Book Review: Ballroom of The Skies by John D. MacDonald

 

Ballroom of the Skies by John D. Macdonald

176 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published

September 1, 1968 by Fawcett Publications, Inc

 

Full review on the way... 

 

Cover of First edition: 

 

Book Review: The Place Frafka Nim

 

The Place Frafka Nim

165 pages, paperback

Published December, 2025

Full review on the way... 

Book Review: Pliable Truths (Star Trek TNG) by Dayton Ward

 

Pliable Truths (Star Trek TNG) by Dayton Ward

352 pages, Paperback

Published May, 2024 by Pocket Books/Star Trek

Review coming soon...

 

 

Re-Read Review of Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
This edition 452 pages, Paperback
Published: May 30, 2023 by Picador 

456 pages, Hardcover

Published October, 2022 by MCD

 Literary awards:

 Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (2022),

 Locus Award for First Novel (2023), 

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Ray Bradbury Prize (2022), 

The Kitschies Nominee for Golden Tentacle (Debut) (2023),

 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize Nominee for Fiction (2023), 

RUSA CODES Reading List Nominee for Science Fiction (2023)

++++2026 re-read. I read the last 200 pages of Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea. Three years ago, I was convinced it was the best book I read that year; now I am fairly certain it is the best Science fiction (in any media) of the 21st century so far. In the sense that it contains First contact, ecological themes, philosophical, religious, and deep consideration of the future of Artificial intelligence... It is the spiritual successor to Lem's Solaris and PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in one masterpiece.  +++

2023 review (but slightly edited)

I am prone to hyperbole when I like a thing, but in the case of this book, I figure I need to warn you that hyperbole is coming. Not only is it coming, but it is serious and earned.

I admit I had not heard of Ray Nayler before all the buzz started on this book. I put it on hold at the library and forgot about it until it was sitting on the hold shelf. I went in not remembering why I was interested. Coming in cold made for an interesting read, but I don't think this book can be ruined. But if it is enough that I call a book a masterpiece to sell you, then by all means I will suggest you read it and come back because you will be thinking about it.

In the late 90s, there was a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you were not there, this story would feel silly but let me tell you a little about it. The book is about a dude whose teacher is a talking Gorilla that patiently explains over the course of the book his philosophy. I am going to shorthand it, but this Gorilla Ishmael explains how the world works, outside of the anthropocentric mode we are all used to. The punk rock subculture I grew up in (the militant Vegan straight-edge scene of the 90s) was filled with environmental and animal rights activism. These causes are still central to who I am. In the 90s scene, Ishmael became the IT book.

Folks were getting tattoos, bands were recording concept albums, language was adopted from this book, and a whole radical subculture for a few years was treating this book (and the loose sequel The Story of B) like a religious text. Ishmael is not a good novel, but as a vessel of powerful, thought-provoking ideas, it was awesome.  I thought of it often when reading The Mountain in the Sea.   

Ray Nayler has created an equally thought-provoking piece of science fiction, but unlike Quinn’s book The Mountain in the Sea is a masterpiece of Science Fiction that is equally powerful as a narrative as it is a carrier of many powerful messages. My jaw dropped at the quality of this book often and in the ultimate sign of respect, I was jealous of Nayler’s ability to pull off this book. Like all the best works of modern fiction, only this one fucking person could write it. Nayler’s combination of SF fandom, knowledge of science, and intergovernmental experience created a literary unicorn. One unbelievable alchemy of thought and talent spit out this incredible masterpiece that shook me to my core. 

The Mountain in the Sea was preaching to the choir with me, I already shared many of the views that came across, but it was a beautiful feeling to read it. A science fiction novel that had so much to say is not rare but one that doesn’t with skill, style, and heart in equal measure is a pretty special treat.

Set in the near future, the story is told from many points of view but the primary one is Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen. She is brought in to investigate the incidents of violence that have been cropping up around the ocean of Octopuses that kill humans. Nguyen has spent her career trying to communicate with cephalopods and the Ocean in general. Much of the novel is set up by quotes from the book that it is implied that she wrote after these events, called How Oceans Think.  After the first chapter, I thought this was a real book and was upset I could not add it to my Goodreads “to be read” shelf.

There are a few other plots that Nayler weaves into the main one is an AI-driven automatic fishing vessel that is attacked by the Octopuses. There are a few human crew members and a couple of stowaways. This storyline and one involving automatic monks explore the possible consciousness of machines. This is the best exploration of those concepts I have read besides perhaps S.B. Divya’s Machinehood and Meru, very serious books, and the angry yet funny satire of Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts.  

Again, I am giving you a chance to bail without getting details, but it is massive environmental pressures force the Octopus to evolve.  Dr.Nguyen is forced to confront these evolving octopuses who use symbols and sprays to communicate. Nayler lays out this communication through thrilling but patient scenes.

“The Octopus was standing, the tips of its arms the only things in contact with the floor of the chamber. As in the video before, it was in the full “Nosferatu pose – tall, its mantle vertical above its head, its arms, and web spread. The threat pose.  And like before, the octopus, easily as tall as a human being was almost white.
Speak to me.”

The book design highlights these symbols that make up their attempts to explain to the human race.  We are here, and we are trying to communicate. This will invite positive Arrival comparisons.  The comparisons to the Abyss are for ocean reasons, but we are not talking to aliens, but desperate Earthlings trying to warn us. Stop killing us, for we will start fighting back.  There is a version of this story that is like an ocean strikes back Roland Emmerich-style action disaster movie. In that AI-generated story, Dr. Nguyen would have to translate the message in time to save her estranged child.  

Thankfully, Nayler is not interested in the action; he is interested in nudging your thoughts.  This book is exciting because the story takes you to places that force you to think about our relationship to this massive part of the planet that we depend upon to live. The book is opinionated but not preachy, and with the Orcas sabotaging boats and ships off the coast of Spain, it seems prophetic.

“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.”
 
It is impossible to talk about the other themes of the novel as I see them without spoiling some elements. Dr.Nguyen has a friend who she communicates through the majority of the book. I just assumed this character was human. At a certain point, it was clear to me that the “Friend” was an AI.  I think each reader will have a different moment when they realize that. I am sure there were clues but I didn’t figure that out until deep into the book.

Robotic monks, automatic fishing vessels, and a character who is the Elon Musk of AI, Nayler wrote this book long before AI  became one of the dominant issues we as a culture were dealing with. Paul Tremblay didn’t know when he wrote Survivor Song that his pandemic novel due to be released in 2020 was timely. Nayler’s novel about what it means to think, be aware, and communicate is a Science fiction novel set in the future about now. A dying world (from a human sustainability standpoint) with our cultures trying to figure out how to handle machines designed to think.  I mean, WGA members striking to ensure AI doesn’t take their jobs had to skip the picket line today because the skyline looked like Blade Runner 2049.

“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
 
This is a novel about thought. The learning of the language of Octopus characters is at the heart of the discovery Nayler is asking you to go on. We have been taught this illusion that our humanity is a singular existence. It leads many to direct their lives toward consumption and the happiness of oneself above all other motivations.

Life in the ocean doesn’t have motivations we recognize and if we started to be able to understand each other it would not make us feel great. Consider this quote from the book inside the book.

“Think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
 
This is nothing new for folks like me. 30 years of questioning the anthropocentric authority resulted in three decades of veganism and life with all kinds of harsh truths. Every day, the millions and millions of living, breathing, and feeling animals that are used for their flesh hurt my soul. I have to live with the fact that I live in a sense behind enemy lines. Our culture is violent and self-destructive, and it was nice that a character in this novel expressed feelings all too common for me.

“The man sipped his tea. “This feeling I have, of disgust and hatred, when I hear of what was done to the dogs— in some people, this feeling is multiplied a hundredfold. In some people, this feeling of disgust at what humans are doing to the world becomes everything for them. They cannot stop thinking of such things—of the terrible cruelties we continue to inflict on the animals unlucky enough to share this planet with us. They feel the need to intervene: to do something to stop the suffering. They have to act: their rage will not allow them any other course of action.”

Everyone who has read my reviews knows I think the key to storytelling is parallels and reversals, what this lacks in huge action, it makes up with these fundamentals. They are all over this novel. Humans investigate what they think are monstrous actions of the Octopus but learn to communicate and thus…

“We’re monsters to the Octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”
The AI helps the human characters to understand the flaws their creators couldn’t engineer in them.

 “We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.”

When Stranger in a Strangeland came out it weirdly became a hippie sensation. Good thing most of those folks didn’t Grok Starship Troopers. Decades later anarchist bookstores in fiction and real life are named after elements of Leguin’s The Dispossessed. I am all for Science Fiction having this effect. In a better world, political leaders would be combating climate change and plastic land masses in the ocean with a copy of The Mountain in the Sea in their backpacks or on their shelves.  It is like Ray Nayler has pointed a telescope at the ocean.  A picture is worth a thousand words, but this collection of words is priceless. A masterpiece of Science Fiction worthy of all the awards.

Book Review: The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions by D. Harlan Wilson

 

The Auto/Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions by D. Harlan Wilson

296 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication: September 8, 2026 by Routledge

This is a book I have tracked from kernel to publication, so you can take this review with a ton of salt, if you must but I am going to go deep with the things that make it important. Yes, DHW is my podcast co-host. As brothers in this work, I really encouraged him to write this and feel he has managed the impossible. Bring something fresh to the studies of a writer who probably has fifty or more books about him already. That is the angle, a book about the books about the man who wrote books sometimes about himself. 

Infinite Regressions. Yes, Professor Wilson is the person to write this. His fiction is Schi-flow experimental, so it should not surprise anyone that he found an uncornered angle to Dick- scholarship. His academic writing is serious, ,from monographs on J.G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, and most recently with Kubrick in Strangelove Country.

Sure, it is a book about PKD, but it is also about Gregg Rickman, Anne Dick and Kyle Arnold, who have written books about PKD. The best example might be how DHW writes about one-time editor of the PKD Society newsletter Paul Williams (who was also in charge of his literary estate).  “These qualities have been documented many times over since Only Apparently Real, which I had not read in full until the research phase of Infinite Regressions. None of the information it contains about Dick was new to me. I had gotten the information from other sources, many of them deriving from this biography. So I found myself less interested in Dick than Williams. How did it feel to be in Dick’s presence as a friend? As a biographer? What about a biografriend?But let’s say I knew nothing about Dick.¨ 

Wilson didn’t invent a term like Biografriend, but he uses it in a Dickian fashion that blurs subject and writer.  Wilsonś narrative becomes a study of the many men and women who study PKD. In some cases close friends or even the two wives who wrote books about him. The obsession with PKD as a storyteller is one thing, him as a thinker another. Some of the books are just memoirs of wives and girlfriends trying to understand their relationship. 

´´My argument is that Williams (or any PKD life‐writer) becomes more interesting just by being in Dick’s uncanny sphere, which can evoke feelings of empathy, ardor, and belonging alongside a Kierkegaardian fear and trembling that beckons us to jump down a rabbit hole of absurdism.”

DHW shows great interest in showing how the Megatext of books about PKD says as much about the people in his orbit, those relationships can be direct through friendship or indirect through the PKD canon or the fandom. One thing this book does that very few biographical looks at great authors do is study the relationship between the author and those who read him. 

One thing of great interest to Dickheads in general is the updates on the planned trilogy of biographies that Gregg Rickman only finished one volume of. First teased as Firebright in the late 80s in the PKD and more recently teased as The Variable Man. Rickman released a short book on PKD on Film, and we knew he was working on it, but as years turned into decades the mystery grew for Dickheads.

DHW however, was able to read an in -progress draft of The Variable Man; it is pretty much a scoop that we got insight into how sections of the book are named: I am Machine, Schism in Me, and Imposter.

While Wilson is a co-host of the Dickheads podcast, we put him in the hot seat in a recent episode of the PKD hangout. We talked about Paul Williamns and Rickman of course.

I like some of the flowery big-word super academic sounding paragraphs of DHW and when I quoted this next part as sounding like a mission statement… 

“In Infinite Regressions, after all, I am feeding on the bio‐texts that feed on Philip K. Dick, although my scholarly PKD meta‐biotext operates at a distant remove from the primary source, whereas the closer proximity of creative PKD biotexts enables them to easily sink fangs into Dick’s jugular. Dick’s autobiografiction, in turn, eats itself.”

DHW laughed and said maybe that should be edited down but it does feel like the meaning of the whole thing. 

DHW hints at other books for other academics. A study of the PKDS Newsletters, or science-fictionalized biographies and PKD inspired works. That is where my novel Great America in Dead World is mentioned.  I love the idea of PKD’s style as a virus.

“A virus or infection is a suitable metaphor. As an artpiece in an artwork, however, the interpolated Dick does not carry negative or harmful connotations—such fictions celebrate his lifework and sometimes treat it like a literary experiment, as in David Agranoff’s novel Great America in Dead World (2025), a “post‐truth” satire set in a Phildickian dystopia, composed by Agranoff according to the formula Dick diagrammed in his letter to Goulart. Then again, there is a distinctly viral and infectious quality to Dick’s fiction and life experience that is clinically negative, toxic, and ruinous (i.e., “not so benign”). The metaphor works as an agent of chaos, too.”

That is kinda the idea of Keith Giles doing Pink Beam Press, and longtime Bizarro writer Garret Cook is also experimenting with using the formula. This part of the book covers mostly the fictionalized takes on PKd like The Ben H. Winters Benjamin comic or Michael Bishop’s Alas, Philip K. Dick is Dead. These novels are total fiction, but they build on the mythology.

We are not done with academic big word salad. Are you ready for one of my favorites? 

“Dick’s novelistic lifework during the final stage of his career is a psychonautic case study for autobiografiction’s evolutionary aptitude. As a SF author in the postmodern era who dabbled in pomo aesthetics (n.b.,metafiction), he constructed a dialectic that intertwined his own psychological voyages extraordinaires with broader philosophical curiosity.”

He was an SF writer who got in his own head and thought about deep stuff. Ok DHW said it better. This is an important Text, that sadly is only available in a $200 Physical edition; hopefully it will be available in a more inexpensive version. This is a long book, but well researched, and most importantly for an academic text, it will expand the borders of knowledge on the topic.  A towering achievement.

Book Review: 2054 by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis

 

2054 by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis

304 pages, Hardcover

Published March, 2024 by Penguin Press

Sometimes doing some totally different works for a sequel, but often you have to think about what it is that people are looking for in your story. The elements that made 2034 interesting were mostly related to the author's knowledge as U.S. military experts speculating about stuff they know all about. So what if they speculate 20 more years in the future and write about stuff they don’t know as well?

So this a a SF novel about AI or AGI and singularity, and it writes about technology in ways that feel out of date today. That is fine, I read SF from the fifties, but the insider thing is what made the first compelling despite the flaws the book has.

Since I read this and have already re-read The Mountain in Sea, which makes this novel feel pedestrian on the topic. I hate to be brutal, but this novel was just terrible. boring, with nothing new or interesting to say, doesn’t pick up interesting threads from the last book and flat characters all around. 2034 is imperfect but it is at least worthy of sparking conversation. 

Book Review Electric Forest by Tanith Lee

 

Electric Forest by Tanith Lee

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published August, 1979 by DAW

How had I never read Tanith Lee? I mean, I had read stories here and there. They were great. Her reputation was sky-high. I opened the library app and put this one on hold. Was it the best choice to start with? Somehow told me I have many better works to read in the future, so we will see. I did like this one, so I will read on.

My first impression of Lee’s writing is that it is more lush and beautiful prose than I expect from New Wave-era science fiction that feels like it is gothic and from an older era. The world-building is well done, but not subtle, despite heavy-handed use of made-up words and measurements like Sevenday of the First Dek on the Calendar-dial. January 7th?  It flows mostly invisibly in the flowery prose. The story was an inventive twist on a Frankenstein-like mad scientist story that plays well with themes that feel more raw and real coming from a woman writing it. If this is not one of the better Tanith Lee’s novels, then I expect some seriously good works later. 

Set in a far-future human colony world of Indigo, where most of the public is genetically engineered to be perfect. Magdala is a natural birth, the child of a prostitute and a John,  so she feels she is ugly and a freak, not to mention the lowest of low class. This world is not so alien that we can’t recognize the E.C. (Earth Conclave), but it is an excellent SF setting.

The twist at the end that I won't explain plays with reality that is worthy of Brunner or PKD, but it would be fair to say Lee is a bit more talented writer on a word-to-word basis. The alchemy of who becomes successful is more than word to word of course.  It is not just the twist; the setup of Magdala and her relationship after the consciousness transfer is ripe with drama. She has to keep her old body alive, and the question of who is alive and what is real grows out of this. “...Magdala, your consciousness has transferred wholly from your own unlovely head to a crystal conductor in the skull of a simulate woman. It’s a sensit dream, but, Christ, the most fantastic sensit of them all, Because this is real. You’ve got a body that factually be doing whatever you experience.”

She also realizes that Claudio, who looks like a savior, might not have her best interests in mind. He has a bit of a far-future tech-bro feeling. “Science was-is-his pastime. His only motive in becoming a scientist has been to stave off boredom.”

Magdala, not caring about her life, even after she gains beauty, gives her power with Caludio, who thinks he can control her. This future’s version of TV- Tri-V dramas also plays a role. After Magadala becomes a different person, her spongey relationship with reality blurs the line with the dramas she watches.

The ending might not work for everyone, but for the readers, it either totally makes the book amazing or nukes it, with very few opinions in between. In a novel about transformation and resurrection, reality is up for debate. This novel plays with themes spread across the various twists that have the effect of almost rebooting itself. 

Great stuff, it is interesting to compare her style to other women active in SF at the time. Not as directly political as Leguin, not as experimental as Joanna Russ, or as adventure-minded as Leigh Brackett. The reality is that the women of the New Era all did a little bit of it. I suspect a few books from now, Tanith Lee will rank up there with the greats.