100 Books #13 - J.G. Ballard's THE CRYSTAL WORLD

Flawed as this short little novel is, I weep that our ideal time for a cinematic adaptation of it is past, for I can think of no team who could do it justice as Peter Greenaway and Sacha Vierney could have, and they don't work together anymore. But their mastery of light in cinema, especially as demonstrated in Drowning By Numbers and A Zed and Two Noughts, could alone bring Ballard's exquisite vision to the screen.

And there, I would love to see it. And Greenaway could  maybe pep up the story a little.

I mention this because the play of light on the surfaces of the slowly (and sometimes not-so-slowly) transforming surfaces of the jungles in The Crystal World is very, very important. Very. Description of same makes up the bulk of its verbiage. Ballard, perhaps mesmerized by the very idea of his creation, took great pains to share its every sparkly, shiny, spiny detail. As such, there is some seriously gorgeous prose to be had in this book, and thus much enjoyment, if that is your thing.

It's possibly the first book ever for which one wishes one had sunglasses for one's mind's eye.

Dazzling as the book is -- and not just visually; the scientific explanation for how and why this is happening, involving theories about sub-atomic particles and space-time that I do not feel adequate to explaining here, is also quite dazzling --  it's also one of the most melancholy reads I've encountered since, say The Road. For there are some people, including a band of lepers led by the protagonist's ex-lover, want to be crystallized. To be crystallized is to have time, and thus the progress of the disease, stop; to be alive but to cease decaying. The fact that nothing else will ever happen to them again is just by the bye. Like the characters of Ballard's The Drowned World, most of this novel's cast comprises people half in love with death, or at least with the destruction of the human world and the seductive chance it offers them to be something else.

Combine this with yet another Conradian quest (Ballard must have had an even bigger boner for Conrad than your humble blogger does), up an African river, seeking a long-lost companion who has gone nuts in the jungle, and you almost have a really great novel. But somehow, perhaps its the extreme disinterest Ballard, and thus this reader, has in the characters peopling his frosty landscapes, perhaps it's just the depressing nature of all of this beauty, paging through this slim little novel felt like more of a chore than a delight. I'd still recommend it to anyone who values imagination and perfect prose, but with the caveat that such joys come with a price, and in this case, it's story. Ah, me.

100 Books #12 - Michael Lewis' BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD

My name is Kate Sherrod, and I have a problem.

I seem to be unable to resist indulging in my bad, unhealthy, depressing habit of snagging every remotely interesting-sounding book about the current financial crisis that I see. And reading them quickly, even though, at this point, I'm pretty sure I've read every perspective on it available, if not every one imaginable.

But then, see, there's always something new to be found. And this book is a great example -- even though I had previously read early versions of two of the chapters when they were articles in Vanity Fair.

For what Michael Lewis has done here is visit two of the "PIG" countries* to try to get a grip on what happened there, and continues to happen, as well as making stops in Iceland (they of the brand-new high-flying bankers-who-should-have-stayed-fishermen and also of ordinary citizens who have flat-out refused to bail those bankers out), Germany and California**.

It was the German chapter that I found most eye-opening, despite the fact that Lewis spends a lot of it amused at watching his interpreter-driver come to grips with a book purporting to expose Germany's natural character (as, esentially a bunch of badly closeted fecophiliacs, obsessed with dirt but preferring to appear otherwise, to appear spotlessly sterile and clean; clean on the outside, dirty on the inside). For as many books as I have read on this subject, I had never thought to ask why Deutchebank and other German banks were so willing to participate in the sub-prime mortgage debacle that the American investment banks cooked up. I was too fixated on the greed and suicidal stupidity of the Americans to concern myself with the apparent cluelessness of the Germans.

But Lewis wasn't -- which is why he's a bigtime financial writer and I'm a doofus poet living on Mars -- and he wanted to know why the German bankers had acted so witlessly in the years heading up to the crisis. And what he found had a lot to do with that whole national character thing - dirty on the inside, clean on the outside. Since the USA's banking sector appeared to be well-regulated, to have serious rules, then why wouldn't its financial products be as good as the American bankers said they were? The forms were being obeyed to the letter, after all.

So yes, while the Greeks were busy not paying taxes and being woefully un-civic minded and the Irish were busy selling Irish real estate to each other and the Icelanders were busy doing something other than fishing for once, the Germans were willfully not looking for the evil little man behind the curtain. And California, well, California, as I observe in my second footnote, needs a whole 'nother book maybe.***

So yes, I have a problem, but with books like this still out there for me to enjoy and learn from, it's not a problem I'm much interested in solving at present. Which makes me just like everybody else.

*PIG now being the financial dude acronym for the quickly sinking/defaulting nations of Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

**His hillbombing mountain biking interview with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger alone is probably worth the price of the book, guys, and would probably make an awesome book with more material. Apparently, someone else already wrote it and yes, a sample of California Crackup is already on my Kindle. Did I mention that I have a problem?

***Though a Cadillac Desert comparison does come to mind. Just as the Colorado river is now way over-allocated and doesn't make it to the ocean anymore because the original allocations were made in a record flood year, so too California's budget; everyone (by which I mean state employees and retirees) got used to what they were getting in fat years and refused to give it up in lean until boom! California is completely dysfunctional and heading for ruin.

100 Books #7 -- Suzanne Collins' MOCKINGJAY

I sure do like Suzanne Collins' reality TV stars better than our lot - but that's the only thing about her world that I can say such a thing about. And what they have to endure to become what they are is quite terrifying.
This third volume of The Hunger Games brings all of the allegory home: the pampered, opulent Capitol as a first world civilization dependent on its subjugated colony/districts for sustenance and entertainment; the Games as war, in which children are forced to fight out their parents' conflicts. Which is to say it's all pretty ugly, and pretty familiar, right down to the transformation of Katniss Everdeen into a fiery rebel leader - but only for the cameras.
This is a cynical book on a macro level but still a complex and rewarding one. The comparison I made to Orson Scott Card's best work still holds, though in this volume I thought of Songbird's Ansett more than of Ender or Bean as several of Collins' characters share bits of the former's harrowing experience.
And I, for one, am exhausted from sharing it all with them.

This is going to be fun...

As most of you know by now, I'm just not a scribbler of cultural reportage, I'm also a poet and a fiction writer. I have a hell of a lot of projects on the boil and probably don't need to add another one, but this looks like too much fun to pass up!

Behold, the 2012 Form and Genre Challenge!

So, my dearest readers, you may look forward to seeing my contributions to this odd little project right here at Kate of Mind. The challenge for this coming week is a 1500 word short story in the third person. Any genre, any topic. My brain is bubbling with ideas.

Yee and also haw!

100 Books #11 - Lavie Tidhar's THE GREAT GAME

I would call myself a moderate steampunk fan -- I find automatons charming, I like clockwork, I certainly like well-dressed men gallavanting about in nice suits and top hats (though I don't envy the distaff their petticoats and crinolines and frippery and corsets) -- but I'm certainly not the sort who drops everything and rushes to the bookstore at the news that someone has published a new steampunk novel. It's low dose stuff for me, like brandy and cigars: pleasant once in a while but not so enjoyable if taken on a daily basis. Cough. So I cannot by any stretch of the imagination call myself an expert on the genre, but I think I've found something a bit unusual here.

The steampunk milieu of Lavie Tidhar's Bookman series (of which this is the third volume*) is one in which the author has actually taken pains to not only come up with an explanation for why the technology of steam and clockwork is so much more advanced than what was achieved during the actual reign of Queen Victoria, but has come up with a highly entertaining, even somewhat Lovecraftian explanation. For in this world, highly advanced and mysterious reptilian aliens landed on an island in the South Pacific, there to be contacted by Amerigo Vespucci and brought to Europe and thence to usurp the throne of England. Henry VII being the first Lizard King** and the succession proceeding from there in much the way of our world except, e.g. Elizabeth I was the greatest of all the rulers of the Lizardines, at least until Victoria of the powerful tail and forked tongue and...

And guys, I haven't even gotten to the weird bits yet.

For The Great Game (and presumably the two prior Bookman novels) entertains two big conceits simultaneously: 1. That the long rule of England and other bits of Europe by advanced reptilian aliens from outer space has spurred considerable technological development to the point where, for instance, Charles Babbage lives on and on as a nightmarishly freaky steampunk cyborg, and 2. That pretty much every character from 19th Century popular fiction actually existed, in many cases right alongside the authors who made them up in our world, so that not only is Bram Stoker a character but so is Lucy Westenra***. Karl May, the German author of a series of dime westerns, exists and so does his famous character, the Apache warrior Winnetou (who, of course, trained Harry Houdini in the way of the diplomat/spy. Of course). And there are more and more and more. For about the first third of the novel, it is amusing to spot all the characters from Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (though I got a bit annoyed at the coyness with which some were presented, as if I was being challenged to recognize them, which kept knocking me out of my happy story reading trance, and we all know how much I don't like that), but after a while, one goes into overload. When Miss Havisham shows up as some kind of human library, I kind of threw my hands up in the air and sighed. But I also chuckled a bit.

Which is to say that if you're a fan of crossovers and secret histories, the Bookman series will pretty much make your brain explode. Keep your tophat on tightly so as to avoid spattering the wallpaper, would you?

Me, I'm not so much of one. I prefer authors to make up their own characters, on the whole -- but at least, if one is going to do it, Lavie Tidhar has pretty much shown exactly how to do it.

Even before Harry Houdini is made over into a [spoiler redacted] and is sent off into [spoiler redacted]. And Number Six refrains from announcing he is not a number but does indeed find his way out of The Village. What? No no, just roll with it.

You'll be glad you did.

*Once again, my Angry Robot ebook subscription brought me a late entry in a series. Regular readers of this blog know that usually results in my huffing off to the AR store to snag the earlier entries because I have that serial compulsion they count on, but just this once I decided to try jumping in at Book Three. I'm glad I did. And yes, I huffed off to the store to get the earlier books, but only after realizing I'd plowed through 2/3 of this book in a single sitting. Wa-hey!

**Nuts to you, Jim Morrison. Hee hee.

***And, as seems traditional for steampunk, the female characters play havoc with conventional gender stereotyping by being, to a woman, pistol-packing paragons of badassery (except when, as with Isabella Beeston, they remain somewhat conventionally feminine except in that they get elected Prime Minister). As someone who enjoys the classics but always gnashes her teeth at how much it always sucks to be a woman in the periods depicted, I must say I enjoy the hell out of this tradition, even though it strains my credulity rather a lot.

100 Books #10 - Guy Adams' RESTORATION

I'm not 100% sure how correctly to refer to the title of this book. The cover and its nature as a sequel to The World House lend themselves to the idea of its title being The World House Restoration, but everywhere I see mentions of it, it's called simply Restoration. So much more than three words are lost, though, in snipping that title down to a pithy but almost too ambiguous Restoration.. But that's a small quibble, and, well, I'm afraid I do have bigger ones.

I wanted to like this book so much more than the prior one. The World House was a hot mess in every way, messing with readers' expectations, messing with basic ideas about home and safety, messing with genre conventions, messing especially with metaphors and metaphorical ideas -- a mess, too, in that it was muddling around with too many characters, too many little story arcs, more impressed with its genuinely amazing and imaginative setting than with story. And, as I complained of at length in my entry on it last year, a mess of formatting problems.

So yeah, I wanted to like this book more, especially when I noticed that it was not burdened too terribly with the formatting/presentation problems of The World House (though it could still stand more editing, or at least a course on usage for Mr. Adams, who consistently uses the wrong "it's" throughout. For the possessive, inside or outside the Commonwealth, one omits the apostrophe, sir). I wanted to, but ultimately I couldn't, because there was even less of a story here than in the first book.

At least Restoration shares the first book's strengths, which are formidable. Guy Adams is a sick, sick man, and misses no opportunity for a gross-out, an anguished or chilling image, a subversion of what ought to be a banal setting or scene into something that makes one, for instance, never, ever want to dine at a chain steakhouse again. He paints his grotesque, harrowing, frightening scenes deftly and with creepy flair (I also don't ever want to dance to Wurlitzer music); he's one of the best in the business at that.

But the story is a big old mess, one about which I found myself almost completely unable to care or even comprehend half of the time. A time travel thread is pretty neatly handled, but its connection to the rest of the stuff going on is tenuous as hell; I gave up even trying to make it after a while. A fantastic, near-omnipotent villain (the prisoner who was the House's original and intended occupant before the characters in the prior novel blundered and let him escape) is amok in the world and is, I'm pretty sure, a self portrait of the author (whom I don't think I ever want to meet). Shades of Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon there; omnipotent villains are such fun, aren't they? But how he meets his fate makes not a lot of sense either.

After a while, I just stopped trying to find a story at all and just read this book as a Rings of Saturn-style series of set pieces, which wound up working rather well (and very effectively, if by "effective" one means "oh god pass the brain bleach now"), but isn't ideally what one looks for in a novel. Which is too bad, really.

Guy Adams should be hired to design spook houses for carnivals. And then paid very, very well to roll up his plans and hide them away lest anyone actually try to build them. Shudder.

100 Books #9 - Greg Bear's DARWIN'S RADIO

Just over a year ago, I gleefully dove into the wonders of John Wyndam's The Midwich Cuckoos on this very blog, little knowing what a neat parallel to it I would find the following year in Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, a book which attempts to answer, in excruciating scientific speculative detail, the question of what it might be like if the children that made Midwich such an effective horror story, turned out to be mostly benign. Mostly.

Greg Bear is one of those writers who give hard sci-fi a good name. His case for evolution being something other than the gradual and randomly lucky process we tend to think it is, is painstakingly researched and presented, with just enough variety in the expository passages to keep the reader from feeling lectured to. His idea for how a new human species may arise to possibly replace us feels fresh and believable even if perhaps a tad pollyanna-ish.* And his version of that new sub-species, only glimpsed in this book (one presumes that the sequel, Darwin's Children, will give us a closer look), seems charming and welcome -- though seen only, in this book, through the eyes of a very specific kind of viewpoint character, the mother of one of the new specimens, who also happens to be the scientist who predicted how they might come about. The rest of the world is kind of freaked out, expecting Midwich, perhaps, on a grand scale, and lashing out. Xenogenesis is maybe never welcome.

I've a decent background in molecular and cell biology, so I found some of the lengthy explanations tedious, but even so I was glad to have the glossary at the back handy as I read. One wishes, though, in books like these, that their ebook versions had that glossary hyperlinked, so that whenever a tricky term came up, one click might lead one, not to the reader's admittedly pretty OK built-in dictionary, but to that richer resource included in the book. I suppose no one wants to scare up an intern willing to do all that grunt work, though. Sure would be nice.

In the end, Darwin's Radio was a good enough read, but nowhere near as fascinating and chilling as what I still think of as Bear's finest novel, Blood Music, a spectacular piece of sci-fi horror, a gradual intellectual creepiness setting in slowly until its premise's full implications are realized in the grandest possible manner (think Scott Sigler on a much slower burn with a lot less gore and a lot more thought experimentation). Here it's all more subdued, even the body horror potential of xenogenetic pregnancy, and the characters kind of uniformly well-informed and bland. I would have liked some non-scientist point of view characters, or at least a real renegade like in Blood Music (if you're new to Bear or just want to try one of his books, I'd recommend that over Darwin's Radio). As it was, I had to sort of flog myself to finish this one.

Of course, maybe I've just been spoiled for this genre by Baby McButter.

*Myself, I still go for the Michel Houellebecq version of how that's going to happen: we're so sick of being ourselves, inhabiting these kluged bodies and brains, that we sit down and redesign ourselves from scratch and breathe a collective sigh of relief as we see our children slowly outlive us to create a world free of persnickety things like unrequited sexual desire. Check out his magnificently bleak and decadent The Elementary Particles for the whole deal.