Cole Haddon's PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

I thought I'd see a novel in which Phish's "Divided Sky" created the universe (because, well, it did) before I saw one in which David Bowie really and truly actually was the one and only thing that kept that universe together, but that was reckoning without yet another irresistible force in the universe: Cole Fucking Haddon.

This is another wild ride, friends. Buckle up. Or don't. You might prefer it in the alternate universe into which you get flung by weird forces you can't even perceive, let alone comprehend. I mean, you do you.

Haddon's debut in prose fiction* is pretty much what I had hoped Herve LeTellier's The Anomaly would be, and then some. Which means that yes, we're dealing with Simulation Theory again, but in a much cooler way that also encompasses the multiverse and time travel and I've already mentioned that David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, right? David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, you guys. And saved Ali from letting fear eat his soul just as a sort of side effect. Dammit, who's cutting onions in here?

I promise I'll settle down at some point. Maybe in the next review.

I kind of liked this book, you guys. It has everything I like best in speculative fiction, including some things I haven't encountered before in speculative fiction before but now slightly resent that I hadn't, like amazing lady scientists making huge differences in multiple centuries, I Am My Own Grandpa type character arcs, interesting answers to questions like What If Elon Musk But Worse, villains that turn out to be more interesting than they seemed at first and at least one teenage antihero who is building bombs destined to explode in multiple centuries because a bunny rabbit he believes is Allah himself has been telling him to with terrible urgency and persuasiveness and you will not believe where this teenager ends up as your favorite character in the whole cast of battered babies and misfits getting ground through the gears of Haddon's many interwoven plots. Which plots both do and do not neatly resolve themselves offscreen and subtly and with enough ambiguity to keep even the most discerning alternate reality snob/comics guy happy.

A word of warning, though, to those like me who read pretty much entirely in ebook format these days (as readers of this blog know, I have extraordinary difficulty physically holding print books, let alone turning their pages, these days, and it's only gotten worse over the years): a great deal of the David Bowie-esque material takes place off screen and is told in the form of things like newspaper clippings, which are embedded as graphics files in the ebook version, meaning the print is very, very, very small and closely formatted to resemble the content they represent and even with my very best cheaters on I struggled to read these bits. Fortunately, there are only a few of these, because you absolutely don't want to skip them; they are expertly done and add a whole extra, wonderful layer to the storytelling of Psalms for the End of the World.

Now excuse me. I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to find a way to break into the world where this book got all of the notice and acclaim and international translation attention that went to The Anomaly in this one. Who knows, maybe that's also the one where Gene Wolfe got a Nobel Prize.

*He is also an author of some kickass comic books, wrote a lot for Hollywood and even got to create a real live TV show for NBC starring the guy who played an alternate version of David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. All of this and only then did he decide to publish a novel. Cuz why not?

Emily St. John Mandel's SEA OF TRANQUILITY

Ok, friends, I'm calling it: I'm officially over the Simulation Theory. It was interesting, even diverting, for a while, but now the Zoanthropes who can't be trusted to tell the difference between fact and fiction have gotten hold of it have added it to their quiver of arguments in favor of not being their brothers' keepers and they're thus absolved from giving a fuck about anybody else despite what their holy books tell them* and I just can't anymore. 

Ware spoilers for the book, by the way. I 

But it do keep coming up in the books I'm reading and even if it wasn't just a gussied-up version of "characters who know or realized they're in a novel" it's come up TOO MUCH and the next time I see it, even if it's a fucking prize-winning Instant Classic, I'm not gonna bother finishing that book. 

Anyway, Sea of Tranquility. Which commits another sin-in-my-book regarding books in that the main point-of-view character is a novelist.

I realize that I already sound like I hated this, but I didn't. Author Emily St. John Mandel has created a cast of characters, living in different periods of history and the Future, that I felt like I understood and quickly came to care about, and put them in interesting situations within their own timelines and experiences that kept me caring even when I realized that they were really just parts in a familiar Simulated machine, and the book is pretty short (by my standards anyway) so I didn't feel the need to put it aside or drop it altogether at the time, though about 2/3 of the way through it I started feeling like I'd read it all before fairly recently.

The book takes place in, in chronological order, frontier British Columbia, present day New York City, a book tour around the world in the 22nd century, and a colonized Moon in the 23rd, with the Moon being home to three domed cities (one of which is charmingly dilapidated to represent the diminished glamor of life on the moon when other planets in our solar system and in another solar system are now also settled by humans) and a Time Institute which, yes, is a giant time travel bureaucracy (yay!)... tasked with gathering evidence to finaly prove or disprove the Simulation Theory, because An Anomaly has crept up (yawn) which allows all of the aforementioned points in space-time to connect and bleed into each other, but just for a moment -- an arresting moment that has inspired, again in chronological order, a letter home describing a wilderness encounter with the Anomaly, a musical-composition-cum-video installation featuring a glimpse of the Anomaly, and a vividly described passage in a novel that can only be describing an enounter with the Anomaly (but written by someone who grew up on the Moon!).

The Time Institute has noticed these artistic coincidences, sent Time Travelers to investigate them, and has concluded that this strongly indicates a Glitch in the Simulation (yawn) that needs further investigation. Enter one Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a somewhat wayward divorced man in his 30s who was named after a character in the Novel and whose name also appears in the initial stories of the other encounters with the Anomaly. Yawn. Of course he's going to be a Time Traveler. But, to Mandel's credit, for a long time this looked like it was going to be a different kind of coincidence -- a family name passed on to descendants, perhaps? 

*Which, those same holy books seem awfully prone as it is to persuading their adherents that this fragile little planet whose surface we cling to was given to us to dominate and so we don't bear any responsibility for taking care of it or making sure its habitable for other life forms who aren't of immediate economic utility to us. Why, yes, it drives me crazy that so many people consider these texts to be the Ne Plus Ultra of morality when they actually seem to demand the bare minimum of same of The Faithful. And that The Faithful, even as they scream for everybody to adhere to their idiosyncratic interpretations of holy writ, seem in their own conduct to regard these texts more as guidelines than absolutes. Slavish enforced obedience for others, freedom to cherry pick for me...