]
SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA by James Morrow (ISBN-13 978-1-892391-84-1, ISBN-10 1-892391-84-8) is an alternate history in which the United States developed a secret biological weapon towards the end of World War II: Gorgantis, a giant lizard designed to stomp Japanese cities. But in order to demonstrate its power, they enlist the aid of Hollywood to fake a demonstration using a man in a suit, and that man is horror film star Syms Thorley.
Now, Syms Thorley is a fictional character, as are many of the other Hollywood personages, but many others are real (though in our world not involved in a giant reptilian weapon). Just to cover a few that appear relatively early: James Whale and Willis O' Brien are of course real, and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS is a real movie. Gorgantis is obviously a copy of Gojira/Godzilla. Kha-Ton-Ra is obviously a copy of the cinematic Im-ho-tep (who is also mentioned). Crepuscula is completely made up. Siegfried K. Dagover appears to be a fictional relative of Lil Dagover (from THE CABINET OF CALIGARI). Producer Sam Katzman, director William ("One-Take"), cinematographer Mack Stengler, and art director Dave Milton are real.
All this should make clear that the book is aimed at fans of the horror films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. If you like Morrow's other work, but are unfamiliar with the films, this book is not going to be very meaningful.
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THE SFWA EUROPEAN HALL OF FAME edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/31/2007]
I am not going to review THE SFWA EUROPEAN HALL OF FAME edited by James Morrow (ISBN-13 978-0-7653-1536-6, ISBN-10 0-7653-1536-X), but I will make a couple of comments on it. First, look for this in your library at Dewey Decimal 808.83(9762) if you cannot find it in fiction or science fiction, as the Dewey Decimal number is the cataloguing data Tor provided. It seems like a great way to hide from its main audience in libraries, though it should not affect bookstore placement.
As Morrow notes, all but one of the sixteen stories are from the Indo-European family of languages (that one being from Finnish). Of the fifteen, seven are from Romance languages, four from Slavic, two Germanic, one Nordic, and one Greek. (No Hungarian?) Clearly "European" here means continental Europe and does not include Britain. (One wonders if there will be future anthologies for Latin America, Asia, and Africa.)
Finally, let me talk about translations. This has a new translation of Richard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero's "The Day We Went Through the Transition". This translation is by Yolanda Molina-Gavilan and James Stevens-Arce. The story previously appeared in English in COSMOS LATINOS (edited by Andrea L. Bell and Molina-Gavilan) in a translation by Molina- Gavilan alone. (That earlier translation was a finalist for the Sidewise Award in 2004.) The most obvious change is that the new translation is in the present tense, while the older one is the past tense (as is the original). In addition, though, sentence structure is different, sentences and even paragraphs are in a different order, and so on. If you cannot decide which translation to read, the original Spanish is available on-line.
As an example of what I mean, here are the third and fourth paragraphs from each, which explain the Transition:
Spanish:
La transición es un clásico. Al menos una vez por semana hay que hacerla, y en ocasiones hasta dos o tres veces en un mismo d¡a. ¿:Por qué todos los terroristas, de uno u otro bando, tienen semejante fijación con ese per¡odo? ¿:Por qué no intervienen más a menudo en la guerra civil o en el asunto de la armada invencible? Supongo que, simplemente, la transición está tan llena de posibilidades, hay tantos caminos abiertos simultáneamente que todo bando pol¡tico o grupo económico se cree capaz de ajustar el proceso de forma que triunfe su particular posición.Parece tratarse también de una fijación particularmente española. Otros pa¡ses sufren también ataques terroristas que pretenden cambiar la historia a su gusto, pero esos casos se producen una o dos veces al año. Sin embargo nosotros tenemos que lidiar hasta con treinta casos a la semana y más de la mitad pueden situarse en la transición. Parece que los españoles estamos tan insatisfechos de nuestra historia y somos tan incapaces de aceptar que otros hayan triunfado en el pasado que realizamos grandes esfuerzos por cambiarla. En cualquier caso, no importa: el trabajo del Cuerpo de Intervención Temporal de la GEI es evitar que esas situaciones se den, y en particular cuidamos mucho de la transición.
Yolanda Molina-Gavilan (2003):
The Transition is a classic. Someone has to go through it at least once a week, and sometimes even two or three times on the same day. Why are all the terrorists, from both sides, fixated on that time period? Why don't they intervene more often in the Civil War, or in that Invincible Armada affair? I suppose that the Transition is just so full of possibilities, there are so many simultaneously open paths, that every political camp or economic group believes it self capable of adjusting the process so that its particular position triumphs.It seems to be a particularly Spanish fixation as well. Other countries also suffer from attacks by terrorists who attempt to change history to their own liking, but those cases happen once or twice a year. We, however, have to manage up to thirty cases a week, and more than half of them may be placed at the Transition period. It seems that we Spaniards are as unsatisfied with our own history and are so incapable of accepting that others have triumphed in the past, that we make great efforts to change it. It doesn't matter, in any case: the work of the GEI Temporal Intervention Corps is to stop these situations from happening, and we pay particular attention to the Transition.
Yolanda Molina-Gavilan and James Stevens-Arce (2007):
The Transition is our hottest troublespot. We must restore it constantly, sometimes two or three times a day. Most countries endure timeshift attacks no more than twice a year, but El Gripo Espanol de Intelligencia registers as many as thirty a week--over half targeting the Transition.Apparently, we are so unhappy with our own history and so resentful of other nations' triumphs that every disaffected group feels the past can be altered to its advantage. But our territories don't show much interest in reconfiguring the eras of the Civil War or the Invincible Armada. Perhaps because the Transition was our last major cultural paradigm shift prior to the discovery of Temporal Theory, it seems especially rich in potential futures, especially ripe with possibilities. ..."
I have no idea *where* that last sentence came from--the original has nothing like it. My impression is that Molina-Gavilan's translation is the more accurate one; the joint one by Molina- Gavilan and Stevens-Arce is more a retelling that a translation.
And the reason may be in the introduction, where James Morrow describes working on a translation of a French story, and says, "I found myself intuitively noodling with the sentences: striking out arguably superfluous words, hunting down needless repetitions, searching for le mot juste, all the usual things. By the midpoint of the trip I was in a bittersweet mood, lamenting the sorry circumstance that so few SF translations ever receive this sort of joyful tweaking." I have great respect for Morrow, but he and I have very different philosophies of translation: I want a translation to be as accurate (though not necessarily literal) to the original as possible, while he seems to think a translator should also function as an editor.
To order The SFWA European Hall of Fame from amazon.com, click here.
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/28/2005]
Just to provide "equal time" for all the quotes demonstrating anti-Semitism in early 20th century mysteries, I'll include this from DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS by Walter Mosley (ISBN 0-393-02854-2): The narrator is remembering his time in the Army and the liberation of one of the death camps, and says, "That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years."
To order Devil in a Blue Dress from amazon.com, click here.
THE STONE READER by Dow Mossman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/28/2004]
And one non-book: I watched THE STONE READER, a documentary about the filmmaker's search for Dow Mossman, the author of THE STONES OF SUMMER. Mark Moskowitz had tried to read the book in the 1970s and hated it, but when he came across his copy recently he found that to the contrary he now thought it was superb. He realized that Mossman hadn't ever written anything else and had disappeared from view. So he embarked on a quest to find Mossman and discover why this is so. The first part of the film is not specifically about THE STONES OF SUMMER, and books that matter to their readers in general--books like CATCH-22 and HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON and CALL IT SLEEP and many others. Moskowitz travels around, talking to people involved in publishing, teaching, or just plain reading, all the time looking for hints to what happened to Mossman. And this is the only movie I can remember that has, following the song credits, book credits--and more books were listed than I ever saw songs listed. Highly recommended for all lovers of books. (No, I won't tell you what happens.)
To order the movie The Stone Reader from amazon.com, click here.
To order the book The Stones of Summer from amazon.com, click here.
TURNING JAPANESE: MEMOIRS OF A SANSEI by David Mura:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/02/2005]
David Mura is a third-generation Japanese-American and his TURNING JAPANESE: MEMOIRS OF A SANSEI (ISBN 0-385-42344-6) is the story of his one-year sabbatical in Japan where he discovers that he is more Japanese than he thought he was. (He was born and raised in Minnesota, where his parents lived after they left their internment camp.) This book is very similar to Victoria Abbott Riccardi's UNTANGLING MY CHOPSTICKS (which I reviewed in the 12/03/04 issue of the MT VOID) in its story of an American trying to live in Japanese culture rather than make a brief visit. In both cases, though, the author has gone to Japan with a specific educational/artistic agenda and in both cases, the books spend a lot of time discussing classes, teachers, and meetings with others in that field. TURNING JAPANESE also spends time discussing the strain that Japan put on Mura's relationship with his Euro-American spouse. (Shifra Horn's SHALOM, JAPAN, reviewed in the 12/31/04 issue of the MT VOID, is a much "purer" look at Japan.) Choose Mura's book if you're interested in someone discovering his "roots" (or some of them), Mura or Riccardi for a discussion of Japanese art and the philosophy thereof, or Horn's book for more about Japan itself.
To order Turning Japanese from amazon.com, click here.
A YEAR AT THE MOVIES by Kevin Murphy:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/2006]
A book that "jumped the queue" for me was A YEAR AT THE MOVIES by Kevin Murphy (ISBN 0-06-093786-6). Murphy set himself a goal of watching a movie in a public presentation every day. This allowed him to count films on airplanes, which was necessary because he was flying to Cannes, Australia, Canada, and other exotic places to find the world's smallest cinema, a cinema built out of ice, etc. His chapters (one per week) are not so much about the movies--though he does include some comments on some of them--but on various aspects of movie-going. Why are theaters so poorly designed? Why do the audiences have the attention span of goldfish? Can you survive entirely on movie concession stand food? (And conversely, how much food can you sneak into a theater at any one time?) Since Kevin Murphy was one of the hecklers from "Mystery Science Theater 3000", he may be as much to blame for noisy audiences as anyone, but his points are in general well-taken. Murphy makes no startling new discoveries, but he does summarize what we know about the joys and pitfalls of movie-going.
To order A Year at the Movies from amazon.com, click here.
THE VOICE OF THE CORPSE by Max Murray:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/17/2004]
Max Murray's THE VOICE OF THE CORPSE (ISBN 0-486-24905-0) is yet another Dover mystery from the first part of the last century, and is full of blackmail and hidden secrets, perhaps to excess. I suppose it is possible that everyone has such things to hide, but that one person could ferret them all out strains credulity a bit.
To order The Voice of the Corpse from amazon.com, click here.
THE SECOND FAVORITE SON by Daniel Myers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/18/2005]
Daniel Myers's THE SECOND FAVORITE SON (ISBN 1-877-27044-X) is an alternate history based on the South winning the American Civil War (though it starts well before that, during the Revolutionary War). Though Myers was born in Chicago, he has lived abroad a lot, most recently in New Zealand. That may be why the extrapolation doesn't work: the resulting society seems just like what we had before the Civil Rights movement. I might accept that in a world that would have been very different with both a United States and a Confederate States of America there might be communists, WWI, and a Depression. However, Myers also has interstates (in our timeline conceived of by Eisenhower for military purposes), Toyotas, and California as being known for its gay population (as well as the word "gay" used in this way). (Without a civil rights movement, would there have been a gay rights movement? Also, white as a wedding dress color became common only when Queen Victoria wore it, so the comments about it during the Revolutionary War era are just plain wrong. I'm not sure why the author decided to make this an alternate history rather than a straight contemporary mystery, but that aspect does not work very well.
To order The Second Favorite Son from amazon.com, click here.