Postcards from a Dying World: 2020

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Top Movies of 2020 Podcast + list

So every year around this time I publish a list on my blog of the top 15 new releases of movies I watched over the year. This year the list will live exclusively on the podcast for a week, and then I will do a print take on ye ol' Blog. This episode is moderated by my Dickheads podcast co-host, Langhorne J. Tweed.

Langhorne gives us his films. We love talking about, debating, and breaking down movies. So hope you have fun listing to us.

Top 15 Movies of 2020 Podcast on Apple

Top 15 Movies podcast on Spotify

My favorite movies of 2020. for full commentary listen to the podcast.

1>The Platform

2>Sputnik

3>Sound of Metal

4>Da 5 Bloods

5>Fractured

6>Possessor

7>Books of Blood

8>Capone

9>7500

10>Vast of Night

11>Vivarium

12>You should have left

13>Invisible Man

14>Relic

15> Bill and Ted Face the Music

Honestly, when I made the list I forgot that The Lodge and 1917 were this year, you can hear me struggle with that on the podcast.

Honorable mentions: Tenet, The trial of the Chicago 7, Resistance, Palm Springs, Color out of Space.

Unhinged is the worst movie I watched.

Best Reads of 2020 Podcast + published list!

So every year around this time I publish a list on my blog of the top new releases I read over the year. This year the list will live exclusively on the podcast for a week, and then I will do a print take on ye ol' Blog. This episode is moderated by my Dickheads podcast co-host, Langhorne J. Tweed.

I also added a few retro reads, favorite PKD reads and the Tweed-ster asks me about some of the 87 books I read this year. If you want to skip ahead to the Top Ten List it starts 44 minutes in.

Book Review: Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

Paperback, 136 pages

Published September 1st 2020 by Tor.com

Long time fan of Stephen Graham Jones and since my experience reading The Only Good Indian which I have not been shy of spoiling my best of the year list as my favorite novel of the year. I admit my experience of Night of the Mannequins was absolutely influenced by my interview with Stephen early this year on the podcast that shares the name with this blog.

Here is the thing I am going to state clearly and upfront. Stephen Graham Jones with the back to back of Mongrels and The Only Good Indian cemented himself as an author I will follow to anything he puts between a cover. The strength of NOM comes in the playful, sarcastic tone. This short book is about teenage pranksters and in a sense, the story itself is a prank. A violent prank by an author who is so good that he writes the most artistic of horror fiction while being one of those fans who hates slow-burn arthouse horror.

NOM is the tongue in cheek teen horror that comes very much from a singular voice. When I say the interview taught me about this book that is what I mean. Stephen told me in the interview that he hates slow-burn horror movies. He wants to get to the slasher and most violent stuff when he watches a horror movie. At the same time, he writes beautiful prose, understands his teenage characters, and in this short book subverts expectations.

The Only Good Indian was structured so each act had a different style of prose. As gut-wrenching experience as it was I not alone in saying that the first act was the most entertaining style of the three. The characters leaped off the page and was smile-inducing in the subtle comic observations. Very Lansdale-like in the ability to use subtle moments to make you smile or feel uncomfortable.
At this point I want you to know that this novella has a Splatterpunk meets Lansdale and you should read it. STOP RIGHT here so you will not be spoiled and enjoy it.

OK SPOILERS. GO READ IT AND COME BACK. I MEAN IT.

“So Shanna got a new job at the movie theatre, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.”

So Stephen Graham Jones wrote a new novella and thought he’d play a fun prank on us, and now most of my expectations are dead and I’m starting to feel kind of jealous about it all. Jealous of what he did as a writer. The set-up is there paying off the title. A group of rural teens who are super recognizable to this former small-town trouble maker.

The story is set up with a perfect misdirection, I didn’t even read the back cover so I was totally like clay that SGJ molded into thinking I was reading something else. Sawyer is a teenage trouble maker who unofficially leads this group of trouble makers. He is the one with all the bad ideas, that sound hilarious to the yet fully formed brain. When they find a beaten old Mannequin in the woods they start using it in prank after prank.

One of those pranks is on Shana by sneaking Manny into the theater she works at. Given the title and the set-up, I believed Swayer when he said he saw Manny come alive in the theater and escape. Of course, you think this is a novel about the start of the Mannequin apocalypse. Certainly, with a title like that.

The narrative and psychological magic trick in this novella is about the madness of teenage indifference cranked to 11 like a spinal tap volume knob. Stephen Graham Jones always makes everything 'one' louder no matter if it is the humor, horror, or scathing insights. The violence and creeping horror is enough for a book twice the length but the pages drip with all the ingredients of SGJ special sauce.

Sawyer is the monster, while he projects on Manny it is to do violence and justify it with a story that makes him a hero. He must act before Manny. It is a stupid plan, but Sawyer is the guy who always has bad ideas. There are only green lights in his mind.

“Sometimes you just know what you're doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.”

Night of the Mannequins is one of those books that just feels like silly fun as the pages zoom past but it is one you’ll think about long after it is done. Bravo again Stephen Graham Jones.

Monday, December 28, 2020

Book Review: To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu

To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published October 20th 2020 by Tor Books

Sometimes success happens to exactly the right person. If you had told me a decade ago that one of the most popular of New Times Bestselling authors in the field of Science Fiction would be a translated Chinese author I would not have believed you. Set aside for the how tactical commercially engineered the Oprah and Obama reading lists are, it was Obama listing Cixin Liu’s breakthrough novel The Three-Body Problem that made that happen.

I am not taking away from Cixin Liu or his achievement. The opposite if all those hopey Changey readers picked up the Three-Body Problem and hated it then we would have this short story collection, six other translations, a movie adaptation from China that played in theaters here, or an Amazon series in pre-production. Yes, the sales dipped a little with plenty of people who didn’t get it. That said Chinese Science Fiction in general was all the ships that were lifted with the rising tide.

Personally, I added five Chinese authors that I am going to read whenever I can. Stanley Chan’s The Waste Tide being by far my favorite Chinese Science Fiction novel, and Han Song as the master of the surreal short story. That said much of that movement owes the broad appeal of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body trilogy.

I think personally we owe Cixin Liu for having such a unique style. As an engineer, he writes Sci-fi that blends the line between mind-bindingly huge epic concepts and plausible-sounding hard sci-fi. If there is a secret sauce for the Cixin Liu formula it is these deep philosophical thoughts, historical thinking, and weird speculative science. I don’t think his characters are very strong but that is fine. The ideas at the heart of the stories are so intense. The settings always Chinese but I think that international feel and view into another culture is part of the appeal for me.

There is a limitless feel to Cixin Liu’s ideas. As this is a short story collection I preferred some stories more than others. One of the stories that showed his engineering mind is the story “Fire in the Earth.” This was almost a short novel and this one didn’t hook me. Even though I didn’t like this story the setting in a Chinese mine did have some interesting implications that bubbled under the surface.

So I know I already said his imagination feels limitless but to me the best stories in this collection are the ones that test those limits. Some of these stories feel like you are inside a bubble using your hand test whether it is going to pop or not.

“In my sci-fi, I challenge myself to imagine the relationship between small people and the great universe – not in the metaphysical sense of philosophy, nor as to when someone looks up at the starry sky and feels such sentiment and pathos that their views on human life and the universe change.”

The first story “The Village Teacher” certainly is about the small people and the great universe, the story cuts back and forth between a teacher in a small Chinese village and vast galaxy-spanning space opera. It is an excellent way to start the collection. It serves as a mission statement showing the Yin and Yang of these stories. The small and the great. The human and the eternal void.

The second story is my favorite in the collection “Time Migration” could and should be an episode of Black Mirror. This story uses a technological hook to force the characters to address epic timespans of many thousands of years in a few short pages and it works. The closing notes reminding us of conclusions not new in science fiction but done in a totally original way. For a real beautiful closing paragraph, this story is incredible.

Every story in this collection is worth reading but the other stand-out for me was “Ode to Joy.” This story involves a concert at the U.N. fist contact with an alien musician and a giant space mirror. It considering everything from the nature of music, god and is overflowing with epic ideas. Any story where an alien musician uses a giant mirror to turn Proxima Centauri into a metronome is going to have my attention.

There are stories and characters here but if you are considering reading Cixin Liu you need to be reading take philosophical asides. “When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future.”

Some are galaxy-spanning and some are sharp and political. “What we are dealing with amounts to a grain of sand in the Cosmos. It ought to be easy.”

Sometimes deep and sometimes bluntly on the nose, Cixin Liu comments on the universe both vast and cosmic and bluntly real. It is important stuff. I am a fan and think you should be too.

Friday, December 25, 2020

Book Review: Ring Shout by P.Djeli Clark

Ring Shout by P.Djeli Clark

Hardcover, 192 pages

Published October 2020 by Tordotcom

2020 has been a heck of a year for horror fiction. The sheer number of masterpieces released this year is really insane. I can think of six titles that in a normal book year would be sue "best of the year" books. It is not just the amazing depths of The Only Good Indian or Genre-crossing of the Loop. There have been several unintentionally well-timed books like Malorie by Malerman which paralleled the mask debate going on in the real world or Tremblay’s Survivor Song which hit mailboxes everywhere as readers were in lockdown at home rationing toilet paper.

So it is also a hell of a time to release a horror novel about the legacy of racism and slavery. Ring Shout hit the streets at the same time as most major cities were in turmoil with protests demanding justice for George Floyd and BreonnaTaylor. History repeats itself and no one knows that better than an actual historian.

P. Deli Clark is the pen-name for the fiction of historian Dexter Gabriel and when you learn this it will all make sense. This is my second book by Clark and each time I thought to myself that the dude does amazing research. The first book I read was Black God’s Drum. That Afrocentric steampunk novella played with history and setting so well. The level of world-building was next level and I wanted hundreds of pages more. I told myself that I was going to follow this author.
I had already planned on reading when Mother Horror Sadie Hartman said it was one of her reads of the year. So I bumped it up to make sure I got it in before the end of the year.

Ring Shout is an amazing piece of work from a single voice. No one else on this planet could write this story and those are the best stories always. Ring Shout is a dark fantasy that is not only in conversation with history but confronting it. This novel is a cutting piece of commentary that comes out a century after it’s events and sadly doesn’t feel distant.

In 1915 after the release of Birth of a Nation, the real-life film that glorified the existence of the Klan. Our main point of view is Maryse Boudreaux who leads a group of resistance fighters who use swords, bombs, and guns to fight back against the demons in white hoods. It is not that much of a leap to imagine the monsters that terrorized the south as hate directed demons from a Lovecraftian universe. No surprise that Clark’s conversation extends to old Howie whose notions of race were less than kind. It is more subtle than Lovecraft Country or Jeminsin’s The City We Become but Ring Shout is clearly in that conversation.

The structure of the story is such that we get the impression that Maryse and her crew have been at it for a while. It is a wonderful fantasy to imagine avenging angels traveling the south looking for revenge and justice fighting the demons in white. At moments it is as fun as it sounds. I didn’t find Ring Shout to be a scary book, while demonic Klans are of course a scary concept, I felt confident in the resistance. That is why I think this book is more Dark Fantasy than anything.

Anyone who reads my commentary on horror knows that I believe in constantly expanding the scope of horror not shrinking it. One of the most interesting aspects of this book to me is the thin line between real history and mythology. In our history as a species very real-life monsters have inspired mythological creatures. To the people of color in the south, the ghosts in white and the demons hiding behind white cloaks were very real.

“They come one night, while we were sleeping. Men, wearing white sheets and hoods. Daddy open the door holding his shotgun, and they start quarreling. My Brother, he say they look like ghosts. But I can see proper. They ain’t men, they are monsters.”

The Klan were real monsters that roamed America, demons that haunt our history and sadly they refuse to die still.

“Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way.”

I wish the above quote only represented history, but sadly when grand juries clear the men who murdered Breonna Taylor, the above statement doesn’t feel like history. Raised in the south Clark grew-up in Houston, but did spend some of his formative years in his parents Trinidad and Tobago. I don’t know how radical or not radical the author is but in all the right ways this is a radical work of fiction.

The best horror and fantasy makes you think and in 180 pages this book makes you consider the Mythology of the Klan, the racism of Lovecraft, the power of fight the mythology as much as the actual monsters, and plenty more. The benefits of this novel being written by an actual historian cannot be undervalued, and in the end, it makes this book a bit of a miracle.

Thursday, December 24, 2020

Book Review: Stonefish Scott R. Jones

Stonefish Scott R. Jones

paperback, 313 pages

Published by Wordhorde Press February 2020

For reasons I can’t really explain just yet I have been really distracted the last couple of weeks so I apologize in advance if this review is not as detailed as I normally like to be. That out of the way lets talk about Stonefish. The author Scott Jones was a guest on Dickheads when we broke down the PKD novel The Zap Gun. At the time my co-host Anthony Trevino declared Stonefish not only a Dick-like suggestion but one of his favorite reads of the year. He was so assured I would like it that he gave me a copy. So yeah Thank you, Anthony.

Stonefish is written by Scott R. Jones who is well known in Lovecraftian circles having written about Howie in both fiction and non-fiction. If you have to define Stonefish you might say bizarro, as it is super strange and surreal at times, it is very Science Fiction in gonzo 60s new wave that reminded me not just of PKD although he is clearly an influence. Fans of John Shirley and even a little Rudy Rucker will be pleased. At the same time Stonefish walks that thin line where the horror and Sci-fi novel gets blurred in a way that John Brunner was a master at.

Stonefish was published by Ross Lockheart’s indie press Word Horde. This company has set a very high watermark and the quality almost never fails. It is the type of book that the big houses in New York wouldn’t touch or understand. In the 60s it took really out there thinkers like your Don Wollheim and Malzbergs reading the slush piles to find homes for books like these.

Those were physically thin but also thin on characters and deep prose. Don’t get me wrong I love that stuff but for every Dune or Canticle for Lebowitz, there were 100 space pirate books. Jones has created a super weird and creative novel that is overflowing with ideas and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments intentional humor. Plenty of “what the fuck am I reading” moments that those of us who love the weird crave.

The story follows journalist Den Second as he investigates a tech guru Gregor Makarios who disappeared into a psychedelic spiritually-minded virtual realm. Where else would a high-tech hermit live? In this unreal realm, Gregor explores the nature of reality and the meaning of life. Jones weaves traditional and experimental structure to tell the story through a series of visions and Den’s extensive interviews with Gregor.

What is reality? What does it mean to be human? How are we affecting the fabric of life? What is technology doing to the human being? Stonefish is full of questions. Gregor’s psychology becomes Scott Jones's path to a psychological deep dive into our human nature and the crossroads with grand and scary cosmic questions. For an author known for his Lovecraftian interests, this novel is more spiritually lined up with the questions pondered in the work of Philip K Dick.

The book includes gnostic Coprophilic Sasquatch Archons, they are online cryptid avatars for Gregor. They are probably the single weirdest thing in the book, even this virtual online world has developed its myths legends, and weird corners.

Weirder than most cyberpunk Stonefish is full of leather trench coats and Mirrorshades. This novel doesn’t have a Cyberpunk outfit but it has the beating heart of that genre.

My favorite moments happened on pages 186 and 87...

“Shit gets real. Shit is the real. Shit is the soft skin of Stonefish, the convincing layer that tells yes, yes, you’re here and it’s all happening, and you are part of it an ain’t life grand?”

And a page later he is one of the most important passages. This is Gregor speaking directly to the audience:

“You’re trying to make sense of this. Don’t … I can’t make sense of it for you, either, so don’t ask. Stories, though! Stories I can tell.”

Is it dismissive to say this novel is about our relationship to reality? Such an important question why not ask it as many times as we can. Stonefish was a treat, a weird off-putting, and times hilarious trip. I am sold on Scott Jones as a writer so here is hoping for more. Read Stonefish for sure.

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Book Review: Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds Edited by Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter, Marcy Goldberg

Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds Edited by Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter, Marcy Goldberg

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published by University of Wales Press

I admit if I had not misunderstood what this book was about, I probably would not have read it, but this thoughtful well-researched anthology about Utopian films was very good. Happy mistake as it were. What I thought I was reading was a look at the history of Utopian novels and stories throughout history. I expected tons of essays about Utopian novels from Thomas Moore in the 16th century with Utopia to Leguin and Kim Stanley Robinson whose Ministry for the Future I was reading at the same time as this book.

The history of Utopian novels gets a great treatment in the book’s introduction, it laid out enough novels and books that I was making a list and added a dozen to my want to read shelf on Good reads. So I can’t complain at all as that was what I was initially looking for. I admit I was hoping for a whole book on the subject. Despite that but I am happy with what I got. This is a look at how Utopian visions have found an accidentally updated and modern home more in film and more specifically documentary film in recent history.

The editors did an amazing job finding or cultivating articles that highlighted examples both positive and negative. By positive I am thinking about the films about small-town environmental activism and negative being the viral internet videos that envisioned a Muslim Caliphate. I mean Utopias are somewhat in the eye of the beholder. The caliphate envisioned certainly seemed positive but at that point, it is hard to ignore the videos released with them that included violence and beheadings.

Once the actual articles start there is a variety of topics, all are interesting but like any fictional anthology, there are some that interested me more than others. Co-editor Simon Spiegel’s article On Isis videos “The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda 85 Videos as Utopian Texts” was in my wheelhouse because it related to an article I am writing and a novel I have been outlining.

I also very much enjoyed Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent which in a sense extended the feeling of the introduction. The various essays that rose above and became highlights for me included Trans-utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities by Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner and Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring by Jane M. Gaine

The second of those was probably my favorite that gave details on the Arab Spring which I didn’t realize until that moment I didn’t know much about. That got down into details about the hero of the uprising who I didn’t know worked at google.

Practicing Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement by Chelsea Wessels and Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button Matthew Holtmeier both were great examples of showcasing films that highlighted on the ground activism, but in a sense every page of this book did.

Look I don’t have as much to say as this book is not my wheelhouse, but I thought it was a helpful read and I felt more educated in the end. The eco-feminism essay reminded me of activists from my life and overall it introduced me to some interesting people and stories I didn’t know. I do know this finding these Utopia narratives in documentary films is something I will be putting more energy into. OK book, mission accomplished.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Book Review: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hardcover, 576 pages

Published October 6th 2020 by Orbit

Sometimes when an author or musician puts out a piece of work it feels like something they have been building to over the years. I am not saying anything that has not been clear for some time. For more than a decade, Kim Stanley Robinson has been using Science Fiction to sound the alarm about global climate change most notably with his Science in the Capital Trilogy (collected as Green Earth) and New York 2140. That said even his generation starship novel Aurora touched on the subject as well by highlighting the importance of our relationship as a species to the earth.

Ministry for The Future feels like an exclamation point on these novels, a final say if you will. KSR has implied as much during interviews promoting this book. To accomplish this final statement KSR uses a tactic I have spoken often about in the last year. The anti-novel structure first appeared in genre fiction in the 1969 Hugo award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, that novel was influenced by USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. KSR has also mentioned John Dos Passos in interviews but I think it stands to reason that Brunner’s ground-breaking ecological Sci-fi novel was also an influence on Ministry.

Ministry for the future shares a structure with those novels in the sense that the closest thing to main characters come and go. Through the narrative, the character moments are broken up with first-hand accounts, and poetic chapters directly speak to the reader. Some of these chapters include dark horrors such as the Indian Heat-waves that kill 20 million people and some vignettes like the chapter written in the first person from the point of view of a photon.

Some chapters are character-driven enough that we feel really connected to Mary Murphy who is the political figure at a new international committee set up to protect the rights of the animals and people of the future. That is the heart of the idea, shouldn’t the people who have to live in the world we leave behind have a say? The character moments are important and give depth to the story. Mary eventually comes to an understanding with the eco-radicals in the form of a relationship with Frank a member of the group Children of Kali who kidnaps her and wants her to do more. He was radicalized by surviving the heatwave in India, his influence on her leads her to form a black ops wing of the Ministry lead by a fellow India survivor Badim.

These are good characters that have powerful moments peppered through the novel, but the reality is this anti-novel is less interested in them than expressing the message. I know KSR says the characters are the most important element to him, but in this novel, the positive manifesto of a climate solution is possible to dominate the pages. No matter what he says the message is clearly driving this bus with characters several seats back. Goofy analogy but overstated to make a point.

The book is filled with moments that in isolation could be considered mission statement moments, the first came only twenty-fives pages in. When KSR quotes his thesis advisor Frederic Jameson* “Easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on literal, vicious accuracy.”

The most horrific moments of this novel, maybe of KSR’s entire career come in the early chapters when we follow characters desperate to survive the apocalyptic heatwave in India. This is that violence of climate inaction and capitalism mass murdering in a way that speculative fiction has a unique ability to highlight. It is easy to kick the can of action down the road if we don’t think about the actual suffering we are causing. In chapter 51 Robinson points to an entire decade where the planet deals with this kind of climate suffering.

“The Thirties were the zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.

Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. They went through the motions, always in a state of suspended dread…”

It is not that far-fetched and ten years out we better start thinking about it now. Already Europe has dealt with various heatwaves, and here in America, we seesaw between extreme heat and cold depending on the season. The zombie years are coming and novels like this that paint a vivid picture are important of making sure we meet this moment.

“…the heatwave was said to have killed twenty million. As many people, in other words as soldiers who died in World War One, a death toll which had taken four years of intensely purposeful killing; and the heatwave had taken only two weeks. It somewhat resembled the Spanish Flu of 1918 0r 1920, they said; but not. Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human inaction, killing the most vulnerable.”

The Indian heatwave chapters are dark and impactful but those moments of horror are not KSR’s strength. So potential readers should not fear that they will be living in sorrow through these pages. This novel is content with introducing these ideas early and trusting you to remember that feeling while it focuses on solutions.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of this book is KSR’s reluctance to address the real-life anger that the Indian heatwave would naturally cause. We saw this last year the level of anger and violence that the video of the George Floyd murder inspired. Militant eco-radicals and the black ops wing of the Ministry are not ignored, but the author’s uncomfortableness with political violence was enough for him to sideline those elements.

In his interview with Ezra Klein KSR admitted to being uncomfortable with those elements and unsure if he didn’t fumble those moments. Ultimately the novel is still effective but Klein was more forgiving about this than I am on this point. The anger and fear will be a part of this future and the one and only problem I have with the novel is it is unrealistic to avoid this. It is not that it is not ignored, in this future air travel is extinct after drones attacked planes.

This is a minor problem overall when you consider that for more than 500 pages Ministry For The Future offers more than warnings. Plenty of Cli-fi novels will fill their pages with unrelenting horror. As the author of a published Cli-fi novel, I am certainly guilty myself so I suppose if you want the anger there are plenty of alternatives. Because the thing this novel does that is groundbreaking is explaining the gears of capitalism, political infighting, and in the end speculative solutions.

“The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent.”

Science Fiction in a KSR sense is more social science than spaceships and time travel, although he has done both before. He is a hard Sci-fi writer that craves realism so in that sense this novel had to get into the weeds of how Capitalism works, pardon me, how it fails to work for the globe.

“macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half-century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field…”

Capitalism is killing us. It doesn’t work. It is a total failure, and going back to that quote from page 25 the point of this novel through its many threads is clear. Finding a solution will require first an admission that capitalism as we know has to end or radically change. The heart of Star Trek as a speculative story is to imagine a wagon train to the stars. The heart of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is to explore a dystopia where it is not clear who or what is even human anymore. The heart of Ministry for the Future is imaging a world where capitalism ends for thinking of the earth as our home we depend on.

This is highlighted by the scene where people all over the world decide organically to celebrate Gaia day each year. Seems an impossible feat in a world where the day after thanksgiving year involves people get injured racing to sales on flat-screen TVs.

“But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point, the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic— beyond that, après moi le déluge.”

Will we shrug another warning off? Ministry for The Future is not my favorite KSR novel, and it is not my favorite read of the year. That said it is probably the most important book I read all year. The synergy of message and style won't make for the most exciting read for most. In the narrative, there is not your typical action style plot or ticking clock. That said the ticking clock is more real in this book than a thousand thrillers, and in a meta sense you are the hero of this novel, the clock is ticking and you are the one who can save the characters in this novel. You can help your children or grandchildren avoid the lows of this novel, and to experience the highs. So I hope you readers and better yet take it to heart.

*Thanks to David Gill PKD expert who pointed who he learned this from, and confirmed on KSR’s Ezra Klein interview.

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Book Review: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Paperback, 304 pages

Published October 9th 2012 by Solaris (first published 2011)

World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (2012)
British Science Fiction Association Award Nominee for Novel (2011)
The Kitschies Nominee for Red Tentacle (Novel) (2011)

Time is a funny thing. Around 2007 one of the Science Fiction new wave’s elder statesmen Norman Spinrad was collecting rejections around New York. This was rare in his four-decade career. The book he couldn’t sell was a radical one for sure. Osama the Gun a novel set in a future Al-Qaeda-inspired caliphate was a bold story for sure. I mean you are talking about the guy who satirized the Lord of Rings by writing a novel as Hitler and got it published as the Iron Dream in the 70s. No one would touch his Osama book.

A few years later in 2012, Lavie Tidhar upset the World Fantasy award by beating a couple of lightweights like Stephen King and George RR Martin. The remarkable thing is the novel he won with was an alternate History called Osama. I can imagine Norman Spinrad’s raised eyebrow who only published his novel the year before after years of trying. He couldn’t get anyone to touch his Osama novel while this one won a major award.

Hey, it is all subjective and timing is everything. I like both novels but Lavie Tidhar’s Osama is operating on another level. It was my mission this year to read several books on the topic of Speculative Fiction and the War on Terror. I had decided to save this one not only because it won the big prize but I knew it was respected by author and professor D.Harlan Wilson who picked it as his Dick-like Suggestion on our podcast Dickheads. He referred to it as the type of novel that Phil had wanted to write.

The comparisons to The Man in the High Castle are obvious but it appears Tidhar was not shy about parallels to the classic Hugo winner. It is hard to not compare these two books but I am going to do my best. One underrated aspect of PKD’s alternate worlds is they are not the opposite of ours. The reality where the allies won in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy the novel inside a novel is not ours. The history is different. That is indeed the tactic that Tidhar takes with this story.

Through-out the events of Osama, there is a blending between the fiction of the novel, The fictional novel in the story, and details from actual history. As a human being, Tidhar mentioned on the very first page I think as a disclaimer that he had several near misses with famous terrorist attacks. In some ways, he was a witness to this history in a unique way. This motivates the story and standing in for Tidhar is our main point of view character Joe. We know Joe is a Detective, and that he lives in a French Indochina that never saw the conflict and war that southeast Asia did in our reality. We don’t know much else not even his last name.

Joe’s mission in the book is to find Michael Longshott is pulp novelist who writes the Osama Bin Laden novels that are a popular series of books about a terrorist vigilante who has become popular. While some of the events sound like our history they are slightly off. A very fine point is put on the question of what if and how it relates to the Middle East and the War on Terror. A character asks the question outright.

“What if the Cairo Conference of 1921 went ahead as planned, with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dividing up the Middle East for the British? What if they chose a Hashemite king to rule Iraq, and would that have led to a revolution in the nineteen fifties? Or, what if the French war in Indochina somehow led to American involvement in Vietnam? Or if the British held on to their colonies in Africa after the Second World War? You see – " he was in full steam now, his eyes shining like the headlamps of a speeding engine – "the Vigilante series is full of this sort of thing. A series of simple decisions made in hotel rooms and offices that led to a completely different world.”

This novel makes clear that decisions made at Downing Street and hotels are the main ingredients of this conflict. The real answer to why do they hate us? Is so drastic that it takes a blending of reality and fiction to process. Osama Bin Laden became a bogeyman; he became a living alternate history depending on what world and reality you choose to live in. In one reality he is a mythic figure with conventions and a fan following. In another, he is the most hated and hunted man by the most powerful nation on the planet.

“It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling.”

The conflict has always on been about narratives, from attacks meant to inspire fear to Bin Laden being buried at sea to reduce the idea of an honorable funeral. A story about false histories and blending realities is a good way to comment on this conflict. Terror at the end of the day is an emotion and a War on Terrorism will always, in the end, be about who controls the narrative.

Joe spends the bulk of the book trying to find Mike Longshott, what started as a job becomes an obsession. If there is a weakness to this book in my opinion that search takes a bit too long. As Joe gets closer his grip on reality begins to melt away. It is at this point that goes from being influenced by Philip K Dick and his classic High Castle to being in conversation with it.

Is Joe being affected by drugs? Is he a victim of terrorism reliving trauma? By the time he gets to the heart of the mystery, he could be in a hidden pocket between universes. The speculative elements at this point go beyond the alt-history and are delightfully weird.

“Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was – there could be – nothing real about such things.”

This novel is beautifully written with artful prose. Tidhar has command of the concept and the message and translates it through a noir detective spectrum. It is influenced by classics and the conversation of ideas and ideals makes this book a profound act of Science Fiction. It deserves the awards it won and in fact, I am surprised it didn’t win more. As a commentary on the War on Terrorism, it is spot on and an excellent example of what IMPORTANT science fiction can do.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Book Review: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Paperback, 281 pages
Published January 2018 by Penguin Books (first published March 1st 2013)

Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominee (2019)

International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) (2014)
International Booker Prize Nominee (2018)

Frankenstein in Baghdad was a book I couldn’t avoid this year. One of my reading themes this year has been the speculative fiction take on the War on Terrorism. Since it was recognized by the three listed awards it was well known for its a surreal and dark satire of the American occupation of Iraq. This novel is a prime example of what the horror genre can do to highlight and expose the corruption and sad realities of 21st-century colonialism.

Now that GW Bush is retired in Texas doing his best Bob Ross it is easy to let the misery our nation caused in Baghdad fade into memory. That is one of the reasons this novel is so important. Under the guise of phantom weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. invasion kicked up a hornet's nest of violence that became a part of daily life in the city of Baghdad.

Ahmed Saadawi is using a surreal fantasy to highlight the very nightmare of military occupation. The story follows a variety of characters around the city. I know it is a trite statement to say that the city is a character, but in this case, the occupation is a character. The person who really drives the early moments of the story is Hadi who is a junk dealer who is kinda known for his wild stories. In his form of personal protest, he collects the body parts of victims of violence and with each collection, we get the person’s story.

Once the parts are collected, they are brought back to life by magic. This monster is called Whatshisname and despite being the reanimated bits and pieces of war victims the horror around them makes him less of the story than you might think.

There is a large cast of characters and even the list of them in the front didn’t totally help me keep them all clear. That was the one thing that didn’t totally work for this reader.

The fantasy elements were interesting but the solidly anti-war and occupation moments are what make this book interesting. Whatshisname is a collection of body parts that certainly invokes old Frankie. There is not much connection to the Mary Shelly classic but that is not the point.
The novel highlights many elements of the occupation that gets overlooked in this country. What are the divisions in cultures throughout the region, what different religions make up the region then the novel is doing something important. Internationally the need for a spotlight on the history and lasting impact of the W’s invasion is more than just a resurgent ISIS.

There are aspects of this novel I am sure people not from inside the bubble would not get. I know many religious themes are beyond me. The thing is I want to be exposed to those things. That is why I read and review translated genre fiction. If you want your eyes opened in this way reading translated genre is a great way to do it, and this book is a great example.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Book Review: Stay Ugly by Daniel Vlasaty

Stay Ugly by Daniel Vlasaty

Paperback, 161 pages

Published February 2020 by All Due Respect, an imprint of Down & Out Books

This is my second book by the author, but the first book I read was Vlasaty's early New bizarro author series entry The Church of TV as God. I read that six years ago and said "So enter Daniel Valasty and then Church of TV as God. This is a surreal social commentary that seems tightly packed. I think this concept and story could have been twice as long under the skill of a writer like Valasty."

There have been almost forty of the New Bizarro Author series books and this one of the ones that stuck with me. Besides my writing parter Anthony Trevino's King Space Void this was Vlasaty's entry was my favorite. I checked all of the titles, even if I only finished and reviewed a few of them. Sometimes the full-on Bizarro doesn't connect with me.

This is a personal thing as I am a plot and vivid character reader. I could see even writing in a genre where those elements are not mandatory that Vlasaty had skills. So I was excited as DV started to release short novellas and novels in the crime genre. While I suggested that he could write longer pieces, it is clear that these short works are his sweet spot.

This is a smart direction for this author who is writing what he knows, considering his day job was for years working in a methadone clinic. Many of the smartest decisions a writer makes is long before they sit down to write. Authors that live in the real world and have unique experiences kinda have a duty to work them into their fiction.

Stay Ugly is a hard-boiled mystery novel that delivers on the title. It is a grim ugly tale, that is entertaining and for those with a dark sense of humor, it is funny. In 180 or so pages Stay Ugly is a tightly packed mystery that all unfolds after midnight in one of Chicago's nastier hoods. Every football coach quote Richard Pryor who said nothing good happens after midnight.

This story is told in first person by Eric whose small Rogers park world post-prison can't break the habit of calling him Ugly. He is not helping matters by dominating week after week the neighborhood's underground fight club. After winning another fight he was the smaller underdog in the dealer at the center of the fight club tells him that Eric's brother has disappeared with 100K of product.

His brother is marked for death unless Eric can find him first. The mystery of the missing methhead brother drives the story. My favorite elements are spoilers but let just say the last 30 pages were not what I expected.

If you are looking for a redemption tale with a happy character arc this is not the book. Vlasaty opens the book in the gutter and that is the wave he surfs until the last page. The best thing about the book is the pace, and some of the little details that made me laugh.

Like the chapter that ended with:

"I kiss my fists and Nicky tells me to go fuck myself and we walk into the dark building. Laughing it up like everything's good and cool and happy. Like we're not about to walk into a dark and dirty crack house and face some unknown shit.

Like everything isn't terrible."

I laughed out loud when I looked and the next page and the chapter was titled "Everything is Terrible."

So are there negatives here? Very little. I think the things I didn't like are personal to me and won't affect all readers. The narrative is first-person and which is my least favorite form of tense in part because it takes me out of the book. I assume the storyteller will survive to tell the story and I wonder constantly why and how they are telling the story. I will say the longer the book goes and I get lost in the story I think about it less. That is 'a me thing'. Speaking of me things.

The other thing is not Vlasaty's fault but the last book I read was a science book so all the character's dialogue with "Whatevers" and excessive "fuckings" and "shits" were correct but took me a few pages to settle into.

This is a fun book for crime readers who like stories vivid, visceral, and ugly enough to make you happy you don't live in the world of the book. That makes it my jam. This book would make a great film and is out there for crime readers who think the classics are too clean.