Podcast Episode/Review: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

 

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Published by Doubleday May 1969

Dickheads episode coming  featuring guest Dickheads Stephen Graham Jones author of The Only Good Indian and Mongrels. 

Soundcloud for the episode... 

YouTube video still on the way...

Book Review: Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

Hardcover, 247 pages

Published January 1980 by Doubleday Books

 

I’ll admit it I got sucked in by Queen’s Gambit like everyone else. When we watched the first episode I was surprised to see that it was based on a novel by Walter Tevis. This is an author I knew and had read before. It had been decades since I read The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler and in the last decade I had read his last Sci-fi Novel Steps of the Sun but I had not heard of Queen’s Gambit. I decided I wanted to look and see what other Tevis gems I had missed. When I went to Good Reads I saw that I had already marked this book as want to read. With further online encouragement from Professor D.Harlan Wilson, I bumped this novel up in my TBR.

Mockingbird is an interesting work of Science Fiction for an author primarily known for his mainstream work. It would be reductive to make simple comparisons but the most obvious is Brave New World but that is unavoidable as this dystopia has similar elements like the lack of monogamy and the plethora of drugs. That is really yet, very surface level. Brave New World is a dystopia wearing a Utopia Halloween costume. Mockingbird is a pure Dystopia that explores Humanity’s downfall via the mind of Walter Tevis.

By modern standards, this is a short novel, but Mockingbird is jam packed with ideas, questions, and an intense dialogue with history and culture that is only possible when a story reaches beyond history and character into speculation. This is what Science Fiction at its best can do that mainstream novel can’t. Surrealism, fantasy, and magic realism can do many of the same tricks but Tevis a master of mainstream novels like The Hustler doesn’t take the genre lightly.

Like a battering ram tearing through the castle gates, major themes and important ideas are dead on this battlefield. Mockingbird is one you enjoy as your reading, but long after you close the book you will be considering its ideas.

When the book starts it would be easy for a modern reader to dismiss this rather pulpy and simplistic look at a robot – a member of the 9th class of robots designed to serve the human race. The sad robot trope is most famous in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that book did exist. Our sad robot here is Bob, he is wary of running human affairs we don’t know why but when he climbs to the top of the Empire state building which he says is the tallest building left in this future. He wants to die but can’t.

He is one of our three POV characters the other two Paul and Mary Lou are humans who challenge societal standards by learning to read. There are laws against reading, it is just the way things are. Reading is for robots, who run the show.

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

Of course, with reading comes questions and answers and threatens the control the robots have slowly been handed. Keep in mind it is clear that in this story we handed the control to the robots. Just as we basically log into big brother in the form of social meeting in a way that would probably stunned mister Orwell. Tevis on the other hand imagined it pretty clearly.

  Reading is more than an information transfer for Paul and Mary Lou. The freedom leads the two characters to fall in love. Paul is punished with Prison as monogamy and his desire to learn will upset the balance they have developed in society. Paul and Mary Lou’s love affair is one thing and in a sense the more important rebellion in the eyes of this society. Bob the Robot is more concerned about humans coupling again than it is that they are learning. That is ultimately a mistake by the robot and in the final pages, we understand why.

A science fiction novel that reverses the dystopic destruction of books like Fahrenheit 451 with a story about the power of reading in action is refreshing.  The San Francisco Chronicle went as far as calling it a sequel to Bradbury but I think response is a better description. It is a response in the same war Haldeman’s Forever War is responding to Starship Troopers. Tevis pointed out more than once that he was inspired by the fall of literacy he was watching teaching high school English for more decades.

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”

So if we ignore the sexism at the end there, the message is important. Touching another person’s mind in the way an author and reader mind meld is something this future world doesn’t know. Once Paul and Mary Lou learn, it changes them forever.

They learn valuable things like history and also unimportant things. Tevis doesn’t ignore the pluses and minus of the canon of human writing. Even in Sci-fi for every Mockingbird, there is Dean Koontz's 40th generation copy of Frankenstein with a dog hero novels.   

One of the most important and powerful books that Paul reads as he learns the power of reading is titled The Causes of Population Decline. This happened in the world of Mockingbird in the twenty-first century but it is unclear what year exactly. We know humans were still reading and writing in the last date on any of his books is 2135. This is an excellent world-building detail.

The Causes of Overpopulation are boiled down to six reasons.

1. Fears of overpopulation
2. The perfection of sterilization techniques
3. The disappearance of the family.
4. The widespread concern with “inner” experiences
5. A loss of interest in children
6. A widespread desire to avoid responsibilities


The mission statement of the novel really comes on pages 158 and 59 of the first edition hardcover I read. This happens when Bob Android-splains the decline of the human race and blames cars.

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile paved the way for more profound – more inward- inner dependencies upon Television and then robots, and finally the ultimate and predictable conclusion of it all: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind…It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”

Mockingbird is a deeply misanthropic novel, and you should know that coming from me that is not a knock against it. In fact, you can feel the frustrated intellectual living in small-town Midwest for decades dripping off every page of this novel. I loved that and related to it pretty hardcore.

But the fact is Tevis did tell us in a Radio interview in 1981 his intentions. “…what I am convinced of is that it is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives, and that’s what I hope I do say, and say well, from time to time in the book.”

Well Mister Tevis I would say you pulled that off. This novel is super close to being a masterpiece if he didn’t blink at the end miss the chance to end this book with the strength of the earlier pages. I have to spoil that to explain my feelings on that.

Overall Mockingbird is a must-read for fans of highly literate Sci-fi. I think of the three genre novels Tevis wrote this one was my favorite. At times this book is profound and at other times it is funny in a sly way. Tevis is such a talented storyteller and I love that he is coming to the book with a point of view.

I have just one problem…

Major spoilers ahead…

The Final Twist of the knife comes on page 210. Mary Lou is about ready to give birth and Bob the robot is not happy. He is helping her because he is programmed to. The thing is he will live on the serve humanity as long as it exists. So you see the big reveal is that Bob sabotaged and sterilized the human race just so he could die. Mary Lou actually calls him out “You fed the world birth control because YOU felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind…”

The debate is an interesting one. Bob reminds her that mankind was plenty suicidal on its own and she blames Bob for drugging the entire species through social control.

This ending was a cool reveal and story-wise I loved it. As far as what it is saying about the theme that is totally different. I don’t like how this information ethically dodges some of humanity’s responsibility. To me it is similar to the ending of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds a movie I liked for its unrelenting brutality, the problem was The Berg blinked and undid all the amazing build-up by having Tom Cruise’s son alive against all story logic.

Here I think Tevis had a neat story twist that subverts the overall message of the book. That’s fine because at least there was a message.  

Book Review: The Human Son by Adrian J. Walker

 

The Human Son by Adrian J. Walker
Paperback 500 pages
Published April  2020 by Solaris

At the risk of sound hyperbolic, The Human Son is a beautiful example of powerful, thoughtful, and carefully crafted speculative fiction. It is kind of impossible not to think of this novel without taking massive swings at the nature of humanity, parenthood, and the existence of the species itself. On the surface, this novel is CLI-FI set five and a half centuries from now after the last breath of a single human was taken in Sweden.

Don’t be too sad about it this happening, it was the plan, besides you and I are not exactly doing enough to prevent this future.  Are we?

The Human Son is the third novel I have read by Adrian Walker who I discovered like many other people - when Stephen King tweeted that he had a great find at the Toronto airport. That book was Walker’s novel End of the World Running Club. It is a nerve-racking suspense-filled novel that feels like a journey for the reader as much as the characters. The book is almost 500 pages but it is a quick read and the story cooks. Once the main characters take off on their run that drives the story, the journey not only explores survival but themes of family and the limits of endurance.

I also read Last Dog on Earth which I liked but I had a hard time with large sections of the book being in a dog’s first-person narrative. It pushed my suspension of disbelief a little too far. That said Walker won my attention fully with Running Club.  Also, the elevator pitch of A Dog’s Purpose meets The Road is pretty crazy awesome.  

Walker really enjoys the end of the world. Those first two novels are more fun suspense-driven but here Walker delivered a thoughtful masterpiece of Sci-fi. What Walker brings is narratives that are driven by deeply felt emotional moments. In Running Club, this really invested the reader.  This story doesn’t have the action and suspense driving it, however, that doesn’t matter I was fully engaged.  It could be that the themes hit my buttons but I was still very invested in the characters. The theme of family biological or otherwise appears to be the thread that ties Walker’s work together.  

I do come to this book from a weird angle. In many ways, The Human Son is about parenthood, and environmentalism, as a person who did choose not to have children in part because of ecological reasons this book hit me differently than most. It is about parenthood and in that sense, I can intellectually understand but I am sure some of that feeling is lost.  I think the balance of frustrations and joy that are the yin and yang experience of growing a human is a huge part of this story.

The majority of the characters are from a subhuman species the Erta who was genetically engineered by some of the last humans with the purpose of rehabbing the earth to make it livable again. The Erta is hyper-intelligent, strong, and don’t have to deal with as many emotions and hangs as we do. They specialize and over their long lives, they accomplished their goals.

For 500 years they lived in a small community in Sweden and managed to fix the climate crisis and now they have a dilemma. Should they reintroduce the human race?  The test will be Reed one human boy and he will be raised by an Erta Ima. Her specialty was cleaning the sky, and now her work is done. After years of traveling by Balloon, her new purpose raises the lone human.

Thus begins a journey of motherhood that is at times both alien and very relatable. There are moments of very natural parental reaction. The conflict of the final act is unavoidable. Despite being predictable but since I was invested and into the story it still worked perfectly for me. Of course, some of Erta objects to the human child. After seeing the paradise earth has become it is not a surprise that some of Erta don’t see the value in the human race. Not to say there is not a twist or surprises but the path there is clear.

On a technical level, the prose of this novel is tricky, slipping naturally from second person to first person and back and forth. The reason is Ima is writing this book for Reed. Normally I am not a huge fan of first-person and one of those reasons is a bit of a problem here. We know Reed and Ima survive for her to write and for him to read it. That said the way the story is told to Reed and the reader by proxy is so wonderful I fell into the flow of the novel easily.

The debate over Reed bubbles up on page 336 when Benedikt who is Erta admits that the child was engineered with challenges that made failure more likely. Ima experiences the challenges most parents feel when their child faces natural challenges. The differences between the Erta and flawed humans because the basis of the debate.

“Don’t you see Ima? It had to be this way. You and I were born in clear tanks with clear minds and a clear purpose. Reed’s species crawled from the mud into a world that wanted to kill them, and no idea how to live in it. Utopia is no place for them to prove themselves.”

Every parent wants their children to have everything they want and need. The pain of seeing your kids struggle is hard. Walker also faced the trouble of how do you set a story in a utopia, well it has to fall. It is a sad narrative reality but Reed had to be the oil poisoning the clear water. With their mission done there is no place for Reed in the future of Erta who plans to leave earth and Transcend. The question is do humans deserve to live?

“I have spent my life planning transcendence, five centuries planning our escape from this rock. We don’t belong here, Ima, not in this place of beasts or hurricanes. But they do. This is where they thrive in dark places.”

There is a heartbreaking moment that is a bit of a spoiler so you might want to avoid this comment if you don’t want to know. In the last pages of the book (428) Reed learns that some of the Erta is determined not to let him survive. Early in the book, we know that the humans mostly agreed to the extinction in hopes the Erta would bring them back. That was the plan.  One of the most heartbreaking moments is when Reed faced the end pleads with Ima that some humans must have survived, or hidden.

“What about underground? Or high in the mountains? Space? They had rockets. Maybe a different planet.”

“It is not possible.”

“It must be. I can’t be alone.”

All Ima can do at that point is say is that she is sorry.

The Human Son is a great example of cli-fi and an important entry in the subgenre. It is a novel about parenthood but also the weight of choice to have children in an overpopulated and resource stressed world. I don’t know if that was Walker’s intention but it felt that way to me.

“Like it or not Reed you are human.”
“I don’t feel human,” You sat up and pointed at the projector. “I’ve seen them on that thing. They were monsters. All those bombs and guns, all those wars.”

“All the fighting you  mean?” Your eyes found a cornerin which to sulk. I walked to the window and pulled the blinds. “Anyway, that’s  not the only thing they did.”

I could be wrong but it seems this debate is at the heart of this novel's mission statement. It walks the line like a tightrope between dystopia and utopia. At the heart is Science fiction at its best. Making us think deeply about the world today through the lens of tomorrow. Great stuff. Read it, please.
 

 

Book Review: Okamoto Kidō: Master of the Uncanny by Okamoto Kido, Nancy H. Ross (translator)

 

Okamoto Kidō: Master of the Uncanny

by Okamoto Kido, Nancy H. Ross (translator) 

Paperback, 168 pages

Published October 10th 2020 by Kurodahan Press

 In the last couple of years, the growth of the Bizarro fiction as a community has been fun to watch. It really started with a few authors marketing themselves together. At one of the first bizarro cons author, John Skipp and I were having a conversation with one of the younger authors in the community about the centuries-long tradition of weird fiction. While Surrealism is credited to the 1920s the truth is Homer wrote weird fiction, and we know weird stories have always existed.

What I am learning the plenty of cultures have writers like Okamoto Kido who are a part of this tradition. I really need to thank Edward Lippset of Kurodahan Press for sending me this book. I am very familiar with The Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling written in the 17th century.  That book is filled with weird fiction but it is one of the most loved, taught, and read works of Chinese fiction even centuries later.

It is also clear that Pu Slongling is a massive influence on Okamoto Kido whose stories are filled with many of the same ghosts, white-haired demons, weird animals, and haunted objects. It is interesting to think about the fact that these stories were written in the same decades that Weird Tales were publishing Lovecraft.

Okamoto Kido is an interesting dude and the title calls him a Master of the Uncanny I can’t disagree. His history is interesting as the stories themselves. Edward of Kurodahan gives us a good introduction. Born in the late 19th century his father was actually a Samurai. He lived through the Meiji Restoration – the time often credited as the modernization of Japanese society. That said he was well-read in multiple languages and worked for years as an English translator.

He was mostly known for writing plays, but it is his stories that we have here. I can’t tell if all his stories were weird, but they are all delightfully strange here. That may be a choice of the translator or publisher to highlight stories of this style. According to the introduction in Japanese, there is four collections worth of his stories.

This book has twelve stories all of which contain something worth reading. Interesting characters including 19th-century Japanese drifters, Samurai, and blind swordsmen. Even some of the relationships are fascinating as an American reader in the 21st-century stories like The Kiso Traveler. This opening tale has a ghost drifter but the relationship of the father and son in the Meiji Restoration era is what fascinated me.

The stories with haunted flutes and phantom monkey eyes that mysteriously watch the characters are creepy.  The Monkey’s eyes will remind serious horror short story readers of The Monkey the cover story of Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew. The stories all work well and are great examples of fear of being a universal language. The story that I thought was the best was the Shadow Stepping game.

The Stepping Game is a super paranoid tale of a woman O-Seki who becomes scared that if something happens to her shadow it will happen to her body. She becomes worried to even cast a shadow. This was my favorite story in the collection and one that would make a great episode of Something like Creepshow, or a Night Galley type horror anthology show.

I think this book and Tales from a Chinese Studio are must-reads for readers serious about experimental, surreal, and bizarro fiction. I also think if you are serious about horror fiction in the short form this book should be a part of your education. I thought this was both an education and an entertainment experience. Big thumbs up.

Book Review: Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse

 

Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse

Hardcover, 454 pages

Published October 2020 by Saga Press

 This was an impulse library hold, I was scrolling through the new arrivals on my library app and saw this beautiful cover.  I knew Rebecca Roanhorse was a respected author. I had to admit as I was staring at the library app that I had only read her Star Wars novel. I could tell she was a talented writer but she had the shitty task of writing a novel leading into that disaster of a narrative that was Rise of Skywalker. I remembered that I promised myself to give one of Roanhorse’s novels a read after that.

So I should say straight out of the gate that epic fantasy is not my thing. I read heavily in this genre when I was a teenager but George RR Martin burned me out for this genre long before HBO got its dragon claws into Song of Ice and Fire. My favorite fantasies are Chinese Wuxia novels. I totally get that Roanhorse wanted to write a non-euro feeling fantasy. That is not that weird to me as I have read TONS of Chinese fantasy.

That being said this is a unique epic in the sense that the setting is essentially pre-Columbian Mexico in the same that Middle Earth is pretty much set in fictionalized Europe. There is plenty of Aztec themed fantasy and horror probably the most noted example would be Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow.  This is different as the cultures and worlds that Roanhorse are totally her invention just very influenced by that region and those cultures.

Black Sun is powerful stuff. I know I am not the target audience so I think epic fantasy readers are almost a surefire five-star experience. Worldbuilding is in my wheelhouse and Roanhorse is clearly a master at weaving these details into the narrative without slowing the story or distracting. No info-dumps and the story never strays or over explains like many of the doorstop fantasy novels tend to do.

The story has a great cast of characters but mostly focuses on the core of a few main characters. Serapio is the character is closest to the typical hero’s journey who is traveling to the grand city of Tova while evolving into a Crow-god. He is also blind, so it is no little thing giving your hero a major disability. He has to confront the Sun-priest in the big city during the winter solstice.  Similar to how Luke learns of his powers in the force. Serapio’s process of learning his powers are helped long by a wizard. This character Xiala is Obi-wan and Han Solo rolled together, she uses songs as magic spells and is a sea captain.

It is Xiala who takes Serapio on the epic month-long journey to Tova.  They are certainly the strongest characters in the book, their chapters had a richer more driving feeling to them at least for me. That is not to say that the intrigue in Tova didn’t come with interesting drama. The sun priestess Naranpa learns to deal with power while surviving various attempts on her life.
As a grand adventure, we have a dangerous journey across unknown waters,  sea creatures, magic, battles, diverse and interesting characters. As an adventure story, there is plenty of fun to consume. As a deeper more thought riff on the epic fantasy, there is context to dive deep into…

“And Grandfather Crow said to First Woman, tell me your stories so that I might know who you are and what you value. If your stories are of the glory of war, I will know you value power. If your stories are of kinship, I know you value relationship. If your stories are of many children, I know you value legacy. But if your stories are of adaptation and survival, of long memory and revenge, then I will know you are a Crow like me.”   

I am always looking for quotes that feel like mission statements for novels. The power of the stories carries weight in this world. Much of the narrative is told to us in stories that we hear in the same exact words of the characters. This is a risky tactic for authors with less skill. Roanhorse has the skill that most readers will naturally fall into the spell of the stories inside the story's format.  I love the idea that the stories being told is how Grandfather Crow intends to learn about a person.

Is this novel about the glories of war or the value of relationships? This has been the struggle of progressives who write in this genre, the inherit glorification of war and conflict that inspired Spinrad to spoof Lord of the Rings in the Iron Dream. In that sense, at times I felt this novel had more kinship with Leguin’s Earth Sea than anything by Tolkien or Martin.

This book values nature, magic, and the spirit of adventure with-out the callous violence of many of its peers.  The duty and destiny are there but I am not sure if Joseph Campbell ever mused on hero’s journey with this cast. To say this book is Inclusive is an understatement, but it is as casual and naturally delivered as the world-building. The casual off-handed reveal that our main hero is bisexual and disabled is refreshing and a host of queer and transgender characters are all very welcome. Representation matters and here it is done right.

“If you are neither man nor woman, what are you?”
“A third gender, one I don’t believe you acknowledge here in this little backwater country.  I am bayeki. But what should concern you more is that I am a Watcher.”

There is a glorious spiritual nature to the journey the characters and the reader take with Black Sun. The power of the ocean delivering some of the most powerfully scary moments balanced by magic carried on the notes of beautiful songs. No one has to explain how the magic of this novel is tied to the ocean, the land of the sky.
 
“The sea herself," she said. "I am her daughter, and when I'm with my mother"--she exhaled gustily--"nobody fucks with her children.”
“That all is the same,” he said, understanding immediately. “There is no difference between yourselves and the land.”  

Powerful stuff, the only weakness for me was minor. there were a few times when there was language or things that felt like our world. Like the F-bomb dropped above. I liked the sentiment but it felt a little out of place.  Total nitpick and nothing that was not totally outweighed by the hundreds of exciting details I did love.

Black Sun is the first of a trilogy, and at 450 pages it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Perfect length because it is epic but not exhausting.  While this is generally not the type of genre fiction I like. I am a dystopian or space opera reading this novel still worked for me. Roanhorse is a powerful writer who builds a world and characters that never lacks heart. Big Thumbs up.