Monday, April 27, 2020

Venus on the Half-Shell, or Not quite Vonnegut

I have written here before about how much I have admired Kurt Vonnegut's writing.  I have read probably everything he wrote and, as it turns out, one book that he didn't write.  Anyone familiar with Vonnegut's writing will recognize Kilgore Trout, an character who appears in many of Vonnegut's novel who is, himself, a sci-fi author.  Trout however, writes schlocky, high-concept sci-fi and is mainly interesting as a mouth-piece for Vonnegut's own undeveloped ideas that he suspected would 
not make for good stories.  
In my college days I spent hours upon hours scouring second hand book and record stores, always with a list of deeply coveted pieces in mind.  Back in these days, I knew that someone had pseudonomously written a Kilgore Trout book, so this was one of the items I always sought.
Well, I found it and I read it, most likely 20 or more years ago.  I have moved this thing from state to state with me ever since.  I suppose I liked the novelty of it and I even supposed that it might have been worth something.  Maybe it is.
As I finally picked this up to reread this week, I quickly discovered why I remembered nothing about it except the cover and its provenance.  It is just terrible, and in a way that affected Vonnegutism can be.  The story is bad, the jokes are bad, and the idea is bad.  I considered including some passages to demonstrate this here, but even that seems too generous for this thing.  I don't want anyone to have the illusion that I am endorsing this book in any way.
I read about 75 pages of this thing before throwing in the towel.  
I will say that I like the cover and, as a dedicated postmodernist, I love the conceit of the book.
I really do like the idea of writing as Kilgore Trout.  I am not so besotted with Vonnegut to think that no one could do this.  I think that there are authors who could pull this off.  This guy (I do know who the real author is but don't want to put his name to this) just isn't the one to do it.  He did write a lot of other sci-fi, but not anything that I had ever read.  I won't say that this book would preclude me from reading any of his other work, but this is a pretty big hurdle to surpass.

So, if you see this book and are interested, I would advise buying it only as a curiosity and saving yourself the time to just go read Vonnegut instead.

Monday, April 20, 2020

Heart-Shaped Box (this is not a post about Nirvana)

Boy, oh boy, do I like Joe Hill.  I know I am late to the party on this one, but his books are the perfect combination of smart and easy-to-read.  His narratives weave the perfect path between innovation and predictability that is difficult to even describe.  His setups are good and then they take unexpected turns that keep his reader interested.  In this novel, he opens with an aging rockstar deciding to buy a ghost online from an auction site.
Judas Coyle, the goth rocker protagonist of the novel, is connected to the dead man in a particular way that is not revealed until later in the novel.  Jude buys the ghost as a curiosity because he has money to burn and learns later that he was set up by the seller to ensure his purchase.  This ghost was meant for him.
There is a lot of pleasure in discovering the rules of this haunting so I won't go too far into details of the narrative.
However, what I like about this book is the way that Coyle becomes more personable.  Hill is able to write this character in such a way that he can be appealing and shitty at the same time.  In fact, this is what Hill's character banks on for his professional success.  He is at the same time callous and sensitive, he can be caring and also ruthless.  The complexities of his character and his flaws make him more endearing.  In the beginning, Coyle believes that the haunting is motivated by revenge for what he may have done to the relative of the dead man.  This means that Coyle is at the same time sensitive to his own ability to hurt others and unwilling to make excuses for himself.  He never once tries to argue that his treatment by the dead man is unfair, he just wants to be free of the ghost.  Later in the novel when Coyle learns more about the nature of the haunting, and the man behind it, he doesn't feel particularly vindicated.  The motivations are other than what he had at first suspected, but Coyle knows that this doesn't really let him off the hook.
One thing that Hill is particularly good at is bending the reality that Judas Coyle experiences for his reader.  The ghost makes Coyle and those around him see altered versions of his reality, a future in which he has killed his family or girlfriend.  This does freak everybody out and it makes them question their version of reality and is genuinely spooky. 
Heart-Shaped Box is Joe Hill's first novel, and it is the first of his that I have read.  As I have mentioned in previous posts about Hill's work, I am still excited to continue to read him.

Monday, April 13, 2020

The Warehouse

Rob Hart's novel The Warehouse explores a future world in which a Wal-Mart-Amazon hybrid mega-retailer achieves complete market saturation and dominance in a post-capitalist world.  In short, this means that the warehouses for Cloud stores are live/work facilities that operate like corporate owned cities.  Those who are hired by Cloud live within the complex (their board is pre-deducted from their pay), shop at specially designated promenades in the complex (staffed by other Cloud employees) where they pay with "credits" that are roughly equivalent to US dollars (which have been converted for them by Cloud at no fee), and dine at Cloud-owned restaurants (also staffed by Cloud employees).  Each Cloud employee is issued a helpful smart watch that is a personal ID, method of payment, training guide, locator, etc.  So everything within the complexes are a function of employment and are designed to monitor the individual's movements.  The city-stores replace the city-state of old in this world and there is little reason ever to leave the facilities.  In fact, the few scenes narrated outside of the facility show a world that is run-down and on the brink of collapse.  At several points in the novel, we learn that there are very few other employers in the world.  What this means for the economy of this world is that the company Cloud exists to sell to its own employees.  It is a perfect post-capitalist world in which the corporation creates and serves its own demand, serving its own employees and trading in its own corporate scrip.  While all of this is an obvious allegory for Amazon and the tech-giants' corporate campuses, the story itself holds together pretty well.
The narrative follows two recent hires at Cloud; one, a corporate spy hired by an unknown to gather information on Cloud's employment practices, the other, an inventor/small business owner who was put out of business by Cloud's cutthroat practice of undercutting competition and cannot find work elsewhere.  The latter individual, Paxton, had worked at a prison guard in the past and so is designated to work in Cloud security division.  The corporate spy, Zinnia, ends up using Paxton's connections because she is relegated to working in the warehouse as a picker.
There is a romance subplot between the two and the bulk of the narrative is rather predictable, given the setup.  Zinnia seeks to work around the smart watch system to move around the facility with impunity while Paxton unwittingly gets drawn into his own work.
Working in a warehouse myself, I found the author's descriptions of the stocking and picking practices to be inconsistent with how a facility like this would actually be run.  There is a fundamental problem with the logistics that Hart has developed for the novel that would render the whole operation obsolete and completely unable to fulfill the demand that it must meet.  This is an uninteresting aspect of supply chain management that I may answer questions about in the comments if anyone is interested in knowing more but which does not interest me to write about here.  No one not working in a fulfillment center would ever think twice about these things, so it is moot to the actual reading of the novel.
There are two other points I want to hit regarding this novel.  First, Hart creates a pretty interesting analogy in the book about the source of beef for the famous Cloudburgers available only inside the facilities.  It turns out that in this world beef is an expensive rarity enjoyed by only the very privileged.  However, Cloudburger is well known to be of exceptional quality.  The main characters eat these burgers several times throughout the novel before Zinnia discovers their provenance.  Much like Soylent Green, Snowpiercer, and other sci-fi stories before this, the source of food can be a big question.  The Cloud burgers are not made from former employees, as I suspected, but are made from the protein extracted from the waste that the employees produce.  Yes, Cloudburgers are in fact shitburgers.  I like this disgusting idea because it fulfills the notion that the entire novel presents that Cloud serves its own needs.  Recycling the shit of its employees as food seems to line up pretty well with the system of selling your own products to your own employees with your own currency.  Cloud closes the loop in both cases, which leads anyone to wonder how the system sustains itself with no outside input.  This, then, is the central question that the novel presents and which any post-capitalist, dystopian story worth its salt presents.  How does the system sustain?
The second point is the allusions the novel makes to the Ursula K. LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas."  During a trip to the world outside of the Cloud complex, Zinnia runs into a band of scavengers who want to try to break into and disrupt Cloud.  After a struggle and with the bandits retreating, one of them calls Zinnia Omela.  I didn't catch the reference at the time, having not read the story, but Zinnia recalls the story and it makes her rethink her position a bit.
LeGuin describes the city of Omelas where people are happy and carry out their lives at peace but all of the adults know that the price of their peace and contentment is a single child held captive in a cellar beneath the city.  LeGuin doesn't explain why the city works this way but the scapegoat child has reverted to a feral, brutish state and the citizens may not give any comfort.
LeGuin doesn't blame the citizens or moralize beyond mentioning that there are some who leave the city once they have learned of this secret.  So the question remains who might have the moral high-ground here?  Those who walk away simply walk away and choose not to alleviate the child's suffering.  Those who remain take the child's suffering as a reasonable trade for the happiness of a city full of people.
In the context of the novel, this seems to be a question about complicity since all who are inside of the Cloud complex have once been outside of them and know what the conditions are like.  They receive some degree of comfort in their employment and must be content in the knowledge that there are many more suffering on the outside.  The analogy isn't perfect, but it is enough for the novel as it attempts to put the same question to its own readers.

Monday, April 6, 2020

The War of Two Worlds

The second novel in this Poul Anderson book, The War of Two Worlds, plays much like the first one, Planet of No Return.  Space travel is normal and the major conflicts arise between humans and aliens.
The War of Two Worlds is, as the title would suggest, something of a take on H.G. Wells' classic novel War of the Worlds, but the conflict between humans and Martians is twisted a bit.  In Anderson's novel the conflict between Earth and Mars is sparked by a false flag operation by shape-shifting aliens from Sirius.  The aliens, exiled from their own planet, pit Earth and Mars against one another so that they can swoop in and mop up both weakened parties.  The novel is good pulp and imaginative for what it is.  It even seems to forecast some elements that The Expanse picks up regarding these different, alien political factions.

This book got me thinking about a different topic altogether, however, that is now a staple in science fiction: the identity of Martians.
From novels like Anderson's and Wells' to Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and more, Martians have always been an alien species that are generally humanoid and have identifiable, if not down right sympathetic, motives.  Martians want a home or conquest, or have some other need that must be met. 

More and more, however, the Martians are us.  Martians are humans.  Going back to Kim Stanley Robinson's 1992 Red Mars, those who inhabit the red planet are not aliens from a separate evolutionary line, they are humans who have either traveled there or were born there.  Beyond Ronbinson's Mars trilogy, this holds true for Andy Weir's The Martian, the humans from various regions in The Expanse, and I'm sure dozens of other examples.
Robinson and James S.A. Corey create humans with different body shapes to show their origins but they are all humans.  This move is significant, I think, because it reflects a different ethos regarding our place in the universe.  The actual aliens, the ones who truly come from beyond, are not recognizable by their motivations or body shape, they are truly alien. 
In The Expanse, the aliens represented by the protomolecule have their own powers and motivations that are beyond the characters' ability to understand.  I have drawn the parallel between The Expanse and Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past before, and I think that it holds here as well.  The aliens in Liu's trilogy are equally foreign and are nearly abstract in their differences from humans.
This tendency shows both the unity and the divisions within humanity.