Just a post about 3 books I recently read.
The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez is a cool book. It hit a lot of buttons for me. Here it is: think about a hard-boiled detective novel set in a gritty city. The city is populated by a mix of robots (drones, autos and bots – that is, those that have low functioning programming, those that have more sophisticated programming, and those that have free will), mutants, and probably some humans (norms). The protagonist is an auto, a robot that was basically designed to be a war crime but had somehow achieved self-awareness and has free will, named Mack Megaton. Mack starts out the novel as a cab driver but quickly becomes a hard-scrabble detective who needs to find the only friends he has who had, coincidentally, been kidnapped by a low-life. In the process of finding his friends, Mack gains a girlfriend, deepens his relationship with a detective in the police force, makes friends with Jung, a hyper-evolved ape who becomes his side-kick, fights off a giant alien conspiracy, and learns a lot about himself.
Although the novel is steeped in sci-fi from the robot protagonist to an alien conspiracy, the plot of the novel is pure hard-boiled detective. Most classic hard-boiled detective novels from Dashiell Hammet to Brett Halliday, and even Sara Paretsky share a pretty formulaic plot arc. That is: the detective becomes involved in some case, usually something simple-seeming at first, then the case gets more complicated, and the detective meets one of more of the following: an attractive distraction, a side-kick or partner, an old friend/enemy, a member of an official law enforcement body, and the character that turns out to be the antagonist. After meeting the key people in the investigation, the detective will then discover that the initial case is just a small part of a broader case that touches on more important people. At this point, the detective gets warned off but doesn't listen and so faces some kind of temporarily incapacitating injury that leaves the detective more determined to follow through. Occasionally the attractive distraction and/or side-kick is injured or kidnapped instead. There is also usually an argument between real law enforcement and the detective wherein the officer threatens the detective off the case.
Martinez seems well aware of these detective fiction conventions because this novel pretty much hits them all, and even includes a good bit of tough guy jawing. One of the more interesting elements in this novel is something that I have noticed in other hard-boiled novels as well, which is the detective fighting off the attractive distraction for some reason. In this case, the detective (a robot) rejects the distraction because she is a human and he cannot feel love or attraction. There is even a funny line when Mack considers that she meets the parameters for physical beauty but he can't do anything with that information.
So, a fun read and worth picking up.
A few weeks back I mentioned Michio Kaku's pop science book Physics of the Future and I recently read another of his, Physics of the Impossible. The premise behind the book is that at many stages in history, scientists considered certain technologies impossible given their understanding of physics and existent technologies. Down the line, of course, many of these advances become possible based on advances in science or changes in our fundamental understanding of the laws of phyasics.
Kaku creates three classes of Impossibilities: that which is currently impossible but may become possible in the next century, that which may become possible within a thousand years of more, and impossibilities that violate the laws of physics. I like the division of impossibility and the openness to future advances. The book takes up a lot of sci-fi technologies such as force fields, ray guns, time travel, and the like. The book is an interesting meditation on what it means to be possible and the writing is just on the edge of a layman's understanding. Good read.
Finally, I am just going to make a small note about Mickey Spillane's The Girl Hunters. I have mentioned many times that these trashy hard-boiled detective novels are my guilty pleasure. Mickey Spillane in particular because he holds a lot of retrograde social views and his writing is often hilariously bad and over-wrought. But, he can write a mystery.
I picked this novel up to read because I had just finished The Automatic Detective and wanted a bit more detective. I read this novel a number of years ago and it is an interesting one because Mike Hammer, Spillane's perennial detective, has been off the job and off the grid for seven years. He had gone on a bender after he thought he saw Velda die. Velda had been his assistant whom he regularly sexually harassed and thought he was in love with. All of these novels are from Hammer's perspective, so who knows what Velda thought about all of this. She may have faked her own death to get away from her lecherous brute of a boss.
Anyway, Mike gets the tipoff that Velda isn't dead and that there are bigger things in the background. So Hammer cleans himself up and has basically the same adventure that I outlined above except without robots. It is a fun read if you are able to ignore a lot of Spillane's politics.
I will say though, Spillane's books are not good books. His gift was in creating a compelling (for what he is) character and in adhering to a tried-and-true formula. This isn't a knock. A lot of other authors I like have done the same thing. So this book probably isn't for everyone.
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