Vladimir Sorokin's BLUE LARD (Tr by Max Lawton

About midway through Vladimir Sorokin's infamous, absurd and obscene Blue Lard, a very au courant couple in an alternate (very alternate) mid 20th century Moscow go out on a very chic date that winds up forming a tableau of the most perfect encapsulation of the state of world culture in the 1990s I've encountered in a long time, maybe ever. It might seem ordinary at first: they attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Ballet. But this ain't the stately, ornate palace of the arts you're no-doubt imagining right now. I mean, well, it is, but it's also so much more:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system.  Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with strong enough lighting -- from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.

To attend a performance at this Bolshoi requires donning a kind of diving suit, and the lobby of the famous theater now functions as an airlock, from which the contents of the auditorium are pumped in and out to facilitate entry to the performances. The rest is pretty much a typical theater-going experience, just murkier. Oh, and you have to attach a special apparatus to your diving helmet to make it compatible with the drinks service in order to enjoy your champagne uncontaminated by #1 and #2 and whatnot. As is ever the concern when ordering comestibles in public, no?

By the way, sorry if any of the above grossed you out too much. But if it did, you might as well stop reading this post, and cross Blue Lard off your TBR, because the vast variety of offensive material packed into this novel, of which the Bolshoi sewer lagoon is by no means the most offensive, means it probably isn't for you. 

Except, well, you'd be missing out on a lot. Even a pretty decent and straightforward plot (well, except for some wibbly wobbly timey wimey bits) mixed in with outrageous scenes, nearly impenetrable slangs (including a lot in a sort of Russian/Chinese pidgin that only dorks like translator Max Lawton and Your Humble Blogger* likely really enjoy; there's a glossary in the back of the NYRB edition**) and off-kilter parodies of the works of most of Russian literature's greatest heroes that, to a 21st century reader, are gonna feel like the output of a Large Language Model force fed on Pushkin and Akhmatova, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Platonov and Chekhov, but are somehow both worse and better than that for reasons I'll get into later. 

Later in the book, after a hilariously explicit yet oddly tender sex scene that you've probably already heard about if you've heard anything about this book, the lovers have a bit of a literary discussion for their exhausted and happy pillow talk:

"I've forgotten what a book even is."

"That's forgivable for the leader."

"Are there interesting writers?"

"There are.  But not interesting books."

"In what sense?"

"You see... something is happening with Russian literature. But I still haven't quite understood what."

"Is it rotting?"

"Probably."

"Well, we're all rotting. As soon as a man stops growing, he starts rotting."

"A book isn't a man."

"Do you mean to say that books don't rot?"

Blue Lard is the first book that I've encountered that i truly feel could only have been written in the 1990s, a decade in which public intellectuals were making nonsense declarations about "The end of history" and predicting stagnation and stasis as all we had to look forward to now that the great Cold War had been "won" by the West. At the time I thought this attitude only prevailed in the West -- the former Soviet Union was still living through some mighty interesting times*** -- but here in this book that first saw print in 1999 we have the above arresting image of the flower of Russian arts and culture reduced to its very dregs, passed through a million digestive systems and still being circulated and presented as all there was on offer. And that's just for a start.

Egads, I love this weirdo, Sorokin.

But so,  what does all this have to do with lard, of any color? 

I'm not going to go too deep into the color stuff. Sean over at SFUltra handled all that just fine and I'd just be rehashing him. Suffice it to say that this particular term for the color blue in Russia has come to take on connotations not unlike our old use of "lavender." But what's the Lard?

Buckle up. 

So, for about the first third or so of the book, told by the way, in epistolary form by a technician to his absent lover in the kind of prose that might remind the reader of James Joyce's love letters to his wife, Nora, if James Joyce had been a Russian science fiction writer, concerns a bizarre project. For the good of Mother Russia, hilariously mis-grown  clones of great Russian literary figures of the past are set to work producing new texts, not for the sake of generating those texts (which are shared in full in these letters), but in order to collect the weird and unspecifically powerful residue that these clones produce as a byproduct of their literary efforts, a blue substance very like bacon fat that the clones secrete when writing.

So basically, Blue Lard is misbegotten creativity (the only kind Sorokin foresaw his culture producing as the millennium ended****) made tangible and collected to use as fuel for grander projects. Our correspondent and his coworkers all believe that it will serve as fuel to power a nuclear reactor on the Moon. Russian greatness of the future must consume Russian greatness from the past in order to achieve Russian greatness in the present. Or something. How all of that is supposed to work is beside the point -- very much so, as at no point do we even come close to seeing this reactor, or the Moon at all. What does become of the Blue Lard is so much weirder than that. So much. As Lawton says in his "extraduction" at the end of the book, Blue Lard isn't meant to be understood so much as borne witness to.

Except, and I know this is the very height of hubris to even pretend to say, I feel like I did, in fact, understand that to which I bore witness, here. Just not on a conscious level. Or a rational one. But Vladimir Sorokin and Max Lawton put something in my brain by means of black excrescences on white paper, and that something will live in there forever, inflating the view my inner eye has of my brain, like Tetsuo's body in the last act of Akira, eternally. If you've already read this book, you know exactly what I'm referring to here. Heh.

But so anyway, this whatever that Sorokin and Lawton put into my brain, can I even explain it? In a blog post? You see here that I have tried. But I feel like I've failed, even as most people feel like they have failed to understand Blue Lard. But maybe it's not a matter of understanding, or of bearing witness, but of making the mighty effort to invent a new art form, a new kind of expression, with which we can convey our individual and idiosyncratic experiences of reading Blue Lard. I'm game. How about you?

Rips, ni ma de.

*Recall that Mandarin and Russian are the two languages that I've made the most effort to sort-of learn except my squirrel brain is even worse about hopping from language to language than it is from book to book.

**But you don't really need it. Context clues are usually enough to get the gyst, and I think constantly flipping to the glossary page would just slow you down/annoy you into DNFing long before the real fun of Blue Lard even begins.

***My perspective on this is still, I freely admit, colored by my old Beaudacious Bard College classmate's big ugly book about his experiences in Russia in the 90s.

****I think he's been proven wrong on this score, I'm happy to say. Not only has Sorokin himself continued to publish some fascinating work almost as fucked up as Blue Lard, but so have the Dyachenkos, Tatyana Tolstaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Victor Pelevin, Dmitry Glukhovsky and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, to name a few whose work I myself have read. Perhaps not all of this will be regarded as immortal work for the ages, but some of it likely will, and none of it is rotted or boring or terribly conventional. I've certainly enjoyed it quite a lot, anyway, some of it, like Vodolazkin's Laurus, I've read more than once and even decided to try reading in the original because I've liked it so much. To say nothing of Belorussian, Ukrainian and other Former Soviet states whose native writers are getting the kind of international attention that used only to be possible for either very orthodox or wildly transgressive Russian nationals 

Edward Ashton's ANTIMATTER BLUES (Narr John Pirhalla & Katharine Chin)

Somehow I didn't know that a sequel to Mickey7 was in the works, let alone already published. Thank goodness for Mastodon, where I landed early in the Twitter diaspora and where frank curiosity about what everybody else is reading is possibly the most common conversation I have there, or I still wouldn't know that Edward Ashton'sp Antimatter Blues existed!

I hadn't planned to read the audio edition, though. But for some reason, that's the version my public library bought despite owning only the ebook version of Mickey7, so, since beggars can't be choosers and I'm a beggar since retirement, audio it was this time. 

Except now I have a new audio narration pet peeve: when a (first person) narrator aims for callow and casual but the only note he really achieves is every sentence that isn't another character's dialog ends in what I can only describe as a verbal shrug. Like when a parent tries to warn a kid not to come crying to them if they ignore the warning and suffer mild to moderate consequences? Except it's every single sentence, and usually nobody could have predicted the consequences of a thing so nobody could have warned about a thing and the consequences are usually way beyond mild to moderate -- often they are severe to near-fatal, i.e. the kind after which it is never appropriate to say anything remotely like "I told you so" especially since usually no, in fact, you didn't. It makes the narrator character, Mickey, who is already not the most sympathetic or reliable of these, sound like he is constantly abdicating responsibility for every single thing that happens. This could be excused as an audio narrating choice when it's a thing for which responsibility might be assigned, like having lied to your partner or lost an important resource or, you know, actually did tell you so, but this tone is even used when describing perfectly mundane things like crossing a room or biting into a protein bar. Over eight or so hours of a really great story, this goes from being annoying and occasionally misleading to my finally wanting to send narrator John Pirhalla* back to high school speech class. And flunk him on principle the first time so he has to take it twice. 

As for Pirhalla's co-narrator, who's really more of a guest voice but that's not really officially a thing, Katherine Chin, she is fine. I can't say more than that, though, because of a weird choice the producers made to have Pirhalla voice everybody's dialogue, including the female characters', including Mickey's beloved, Nasha, who is actually so important she's basically a co-protagonist... in the bog-standard "raise your pitch above your normal speaking level, add lots more vaguely "feminine" breathiness and give most of your lines a flirty tone" style that way too many male narrators use for female or enby characters. Why do they have Chin at all, then? Only to play Nasha when her dialogue comes over the radio. Um, whut.

Anyway, the book is good enough to make up for all of that. I'm a big fan of the book. I recommend it to everybody who likes science fiction. But I'll urge anybody who decides to read to to do so in digital format or in good old fashioned print.*

Well, except for one kind of neat thing about the audio versus other formats: in the book, we come to know a non-human character called Speaker, who not only learned human language wholly from years of eavesdropping on radio conversations between Mickey and his best friend, Berto, but has also exactly duplicated Berto's voice and speech patterns; if they heard but couldn't see the one speaking, nobody could ever tell Speaker and Berto apart until it became a matter of each character's unique perspective or experiences being communicated, i.e., the voice said something that only Speaker or Berto could or would say. Berto is a daredevil pilot who talks like Buzz Lightyear. Speaker is a constructed representative of a vast hive mind and its body, like all of its kind, is a vaguely insectoid/trilobite-ish form. So imagine a Buzz Lightyear and a giant pill bug who also talks like Buzz Lightyear on a desperate mission together. It's amusing in audio book format in a way print could never match. If that sounds like fun to you and you think I'm being overly sensitive (I mean, I've coached high school speech teams to state championships a few times so I've made a lot of kids pay attention to details like this, so yes, I am more sensitive than most when it comes to vocal narrative) to the Verbal Shrug issue, hey, sample it and see. 

Anyway...

Our story picks up two years after Mickey Barnes, seventh of his name, resigned his job as the "Expendable" for humanity's beachhead colony on an icy frost clod of a planet called Nefilheim. A mission's Expendable is a person with no particular skill set of the kind that would ordinarily merit a spot on a mission but is simply willing to do all the dangerous/fatal tasks that need doing on that mission. If an Expendable dies in the line of duty, a new clone of that person is quickly grown in a vat and imprinted with the previous clone's memories and personality from up to the moment the prior clone last submitted to Upload. The memories might thus include the prior's experience of dying from, say, being the first to try eating vegetation or meat from a new planet, or being attacked by a new creature, or exposure to radiation while making emergency repairs to the kind of thing that emits radiation.

Mickey 7 explored the consequences of an Expendable actually surviving a supposed death but only making it back home after he, presumed dead by the rest of the crew, had already been replaced by his clone. In the process, Mickey discovered that an alien monster (that happens to be what everyone thinks killed him) is actually sentient. And in his dealings with the monster species that I don't want to get too specific about, one important thing that I can't help spoiling happens: he left a very powerful antimatter bomb in their possession. Or at least told his commanding officer that he did.

As Antimatter Blues gets going, Mickey's colony finds itself sorely in need of getting that bomb back, not to use as a weapon or to blow anything up, but to drain of its antimatter for fuel to keep the colony going through a projected planetary winter that could very well render the whole colony extinct. And we find out /are reminded what Mickey really did with the bomb, which becomes a McGuffin in a vastly entertaining plot that involves renewing relations with the alien Creepers, whose vast underground labyrinth of a habitat is very near the humans' dome, meeting another population of Creepers who are even weirder and scarier than humanity's neighbors, and getting inextricably and irrevocably involved in inter-population politics as they race to recover humanity's only hope for survival. In the process we get to know Berto and Nasha a lot better than we did last novel. Nasha especially gets a chance to become a more important character in her own right, starting with a pretty grim and close look at what it has been like for her to watch her boyfriend die of various hazards seven times. Amusingly, she gets referred to as "The Nasha" by the Creepers, whose perspective on her, remember, has been formed by supposedly private conversations between her boyfriend Mickey and her fellow pilot, Berto, both of whom affect an exaggerated fear of/respect for Nasha at all times. In other words, the Creepers think that Nasha is pretty much the biggest badass ever, and she comes pretty close to proving them right.

Mickey, also, gets to show a bit more general heroism as he is all but shoved into command of the mission, since it's his fault the antimatter is out of human control. He makes a hell of an ambassador to an alien race, but his unique experiences as a former Expendable give him an equally unique perspective on what it means to be an individual, a concept he has great difficulty explaining to the two flavors of hive mind with which he has to negotiate.

But of course it's the Creeper called Speaker who steals the show this time around, weirdly charismatic, stern, occasionally baffled by us weirdo humans and very, very committed to his Nest's survival. It's the Speaker's presence in this second book that really makes it an even better read than its predecessor and makes me hope for a few more Mickey7 novels to come. Mickey and the Creepers. I mean, come on!

*Who sounds enough like Casey Kasem that I was constantly waiting to hear this. And so I hereby renew my plea for blooper reels at the end of audio books. They would be the most fun. And if there are still more than a handful of home-producers out there, I absolutely want to hear the takes spoiled/enhanced by your pets (*cough* especially Paul E. Cooley *cough*). Come on. You know it would enhance the whole audio book experience and thus allow your special friends to contribute a tiny bit more to your (hahahahaha) livelihood (hohohohoho).

**I have a terrible, terrible time with paperbacks, especially trade paperbacks, because I can't physically handle or manipulate these for more than about 15 minutes per day without searing physical pain and inability to get pretty much anything else done that day. I have a category on most social reading sites I call "On Dead Tree Despite The Pain" into which I put books that I found worth that annoyance and discomfort to read and finish. Guys, I would have read Antimatter Blues in a mass market paperback if I had to. In fact, I seriously considered DNFing the audio book (no sunk cost except a tiny bit of my tax dollars) and waiting for a cheap used paperback to wash up at Alibris or my local used bookstore. But I really got into the story so I forged on through. 

Edward Ashton's MICKEY7

There's nothing like a good old-fashioned space colonization story. There's also nothing like a good old cloning story. And when you combine the two, you usually get a cracking good old-fashioned science fiction story. I mean, look what Duncan Jones did with it!

Pretty soon we're going to get to see what Bong-Joon Ho does with it, when he adapts this novel for the big screen. And I, for one, can't wait, because Edward Ashton's Mickey7 is perfect for him. 

Mickey Barnes has grown up in a fairly new human colony on a planet named Midgard, which is pretty habitable after a few generations of danger and effort following a well-established formula that isn't always successful, but is successful enough. More on that in a bit. For now we can just say that Midgard is well-established enough to have room in its society for the occasional fuckup of a person. Mickey Barnes is one of those. So nobody, not even his purported best friend, is surprised when Mickey winds up highly motivated to get the hell off Midgard and joins the next outward expansion of humanity as the one member of a spaceship crew that doesn't have to be the best of the best: the Expendable.

No, I don't know if the Expendable wears a red shirt. It would be fine if they did, although an Expenable isn't just someone who isn't all that important to the larger story arc but whose death can move an episode's plot along; an Expendable is literally the member of the crew, and later of the founding generation of the new colony, whose entire purpose is to die for the rest. Fatal debris strike in flight that'll expose the repairman to fatal doses of radiation in minutes? Send out the Expendable. Unknown if the soil/air/water of the newly settled planet has cooties that will kill a human? Feed it to the Expendable first. But why, then, does a colony ship only carry one Expendable and not many?

Because the one *is* many. Because the tech McGuffin that makes Mikey7 work is a combination of perfected cloning technology and brain scanning/duplication that means, as long as your Expendable has been regular in their "updates" they can die horribly and you can just print up another iteration of that Expendable out of your really fancy 3D printer and the new copy will have all of the prior one's memories right up until their most recent update and will carry on with whatever menial work you have for them until it's time to send them on another suicide mission. As long as you have enough raw materials to keep making new copies of the Expendable, that person is, at least from the perspective of the rest of the crew, functionally immortal with just a few inconvenient but also totally exploitable memory gaps here and there.

And no sneaky making more than one copy; that's strictly taboo after a rich guy once slowly took over an entire planet by making multiple copies of himself, overwhelming all of the other colonists one by one and feeding them back into the printer to make more copies of himself. He was poised to start taking over nearby planets when humanity as a whole came together to forcibly stop him in a disastrously permanent fashion. D'oh!

Which means yes, there are totally people with completely irrational prejudices against Expendables. Do you see why this is perfect Bong-Joon Ho material? I mean, he could have just put in an order for a story like this and wouldn't have gotten a more perfect source from which to make his next exciting, bloody, brutal and socially conscious film!

Meanwhile, it's a great read. Mickey is a perfectly relatable character, and Ashton does a perfect job of making us feel his dilemmas as the missteps of others put him in the very worst position an Expendable on a colony mission could be in: an accidental Multiple. And no, this is not a spoiler; it's in the promo copy for the book. Meanwhile, the new colony planet is even less hospitable than it looked through the telescopes back on Midgard -- and it already looked plenty inhospitable, which is why it's been named Niflheim. Brush up on your Norse mythology if you don't know why that's a hell of a name to give a planet (see what I did there?).

Hurry up with the movie!