Book Review: Far From Home by Walter Tevis

 

Far From Home by Walter Tevis

Hardcover, 181 pages

Published October 1st 1981 by Doubleday Books (first published 1981)

 

Walter Tevis is a very interesting writer to me for many reasons. When I started to enjoy the new take on The Man Who Fell to Earth from creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet I decided I was going to finish reading all of the Tevis books. I mean sadly there are so few of them. I knew I wanted to cover him on the show I figured why not know it all. Covering his short stories seemed like the easiest and smartest thing to do and I was glad I did.

Tevis is an interesting case because his first published stories were science fiction, and while many writers in the genre wanted to break out of the genre ghetto they never did. Philip K. Dick tried and failed so many times to break into the mainstream that he had a pile of manuscripts left behind when he died. Only Confessions of a Crap Artist survived. John Brunner wrote a novel about the anti-nuke movement that has been lost to time.  One of the reasons I think Tevis was different is because of how purely good his prose was.

 His skill at world-building honed in many science fiction stories is clear when you read the Hustler it is one of the things that makes the thing work.  The subtle ease with which he builds the world of the 50s poolhall is done with a world-builders eye in the way most mainstream authors don’t think about. They assume you know enough about the world.  The stories in this collection are divided into two sections, close to home, and far from home. The first half is from short stories mostly from 1980, and the second half is classic stories from the pulp magazines like Horace Gold's Galaxy in the late 50s early 60s, including the first published Tevis story.

The stories in the first half are interesting in many ways because they were the first Tevis wrote after close to two decades of not writing. Teaching and drinking his nights away it took the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, A second marriage, and moving to New York to re-ignite his passions. While it might not have been cool for his family the output gave us lots more work. Two SF novels, Two mainstream novels, and these short stories. The stories of this era have a Charles Beaumont feel to them. It is interesting to compare the two authors. Both left far too few stories, ones that were light on fantastical elements, lean tight prose, and powerful meaning that are sometimes super dark. The stories in the second have are far stranger and embrace the pulpy tradition of SF.

The topics in the first half range from Twilight Zoney tales of phones that call the past to super gross stories about incest. These stories feel like Beaumont in all the ways that made his short stories amazing. Tevis has a hybrid reputation thanks to Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler and I get the feeling he was prouder of these. Two or three of the stories seem to be inspired by the very challenging relationship Tevis had with his parents, one of which is DISTURBING.

Me? I liked the second half stories a lot more. They are a cool capsule of the writer learning his craft and in a sense, they showed me exactly what I wanted to see. The seeds of the writer who he would become. Stories like the Big Bounce, The Goldbrick, and his first published story the Ifth of Oofth.
The Big Bounce is probably his most famous short story, it has been collected and reprinted several dozen times. Like many of these stories, they feature out-of-date ideas for technology. You see bits and pieces of the writer who as a 12-year boy wrote a letter to Fantastic Adventures to rate the stories. Tevis did love Science fiction since before WW2, and snooty literary readers should just enjoy it when he is totally science fictioning it up.

The Big Bounce is a classic for a reason. The story of an inventor who creates a limitless power source, well he has to figure out one tiny detail. He can’t control it. Simak had written a novel in 1952 called Ring Around the Sun that explored the idea of a limitless power source, but the big bounce is the story of an inventor that doesn’t get there…

“I was so excited by the thing that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders.
I even worked out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as a solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You’d build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course, it would be kind of a rough ride…
In the morning, I called my superintendent and told him to get a substitute for the rest of the week; I was going to be busy.”

It is foundational to his classic novel to come. Farnsworth the inventor is an early version of Thomas Netwon in The Man Who Fell to Earth. That said it is a bit of a satire of Science fiction. Not in laugh out loud funny way, but in witty, I see what you did there way.

 One of my favorite aspects of the Goldbrick was the world-building and I think I want to comment on something said in this fantastically weird tale about an indestructible Goldbrick. In the story, the army destroys an entire mountain and still can’t destroy this brick. The reason why presents a great ending I don’t want to spoil. Again this is a funny weird concept that might not hold up to scientific eyes, but it is a just surreal SF story.

That said let's talk about this bit of world-building.  Published in 1957…

“U-10 had been before the 1980s Decade of Enlightenment, the University of Tennessee – the 1980s had held no illusions what was important to the American way of life- and they landed their little olive drab plastic craft in front of the library.”

The library is everything in the 1980s because it is a time of enlightenment. Who knows if Tevis really thought in the 1980s that humanity would have it all figured out or if it was part of the satire of the story. I think it is the second option. As Tevis was at the time using his science fiction to comment on the world where he always felt out of place.

That 12-year-old who wrote to Fantastic adventures was just two years from the culture shock of moving from San Francisco to Lexington Kentucky. Science fiction was an escape. If you look at these stories as much more than that you may be missing the point.

This collection is a must-read for two groups. Those who love SF short stories and Walter Tevis completionists. It is not SF canon by any stretch but a few of the stories come close. I loved it but I love Tevis.

Book Review: All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

 

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner 

Hardcover, 576 pages

Published August 2021 by Little, Brown and Company

 

I generally don’t write long reviews for non-fiction/research books. But this book deserves a brighter look. It was one I had not heard of and got on an impulse while looking at the new releases at the library. I am assuming that Rebecca Donner who is telling the story of her great aunt Mildred had this piece of family lore around her during her whole life. I am also supposing as the events of the Trump years and slow march towards a Christian-right wing coup in America was attempted she thought it was time.

It is clear in doing the research for the book that the parallels to our slow creep towards authoritarianism as waged by the orange asshole were probably pretty clear. Don’t get me wrong Donner never says that. She doesn’t have to. It is super obvious.   

I will give you a personal example. You see when I was reading this was the same week that the draft document about the supreme court overturning Roe V Wade came out. I got to the chapter in this book where the Nazis slowly made abortion illegal to make sure there were plenty of Nazi babies for the Reich. During the early years the newspapers wrote off Hitler as a buffoon, a moron much like most of us wrote off Trump. The slow creep of more and more people taking the guy seriously just sounded familiar.

It is not a one-to-one comparison but it is scary. Donner’s great aunt Mildred was an American born and raised in Milwaukee. She met and married a fellow grad student at the university from Germany and she was excited to return with him and study for her Ph.D. in Europe.

By 1932 he was an organizer in the underground resistance to Hitler and the rising Nazi party. This book doesn’t have a Hollywood ending. Mildred ended up beheaded on Hitler’s order. She and her husband smuggled information to the allies and the Russians. Continued to resist even after capture. What makes this book special is not just the details of their lives.

Plenty of Germans did resist Hitler and their names have been lost to history. They gave their lives trying to fight the bastards and most are completely forgotten.  I think this is a great history book, big thumbs up from me.

Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

 

 

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

SF masterworks Paperback, 244 pages

Published 2010 by Gollancz (first published 1956) 

 

During my early years of SF reading between the years when I was in middle school through my freshman year of college, I tried to read as many classics and canon of science fiction as I could. I had read Bester’s The Demolished Man at that time and while liked it I wasn’t sure I was ready for this one and kept putting it off. Two things really pushed me to finally read it. New Wave author Barry Malzberg who I have great respect for called Bester the best to have written in the genre. In our interview on Dickheads he also said “He was a son of bitch but he was also the best of us and I loved him.”

 Then another guest of the podcast D.Harlan Wilson wrote an entire book as a critical companion to this novel, and I knew I would have to have him back. I believe in the canon of science fiction for the most part. I think everyone who takes the genre's history seriously as I do should read specific titles and know this was one. At first, I was a bit worried that the hype was going ruin this book for me. I do think I had my bar set very high.

For the first 60 pages or so I was totally sold, in the middle I felt it dragged a bit and then Bester absolutely stuck the landing with a powerful ending. Much has been said about the timeless nature of the text. Some SF novels show their era and that adds to the charm. City by Clifford Simak feels 200% a product of the 50s and out of date. Even in that decade, City had an old-school pulpy feel. It is part of the charm. The ideas come from a writer who was already an elder statesman of the community at that time. A Canticle for Lebowitz is an example of a novel that could’ve been written in the 50s, 60s, or today. Nothing about it feels dated. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is another one that besides the mention of the nuclear war of 1976 would otherwise feel timeless.

TSMD is somewhere in between but I think rooting it in 1955 is part of the charm. Let’s face it Bester who was not comfortable with the New Wave label but he was also as different from the Simaks and Heinleins of the scene as you could be. He was brash and allegedly left his literary rights to his bartender.

Considering that we are still in the era when Elvis shaking his hips was causing outrage this novel is punk as hell. I mean he has a guy with tribal tiger stripe tattoos and Nomad on his forehead. Teleportation and all kinds of other ahead of its time stuff. As an SF updating of the Count of Monte Cristo it works. It riffs on Frankenstein and the Island of Dr. Moreau. As a work of SF, the meta-commentary is one of the things that really makes the novel special.

“You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.”  

 That was a little on the nose, but most of the commentary is more subtle. Bester was not only telling the story he wanted to but he was commenting on the genre as a whole at the same time. At times TSMD pokes fun at or looks at the construction of SF in general. In this sense, it went over the heads of many readers and critics but was not lost on the next generation of writers inspired by it. Neil Gaiman and William Gibson are the most often quoted but their generation of writers just wouldn’t exist without TSMD.  That is what we mean by canon when we talk about genres. It is one of the reasons Professor D.Harlan Wilson was able to quite easily fill 133 pages of a companion book that I am currently reading.  The novel comments on the revenge story, the mad scientist, the magical supermen stories (that Campbell loved in SF), and flawed heroes.

At the same time, the book is at its worst when race and gender are involved. I make no excuses for this, it is the unfortunate nature of the book’s in the era. Even the otherwise really genius ones. Most Science fiction novels envision a clean progressive future when technology advances. Bester invents a world where teleportation (Jaunt) has become normal and this future is not clean as you might think.  

The comparisons to cyberpunk that it clearly inspired come mostly from the connections Jaunting creates. The way our world becomes interconnected online, this future is connected to the mental power to move anywhere with the whim of a thought.

“This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying... but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks... but nobody loved it.”

 Many of the golden age authors were not able to give their novels the sharp edges needed for a work like this. It is clear that Bester was inspired by the same author as Philip K. Dick at the time, the difference between Bester, PKD and Van Vogt is coherence. Bester knew the novel he was writing and was not plotting by dreams or the IChing.

 Early in the novel Gully's isolation and pain at being left to die hit me hard. Sure if the novel was a simple revenge tale I would have still enjoyed it. We have seen revenge tales before and on the journey Gully changes into a complete and totally different person. Along the way, his journey becomes a window to look at how humanity meets this future. He has to learn language, and in himself to become more than human.

"Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open." Foyle laughed savagely. "I've ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I've blown that last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on.... No more telling the children what's best for them to know.... Let 'em all grow up. It's about time."

"Christ, he is insane."

"Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and the dying. The common man's been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us.... Compulsive men... Tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?"

Science fiction at its strongest tells stories that balance character and ideas in a way no other genre can. It takes situations or settings impossible in the real world and holds a mirror up to the character and ideas. If novels don’t have that balance like say Foundation by Asimov it can present ideas but often people don’t finish reading that book. It needs characters.

TSMD is ALMOST the complete package. The problem comes in the things that have not aged well. The paper-thin female characters, the implications of rape are not OK ever. Bester himself dismissed the idea of love stories therefore the sexuality in his books has a cringe-inducing edge to them. These are minor parts so it could be easy to miss them. By the time you are done with the novel so many ideas have been thrown your way, it would be easy to forget the awful misogyny which is minor but sadly there.

Bester tries to handle race by suggesting that jaunting has put an end to racial divides by ending the differences. In the pages after suggesting that racial prejudice is gone, we see evidence of it in the author. Jisabella is described as Red, suggesting that she is Native American in a cringey way. Robin Wednesday is black, so for the lip service he gives to race is a thing of the past stereotypes are not.

TSMD is not forgiven for those moments, but someone reading for entertainment, not to write a detailed review, or record a podcast might not notice those elements. They are minor compared to the overall story. This book is a SF masterwork for sure, and for all the flaws the strengths outweigh them. This novel is canon and should be. In the end, Gully transcends space and time and becomes a god-like being. Few novels could pull off this ending, but as Gully’s journey which starts with him being left for dead, without language to a person who can with his mind can travel the universe is the ultimate SF pay-off. Remember Bester is looking at SF as a genre, so his character is like a science fiction writer, he is using his mind to travel time and space.

In the book's opening, Bester suggests that one needs faith to jaunte. Once Gully believes in himself and his own power he becomes limitless. Hero’s journey. Revenge tale. Genius science fiction years ahead of the genre.

 

D.Harlan Wilson's companion book is awesome...

Link DHW's book...

Podcast interview with him coming soon...

(first published 1956) 

 

Book review: The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

 

The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Hardcover, 524 pages

Published May 2005 by Cambridge University Press 

 

 

I should have read this book a long time ago.  The author Gavriel Rosenfeld is a former interview guest of Dickheads and when I had him on I didn’t have time to read this book first. He is a specialist in the history of the Third Reich. He also grew up in my hometown, our parents knew each other from the Jewish community and he was good friends with my step-brother. Small world huh.

The study of the Nazi Germany era is important for many reasons, I should have to explain it but here we go. The current rise of American fascism and homegrown Nationalism came really close last year to overturning an election. Many similarities to those early days of Hitler we see repeated in the Trump years. Just yesterday as I write this review a shooter scared of white replacement theory popularized by Fox News mouthpiece Tucker Carlson killed 10 people in a Grocery store in a Buffalo NY grocery store.

 I am a science fiction guy, I love the genre and I love when we as a community add to the discourse. As a sub-genre Alternate history is a valuable tool of speculative fiction.  Alt-history has been used for many other parts of history like Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or more recently  Lavie Tidhar’s Osama but the Nazi era is the most popular era to explore.  My boy Philip K. Dick might have the most popular with Man in High Castle but there are a lot more examples.
I don’t really have the bandwidth to read them all so Rosenfeld’s very detailed history of fake history is an extremely helpful resource. I was interested to see that Alt-histories exploring the Nazis winning pre-date the war itself. British novels warning of the failure to stop Hitler were more common than I could have imagined. I had heard of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika night written in 1937, but Rosenfeld does a good job breaking down the various book by the decade.

While not all Rosenfeld's reviews are positive, he highlights the things he feels either make a story work or not work. Most importantly he breaks down the ways each work compares to the fabric of our reality. It makes for a very interesting study. I was surprised that Man in the High Castle only took up a few pages. I made a list of several novels I wanted to check out. Highlighted lots of stuff on several pages. Now I feel when I talk about Man in the High Castle I will have a wider understanding of Alt-history and Nazism.

This book is a great resource that historians of science fiction itself should have on the shelf. 

The Dickheads podcast episode with Dr. Rosenfeld...

Dickheads episode video that includes Dr. Rosenfeld

Audio of the interview 

Book Review: The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

 

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

Paperback, SF Masterworks, 192 pages

Published November 2015 by Gollancz (first published February 1963)

(Note this is a re-read for me as I read this at some point in the 90s.)

For a book written in 1963, this is a really interesting time for the life of this masterpiece. Sometimes the terms masterpiece or classic get thrown around and they don't apply, this book I think would survive without the other media but the strength of the story comes from the power of the writer Walter Tevis. (keep your eye for more writing on his life and career) Despite dying in 1984 his books have remained in print, and the dominance of Queen's Gambit on Netflix made his last novel a household name. This was not the first time when his novels had that kinda reach. The Hustler released in 1959 was turned into a film just two starring a young Paul Newman and became classic outside of the genre ghetto. Tevis was lucky despite taking many years off from writing his work remained popular, in 1976 The Man Who fell to Earth was adapted by Nicholas Roeg into the strange film that has become a cult classic featuring the first film appearance of David Bowie. He was inspired casting and is a huge reason why we are talking about it now. I am not sure the current show produced by Star Trek creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet would have gotten the green light if they couldn’t sell it to Showtime as from the novelist of Queen’s Gambit which was a massive hit for Netflix.

Without talking about the film or the new TV series which is essentially a sequel to the movie the novel plays an important role in the genre, beyond just being good. It is more than good, it is a great and important work. It plays a transitional role in two foundational ways. For the genre, this novel marks the last major work of an era, in part because of when it was published. 1963 was still close to the dawn of the space race and it was a time when real exploration of the solar system was happening for the first time. The space operas of the golden age were being knocked out of hard science, and even novels considered to be more possible from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to pulpy fantasies like Burroughs John Carter books were looking more impossible. Mars was starting to look like the lifeless radiation-drenched desert planet we know it to be now. Thomas Newton doesn't call his home Mars, but it is heavily hinted. It is possible that the dead world we see is what he called Anthea it is left up to us readers to decide.

The timing of this novel is also makes TMWFTE Transitional in the sense that it is one of the early serious Science Fiction novels to address environmentalism. Coming one year after the landmark publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and before the launching of Earth Day. This novel is a true ecologically themed Science Fiction novel every bit as much as Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or modern novels like Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. While more subtle than say 1984 (about Fascism) or Alas, Babylon (About nuclear war) but just as effective as a warning novel. Tevis expresses through Newton little doubt that the human race as it is currently living will not survive.

Before I start breaking it down let me say this book deserves all the hyperbole thrown on it. It is a classic in every sense. It has a very midwestern pastoral feeling that makes it feel like the works of Clifford Simak. I suspect the Minnesota newspaperman who never broke out of the genre ghetto was a huge influence on Tevis. Simak’s Way Station is a very similar novel released the same year.  The Tevis novel was not even nominated, but I would say it is a slightly better novel. The reason the Simak novel won the Hugo is in part because they are voted on by fans. The Way Station Hugo was in part a lifetime achievement award. Tevis was famous because his first novel had mainstream success, but he didn’t have a following in the genre. Remember Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut was released that year, and yeah it didn’t win either.      

Okay, all that doesn’t matter you should read all three. You can put The Man Who Who fell to Earth on your list now, here are some reasons why. If you want to go in without a hint of theme or spoilers click away now…

To the best knowledge of the time, Tevis took science seriously enough to make Thomas Newton actually looked and felt alien. While the knowledge of science has pushed forward over the decades this gives the novel a slightly more surreal feel than it had at the time. If anyone was wondering how to feel the author of Queen’s Gambit or The Hustler handled the science fictional aspects don’t worry.

“He was sick, sick from the long dangerous trip he had taken, sick from all the medicine —the pills, the inoculations, the inhaled gases — sick from worry, the anticipation of a crisis, and terribly sick from the awful burden of his own weight. He had known for years that when the time came, when he would finally land and begin to affect that complex, long-prepared plan, he would feel something like this. The place, however much he had studied it, however much he had rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the grass and became very sick.”

This alien nature of Thomas Newton and the stranger in a strange land vibe is played weirder and with more bizzaro touch in the novel and the 1976 film. The current TV adaptation leans more into camp that feels more like the 1984 John Carpenter movie Starman. I actually think this is a smart choice for the TV show that makes Faraday played by Chiwetel Ejiofor instantly sympathetic. It also makes the show more entertaining.

That pastoral midwestern autobiographical feel of the novel is something that the movie or series doesn’t have but I don’t think that is a bad thing. This is the personal part of the novel, Tevis never felt comfortable growing up in Kentucky a place where he always felt alien and out of place in. It is a theme he would return to. It is not that the series is devoid of this Naomi Harris plays Justin Falls a brilliant scientist who theories were so ahead of her times she is laughed out of academia. When we meet her she is struggling to survive and take care of her dying father.

This is a smart updating of the story, and considering that the series is a directly sequel to the film, in this sense it touches on the often overlooked themes of the novel. That feeling of being a freak. Now that nerd culture is celebrated it requires that we use a Wayback machine like a 1963 novel to remember how alienating it felt to be super smart and into weird things in a part of the world that just wanted down-home country folk conformity. Two decades before he wrote Queen’s Gambit… The Man Who Fell to Earth is totally a novel about being a nerd in the midwest.

Another aspect of the novel that which from being good science fiction to out-of-date surrealism is the world-building. Written in 1961 or 62 but taking place in the late 1980s as Tevis foresaw it gives the novel an extra special feel.

“A newsreel in progress and he watched it dully, with the mild dread that such things gave him. There were pictures of riots in Africa. How many years have they been rioting in Africa? Ever since the sixties? there was a speech by a gold coast politician, threatening the use of 'Tactical Hydrogen weapons against some hapless formentors."

The focus on African nations is a bit strange and certainly, it was an unfortunate choice to only focus on violence in Africa. One of the few things I didn't think aged well. Hydrogen weapons didn’t become a thing. The idea that he saw the world still being in chaos certainly came true. We are not in a positive future free of conflict, Tevis felt comfortable with that prediction. Thomas Newton left a dead world and knows all too well that the earth is on the same path as his homeworld. When he first arrives on earth, it is uncomfortable, scary, and alien to him. As he grows to understand it we also learn that yearns for the world he left even though it is dead.

"He looked out the window at the brighter light of morning, at the pale blue sky, possibly directly where he was looking, was Anthea. A cold place, dying, but one for which he became homesick."

Using the tool of science fiction Tevis does something he couldn’t do as effectively in a straight autobiography about his life in Kentucky. He can step outside of the human race and give it an outsider look.  

“Not all of us are insane.’
‘But most of you are. Enough of you are – it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.”

As for the pastoral passages. I love when the novel perfectly blends the midwestern feel with the pulpy old school feel of 60s science fiction.

“…A home built in heavy-handed and tasteless pride by some unknown and long-dead tobacco or coal or lumber baron more than a century before; and to his left the most austere and futuristic of all constructions, a spaceship. A spaceship standing in a Kentucky pasture, surrounded by autumnal mountains…”
 
The following moment has a powerful Simak feeling to it. It gives a sense of Kentucky in the summer. The transition from the beauty of the earth to dead Anthea is heartbreaking.

"He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people...”

This leads Newton to value the earth in a way we take for granted.  Someone who knows and understands just how rare and beautiful the earth is. Not only did he come from a dead world but he is not as attuned to it as we are, he struggles to live in our gravity for example. He understands far better than the average human the stakes.

“Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”

In a modern sense, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora does a wonderful job making this same point. This is where the TV series (at the time of this review three episodes have been released) and the novel are most aligned. In the same week that a Kurtzman and Lumet co-scripted episode of Star Trek that had a passionate speech where a Starfleet talked of the civil war that almost lead to our demise, the series of TMWFTE gave us 8 years before we have ended our civilization.  It was funny, after the first episode I posted something on Facebook about how I loved the series and someone responded. “Another show ignoring the source material.”

Uh...not at all. Walter Tevis and his themes are alive and well in the series. Kurtzman and Lumet are honoring the novel as far as I am concerned.

“He felt somehow like a college sophomore, arguing human destiny. But this was not exactly abstract philosophizing. “Doesn’t mankind have a right to choose its own form of Destruction?”
 

It is interesting that Newton mocks democracy in a passage, but doesn’t really go into what exactly the nearly dead world offers as an alternative. Also in the SF masterworks edition, there is a reference to Watergate and the Nixon scandal. The novel was written in 1963, and this edition was 2016. Tevis died in 1984. I assume he added that scene before his death. Anyways it confused me.

Now if perhaps I have given the impression that the novel is all negative, that is not the case at all. Newton is not impressed with how we treated our planet but we are having an effect on them.

“I think you’re lying, Mister Newton. We Aren’t insects to you. Maybe we were at first, but we aren’t now.”
“Oh yes, I love you, certainly. Some of you. But you’re insects anyway. However, I may be more like you than I am like me.”

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a science fiction masterpiece. A novel of environmentalism for sure but I think if you really look deep now at the thing that gives it life is the intense exploration of feeling different. If the novel has a mission statement…

“I’m Thomas Jerome Newton, from Idle creek, Kentucky I’m a physical freak. You’ve seen my birth record in the Bassett County courthouse. I was born there in 1918.”
“That would make you 70 years old. You look forty.”
Newton shrugged his shoulders. “As I say, I’m a freak. A mutant. Possibly a new species. I don’t think that is illegal, is it?”

 
 


   

Book Review: 36 Streets by T.R. Napper

 

36 Streets by T.R. Napper

Paperback, 448 pages

Published February 8th 2022 by Titan Books

One of the best things about science fiction becoming more international is we get more international voices.  Napper is out of Australia but according to his bio, he has lots of experience with Southeast Asia. His experience really makes this novel unique on many levels but we are here to chat about it. This is a noir cyberpunk novel that is not set in an amorphis random city, the world-building and setting is one of the best features of this novel.

Set a hundred or so years in the future in Chinese occupied Ha Noi. The future of this novel is Sino-dominated like the classic China Mountain Zhang, but unlike the Maureen McHugh masterpiece, the majority of those details are beyond the narrative. This is a fine choice as we know what we need to know, and that leaves Napper room to expand.

April was one of the best reading months I have had of modern Science fiction in a long, long time. So at any point, if it seems like I am being negative, I am not. I loved this novel. I thought it was great but my bar is pretty high at the moment. I read a succession of masterpieces in the last month and while I think this novel is very good to great that M word is one I don’t take lightly.

Before I get into spoilers let me get into a few things I thought were really cool. For the most part, I enjoy that the speculative fiction community is getting progressive. I like the diversity, I like the new voices. I also like the occasional old-school action-adventure sci-fi story. I don’t want sad puppies bullshit so 36 Streets is perfect. Plenty of diversity in setting, characters, a progressive message but strong guns-blazing action.

So if that sounds good and you trust me stop right here, go read it, and come back.
Still need more convincing. OK let's get into the story Lin Vu is a gangster living in the streaming technology hybrid world of this future. There are all kinds of neat details. People in this future are on the net through contact lenses. Lin grew up in Australia even though she was born in Vietnam. She doesn’t speak the language she gets English subtitled in her retina [like this] something that fades into the background.

Lin learned badassery in a series of flashbacks under the of a gangster Bao Nguyen. Family, country, and gang loyalty are all tested in occupied Vietnam. While we follow Lin a simulation VR game Fat Victory becomes all the rage. In the game, the US-Vietnam war is replayed and has become addictive. We dive more into the game as one of the designers comes to the city to track down the murderer of a friend.  

What happens is a noir mystery and action tale that is woven together with excellent world-building and a reflection of how mega-corporations, crime, and colonization come ahead in 22nd century Ha Noi.

The World-building is summed up nicely with this passage early in the novel.

“Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the old quarter. The men at Bia’Hoi She just watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than unusual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers on edge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with the Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, and a dozen were injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone an informant, everyone Viet Minh, no one able to talk or trust.
She lurch-stepped down the alley. The thirty-six streets they called it.”

Once the novel gets into the video and there are several mentions of the classic novel of the Vietnam War from the native side The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. This is an important book to the story of 36 Streets, and while I have read it I like Napper does a good job explaining the importance through quotes straight from The Sorrow of War “The tragedies of the war years have bequeathed to my soul the spiritual strength that allows me to escape the infinite present.”

That novel for the people of that country is All Quiet on the Western Front, and Platoon all in one. A haunting and amazing reading experience. It really sets up the idea that the creators of Fat Victory are trying to erase not only national pride but the spiritual earthquake that the conflict was for the tiny nation. The simulation/game was being used to make the “Chinese Dream” more acceptable to people who fought the French and Americans out of their land.

“What they tried to do with Fat Victory was a war crime. I mean, these pricks tried to mind-fuck an entire population, turn them against the country of their birth.”

The mission statement could get lost in all the action, which is lots of fun. If you are focused on gun battles, swords, weapons, and how the technology works then you might miss the subtle way Napper told you what the message is.

“To one side were the windows, looking out over the city. Oceans of people passed, in the spaces between the neon and the streetlight. Towers of steel and glass, lighted windows, a universe in each one. People living their lives, side by side, yet so far from each other. Lin’s line of sight was the halo-billboard of the girl in a red dress, twirling it, smiling and mouthing the words: The Chinese Dream is my dream.”

Lin is a stranger in a strange land, but so are all the people of the 36 streets and the game, the technology is trying to make them into something they are not. At the heart of this cyberpunk noir. That is your theme.

I am on record as preferring novels under three hundred pages. I liked this novel from beginning to end but I do think it could have been streamlined a bit. That is a minor nitpick. I loved the setting most of all, but really enjoyed the characters and the story. More than anything I am dying for more stories in this city.

36 Streets by T.R. Napper is overdue old school cyberpunk. Put on your mirrorshades and read it.


   

Audiobook review: Star Trek: The Antares Maelstrom by Greg Cox

 

Star Trek: The Antares Maelstrom by Greg Cox

Audiobook, 304 pages
Published August 2019 by Simon Schuster Audio
Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
Length: 11 hrs and 34

The way I consume books has pretty much prevented me from using audiobooks. I can't sit and just listen to them. Often I listen to them when I am walking the dog, or to and from work. The thing is that means that I do better listening to books that exist in franchises that I know well, with characters and settings established. So I have been getting Audiobooks from the Libby app through the library. Star Wars and Star Trek books are perfect because I know them.

For the first Star Trek book, I wanted to listen to a Greg Cox book as a friend of my podcast(listen to the Richard Matheson tribute episode we did). This is not the title I would have chosen of Greg's to start with but I am glad it was the one they had. I am a Wrath of Khan fan and if anyone could build a whole novel out of one line of dialogue in Wrath it is Greg.

This is an Original Series Enterprise story and what makes The Antares Maelstrom fun and special is the variety of storylines the novel is built around. There is an A, B, C, and D storyline. The way the novel is structured there is Sulu getting command of the special security detail on a space station, Spock and Chekov investigating a prime directive violation, Scotty trying to save an old starship being used as a colony power planet, and Kirk trying to get a gold rush style colony to join the Federation.

This planet is on the far side of The Antares Maelstrom, a part of space impossible to pass, but now a rare mineral has been found on a colony world on the other side everyone wants a shortcut, one that might risk many lives. The Spock and Sulu storylines were my favorite but really made this novel cool was the way each story gave the various characters their own moments to shine.

Hats off to Robert Petoff who really nailed the voices, Sulu and Scotty most of all. Sulu was impressive because Takei's voice is subtle. Greg Cox is so great at writing original series, and you can feel his love for the source material the whole time. Super fun.