Book Review: Make it Stop by Jim Ruland

 

 

Make it Stop by Jim Ruland

 256 pages, Paperback
Published April, 2023 by Rare Bird Books

Podcast interview on the way!

We have many great writers in San Diego, perhaps one of the most respected is Jim Ruland. While he has made a name for himself writing books about punk rock, co-authoring Damaged the autobiography of Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris, telling the story of Bad Religion, and writing Corporate Rock Sucks THE BOOK on SST Records the pioneering punk record label. In town, we know Jim from his classic reading series Vermin on the Mount, which gathered authors, poets, and performance artists.  Jim is visible at book events around town, where he often writes culture articles for the LA Times.

I had his novel on my shelf for a while and needed to read it. I knew it had a slight speculative edge, reminding me of some high-powered things. The comp I came up with was a manic political thriller that crosses vibes somewhere between Fight Club and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

There are a couple of reasons why I read this now. It was an episode of a NY Times podcast that was talking about rehab and psych wards that were trapping people and not letting them go. I thought as I was listening, hey that is the topic of Jim’s book. I bumped up my list, and then I saw Jim at the Verbatim Book Fair. I decided that it would be my read for the flight to Portland for Bizarro con. I started it on the bus to the airport and finished before I even got to brunch in Portland. It was a great almost one sitting read.

Make It Stop is a strange novel that doesn’t fit tidy into any specific genre. It is a political thriller, mildly a crime novel, and mainly a speculative fiction novel, but it could be called many things. I suspect the publisher is less comfortable with the SF label than Jim is. That said it is a near-future political thriller…you know Science Fiction.

Melanie is our main point-of-view character, a former drug addict who found herself in rehab and couldn’t get released due to laws that state you can be held as long as you still owe money for your care, and of course each day the cost racks up. This kind of healthcare trap is the kinda thing you think can’t happen but it does. The reason Melanie is in rehab however is as a member of Make It Stop a clandestine underground group, breaking people out of these healthcare prisons. The legal term ‘Indefinite forfeiture of liberty.’ In other words some capitalist bastardization of things that should be a right.

In one of the early chapters, Ruland has a character that highlights the struggle. “It's been three years, nine months, and twenty-four days since he chewed up Three hundred milligrams of oxycontin, chased it with a pint of rum, and waited to die. Trevor woke up in a hospital and restraints, hooked up to all kinds of tubes. For three days the lights burned through his eyelids while the voices of his deceased father and missing mother drifted through his bed and truly wished he was dead.

When he got out of the hospital, he was Seventy-three thousand dollars in debt and remanded to court-ordered rehab, where he started plotting his next attempt. There he met Doyle who enlisted him in his organization. Trevor wasn't a smash-the-state type like many of the others who were drawn to make it stop and groups like it there seemed to be more of them every week.”

The idea that people can be trapped in these health care networks that become debtors' prisons in every sense is a nightmare. Through carefully crafted backstories and dialogue Ruland has created a thought-provoking piece of entertainment. The characters are rich and fully realized, and the story is fun and interesting while communicating the message. It is also just a fun ride seeing the Robin Hood activists fight the system. 

Still, you might be wondering why I call it SF when it is so clearly ripped from the headlines. There is a technology like TruLuv dating apps (again still not that futuristic), and there are different cars and phones that gave way to TABS (tablets).  Doyle, one of the leaders of Make it Stop introduces us to the key speculative element when he goes to a morgue to identify a dead member of their team. He is struck.

A new drug on the street…” Sorry, Sally says. “Should have warned you about that these Kannibals have an intense odor.”

“Kannibals?” He fumbles in his pocket for a cough drop and pops it into his mouth. An old trick a cop taught him.

“Kannabliss users. Sally offers him a paper mask that Doyle waves off. Though most of the time they just call it bliss. Nasty stuff.”

I love a good fictional drug, and the new drug on the street simulates the euphoria of climax during sex, thus becoming popular quickly. The deadly side effects are a risk, but as addictive as it is makes it a money maker for Hansen the mustache-twirling CEO of Health Safety Net. The fictional drug and this wicked CEO keep a train of people coming into their hospitals. There is something that people always say about James Cameron’s Aliens. Capitalism is the real villain. Capitalism mixed with a uniquely American clusterfuck of a broken healthcare system is the villain in Make it Stop. It would be impossible to make a human character an avatar for that mess and not have them come off as less reasonable than Cobra Commander before his morning coffee.   

Make it Stop is an angry novel that at times has the energy of a punk rock song, but it is written carefully by a great storyteller. Ruland went through many drafts, including longer versions but you don’t feel the ghosts of the phantom limb chapters ever. There are hardly any wasted words. It is not a super long novel, but it fits in as much message, character study, and weird fun as a much longer would struggle with. Make it Stop is a great reading experience and is recommended.  

Book Review: Fury by Henry Kuttner

 

Fury by Henry Kuttner

There is something weird and magical about Science fiction from long ago. Reading a story about the future written by a person living eight decades ago takes on a bizarro vibe that is its own thing. Fury packaged as it was in the copy I read is labeled a masterwork, and it was that when it was written, but now it reads so differently, still a masterpiece, but entirely of its time. It is not timeless as I would argue I Am Legend, or Canticle for Lebowitz are.  A novel can be super out of date like most of PKD’s novels and still be a masterwork. 

Sure, the science of Venus was wildly out of date, even Asimov was still publishing about oceans on Venus seven years later in Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.  It is not just the planetary science but the science fictional themes of mutants who live hundreds of years mixed with thieves who talk about bombs being hidden in the dough. Nothing places your novel in the past more than referring to cash as “The Dough,” It is a strange alternate universe you find in the 1940s SF novel. 

Fury first appeared as a sequel to the short story “Clash by Night” in the May 1947 issue of Astounding magazine edited of course by the now controversial figure John W. Campbell. It appears with a Theodore Sturgeon novelette.  It appeared under the byline Lawrence O'Donnell, one of many pen names employed by the science fiction power couple Catherine Lucille Moore and Henry Kuttner. It was the cover story. Fury is now considered the product of Henry Kuttner, but Moore claimed that she may have written ⅛ of the text. How she came to that number, it appears she credited most of this novel with her husband.

You can read the original appearance on Internet Archive: As it first appeared.

 This story appeared during a period when the couple was living in New York City and prolifically producing future classics ranging from the time travel novella Vintage Season to the SF Hall of Fame story Mimzy were the Borogoves. In 1947 alone they delivered three novels "The Fairy Chessmen," (an influence on a 1967 treatment for a novel Philip K. Dick didn’t end up writing) "Valley of the Flame" and "The Dark World."   I recently read this quote from Catherine Moore from the 70s. “When you write for a living, you have to write a tremendous lot of copy. Three days before rent is due, if you haven't got money in the bank, you write a story, regardless, then you rush down and give it to the publishers. By this time we had formed a happy association with several publishing houses in New York, and they would take the story in, read it quickly, and give Hank a check he would walk home because we didn't have an extra nickel for the subway…” (Science Fiction An Oral History edited by Scott Apel)

Authors at the time hustling would often write stories to the sensibility of certain editors, it wasn’t the authors obsessed with psi-powers and supermen but Campbell. The supermen of Fury can’t fly but they can live for hundreds of years and avoid the suffering of being almost slaves. 

“Their early years merged into the unremembered past. Time moved more slowly for Sam then. Days and hours dragged. The man and woman he knew as father and mother had nothing in common with him, even then for the operation had altered his mind; His intelligence, his ingenuity; he had inherited from half-mutant ancestors. Though the mutation was merely one of longevity that trait had made it possible for the harkers to rise to dominance on Venus. They were not only long-lived ones, by any means; There were a few hundred others who had a life expectancy of two to 700 years depending on various complicated factors. That the strain bred through. It was easy to identify them.”

For those who love effective world-building Fury, is a master class, in a subtle, matter-of-fact way we are introduced to this colony called the Keeps that was built in the aftermath of an atomic war, under the seas of Venus. If you can’t handle a novel set in an ocean on a world we now know is too hot for an ocean, then I am sorry you have a boring imagination.  

Sam Harker (Reed eventually) is a fascinating character in the long history of the hero’s Journey.  Living in the Keeps under sea Venus colonies were named for American states. Classism in this society is a division of working-class natural humans and mutants who are called immortals so far they have lived a few hundred years but the experiment has just begun.  The novel is broken up into three parts, as it was essentially designed to be a serial in Astounding so the story is broken up into three parts. The rumor is that they sold part one and Campbell rushed it into production in Astounding before it was even finished. Is that true? Hard to say but it sounds right. If you don’t want spoilers this is a good place to bounce.

Sam was born into the working class, and the early chapters of the novel highlight the various levels of the unofficial caste system under the seas on Venus. It is all the backcover description, so it is not much of a spoiler to point out that Sam finds out he is immortal. This happens after he is drugged by something called ‘Dream Dust’. He wakes up forty years later, he hasn’t aged and that is when the rage sets in. His father lied to him, he hasn’t aged while asleep so he quickly figures out his immortal.

Sam is driven by the fury, that he was denied this birthright, but drives him to tear down the system, and move his people from the undersea Citadels and rebuild society Overground jungles. The story might seem tilted to a kind of pulp action but it is more in the vein of intrigue and Socio-political dynamics.  This wouldn’t work without effective and well written world-building.

 “Carnival was a respected custom. All Delaware Keep was shining. Colored perfumes hung like a haze above the Moving Ways, clinging to the merrymakers as they passed. It was a time when all classes mingled.

Technically there were no lower classes….”

It is descriptive and well-written with 40s style future tech like Moving Ways, and telecast visors. The novel is filled with things like the almost VR-styled natural habitat.

“Haven approximated man's half-forgotten birthplace. It was earth, but an earth glamorized and inaccurately remembered it was a gigantic half dome honeycombed with cells that made a shell arched over a public room below. Each cell could be blocked off, or a rearrangement of penetrating rays to give you the illusion of being in the midst of an immense, crowded room or you could use the architect's original plan and enjoy the illusion of a terrestrial background.”

The setting is great, and Golden Age SF is constantly accused of being about ideas to the point of sacrificing the characters. Sam as a character is driven by a rage that parallels the wild ecology of this savage Venus. Sam felt his father intentionally doomed him after his mother died giving birth to him. His mother’s death happens on the first page, Sam’s father hated him from the moment he was born.

“But Sam reads anger was a rage Against intangibles like time and destiny, and the only target it could find to explode against was himself. Granted that such anger is not normal in a man. But Sam Reed was not normal. His father before him could not have been normal, or he would never have taken such disproportionate vengeance on his son. A flaw somewhere in the harbor blood was responsible for the bitter rage in which father and son alike lived out their days, far separate, raging against far different things, but in armed rebellion all their lives, both of them, against life itself.”

Sam plays the hero role because he wants to change the stagnant society. He starts in foster care no idea who his real father is, and rises through a crime family. Knowing what he could have been opens his eyes.

“There was something like a bright explosion in the center of his brain. Immortality! Immortality! All the possibilities, all the dangers all the glories lying before him burst outward in one blinding glow, and then the glow faded and he was afraid for a moment of maturity responsibilities this new incredible maturity so far beyond anything he'd ever dreamed of before.”

Sam leads the movement that would in a typical pulp novel end with all the wild lifeforms on Venus or the Technology in the Keeps. The story always finds ways to transcend the normal Golden Age weaknesses and come back to the characters.

"I know Sam Reed. Don't forget his background. During his formative years, he thought of himself as a short termer. He's got a tremendously strong instinct for self-preservation, because of the life he lived in the Keeps.”

Overall the book really explores many themes and ideas I was excited to find. There are plenty of side characters including the one oracle-wise wizard type who is character who explains what all this anger and fury as wrought.

“Back in the 20^th century a lot of men knew what was going to happen to earth. They said so. They said it loud and often. And they were men who earned public respect. They should have been believed maybe they were, by a lot of people. But not enough. The minds of men kept right on working in the same set patterns. And so we lost earth.”

It is not the guns or the rockets, the bombs burned away the atmosphere of earth but it was driven by FURY, something that exists in the mind.

“The future is the mind of man it wasn’t an atomic power that destroyed Earth. It was a pattern of thought.”

Fury is a Golden Age pulp novel that punches way above its weight class. It is one of the best works of the Moore/Kuttner duo. It is a must-read for those who love old-school Science Fiction.