A Maze of Death

A few weeks ago I picked up a collection of Philip K. Dick novels and recently finished the first in the book, A Maze of Death.  I have read a bunch of Dick's work over the years and have even taught Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and have always enjoyed it.  I don't have a lot to say about this novel aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it and Dick does something in it that I have thought about a lot in the past.
In the novel, Dick dumps a bunch of characters into an unfamiliar situation and lets them figure out what is going on.  The narrative builds along with the characters' knowledge, so the reader learns about what is happening as the characters do.  This helps to create in the reader similar senses of alienation and familiarity that the characters experience.  As in many of his novels, the characters begin to doubt the reality of their world and, then, to question their experience of their reality.
I like the idea that there is something to gain from questioning the world we inhabit and that those who do so are not automatically incorrect.  The characters in this novel (largely flat and interchangeable) eventually come out the the VR simulation that has been the entirety of the narrative up to that point, and are instantly aware of the fact that they had placed themselves in the simulation and that they had actually made up the entire world themselves along with the AI running the simulation.
Dick's characters do not always come to a grander revelation, but they usually do gain something from their skepticism, even if that gain is only coming a bit closer to a truth about themselves or their world.
There is a strong similarity between the simulation the characters eventually escape (and subsequently voluntarily re-enter) and Area X in Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation.  The characters in both novels face a surreality that similarly leaves the reader questioning what is real within the confines of the fiction.  I don't know that both have the same effect in the end, but it interesting to note the possible inspiration for the later novel.  As a part of the "new weird," it would seem natural for VanderMeer to take after Dick.  I just haven't done any research to know for sure.

Sci-fi's Unsatisfying Sequel Problem

Recently I finished reading the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's groundbreaking Rendezvous with Rama.  This second book in the Rama series, Rama II, details a second excursion to meet a second mysterious alien ship.  The book itself is rather uninteresting.  It follows up on many of the themes of the original novel, but fails to captivate in the same way.  Rendezvous with Rama focuses on the unknown ship's construction as the cosmonauts attempt to divine its origins and purpose.  This all established, Rama II introduces a new set of cosmonauts and delves into their interactions instead.  We do get more descriptions of the interior of the Raman ship, but they are largely just developed detail of the first novel rather than any extrapolation into new material.  There are a few revelations, but these are never built upon.  For example, one of the cosmonauts (in an unresolved treachery plot) runs across doppelgängers of the first crew to visit the first ship.  This should be a major turning point of the novel because it reveals that the first interstellar ship is in contact with the second, despite there being no evidence of any sentient alien crew, and also that the "biots," or robotic alien animals that both human crews encounter may actually be replications of species that the ship had previously been in contact with.  The discovery goes largely uncommented upon.
The problem with Rama II is one that pervades a certain era of sci-fi.  Clarke's other noted series, 2001 and its sequels suffered the same fate as well as Asimov's Foundation series, among others.  These series all began as brilliant one-off novels that foundered and lost their way.  Rama II was unnecessary and I cannot imagine that the remaining sequels get any better.  In fairness, Rama II has the potential to be a good stand-alone.  The character development is good and there is the making of a good thriller plot within the novel.  However, as a sequel to Rendezvous with Rama, it breaks too sharply from the thematics that made the original striking.
I read the first novel long after I had begun reading hard sci-fi such as that written by Kim Stanley Robinson, but is easy to see the influence that Rendezvous had on Robinson's work.  That novel is deeply invested in the logistics of interstellar travel and the difficulties humans would face when trying to interact with a true alien culture/technology.  There is some character drama in the book, but it is largely in service to this main theme.  Rama II loses that focus.

Mighty Like a Rose

I really enjoyed reading Elvis Costello's musical memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.  The book was given to me over a year ago by a friend who is a much better gift-giver than I am.  I was a little skeptical about reading a musician's memoir because I don't particularly like reading memoirs in the first place (though I seem to read an awful lot of them for all that) and because of the way that I tend to think about music, but I'll come back to that.
One of the things that stood out to me is that this reads more like a full autobiography than just a memoir of Costello's musical career.  He weaves personal and family history along with discussions of his lyrics and the music that inspired him into the overarching narrative of his life in music.  But this makes it sound more organized than it is.  At times, the book reads more like an oral history because Costello will veer off from one story to another based on his own associative logic.  The book is more-or-less chronological, but it takes minor detours from time to time.
I spent a lot of time while in college searching out Elvis Costello's music and searching specifically for vinyl albums, so a lot of this felt very familiar.  This makes me realize that there are whole swaths of his music that I still don't know.  While I know that this is all out there, I still think of Elvis in his knock-kneed rocker stance on the cover of My Aim is True.  This memoir felt like my own personal history in a way as I read about his recording Delivery Man, and I hoped that he would mention something from the concert he played in support of that album in Columbus, OH in 2005 that I attended.  This also made me realize that I still think of When I was Cruel and Delivery Man (released in 2002 and 2005, respectively) as his "new" albums.
I have a way of thinking about music as abstraction.  I want to think about music apart from the musician in the sense that any art is separable from the artist.  When music, or any art, is abstracted from its source it is easier to enjoy and also to criticize.  When I think and write about music, I am moved by the personal experience and the connections that it forges with others.  I want others to experience and enjoy the music in the same way that I do.  The shared experience of music is a less distorted medium of communication than most for being abstracted.  Songs are encapsulations of energy, thought, and emotion.  They convey a lot about the artist, of course, but also about what we latch on to and this is why so many subcultures generate around music.  The things that we like define us as much or more than the things we do.  When I was young I connected so much of my thought, fashion, and aesthetics with the music that I listened to.
This post is perilously close to going off the rails as I just deleted a paragraph about Dick Hebdige's Subculture: the Meaning of Style.  It is an excellent book but would have lead down a path I don't want to go right now.
Bringing this all back around, Costello does not do what I feared he would do.  He wrote sensitively and honestly about his life and work.  He didn't disillusion me and I do appreciate that.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time blends some familiar sci-fi elements such as a generation ship, anxiety of deep space travel and suspension pods, and the search for a new home planet after Earth is rendered inhospitable with some new and surprising direction.  The novel alternates between two narrative strands: the first line details the crew aboard generation ship Gilgamesh travel through interstellar space, scouring planets that had been scouted and seeded by their more advanced ancestors.  The second line follows the development of super-intelligent spiders on one of these planets.  This planet had been "seeded" with a nanovirus that was meant to speed evolution in monkeys that would help to make the planet more hospitable when humans eventually returned to the planet.  The monkeys all died in transit and the nanovirus infected spiders instead.

The super-intelligent spiders angle took a while to grow on me because Tchaikovsky endeavors to tell the story from the spiders' point of view, which can be a little dicey.  However, he does grow into the task a bit more as the story progresses and he moves beyond the initial evolutionary stages and shows a spider population with increasing alien technology.

Aboard the Gilgamesh, the Key Crew members transition in and out of suspension, essentially manipulating time and extending their own lifespans to counteract the difficulties of space travel.  The crew members use suspension and lengths of time to gain advantage over one another.  Essentially, the last one to go into suspension and the first one to awaken have the advantage because they can then control when the others emerge from their sleep.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the primary characters comes to learn that he has been in suspension for much longer than the others and that a lot has been going on.  As the Gilgamesh approaches its goal planet, we learn that key crew members have had children and there have been many successive generations born on the ship.  These generations revert to an almost tribal way of living and the captain of the ship uses suspension to appear once per generation and to create a myth of himself.

There are other surprises in the novel that it is worth checking out first hand, particularly the final confrontation between the Gilgamesh and the spiders on the green planet.

When I began this post a week or so ago, I found myself getting bogged down in plot and detail.  I edited some of that out before finishing.