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.

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.

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.

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. 

Full Throttle

Joe Hill's newest short story collection, Full Throttle, is as eclectic and fast-paced as 20th Century Ghosts.  I think that 20th Century Ghosts was among my favorite books that I read last year.  That book is chilling and thought-provoking at the same time.
This collection has some great high-points, but there are also some stories that left me wanting a little more.  Hill proves that he is a writer who thinks about process every bit as much as his father, Stephen King, as he provides both an introduction to the collection and notes to each of the stories.  In some ways I liked reading about Hill's relationship with reading and writing and the way that he thinks about process even more than some of the stories.  It is clear that he knows his influences and is a very conscientious artist.  The clarity that he brings to these explanatory notes borders on some of the best writing advice that I gleaned from King's On Writing. 
Rather than bumping through each of the stories, I am just going to hit upon a few that I liked the most and/or struck me in some way.

Probably my favorite story of the collection is "All I Care about is You," a futuristic, sci-fi story about a girl who pays for a robot companion on her birthday.  The story hits a lot of notes that I really like in sci-fi: the world is lived in and shows signs of wear, it is not enamored of the future and isn't afraid to show some of it's ugly parts.  For whatever technology may bring, there is still unhappiness and disappointment in the world.  For an author, like Hill, who is not primarily a sci-fi writer, this is a profound stroke.  There is a great turn in the story that I don't want to ruin here, but the interplay between the girl and the robot, and in particular the way that Hill writes the robot's simulated sincerity is very deep and well written.

"Late Returns" is ostensibly a story about a man grieving the deaths of his parents while working through a change in his life, taking a job driving a bookmobile.  But this story is also about the relationship that readers have to their books and the way that they can draw us and touch us.  This is something of a ghost story, but played in a low-key way that is very reminiscent of the story "20th Century Ghosts" from the book of the same name.  In both stories, Hill draws a line from aesthetics to life and death that is fascinating to consider. 

"Faun" is a great adventure/fantasy story with another good turn.  Hill shows his skills with classic mis-direction and connects folklore with a critique of privilege in a not-overbearing way.  This story has great momentum and offers compelling character studies of two of its key players.

In addition to all of the stories that work really well in this book, there are two that fell flat for me, and both because of the structure/conceit because there are great core ideas behind them.  The first, "The Devil on the Staircase," is written in "staircases" instead of paragraphs.  The story is pretty good but the structure is jarring and makes it difficult to read.  The pages look like those that a terrified Wendy Torrance finds in Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.  In the note to this story, Hill bets his reader that they have never read a story written this way before.  True, I haven't, but that isn't enough to recommend it.

"Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is similarly bound up in its conceit.  The entire story is written in tweets from a teenage girl on a family road trip.  The family stumble into a circus that contains real zombies.  Again, this is a neat story, but the structuring makes it difficult to read and, ultimately, doesn't add much to the story itself.  I would rather have read a more straight-forward narrative that was peppered with tweets, or one that was more thematically about social media than just the structure.

The remainder of the stories are good and vary in their depth.  The collection, overall, is a quality one and worth the read, however, I would still rank 20th Century Ghosts a little higher.  I still have not yet read one of Hill's novels, though I have a couple of these on my next up pile.

The Expanse, pt. 3: Abaddon's Gate

This post is going to be a little off-the-cuff because I finished this book about a week ago and I am beginning to lose some of the details.  I won't get too bogged down in the specifics of plot and so forth, but will stick to the broad themes and my impressions.
This is the third novel in The Expanse series and it does begin to feel like it is settling in.  The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, sets the stage for a densely populated and fast-paced sci-fi/adventure/detective story.  These elements seemed to be a little crammed together until I had a realization about the series that I will come back to in a bit.  That first novel was very satisfying and showed a lot of potential.
The second novel, Caliban's War, opened with a bang and started off very strong.  It got a little logy and recycled some plot elements from the first novel in a way that was not quite as satisfying as it could have been.  Familiar characters played their familiar parts in a satisfying way and the introduction of a few new personalities kept it fresh. 
The third novel of the series, Abaddon's Gate, takes a bit of a turn in a way that helped to renew the series' direction.  This book veered away from the lost-little-girl MacGuffin of the first two books to pursue a new course.  In the first two books the reader is introduced to the protomolecule, a piece of alien bioware that was first weaponized by humans and then seemed to become sentient.  At the opening of the third novel, the protomolecule has stationed itself as a gate among the outer planets and seems to react to a ship flying into it.
What follows is a three-way standoff between the forces of Mars, Earth, and the Outer Planets Alliance as they each attempts to cordon off and, ultimately, control the portal.  Holden and his crew, having been framed for sparking a hot war, are the first to enter the gate in their attempt to evade the other forces.  This is as far as I am going with plot summary.
The entry into the gate is the first major departure from a relatively realistic sci-fi world.  So far in The Expanse, the alien protomolecule is the only thing to really push the boundaries of suspension of disbelief.  There are the standard near-relativistic speeds that are currently out of our grasp and other space technologies, but these are part and parcel of most mainstream sci-fi and don't push credulity too much.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is hard sci-fi, but it keeps things pretty restrained. 
Here is the big difference for me: once the Rocinante passes through the gate, it experiences different physical laws of the universe.  The protomolecule is able to alter laws of physics, and this is a major shift from the preceding books.
In this regard, this series reminds me of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy in which humans make contact with alien civilization who are able to alter physics.  That trilogy, like The Expanse, remains relatively realistic up to this point (Liu includes some medical/cryo tech that strains suspension of disbelief, but I mean this in a general way). 
For both series, the turn from realistic, if still fantastic, sci-fi, also marks a turning point for the characters in the story.  For Liu, this marks, literally, the end of the world as the characters perceive it.  For the characters of The Expanse, the future is less certain.  There are still a lot of books to come after this and this changes the nature of the world within this fiction.  I leave this book more interested to see where the series will go than at the end of the second book.

So, here is the realization that I hinted at earlier.  While listening to an episode of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders' fantastic podcast Our Opinions are Correct about pulp fiction, I realized what it is about The Expanse that is simultaneously engrossing and a bit frustrating.  This series, it seems to me, takes many of its cues from adventure pulp.  James Holden, so far the central figure of the world of The Expanse, is a no-nonsense captain of a certain type.  He is unflaggingly tied to his sense of ethics and is a steadfast friend to his crew.  He plays a sort of moral center in this world that is largely built on his notions of integrity.  He maintains this sense of morality even as he kills and steals.  The books do recognize his flaws, but he persistently overcomes, and then reverts back to his own personality.  This is an energizing narrative to read.  He gets into jams with his crew, and they fight and cogitate their way out.  The serial nature of the books lends itself to the pulp aesthetic, as well.  I know that there are a lot of books left in the series and though I am not positive that Holden and his crew will continue intact through them all, I sort of suspect that they will, or that most of the characters will remain constant.  At a certain point, I would think that the appeal of the characters and their dynamic is as much a part of the appeal as the sci-fi elements. 
I have more books to go to see if this prediction bears out. 
Of course, none of this is to say that the books are worse, or weaker for it.  This just helps me to contextualize the world in a different way.  The series has been good so far and I will continue to read these for as long as I enjoy them.  In a way, I hope that I am wrong and that I will find in these books what I found in Liu's, but I am okay just enjoying the adventure for what it is for now.

Planet of No Return

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about sci-fi books that I used to find in the laundry room of the apartment building where I used to live.  Someone had dropped a bunch of pulp books from '70s down there and I liberated a bunch when I moved out.  One of these is titled The Worlds of Poul Anderson and contains three of his novels.  To be honest, I had not heard of Poul Anderson before but the books looked cool, so I took this one.  I have seen the name pop up a lot since that time and now, after having read the first novel in the book, Planet of No Return, I am a little surprised that I have not heard more about him. 
His writing is like a lot of sci-fi authors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  It is somewhat spare and straightforward.  There are fantastical elements, to be sure, but they are related in an earnest way that actually downplays the invention in it.  There is almost a reportage style that Anderson uses (Heinlein does this some, too) that mirrors some aspects of American Modernism. 

Planet of No Return is a novel of ideas, the plot being rather simple.  The primary conceit is that humans have developed a means of faster-than-light speed travel that can take them out into the stars.  The crew of one ship makes an expedition to a planet that a previous ship had gone to but gotten lost.  This expedition is partly to try to discover what happened to the first mission and partly to fulfill the purpose of the first mission, which was to judge the planet for suitability for colonization. 
Upon arrival, the crew finds that the planet is already populated by Rorvan, a seemingly primitive civilization.  As they try to learn the language, the crew ends up traveling a circuitous path with the Rorvan to the seat of their civilization.  It ends up that the Rorvan are actually far advanced compared with Earth humans and they have set up a ruse to try to dissuade the colonization.  Once the crew discovers this, they have to decide whether they are going to expose the plan or keep the secret and leave the planet alone.  A pretty cool idea. 
One of the big wrinkles in this is that one member of the crew, Avery, had actually been on the first expedition and was working in concert with the Rorvan.  See, Avery had been a member of a cabal on Earth that was, itself, attempting to work against outer space colonization because they perceived diverging arcs of history for humankind.  One arc leads to outer-space colonization and a decline of human civilization because they never need to learn to solve the problems of a home planet.  The second arc keeps humans on Earth for long enough to mature as a species and work together.  Avery sides with the more utopian sect that wants to remain on Earth longer. 
I like this idea because it removes the Rorvan from the equation.  They just happened to want the same thing that Avery's folks did.  The true conflict is between two visions of humanity's future, and it is not revealed until the very final pages of this short book.  But Anderson builds the tension in such a way that it does come as a surprise.
There is one last twist, and that is that the members of the crew who must decide the fate of humanity are of the opinion that venturing out into space is the way of freedom and that remaining on Earth according to Avery's plan (which does, to be fair, involve deception) is a limitation on this freedom.  This sort of frontiersmanship fits in with the libertarian philosophy of someone like Robert Heinlein.  Avery is cast as paternalistic because of his desire to shield humanity from outside influence and escapism, but he ultimately works against extraterrestrial colonialism and a far greater potential for paternalistic oppression.
The answers are not simple in this text and Anderson leaves this up to the reader.  No character's perspective stands out as the obvious answer but the question is left open as to the best course of action for humanity.