Karen Tidbeck's AMATKA (Tr Karen Tidbeck)

Do you like the art style known as Socialist Realism, but wish that maybe it was a little less realistic? Alternatively, do you like fantasy, but wish it could sometimes be a little more socialist?

Do you believe in the magic of language?

Boy have I got a book for you!

Karen Tidbeck's Amatka might be a portal fantasy of sorts, but it's hard to say, just as it's hard to say a lot of things about the world in which the title town sits, to which its inhabitants came generations ago as colonists of a sort, from what sounds like it might have been our ordinary everyday world, but could also have been the dystopian hellscape our best writers still feel coming despite how smugly we once regarded books like The Sheep Look Up as "self-denying prophecies.*" But I don't think they came in a spaceship, or in any kind of craft at all. 

I ginned up as many theories about what was really going on in Tidbeck's strange world as there are pages in this short novel, and I trashed nearly all of them, resurrected some of them, trashed them again, chanted nonsense words over them to see what they would do (but only if no one was about to hear me blaspheming/threatening the very stability of reality by so speaking), babbled to my book bestie (the mad book snob formerly but sometimes still known as Popqueenie), who originally turned me on to this book, that I had suspicions that there was some weird kind of "slavery with extra steps" kind of nightmare scenario at work here... cheered that the rather hapless heroine was finally taking on some agency and acting on her suspicions, only to grind my teeth to see her chicken out or dampen it down for the sake of her budding relationship with her love interest... you know. All the things great fiction makes us do in our heads while in reality we're sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and one or more mammals using us as furniture and a book or some other kind of reading device spread open before us...

Anyway, let's talk about that heroine, whose name is Vanja and who isn't super thrilled with her job, but it could be worse -- and suddenly it's giving her the opportunity to travel and see more of her strange world. We meet her busily reminding all of her possessions of what they are by softly naming them off, one by one, working overtime to make sure that none of her words become rote; she learned long ago when assigned to do this with her childhood classroom's supply of pencils that saying "pencil" over and over again gets, first really dull, then kind of meditative, and then maybe nonsensical until you might as well, instead of saying "pencil pencil pencil" start saying "pencilpencilpencil" until you're kind of half-consciously saying "cilpen cilpen cil--" and oops, suddenly all of those pencils start losing their form and essential nature and then collapse into... something else... and everybody around you starts losing their minds with worry and panic and yelling at you for your carelessness and calling in the Cleaners to stop a chain reaction of form-losing from happening and taking everything in the colony, or at least in the classroom, with it.

You know. How everybody rides a slow, somewhat ill-maintained train from one town to another on an ordinary day.

Some reviewers of this book have complained quite a lot about Vanja, whose advent on the cold, chilly and mysteriously depopulated Amatka settlement touches off a whole series of calamities, being a badly written or unbelievable character. It would not surprise me at all that none of those reviewers have grown up in a truly small town, a really rural and underpopulated one by most of the 21st century's standards, and don't know just how different life is in such places from even the cities most consider to be small towns in this day and age. In a truly small town (as long-time readers of this blog know, I grew up in southern Wyoming, in a town with fewer than 1600 people, over 20 empty miles (as in no rest stops, no convenience stores, no gas stations, just big sprawling cattle ranches populated by cattle and haystacks and maybe one guy on a 4-wheeler or, yes, horse) from the nearest town, which boasted a population of maybe 300. We didn't have professional firefighters; we had volunteers, people from the community who had other full-time jobs and families and responsibilities who nonetheless also took on the role of responding to structure fires, wild land fires and many other dangerous accidents that professional firefighters in larger cities probably would never dream of being expected to deal with (a large proportion of these volunteers were also our emergency medical responders, paid a token amount and subject to brutal on-call schedules 24/7/365). Newcomers to our area were always kind of shocked and disbelieving about this at first, charmed by it for a while, and then sooner or later often pretty resentful when they realized that there weren't a lot of resources to go around and it's really better for everybody if they learn to manage some small issues themselves and take prevention very, very seriously.

And some of them never get it. Sigh.

Anyway, I bring this up because, for whatever mysterious reason that it's great fun to theorize about (myself I came up with a truly horrifying interpretation that still haunts me as a possible - Tidbeck has given us a truly awesome -- in the old-fashioned sense of that word -- thought experiment of an allegory of a horror scenario in the pages of this novel) because in Amatka and the larger world in which it's situated, reality itself is what everybody is responsible for maintaining, very deliberately, very consciously, every day. Because with the exception of the original stuffs -- paper, fabric, metal, wood, food organisms (I think?) -- that the original settlers brought with them to this weird and alien world, all matter is profoundly protean and malleable and uniquely responsive to human language to a rather shocking degree. Imagine if you'd forgotten to remind your clothing that it is clothing for a few days and it suddenly just dissolved into weird and possibly hazardous goo while you were wearing it at work! What if you hadn't declared that your bed was a bed for a few days, clearly and distinctly and unambiguously (and, importantly, without using metaphors -- no calling it "my sleepy sack" or "slumberland'; you have to address it, as it were, in the second person, and call it a bed), and forgetfully went to sleep in it one night, only to have it turn to slop in the night?

So, okay, life is hard, and a lot of your conscious thought (which is not an inexhaustible supply; ask any chronically ill person you know about what happens when they've spent too much of their energy in a day "playing through the pain" and then suddenly have to do some real cognitive labor like reading a page in a foreign language or updating a home budget spreadsheet or remembering to call the appliance repairman because the stove is more broken than you and YouTube can figure out how to fix which is maybe how you spent too much of that energy in the first place. You get me?) has to go into just maintaining the physical integrity of your clothes and tools and furniture and transportation and even, say, the documents that your company-or-co-operative keeps its records on. But that's true everywhere in this world, right?

Ah, but the more people there are on the ground to maintain stuff, the easier the work of maintenance is, right? For this reason, for example, nobody in Amatka lives alone. One tired person could never maintain the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the household chattels like curtains and blankets and bath towels and the walls and floor and ceiling and plumbing and heating ducts. By the time you'd got all that done you'd be overdue to start all over again.

And there's a whole town to maintain here. With factories and offices and city administration and water and sewer plants and greenhouses to grow the food in and... get me?

But so, Vanja is from a much bigger settlement, where there are lots more people to pay attention and name things and keep everything going at the basic level, and thus there can also be people who specialize in weird and kind of pointless Golgafrincham B Ark things like marketing, which is what Vanja does for a company who is maybe going to expand its service area if she can find a way to persuade residents of other settlements, such as Amatka, to buy their products instead of relying on their own homegrown soap and detergent and medicines and band-aids. She's grown up with only a little bit being asked of her by her community, and now she's come to an area that is unaccustomed to visitors overall but still expects them to do their part while they're there and...

And, oh, by the way; the ruling powers of this society have deemed it not that important to educate much of the populace about the actual nature of reality. So lots of people like Vanja have grown up with the habit of naming things -- it's drilled into them from earliest days and everybody probably has an incident like hers with the schoolroom pencils haunting their memories -- but seem to think it's a weird cultural thing and maybe out of date and really kind of fascist if you think about it because there's so much control over your behavior and how you use language and what about things like poetry, man?

So no, Vanja is not a poorly written or unbelievable character. She is a totally convincing and terrifyingly plausible product of her admittedly weird and kind of allegorical but compelling and mysterious environment. I know I've gone off about this at tedious length, but it's really important that you understand this going into the book because -- look, I wouldn't go to all of this effort, to any effort at all, really,** if I didn't think Amatka was something special. And if the reviewers bitching about it having top tier ideas but being a shitty novel didn't really piss me off. Heh.

Anyway, Vanja has come to Amatka to do her market research and of course is immediately put off by the impossibility of her task. And the shoddiness of her accommodations for her stay: she is assigned to an ordinary workers' house, which she will share with several strangers, including an old lady who needs extra care and help with maintaining her stuff because she's old and deteriorating but Amatka society still at least theoretically values her enough to keep her alive even though she can't work anymore; a greenhouse worker, Ivan, and Vanja's hostess and eventual love interest, Nina. And, on the odd weekend, Ivan and Nina's two daughters, who visit now and then to maintain basic ties with their parents but since their parents' work (everybody's work) is too important to also have to spend the mental and physical energy raising their kids and maintaining their stuff, kids in Amatka live and are educated communally, by teachers who live communally with them and thus aren't expecting to maintain individual households and chattels and whatnot. 

Make no mistake: if nothing else, Tidbeck has created perhaps the perfect scenario in which socialism is the only way for humans to exist. Feel about that however you like; you can't deny that this is interesting.

So, anyway, here comes Vanja, ready to convince the good people of Amatka that the hygiene products they've been using are inferior to what can be gotten from elsewhere (and never mind that in order to get them from Vanja's city to Amatka, someone would probably have to ride on the train with the shipment to keep telling everything what it is so it doesn't collapse into goo on the way, and of course someone has to maintain the train itself for the shipment, and goodness me, what would happen if something went wrong en route and suddenly there were no hygiene products to be had in Amatka because market forces had driven the local stuff out of production in favor of the fancier stuff from abroad? This is just my personal speculation; these arguments don't exactly come up in the novel, but it's part of the array of forces lined up against Vanja's mission before she even arrives, and she's primed to resent it before she even meets anybody), and not really prepared to pull her weight within the town while she's there; some of her own personal belongings denature themselves on her very first night, throwing the whole neighborhood into panic and forcing other town citizens out of their beds to come and contain the problem she created through her carelessness. You can see where this has the potential to go. Several wheres, several ways.

And then, Vanja falls in love with Nina, who seems to kind of return her feelings. And Vanja, from a big impersonal city that is full of people who, while not as individuals quite so slavishly bound to the round of mentally and verbally maintaining everything around them as Amatkans, still have to devote a fair amount of mental energy to keeping everything together and so don't have as much to spare for emotional attachments as we do in our ordinary world where the kitchen table remains a kitchen table forever unless it's smashed or burned, so, again, I argue that it's entirely plausible that "kind of" returning Vanja's feelings is enough to make Vanja, whose life back home was pretty dull even for a functionary like her, to decide she'll chuck it all and stay in Amatka with Nina. Who, for her part, seems glad to have another set of hands and brain cells to keep it all going, even if she's not, like, writing love songs and greeting Vanja with flowers at the end of the day.

But Vanja is still the city girl, and while she knows intellectually that she's got to step up and change her ways, still has that core of skepticism and resentment that won't go away no matter how much daily evidence she has that telling her file folders that they are file folders matters and has some outdated but very human ideas about freedom and expression and literally counter-productive things like that, and is nosy enough, as she starts imperfectly adjusting to her new life, to start connecting with other locals who might have some of the same notions, and to notice that some things like books of poetry in the town library that the authorities keep redacting and then suppressing, point to the possibility of another way of living if only, if only...!

So, look, this is an incredible book. Incredible science fiction, incredible social fiction, incredible weird fiction, just incredible. It's one of the best novels I read last year (look, it takes a while to generate these screeds of mine) and one I think that everybody should have a look at, and not just for its ideas.

Anybody who tells you it's a great novel trapped in a shitty one is just plain wrong. And if I don't tell you that, market forces might stop us from seeing what else Tidbeck has under their sleeve. And I very much want to find out what that is.

Karen Tidbeck. Author. Novel. Weird Fiction. Book. Treasure.

*But apparently at least 1/3 of the active voters in the United States in 2024 were regarding as a statement of goals, if not an instruction manual.

**If you haven't noticed, I don't review books that I don't at least like. I read a lot more books than I write about on here, and I am a ruthless did-not-finisher these days; my lifespan is in its second "half" (if you can say that about its uncertain length especially in this horrible century) and there are still so many books I want to read yet, so if I'm not feeling it on one, I move on. So if you see a book on this blog, it's because I think it's good enough or interesting enough or important enough to hurt myself to tell you about. Amatka is all of the above.

Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS

Was Monday Night Rehabilitation your favorite scene of Idiocracy but you wish it was not only serious but a searing indictment of the United States' incarceration- and punishment-focused criminal justice system? Are you looking for some brutal speculative fiction that will also educate you fairly thoroughly (for a novel) about the history of human rights abuses in the prison system, but with a heaping helping of material that illustrates how high technology could make it all magnitudes of order worse? Do you like footnotes* in your novels?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has you covered, friends. 

These are not complaints about his book, by the way. Quite the opposite!

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of those books that you go into expecting to be emotionally and spiritually slapped around and punched in the gut for your own good, and you will be, but it's far from being the mere hybrid of Oz and The Hunger Games that its marketers would have you expect. For one thing, it's primarily a love story, if a most unconventional one. And no, I'm not calling it "unconventional" because the protagonist and her lover are both women. Or both incarcerated. That's actually pretty conventional for stuff that I read. And anyway, I don't mean that kind of love story; this isn't a romance novel. A love story. 

First, though, a basic outline of the book's premise, which alone is enough to induce nightmares. In a dystopia near you, technological advances in prisoner control have reached nightmarish levels, to the point where new inmates are subjected to the implantation of devices that allow their jailers to literally drag their bodies along with magnets, or hold them motionless, or, most horribly, induce levels of direct neurological pain beyond anything previously known to science without doing any actual physical damage. Just a load of psychological damage to personality-warping, or even erasing, levels.

This alone would make for a harrowing story, but Adjei-Brenyah has more horrors for us. For not only are prisons now fully privatized, and seem to have completely absorbed entire sectors of the U.S. economy like manufacturing, food processing, anything that requires, you know, labor -- but the mega-corporations who own them have decided that their neo-slaves should also become the entertainment industry. Select inmates are pulled out of their ordinary prison-hells and turned into modern-day gladiators, forced into nomadic lives marching in small teams called Chains from city to city all over the country, and when they reach the next city on their eternal itinerary, fighting to the death in sports arenas before enormous live crowds and worldwide television (holographic?) audiences.

Oh, and pretty much all their time trudging between cities and camping overnight is a reality show that's every bit as popular as the games. No holds barred. No privacy at all. So, e.g., if our heroine, Loretta "Blood Mama" Thuwar and her lady-love Hamara "Hurricane" Stack choose to enjoy intimacy in their tent at the end of the day, four or five little autonomous drone cameras will be in there with them, getting all the angles for the titillation of millions.

Why would anyone agree to such an existence? Well, first of all, did you pay attention to the horrible coercion technology I described above? And second, it's kind of a way out of the prison system; if you're killed in battle or en route (or in camp by a member of your own Chain), you are regarded as Low Freed. If you survive a set number of battles, you can be High Freed - as in released back into the general population, on your own recognizance. Back in the real world.

We don't just follow Thuwar and Stack on their bloody perambulations, though. Interspersed chapters introduce us to some ordinary prisoners and let us share their brutal daily lives by way of tracing a person's journey from, say,  neo-slave meatpacker to becoming one of the guys destined to face Thuwar's nasty, heavy war hammer or Stack's vicious scythe.

And we also meet a few people on the outside, including the host of the premium sports feed of the actual battles (only the reality show of between-battle life is free; tickets to the fights are hideously expensive, and the telecasts aren't too cheap either) and his wife who is slowly being seduced into becoming a fan of the show, and a handful of activists who still think all of this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and are trying to do something about it.

Most poignant of these is Patricia, a woman who dedicated her career to ending the kind of pain that tormented her father as he slowly died from bone cancer in her youth, but whose work (you can just feel it coming already, can't you?) wound up actually yielding the pain-inducing technology the prison system has come to rely on. Her story alone would make a compelling novel, but is much more devastating woven in here with those of the victims she never intended and the people working for a little bit of clemency for them. 

But remember how I called this a love story? It truly, truly is. Thuwar and Stack are lovers, sure, but not in the, say,  Mickey and Mallory Knox sense that a scenario like this might lead us to expect. They are convicted murderers, both of them, and have each killed many more people since their original crimes, but they are both still committed to maintaining their humanity and dignity -- and to helping the rest of their Chain to do the same. While most Chains are free-for-all blood-baths of treachery and literal back-stabbing, Thurwar and Stack have managed to make theirs more like a family, though it's one of which they, and particularly Thuwar, who is pretty much the G.O.A.T., are in charge, and since it's composed of murderers and rapists turned bloodsport athletes, it's an all but farcically dysfunctional one. 

And the pair have at least partly made names for themselves for extending love not only to their fellow gladiators, but to their opponents (Hamara telling each that she loves them, and holding them tenderly as they die) and even the spectators getting their jollies by ogling them, catcalling them, betting on them and watching them murder other human beings. You know, the thing they got sentenced to prison for. 

Love, too, pervades the stories of the abolitionists trying to end this system, some of whom, we find, have every reason not to want these inmates back in society. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine sense of drama.

He also, and this may make this book more attractive to some readers than it did to me, very good at writing fight scenes and other violence. You players of, like, Mortal Kombat and whatnot will be very satisfied on that score. No character wholly escapes the brutality, and we're not spared it either. It's not stomach-churningly gory, but it's very, very violent. And very, very sports.

I like neither of these things, nor do I like reality TV. But I like books that confront the kind of issues that Chain-Gang All-Stars does, especially when they do it as well as Chain-Gang All-Stars does.

But yes, I skimmed the action scenes. 

*Adjei-Brenyah employs footnotes throughout the book for two distinct and interesting purposes; one, to convey factual information about our own actual world of 2024 in the U.S.A. in all its merciless ugliness, and two, to offer a running meta-commentary on the characters the narrative introduces to us, makes us care about, then kills off spectacularly. The combination forms a unique rhetorical device that I hope does not become a tiresome trend but wouldn't mind seeing a little bit more of. Speaking of which, I really hope there's a sequel to this because I really want to watch what happens to [REDACTED] next!

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!

Annalee Newitz' THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE

It's been a while since I indulged myself in some fun time travel shenanigans, and my trusted guides to all things cool, the maginificent Prince Jvstin and the ever-correct Popqueenie, have often mentioned Annalee Newitz as a trusted source for the kind of shenanigans we like, so I kind of feel some egg dripping down the deepening crevices in my face that it took a big fat sale at Audible to get me to finally actually read them.

Better late than never. Even if it's time travel. Or especially if it's time travel?

The Future of Another Timeline starts off the way more cool science fiction adventures should, at a great big punk rock/riot grrl concert in the late 20th century. As described by narrator Laura Nicol, it's a thrashing good time that takes no prisoners or bullshit and just brings back all the great memories of wishing I had grown up somewhere where things like that actually happened in the late 20th century, instead of somewhere they have both kinds of music, country and Christian. It's so on the nose that at first one could easily not notice that this scene is not taking place in our world. My first clue was the Wonder Woman tee shirts celebrating the terrific Tim Burton Wonder Woman film that came out in the late 80s.

Oh. Oh...? Oh!

Before we know it, we have a woman folding herself -- well, not exactly, but she is observing the trail of effect caused by her own younger self in a world where time travel is not only real but also not a secret -- and in an incredibly intriguing way. Machines that make time travel possible are buried deep in ancient geological features in several out-of-the-way locations all around the Earth, including one on the border between Manitoba and Saskechewan, and another in the nation of Jordan, and are the subject of general knowledge. Nobody has to have that awkward conversation in which they have to try to persuade someone that no, really, they're from the future, not even in the late 1800s. AND... Nobody has to make the same tired observation about something being bigger on the inside. Etc.

I think this is a first, for me.

But, somewhat more conventionally -- because cool world building and neat set pieces do not a novel make, one needs a story -- there is a sort of temporal cold war between at least two factions over how much "editing" can happen and what kind of world that editing is to try to make for everyone. Agents from each side keep meeting up at different points in a history that is not, as currently understood by the "geoscientists" of this world (delightfully, since the time machines are buried in shield rock, time travel and its various academic offshoots are the province of geologists), governed by the "Great Man" theory -- someone once traveled back and killed off the tyrant who originally conquered almost all of Europe in the early 19th century, only to see some other guy named Napoleon rise up and take his place and do pretty much the same thing, for instance -- but can still be altered through patient nudging of social movements. A well-executed leaflet campaign can do more, in this world, than a well-aimed shot from a gun, whether that gun be period or anachronistic. I like this. So much.

But so, does this mean that Annalee Newitz has found a way to make the bog standard "time police" motif of science fiction into a fresh and new... metaphor for Culture War? In fact, they have. Meaning this is a hell of a novel to have been reading right when the United States Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs Wade, the law of the land for most of my adult life that has established abortion as a Constitutional right and done the most since the 19th amendment to uphold in no uncertain terms the right of a little over half of the human race to enjoy a certain standard of basic humanity to a greater degree than any generation born before us.

Which, along with other pesky ideas like offering education to all regardless of whether or not they have functioning uteruses, letting such people vote, choose their own marriage partners (or none at all) on their own terms, etc. (to say nothing of the rights of people who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, or Christian) are very much in the crosshairs of one of the factions involved in this version of the Time War, the Comstockers (named for and kind of led by Anthony Comstock, of Society for the Suppression of Vice fame).*

I think he's rather well represented in this, the best book trailer, maybe ever, by the way. I'd like to think the real Comstock had nightmares just like this.

But, back to the Temporal Culture War. Its other faction, to which our time traveling concert goer, Tess, belongs, call themselves the Daughters of Harriet (as in Harriet Tubman, who in this world was once a U.S. Senator). Headquartered in California in the year 2022, they meet in secret to plan operations to preserve the freedoms they have gained, to extend them to other marginalized people, and to expand them. Operations in pursuit of this goal include missions such as sending Tess back to the famous Columbian Expedition of 1893 to hook up with some sort-of-Algerian belly dancers getting ready to take the Midway by storm and open a lot of closed minds -- unless the Comstockers can succeed in persuading the Respectable White Ladies of Chicago that the dancers are a threat to the good moral character of their city and must be shut down. While there, Tess befriends a dancer, a crusading young muckraker, and no less a personage than Sol Bloom, who all enthusiastically join her cause.

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans going on in the sixth century, BCE that have the potential to render all of the Daughters' efforts moot forever. DRAMA BUTTON PUSH ALL THE DRAMA BUTTONS YOU GUYS.

In lesser hands, this could be an awful, hectoring, didactic bore of a read, or a chaotic mess, or both, but Newitz maintains a high standard of storytelling, especially character drama, focusing on Tess's adventures in time but also on the somewhat ordinary suburban life of her younger counterpart, Beth, the Riot Grrl who originally went to that great punk show in 1992 but whose teenage years seem destined to have rather a higher body count than any teenager since J.D. met Veronica and all the Heathers in suburban Ohio back in 1989, if you know what I mean. How very.

The novel comes especially to life as an audio book, by the way; Nicol has just the right kind of California cool to her delivery to sell Beth's story especially, but imparts just enough gravitas to Tess's chapters to help us see her as the kind of woman Beth might could become if wibbly wobbly timey wimey all works out. As an extra treat we get something that only an audio edition can bring us -- a sound clip from fictional band Grape Ape's hit single from another timeline "What I Like to See", and an interview between Newitz and Desi Lopez about the making of the book trailer and the writing of the seriously catchy song featured in it. Popqueenie and I agree, if Grape Ape had been a real band in the 90s, we would have moved heaven and earth to be at every show.

All in all, The Future of Another Timeline is one of the most amazing balancing acts I've ever seen in book form. There are so many things that could go wrong with it, and none of them do, and it still has plenty of surprises for even the most jaded time travel reader. It's a tremendous accomplishment and has definitely turned me into a Newitz fangirl. Which, I really already should have been, because of Io9 and Charlie Jane and all...

I would (ahem) read any number of sequels to this if (cough) certain parties felt like making those a thing. As such.

*That jerk's best appearance in literature since his side-cameos in various Robert Anton Wilson joints in the 70s and 80s.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About the Crimes (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

Blogger's note: I'm covering this giant doorstop of a novel part by part. This post is the fourth of five. To read prior entries in order, start with The Part About the Critics" HERE, then "The Part About Amalfitano" HERE, then "The Part about Fate" HERE.

We just passed the twelfth anniversary of the internet publication of the greatest book review ever written, and I was today years old when I realized that yes, in fact, "The Part About the Crimes" is the A Feast for Crows of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially as rendered in audio format by the talented but exhausted-sounding Scott Brick, whose habit of giving every sentence a rapid rise and quick plunging fall in pitch to convey a certain kind of drama just drives home the repetitive, almost liturgical quality of so much of this part of the novel, by far its most depressing and demoralizing oh my god too many hours, which, its title tells us right away we should not be expecting a walk in the park, but even by the standards of something explicitly about the tidal wave of femicide that is the primary thread in this big fat tapestry, this is grim stuff. I think this whole damned city of Santa Teresa must all be the kind of paid up subscribers to Black Dawn (see my post about "The Part About Fate") that drop everything when the new issue arrives in the mail and don't do a damned thing until they've read the whole magazine cover to cover. Or at least, that's what the cops do. When they're not relentlessly trading dated and exhaustingly horrible and sexist "what's the difference between women and X" jokes, anyway. Yuck.*

The stuff between the repetitions isn't much better, either. For instance, about midway through this part, a side character from "The Part About Fate", a Mexico City sportswriter named Sergio, pops up again, now back in Santa Teresa to write about its seemingly dual crime wave (we'll talk about about the Penitent later) in his new role as a crime reporter, takes a prostitute to bed and has a weird conversation with her that still kind of makes me want to scream.

Smoking a post-coital cigarette**, Sergio starts demanding to know what the unnamed prostitute knows about the murders, and gets pretty shitty when she tells him she has a "vague idea" about them. He berates her for not having solidarity with all these other whores who have been murdered since she is one herself, then she reponds, not by expressing sympathy or regret or concern or fear, even for herself, but by pointing out that Sergio has made a category error. The women being murdered in Santa Teresa have not been prostitutes, but, mostly, workers, employees of the maquilladoras. She emphasizes the word "workers" and just generally conveys the idea that as far as she is concerned, what she does for a living is not "work." Again, I'm kind of applying 21st century standards to a book set and largely composed during the 90s, but even back in those far off days, before we all as a society (or at least the left-leaning half of society) agreed that "sex work is work" we did refer to prostitutes as "working girls," so, uh, no.

I mean, I know I'm being picky and even a little precious about this scene in a novel section that basically exists to drive home that the failure to regard women as fully human has big social and individual costs that disproportionately (and often fatally) are paid by those same women, but hey, it's also an illustrative passage of how grim this part can be. But this is "The Part About the Crimes" at its lightest.

Overwhelmingly, "The Part About the Crimes" is about repeating one archetypal scene over and over and over and over again (I think the official femicide body count for this novel is 109, but I can't remember where I saw that and might be too lazy by the time I've written this post to track it down), just like Brienne of Tarth repeating Sansa Stark's description to every character she meets, except way more grim. It mostly goes something like this:  In (a month of a year), a (woman or a teenager or, a few times, a tween), who may or may not have a name, is found dead and unceremoniously dumped somewhere -- in a field, alongside a highway, etc. -- where she won't necessarily be noticed right away but (with a few grim skeletal exceptions) but is likely to be noticed after a reasonably short period of time. We get a description of her clothes. We learn whether she has been shot or stabbed or strangled. We get the important information as to whether or not she was raped and in what orifices. We find out which of Santa Teresa's Finest gets assigned her case. We get a half-assed account of his half-assed efforts. We are then told that the case was "closed" or "shelved", but here these two terms are basically interchangeable for verisimilitude; in real life, cops don't just say "we gave up."

Over and over and over again.

And while not every murder victim gets a name -- either because by the time she is found she is no longer identifiable, or simply because nobody ever shows up to claim or identify her -- every cop does, and gets a little vignette about as detailed as Stephen King's slapstick death stories midway through The Stand, usually with cameo appearances by other cop characters, but ultimately the cops' stories blur together and fade from the reader's  memory exactly as the murder victims have from the city's, because 2666 is not a whodunnit. There is not going to be a hero detective who puts it altogether and solves the crime spree.

Very few people, apart from the odd journalist (and what about Guadelupe? The female journalist? Who had an appointment with a locked up tall German towards the end of "The Part About Fate" but whom Oscar just leaves behind to drive to America with Rosa A?) even see that there really is a crime wave, let alone of the scale that it is. A few cops put their heads together about a few murders they're working on that share some grisly signature details and speculate about a serial killer, but that's only for a few of the murders, ignoring the vast number of dead women who did not have one breast sliced off and the nipple bitten off the breast that's still attached. Some of the individual murders do get solved, kind of by accident, in that they turn out to be the sadly predictable final outcomes of domestic violence, but on the whole, only we, Bolaño's readers, ever see the really big picture.

And really, this pretty much tracks for how murder investigations work in the real world. Real Cops don't solve crimes.

But anyway, this part, about the crimes, isn't just about the femicides (the recitation of which kept making me think of the sad but wistful continuing Roll Call of the Dead in Sjon's amazing CoDex: 1962). There's also a serial church desecrator on the loose! And his crimes are bizarre and spectacular and the closest thing to almost kind of funny that "The Part About the Crimes" gets.

Well, except for this one bit, when the femicides, in attenuated form, briefly have come to the attention of the powers that be in Santa Teresa, which is, I think, Natasha Wimmer making a smart and amusing choice in presenting in the sing-song of a children's book rather than the hard boiled no-nonsense crime talk we're expecting in such a scene:

Life is hard, said the mayor of Santa Teresa. We have three clear-cut cases, said Inspector Angel Fernandez. Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass, said the man from the chamber of commerce. I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight, said Pedro Negrete.

Pretty much the whole rest of the novel handles dialogue in the conventional, subject-verb forms of English prose, in which the scene would have looked like this:

"Life is hard," the mayor of Santa Teresa said.

"We have three clear-cut cases," Inspector Angel Fernandez said.

"Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass," the man from the chamber of commerce said.

"I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight," Pedro Negrete said.

The fact that this exchange is followed by a remark from the mayor that "the important thing is not to stir up any shit" may shatter the stylized children's book feel but drives home the real point being made, that this whole scene is a rote performance of professional concern, rather than a genuine attempt to communicate anything. It's the only time I actually smiled in this whole section. Thanks, Natasha!

But I haven't even got to what passes for the protagonists of "The Part About the Crimes", if there can be said that there are any. I reckon on two of them: Klaus Haas, a big tall German guy arrested on flimsy and circumstantial evidence for one of the 109 murders, who has various adventures in the Mexican jail where he awaits sentencing for so long that he eventually just calls a press conference to try to point the finger at another party for the killings; and the magnificently named Congresswoman Azucena Exquivel Plata, who has a disappeared friend, Kelly (real name, Luz-Maria), Kelly being linked, of course, to a series of orgiastic parties out on the ranches outside of Santa Teresa, to which many young and/or underage women are brought to be debauched. Hmm. The former gets involved in all kinds of inmate scuffles and, though he is himself so tall as to almost count as a giant, portentously keeps announcing to his fellow prisoners that The Giant is coming and they'd best be scared; the latter burdens us with the story of her insanely privileged life and her friendship with Ghislaine Kelly while she interviews/interrogates a private detective she's hired to find her friend.

Can these characters be protagonists, though, when one is only barely there and the other isn't even mentioned in passing until about the last 20% or so of "The Part About the Crimes?" Well, there's nobody else who comes close to qualifying, so, yes?

Speaking of that last 20% or so, it really veers off in its own weird direction, cutting up four different narratives into very small pieces and layering them on top of each other like so many jenga blocks to really drive home how much reader/listener annoyance Bolaño and Brick are going for. The Klaus Haas narrative bits start feeling like they're leading to a shaggy dog story, but you're never sure because just when they get interesting, you're torn away to another piece of Azucena's story, then to a bit about a figurant, Kessler (an American law enforcement consultant who is just sort of touring the scenes of all the crimes and letting everybody cater to him), then to another bit of corpse porn, then back to Klaus. Who, yes, sounds like he bears a more than passing resemblance to another absurdly tall German guy, whom, 700 years or so ago, three literary critics traveled to Mexico to find and bring back to Europe to accept his Nobel prize, Benno von Archimboldi. But Klaus is, of course, too young to be Archimboldi. Isn't he?

This brings me to the one thing that I'm still really impressed by in this section of 2666. Bolaño is playing a lot with the ideas of detective fiction, and several times seems on the verge of setting up one of his many interchangeable cop-or-journalist*** characters as the Detective Who Will Solve It All, only to Lucy-yank away the football from our Charlie Brown expectations. But I'm a Gene Wolfe girl, so I became convinced right away on my first reading (and still believe it on my second, here) that we, the readers, are meant to be the Detective. If this was Gene Wolfe's 2666, I'd be sure of this, confident that if I took the time to read this book six or seven times and make careful notes of which of the bodies got which treatment and was associated with which model of car, and, probably, drew myself a detailed map of Santa Teresa and its environs, and made a careful study of the onamastics employed, I could accurately solve every single one of these murders, which, of course, have not all been committed by the same guy, or even the same guys. Factor out the domestic violence/honor killings and you're left with, I think, three, possibly four parties (depending on if Klaus Haas is guilty of anything besides slightly knowing one of the victims and standing out as a ridiculously tall German in this city of maquilladoras and nightclubs.)

BUT I'M NOT SURE. This is still the only Bolaño I've read. Is he a craftsman on Gene Wolfe's level? None of my Bolañeros and Bolañeras seem to have read Gene Wolfe (it's a mission of mine to get them to one day, when they're ready. They're getting there), and I don't think any of my Solar Cyclists have read Bolaño, so I'm the only one in a position to compare them that I know of. And I want to be sure, before I start reading Bolaño like Wolfe, that it would be worth the effort. I'm not a young woman, my TBR pile is huge, I've already given up television in the interest of reading as much of it as I can before I join the Roll Call of the Dead, and I'm longing to re-read all of Dorothy Dunnett again before I punch out, too.

Anyway and otherwise, man, all I can say is that Roberto Bolaño must have been thinking a lot about Dunbar's Number while he was writing this. This is best illustrated by one of the cop stories, the account of the sheriff of Huntsville AZ, Harry Magaña, summoned to Santa Teresa by a citizen of his fair city who was recently in Santa Teresa with a friend, only to lose track of that friend until she turned up murdered. All excited to play white knight, Harry comes barreling into Santa Teresa fixin' to investigate the hell out of this one murder, with or without the cooperation of the local constabulary. He catches the situation's brutality like a virus and meets a mysterious fate in Tijuana and could now be the Santa Teresa PD's poster boy for Not Getting Too Hung Up on One Case, punished for caring about a single person among 109. Gulp.

And so, onward to the fifth and final "Part About Archimboldi." Which I only dimly remember, and might not remember accurately at all because I'm starting strongly to suspect that "The Part About the Crimes" may have made me lose patience with this doorstop. Did I finish it, or did I not?

Watch this space, true believers.

*Which, I grew up in a law enforcement family and turned around and took employment for ten years with that same law enforcement agency (as a dispatcher, not a sworn officer) and this is the most accurate depiction of cops I've yet found in literature. When I say yuck, I mean yuck. I was still eyeball deep in my own law enforcement career when I first read 2666 so I thought maybe this time around it wouldn't hit me as bad but, nope. I'm still projectile vomiting in my head at this.

**And man, do all of these characters smoke in this novel. I know it was the 90s and whatnot but WOW. Of course, I've been reading lots of other international literature in which this keeps featuring. Everybody in Drive Your Cart over the Bones of the Dead smoked. The very freaking pages of The Morning Star were sucking on coffin nails, etc -- and those are both novels written and set in this century -- so I'm maybe more sensitive to this than usual but man, oh man, this novel brought to you by the international tobacco industry.

***One of these is a late entry in the contest to become my favorite character, the hilariously named Mary-Sue Brava, a reporter from Phoenix who gets hung up on the disappearance of another journalist who was one of only like four people to show up for Klaus Haas' press conference. I would like more of her, please, but nobody cares what I want. Anyway, I don't care that your name is Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I still love you.

J.G. Ballard's THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

The Atrocity Exhibition is best read as if one were the poor schmuck who has to pick up after a colossal accident in which a fairly banal narrative of obsession, injury and celebrity was dropped from a very great height and shattered into dozens of pieces, each composed entirely of very jagged and sharp edges. It's impossible to handle them without being injured by them, and it's useless to even think of trying to reassemble them into what they "originally were" because The Atrocity Exhibition wasn't finished until it was dropped from a very great height and shattered into dozens of pieces, each composed entirely of very jagged and sharp edges.

The annotated edition, which is the one that I read, at least comes with a few band-aids in the form of remarks made by the author years later, about what was going on historically or culturally that might be opaque to readers who weren't there for the original happenings, but band-aids is all they are, and your mind's body is still brutally slashed and hemorrhaging terribly and getting worse with each turn of the page, but still you read because you can't look away, and you wonder where Ballard is going with all of this, if he's going anywhere but into a more conventionally told version of the car crash angles when he gets around to writing Crash (which I've seen the film of but have yet to read).

It's one of the worst books that I've ever read twice, and one of the best books that I've ever screamed at and wanted to throw against a wall. It's gross and demented and beautifully written. One GoodReads reviewer brilliantly arranged its lines of prose into free verse a la The Wasteland and it works amazingly well that way.

It also gave me a new appreciation for the works of Max Ernst. I will be eternally grateful to The Atrocity Exhibition for this, even though this means that I'll never be able to look at an Ernst painting without thinking of car crashes and an imaginary breast reduction surgery performed on Mae West and the "protagonist's" "lovers" rendered in extreme closeups, reduced to geometry, and projected onto billboards that crowd the landscape from every angle. And lots of sex scenes that are most certainly not sexy. And...

Ouch.

Jessica Mitford's THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH REVISITED

In 1963, investigative journalist Jessica Mitford, youngest of the amazing brood of literary siblings that includes my beloved "U and Non-U" Nancy, published a tartly observed expose of the American funeral industry that opened a lot of eyes and angered a lot of undertaker funeral director grief therapists and made her a hero to the kind of flinty-eyed, savvy observers and consumers of American culture that I would most like to be myself.

At that time, The American Way of Death focused mostly on the racket of coffin casket sales and marketing and the budding collusion between undertakers and florists and other providers of goods and services used in disposing of honoring the dead during the apex of American civilization. The coming of giant funeral home conglomerates, industrial-scale mausoleum development and aggressive "pre-need" marketing was hinted at but still, in the 1960s, still all just potential. For this newer edition, published in 1998, The American Way of Death Revisited took on those developments with just as jaundiced, as funny, as tartly observed glee as the original work, and while yes, it disgusted me in many ways, it also made me laugh the way Paul "Dumbing of America" Fussell makes me laugh: bitterly but heartily.

I haven't had direct experience with this industry as yet, but sooner or later I will, and I'm already mad at the kind of crap they're going to try to pull. Suggesting, for instance, that cremation is disrespectful but that if I must I still have to buy a casket to cremate someone in (not true). Insisting that the body is required by to be embalmed as a public safety measure (not true). Intimating that I'm a bad, cold, unfeeling person if I don't shell out for embalming and for a big fancy satin lined casket and an open casket funeral so everybody can look at the deceased one last time looking better than he or she ever did in life (!) and a for vault to go over the casket and protect it from the elements and by the way it's really more tasteful to buy a bronze plaque to go over the hole in the ground where you stash the meat than to have a headstone made by a monumental mason. Because the bronze plaque manufacturers are our sort but those headstone people are really not the thing, you know. And don't even talk about scattering ashes, horrors!

By the way, as Mitford confirms (I had long suspected it but never been sure) embalming isn't really preservation at all; it's pretty much just an exercise in human taxidermy, its aim to make the corpse look good for that open casket funeral; its effects start to go to crap almost before the earth hits the coffin lid internment. You're paying to have your loved one (wink at Evelyn Waugh fans) stuffed and mounted like an elk head for display so that your friends and family can admire the taxidermist's embalmer's handiwork* so they'll choose him or her when it's their turn to let someone go.

 But I'm only scratching the surface of what's disinterred here. The Death Industry has, we learn, lobbyists every bit as powerful and persuasive as Wall Street, and they've skewed so many laws and codes in that industry's favor that it's hard to tell what the consumer's rights still even are. I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 1998. I'm waiting for pre-need funeral ads to start showing up in the margins of my Gmail. And the grief therapist marketing spam. And...

And it's all such a horrible mess, really, because the majority of Americans seem to think a big showy expensive open casket funeral is traditional and only decent and anyone who doesn't opt for this must be an unfeeling jerk who hated his deceased; i.e., the marketing has been successful as hell. So now the "conventions" the Death Industry pretty much invented to squeeze more money out of the recently bereaved (preying on their emotional vulnerability unconscionably) really are what's expected. Only the very strong and stubborn are coming out of the experience with their fleeces intact, I suspect.

But, you know, you can't take it with you. Whatever your culture's funeral customs.

*It's impossible not to think of John Waters' gleeful turn as a funeral director in My Name Is Earl, he of the "living tableau." And yes, Six Feet Under too, of course. But I think Waters did it way better. Because John Waters. Der.