T.J. Bass' THE GODWHALE

An absolute kitchen-sink classic* of more-or-less-mid-century science fiction, T.J. Bass' The Godwhale is one of the most enjoyable reads I've had this year, even while it was also, broadly, pretty bleak.

The story starts firmly in  overpopulated, dystopian Stand on Zanzibar territory, with our sort-of-protagonist, Larry Dever, quickly and stupidly maneuvering himself into becoming a medical time traveler by getting himself cut in half. The medical science of his near-future time still isn't up to making him whole again, or at least not whole enough to suit him, so he elects to go into suspended animation until it can, gambling on Progress to give him back his legs, internal organs, and fully functioning tallywhacker. As one does.

Oddly enough, his gamble pays off in a way -- he becomes the ancestor to pretty much everyone else that matters in the rest of the story. But only in a way.

Seemingly irrelevant at the time but, as it turns out, crucial to the novel's denouement, Larry is first revived by a world in which his many-times-great-grand-nieces and nephews are getting ready to "seed" other planets, sending out genetic arks into outer space, and while they still can't bring him back to cherry-poppin' full functionality, they can still make him a star-daddy, after a fashion -- he's got wonderfully "primitive" genes compared to what's around in his new time -- humanity is starting to degenerate as only people who can handle overcrowding are able to/allowed to breed, resulting in a loss of hybrid vigor and good old fashioned paleolithic-ish awesomeness of which our man Larry is a last surviving example, even though he's now just a "hemi-human." They'd love to graft him onto a clone-grown lower half and send him into the stars, but when he finds out just how they'd accomplish this, he elects to go back to sleep. They can use his clone-grown material as well as his own sweet self to seed the stars.

All of this is just prologue, though... and then he wakes up again, more or less by accident, into the world of The Hive, in which Bass' other novel Half-Past Human, is set (apparently The Godwhale is a sequel thereto. Oops). A world in which humanity now averages about four feet tall (if that) lives by the multi-billions in one giant, continent-spanning, computer-controlled underground city in unbearably close quarters, below vast Gardens of the kind only Monsanto could love (as in the food plants cannot pollinate themselves or in any way breed, and have to be synthesized from the amino acids up) that exist solely to provide calories for the teeming masses crammed in below, in which no animal life apart from the Hive's stunted little denizens exists, and in which the oceans are completely, lifelessly sterile.

Except for the titular Godwhale, a Harvester, a cybernetic whale remnant of some civilization that existed about halfway between Larry's first awakening and his second, in which giant artificially intelligent cyborgs gathered all the fish and plankton and sea greens and protein from the sea and existed to serve man. This one last cyborg, who lends the novel its title, seems from its having that honor like it's going to be more of a personality within said novel, but alas, the Rokal Maru serves more as a setting-cum-excuse than a partner in protagonism to Larry. I would have loved to have her as more of a character and less of a plot device. Alas. Anyway, she's spent hundreds of years beached on a reef somewhere until suddenly her little robot friend Trilobite discovers not only that there are still people on this here planet, but also maybe some other things are starting to show up, too. Almost as if a cache of biological samples somehow broke open or something. Hmm!

This all probably seems super spoilery, but really, I assure you, it isn't. This is all milieu I'm explaining here, a setting in which a complex and varied plot told in a series of vignettes over decades takes place and which I'm not going to divulge except to say that, well, yes, Larry's genes got around really good for a guy who didn't even have gonads by the end of the first chapter.

Author T.J. Bass, who sadly died in 2011, thus preventing me from fangirling him on social media because I'd not yet heard of him, was a medical doctor by profession, meaning there is enough hard sci-fi content here to satisfy the most grognard among us (provided he considers medicine and biology to be science-y enough), but it almost never overwhelms the story, or the action, of which there is plenty.

I've never so enjoyed being so disappointed in humanity, you guys. Ever.

*Seriously. From its titular cybernetic whale/ship to its medical time travel to its status as another finger-wagging parable to its post-apocalyptic (and post-post apocalyptic, and post-post-post apocalyptic)(remember, it's sort of a time travel tale, though all the travel is in one direction) settings to its The Man Who Folded Himself identity-collapsing (half the novel's characters are pretty much clones of its sort-of-point-of-view character) to its reverse Planet of the Apes ending, this novel is going to remind you of everything while still being its own unique thing. Quite a feat, that!

VINYL - Willie Nelson "The Sound In Your Mind"

I just had a crazy dream which I absolutely blame on Tamaranorbust and Jeff Gordinier. And on all the cold medicine I've been having to take this week. In it, my high school band teacher, who was absolutely this kind of guy, had assigned us to listen to an album side a day on vinyl and note down our thoughts on it for something we had to hand in at the end of the year. For my first album side I chose Willie Nelson's The Sound in Your Mind off of which the song in the [VINYL] video embedded above was a single, which somehow had transported itself into my parents' record collection in that way things do in dreams (in real life, I don't think my parents ever had any Willie Nelson -- even before his braids and tax problems, he wasn't really their style. Just a hippie who played country instead of psychedelic rock). I woke up really, really wanting to do my band homework!

Alas, I don't have a turntable or any vinyl anymore. I have plenty of vices taking up plenty of space in my house, but analog audio collecting hasn't ever been one of them. But then I remembered how the world's favorite jukebox, YouTube, features rather a lot of videos like this one, of someone playing an analog vinyl favorite with the camera just focused on the turntable. It's a whole thing that I've only peripherally noticed and appreciated as a sort of protest against Mp3s, which my readers are all pretty much the sort of people who know are compressed to hell and sound terrible compared even to audio CDs, which themselves sound pretty awful compared to vinyl, but yannow.

Anyway, so I really liked the idea of a time-compressed version of that band homework (not sure how many of us have time to listen to a whole album side every day as busy grown-ups), so I thought of doing it this way, and blogging it, for a while, just as an experiment.

Furthermore, rather than impose just my tastes on everybody, I thought maybe I'd open up the floor to suggestions for tracks to include this way. Maybe if it turns out to be something I like I'll spin it off as a separate blog, but for now, just think of it as another KateOfMind.

Hook up your computer to the best speakers you've got in the house (me, I've got some Harmon Kardon Soundsticks, which aren't exactly my brothaman's giant vintage Monsoons, but have always served this non-audiophile's purpose well enough) and give this tune a spin.

100 Books #74 - James Clavell's SHOGUN

I realized, as I started reading this risibly enormous tome, that there has been a lacuna in my omnivorousness, reading-wise. I have relatively little experience with 20th century blockbuster/bestselling fiction generally, and almost no experience with blockbuster fiction of the 1970s/80s, except for maybe a spate of devouring every Robert Ludlum I could get my hands on after seeing the miniseries adaptation of The Bourne Identity on TV as a young'un.*

A lot has changed in the world since this novel's first publication in 1975. Like a whole explosion of cross-pollenization between Japanese and American/Western European pop culture that has also led to a much greater general understanding of Japanese high culture in our hemisphere as well. I spent a lot of the 90s watching all kinds of anime with my friends, for instance, and since my friends were the kind of people who can't just sort of enjoy a thing, we became immersed in all things Japanese: food, language, culture, music, handicrafts, gardening. The Porter Exchange Building in Cambridge, MA was like our second home. We ate Pocky more than candy bars. If it was Japanese, we were all over it.

So a lot of what pads out this giant (over 1100 pages!) novel seems to be stuff that makes me want to scream "I already freaking know that" to James Clavell. Which is woefully unfair. As I said, in 1975, the ubiquity of Japanese pop- and high-culture in our society was still in the future. Most of Clavell's readers then doubtless knew less about Japan than I now know about string theory; even the plethora of Samurai films we take for granted today, including many amazing ones that pre-date this novel, were hard for most of Clavell's readership/audience to come by. A nearby move theater had to be screening them, and foreign films were really only shown in college towns and other hoity-toity places. I know all this. I was alive in 1975. Okay, I was only five years old, but things didn't really change in this regard until I was almost an adult.

So the experience of reading Shogun in the 21st century has been kind of a herky-jerky one; I was divided between the otaku-type who bristles at being subjected to declarative sentences about the obvious, the post-modern moralist who bristles at the fetishization of Asian women that lards so many chapters, and the ordinary happy little reader who just wants to be told a good story. To some degree, this is always the case for an educated reader -- especially a reader who majored in literature -- but for some reason this conflict was profound as I read this book.

Which is a shame, because there is quite a good story here. And Clavell tells it very well indeed, in vivid prose, at a lively pace, and with quite an interesting set of characters, European and Japanese. I especially admire the proxy sectarian struggles, a 17th century culture war with actual stakes!

Too, the extraordinary length is not all condescending culture-translating pandering. This is a big, big story, a first contact tale in which both sides are of the same species and from the same planet, but are alien enough to each other for the plot to be seamlessly transferred to an episode of Star Trek. Which is awesome!

So, as a meditation on the power and value of novelty and on the struggle to exploit it, Shogun is nonpareil.

I mean, it's an Elizabethan Englishman in Japan! Who just happens to also be the best guy ever at improvised sign language. Seriously, the first third or so of the book seems to have something along the lines of "With signs Blackthorne made him comprehend" every few pages. But Clavell is perhaps sparing us the tedious description of the combination of signs-and-blank-stares-and-more-emphatic-signs he probably is really describing, neh? So perhaps I'll just stick to Elizabethan in Japan! Gaudeamus! Except he's a Protestant, so I should avoid Latin. Hooray!

And the flesh is barely back on Blackthorne's bones when he becomes the hottest commodity to hit Japan since the Black Ships first arrived, and maybe even hotter than them, because he has the power to complete -- and completely transform -- the Japanese understanding of the greater world from which he and they came. He quickly realizes his power, as the first non-Iberian visitor to Japan, to poke holes in the tissue of lies and concealed motives that have been presented to the Japanese who welcomed the Spanish and Portuguese as trading partners and missionaries but were ignorant of just how those newcomers had behaved in those roles in other parts of the world (think Conquistadors) and of their essential goal of world domination, with Japan just the latest strategic stepping stone to feel their boots.

All that and he knows all about deep-seafaring, shipbuilding, navigation, and where the Portuguese have stationed forts -- staffed and defended by samurai! -- along the African and Indian coasts. And he's a blonde-haired, blue-eyed giant, packed with DNA that has not ever been combined with the local gene pool, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Which brings me to the wonderful Mariko, one of the most fascinating heroines I've encountered in some time. She is far more than a love interest, and not just because she's handy with a sword; she is indispensable to the machinations of her liege lord, Toranaga, keeping the plot churning so constantly that the reader only rarely notices that this novel is really just one giant tease for Crimson Sky. Mariko, though, ah, Mariko. She can get more done with a non-committal bit of politeness than a whole army of Brown or Gray samurai bristling with swords -- or muskets. Her continual awareness of how everything is playing out and exactly how much she and her men can get away with make her a complete joy to read. And of course, without her, Blackthorne is a resource no one can exploit, or even understand.

And Toranaga! He lives forever in my head personified by the great Toshiro Mifune. I love his weirdly majestic interpretation of a sailor's hornpipe and wish I could find a clip of him doing it alone on the mountaintop, but this is still pretty good:



In short, I can't remember when the last time was that I so enjoyed being so exhausted by a novel. I approached its end with a mixture of joyous anticipation (because I have so many other interesting books lined up to read) and bittersweet sadness (because I've gotten a great deal of pleasure out of reading this one). There are, of course, four other giant boluses of novel that Clavell set in Asia, and I will definitely read them in time on the strength of this one, but none of them will have Toranaga. Or Mariko. Or Blackthorne. Or Yabu. Or Rodrigues. Or Father Alvito and those wicked, scheming Jesuits. Ah, me.

*Coincidentally, that miniseries starred none other than Richard Chamberlain (and seriously, shut up about Matt Damon. The King of the Miniseries is the only true Jason Bourne), who, of course, also starred in the miniseries adaptation of Shogun. And speaking of the miniseries, I had a delirious moment or two whenever Mariko addressed Blackthorne and calls him "Pilot-Major Blackthorne," because of course the actress exaggerates the famous Asian accent so it sounds like she's calling him "Pirate-Major Brackthorne" and immediately I have Gilbert & Sullivan on the brain. Gilbert & Sullivan are, of course, also famous for "The Mikado" in which Japan is used as an exotic setting for a sharply satirical commentary on English society.