Utter craziness from the mad scientist mentioned two posts down. The good reads keep coming and this one proved to be no exception. How the fuck do you get a parable about the dangers of technology, a physics lesson, a meta-physics lesson, a quantum physics lesson, a nanotechnology seminar, a comedy, and a love story all in 320 pages? Oh, and by the way, this book features the end of the world, that is, the destruction of planet earth and all life on it. And that’s just the first chapter. Can I interest anyone in a some inter-dimensional tourism?
The written word is probably just as powerful as any music, if wielded with just the right force, just the right expertise, just the right passion. And while the musical input and throughput remains as powerful as ever (for chrissakes, I’m listening to The Watch’s Timeless!!), it is the written word, whether on paper or glowing Kindle app that has snared so much of my free time lately.
Getting comfortable with the crowded insanity and brilliance of Lovecraft over the past several months has been a major catalyst. His influence on John Carpenter, on Alien, on Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – well, it’s not just some archaic referent with no independent value to me personally. Actually, the opposite is true. It starts with the time I spent in Providence from 1990 through 1994. Also, once you get through the adverbs and the ‘eldritch’ and ‘cyclopean’ and all that other stuff, there is a thrilling and horrifying narrative. It’s easy to see why the man’s work is so influential. He’s like the Robert Johnson of modern horror.
I also wanted to get out in front on the Mountains of Madness movie that is getting under way with Guillermo del Toro at the helm. Now that I’ve read the book, his sincere remonstrations and declarations of fealty to the source code have meaning. Let’s hope he can carry through.
And, while I think I have found a significant resonance with Lovecraft and his progeny, it’s not been just the sons and daughters of that twisted Rhode Island intellect. Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente is heavily promoted on Amazon and the set-up sounded prurient enough: have sex with the right person, go to a magic city in your post-coital sleep. Here’s the trailer:
It’s a good read, certainly steamy enough. I was worried it may be a bit light on story, and that proved to be true, but the atmosphere, descriptions and emotions were so detailed and sumptuous, that it really didn’t matter. I was somewhat reminded of my recent (and first) experience with Murakami – Sputnik Sweeheart embodied some of the same loss and longing. But where that book was a dry martini, Palimpsest is paisley layer cake, detailed and deranged beyond belief.
Having dispensed with love and sex beyond the edge of reality, I somehow got directed, I think through my previous enjoyment of William Gibson (Pattern Recognition remains one of the most entertaining and moving novels I’ve read) to Rudy Rucker. Fortunately, he’s a mad scientist. ‘Postsingular‘ imagines a world where we are always connected to the orphidnet, like the internet, but interfaced with nanotechnology, instead of a computer or some other dumb machine. As a result, everyone is a mind-reader, AI’s float before our eyes and help us in our daily routine, and travel between alternate realities and dimensions seems possible. I say seems, because I’m only about a third of the way through. As hard as the singularity is to imagine, that moment in time (AND the before and after) when EVERYTHING changes for EVERYONE – this book has done it. It’s stylistic and chaotic and a terrible amount of fun.
And now we come to the AuntBeast herself. This may be an addiction in the making. Caitlin Kiernan appeared alongside John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro and even S.T. Joshi in the Lovecraft documentary Fear of the Unknown. Her incisive commentary and inclusion among such giants caused me to want to find out more and I got ‘Silk’ for the Kindle app. Again, I’m only about one third of the way into it, but all I can think is that I know I want to read everything she’s ever written. The atmosphere is terrifying, the characters are drawn with skill and detail that makes them come alive. And in this book, there are a few main characters to keep track of, all women and all young, so the distinctions and distinctiveness are essential as we go from person to person, place to place, skipping through time. But it is the hurtling story, the breakneck swirl of events, even in the set-up, leading to and hinting at this vast (celestial?) evil that doesn’t care about your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or your band or your drugs – that grip of pure fear and madness is literally unlike anything I’ve ever read before. And I love it.
And to top it all off, I finally took delivery today of two Alan Moore titles – Yuggoth Cultures (which, curiously, contains a lot of work NOT written by Moore. Hrmmm…) and The Courtyard. So the fear and madness just keep clicking along.
So I’ve been reading, scaring myself and not blogging. But now, I think I’ll let the dark creepies and nasties out of their cage so that I can share them with you.
I had to cut bait on Connie Willis‘ The Doomsday Book. After reading half way through a 575 page book, I finally realized that a comedy of manners about time-travel into medieval Oxford was not going to do it for me. I believe it is a fine work of literature and the author an artist of exceptional talent, but, personally speaking, I needed a bit more sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
All that being said, I landed a pretty good title with Mike Carey‘s The Devil You Know. Carey became known to me via his work on the DC/Vertigo comic Hellblazer, which itself is a spinoff from the iconic Saga of Swamp Thing and Sandman series. Carey wrote John Constantine, the Hellblazer himself, as a wonderfully sarcastic anti-hero in a trench coat, prone to making VERY bad decisions, but also possessing a surprisingly strong moral compass.
Felix Castor is John Constantine, but belonging solely to Carey. In Hellblazer, Carey has to conform to a character that is not of his creation and managed by several authors over time. With Castor, Carey is the boss from word go.
Castor also operates in a slightly different professional capacity. Whereas Constantine made a living going back and forth between the temporal plane and the underworld, Castor is merely a privateer exorcist, using his tin whistle to move the undead away from a haunted realm to god-knows-where. But that little moral qualm of “killing the dead”, along with a suitably wrecked personal life and a weakness for the ladies makes this Chandler-esque supernatural romp most enjoyable.
For me, Dhalgren was the literary equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a massive tome that has puzzled readers since its publication in 1975. Up to that point, Delany had shown considerable talent in cranking out VERY engaging space operas and other sci-fi, but with Dhalgren, the view is turned inward. Reality is constantly shifting as the main character travels through a dream-city that crashes back-and-forth between chaos, love, violence, sex and apocalypse.
Now, “Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders” is heading toward imminent release (February 1) and it appears that the master has another vast work with which to challenge us. I can hardly wait.
Definitely hot stuff! All the ingredients are here and handled brilliantly. Avery is an extremely sympathetic anti-hero; a killer with a code. Somers does an outstanding job of giving us A LOT of targets in this veritable shoot-em-up, targets that can be terminated with extreme prejudice without the reader feeling too much sympathy for the departed. But, even among the bloodshed and the body count, there is still some measure of humanity, despite the savagery of Somers’ post-unification (read: post-apocalyptic) planet earth.
The finale takes our hero to a place of maddening isolation as he attempts to bring down one more score, one job that will seal his fate if he survives. Without giving too much away, Somers comes up with a vivid plot device that brings the reader right inside the madness that drives the story. It is a terrifically uncomfortable passage that I actually had to set down for a moment before continuing. If nothing else, the author’s ability to evoke such a strong emotional response in the midst of a somewhat formulaic pulp thriller is praise-worthy.
Somers characters and storytelling were good enough to get the book optioned, and I’m interested to see which actors will be selected for which roles. It’s also good enough for me to be excited about the next two Avery Cates books, both of which have now been added to my wish list
Robert J. Sawyer wrote one of the best books of 2009 with www.wake, which envisions the way in which the internet (you know, THE internet) could become self-aware. It’s great story-telling and air-tight tech. The second book in the trilogy comes out tomorrow. Check out a trailer for the book here.
(SPOILER ALERT for links only) Finally, Tamara from Caprica looks like a total bad-ass with her sub-machine gun because she IS a total bad-ass. Annalee Newitz knows how good the show is. Are you watching the best show on television?
Utter craziness from the mad scientist mentioned two posts down. The good reads keep coming and this one proved to be no exception. How the fuck do you get a parable about the dangers of technology, a physics lesson, a meta-physics lesson, a quantum physics lesson, a nanotechnology seminar, a comedy, and a love story all in 320 pages? Oh, and by the way, this book features the end of the world, that is, the destruction of planet earth and all life on it. And that’s just the first chapter. Can I interest anyone in a some inter-dimensional tourism?
