Playing Those Mind Games

Of late, I have been completely obsessed with watching back episodes of LOST. To be honest, I hadn't really been into the show until fairly recently (last on a bandwagon), so when I got hooked I had to catch up fast to make it to the series finale. But as much as the story lines, and all the twisty-turny unexplainedness pulled me in, there was one scene in particular that was the absolute clincher for me. In Season 4, Locke has Ben held captive in Ben's own basement. He brings him a plate of breakfast and a book. But what book gets chosen? VALIS by Philip K. Dick.

Now, I've written about a lot of Philip K. Dick novels on here. You can just look back a few entries to the Are You Living Underground post, as well as the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep post. But I hadn't touched on VALIS before. Why not? Because VALIS is the head trippiest book I have probably read in my entire life, and to even begin talking about VALIS means that you're going down the rabbit hole into the land of the ultra-surreal.

The main narrator of the book is Horselover Fat, and VALIS is the story of Fat's slow revelation that the world he lives in is not the world that truly is. To compare it to the Matrix would be fair, but a vast understatement. See, the folks in the Matrix get to see the reality behind the curtain. The characters in VALIS know that there is a deeper, different reality behind what's seen, experienced and known, and the story is about the dawning realization of this unseen realm, the interconnectedness of everything and the hints that point us toward the "real" world. You're also probably wondering why I keep capitalizing VALIS. It's because it's an acronym, but I'll leave you to find out what it stands for.

Needless to say when I saw this scene in LOST it reaffirmed that the show is firmly rooted in the realms of the bizarre, and that's a place I love to go.
If you're looking for something to blow your mind here are a few additional recommendations.

Videos

2001: A Space Odyssey
Being John Malkovich
Lost (Season One)
The Matrix
Twin Peaks

Children's Works

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Red Book by Barbara Lehman

Graphic Novels

Black Hole by Charles Burns
Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez

Fiction

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Ring / Spiral by Koji Suzuki
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Non-Fiction

Everything is under Control by Robert Anton Wilson
Occult America by Mitch Horowitz
Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
Teleportation by David J. Darling
Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch

Have You Been Living Underground?

I love getting the NPR updates on my Facebook, because I'll find fabulous gems like this article about the new underground bunker company Vivos. Make sure to watch the video as well.

Seeing these luxury disaster shelters immediately made me think about Philip K. Dick's underground world in The Penultimate Truth. In this novel people dwell in an series of connected pods miles below the surface of the earth. Their purpose in these pods is to produce robot soldiers to go to the surface and continue fighting the war that destroyed everything that lives and irradiated most everything else. Each day these pod societies churn out more robots, only to receive orders to build more robots. All the while, on the surface military fiefdoms have cropped up and the folks who orchestrated the war in the first place have carved out vast empty cities to belong solely to them, while the robot soldiers do nothing more than defend their territory from the encroachments of similar military lords. These Ozymandias-like princes jaunt around the country for pointless meetings in private helicopters and jets, and continue to think up ways to perpetuate this mythic war to the billions of humans dwelling underground. Needless to say a few brave souls in the pods are starting to question their conditions, and that's when things begin to really change. This was a quick read and absolutely fascinating.

In a more wacky fantasy vein there is also Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Simon is a digger in an underground village. His family died as the result of a cave-in back when he was younger and he was raised by his best friend Kamina. The lives of the people in Simon's village are turned upside-down when one day a giant robot crashes through the dome ceiling, revealing that there is both life on the surface and that it's unbelievably dangerous. Simon and Kamina team up with a surface girl named Yoko to defeat the giant robot and save their village, but that's only the beginning of a story that spans the most outrageously epic story you will ever read.

If you're more in the mood for a classic you may want to look at Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth made into a film starring Brendan Frazier. In this novel a professor travels down into different layers of geologic history, and along the way encounters the flora and fauna of the ancient earth. Yes, wooly mammoths and dinosaurs! How can you go wrong? On the other end of speculative time is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, where in the far future the peaceful, childlike Eloi people dwell in the decaying surface buildings while the pale ape-like Morlocks live in the dark underground.

Any of these works would make good reading while living in your own beatiful underground dwelling.

Dystopia Schmystopia

If you’re anything like me and many Generation-X pseudo-nerds, then you have a love/hate relationship with future dystopian sci-fi novels. Don't get me wrong—I've read and love a lot of these books. I think they resonate especially with we jaded Gen-X'ers who grew up in the shadow of the last decade of the Cold War. Remember the movie 'Red Dawn'? Enough said.

Although we're no longer terrified of the Soviets lobbing a city-killer sized nuke over Canada, we've experienced a scary last eight years. Partly because of the newly rekindled fire feeding the spread of terrorism (“Bring it on!”), I think we're feeling a slight return of that distant sense of doom. The other day I saw a guy walking around DC wearing a t-shirt that read One Nation Under Surveillance. That's what I’m talking about. Way to distill it to four words, shirt company! Maybe I'm imagining this mood on the street, maybe I'm projecting, but I'm not imagining the hundreds of underground anti-establishment podcasts with themes of mistrust, anarchy, and disdain for our ruling authorities. I listen to them on my lunch break and they make me A) glad to have the freedom of speech B) want to reach for a future dystopian novel.

One problem is the immense number of these novels that are out there—it’s impossible to keep up. If you look to the past you have to go all the way back to Mary Shelley in the 1820s to see this genre first taking shape. In the mid 1900s come the most crucial post-industrial dystopian novels: A Brave New World, Animal Farm, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451. There were also many other lesser-known masterpieces like Naked Lunch, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Postman, and it’s really never stopped since then. Okay, end of sermon. But I would like, O’ my brothers, to talk partially about a novel published in 1962, and what is in part the target of this malenky report, my merry droogs, this being the audio book presentation of a novel of future London, that is, A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess.

In high school and in college, people kept telling me I had to read this book. “Dude, you've read Nineteen-Eighy-Four, now you need to try something harder.” But I’d pick up a paperback edition of Clockwork with tiny type on gray paper and end up putting it down shortly thereafter and start making up excuses: I just can't get into the lingo. It's immediately too dark to get into, it just doesn't click. That all changed two months ago when a library patron returned a 6-disc audio book version of it and suggested, no demanded, that I rip it to my iPod. (BTW, recommendations of patrons, by the way, are how I’ve come across most of my favorite books. Bog bless Washington’s enthusiastic readers and well-stocked libraries!)

Anthony Burgess wrote dozens of novels from 1956 to 1995, but to his chagrin it was Clockwork that won him superstar status. Burgess expressed regret over this any chance he was given. The small tome was just one of many books he'd written over the decades, and not his favorite by any means. Nevertheless, for better or worse, it is for this quirky chronicle of teenage depravity, and largely due to the hit film based on it, that people remember this author and vision of the future.

When I think of the sixties, I picture people sitting around on shag rugs listening to the first Pink Floyd record, often in altered states of mind. But this book was published in 1962, before the hippie thing had exploded. It was in this silence before the coming social hurricane that Burgess gives us his terrifying vision of a bleak, sprawling future full of unrestrained crime carried out by poorly parented teens, all living in fearful concrete suburbs. The only reason I know this is because of Tom Hollander, and Recorded Books.

From the first line, What’s it going to be, then, eh? The character of poor Alex is vividly and effortlessly imagined thanks to Hollander’s perfect cockney accent, urbanized and infused with Russian slang. This isn’t a book report and I don’t want to color anyone’s opinion of the work. I'm not addicted to audio books like some people—I still prefer hard copies. All the same, I do want to throw this out there: I’ve been through A Clockwork Orange three times (!!!) now on my iPod, after having picked up and put down the paper version at least twice as many times. Put it on hold—it’s painless and well worth the minimal trouble, even if you’re a lazy reader like me. You will get pulled in and, if you're anything like me, you'll like it so much you'll laugh out loud on the train and embarrass yourself.

The New New Post Post Cyberpunk Bonanza

Makers
by Cory Doctorow
New York : Tor, 2009.

I have been hearing Cory Doctorow's name in various contexts for a few years, now. As a fan of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, how could I not have? Yet I never read his work until now. With no clue what to look for, I was happily surprised by Makers.

The book, which was serialized by Tor before its actual publication, bears the cute tag-line, "a Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come", and so it seems to be. beginning in a future so near you actually don't know it's not right now, the story follows an economic, technological and social trajectory into a future which wouldn't make half as much sense if you weren't right there to see it. The genius of the story is that, if you have any working knowledge of recent history, that's exactly how the last hundred-and-change years have gone. In some ways, Doctorow's future is more believable because of its retrospective qualities. Another side effect of the story's modern origin is the giddy hilarity that accompanies its creations; good satire hurts so good because of its dreadful familiarity. Makers achieves this with the same flair and foresighted hilarity of Bruce Sterling's Distraction, or William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Reading this book caused a litany of vocabulary words to create themselves in my head, a cluster of blog tags waiting to be born. Postmodern came up a lot, but then post-postmodern could equally apply. Ana-Randian, anarcho-libertarian, post-post-postfeminist, neorealist, techno-comedy, none of them necessarily apply, but all of them came from my instinctive need to create some simple descriptors for this literary equivalent of the portmanteau. Try it - you'll find yourself bathing in the salty waters of Doctorow's compelling ambiguity.

That said, I couldn't help but wonder about the suspiciously familiar main characters, and (perhaps not so strangely) self-referential philosophies of the "makers" whose lives are the center of the book. Many of the themes in Makers, including the use of Disney as a foil and example of dizzyingly vast corporate monstrocity, are reminiscent of Doctorow's other projects. Not that I mind. Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and he does it all the time.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I just finished reading the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It seems like half the staff were reading it all at the same time, and a couple of us watched Blade Runner, the film inspired by the book. It's been sitting on my bookshelf at home for years now, and I've been wanting to read it for a while. Apparently the time was right and it made its way into my backpack and today I finished it.

It was a really great novel. Nobody plays mindgames with the reader, or with his characters, like Philip K. Dick does. The world exists in a state of post-nuclear destruction. The sky is obliterated by radioactive dust, most all life on earth is dead, mutated, or on the verge of extinction. Most of humanity has zoomed off to settle other, non-nuclear worlds with the help of android slaves to build settlements and take care of the major labor. Well, the android models keep getting smarter and smarter, and it becomes more and more difficult to tell androids from humans. So, in order to detect whether or not someone is human or android human police have to administer a test to prove the essential humanity of the individual based on empathetic responses. Rick Deckard works for the San Francisco police department as a bounty hunter who takes down rogue androids. He's been assigned to take out the remaining 6 androids who escaped from their captivity on Mars.

Due to the near extinction of most all animal life humans on Earth have mostly become followers of this empathy cult, whose leader, Wilber Mercer, was a lover of animals. People strive to own and care for living creatures, even though the cost of purchasing, much less caring for, a pet are exorbitantly high given their rarity. Not only do they strive to become pet owners and caretakers, they also spend time "fusing" with the others in the cult through the empathy box, where they share each others emotions as they climb the hill of sacrifice with Mercer.

This becomes the lynch pin in determining whether or not someone is an android. How do they react to animal death? How do they feel about the products that were derived from killing something extraordinarily rare? My own brain goes to thinking about sociopaths like Dexter who have no regard for life, animal or human, because they lack empathetic response. The Voigt-Kampff test they use in the book (and the film) measures how they respond to certain triggering words or situations related to animal cruelty and the death of humans. Interestingly enough, The Wave Magazine in San Francisco used the Voigt-Kampff questions when they spoke with candidates for Mayor of the city. The results were incredibly interesting.

The Scalinata in Literature

I had the weirdest coincidence this last weekend, in that I was reading two separate books that take place in two totally different time periods and both of them mentioned the exact same architectural feature in Rome.

The Spanish Stairs (Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti) were built in the 1720's to connect the Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti. The picture on the left shows the fountain in the Piazza, the church above and on the right is the Keats-Shelley house. That's right, John Keats and Percy Shelley. John Keats lived his last days on earth looking out the window over the Spanish Stairs.

And that's where the story gets interesting.

I started reading Tim Powers's novel "The Stress of Her Regard" a while ago, and still haven't quite finished it. The book is set in the heyday of the English romantic poets, and Keats, Byron and Shelley are main players in the story. The novel follows their lives, and explores what truly was the muse that inspired these greatest of poets to craft their works. Powers's explanation is that the muse was actually a vampiric creature known to the Greeks as a Lamia (note: link contains nude artwork). As the creature slowly drains the life from the poets she alternately inspires them to greater heights of artistry. But over time the poets begin to show the strain on their lives, and eventually they crave to be released from this burden. The scene with Keats plays out with the fantasy creature begging to be let in to keep her lover alive as he dies while gazing over the Scalinata. I totally have not given away even a fraction of this epic fantasy drama by revealing this information. Just know that the rest of it is just as weird and exciting. It took me about 17 years to get around to reading this book, but it was worth the wait.

Halfway through reading "The Stress of Her Regard" I got one of those *sigh* moments and just couldn't be bothered to continue reading it. SO I put down "stress" and picked up something completely different. For no particular reason I was drawn to Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination." I had no idea what it was about, it had just been sitting on my bookshelf at home for too long.

It's the twenty-sixth century and Gulliver Foyle is a space marine of sorts who gets stranded out in deep space with no way home. One day while waiting for who knows how long he spies the passing starship "Vorga" and signals for a ride. Vorga ignores his plea and Gully begins to plot his revenge against the ship. While Foyle is tracking down the crew of the ship to find out who gave the order he finds himself in Italy, looking ot meet up with one of the former crew members, where else, but on the Scalinata!

I can't tell you how weird it was for me to just accidentally read two totally different books, by two totally different authors, set about 700 years apart, where they shared the exact same location at a midway point through the story. Just absolutely bizarre.

Both of the books are extremely interesting, but both for different reasons. "The Stress of Her Regard" is great for people who have a penchant for the romantic poets and a taste for the gothic. There are moments that are positively gruesome, and the language is witty and florid. "The Stars My Destination" is more of a sci-fi vendetta adventure story. The story jumps from place to place quickly, and the ending is completely surreal. It's an absolute page turner.

Check it out!

Sci-fi Review - Pandemonium

Daryl Gregory's debut novel, Pandemonium, is a fantastic mash-up of classic high-concept science fiction and pop-culture satire. By turns comic and introspective (and often both at once), the story explores the collective unconscious and the nature of the relationship between archetypes and the cultures that create them. Gregory's writing style is refreshingly current, witty and self-aware. He not only acknowledges, but includes his influences in the text itself, folding pioneers of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick and A. E. Van Vogt into the story itself. The result is as unique as it is well-crafted.

The story takes place in a world suspiciously similar to our own, with one glaring difference - since the 1940's, people across the world have become victims of demonic possession. Innocent men, women and children are taken seemingly at random by a series of entities known only by their implacable actions and obsessions; the Truth stalks and kills liars, the Little Angel (always a little girl) walks the halls of hospitals, dispensing death with a kiss. Theories abound about what the demons really are, what they represent, and how best to deal with them.

Del Pierce was a boy when he was taken by the Hellion, an entity with a lethal case of ADHD. With love and patience, his family drove the demon out. Now it's back, and as an adult Del must search for a way to stop the demon before it takes complete control. With the help of an angry Irish nun, a Creature from a Black Lagoon and a pair of aging Jungian psychotherapists, Del goes on a quest both literally and figuratively to find a cure. Along the way he will find the source of himself and his demon counterpart, and be surprised by both.

Pandemonium makes a lot of unspoken promises. By incurring the name of Philip K. Dick (indeed, by making him a character), it is expected that this novel will test our basic assumptions about life and identity. It is also expected that we will find something new in its pages, and be kept guessing until the very end. Finally, with all of the pop-culture references, there ought to be some fresh reflections about the world we live in. Daryl Gregory delivers on all of these points, and the result is a highly pleasurable experience.