Leonora Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.

Did you dig One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but kind of wish you could read it gender-flipped? Did you adore the television series Waiting for God but wish you could actually observe all of Tom Ballard's tall tales but as directed by someone like Lindsay Anderson? Leonora Carrington, my new other favorite sculptor-turned novelist, whom I might end up loving even more than sculptor-turned-novelist B. Catling, has you covered and then some.

I do not invoke Ken Kesey's masterpiece, nor my very favorite Britcom* at all lightly, as we'll see.

The text at the beginning of this post is an early declaration from our heroine, Mrs. Marian Leatherby, who has lived some 15 years with her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, two cats and a red hen and spent her days swapping tall tales with her best friend, Carmella, and sucking violet-flavored lozenges on Carmella's porch -- until one day, the very day Carmella gives her the titular hearing trumpet as a gift, Marian learns via the eavesdropping superpowers it gives her that her family considers her not only a burden but as a disgusting one** and is plotting to send her to live in an institution.

In her beastly family's defense, Marian is given to flights of fancy, very vivid and detailed ones in which she hallucinates entire chapters of her old life that blend almost seamlessly, from her point of view, into present conflicts. She freely admits this herself, telling us early on that "Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up." This establishes right away that we're in unreliable narrator territory for what's to come. And oh, what's to come.

The Lightshome (at least that's what I think they called it; ahh, audiobooks!) Home for Senile Old Ladies is a very unusual institution, to say the least. Run by a husband and wife team very much in the Big Nurse role (though not as effective), and rejoicing in the surname of Gambit. Dr. Gambit. Mrs. Gambit. Bahahahaha!), the place has just eight residents when Marian comes to be the ninth. With two exceptions, each resident lives in her own "bungalow" but these quarters are not just cute little houses. No, they are cute little houses in very fanciful forms: a boot, meaning there is at least one Little Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe, a birthday cake, a cuckoo clock, and Marian herself comes to live in what sounds at first like a lighthouse but might actually be a watchtower, the first floor of which is a masterpiece of trompe-l'œil, appearing to be chock full of useful furniture including a bookcase full of books, but only actually offering a single plain chair. This feels like foreshadowing about something or other that will happen later, but I guess it's just there for the sake of being weird, but that's okay, Leonora Carrington, last of the original Surrealists, can be just as weird as she wants, especially when...

Especially when her story is being narrated by the great Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips, aka Siân Phillips, aka Livia from I, Claudius and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim in David Lynch's Dune, that Siân Phillips and of course I had no business being surprised she could be this flat-out funny but oh my goodness, is she flat-out funny, even if the best wit has a menacing undertone that might not have been what Carrington intended but then again, Siân Phillips saw something in there that made her think of menace and I sure as hell ain't gonna argue with a lady packing a gom jabbar, are you?

Anyway. Marian is quickly embroiled in all kinds of weird little intrigues as she gets to know her fellow residents and the weird regime under which they live. Lightshome is not an expensive place in which to warehouse your unwanted elderly, and part of why is that the residents must help out with the kitchen and gardening work to keep the place going, and must also subject themselves to a weird experiment in spiritual discipline in the form of what Dr. Gambit and his wife (whose permanent strenuous yet unfriendly smile has earned her the nickname of Rachel Rictus behind her back) refer to as The Work. We don't see a lot of this, except at meals, when the ladies are required to listen to one of Dr. Gambit's bizarre lectures about the need for self-regulation and continued effort towards one's moral betterment. For instance, Marian, Dr. Gambit quickly notes, eats way too much cauliflower and this gluttony -- for a vegetable most people have to make an effort to acquire a taste for -- is a great impediment to her spiritual development, as is her tendency not to take "The Movements"*** seriously.

Quickly, Marian finds an escape from Dr. Gambit's hectoring in the form of contemplating a strange image on the wall in the dining room, of a nun who is either blind in one eye or winking at the viewer. As the story unfolds, Marian creates a whole backstory for "The Winking Abbess" only to find that it's true, down to the sonorous and elaborate Spanish name Marian dreamed up for this person. We get a full minisode in the novel's middle that is devoted to this story, which involves witchcraft, impersonation, cross dressing, attempted robbery, Templars and the Holy Grail, all delightfully and breathlessly told via a chronicle a resident smuggles to Marian, which purports to quote directly from period sources of unimpeachable accuracy and is clearly the part that Phillips best enjoyed narrating to us because WOW.

And things get even weirder. Apocalyptically so. Murders occur. Hunger strikes, too. And suddenly there's a new Ice Age?

And I haven't even gotten around to Marian's friend Carmella, who keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes to break Marian out of Lightshome, which she and Marian convinced themselves would be indistinguishable from a penitentiary complete with vicious police dogs, barred windows and hard labor. First Carmella is going to land a helicopter (which she will win in a lottery) and whisk Marian away to safety; later in letters she appears to have decided that it is best to dig a tunnel from her home to the institution's grounds and sneak Marian out that way -- and apparently actually starts digging it, because how else explain how she [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and can suddenly afford to [REDACTED] and hire a [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]?

Nor can I even begin to describe Marian's fellow residents, each of whom has her own set of quirks and pecadillos and petty grievances and delusions, all of which prove to be at least somewhat germaine to the novel's denouement which involves the Holy Grail again, with these residents being chosen not only to survive an environmental apocalypse that was predicted in a series of riddles they had to solve before getting to meet a secret extra resident but also to restore the Holy Grail to the original Mother Goddess whose earthly avatar is none other than The Winking Abbess.

All this in not quite seven hours of listening (or about 200 pages), which felt far too short; as I mentioned a few times on Twitter, this is a book I very much wanted to savor slowly but compulsively could not stop listening to and it's going to be hard to top for my favorite read of this silly second year of 2020 And Some Months and yes, I know it's only January, but really, I'm not sure that this isn't my favorite read of this stupid decade, maybe even this excreble century. Yeah. It's that great.

*Yes, I love it even more than Blackadder. Because Graham Crowden. And also Stephanie Cole.

**Not that we're shown any evidence that she is in any way disgusting, apart from sporting a bit of a little grey beard because she's stopped plucking her Old Lady Whiskers; still sound of body, of clean and regular habits, not given to outbursts or intrusions. She is given to elaborate flights of fancy involving vivid and improbable memories of her past, but her primary sin appears to be that she is old, doesn't like the television her grandson has introduced to the home, and doesn't like her daughter-in-law very much.

***These, as described, made me wonder hard whether Brit Marling or another of her co-creators of The OA is a fan of this novel. Which means yes, I kept waiting for the Movements to turn out to be intended to open some kind of portal and, honestly, given the strange way this novel ends, they could have had that effect? Or maybe something else did it? Who knows?

Michael Shea's MR CANNYHARME: A NOVEL OF LOVECRAFTIAN TERROR

"If he's sinking to hell, it's definitely to a poet's inferno."

I first encountered the weird fiction stylings of Michael Shea in an anthology, which included his short story "Fat Face" - but that tale is probably my least favorite entry in Cthulhu 2000 and my least favorite Michael Shea as well. While it contains most of the elements of Shea's oeuvre that people love -- seedy downtown life, inexplicable horrors, bizarre monsters and lots of moisture -- there was something about it that just made me say "eh," and move on.

Enter the venerable, the wonderful H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, in which Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey have been conducting their "Strange Studies of Strange Stories" for over a decade (and it took them most of it to come up with that tagline, bless them), one of the few shows out there of which I never skip an episode, teamed up with Patton Oswalt to evangelize the hell out of Michael Shea's explicitly Cthulhu Mythos fiction, collected now in a terrific volume called Demiurge: The Complete Mythos Tales of Michael Shea and I became a believer!

And yeah, "Fat Face" is not a good example of this stuff. 

With Mr. Cannyharme, we get to see if the combination of Michael Shea and the Cthulhu Mythos can sustain a whole novel. Spoiler: it totally, totally can.

The novel is written as an homage to one of Lovecraft's own stories, "The Hound." You know the one. The one in which the characters are terrified to discover that "the apparently disembodied chatter was in the Dutch language" (Italics very much HPL's). Mr. Cannyharme isn't just "The Hound but 1960s San Francisco," though. He employs "The Hound" as inspiration, as a springboard rather than a model to slavishly copy.

If anything, Mr. Cannyharme makes me think more of Fritz Leiber* than of Lovecraft, specifically Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, which pits a moderately successful but down-on-his-luck writer of novelizations of TV shows against a dead wizard whose magic was woven from the very geography of the city of San Francisco. 

Mr. Cannyharme takes place in that same city, several social classes down from the beautiful art deco apartment building of Leiber's tale. Shea's characters inhabit an old-fashioned transient hotel. Most of them are closer to death than they are to life with a few dazzling exceptions -- a pimp, Razz and especially his employee DeeAnn, who considers sex work to be the best work and has a good "tight five" of witticisms about it to break the ice and change the mind of anyone who thinks otherwise, are particularly fun to read about -- and none more so than the title character, a little old man bent almost double who shuffles around the city during the day handing out weird little tracts to people of his choosing, but otherwise keeps to himself. Or does he?

Pitted against the horrors, along with Razz and DeeAnn, are Jack, the hotel's graveyard shift desk clerk who is pounding out a novel on an old Olympic typewriter and pining for his ex-wife between calls to buzz in the hotel's residents after hours and to supply them with illegal drugs; a very haunted and lost young woman named Brittany who trades sexual favors for her rent (but only with Jack) and is in turn one of Jack's best customers for her comforting "blankie" of drugs that let her hide for a little while from the horrors of her abused childhood and her growing awareness that something really, really isn't right about their building; and a few side characters, such as the barely teenaged daughter of the hotel's perpetually bickering husband and wife managers, the Patels, who run the place on behalf of some richer Patels and turn a blind eye to the rest of the goings-on in the building.

Shea loved San Francisco, lovee especially its seedy underbelly, and it shows on every page. Street scenes full of hustlers and junkies and every other kind of low-life bring out the lyric poet in him for paragraph after paragraph of rhapsodies that are as intoxicating as the contents of Jack's little baggies.

But the drugs Jack is slinging these days are mostly uppers, so even when we're just enjoying the scenery, it's energetic and invigorating:

Down in the street outside the Hyperion, Jack just stands there a moment, taking in the early evening. The candy- colored neons are coming on, the signals blaze, all the tail-lights and headlights river and roar, and above it all a first shy star or two gleams in the purple sky. The sidewalks throng, the working stiffs -- many Latins and Easterners -- threading through the low-lifes... He's right where he should be.

But this is no Visit Beautiful San Francisco tourist copy. Zoom in on individuals and it's even more, ah, vivid:

Below the man's gaping mouth a second bloody mouth gapes still more widely. Sliced meat its lips, and gore its pendant spittle, hanging in crusty drapes down both the man's shoulders.

I mean, yuck, but I've also got to admire the craft, here. And it's this craft that is at the heart of the novel; Cannyharme first ensnares his victim-accomplices by means of poetry, possibly tailored to each reader, and some of those he so ensnares, if they've artistic pretensions already, themselves reach new heights of expression. And Shea doesn't just settle for telling us that their output has improved; he shows us exactly what they've written, indulging in even crazier word-lust and imagery in whole passages of demented verse that would be the best thing about this novel of everything else weren't so good.

And yes, I cried happy little tears for the little world of resistance the novel's handful of survivors build for themselves in the last chapter. Their victory is hard-won and temporary, but as in the denouement of almost all of Shea's Mythos stories, they know they have a fighting chance if they stick together. And keep an eye out for a being in a wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt. Oops, that last bit didn't age super duper well, but c'est la guerre. 

So yeah, Shea gives good novel. And my resolve is redoubled to keep seeking him out. I hear good things about this fella Nifft, for instance.

*But,  of course, Leiber was inspired by Lovecraft. He just hated the world a lot less than cranky, prejudiced misanthrope Howard did.

Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES

Neal Stephenson has never disappointed me, but he sure has tried my patience, and that has never been more true than with his 2015 time sink, Seveneves, which novel I have had on Mount TBR since it was published but always kept misreading the title of. Lots and lots of sexy things distracted me from a big ol' chunk of text called Seveneyes.

I finally got around to it this winter, in audio book form, narrated in part by one Mary Robinette Kowal and while I know she wasn't chairing giant international genre conventions back then, I still wonder how in the world she found the time to record all of this audio, to say nothing of rehearsing it, figuring out how she was going to handle character voices* and mastering more technobabble (albeit probably 100% scientifically accurate, because this is Neal Stephenson) than Stephenson has thrown at us to date** all while writing, rewriting, editing, promoting and narrating her own books. I mean, wow.

At bottom, Seveneves, the first third or so anyway, is a generation ship story, with a twist, in that the ship doesn't go very far away from its point of origin. 

Disaster has struck and is going to keep on striking for thousands of years and the good old blue marble of Earth will be uninhabitable long before those thousands of years are up. Humanity has been caught napping, in that it doesn't have any other stores of DNA in the solar system yet, as in nope, no colonies on the Moon (heh), not Mars, nobody in the asteroid belt, nothing but the good old International Space Station and a bunch of satellites and whatnot in orbit around the good old blue marble that's soon gonna be a good old red marble and look a bit bigger, but there was a very small window of time between the original disaster and the level of recurring disaster that means the end of the world as we know it, so humanity realized it had two options for survival: burrow deep underground and hope to survive as a subterranean population, or expand our presence in orbit. As things progress, some half-assed individual effort is done off-page about trying for the first, but Seveneves is about the second: expanding our presence in orbit, by expanding the International Space Station itself and also building a distributed swarm of little space-arks, holding like four or five people each, set up with basic life support and some possible capacity for growing algae for food and oxygen and whatnot. The "Arklets," as they come to be known, are thus not meant as individual arks but as parts of a scattered whole held together by the power of computation and based around the ISS, which is nicknamed Izzy. It's a cool and highly plausible scenario that I've not seen a lot of yet, so this is more than enough to grab and hold my interest, but...

Of necessity, when something is scientifically plausible, and being imagined by a writer like Neal Stephenson, there's going to be more passages explaining more math and science than most people are ever expected to page through in normal life. But we are Science Fiction Fans and normal standards do not apply, am I right?

But still, for every line of dialogue or description of actual things happening, there's about a paragraph of background information to put the dialogue or happenings in context, and I cannot advocate for its exclusion or reduction but, golly.

As you might expect, most of the characters are scientists, and they are unquestionably heroic as they get problem after problem thrown at them: how much can the ISS be modified and how can it be accomplished; how much raw material is needed to build how many Arklets and how fast can we get them made; who gets to fly on those Arklets; who gets to live on the ISS after all the Arklets are up and the Earth has gone from blue marble to red fireball; how can we keep everybody breathing and eating and pooping and not getting cancer from cosmic rays; how are we gonna keep everybody from going crazy; how are we going to keep everybody safe from micrometeorites and other space hazards; what are we going to do when all the propellant is used up... which of these problems need to be solved first; how many of them can be postponed until later; how can we make sure there is a later in which to solve them; what kind of stuff do we need to focus on making on earth to enhance the Ark Swarm's chances...

All of that is drama enough for a whole novel right there, but that's just one-third of Seveneves. Like my favorite Stephen Baxter novel that I will never read again (Evolution; it's an amazing book but I Just Can't), Seveneves is more interested in what can go wrong *after* the Anthropocene world we know is gone, and wants to extend that after way farther than most books do.

Anyway, as you might expect, all of this doesn't leave a lot of room for us to get to know characters beyond what their scientific or sociological specialty is, but Stephenson does at least try. Unusually for him, this time his greatest success at this is with his villain figure, and man, oh, man, in this villain figure and her effects he kind of perfectly prefigured our big socio-political dilemmas in the 2020s because his villain figure (in the first third of the novel) is the abruptly former President of the United States, a woman named Julia Bliss Flaherty (referred to as "JBF" most of the time), and it's a pity she's a cishet woman because she really needed a mustache to twirl. At first she just seems like the kind of tough but charismatic figure we wish we could have voted for in 2016 instead of the the choices we got, and she seems to handle the disaster on her hands with admirable clarity and honor, pushing for an international accord that includes in some of its finer print a very firm declaration that World Leaders Are Not Allowed On The Ark but hoo dogies, look at that: the very first major hazard post-red marble is an unexpected hunk of metal sort of lurching around in the middle of the ark swarm, causing near collisions and scrambling the algorithms that govern the swarm almost to the point of not being able to govern the swarm and who do you think is inside that hunk of metal? Armed with a gun, aka the single worst thing to have in an outer space scenario? 

Yeah.

And JBF still thinks she's in charge of everything, despite not understanding anything except how to convince people she is in charge. And when she finds out she isn't in charge anymore, instead of accepting things as they are and just being grateful there was a Swarm for her to illegally escape to and looking for a way to maybe actually be useful in the Roslin mode***, she almost immediately starts stirring up shit and honestly, I was bracing myself for her to start convincing people that spacesuits aren't necessary, that's just a lie told by Big Spacesuit to keep us all dependent on them, man. But what she does is almost as bad.

Mary Robinette Kowal, by the way, had *way* too much fun delivering JBF's lines, which without exception made me want to reach through my soundbar and knock out some teeth or something.

JBF's presence in the Swarm puts the reader in an interesting and uncomfortable position. While she is shit-stirring, the person whom the governing bodies of the Earth actually did put in charge, a German scientist, has had to declare what amounts to martial law in the days immediately following the complete destruction of everything left on Earth, because in the early days of a disaster cooperation is more important than feelings even when the conditions are not as extreme as they are when there's just a few millimeters of metal between the people with feelings and hard vaccuum and the feelings are every human left alive (amounting to just over a thousand; almost exactly the size of my little hometown) mourning the billions of dead left behind. The realities of physics and biology give compelling reasons to demand the kind of control that is established in these early days (as all the former goverments and the scientific community of Old Earth understood and codified in the Swarm's constitution) and the reader's rooting interest is thus pulled toward the side of the tightly-controlled soft martial law society the German and the rest of the scientists aboard the ISS have established, at least temporarily.  Which, look, it feels really, really weird in January of 2022, just a few days after the first anniversary of the biggest coup attempt in American history, which aimed to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in place of the pluralism we've always strived for, to be rooting for the authoritarians and against the people who are opposing it and claiming that the majority of the population is not getting its fair say in decision making, OK?

Dammit, Neal!

But all of this is just build-up, really, to the big question that Stephenson wants to pose to us. Uh, big spoilers ahead for this seven year old book, Seveneves (whoa).

All that prologue just explains how a genetic bottleneck comes to be. And it's a hell of a bottleneck. Break the book's title into two words: Seven Eves. That's right, the human race gets narrowed down to just seven fertile women, heiresses to the failures of every attempt to establish genetic diversity in whatever version of the human race survives to recolonize a future Earth.**** Fortunately they still have the equipment and the know-how to use it to create children via parthenogenesis. But wait, there's more. Because the know-how and equipment also come with the ability to screen for the kind of genetic disorders that become such a big problem when a population gets inbred, screen for and correct it. Like, way beyond CRISPR, or at least CRISPR plus a lot more specific knowledge about the human genome and how it's expressed in bodies than we have now.

But so then, what do we want to screen for and eliminate from the future human race, ladies? What heritable medical conditions count as diseases and what are just traits? What about mental illnesses? What about the autism spectrum? What about hairiness? And what genetic babies are we willing to throw out with the genetic bathwater, given how little we still understand about what genes code for what traits -- but we do know that it's not a simple one gene to one trait ratio there, and what if it turns out a gene for an undesirable thing is also linked to a desirable thing or carries the potential to develop a favorable trait in a future environment that we just haven't imagined yet?

These questions matter a lot to me as I continue to cope with one of those disorders that has both a genetic and an environmental component but may also be related to exposure to viruses. It's left me semi-crippled and, due to a whole passel of medication allergies, unable to do much about it and so virtually unemployable. The Nazis would definitely have euthanized me. I'm sure a lot of my neighbors in a blood red state will be eager to do so if certain scenarios they dream about come to pass and that sort of thing becomes possible and acceptable again (which, it kind of already is, as any casual look at what horror stories the disabled community routinely share online about dealing with the U.S. healthcare system, insurance companies, physicians who are trained to blame patients for all of their problems especially if they're fat, etc.). But the genetic component is actually a very common one in the Northern European gene pool and has persisted for so many generations. It must have some survival value, not to have been eliminated long ago by Natural Selection, right? Yet here I sit, reaching for my cane to go back to bed to try to get some sleep after having been wakened in the middle of the night like I always am when the one weak-ass pain medicine that doesn't make me projectile vomit or go straight into anaphylactic shock wears off and all the joints in my body take turns setting off the kind of alarm bells that are really kind of meant for only the dire injuries like a limb having been hacked off or crushed, but in my body just means "hey, we're still alive, I guess."

But I digress.

But so, you can see why that scene smack dab in the middle of the book where seven women have the power and responsibility of deciding what genes the future human race can and can't have but only the really bitchy psychotic cannibal (who just sort of appears in this part of the story but whose back story I really wish I could have gotten in at least as much detail as I got about the evolution of Every Kind of Robot) among them is really making any argument about how maybe some genes we think are bad because of how they're expressed now might not be bad in future scenarios and how it's the potential for new combinations that's the important thing we are going for in trying to assure genetic diversity in the first place and...?

Egads. I listen to a lot of audio books when my body won't let me sleep. Usually I catch myself drifting off, rewind about 15 minutes or so to reset the bookmark, and turn over to conk out for a while. But ending Part 2 of the audio book on that note, that scene, had me lying miserably awake the rest of the night just appalled and terrified and unable to get the scene out of my head.

That's a new achievement for Neal Stephenson, in my personal experience anyway. I mean, bee tee dubs, I had already been up way past my (gigglesnort) bedtime just listening because, you know, the book has lots of good stuff in it and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and stuff.

Unfortunately, what I most wanted to see as far as what was going to happen next and stuff takes place off the pages. While I am no stranger to and sometimes a fan of books that stretch out over eons of time a la Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, a 5000-year-leap between the Meeting of the Seven Eves and the next section of the book robbed me of what I'd really been looking forward to: seeing how these seven women (actually eight, but one of the eight survivors of the Swarm was already past menopause) would rebuild a whole civilization from the products of their own wombs and the genetics lab. We get glimpses of this in the form of flashbacks, but not nearly enough and I spent a good part of the last third of the novel, one big undifferentiated mass (even moreso in audio book form, in which it's a 10+ hour slog of a "chapter" simply called "Five Thousand Years Later", narrated by drowsy-voiced Will Damron instead of Kowal), resenting that Stephenson had skipped the most interesting thing in the book.

But Stephenson was more interested in extrapolating what humanity would be like divided into seven "races" according to the heredities established for them by the Seven Eves, and, of course, Neal gotta Neal, in describing in minute detail all of the fancy futuristic technology these races develop for living and thriving in space and for slowly recolonizing the Earth.

But about these "races"... The descendants of JBF and a nasty piece of work who is the only other survivor of JBF's dumbest plan named Aida are basically in a cold war with all of the other kin-groups, 3 billion strong after 5000 years and living in Stephenson's version of Alastair Reynold's famous Glitter Band -- a ring of habitat satellites circling the Earth, waiting for it to become habitable again. The "Julians" and "Aidans" have dominion in about 1/4 to 1/3 of the habitats, conveniently contiguous, while the "Moirans" and "Teklans"**** and "Dinans" and "Kamalans" (or whatever her descendants are called; rotten thing about audio books is you don't see how names are spelled) and "Ivans" try to give them a wide berth but now that Earth is almost ready for resettlement, the question basically becomes just how much of humankind's worst ideas and tendencies are going to accompany it back down the gravity well.

But really? If I wanted to re-read Clans of the Alaphane Moon, I would just do that, am I right? 

At least there's some neato technology to enjoy, like gliders that are basically inflatable suits that ride the thermals up to "hangars" in the upper atmosphere that lift passengers up into orbit without burning any chemical or nuclear fuel, to say nothing of giant orbital habitats that can house, e.g. complete ecosystems including things like 800 year old fir trees. I mean, this is the future we want, kind of? Maybe? Except for all the dumb factionalism, which I thought is what the original Seven Eves really meant to do away with, didn't they? Or did they?

Oh, and there's kind of a plot to this last section, involving the assembling of a working group including one member of each race, to take on a mission that is kept secret from them and us for far too long; by the time the characters found out what they have been sent to earth to do (it involves problems that have arisen since bands of "Sooners" jumped the gun on resettling the earth and the discovery that some of the undergrounders survived and have their own ideas about who should get to do what with New Earth and zzzz) I really didn't care. I came very close to not finishing this one, my friends. I really liked the first two-thirds but this last part couldn't end fast enough for me. If had been anyone but Stephenson, I probably would have just marked this DNF. The sunk cost fallacy is losing its hold over me as I age, but it's Neal Stephenson, man! He's never let me down!

Except, he almost did. To the point where I kind of want to give the Battlestar Galactica advice to anyone considering reading this who hasn't yet. Stop when you hit "Five Thousand Years Later." Like with BSG, you'll feel this is a horrible thing to do and you'll be so curious about how all of this is going to end but just let your own imagination end it for you instead. Stop watching BSG after the first half of season three; stop reading Seveneves after the Council of the Seven Eves. Maybe even just before the Council. You'll have enjoyed two-third of a terrific story without losing your faith in the guy what made it.

*About which, sigh. While not quite as irritating as when male narrators put on a breathy falsetto for female characters and make them all sound like Bambi the Big Busted Brainless Blue-eyed Bimbo, the reverse strategy of Elizabeth Holmes-ing it up is pretty damned close, and sounds painful. I wish more narrators would just let the dialogue and its tags do the job -- and that their producers/directors/etc would let them. It would be fine, really. As long as the author did their job.

**I haven't read his new book yet, either, so I may be wrong.

***For those who don't click through and haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin is a head of civilian government on a space fleet who, when a new planet is settled by its population, steps down and resumes her original work as a schoolteacher.

****And oh, get this: Moirans and Teclans are understood to share a special bond because the original Moira and the original Tecla were lovers. That's right. Five thousand years later, we're to understand that generations and generations of a couple's parthenogenic children are still mostly attracted to one another. Eyeroll.

****And holy mother of fuck, I wonder if Neal Stephenson is a Gene Wolfe fan because wouldn't this be a bang-up prequel to the Solar Cycle?

Un-Su Kim's THE CABINET (tr by Sean Lin Halbert)

The office worker hero, Mr. Kong, of Un-Su Kim's The Cabinet graduated from college just a few years after I did, with a liberal arts degree of uncertain occupational utility, as I did, but unlike me, when he couldn't find a job, he took all of the money he inherited from his mother (who died the same year he graduated) and spent it on 450 cases of beer and spent 178 days in his apartment drinking it, eating peanuts, and ignoring bill collectors on the phone. I nominate Mr. Kong for Most Generation X Literary Hero, Maybe Ever.

He doesn't share this Important and Popular Fact about himself until midway through the novel, by which time I had spent several hours envying him just a little, for not only did he eventually find a job, he found the Gen X dream job: one in which he is expected to do very, very little, under next to no supervision, one in which he is basically working for free and getting paid to wait around and do you know how many books you could read in a year with a job like that? I do. It's approximately 200. Ask me how I know.

Being male and not-me in lots of other ways, though, perhaps stereotypically but hey, including living in South Korea and having grown up in that system, Mr. Kong feels bad about his dream job, though, too bad to read or otherwise amuse himself, so he spends his work hours staring out the window at a lacklustre cityscape until one day, after trying to convince his nominal boss to please give him something useful to do (denied!) he wanders upstairs to discover the titular Cabinet.

This Cabinet, Cabinet 13, contains some 40 years of files on people all over the world who have exhibited bizarre abilities or whose bodies have gotten inexplicably and improbably strange. Like growing a lizard in place of your tongue strange. Like suddenly falling deeply asleep and staying that way for hundreds of days straight and waking up really refreshed and rarin' to go. Like suddenly growing a gingko tree out of his hand. He meets the professor who has been curating these files and becomes his assistant and starts taking phone calls from these people, most of whom are not just inconvenienced by their weird abilities and experiences but are seriously suffering from them, which is why they are referred to as "Symptomers."

The first half of the novel is mostly a catalog of these sufferers until Kong is moved to take a trip with one of them, not exactly a Symptomer but one who has been calling the Symptomer hotline for years because he is absolutely convinced that the only way his life could ever be worth living is if he can be transformed into a cat. The trip is to see a magician (because why not? After seven some years of reading about and talking to people whose prosthetic fingers have started merging into their flesh as though they were becoming real, would you be sure that a magician can't do what he claims he can?) who might be able to help Kong's poor companion realize his feline dream. It doesn't go that well, and Kong actually, finally gets in trouble. For trying to help. Because this is a Freak of the Week TV show as refracted through a Kafka novel.

I mean, the novel isn't named for the Symptomers. It's named for the Cabinet. And its central concern, if there is one, is with who will take over its management after the professor, who is quite elderly and goes into a terminal coma not long after we "meet" him, is no more. The professor hopes Kong will; another party, The Syndicate, hopes someone else, of their choosing, will.

Translator Sean Lin Halbert and narrator Jun Hwang combine to deliver the stories from the cabinet and Kong's own story in a flat and monotonous tone and style that perfectly drives home the bureacracy + bizarre formula that makes The Cabinet worth opening. Even when Hwang makes an awkward-sounding pause in the middle of the sentence that might be a product of his actual Korean accent, the effect of the pause conveys that unimpressed can't-be-bothered-to-emote-over-this-tedious-stuff tone one expects of a seasoned bureaucrat who's seen it all, even the little lizard eyes peeking out at him from a lady's mouth.

The effect is often quite funny in the way similar scenes in Terry Gilliam's Brazil are quite funny, but there's more than a little Juzo Itami funny to be had as well, as when Kong takes a young woman out to dinner and she binge eats sushi, gets drunk on sake, and then causes a minor scene in the restaurant when he pays the bill; she wants to pay it, she was the pig, she operatically shrieks! The whole thing would fit wonderfully as a scene in Tampopo.* This is quickly followed by the funniest kidnapping scene since Blackadder was kidnapped by the henchmen of Evil Prince Ludwig.**

It gets very difficult to keep track of The Cabinet's sparse plot, though, at least in audio form, as scenes from Kong's life drift into new narratives from the files and are frequently peppered with imagined conversations between Kong and the files' subjects. I suspect this is deliberate on both Kim's, Halbert's and Hwang's parts, creating a form of magical realism that blurs into enjoyable confusion. Just let the weirdness wash over you. It's a short novel. You can enjoy it again anytime you want, and I suspect it will be pretty different each time you do.

I look forward to finding out.

*And I'm not crossing cultures here; the restaurant serves both Korean and Japanese style sushi and the chef is a former sumo wrestler, and thus the scene could happen as readily in Tokyo as in Seoul. So there.

**There, I've moved forward in my references from 1985 to 1986.

Max Barry's JENNIFER GOVERNMENT

Reading like an updated Snow Crash from the point of view from the point of view of characters who actually live in our future instead of one with made-up names for corporations (and minus all the pseudo-Sumerian hive mind stuff), Max Barry's Jennifer Government is a good old-fashioned page-turner dressed up in an ultramodern (well, circa 2003, but its satire hits as hard now as it did then) "suit so cheap that it shines."

Our title character, Jennifer, wasn't always Jennifer Government. Once she was Jennifer Maher, when she worked for a marketing firm called Maher, because in this version of Next Sunday, AD, instead of corporations buying naming rights to years, they instead bestow their names on their employees in lieu of surnames. This extends even to little kids, who take on the name of the school they attend, which school is itself named for the corporation that owns and operates it; hence a character we meet even before we meet Jennifer is a school girl who rejoices in the name of Hayley McDonald's. Because of course she does. And Jennifer's own daughter (she is a single mom in addition to being a stupendous badass with a gun or judo moves) is Kate Mattel, because she goes to a Mattel school. They're really good schools, you guys. Just ask all the Barbie dolls. Which, we later learn, is one of Jennifer's nicknames, but that's not important right now.

If you can't guess already, I really kind of love Jennifer Government, you guys. She's deadly with any number of weapons or her own killer gams or fists, and her catch phrase is an all-purpose conversation stopper that works as well on her offspring as on the bad guys protesting their innocence as she hauls them in: "And yet."

And yet.

Jennifer lives in a world in which the Neoliberal dream came true beyond its dreamers' wildest desires. The United States itself has become a sort of supercorporation, and has franchised out its (heavily revised) Constitution and power structures to huge swathes of territory around the world, including, most recently, Australia (author Max Barry's own home), where most of the action of this novel takes place. There is still a cold war of sorts, but it's between competing customer loyalty clubs. Etc.

As the story begins, a hapless boob named Hack Nike (tah-wang! Bullseye), an unhappy Marketing Operative for the sneaker and sportswear giant who owns his last name, blunders into a conversation between some high powered sociopaths on another floor of Nike's Australia headquarters, and the sociopaths offer him an on the spot promotion if he'll take on a very special assignment for them. They've got a dynamite campaign to capitalize on the success of the company's Cartmanesque strategy of not letting anyone buy their newest sneaker line, then only letting a very few buy it, driving demand to a fever pitch. The company has chosen to next announce that each of its Niketown stores around the USA (which, remember, includes lots more territory than just the original 50 states) is getting four pairs of the new shoes to sell, but they're actually shipping many more. The plan is to just fool their deranged fans into paying too much for sneakers they still think are totally exclusive, but the two Johns Nike whom Hack has met want to go this one better. Actually, many more better. And instead of "better" they really mean "worse." As in, they want Hack to stake out the Sydney mall where their local Niketown is and shoot up to ten customers or would-be customers outside of the store. As in with an actual gun. Because remember how once upon a time people were killing each other in "the ghettos" for coveted shoes? That was such good buzz, man. That drove everybody crazy. Let's do that, but more!

But Hack deserves his first name, and cocks it all up, partly out of queasiness, partly out of naivete, and the ensuing bloodbath draws the attention of the legendary Jennifer Government, who, for reasons we don't learn until much later in the novel, already had her barcode-tattooed eye on the Johns Nike and was ready to pounce.

Caught in the crossfire of the Niketown Incident is the aforementioned Haley McDonald's, who was there at the store hoping to make an investment in these shoes to sell later for much more than she paid, except none of the ATMs at the mall are willing to loan her the cash to do it (because of course ATMs in this world can also issue loans; since they have offered cash "advances" on credit cards for yoinks in the real world, it's really not that weird, if you think about it*). "Lucky" for her, a young stockbroker Buy Mitsui, who's been down on his luck until a friend tempted him into some insider trading that saved his bacon, witnessed her distress and decided, what the hell, he's kind of celebrating, and just gives her the money outright.

Not long after, Buy is desperately administering first aid to a bleeding out Haley and Jennifer Government is in a gun battle with mercenaries from the NRA in the background. Because of course the National Rifle Association has become a mercenary corps.

The whole novel goes at this blistering pace as we also meet the hapless-but-really-good-with-guns Billy, who kind of by accident becomes Billy NRA and is quickly mistaken for another guy named Bill NRA and gets swept up into a series of NRA operations in the wake of the Niketown Incident; Hack Nike's girlfriend Violet No Last Name until she becomes Violet ExxonMobil when the petroleum giant agrees to purchase her bespoke intrusion software for three million dollars that she has trouble collecting on; and even get a bit of goodness from the point of the view of one of the Johns Nike. The one whom Jennifer Government knew back in the day when both of them shared a last name.

For all that its milieu echos that of Snow Crash, what Jennifer Government wound up feeling the most like was a Bruce Sterling novel. Jennifer is an action hero par excellance but Kate keeps her grounded and gives her a vulnerability that makes her a more interesting and well-rounded character. By the time she and Buy Mitsui get around to getting to know each other, well, what you want to happen, happens, in much the way Greta and Oscar come together in Sterling's greatest novel, Distraction** but almost before the reader realizes what is taking place, she is off, gun in hand, to hunt her quarries in London and Los Angeles while the aforementioned Loyalty Club Cold War starts heating up. There are gun battles and chases and bizarre confrontations and the John Nike that is still standing delivers a seriously whackadoo speech in Parliament (yeah, that Parliament) that writes more checks than 75 asses could cash, let alone his.

Can Jennifer Government and her fellow operatives save the day? Will she get a chance to give John Nike a piece of her mind and/or put some holes in his hide? Will Corporate American finally once and for all achieve the entirely unregulated marketplace of its dreams? Gotta read to find out.

It's almost obscene how much fun this book is, you guys.

*Lots about this book are going to make you need a shower. Many showers.

**Which, why is that still not available as an ebook, man? It's so good! I've worn out my original mass market paperback of it even though my hands can't freaking handle paper books anymore.

Giacomo Sartori's BUG (tr by Frederika Randall)

OK, given my known and recently expressed proclivities, you all might be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another bit of entomologically-themed speculative fiction in translation, but you're (mostly) wrong this time: the bug in the title of Giacomo Sartori's Bug refers more to an error in computer code* than to an arthopod. Mostly.

It is also the name of an entity that befriends our narrator, a nameless (again!) boy growing up in a singularly unique family with a father whose cover job is analyzing data for Nutella but whose actual job is terrorist hunting**; a Buddhist mother who is also a beekeeper and very much what holds his weird family together; a brother they call IQ in real life but is better known in cyberspace as Robin Hood and is a 13-year-old hacker god who is secretly building a robot and whose expertise daddy passes off as his own to not-Nutella; and a pot-smoking grandfather who used to be an anarchist but is now an amateur naturalist who studies earthworms and other nematodes.

Our hero, the baby of the family, is deaf, and his deafness is poorly accommodated at school, where no one even makes an effort to let him lip read, let alone learn to sign to him; he's just expected magically to keep up anyway (there is an incompetent teaching aid assisgned to help him but that person never makes an actual appearance in the book). The resulting misunderstandings, and the boy's poor judgment as to how best to make himself understood (by biting people) have left the poor kid with a reputation for behavioral problems even before the fateful day when his mother and closest confidante gets into a terrible car accident and winds up in a coma.

The book, therefore, is the boy dictating to a family friend what amounts to a blow-by-blow account of his life as addressed to his hospitalized and unconscious mother, but kind of played for laughs.

Meanwhile an entity starts contacting him, just as hilarious pranks begin to manifest at the expense of the family's adversaries. The entity doesn't outright claim credit for them -- at first it can't because its understanding of language is too poor to convey abstract thought, even to one such as our boy, but later on when its mastery is assured, it still plays coy about how the malignant neighbor/landlord's smart sprinkler system suddenly started spraying water on all of his fruit trees in the dead of winter, producing a rapturously beautiful effect the boy describes to us in lyrical prose until the weight of the frozen water starts snapping all of the trees' branches, or how a teacher who has made our boy especially misterable at school suddenly has a fake dating profile on a site for explicit golddiggers, or...

The pranks are all cybernetic in nature, so it's easy to guess the nature of the entity pretty early on, unless one has never read science fiction before, but that doesn't stop a rather charming relationship from developing, one in which our boy takes some solace as his world continues to fall apart.

If this all sounds familiar, well, it is, but despite that the book has some surprises for us. I was dead certain that BUG was going to turn out to be a certain thing that would end up doing a certain other thing, but that's not at all what happened, to my delight, for instance.

And it's a book that's just fun to read. The combination of Sartori's sense of humor and wonder and Frederika Randall's taste leaves us with a lot of vividly weird language and startling metaphors to ponder. For instance, late in the book our boy describes his return to school one day thusly:

When I got to school I was preparing to imitate a piece of bric-a-brac nobody pays any attention to, like those birds that peck away on wall clocks.

The weirdness is also on brilliant display in the chapter titles, all of which are directly quoted in the text of their chapters. "Hunkered down like an alligator in the mud of the cushions," "Words tied up in the white sheet of silence," "A corpse bought on Amazon" and my favorite, "Nutella isn't a cyber-weapon." Sure thing, young'un. That's why they have your father on their IT payroll... 

*Though of course that term derives from an incident when an actual insect messed up an early computer back in the days when computers were things that filled entire rooms.

**I imagine him as very much a colleague of those lovable misfits in the short-lived but much-missed data-thriller drama, Rubicon, and so imagine him as being played by James Badge Dale.

Clark Thomas Carlton's THE GHOST ANTS OF GRYLLADESH

It's been a while since I had a new "Antasy" to enjoy -- though it's rather bittersweet to be doing so right after we lost the great E.O. Wilson -- but at long last Clark Thomas Carlton has come through with the third in his bizarre and delightful series that began with Prophets of the Ghost Ants and continued in The Prophet of the Termite God. When I first encountered these books, I described them as "Dune with ant-riders" but as we move into this third novel it has so much more in common with George R.R. Martin's big unfinished fantasy series that this could almost be called "A Feast for Ant-Crows" or some such. Except, you know, not horrifyingly repetitive.

It is, however, as grim as AFfC for much of it. We'll leave aside for the moment some questionable tactics in this continuation of our boy Anand's quest to save the people he persuaded into a new way of life way back in the first novel (I guess there's neither a Security Council nor any Geneva Conventions in his world) because they are employed defensively (but make for rough reading if you're at all sensitive to things like biological or chemical warfare because trigger warning if you are); those aside this is still the darkest view of this world, in which humans have evolved into near-microscopic creatures who ride ants like horses (see cover art) and have entered into more-or-less symbiotic relationships with many other insects despite most of those insects being much larger than humans are, that we've yet seen.

We get a somewhat bewildering array of new and returning POV characters who, I guarentee, will send you scurrying back to the helpful dramatis personae at book's beginning just to keep straight*.  They all have very intense adventures once again as the world of the Antasy reels from the wars fought in prior novels, only to find itself embroiled in new conflicts as forces held down or blocked by the evil Hulkrite Empire are now free to seek revenge, conquer lost territory, and wreak general havoc on Anand and his forces -- and on the civilians who have been caught in the middle of it all.

Like in GRRM's opus, we get the perspectives of people on all sides of the conflict(s), including a refugee princess (Trelanna) who finally, after three novels, garners reader sympathy (she suffered plenty in the prior novels, but elicited schadenfreude rather than pity or sorrow, at least from this reader), not by enacting a redemption arc so much as just really becoming abject and pitiful as she gets swept up in an invading army's progress to attack her homeland and has a forced marriage to its leader to look forward to once her unborn children (by Anand!) are got rid of, one way or the other. Did I mention that The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim? The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim.

Of course, Trellana's mother Polexima, who joined with Anand in establishing a new nation based on freedom, tolerance, and an abandonment of her native land's absurdly rigid hierarchy, in previous novels, had it even worse and bore up much better, never wavering in her commitment to the new way even when hamstrung and hobbled and repeatedly raped by the terrifying army Anand defeated in the second book, so feeling for Trellana only goes so far.

Then there's Anand's cousin-I-think Terraclon, elevated last novel to what amounts to the pope of the religion devoted to Goddess Ant Queen and the series' sole LGBTQA+ representation (unless we count [REDACTED] the non-POV character who becomes his lover by this novel's end), who has pretty much held Anand's forces together while Anand has hared off on weird mission after weird mission on the back of a high-flying locust. Pleckoo, the main villain of the last two novels, gets a quick cameo but is basically fridged, while a new royal lady, Fewlenray has quite an arc of her own while, in one of the things I like best about Clark Thomas Carlton's work (besides the arthopods, of course), several villains get point of view chapters that win, if not our sympathy, at least our empathy as their plans clash with Anand's, assuring that no matter how this ends, somebody we've come to love, like a little, or at least respect, is going to be brought low and we'll cry along with them at least a little bit -- recalling that arch-villain Pleckoo started out his Antastic life as Anand's best friend and cousin, after all...

But the novel is still very much about Anand, whose character deepens and becomes yet more complicated as circumstances and his own shortcomings tempt him into atrocities of his own. He is still that poor nobody from the midden at heart, and while his time among the freedom-loving Dranverites taught him a lot and gave him the courage to share what he learned with his former society, he still reacts at times like that scared and bullied young man, even as he also copes with the fact that both of his very pregnant wives are captives of the very hostile nations who threaten his co-creation of Bee-jor. He becomes a little less lovable but a whole lot more believable in this book, does Anand. Would you have made different choices? Could you have thought of better solutions to his problems?

The novel ends on even more cliffhangers than did The Prophet of the Termite God, so I sure do hope CTC doesn't take our least favorite page out of GRRM's book. Write fast and stay healthy, Clark!

*Indeed, I dithered as I read over whether or not I should backtrack and read The Prophet of the Termite God again because for a lot of these characters, I was uncertain about whether they were completely new for the third novel, or just newly prominent and having emerged from the background of the previous two. I think I should have backtracked.