Jason Pargin's I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

I worry a bit, in the middle of the dumbest year in living memory (so far), that the people who most need to read Jason Pargin's I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, as well as those who are most going to appreciate it, are not going to bother finishing it because of its singular flaw, one that has been creeping very slowly into Pargin's work from the beginning: it's a bit didactic at times. As in there are some scenes that all but descend into Socratic dialogues.*

And there are no elements of hilarious supernatural horror (like in Pargin's John and Dave and Amy books), nor of over-the-top plutocratic science fiction (like in Pargin's Zoey Ashe books) in his latest novel. Pargin would seen to have concluded, like, say, William Gibson did before him (at least for the Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy) that the real, mundane world that we actually live in is plenty weird a setting for his brand of horrifying comedy and searing pathos, thank you very much. 

Which makes the fact that I was reading an ARC of I'm Starting to Worry... at the very instant the news first broke of the shooter at the Trump Rally in Butler, PA on July 13th of this stupid year of 2024 so freaking weird and perfect and unsettling that it made me feel like I was suddenly a bystander in either a John and Dave and Amy novel or a Zoey Ashe novel, for reasons I'll talk about here in a bit.

The plot of I'm Starting to Worry... chiefly concerns a disaffected young man, Abbott Coburn, who accepts a Lyft request from a mysterious woman who needs help transporting the titular Black Box, a roadie crate covered in band stickers, at least one of which stickers looks quite a lot like a radiation hazard sticker as depicted in the cover art, from California to Washington D.C. In Abbott's dad's tricked-out practically brand new Lincoln Navigator, of which Abbot believes his dad is more proud and protective of than he is of Abbot himself. 

We are treated, here and there, to  just enough foreshadowing about the eventual fate of box and car l, and about the subsequent fame of Abbot and the young woman, who gives the improbable but cool name of Ether when Abbott demands to know what to call her, to know that this trip they're planning is not going to go smoothly or end well. Which, of course it isn't; this is a Jason Pargin novel. His first book gave away an unhappy ending in its title! 

The duo's eventual fate is sealed by two unhappy circumstances they don't even know about until miles and days later, when one of them finally breaks the rules of the trip (don't look in the box, don't bring any devices that can track us, etc) and realizes that the Internet has lost its collective mind over their journey and conspiracy theories about it abound; the true point of I'm Starting to Worry... is thus revealed to be that said Internet has given us all a chronic case of what Malka Older named "Narrative Disorder" in her Centenal Cycle: our brains, already inclined to pattern seeking and narrative creation where neither pattern nor narrative actually exist, also can't really tell the difference between the stories it has fabricated and objective reality. Or at least not without more effort than most of us are used to expending to overcome the inherent efficiency/laziness of our brains, the better not to hog all the glucose so our muscles and organs can have some, too.

Anyway, not only did that sticker on the box capture the imagination of some of the worst sufferers ever of Narrative Disorder (aka Reddit users, which, get ready for them: big chunks of the novel take the form of conflicting theories, insults and wild speculation in Reddit threads, even unto the creation by rebels from one subreddit about the escapade of a whole 'nother one, denouncing the users and moderator of the original), but also, the vehicle Ether had originally tried to use to take the box cross country by herself... did in fact set off a radiation detector when investigators found it broken down and abandoned not far from where Abbott picked her up.

 

Oops.

So people think the pair are maybe some kind of terrorists transporting a dirty bomb to set off on the Mall in Washington D.C. No, wait, actually, Abbott is just a dupe in this plot, seduced into driving by Ether, who is a trained Russian sex-spy. No, the radiation is actually from an alien (or alien corpse) that the pair are transporting from a seekrit location to D.C. for a dramatic reveal to finally force Disclosure; Abbott and Ether are heroes! No, wait...

See why it was freaking weird to be reading this on the day a poor marksman took a potshot at the Republican nominee for POTUS?

Anyway, the mystery ropes in two unlikely "detectives" who have assigned themselves to the case: a recently retired FBI agent named Joan Key, and Abbott's father, Hunter, who, it turns out, actually does care quite a bit about his son, thank you (he's just really bad at, you know, emotions and stuff), and would really rather not see his boy go down in a hail of bullets on national TV.

But as Key and Hunter try to track Abbott and Ether -- Key to stop what she is sure is a terrible domestic terror threat that none of her former colleagues will take seriously, Abbott to save his son from certain death or even worse fates and also maybe congratulate him for finally doing something interesting with his life -- they can't help but join a howling pack of weirdos who are all doing the same thing for different reasons, spurred to action by the insanity on Reddit and Facebook, mostly, but also...

We find out early on that Abbott isn't just a Lyft driver who still lives with Daddy, but is also a YouTube streamer of middling popularity; this all really got touched off by a quick post to his channel advising that he was going to be offline for a while having a real life adventure. So some of his fans, hip to what's been going on on Reddit, etc long before Abbott himself is, are out to save him from the Evil Woman who tempted or kidnapped him into being her unwitting stooge.

And there's a big scary and heavily armed guy the duo refers to as the Tattoo Monster on their trail, too. The Tattoo Monster seems to know what's actually in the box and to believe that it's rightfully his, and is surprisingly resourceful for a dude who looks like he hasn't paid attention to anything since Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. In which Tattoo Monster (he has a real name but Tattoo Monster is more fun) could easily have been a character.

It all builds up to a satisfying climax in typical Pargin fashion, both way over the top and just believable enough, both coming at you out of nowhere and telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. 

In the middle, though, we get lots and lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Abbott and Ether, mostly about how much the world sucks and it's going to hell and it's especially bad for unattractive young white men (Abbott, who "spent half his life sensing he was in someone's way and the other half actually being in someone's way but failing to sense it") vs It's only bad from a very narrow, specific and privileged viewpoint and everyone really has a bad case of Internet poisoning and toxic levels of loneliness (Ether).

I have this theory that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

- Ether, explaining why she refers to social media tech as the Black Box of Doom 

So yeah, if you're a fan of Pargin's old work at Crackd, his many podcast appearances on shows like Behind the Bastards, or his TikTok channel, these passages won't be too much of a bother, covering similar mythbuster-y ground to those, but they do slow down the action some and often feel quite preachy if you're already on Pargin's wavelength re: what modern technology and living standards and capitalism have done to our brains and how important it is to unplug and get some perspective -- I can only imagine but that is even worse for those who are not. So I'm sure lots of people are going to be online soon complaining that Pargin has Gone Woke or whatever new slang for pointing out that things could stand some improvement in the equity and kindness departments will be by the time the book is published later this year. 

For this was a Netgalley pick for me, and, weird July 13 experience it was for me, I'm mighty glad to have gotten it.

Pargin doesn't need fancy magic or sci-fi trappings to tell a great, and frequently funny, story. He made my auto-buy list a long time ago, but I maybe need to bump him up to must buy in hardcover.

*I'm aware that this is a strange context in which to use the word "descend" but this is supposed to be genre fiction, and Pargin's audience is not, I suspect, going to like the lecturing and arguing that characterizes a lot of the interactions between our protagonist and his primary companion. I'd love to be wrong!

Virginia Feito's MRS MARCH

 Good old John Berger wrote the perfect encapsulation of what's going on at the heart of Virginia Feito's exquisitely tense and uncomfortable novel of the American mid-century, Mrs. March:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.

Mrs. March -- we don't learn her first name until the last sentence of the book; even when we flashback to her childhood and see her as a little girl desperately trying to earn her ice-queen mother's faintest sign of approval, she is referred to as Mrs. March -- is a walking, talking example of the consequences that these facts about our culture have on women*. A child of incredible privilege, raised by elite parents in the upper echelons of New York Society, Mrs. March has never had the faintest notion that what they declared to be good and important and true could be anything but. And while a slight scandal attached to her marriage to one of her professors, in which she would be (gasp!) a second wife, at least her husband is a professor, and a famous novelist, and handsome, so he's at least kind of a catch. But, of course, our Mrs. March has, in marrying her novelist, taken on an internalized competitor in the form of the First Mrs. March, this novel's first act of doubling its unpleasant-yet-internally-oppressed heroine.

This overwhelming pressure tightens up every passage of this book, written in a third person narration so tightly focused on Mrs. March's point of view and innermost imaginings that it might as well be first person. From beginning to end, the text crackles with the tension between how she feels other people see her and how she wishes to see herself. No room at all is left for how she might actually look or, god forbid, just be. She isn't so much conniving, as the nude women in art about which Berger made his famous remarks, with the forces that turn her into a sight as pre-emptively performing all of the physical and emotional labor necessary to turn herself into a sight before anyone else can. Her internal critic is the most ruthless I've encountered in literature, maybe ever; even when she manages to break free of it for a moment to enjoy, say, a stolen cigarette, her attention is still on what other people would think of her could they see her sneaking a smoke in her beautifully appointed en suite bathroom during her own party -- or rather, the party she organized to celebrate her husband's latest achievement.

 Even before an inciting incident at her favorite bakery sends her into new spirals of paranoia, self-doubt and impotent anger, we have seen her holding an internalized debate with herself over the impact of her decision to wear a pair of kidskin gloves out on her errands.

...they were a very distinct color for gloves: a sort of mint-green. She would never have picked that color out, not once believing she could pull such a thing off, but she thrilled at the fantasy that strangers, when they saw her wearing them, would assume her to be the kind of carefree, confident woman who would have selected such a bold color for herself.

This is a highly characteristic passage, as it turns out; we're treated to variations on it throughout. This makes for some exhausting reading, but this book is about a lot more than just a person struggling with an externally imposed ideal for herself; she is also struggling with the possibility that her husband, a famous novelist, has just ruined both her public persona and her private sense of self, what little of that there is. For as she stands in line at the bakery admiring the idea of herself those mint-green gloves have given her, her husband's latest novel is creating a sensation all over New York City (and thus, naturally, the world). Concerning the plight of a prostitute named Johanna who is so miserable and pathetic that her clientele consists of men who essentially pay her not to sleep with them, this new novel is supposedly his portrait of Mrs. March. Oh, not that Mrs. March is a prostitute or anything so vulgar, just that, supposedly, he has given his pathetic literary prostitute all of Mrs. March's quirks and mannerisms. Supposedly.

It is only when the bakery's owner mentions this to her while packaging her order that Mrs. March realizes this. Characterisitically, Mrs. March concludes that she can never patronize that bakery again, a decision she will make over and over throughout the novel because she simply refuses to handle misperceptions or misunderstandings at all, let alone directly. Many of these situations could be cleared up by a moment's honesty and a moment's courage to speak up to clarify or contradict what's been said to her (or, more often, what she has assumed she can infer via round-about means was said about her behind her back), but Mrs March, Mrs. March won't even read the new novel for herself, even though she used to be her husband's first reader. She prefers to imagine that her husband has cruelly dissected her character and laid out her every flaw, neatly lableled and impossible to gainsay, upon a table for the vulgar masses to see and titter over.

And as for asking her husband directly whether he did or did not base his pathetic prostitute character on her, heaven forfend, for just as Mrs. March has been raised to value appearances over everything in her own conduct, she has also absorbed, chiefly from her mother, the idea that marriage is the ultimate venue for what good old David Foster Wallace has memorably referred to as "appearance poker" and not a place in which to be vulnerable, confiding, anything less than perfect. To ask him about her suspicions would be to invite conflict, and there is no place for that in her perfect tableau of marriage. She did not win the prize of becoming his second wife by contradicting him!

Armed/burdened with her gloriously imperfect understanding of what's becoming of her world, her psyche begins to fracture in at least two very interesting but painful-to-read ways. First, she starts hallucinating, that people have started calling her Johanna, that damning exterior evidence of her failings as a housekeeper** like cockroaches and dead pigeons are appearing and disappearing in her immaculate Upper East Side apartment, and later alternate versions of herself; later she starts imagining not only that her husband has, in fact, exposed her to public ridicule via his ever-more-popular new novel, but has also developed a secret life as a murderer. The collection of "evidence" she gathers to support all of these delusions would stagger the imagination even of your average Q adherent, but since she never confides a single thought to anyone, she struggles along with all of it until, of course, it all starts manifesting in her outward behavior, for which she actually starts to experience actual consequences.

Before things get really bad, though, they get occasionally, though uncomfortably, funny, as when Mrs. March spots a copy of the offending novel in someone's grocery cart at the store and steals it, not to read for herself (she has easy access to the thing at home, of course), but to destroy it, so at least one total stranger in New York City won't be a witness to her shame.

I haven't felt this uncomfortable since the one and only time I watched Darren Aronofsky's harrowing Requiem for a Dream and watched Ellen Burstyn's amazing portrayal of physical and psychic breakdown in the person of Sara Goldfarb. Mrs. March's experience never gets so phantasmogorical as this clip, but it still kind of encapsulates the intensity of what she does endure -- all without any drugs at all.

So, as I said on Twitter earlier this month, if the Ellen Burstyn plot in Requiem for a Dream was your favorite but you wish it took place in the 1970s and was about a novelist's wife, this is your book. Mrs. March, as I said, doesn't resort to drugs, but she also doesn't have anyone in her life who would be willing to intervene with her if she did, or to correct her about what is probably just a giant heap of narcissism and misunderstanding.

Which makes her tale every bit as tragic as Sara Goldfarb's, though Mrs. March perhaps seems less deserving of our sympathies. For Mrs. March is never a likeable character; by the time we see her fussing that her son's Christmas play has been canceled due to a blizzard, not for his sake but because 

It frustrated Mrs. March, too, that the costume she had worked so hard to get the seamstress to finish on time would never be seen by the other children's mothers, who surely hadn't made their sons' and daughters' costumes out of the finest merino wool (italics mine).

-- we have already decided that she is White Privilege, The Woman. And of course her child is simply part of her performance of perfect femininity; she almost admits to herself early in the novel that she only had Jonathan to prove that she was better than the First Mrs. March, who only gave their husband a selfish, jet-setting daughter, and to get one over on her sister, who married well but never had children, and maybe, too, to finally win some approval in their mother's eyes by giving her a grandchild. Not because she, you know, wanted a kid or anything.

I make this sound like a hate read, and maybe in part it is; Mrs. March is Upper Class White Privilege Barbie, so her misery threatens always to become our entertainment. But this is where Virginia Feito is maybe a genius of a special kind, for while she can't make us (or, at least, me) feel sorry for Mrs. March, by novel's end we completely understand why she is the way she is, and maybe, just maybe, we gain an new appreciation for what first and yes, even second wave feminism achieved, for all that Mrs. March would have deplored both movements. We still carry a version of that same internal critic carping at us, but we've developed tools to keep her negativity at least somewhat in check, and have removed a lot of the stigma around the tool that could have done Mrs. March the most good of all: therapy. For as she has shown us by novel's end, a Mrs. March who chooses to act instead of merely appear is capable of some surprising things; it's left to us to imagine, and maybe to mourn, what she might have been capable of if she'd allowed herself to act all along.

*Whether assigned female at birth or not.

**Well, supervisor of a professional housekeeper.

G.K. Chesterton's THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

Mention Gilbert Keith Chesterton to most people nowadays, and they'll probably know him as the author of the Father Brown mysteries and not much else (unless you're mentioning him to Roman Catholics, who might know him for a lot of excellent apologetics for their faith). Unless that person was me, for I have mostly thought of him as that guy who wrote that epic poem about "the last knight of Europe" and the Battle of Lepanto, and I'd have said, "oh, he wrote prose, too?"

So he's kind of like the elephant encountered by all of those blind men who could never agree on what kind of creature they were meant to describe, which is of course hilarious because G.K. Chesterton was himself a pretty large and imposing figure of a man, much like the enigmatic driving force of The Man Who was Thursday, a fantastic allegorical thriller/detective story that (REMEMBER THE VERY BLOG DESCRIPTION TEXT ABOVE SAYS "WARE SPOILERS" SO, YOU KNOW, NO BITCHING) pits a small army of secret policemen against another small army of not-so-secret anarchists, only to eventually lob a bomb of a revelation into the reader's lap that there's actually just the one small army, yuck yuck yuck.

I say yuck yuck yuck as if to mock the story's attempts at humor, but those attempts are actually quite successful. Each plot twist and reveal is skillfully done even as the broad slapstick silliness of each ramps up the broad slapstick silliness of the whole. But where humor usually relieves tension in a scene or story, Chesterton's humor, here, actually manages to make the tension "worse" -- scare quotes here because the worsening of the tension is just so damned enjoyable, whether the reader has yet figured out the final punchline of the joke or not.

I suspect that nowadays, most readers will have anticipated that punchline by at least halfway, if not a quarter of the way, through the story, but as I often maintain (especially when people complain about spoilers), a story that relies solely on surprise for its ultimate effectiveness is not really much of a story. Citizen Kane is still enjoyable if you first heard the secret of Rosebud decades before you actually got to see the film; ditto The Man Who Was Thursday if you've figured out who Sunday "really" is early in the reading.

I put "really" in scare quotes because, of course, Sunday (the characters' names are all their day-of-the-week code names within the anarchist society, the governing board of which meets in glorious public view the better to make the public and the police assume they're just a bunch of ridiculous dilettantes) has an allegorical identity quite beyond his dual role within the world of the story, though both within and without the story, he is the puppetmaster, and seeing him as that and no more is just fine. Seeing him as God, as some chose to do, has about as much impact on the enjoyability of the work as seeing Aslan as Jesus does for the Chronicles of Narnia. Well, aren't you clever.

Regardless of whether one is the kind of reader who seeks to decode literature, who, I suspect, might not like this work quite as much as the kind of reader who is happy to enjoy a surface narrative and maybe idly speculate a little about its Deeper Significance does, The Man Who Was Thursday has quite a lot to offer, quite apart from the slapstick humor of its plot twists and reveals. There are some exquisitely intense scenes when the protagonist provocateur might be about to have his cover blown; there are some genuinely thrilling chase scenes that, as I said before, are even more exciting because they are also funny as hell.

It's a classic for a reason.

Ramez Naam's CRUX

As was true of its predecessor, Nexus, there is a wonderfully thoughtful, speculative exploration on the real world implications of a technology that can connect human minds to the internet of things and to each other buried within Crux.

Deeply, deeply buried to the point of almost being lost.

Which is to say that Crux could have gone one of two ways: it could have fully embraced the neuro/cyberpunk genre it had so much potential to be the greatest new example of, or it could have sunk to the level of techno-thriller with some trace transhuman elements for color.

Crux is, for all its concern with the fate of several groups of cybernetically and neurologically linked children (the Nexus technology, street drug and brain operating system in one, having been seized on early on as a breakthrough therapy for autism, causing thousands of parents to become rogue Nexus users that they might finally communicate and share with their offspring), an action thriller. And a bit of a hot mess of one at that, once it gets going.

For where Nexus contented itself with telling a few people's stories, chiefly Kade's and Samantha's and, to a degree, Su-Yong Shu's, Crux frantically struggles to tell all of the stories, cramming several novels' worth of narratives and ideas (all of which deserve to have been developed at a more leisurely pace, such potential for greatness do they have) into one book and switching, ADD-style, rapidly between storylines, jumping from character to character for just a page or two at a time until the frustrated reader has lost track entirely of what any of these people might remotely have to do with each other except Nexus. They all have something to do with Nexus. Yeah. OK. But wait, what? Who is this person again and why do I care? I thought this chapter was about this other person two continents away? No seriously, who is this person and why do I care?

It got so frustrating I had to put this one down for a while, because I was even losing track of, and sympathy for, the main characters from Nexus. And, of course, tapping my foot through the protracted and frequent bouts of ACKSHUN! Which, admittedly, Naam writes well enough. If you like that sort of thing.

But, I was still curious to see where things were going. And, after all, I liked Nexus enough to name it as an honorable mention for my Definitive Top Ten All Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction list. And the story of Su-Yong Shu, revealed as the first stable uploaded human who had just been walking around in a cloned body in Nexus, and her daughter Ling, was still really moving and compelling and I held out the hope that sooner or later the narrative would get back to them, maybe once everybody else was done shooting everybody else. Which it did, spectacularly if swiftly, setting up a whole new threat for the next novel.

For ultimately, most of what bugged me as I read Crux arose from classic middle chapter problems. The Fellowship, once established, gets broken and everybody has to have his own adventures for a while before the battle at the Black Gate and Mount Doom and the Eagles. The reader must just have faith that all these stories are going to knit back together in the last volume.

Maybe I'm just sick of everything being a trilogy?

Anyway, Crux isn't what I'd hoped it would be, but it's still a cracking good techno-thriller if you're in the mood for one. It's fast paced, full of fighting and explosions and dire threats and drone attacks and stealth goggles and unlimited bandwidth (for me, living in a Wyoming that is still riddled with spots where one can't even get first generation cell service, perfect global connectivity seems the most fantastic element of all) and hey, for what it's worth, no romance, which gives it an extra star right there, from me.

Ramez Naam's NEXUS #OneBookAtATime

I think I do a pretty good job of keeping up on developments in art and science via my RSS feeds, but somehow I seem to have missed the news that Ray Kurzweil and Robert Ludlum had a bastard child together and sent him back in time to grow up as a little Egyptian boy. But, you know, I can't keep track of everything. And better late than never, on such discoveries, I say.

Fortunately for me, I'm not dependent on myself alone to stay on top of matters. I have people like Lee Harris and the rest of the gang at Angry Robot books on my team. And boy, am I glad they found this Ramez Naam guy.

Nexus is that rare treat, a serving of what I can only call neuropunk, a still unusual genre, the best other example I can come up with is probably Bruce Sterling's Distraction (which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite novels), though a case could certainly be made for Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiner-heavy Redemption Ark as well.* Like Distraction, Nexus concerns itself with human enhancement technology that poses some sticky ethical, legal and political questions but is out there in the world regardless, and gaining traction. But where Distraction takes place in an America that is so close to being a failed state as makes no odds, and deals at least in part with political figures who are exploiting the tech for various ends, in Nexus, the American government is still iron-strong and opposes the tech with all its military might, repressive policing and scare tactics. It's impossible, therefore, not to see parallels to the "wars" on drugs and terrorism in which our country is still engaged.

Which is where the Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy DNA comes into the equation, for while one hero, Kaden Lane, is a neuro-hacker extraordinaire, who has, with the help of a small team, added so much functionality to a mindlinking nanotech street drug (that would be Nexus) as to make it a whole new thing, our other is a government agent Samantha Catarenes, herself cybernetically and biotechnologically enhanced to the eyeballs because sometimes to fight monsters one has to become a bit of one, who is so ideologically opposed to what Kade and his people have done that it's a wonder she doesn't claw his eyes out on their first meeting. Nexus has already shown tremendous potential as a tool for coercion, after all. The irony of a government using old-fashioned forms of coercion to suppress a new coercion tech that they don't control is addressed, but only barely; the tension is mostly between those like Kade and the ambiguous pseudo-villain Su-Yong Shu (a Chinese neuroscientist who seems suspiciously way smarter than everyone else on earth) who value its potential to liberate and enhance and transform humanity, and those like Sam and her masters, who are hung up on how much worse it could make life for those who don't choose to take advantage of its offerings. As if anyone wouldn't, am I right?

But never fear, the novel rarely sinks to didacticism. It's too busy also being an action thriller! There are lots and lots and lots of fight scenes, with everything from fists to stealth helicopters. Being the sort who twiddles her thumbs through big explosive action scenes in movies, I could have done with a bit less of this, but I understand why it was there; most other people twiddle their thumbs through the parts I find interesting. And some of the action scenes are quite important to the plot, and to the plot of the book's sequels, to which I am eagerly looking forward.

Some of my friends have complained that there is too much infodump in Nexus, but aside from the unnecessary and distracting "Briefing" interludes**, I didn't see that. Briefings aside, it was just right, balanced out by some nice character moments and some themes I wasn't expecting to encounter here, like the potential dovetailing of Buddhist practice with neurotech (most of the story takes place at a giant international neuroscience conference in Bangkok), though this last element made the excruciatingly long and over-the-top fight scenes all the more jarring.

This first novel is obviously just laying the groundwork for potential big, big stuff in Crux***, due out in September. And a lot of how I'll ultimately evaluate this novel will depend on what Naam does in the sequel. If it's just another violent technothriller with cool transhuman elements, I might be disappointed. At this point, though, I have faith that Naam has something more interesting in mind, that he's brave enough to try really exploring how tech like Nexus (which is not as far-fetched as some might think, as anyone who follows a science blog or two, or who reads Naam's non-fiction More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement [which I declined to finish because I sing in the choir he's preaching to there, and because his publisher apparently blew the editing/proofreading budget on whores and coke or something, but which you might still want to check out if that doesn't bother you as much as it does me] will know already) might fundamentally change our world. All signs point to that being the case, so far.

*In fact, one could read Nexus as a sort of earthbound version of the origin story of the Conjoiners without doing oneself any great mental violence. Har har.

**Why are so many authors relying on this device of fictitious "documentation" these days? It looks to me almost like a lack of confidence in one's storytelling chops, if not an insulting attitude towards readers who "aren't getting it." Authors, once you've earned that willing suspension of disbelief (and Naam did, right away, with a gloriously bizarre and hilarious first scene that I'll remember for a long, long time), readers happily fill in the blanks themselves. They might not fill them in exactly the way you want them to, but that's not your call! Give it a rest and just tell us a damn story.

***And I, for one, am grateful that the sequels won't be Sexus and Plexus. What whaaat?

100 Books #108 - Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

I think it's safe to say that the Sweden of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is very fortunate indeed that  big-time villain Alexander Zalachenko was a Male Chauvinist Pig. Had he encouraged his daughter, Lisbeth Salander, badass superheroine of the trilogy, in the development of her talents, had he cultivated her loyalties, the way he did his giant literally-feel-no-pain freakshow son, Niedermann, well, I'm just not sure this ficitonal Sweden could have survived it.

The only thing harder to deal with than Salander (and Team Salander) refusing to be a victim even after she's been shot in the hip, shoulder and oh yes head would be Salander helping daddy run his epic crime organization.

The action* in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest takes place immediately after the closing battle in The Girl Who Played with Fire, in which Lisbeth was not only shot as described above, not only left for dead but buried in a shallow grave -- and yet still managed to dig herself out and nearly succeed in offing Dear Old Dad. Again. As this third and, alas, final book (I'm told there were originally going to be ten of these, but for the author's unfortunate demise) opens, she and Daddy are rushed to the same intensive care ward, where doctors heroically save both of their lives so they can continue plotting to destroy each other.

Except now the police and the court system and the press are more involved in their family problems than ever before. And the buck doesn't stop there. Oh no. Because all the conspiracy pigeons are coming home to roost. And most of them are armed. Or have AUTHORITAH.

Unfortunately, I'm making this sound more exciting than the book actually is. There has been a plodding element to the other two books in the series -- we get a lot of minutiae mixed in with the excitement and adventure and really wild bad things -- but in this book, there's a lot more of that. We watch characters get dressed and plod around their kitchens making coffee and driving or walking up and down streets in way too much detail, way too often.

And perhaps that's always been the case in these books and I just noticed it more this time around because all that minutiae is padding out... courtroom drama (and a slow-motion courtroom drama that takes more than half the book to even get to the courtroom at that). Law & Order: Sweden. Which means with politicians. Who spend a lot of the time wringing their hands over the finer points of Swedish constitutional law. And drinking coffee.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of nifty cloak and dagger stuff, and when there is tension, it's very tense indeed, and involves some characters who, let's admit it, have kind of just been window dressing up till now (like Erika Berger, who, had this series progressed, could have wound up being a sort of attenuated Robin to Salander's Batman** except, of course, Robin would be older than Batman. And they'd both be female. But hell, wouldn't you want to read that? I would!!!). And added to the mix this time around are not just one but two new badass ex-policewomen, one working in the very government agency that's at the heart of the Salander/Zalachenko conspiracy, one working for the private security firm for whom Salander got her start in the earning money for being smart business.

And so yes, this means that all of the feminist issues that have been at the heart of this series from the beginning are still at the forefront; these stories aren't just crime stories, but stories about crimes against women, at all levels of society, in pretty much every way crimes can be perpetrated on women. Salander is our heroine of record, but really, any of the ladies who don't just get killed off in these novels could take a spotlight, too, I think. Not a whining victim among them; at their worst they are targets who come alive and shoot back. And if they happen to see a fella (or dame) they fancy, they make it happen, and the fancied one had better just get with the program (fortunately, all of them are glad to do so. Though really, I can't see any of these women, badass as they are, acting unethically in this regard. They know too well what it's like to be on the other end of that kind of attention).

This means I forgive them much, but still find this third novel the weakest of them. I'm not much of a legal thriller fan to begin with, and here I was being led through the ins and outs of a country and a government very different from my own. I don't mind learning about that, might even find it intriguing, but if I'm to be asked to do so to understand a piece of fiction, I want a bit more story than I got this time around. Or at least a bit more Girl; as I observed on Goodreads about halfway through reading this one, a better title for this last installment of the Milennium trilogy would be The People Who Talked About the Girl Who Did Stuff in Other Novels.

I got sick of Blomkvist, improbable chick magnet-cum-authorial wish-fulfilling stand-in, somewhere in the middle of the second book, to be honest, but here he is again like a bad, if very earnest and hardworking penny, stepping up his game to try to be a match for Salander (he does have some nifty, crafty ideas; he must have finally remembered that class he took in cunning from that fox at Oxford), but still ultimately depending on Salander to get to the bottom of things so he has facts to expose in his magazine. Even though she's in a hospital room recovering from all the gunshots and technically under arrest. But you know, he's the sidekick. It's what they do. And at least he doesn't complain about it, or try to be macho or dominating. He is protective, but in a motherly and behind-the-scenes way. There, putting it that way, I don't mind him as much. He can be Alfred. Why not.

Even so, while I read the first two books in the series at breakneck paces, barely stopping to sleep, this one, well, it's another one I kept putting aside for fun and shiny things, and finally finished out of a sense of duty, and possibly out of enslavement to the good old sunk cost fallacy. I was already in for two books and then some, better hang in there...

I'll still have a look at the film, though, because the other two films (I'm talking about the Swedish ones, here; I still haven't been able to bring myself to look at the American one) were cracking good adaptations of their books, and so I have hopes that the film of this one will be a leaner and livelier look at this story, too.

And Noomi Rapace was born for the role.

And I need to see her playing a smart person again to get the last taste of Prometheus out of my mouth.

*What actual action there is, I mean.

**Well, okay, that's a stretch, especially since there are other, more badass candidates for this theoretical female Robin in the story. What I'm trying to say is, Erika impressed me a little this time.

100 Books #101 - Justin Robinson's MR. BLANK

Was Tobias Knight your favorite character in Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's fiction, or did you at least wonder what it would be like to be him?

Did you dig X-Files but think it was kind of cheap that Mulder & Scully only had to deal with one freakshow at a time? And too much FBI red tape?

Do conspiracy theories make you horny, baby?

Then, brother, have I got the novel for you.

The title character in Mr. Blank makes Tobias Knight, quintuple agent, look like a monogamous pansy. As he tells us in the novel's exquisitely perfect opening sentence, "Every conspiracy needs a guy like me." The sad bit is, as he goes on to explain, he's that guy for every single conspiracy. And there's only so much of him to go around. So, he has established more false identities than any sane person could keep track of, each with its own email address, cell phone and contract, and contact within a secret organization; the Masons know him by one name, the Satanists by another, etc. Across conspiracies, though, he is at core the same guy: the go-to guy, a low-level initiate/enthusiast who is willing to be the gopher, delivery guy, purchasing agent, evidence hider, witness confuser, whatever dumb little task you need today, Worshipful Sir or Ma'am or Thingie.

The premise could work with any number of plots (har har). The temptation that could waylay it being just to watch him in action, which could be fun as the quotidian-for-him early pages establish; his to-do list (or lists, one for each identity/role) are quite entertaining. I was especially amused by bits like this one: "Commercial candy is allowed to have up to five rat droppings per ounce by law. What they don't say is what kind of rat droppings or whose job it is to put them there."

You get the idea.

So this could have turned into the kind of sprawling hot mess that the Illuminatus! Trilogy (clearly its primary inspiration) was, but Robinson was more interested in producing a piece of quality genre fiction/entertainment than in imparting his mystic-comic wisdom to us in a gigantic parable. I think. At any rate, he found a plot that worked, the good old "someone is trying to kill me and this stacked redhead I just happened to meet along the way" that's straight out of mid-century crime noir. Hey, why mess with perfection?

And this book is so close to genre-mashing perfection that it's almost painful to contemplate how it also kind of bothered me: there's a major sub-plot involving female body-image politics that I didn't quite like, pitting one conspiracy of Rubenesque, curvy women (the stacked redhead and her fuller-figured overladies, whom Mr. Blank refers to as "hippos" and worse) against another of stick-thin model-pushers (though bonus points for the neologism "ascetorexics"). Mr. Blank more or less comes down on the side of the former, mostly due to the presence at his side of their prettiest and smartest (Mina, whom he wants to "paint on the side of a bomber"), so I guess there's that, but still, focusing on that one characteristic of a woman -- her body, her shape -- still counts as objectification, whether you're turned on by it or not, guys. Ew.

If that kind of thing doesn't bother you*, or if it does but you're able to square your shoulders and march on and get past it and focus on all the good stuff, this is quite an enjoyable read. Fnord.

*And usually I'm of this camp, able to dismiss the odd quip about a female character's appearance or a gay character's clothing or whatever as just something that is missing the mark with me but that the author felt necessary to include to appeal to other readers. But here, it is very much front and center, with Mr. Blank all but smacking his lips over Mina on almost every page. What saves it is that she notices this, calls him on it, and occasionally delivers the kind of reprimand that leaves a mark. So that brings up a question for me that I'm not sure I have the answer to: does the presence of a strong and self-determined female character who refuses to be a sidekick justify or compensate adequately for the author's over-the-top rubbing of my readerly nose in all of this body-image crap? Like I said, I don't have an answer, so my annoyance is only mostly assuaged by the fact that everything else in this book was over-the-top awesome.