337 by M. Jonathan Lee

I was recently given the opportunity to review 337 by M. Jonathan Lee, an upcoming release from Hideaway Fall. The narrative follows Sam Darte, a youngish man whose family was destroyed after his mother disappeared from their home when he was young. The novel picks up years later, Sam stuck in a rut and estranged from his wife and the rest of his family. Sam is pulled back to the mystery of his mother's disappearance after he receives a phone call from his father, who is in prison, telling Sam that his grandmother is dying. Realizing the his Gramma might have some information, Sam decides to visit her and reignites his investigation.

The novel is part family drama and part mystery. Sam's mother is absent from the entire novel, but she is its heart and what keeps the whole thing going. A lot of the pleasure of this book lies in slow-burns and reveals, so I will do my best to leave those things in the dark that seem most appropriate. Here are a few things that struck me about this book.

The mystery at the heart of the novel is what has happened to Sam's mother. At the moment the novel opens, Sam seems to be just grinding through his days without experiencing much. The impending death of his grandmother is the inciting incident of the novel and it starts the slow reopening of Sam's character and relationships within the family. Sam's search for the truth about what happened that day allows him to reconnect with some of his family members while he re-covers ground he has already looked into and let go.

Sam hopes that his grandmother may have some information that he has overlooked or that she never mentioned in the past. See, when Sam and his brother were children, their mother left the family with just a note for their father to take care of them. She was never seen alive after that aside from a couple of witnesses who may have spotted her over the next few days. The police suspect the father and he is eventually convicted and imprisoned for her murder. However, no body was ever recovered and the conviction relied on Sam's testimony. The thing of it all is that Sam was never certain that his mother had ever died.

A lot of the middle of the novel reveals Sam's investigations, his relationship with his estranged wife and brother, and his reconciliation with his grandmother. The novel turns slightly as Sam's brother Tom shows up to see their grandmother before she dies and the two are able to reconcile as well. The grandmother's death takes over as the central narrative force in the novel in this section. In this section, Sam realizes that his brother's life is both what he thought it was and a bit more. What Sam had assumed were Tom's lies about people he knows turn out to be true.

After Gramma's death, Sam destroys the box of research that he had kept regarding his mother's disappearance. His grandmother's death seems to signal to him that whatever happened to his mother may remain a mystery to him. The mother doesn't show up and the only new information that Gramma had been able to provide was that maybe three people had seen his mother after her disappearance, but this doesn't lead anywhere. There is one final narrative twist that happens at the very end that I don't want to reveal too much here.

One of the more interesting features that emerges over the course of the novel is the way that Sam's relationship with work is reflected. Lee invents a tool called “mySnug” that tracks Sam's online work. Sam finds some inventive ways to work around the online system to make it look like he is doing more than he does, but he is constantly faced with the mySnug counter, which reads off the amount of time he has logged for the week and also the amount of time that he has left to fulfill. Lee uses this system to help the reader to track Sam's time through the week as well. What this does is to reveal, first, the repetitious nature of Sam's work, and second, the repetitious nature of life and the patterns that emerge whether we mean them to or not. The reader (at least this reader) recognizes the cyclical nature of the work week and the countdown to get it done.

There are two last features that I would mention here: the book format and the title. I am still mulling over the significance of these two items. So rather than providing any kind of analysis of them, I will present my observations and leave it up to you to do with it what you will.

First, this book features similar front and back cover designs and the opening material on both ends is the same. However, if you begin reading from one end, you get to read 15 pages before you are advised to flip the book over and begin reading it there from page 16. You are told, “Nothing is as it seems...” From here, the book seems to proceed in a more traditional narrative way. The chapters are short and tend to narrate in segments as Sam experiences them. I will say that the book flip eluded me. I waited to see if this would pay off and, aside from the warning that things are not as they seem, I didn't catch anything. I am used to postmodern, meta-fictional elements in books, but I didn't catch on to what this was meant to convey. (Please note the double-ended upside-down opening for this book is available in books ordered in hard copy from UK booksellers only.)

The chapter format is also a bit untraditional and I believe that it ties the structure and some narrative elements together. The chapters are structured normally through 66. Chapters 67 through 75 have headings but are left blank. The chapter heading then skip to number 336 and 337, both of which have brief content. Chapter 336 is a bit of a recap of what had happened between chapter 66 and the present and chapter 337 turns the novel in a way I won't mention here in case you want to read it. This last chapter doesn't necessarily change everything in the novel, but it does continue the mystery and leaves it - to some extent – unresolved, but ties in with this last feature.

The title, 337, is not referenced in the novel at all until this final chapter. Even in the final chapter it is not referenced aside from the chapter number. The way that the typeface on the cover is designed, the title and the author's last name mirror one another. This is especially evident on the spine of the book. This could point to some self-reflective or autobiographical elements in the novel, though I am not certain of this at all. There is another potential significance to the number 337 that seems to coincide with themes in the novel. The angel number 337 encourages those who see it to have the courage to live their lives differently. It is an encouragement to having meaningful experiences. This seems to connect with Sam's life before reconnecting with his family and his interface with work and the mySnug app. This final chapter – and what happens in it – may be inducements for Sam to make good on the positive changes that he had lately made in his life and to cheer him on in letting go of the things that were weighing him down.

As I mentioned above, I don't have a final analysis of these last couple of points. Overall, though, I found the book an enjoyable read. Lee does a good job developing characters and establishing tension throughout. I don't mind a lack of resolution in a novel, and I think that some interpretations of this story will lend their own resolution, even if the central mystery of what happened to Sam's mother is never revealed.

The Expanse, part 5. Nemesis Games

 So I just finished Nemesis Games, the fifth book in The Expanse series by James SA Corey. This book changes tactics in a couple of ways from the first four books. The dynamics are different and the story feels fresher for it. Before getting into that, though, I have to say that this series has been good keeping a forward momentum while also hitting a lot of the same beats. What I mean by that is that the first four books, and to some extent this book too, have hit a lot of the same narrative beats. Some disaster takes place in the solar system, Holden and crew get involved somehow, the original disaster turns out to be a part of something bigger that leads back to the government of Earth, Mars, Luna, or the Outer Belt Alliance, and then with some help from one of these factions Holden, et al. manage to resolve the crisis. The narrative paths differ somewhat within each of the novels, but they all tend toward this basic plot arc.

The first major difference that this book adopts is separating the crew. After the last adventure on Ilus, the Rocinante is docked at Tycho Station for some much-needed repairs. Aside from Holden, the crew are all drawn from Tycho to various points for their own reasons. Amos heads to Earth on a mysterious mission, Naomi heads out to try to help out a son that the reader discovers she has, and Alex decides to go to Mars to find closure with his ex-wife. Holden is left alone on the station, feeling unmoored for the first time in the series. For maybe the first time since the opening book, we are reminded of these characters' histories. In Leviathan Wakes, all of the characters aboard the Canturbury are there because of something dark in their histories. Holden was dishonorably discharged from the Earth Navy, same for Alex, Amos had something dark in his past, and we never really knew much about Naomi. Now these personal histories pop back up for the crew and it reinforces the idea that they have become a family by choice, that there is nothing in their past to tie them together. This adds some complexity to the characters that was not there before. It brings more depth to Amos and Naomi, in particular.

While the crew is separated, disaster strikes in the solar system. A terrorist attack on Earth leaves millions dead and changes the power dynamics of the entire system. Coordinated with the Earth attacks are strikes on both Tycho Station and on the Prime Minister of Mars' convoy. All of the important people live, but the alien protomolecule is stolen during the attack on Tycho Station.

Here I am going to gloss over big chunks of the book because, for a while, things will shake out as they do in most of these books.

All of this adds up to the next big shift from the preceding books. That is, we are left with an unknown at the end of the novel. Most of the pieces have been wrapped up: the crew is re-united, those in power have mainly figured out what happened and why these coordinated attacks took place, but the gap that we are left with at the end of the novel is what has happened to the protomolecule. For maybe the first time in the series, we have a cliff-hanger. In the first four books the end has always been left open and there may have been some lingering questions to follow, but this is the first time that it seems that a novel is purposely leading into the next one.

I'm not sure what this means for the series. I didn't mind that this happened, it just seemed to be an interesting change from what the series had lead me to expect from the books. I think that this left me a little more excited to get to the next book. The protomolucule was part of the inciting action in the first novel and it has been in the background of the story for the entire time. It will be interesting to see how it will re-enter the narrative.

Here and Now and Then

 

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

This is an entertaining time travel book. Kin Stewart, an agent for the Time Corruption Bureau (TCB), an agency tasked with tracking down criminals attempting to use time-travel technology to alter history, is stranded in near-present day America, the chronological past for him. His tracker device destroyed, Stewart is stranded for 18 years and builds a life for himself, including getting married and having a child.

His brain unable to support memories from two different eras, he begins to forget his life in 2142 and has a series of headaches and blackouts that his family believes to untreated PTSD. Eventually Kin is found and forced to return to his home timeline. When he researches his family's history, he learns that his wife dies of cancer shortly after he leaves and his daughter spins off the rails, eventually killing two people in a drunk driving crash. The remainder of the book details Kin's mission to re-assimilate into his life in 2142, where only 2 weeks have passed, and then attempt to rescue his daughter from a life of hardship and regret.

Chen doesn't do much to describe the mechanics of time travel, but does lay out some interesting rules. Like many time travel stories, this one also seeks to restrict access and has a hard timeline. That is, there are a lot of concerns about grandfather paradoxes and keeping the reality of time travel hidden from the general public.

One thing that Chen accomplishes in this novel is heightening the drama and creating a sense of urgency. The narrative maintains a good momentum once it gets going, which can be a difficult thing to do in a time travel story. After all, if the traveler can go to any time, what is the urgency of going now when one can go and fix it later? Chen closes this loophole by building some administrative difficulties into time travel and also writes that time travel degrades the traveler's body so that a series of pre-and post-jump shots are needed. Kin's body is worn out from being out of its own time for so long and he loses a required shot.

In the end, Kin accomplishes his mission and regains his love for the woman he left behind in 2142. He is able to regain a connection with his daughter from the other timeline and avoid detection or paradoxes.

This is among a few recent time travel books that I have read and it does well. The rules are a little harder in this one and there is a little less room for rumination on the social effects of time travel, but it does contain some interesting elements, such as meditations on food production in our era versus and 2142, and a seeming-Dune-inspired spice with psychotropic properties from Mars. I hoped that Chen would use the spice as a jumping off point for observations about space travel and colonization, but he keeps his focus tight on Kin's quest, using the spice strategically in the narrative.

David Foster Wallace

 

I keep coming back to David Foster Wallace’s work.  This is an old story, and one that I may have shared on this blog before, but here it is again because this is something that has been important for me.

I picked up Oblivion, the book that turned out to be Wallace’s last short story collection on the recommendation of a friend.  This guy had been pushing Wallace on me for a long time.  Infinite Jest seemed too long ( I didn’t have the same tolerance for long books then that I do now) and too much of an investment.  I opted for the short story collection, which probably delayed my actual appreciation of Wallace for a while.  

Anyway, I struggled through parts of this book and wrote off this writer.  After further insistence from my friend, I picked up Infinite Jest a couple of years later.  I struggled through it and finished it.  I thought it was dumb and pretentious.  I didn’t care about the characters and I think that my reading of it suffered because it was such a struggle and it took me nearly a year to get through it.

The problem that I had is that I kept thinking about it.  When I was in the middle of reading it, I had just started in my doctoral program at the University of Tennessee and I was trying to figure out the direction I wanted to take my studies.  I kept returning to this novel, kept thinking about it.  There was something to it that I couldn’t figure out and it got to me in a way that novels that I just don’t like cannot do.  I went through my courses and decided that I would focus on contemporary postmodern fiction (this wasn’t much of a choice, it is and was all I read).  

I won’t go into too much detail here, but I ended up rereading the book a couple of years later and the whole thing clicked with me.  The book is big and difficult to read, but it is worth the read.  I have made attempts to read through the rest of Wallace’s catalogue and have ended up putting a good dent into it.  I can say that I sort of liked The Broom of the System and will probably read that again soon.  I really like his non-fiction and essays, but I have never liked his short fiction.  Infinite Jest stands out to me as an absolutely stellar novel that is the more stellar because it stands alone among his fictional offerings as a truly, truly quality work.  

This is what brought me to Wallace.  What I am here to write about is D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.  I read this book years ago while I was writing my dissertation (of which Infinite Jest was the focus of a chapter).  It had just been released and it seemed like a source for good supplemental material.  I read it quickly at the time and got a couple of good quotes out of it.

Well, I just finished reading this and my take is a little different.  I still like the book.  I think that Max did a good job with the subject material.  He focuses the narrative of Wallace’s life around his writing and attempts to present a sympathetic version of Wallace for the reader.  Overall, he succeeds in doing this.  This time that I read it, however, I was more struck by Wallace’s idiosyncrasies and the unlikeable aspects of his personality.  After Wallace’s suicide, many sources went out of their way to portray the writer as an earnest, kind person.  I think that he was this.  But I think there was more to him.  I won’t get into my evaluation of him as a person here because all I would be basing it on is my reading of his work and a few interviews.  That doesn’t matter here.

Here’s the thing: I still love Infinite Jest.  I hope that it stands the test of time and continues to be a good book.  The aspects of Wallace’s personality that I don’t like don’t really matter because I never knew him.  I don’t think that he was terrible, so I don’t need to bend myself to make excuses to like him.  By all accounts he really was a nice person and cared a lot about his students.  That is good.  I like that.  

I have mixed feelings about this biography, but that is not specific to this biography.  I think that there is a problem that all biographers face, and that is how to present the narrative of another person’s life.  Max made a decision about how to write about Wallace.  He cast Wallace’s life in a particular light to achieve a particular end.  All biographers do this.  I take a page from Hayden White in this.  White wrote about history and his belief that historians cast events in a particular narrative arc: comedy, tragedy, irony, or farce (I think.  I may be wrong on that last one, I am doing this from memory).  This cuts against the so-called “objectivity” of history because it necessitates the historian’s perspective and affects the way that it is, then, written.

The same must be true of biographies.  This shouldn’t be earth-shattering.  An author must feel a certain attachment -- positive or negative -- to their subject.  And this will come through in the writing.  Wallace’s life was not a narrative, but it was narrativized.  And from a particular perspective.  

So, I reread this book after I had gotten some distance from Wallace’s work.  I still like it.  I think the author did a good job and related some key aspects of Wallace’s life, especially as they connect to his writing.  

Foundation, part 6: Foundation and Earth

Foundation and Earth.  Isaac Asimov

The fifth novel in the Foundation series continues in the more traditional novelistic veil as the fourth book, Foundation’s Edge.  Both of these novels were conceived as whole narratives rather than put together post hoc as the early novels had been.  As I have noted in earlier installments of this string, this allows Asimov more room for character and plot development, both good things.

This novel is further unusual in the series because the plot picks up right where the preceding novel ends.  Here is a bit of recap before I get further into the novel.  In Foundation’s Edge, Golan Trevize and Janov Pelorat have taken a Foundation ship in search of the Second Foundation, which Trevize comes to believe is on Earth, the planet of humanity’s origin.  At this point in history, Earth is mythical and many doubt that it even exists, let alone was the birth world of life.  In this world, it seems, the presence of humans across the galaxy is a given and few question their own lineage or the history of space exploration and settlement. Instead of finding Earth, Golan and Pelorat find Gaia, but forces from the Foundation and Second Foundation that are pursing the duo also find them and Gaia at the same time.  Gaia represents a third power in the universe, a sort of mental inter-connectivity that links the entire planet and everything on it into a sort of super-organism.  The existence of Gaia presents a tri-polar world in which the First Foundation is powered by logic, the Second Foundation by emotion, and Gaia by interconnected mentality.

Unbeknownst to Trevize, he has an unusual mental insight that Gaia prizes and Gaia grants him the choice for the future of humanity from among these three options.  Trevize selects Gaia and then Gaia, in turn, makes the Foundation and Second Foundation forces forget that he exists so that Gaia can move forward with Trevize to create Galaxia, and interconnection the stretches the entire galaxy and everything in it.  

This is where Foundation’s Edge leaves off.  Foundation and Earth picks up with Trevize still wanting to find Earth because he wants to make certain that his decision is the correct one and he believes that he will find the answer he is looking for on Earth.  Carrying over from the preceding novel, Trevize picks up clues from the varying legends about humanity’s origins and finds that all the records have been scrubbed of actual evidence of Earth or its location.

Trevize and Pelorat take off in their ship Far Star, along with Bliss, a representative of Gaia who loves Pelorat and will serve as Trevize’s philosophical foil throughout the novel.  For, even though Trevize has provisionally decided in favor of Gaia (and thus, Galaxia), he has his doubts that he will repeatedly voice.  Remember, he wants to be sure of his decision, although he just seems to regret choosing it most of the time.

This, at least is enough to get started and provide some context for what I think are some of the more interesting points in the novel.  So far, there are really three things that stood out to me as I am reading this.  The first is that Bliss and Trevize’s constant bickering is entirely wearisome.  At nearly every encounter the three have with other worlds, Bliss will take the opportunity to try to convince Trevize of Gaia’s superior interconnected nature.  She will point out some aspect of life and try to make an analogy to show that Trevize’s “isolate” position is lacking.  Trevize argues back each time, attempting to show why his atomistic, individualistic aspect is superior.  Pelorat mainly just tries to keep the peace.  The philosophical argument that this series of discussions seems to want to approach would be between a version of Spinoza’s pantheism and an Enlightenment-era perspective on individuality.  Couple this latter with a mid-twentieth century belief in rugged individualism that Asimov seems to endorse, and we arrive at the heart of the matter.  This is a struggle between the all and the one.  But Trevize, who has already decided in favor of Gaia cannot let go of his individuality.  He wants to see the value in Gaia, and perhaps he only recognizes its worth as opposed to either of the Foundations, but he does supposedly choose Gaia, and Galaxia, even as he rigorously argues against Bliss’s ideas.  Asimov, of course, never makes these philosophical underpinnings explicit (if he was conscious of writing them at the time, that is), but there they are.  

I like this complication of the previous novels because it breaks up the simplistic binary logic.  The tension between the Foundation and the Second Foundation boils down to an old emotion/logic binary that reinforces a lot of bad ideas.  Asimov ascribes stereotypical characteristics to the respective Foundations that reinforce other, mistaken binaries.  The Foundation is logical, urban, scientific, and masculine while the Second Foundation is emotional, pastoral, folksy, and feminine.  Asimov, thankfully, does not go the route of simply coding one good or bad, but he does seem to favor the first Foundation insomuch as it is a Foundation ship that makes Trevize’s search possible and Trevize does come from the Foundation, wherever his allegiances lie later.  The addition of Gaia as a third party disrupts the simple binary, not by just adding a third term, but by working out of line of the other two elements.  To put it another way, Asimov could have added Gaia as a third element that reinforces the binary (logical: emotional: artistic), or he could have attempted to dialectically synthesize the two (logical: emotional: humanistic), but instead he extends the third option beyond current human understanding to totality.  Gaia, and Galaxia by extension, represents a non-synthetic, non-binarized composition of humanity, non-human life, and inert matter into a single consciousness that, paradoxically also has room for individuality.  This take the series off in a much different direction from where the series started when Seldon pitted the order of psychohistory against the chaos of human rationality.

Asimov also introduces a complication in this novel that had not been fully realized in the preceding books in the series.  That is, he acknowledges that human involvement on plants (ie., that acts of settling and colonization) throw things off balance.  In other books in the series, the only real difficulties that humans face are their political interactions with one another.  That humanity has spread across the galaxy to the point that it has forgotten its own origins is presented as a simple fact.  Bliss, the emissary of Gaia, points out that “No inhabited world has a true ecological balance,” meaning that every world that humans have molded worlds to suit themselves in every instance and that this “terraforming” throws off that balance.  This insight occurs after the trio have visited a world formerly inhabited by humans that has gone feral.  

This is the first inkling that there are cracks in the human project of space exploration.  In a piece I wrote on Foundation and the Enlightenment project for tor.com, I argued that Foundation invokes some of the problems of the Enlightenment because it is a project that depends on the willing participation of future generations and assumes that those descendants will have the same goals and values that we do.  In many ways, space exploration is an ultimate extension of the Enlightenment because it is an attempt to know the galaxy and beyond in human terms.  Terraforming is a good from the perspective of those doing the forming.  It is right there in the name.  From a galactic perspective, human space exploration may be an imposition.  At the end of the novel, the characters will be faced with the reality that humanity has been the only species in the galaxy to achieve self-aware intelligence and sophisticated enough technology to travel between stars.  But they also face that possibility there may be intelligent species in other galaxies that do not share human values and humanity is inadequate to facing that challenge.

Taken together, this reflection on terraforming points to two tropes in sf that will develop more strongly in other writers.  I am specifically thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series that takes up the question of the ethics of terraforming directly and of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth Past series in which humanity is threatened by interstellar, possibly intergalactic, aliens and the Dark Forest conundrum.  

There are just a couple of additional points that I will briefly detail now, since this post is starting to get a bit long.  

The first is that Asimov seems to be somewhat forward looking in regards to gender in the future.  I will acknowledge here that Asimov does not have a great track record when it comes to treatment/portrayal of women in his work and that there have been reports of his being a groper in his lifetime.  These are strikes against an author and should not be ignored.  However, in this novel, Asimov does seem to present something of a more nuanced view of gender.  The descendants of the Spacers, those among the first to strike out from Earth, inhabit Solaris and have evolved themselves into a hermaphroditic species.  During their adventures on Solaris, the crew ends up killing one of the Solarians and kidnapping a child.  After the child is aboard the ship, they find that they have difficulty referring to it as “it.”  They have a discussion about gendering and pronouns and end up deciding for the child that “it” will now be “she.”  This is an interesting moment because this discussion of gendered pronoun usage seems very prescient for a writer who generally does not seem interested in gender politics.  Even though the trio ultimately gets it wrong in deciding the gender for the child rather than asking its preferences, this moment does seem ahead of its time.

The last point of interest for me is the way that Asimov decides to cap off the series.  In the world of Foundation, there are no robots until this novel.  The people in the galaxy had not even known about robots until Trevize and Pelorat begin their search.  We find out at the end, though, that the robots themselves are responsible for shepherding humanity throughout time toward a more responsible ecology.  Asimov ties this series with his Robot series here and provides an amendment to the laws of robotics.  This serves as a kind of deus ex machina that wraps up the narrative rather neatly.  Robots guided the Seldon plan and robots are behind the drive to create Galaxia.  They realize that humanity will continue to terraform and mangle the worlds they inhabit because they do not have a broader grasp of the world.  

In its way, the robots and Galaxia undermine the Seldon plan and the drive of the earlier books which did focus on an Enlightenment rationality and notions of progress. This is a bit of a disappointment after reading more than a thousand pages about the various conflicts surrounding the Seldon plan, the Foundation, the Second Foundation, and all of the rest.  These conflicts are largely pointless in the last moments because this unknown entity was manipulating the course of history and, thus, psychohistory.  

So, at the end of five novels, I would say that I still prefer the latter novels to the earlier books.  There is more space for Asimov to flesh out character and deal with complex ideas in these full-length books.  The earliest novels still seem disjointed to me.  The patchwork nature of them as stories without connective tissue is jarring and Seldon’s sometimes appearance isn’t really enough to stitch them together.  Those books really needed some rewriting to make them into novels.  

I have two more books to go in this series and I am really not sure what to expect from them.  I know that the last two are prequels, possibly set during Hari Seldon’s lifetime but before the events of Foundation.  The series is more enjoyable as a whole than I had expected and does contain some thoughtful points.