It’s nearing the end of the year, which traditionally is the time in which I abandon books that I’ve long been loathe to forsake. If you can call two years running a tradition. Which I can, because it’s my web site!
I’ve long been a fan of China Miéville. I was bummed a few years ago when word of his entry in The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases spread around the then thriving Runagate Rampant Yahoo Group (a fan group for Miéville). It was being put out by small publisher and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to buy it. I can’t remember the publisher, but Amazon says the original publisher was Tor, which is hardly small. So my memory is probably suspect.
But while working for the giant chain store last year, one of these babies came across my receiving table. A paperback reprint! I quickly bought the copy for myself. Fortuitous, as the person in charge of fiction at the time saw it and thought she should buy the copy as well. I should have let her have it.
I can’t say this is bad. But it’s not my kind of humor. What it is is a compendium of invented diseases by the leading lights, the up and coming and some of the already established, of the speculative fiction world. For example, Empathetic Fallacy Syndrome
, where the sufferer takes on characteristics of the people around him. Or Bone Leprosy
. In regular leprosy necrotic flesh falls from a person’s bones. In Bone Leprosy, necrotic bones fall from the flesh, leaving a spineless person.
It seems to me this book is for the well-read Nigel Crane’s of the world. There’s probably a ton of references to literature and other items that I’m just not getting. The ones I do get, just seem to be too obscure to be too funny to me. A blurb on the back of the book says it plays delicious postmodernist games that are sure to delight the discerning (and slightly warped) reader
. I am not discerning. And anything characterized as postmodernist
(an oxymoron in my world) ain’t gonna get over with me.
Nevertheless, one entry I found highly amusing, which is why I decided I would keep attempting to read more of the book. Perhaps if one was good more would be. After 100 pages, admittedly read one entry every few weeks while sitting on the pot, I’m throwing in the towel. If there is something else I find amusing in here, I’m not going to slog through the rest.
The one good entry? Rachel Pollack’s Delusions of Universal Grandeur. Sufferers’ symptoms include the severe delusional belief that the universe is ever more gigantic
and typically is accompanied by the belief that the universe is vastly old
. But I imagine that if I proposed this as a funny disease to my friends, they’d think I was being obscure much as I think the rest of this book is just too obscure.
Title: The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
Editors: Jeff VanderMeer, Mark Roberts
Cover creator: John Coultheart
Imprint / publisher: Bantam / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 298 p. (gave up at 100)
Publication date: July 2005 (originally 2003)
ISBN-10: 0-553-38339-6
Subject: Medicine — Humor
Subject: Diseases — Humor
LC classification: PN6231.M4 T45 2005
