Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I know I’m late to the party here, but I’ve recently found myself obsessed with Cory Doctorow’s BOING BOING, a “directory of wonderful things” that provokes me daily. I’m looking forward to reading his newest novel, which has been published to some fairly glowing reviews from people I trust. I’m pleased to see that Adam Balm’s included a review of it in his latest column, and I’m excited to see what else he’s talking about this this time as well...
Okay, there's just a couple items right off the bat that I didn't have time to review but wanted pimp just the same. First, there's the Vandermeers' STEAMPUNK anthology which is out right now and seemingly getting a lot of press, including a mention in the NY Times. Its already going back to print having sold out its first run, but you can still get it through amazon if your local B&N happens to be out. And if that's whetted your appetite for anachronistic victorian SF, I highly recommend Moorcock's THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE, which for some reason I never got around to reviewing either. Second, the Interzone Mundane SF issue has just hit the stands and should be invading the American shores within the next few weeks. It seems like I've become a complete shill for the Mundanistas lately so I figure why stop now. If you like your genre fiction ripped from the headlines and scary as hell, definitely take a chance and give it a look. PROJECT MOONBASE AND OTHERS by Robert A. Heinlein LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow THE STONE GODS by Jeanette Winterson NULL-A CONTINUUM by John C. Wright PROJECT MOONBASE AND OTHERS by Robert A. Heinlein Subterranean Press Somewhere around 1952-53, in the years between the success of Destination Moon in 1950, and the disaster and what would become the film Project Moonbase in 1953, an idea was hatched between Heinlein and producer Jack Seaman to make Heinlein's "future history" stories into a TV anthology series. Each episode would be bookended by a teacher in a future classroom, introducing these stories as though they were actual historical events. The idea was ambitious for its day, and it would probably be considered ambitious even now, for a TeeVee show to try to map out the entire future evolution and progression of the human race for centuries to come. The only thing that comes close to it off the top of my head is “Deconstruction of Falling Stars” from Babylon 5. But for whatever reason, Jack Seaman decided that he had to uphold the producer's creed to screw SF writers, taking the script for the episode "Ring Around the Moon" and stretching it into a cheaply made and almost unwatchable feature film. Its sets and costumes were hand-me-downs from "Cat-Women of the Moon". Heinlein was righteously pissed, and the series was put on ice. PROJECT MOONBASE AND OTHERS, due out this coming July, is a kind of postmortem, the closest we'll ever get to finding out what Heinlein's vision would've looked like on the small screen. Most of the screenplays here appear for the first time in print. PROJECT MOONBASE opens in the distant world of 1970, where after the U.S. has established the first orbital space station, "as a military guardian of the sky" and "free men were reaching for the moon to consolidate the safety of the Free World.". And not content with America's glorious new hegemony of space power, "the enemies of Freedom were not idle--they were working to destroy the Space Station." (Why is Freedom capitalized?) Anyway we're quickly introduced to a shadowy group which doesn't give any indication of having an actual nationality or ideology (But whoever they are, I hate them), who are plotting to kidnap one of the scientists (A Dr. Wernher) and replace him with an impostor. This sleeper agent will then follow the moon ship Magellan up to the station, and either blow it up while on board or ram the rocketship into the station. It doesn't go quite as planned, for some reason the crew becomes suspicious when this scientist doesn't know anything about science and keeps asking "how do I vurk controls to ram rocketship into station, imperialist peeg?" or something to that effect. Also, he's foreign, and that's enough of a giveaway as anything. I gotta admit a swell of nerdstalgia just imagining the visuals, sad as it is. Everything is total Von Braun/Willy Ley, straight out of Colliers, all that's missing is Chesley Bonestell's guiding hand as matte painter and model maker. Liberal for its time, the mission is commanded by a woman named Colonel Briteis (Bright Eyes), who is kind of the Charles Lindbergh of space. She had the fortune to weigh around half as much as any male competitor, and mass being everything in rocketry, she emerge as the first real hero of the space age. As pointed out in the introduction, Heinlein's progressive enough to have a woman command the first mission to orbit the moon, but still enough of a product of his time (and sadly, the all boys club that was the science fiction world back then) that he has the woman's commanding officer threaten to spank her if she doesn't do as ordered. There's also the expected sexual tension between her and her XO, who's indignant at being subordinate to a woman, especially one he wants to poke. When the sleeper agent's discovered, a fist fight breaks out in the cockpit, and the moon ship spins wildly out of control. With the Magellan on a course to slam into the broad side of the Moon, they have to make an emergency landing. Once they're there, they're told to stay put until they can be re-supplied. Their mission has changed, and the Magellan is re-named Moonbase One. And of course, since a man and a woman can't live together in sin, they are married at the end. Zoing! Almost more entertaining than the stories themselves is Heinlein's little asides. He spends pages trying to instruct the director how to film to simulate in zero gravity or how to make magnetic boots make that 'clink' sound to show they're really magnetic, or his seven pages of notes explaining how to shoot a tesseract house that's supposed to be constructed using hyperspatial geometry. I love how after giving a long set of navigational coordinates in “Space Jockey”, Heinlein cautions Seaman that those figures are only accurate to “less than plus-or-minus one degree”, but that it would go unnoticed unless someone had a calculator and a set of tables in front of him. And maybe more telling is some of his character descriptions: "MRS. APPLEBY---A silly-ass female, upper-class, too much money for her own good. Being under no necessity to do so, she hasn't used her brain since her school days." and in describing the character of Junior Schaht, "This little monster is every offensive spoiled brat you have ever met." It's also really important to him to describe in detail what all the women on the show are wearing. Since, he explains, clothing is so expensive to ship up to the moon, everyone walks around "as near naked as the law allows". Josephine MacRae in "It's Great to Be Back" is described as wearing "about three ounces of nylon...the bra might be bands of material crossing her front diagonally, or she might be wearing 'posees' stuck on under a sheer singlet...whatever it is, her costume should be attractive, exotic, and durned scanty!" Although, at least once he feels the need to add "NOTE: Easy on the cleavage---this is not a sexy scene!" Some of these (like Requiem) were adapted for radio before, for X Minus One. There's something about R.A.H.'s future history stories, being little slice-of-life vignettes, that seem to lend themselves to the screenplay format. You don't lose a whole lot in adapting them. Although I don't know how the three minute speech on Picard-Vessiot theory, homomorphology and four dimensional architecture in “And He Built a Crooked House” would've held the attention of a 50's tv audience. Maybe if he had a chick wearing about three ounces of nylon explaining it all. All in all, I'm probably more than a little bit biased about PROJECT MOONBASE. I guess it's hard to be objective when you feel like you've found the equivalent of buried treasure. After more than 50 years, we have a side of Heinlein's body of work that we'll never glimpsed before, and---most shockingly of all---some of still holds up pretty damn well. PROJECT MOONBASE AND OTHERS will be released July 28th. LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow Tor So, since beginning this column, I have consistently bitched about two things being wrong with the genre these days. 1) The lack of SF being published that's geared toward young/new readers. 2) The lack of relevant, rather than just purely escapist, SF fiction being published. (It looks like I was wrong about the first, as John Scalzi just pointed out. YA science fiction actually outsells adult SF two-to-one.) In any event, LITTLE BROTHER is an answer to both these prayers. It's a novel, it's a manifesto, it's a hacking/jamming instruction manual, but most of all it's a calling out to a generation. (I think I saw one review calling it this generation's 'Steal This Book') Right now kids are growing up without ever having known that people weren't always finger-printed when they went to Disney land, that it wasn't always normal to be photographed by CCTV cameras half a dozen times on your way to work, or that when you track and profile and data mine millions of people, you don't make it easier to find a terrorist 'needle in a haystack', you just make it easier to build new and bigger haystacks. (The paradox of the false positive.) Each chapter is devoted to a different lesson on ways to protect your privacy, what to know about your constitutional rights, and basically how not to trade freedom for a little temporary security. I'm not the least bit surprised to see the blurb on the cover by Neil Gaiman recommending it over any book published so far this year. Marcus Yallow (alias W1n5t0n. OMG! Liek Winston Smith but 1337!) one day skips school to go off and play an alternate reality game in downtown San Francisco, but as luck would have it, that will also be the day of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The Bay Bridge is blown up, followed by the BART. (It's not exactly a spoiler to say that we never find out who the perpetrators were, and it doesn't seem to matter to the story.) His friend Darryl is injured, and he tries to wave down a humvee passing by. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the passing soldiers cuff him, hood him, and he's subsequently imprisoned, interrogated, and humiliated for days. When he's finally let go, he's threatened not to speak a word of what's happened to him, and he returns home to a city that has now become a virtual police state. His computer bugged, he creates "the Xnet", a network of X-boxes that bypasses the internet, first as a way to keep Homeland Security from spying on him directly, then as a way to pass on information on how to defeat every one of the new security measures the DHS puts into place. But it seems that everything he does, every one of his plans seems to backfire, and more people just end up getting hurt. And this is probably one of the things I love most about LITTLE BROTHER. He never gives you the easy way out, the obvious teenage power fantasy solutions. You wait for the moment where Marcus plots to break Darryl out of Gitmo-by-the-Bay, or for him to crack DHS's mainframe, or for your standard 'hackers of the world unite' scene, the montage where "We're not gonna take it..." starts playing over the loudspeaker, but it never comes. He never gives you that lazy emotional satisfaction. But no. For a young adult book, it's surprisingly mature in what one kid can do to make a difference (Being both optimistic yet realistic). Marcus's victory, when it comes, is mixed and muted. I actually got a little pissed off after finishing it, and not for the obvious reasons. I was pissed off because this is a book that could've been written any time in the past decade, if the genre hadn't been lulled asleep at the fucking switch, all too pleased to sedate itself with the their own literary Soma, with promises of a far off post-singularity, post-scarcity, nano-quantum-open-source-utopia wish fulfillment fantasy. And sadly, Doctorow is just as guilty as anyone else, having led the charge. Yeah I know, only jailers are against escapism, but it's come at the expense of actually writing about what's going on in the world around us. As of this writing, LITTLE BROTHER has already smashed into the NY Times best-seller list, and I think word of mouth is going to keep it there for some time. After this, Doctorow heads to another juvenile, a novel length adaptation of his Anda's Game, (another work where Cory's activist nature is front and center) and I couldn't be happier. This is what it looks like when an author finally realizes the power of his own voice. LITTLE BROTHER was released April 29th. THE STONE GODS by Jeanette Winterson Harcourt Divided into three parts, THE STONE GODS tells the story of Billie Crusoe, who journeys from the planet Orbus to earth 65 million years ago, who lives again accompanying Captain Cook on his expedition to Easter Island in 1774, and then in a post world war three world after Iran has nuked the west, and where a corporation named MORE emerges (as it did once before) to take control. Apparently the idea came to Winterson when Stephen Hawking was in the news a while back, going on again about how we need to colonize space or go extinct (the old 'eggs all in one basket' argument). What she took away from it, that people destroy and destroy, and then move on, is the repeating them of STONE GODS. And so Easter Island is the crux of the parable Winterson is telling (hence the title), being probably one of the most extreme examples of ecosystem destruction in modern history. From what I read, she's also supposed to be doing a riff off of Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO here (I wouldn't know), at but I'm surprised that hardly anyone has brought up Thornton Wilder. Because THE STONE GODS reads like 'The Skin of Our Teeth' in novel form. Partly because of the three act/three ages structure using the same characters, (Yeah, I know the same thing was done with the Fountain) but mostly because of the same dismal message that history is cyclical, and that humans are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. “Everything is imprinted with what once was.” ACT ONE begins on Orbus, which bears a striking resemblance to our own 21st century earth. Billie Crusoe works for Enhancement Services in Tech City, convincing people it's in their best interest not to be too different from everybody else. When everyone can be born perfect, beauty is found in deviants. Women lock their age to look perpetually adolescent (which, I guess would make every man kind of a pedo.) and the men that are found most attractive are killers and rapists. Orbus is dying. Well, not dying, exactly. The inhabitants just "fucked it to death and kicked it when it wouldn't get up". As can happen. A new world, 'Planet Blue' has been discovered, and the Central Power intends to colonize the new world, and leave this dying one to the Caliphate. Billie, along with the Robo Sapien Spike, join Captain Handsome's voyage to the new world. Although one stumbling block to colonization happens to be the dinosaurs that are currently living there. So Captain Handsome hatches a plan to send an asteroid crashing into it, which should clear them out nicely. But there's a wrinkle. A snag. The ash kicked up from the impact blots out the sun, making the planet unlivable for the foreseeable future. (Damn you, irony!) In ACT TWO, Billie is left to fend for herself on Easter Island, as James Cook and his ship sails off. Billie soon befriends Spikkers (who I guess represents 'Spike' in this time-frame) who speaks pidgin english, and tells her how Easter Island has been turned into a wasteland to construct the giant heads that will become its face to the world. Now two cults battle for control of Easter Island, the Cult of the White Man and the Cult of the Bird Man. The White Man ordered the last tree protected as a sacred object, but the Bird Man had it cut down. Spikker plots to steal the egg of the Bird Man cult, bringing their power back to the gods of the old ways, ending the civil war, and "the trees will grow and the birds will return" again. Except it doesn't. The act closes with the word that "To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed, and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed." ACT THREE brings it all full circle. In the near future, Billie is riding to work one day on the subway when she comes across some papers someone had left. It turns out to be the manuscript for this book. This future earth is almost indistinguishable from that of Orbus in the first act. She works for the MORE corporation in Tech City. They're building the Robo Sapien Spike who is supposed to govern more rationally than humans. But before she's completed, Billie takes her to Wreck City, the city of refugees and outcasts who won't live under the rule of MORE, where a signal from the past awaits them that's been broadcasting for the last 65 million years. The word "preachy" isn't preachy enough to describe Winterson's approach, and I think that's probably turned a lot of people off. I can sympathize, and it's one of those books people line up to sneer at, because they know they're too cool and savvy to fall for propaganda like that. Every point she has to make, she hammers home hard enough to leave a crater, and in case you get lost in her flowery prose, she revisits them all over again page after page. Whether you think it's lesson or lecture, parable or propaganda, probably depends on the reader. As wide as it is in scope is as heavy it is in message. You'll find the universe in THE STONE GODS, but you won't find subtlety. THE STONE GODS was released in the UK last year, and in the US on April 1st. NULL-A CONTINUUM by John C. Wright Tor/SciFi This is why they keep making sequels to dead people's novels. This is the second time van Vogt has received the treatment. I reviewed SLAN HUNTER around the same time last year. Kevin J. Anderson was a safe choice, his DUNE sequels didn't even try to reach the heights of Frank Herbert, they just tried not to be boring. SLAN HUNTER, the sequel to van Vogt's SLAN, was more of the same. It was faithful to a degree, but not terribly inventive in its own right. John C. Wright on the other hand, also doesn't try to reach the heights of A.E. van Vogt's Null-A series, (THE WORLD OF NULL-A, THE PLAYERS OF NULL-A, NULL-A THREE) he tries to surpass them. Outside of THE TIME SHIPS, this is probably the most ambitious 'sequel by another hand' to a science fiction book that I have ever read, and that's saying a lot. Van Vogt was dense, ornate, pretentious, frustrating and intimidating. He lived by the maxim that you should have a new mind-shattering idea at least every five hundred words, which doesn't make for the easiest night table reading. He was denounced loudly in the pages of Astounding for being incomprehensible and deliberately obfuscating. Damon Knight wrote his famous repudiation, which didn't stop THE WORLD OF NULL-A from becoming the first modern science fiction released in hard cover and one of the biggest sellers of its time. WORLD OF NULL-A probably single handedly set the stage for Philip K. Dick, Sam Delany and pretty much the entire New Wave. Every time you see a hero who wakes up with no memory of who he is, unaware of what in his life is illusion and what is reality, you are seeing van Vogt. He pioneered the exploration of innerspace, and he suffered the familiar curse of a man too ahead of his time. A prophet is never accepted in his own country. The word 'NULL-A' itself refers to “non-Aristotelean logic”, which was supposed to do for logic and philosophy what the non-newtonian and non-euclidean revolutions did for physics and geometry respectively. But it didn't really turn out that way. It was a fringe school of thought, when General Semantics came on the scene, rejected by academia, nearly laughed out of existence, and interestingly, became the main inspiration for L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics, and the Church of Scientology. If not for van Vogt, no one would even remember it today, and the phrase “The map is not the territory” wouldn't be common vernacular, if not a cliché. Each book in the NULL-A sequence raised the stakes. What began on a planetary and then interplanetary stage soon expanded to interstellar, and then intergalactic with van Vogt's final, and largely disregarded effort. (It's possible that by NULL-A three, van Vogt's Alzheimer's was already beginning to have an effect.) NULL-A CONTINUUM enlarges the canvas to a universal scale, from before the big bang to alternate pocket universes and false realities, to the final epoch of the universe eons in the future, with a sentient cosmic mind at war with itself for its own sanity. It becomes more Stapledon than van Vogt. But that's not always a good thing. One of the big problems with the old Superscience stories in the footsteps of Doc Smith and Edmond Hamilton is that you can only take so much 'billions and billions'. With Sunsawunda, like all drugs, the second hit is never as good as the first, and you soon become numb as characters become gods and timescales stretch to infinity. Probably everything after the first 150 pages seems like just a series of Gilbert Gosseyn waking up in a new disorienting place or time or body and someone spending an entire chapter trying to explain some new aspect of reality or metaphysics that too often turns out to be pointless subterfuge. The maze becomes the message. It becomes less like a science fiction novel reading experience and more like slogging through Derrida, or listening to some obnoxious humanities major who slogged through Derrida. You almost pray for Alan Sokal to walk into the room and call bullshit on all the pseudo-intellectual posturing. It's also at times an inconsistent hodge-podge of 40's pulp pseudo-science, new age transhuman pantheistic mysticism, and modern day hard science that doesn't always quite mesh together. There's one moment where a scientist remarks in awe about Gosseyn "that the number of neural interconnections in Gosseyn's second brain exceeded the number of estimated particles in the universe!", which is less impressive considering that the same is already true about the human brain. But at the same time, I just can't bring myself to give this thing a negative review. It honestly is brilliant, it's brave and boundary pushing, it's byzantine and awe inspiring and, yes...dense, ornate, pretentious, frustrating and intimidating. The same people who threw down van Vogt in a fit of rage and confusion will thrown down this for the same reason. As it should be. The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it represents. And---I'm guessing I'm not the only one who'll make the joke---John C. Wright isn't A.E. van Vogt. But he's similar enough. NULL-A CONTINUUM is his distortion effect, he's bridged the gap between the two. NULL-A CONTINUUM was released on May 13th. Alright, I'll be back in a few weeks with more including a first look at Thomas M. Disch's newest, where he reveals himself to be God and gives us the truth about his battle with Philip K. Dick for control of the universe...and hilarity ensues! E-mail me here to tell me what I should read, send me things to review, or just to chat about SF in general!
